Complete and Utter Zebu

Professor John Bridgeman, the former Director-General of the Office of Fair Trading, has laid into supermarkets – particularly Asda and Tesco – for giving a misleading impression that they are cutting prices across the board, when the reality is very different.

In a full week just before Christmas, Asda cut nearly the price of almost 800 products. However, for two-thirds of those items, the cut was only 1p. At the same time, it put up the price of more than 850 items, with over half of those going up by more than 10p.

In that same week, Tesco cut the cost of over 900 items but over two-thirds of them saw only a 1p price reduction, while over a 1,000 products saw their price rise, 60% by more than 10p.

Professor Bridgeman calls this practice “price flexing” and, reported in The Guardian, he claims that it shows “a cynical manipulation of the language of value…They are not in reality cutting prices but flexing prices, making them go up and down and destabilising the price structure. All they are doing is introducing so much volatility no one can tell whether prices are going up or down. It can only be to consumers’ detriment and it does their image no good.”

“The most dangerous thing [for] competition in this sector is price volatility. It confuses consumers, deters investors and has driven corner shops out of business because they don’t know what price they have to compete on.” – Professor John Bridgeman

Research by Loughborough University confirms that average price rises are far larger than price cuts among the big four supermarkets, which also includes Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. By far the most common price cut made in the past four years is just 1p which, as Loughborough’s Professor Paul Dobson points out, makes little difference to the bill at the checkout but enables the supermarkets to make the benevolent claim that they are cutting “thousands of prices”.

See: The Guardian report

Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski was surprised by the garishness of the carpets in the casinos of Las Vegas. Until, that is, he realised that they had a purpose – to stop the punters feeling sleepy because sleepy tourists don’t spend money. If your eyes stray to the floor and see one of these monstrosities, you are likely to be jolted awake again.

A collection of his photographs of these extraordinary carpets, quite unlike anything you will find anywhere else, is on The Daily Telegraph website. If you’re feeling sleepy at your keyboard, perhaps flipping through them will work the same trick. This ploy is spoofed in the current family film Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Updating the Greek myths, Percy and his colleagues are detained in a casino by being persuaded to eat lotus flowers. They eventually emerge to discover that days, not hours, have passed.

Retailers use a variety of psychological tricks on their customers too, of course. You’ll find few windows in department stores or shopping centres, though there are usually plenty of mirrors, which serve to slow shoppers down. In fact shopping centres are specifically designed, not for your comfort and convenience, but to confuse and baffle you. They aim to induce a condition known as the “Gruen transfer”, named after the man who designed the first shopping mall in 1856.

The Gruen transfer is the moment when customers suffer “scripted disorientation”. They slow from a confident stride to a baffled dawdle, eyes glazing over as they forget what they came for and realise there are SO MANY THINGS they could be spending their money on. So don’t feel daft next time you lose your bearings in a shopping mall. The bally places are designed to keep you there as long as possible. At least they don’t have Vegas-style garish carpets. Yet.

France’s greatest living thinker, Bernard-Henri Lévy is looking about as great a brain as Ricky Gervais’ podcasting tame idiot Karl Pilkington. In his new book On War in Philosophy, he quotes extensively from the lesser-known philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul. Attacking Immanuel Kant as being a “fake” and “raving mad”, Lévy frequently refers to Botul’s great work The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant. Apparently, he has frequently used him as a source in the past when giving talks, but it is only in his new book that he has done so in print.

A little embarrassing therefore, to discover that Botul never existed. He was created as a gag in 1999 by Frederic Pages, a journalist with Le Canard Enchainé, France’s equivalent of Private Eye. The imaginary Botul founded a school of thought known as Botulism, believing in the theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” or “the Metaphysics of the flabby”. So well known is the Botul spoof that there is even a Wikipedia entry on him.

It isn’t only the flamboyant Lévy – usually known just as BHL – who has been made to look a fool, but all the critics who lauded his book. At least Lévy has had the good grace to acknowledge how daft he’s been: “It was a truly brilliant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Canard Enchainé journalist, who remains a good philosopher all the same.”

The rest of us, of course, know all we need to know about Kant and other philosophers from Monty Python:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table

David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.


John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
 with half a pint of shandy was particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
 half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
, Hobbes was fond of his dram.

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, “I drink therefore I am.”

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;

A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed.

Related post:
Photo that could have changed history is a fake.

With money tight, we’re all looking to save money. But those who buy cheap perfume or after-shave at markets, online or when abroad, believing they’re conserving cash, may not realise they are actually putting some deeply unpleasant substances on their skin.

Harper’s Bazaar in the United States investigated a range of counterfeit perfumes and found ingredients such as urine, antifreeze and bacteria.

Valerie Salembier, publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, said: “You’re putting something on your face, on your neck, on your wrists. Those are sensitive parts of the body, so, to have active ingredients that could endanger your life is a very serious health risk.”

Dermatologist Jeannette Graf told ABC News, on which Salembier appeared, that while she had never seen a skin reaction from perfume, fake fragrances could cause contact dermatitis or inflammation of the skin in some people.

“They felt burning. They saw redness. It felt uncomfortable, it didn’t smell right. And that’s almost immediate” – Dematologist Jeannette Graf

Although, perhaps surprisingly, the story wasn’t reported in the British press, the findings chime with previous reports in the UK. A while back, for instance, Trading Standards Officers discovered that bottles of Chanel No. 5 eau de toilette on sale in an Oxfordshire market had rather more of the “toilette” about them than usual. In Australia, as well as urine, perfumes have been found which contain a mix of fragrance and pond water.

As the fakes can look so much like the originals, apart from the fact that you seem to be getting a bargain, how do you tell if what’s on offer is counterfeit?

• Look for dodgy spelling, and dodgy people selling it in dodgy places
• If the smell doesn’t last much longer than an hour, it may be a fake. Try spraying some on a piece of cardboard and leaving it for a while.
• If the cellophane around the box isn’t snug, that could be a tipoff.
• And, as with everything, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

According to the Netmums website, over 100,000 women a year are being conned into paying money for useless fertility treatments.

A survey of 2,000 women found that one in three of those trying to have a child were so desperate that they spent over £500 on bizarre treatments. As well as acupuncture and aromatherapy, many turned to clairvoyants and mediums. Some bought fertility statues to be placed in the bedroom and a quarter bought fertility spells. Perhaps not surprisingly, 85% of those would paid for spells did not succeed in becoming pregnant.

Siobhan Freegard of netmums said: “Our team was shocked by how many women are using spells and statues.”

MORE ZEBU
A new book out claims that the responsibility for Britain’s obesity epidemic lies with the Government, which is giving disastrously wrong dietary advice to the public. It isn’t fat in foods that is the problem, claims Hannah Sutter, but starch which, we are constanty told, is good for us, despite our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. She also points out that the Government vendetta against fats is based on highly debatable research, something we covered in Complete and Utter Zebu. The Daily Mail carries an interesting piece on her book, Big Fat Lies: Is Your Government Making You Fat?

Over the past few weeks, rumours have been growing that the gold which forms a large part of the reserves of many major countries may not be all it seems. The Chinese government, it is said, took delivery of some 400-ounce gold bars last October and decided to do a random test.

To their surprise, the bars were not solid but were made of tungsten, much the same density as gold, and surrounded by an outer coating of bullion. The tale has it that the bars – nigh on 6,000 of them – came from America and had previously been stored in Fort Knox. Some time during the Clinton administration, so it is said, 640,000 tungsten blanks were coated with gold and placed in the depository at Fort Knox.

This story has all the hallmarks (sorry!) of a great conspiracy, particularly as the wilder variants suggest that this is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. As with all the best conspiracy theories, it is hard to disprove, given that the guardians of Fort Knox and the Bank of England aren’t likely to throw their doors open to visitors. With gold at a 10-year-high of well over $1,000 an ounce, imagine the consequences if there was even the slightest grain of truth (sorry again!). It would make the recent financial crisis resemble a flea bite on an elephant.

But how to find out? We could, of course, have mounted a full-scale raid on Fort Knox as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But we reckoned some of the people there must have seen the movie, so the element of surprise would probably not be on our side. We could have bought ourselves a few bars and had them tested but as they currently cost over $400,000 a bar, that seemed a little extravagant.

So instead we contacted the London Bullion Market Association. If anybody knows about gold, it is the LBMA. It sets the “Good Delivery” standards, ensuring that all gold traded around the world meets the same criteria and thus removing the need for gold to be tested every time a transaction occurs. They claimed not to have heard the rumours (a little odd, perhaps) but were quick to say that it was utter tosh. With gold only a little below its peak, it is clear that the market as a whole does not give the yarn much credence. If they did, the price of gold would be in free fall.

And, as one City expert pointed out, given the vociferousness of the Chinese government on so many other matters, if it really had discovered that 6,000 gold bars from America were nothing more than shiny tungsten, would they not be making a very, very, very loud noise about it?

So, a great conspiracy theory, but almost certainly nothing more than that. That does not mean, of course, that there are not other scams involving gold, but we’ll return to that another day.

It wasn’t so long ago that we reported the academic study that found that Ginkgo biloba had no effect whatsoever on memory, despite all the claims made for it.

Now another study finds that people taking placebos which they believe will help their memory see a real improvement. Dr. Sophie Parker of Victoria University in New Zealand said: “I was interested in what would happen when people were given an inert substance that they thought had cognitive enhancing properties. We went to great lengths to create a believable story about this so-called drug.

“We set up a fictional pharmaceutical company, a fake website, a promotional DVD and posters for the sham drug.”

The drug was called R273 and was actually Vitamin C powder mixed with water. Three trials were set up using 300 psychology students as guinea-pigs. “People unwittingly acted in ways that improved their memory, responses, concentration” whereas those who were no given the fake drug “showed no real improvement in either retrospective or prospective memory.”

According to Dr. Parker, “In order to monitor sources of information about the past, at to remember future tasks and actions, people can either use a monitoring process or can rely on automatic memory processes…Typically, the more monitoring people use, the better their memory performance.” The guinea-pigs were better able to resist misleading suggestions and to perform memory tasks because they put more effort into monitoring.

I’m no doctor, but surely this is the opposite result to the tests on ginkgo? There, people believed they were taking a memory-enhancing drug yet no difference was seen at all. I’m confused.

Related posts
Ginkgo biloba is no miracle drug

GOVERNMENT IGNORES THAT THERE ARE MILLIONS MORE NI NUMBERS THAN VOTERS

In yet another instance of right-hand-not-knowing-what-left-hand-is-doing government, The Daily Telegraph reports today that the right to vote is going to be linked to people’s National Insurance numbers in future. After July, everybody wishing to keep their entitlement to vote will be required to give their signature, date of birth and National Insurance number, to be recorded in an Individual Elector Registration.

Although supposedly intended to cut down on fraud, there is concern not only that the information might be sold but that it is “the perfect kit for identity fraud”. We should not forget the government’s form when it comes to safeguarding our records. The Ministry of Justice lost the records, including NI numbers, of 45,000 people in 2007, while the personal data of over four million people was mislaid by assorted government departments in the year to April 2008.

Even more pertinent, though, is the information given in a Parliamentary answer in 2007. The Department for Work and Pensions admitted then that it had nine million National Insurance numbers which it could not connect with real people. That is 20% of the adult population of the UK. And yet it is the connection to National Insurance numbers that the Government thinks will help cut electoral fraud, almost all of which is, in any case, linked to postal voting.

Another triumph for joined-up thinking.

OTHER POSTS
MPs get Statistics for Dummies book
How your train is official “on time” even when it is late

SILLY POST
Is there a real-life Avatar in Gordon Brown’s cabinet?

COULD AN AVATAR HAVE INFILTRATED GORDON BROWN’S CABINET?

Okay, so this isn’t proper Zebu. However, for various reasons too tedious to recount here, we haven’t be able to update the blog for a couple of days. This is something we made earlier and thought you might enjoy, Zebu or not. As ever, the trick to seeing it properly is to click on it.