Later On

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 640,000 times in 2011. If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 8 sold-out events for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The title refers to the common organizational practice of distorting reports, facts, and statistics to hide problems—until, of course, the problems become so severe that they can no longer be hidden—Google “Olympus Corporation scandal” for a prime example. Of, to take a domestic example, the false claim that the air around the wreckage of the World Trade towers was safe—a perfectly good lie until the workers started falling ill. But Christine Todd Whitman got away with it, and she’s quite happy about that. The New England Journal of Medicine took a look at the issue in 2007 and Wikipedia has an excellent summary article of the situation.

The idea to which the title refers is that top management, on learning that some indicator is showing serious problems—the needle now being in the red zone—will without hesitation immediately call for bending the needle so that it’s back in the green. Indeed, in my experience, this has been the first response, but perhaps I’ve not had the experience in working with truly good companies in which there is a strong moral obligation to face the truth and report the facts: like the Catholic church, for example.

At any rate, the NYPD is now refusing to record crimes so that their statistics will look better. Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein report in the NY Times:

Jill Korber walked into a drab police station in Queens in July to report that a passing bicyclist had groped her two days in a row. She left in tears, frustrated, she said, by the response of the first officer she encountered.

“He told me it would be a waste of time, because I didn’t know who the guy was or where he worked or anything,” said Ms. Korber, 34, a schoolteacher. “His words to me were, ‘These things happen.’ He said those words.”

Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.

While it is difficult to say how often crime complaints are not officially recorded, the Police Department is conscious of the potential problem [the Police Department should be conscious of the problem, because it is the Police Department that is causing the problem - LG], trying to ferret out unreported crimes through audits of emergency calls and of any resulting paperwork.

As concerns grew about the integrity of the data, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, appointed a panel of former federal prosecutors in January to study the crime-reporting system. The move was unusual for Mr. Kelly, who is normally reluctant to invite outside scrutiny.

The panel, which has not yet released its findings, was expected to focus on the downgrading of crimes, in which officers improperly classify felonies as misdemeanors.

But of nearly as much concern to people in law enforcement are crimes that officers simply failed to record, which one high-ranking police commander in Manhattan suggested was “the newest evolution in this numbers game.”

It is not unusual for detectives, who handle telephone calls from victims inquiring about the status of their cases, to learn that no paperwork exists. Detectives said it was hard to tell if those were administrative mix-ups or something deliberate. But they noted their skepticism that some complaints could simply vanish in the digital age. . .

Continue reading.

Salon has a collection of viral videos from the past year. Two that appealed to me:

The baby clearly thinks his dad is the wittiest comic going.

And this baby finds mom’s nose-blowing astounding, but funny in retrospect:

And there’s the kitten having the bad dream:

That one I’ve blogged before, but I do like it.

I got this Sound+Sleep device and used it last night. My goal is to sleep through the late-night parties (and conversations) of neighbors. (I live in an apartment with thin walls.)

First impressions are positive. It’s compact in size—clock-radio or smaller—and the controls are well thought out. Good display lights enable you to see what the settings are in a dark room, and you can toggle the display lights on and off. Controls are easily found and identified by a sleepy man in a dark room.

The sounds are pretty good, though “Meadow” didn’t work for me. I sent them a suggestion:

For the next model, I suggest you add the option to download (perhaps after purchasing them) additional sound samples—add-on sales to supplement the basic unit sales, plus makes the unit more interesting. In particular, I strongly recommend that you make the device “open-architecture” so that customers can load their own sounds into the unit. I’m thinking that you give the device a mini-USB port and allow users to connect it to their computer to transfer MP3 files for sounds, those files downloadable from the Sound+Sleep site or created by the user.

This makes the device a “platform” and should greatly increase product appeal and extend product life.

The product runs $130 (after discount) on Amazon.com, but (oddly) it can be brought directly through the site for $100 including a two-year warranty extension (not included in the Amazon price).

One thing that is appealing is the “adaptive” technology: if the level of noise increases, the unit responds by increasing the level of the masking sounds:

In Adaptive Mode, SOUND+SLEEP dynamically adds sounds to the SoundStory and automatically adjusts volume to offer superior sound masking or neutralizing capabilities. All that’s left to hear is a soothing natural sound that minimizes disruptions that disturb or interrupt sleep. As intrusive noises subside, SOUND+SLEEP gradually and automatically returns to normal playback settings.

They also suggest specific tracks for specific sorts of sounds:

SOUND+SLEEP responds to a wide variety of noises, responding best to loud, sudden changes in background noise that can be detected by the microphone and readily differentiated from the sound being played by the unit.

The louder the noise, the more readily SOUND+SLEEP responds. If the noise is too faint to be detected by the microphone, SOUND+SLEEP’s responsiveness is reduced, but the likelihood that anyone but the most acute listener will detect the noise is equally low.

Finally, certain SoundStories are more effective than others in neutralizing certain sounds because they’re in a similar frequency to the noise you want to neutralize. This following table suggests SoundStories you may find more effective in minimizing certain common sound intrusions.

Background Noise	Suggested SoundStory
Traffic, road noise	Ocean
Jackhammer, electric drill	Rainfall
Jet aircraft	Ocean, Brook
Sirens	Brook, Meadow
Barking dogs	Rainstorm, brook
Noisy neighbors	Ocean, Rainstorm

That’s it for the year, shaving-wise. At a commenter’s request, I compared the Weber and Merkur HD, but to begin at the beginning:

MR GLO, then an enjoyable face lathering using the Thäter brush—a very nice little brush indeed—and Martin de Candre’s excellent shaving soap. I took my time, and then made sure both razors were using the same blade: a new Swedish Gillette blade.

The shave is similar—indeed, on inspecting the head, the Weber head very closely matches the configuration of the Merkur Classic head, which the HD uses. However, the razor has a different feel because of the Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) coating it uses: slick and smooth. The longer handle also gave the Weber a different feel from the HD. That said, however, the two are quite similar in their action. Both use the traditional straight-ahead cut (unlike the Slant), and—as I wrote—the two heads seem remarkably similar in shape.

Three very smooth passes, a splash of the Klar Seifen Sandalwood, and I’m ready to wrap up the year.

UPDATE: The more I inspect the head, the more I think this is the Merkur Classic head with a new finish—which does indeed make a difference in the feel, as I note.