That “Wild Gulf Shrimp” You Bought Might Actually Be Farmed Whiteleg Shrimp

(Photos in the Sunset)

Just because you spent an hour searching the grocery store for the perfect bag of Wild Gulf Shrimp doesn’t mean you’re actually getting wild shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico.. In fact a new study released Thursday found that nearly a third of the shrimp products being sold in U.S. stores and restaurants aren’t what they seem to be.

The study from international environmental advocacy group, Oceana, analyzed 143 shrimp products from 111 grocery stores and restaurants in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, OR, and the Gulf of Mexico region.

DNA testing revealed that 30% of the products contained some kind of misrepresentation including products where one species was swapped for another; product sold as Gulf/wild shrimp were actually farmed; or bags included a mix of different species.

According to the report, the most common misrepresentation was the labeling of farmed whiteleg shrimp as “wild” or “Gulf” shrimp. However, none of the shrimp labeled as farmed were misrepresented.

And in one of the more disturbing findings, the group discovered that a frozen bag of salad-sized shrimp included an aquarium pet – a banded coral shrimp – not meant for consumption.

“Despite its popularity, U.S. consumers are routinely given little to no information about the shrimp they purchase,” Beth Lowell, senior campaign director at Oceana, says in a statement. “While shrimp is the most commonly consumed seafood in the U.S., and the most highly traded seafood in the world, its high demand has led to conservation concerns as well as a bait and switch on consumers.”

While Oceana found misrepresented shrimp in all regions that were tested, the most came from New York City where 43% of the products were mislabeled.

Products in Washington, D.C. didn’t fare much better, with 33% of products found to be mislabeled.

One might assume that shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico region would have the least amount of mislabeling, but you’d be wrong. The area was found to have about 30% of products mislabeled.

In fact, Portland had the fewest products mislabeled, with just 5% containing misrepresentations.

Overall, Oceana reports that 35% of the 111 vendors selling the tested products sold misrepresented shrimp.

While a majority of the 70 restaurants visited for the study did not include information about the types of scrimp, nearly 31% of those who did provide information sold misrepresented shrimp.

Of the 41 grocery stores included in the study, 41% sold misrepresented products.

“Until traceability is the status quo, consumers should ask more questions about the seafood they purchase, including what kind it is, if it is wild or farm-raised, and where and how it was caught,” Lowell says in the statement.

Oceana is urging the government task force responsible for combating seafood fraud to take a comprehensive approach to addressing issues of traceability to ensure that products sold in the U.S. are safe, legally caught, and properly labeled.

Oceana Study Reveals Misrepresentation of America’s Favorite Seafood [Oceana]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Study Finds Internet Congestion Really Is About Business, Not Technology

(frankieleon)

Various enormous corporations have this year been at each other’s throats over how well or how poorly internet traffic travels through their systems. A new report indicates that some of the mud-slinging this year is true: interconnection, or peering, between ISPs is why end-users are getting terrible internet traffic. But, they say, it’s business, and not technology, that’s making your Netflix buffer.

DSL Reports points the way to the study, from an internet research organization called M-Lab. M-Lab studied how traffic does (or doesn’t) make it to you through the peering connections it travels through.

Peering has come up a lot this year, most notably around Netflix. The streaming-video behemoth contended that major ISPs — particularly but not solely Comcast and Verizon — were deliberately letting Netflix traffic clog up.

The congestion was happening at interconnection points, the places where the transit ISPs Netflix partnered with — companies like Level 3 and Cogent — met up with the access ISPs (the “last mile” providers) that home users use. To alleviate the congestion and avoid hemorrhaging customers who couldn’t use the service they paid for, Netflix eventually paid Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable for direct access to their networks, bypassing those interconnection points entirely.

But even though Netflix moves a lot of data, they’re hardly the only internet traffic moving around out there. Massive amounts of information pass through transit ISPs and peering connections every moment of every day. So where are the problems in the system?

M-Lab sat down and did a long-term study measuring how internet traffic moves through all those different transit tributaries, so to speak. The full report (a href=”http://ift.tt/1wJRwge) delves into some of the technicalities of measuring and quantifying interconnection and is kind of a hefty read. There are, however, some clear key take-aways.

From a high level, you see some of the patterns you’d expect. For example, there’s a lot less network congestion at 3 o’clock in the morning then there is at prime-time, between 7 and 11 p.m.

But beyond that, one pattern began clearly to emerge. The network congestion M-Lab was seeing, they write, doesn’t appear to be connected to the technical limitations of ISPs or the connection points themselves. Instead, it seems, “business relationships between ISPs, and not major technical problems, are at the root of the problems we observed.”

M-Lab is very careful to remind readers that they have data proving correlations, but insufficient information to assign blame. “While we feel safe pinpointing the interconnection relationship … as a factor in performance degradation,” M-Lab writes, “it is important to not that we cannot determine which actors or actions are ‘responsible’ for observed degradation. We cannot tell whether any particular ISP between the user and a measurement point is ‘at fault,’ what the contractual agreement between ISPs did or did not dictate vis-a-vis interconnection, or whether specific network modification was done to alleviate or magnify a given incident.”

But the evidence does look worse for some companies than for others. M-Lab used New York City as one of their case studies. They found that in 2013, internet traffic delivered to Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast via Cogent took a dramatic hit before rebounding equally dramatically roughly 10 months later:

via the Measurement Lab Interconnection Study

Since all three ISPs took a hit at roughly the same time, it seems easy to look for a common link. In this case, that link would be Cogent. Perhaps the trouble was on their end, instead of at three different companies?

Not so, says M-Lab. The next graph demonstrates that during the same period of time, in the same city, Cablevision’s traffic through Cogent moved smoothly and quickly without taking the same precipitous plunge as the other three providers’.

So that says Cogent was up and running. So perhaps TWC, Comcast, and Verizon all suffered a freak simultaneous set of outages? M-Lab couldn’t rule that out, but they also measured the connections all four last-mile ISPs had to another transit provider, Internap, during the same time period. Those connections did not see any significant degradation.

Although they are once again careful not to assign blame, M-Lab points out that the data “strongly suggests that the issues seen are not isolated to the consumer-facing, edge networks of impacted Access ISPs, but rather relate to the interconnections traversed between Cogent and the three impacted Access ISPs – Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon.”

Whether the last-mile providers are doing it to squeeze more money out of video companies or simply having contractual disagreements with Cogent doesn’t really matter to consumers who, once again, are stuck in the middle without the chance to flee to the competition.

M-Lab: Streaming Issues Were Conscious ISP Business Decision [DSL Reports]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist

Starz Also Looking At Online-Only Streaming Service

In the wake of HBO’s still-vague announcement that it will soon be launching a streaming video service that doesn’t require a pay-TV subscription, Starz — the nudity and violence-loving competitor to HBO — says it is also looking into the possibility.

Starz CEO Chris Albrecht — taking a break from ensuring that all of his original programming maintains the proper nipple-to-decaptitation ratio that its viewers have come to expect — recently told reporters that his company is already planning an on-demand streaming service for international markets.

The premium network already offers a streaming service to subscribers in the U.S., but just like HBO Go, you need to first pay for TV service through a cable or satellite provider.

But Albrecht indicated that Starz is looking at options for an online-only service here in the U.S., which he views as an inevitability.

“This is a tide that has to turn,” he explained, saying that the value of a paid premium channel is constrained by the current business model.

“I don’t think it cannibalizes the existing business,” says Albrecht of skeptics’ claims that you can’t succeed in offering both a pay-TV service and an over-the-top online-only service. “It is a way to innovate and create real value.”

He explains that it’s important to attract those consumers who have either given up on pay-TV or have never given it a chance because there are plenty of non-cable entertainment options available.

“Let’s get them in the tent,” says Albrecht. “Let’s give them what they want.”

One statement from the CEO seems to indicate that, as we suggested in a previous story about the impending HBO service, that cable companies could benefit by continuing to do the billing for over-the-top services.

“The distributors have to decide they want to not just sell [cord-cutters] broadband but they want them to be video customers as well,” he explained. “To us this is a no-brainer.”

[via Variety]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Sale Of Motorola Mobility From Google To Lenovo Is Finalized

(Louis Abate)

Earlier this year, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion in cash and stock. Just three years ago, Google bought the company for $12.5 billion, but this isn’t as terrible a business deal as it might appear: while Lenovo gets the phone business, Google gets to keep the company’s valuable library of patents.

Google spent $12.5 billion on the company, maker of many well-respected handsets that run Google’s Android phone and tablet operating system. Motorola Mobility doesn’t turn a profit, but Lenovo now has a reputation for buying brands with a lot of potential and nurturing them into a bigger business. There are even rumors that the company may be looking to purchase Blackberry, an even more troubled smartphone maker. and has been focusing on lower-end smartphones for developing markets.

Lenovo is now the top computer manufacturer in the world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers want to buy a smartphone from them. The company plans to keep Motorola Mobility’s headquarters in Chicago, and keep the Motorola brand. That’s smart, since the brand has 8% of the market.

It’s official: Motorola Mobility now belongs to Lenovo [CNET]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

5 Things We Learned About The Single Mom That Made Tupperware Parties Famous

Brownie Wise, the force behind Tupperware’s sales party technique, would toss sealed bowls full of liquid to demonstrate the product.

Whether you’ve ever sat through a sales “party” for some sort of product — whether it’s cleaning products, makeup, weight-loss treatments or marital aids — the mere existence of this type of social soft sell owes a lot to one woman, Brownie Wise, who didn’t just have a made-for-TV name, but who came out of nowhere to make Tupperware a household name before being left with little to show for her efforts.

Over at Mental Floss, writer Jen Doll takes an in-depth look at Brownie’s fascinating life that is definitely worth a read. But if you’re too busy planning your own sales party for this weekend, here are some of the things we learned about this retail revolutionary:

1. Before getting into sales, she penned a women’s advice column

In the 1940s, while working as a secretary at Bendix Aviation in Michigan, Brownie also penned an advice column for the Detroit News under the pseudonym of “Hibiscus,” a well-heeled housewife who lived with her family in a fictional home dubbed “Lovehaven,” even though Brownie herself was a divorced mom living a very different life from the one she described on paper.

2. Tupperware wasn’t her first stab at throwing sales parties

After being less than impressed by a Stanley Home Products door-to-door salesman, Brownie decided to try her hand at a side job selling Stanley items using the company’s experimental program of hosting parties to demonstrate their products.

She was soon earning enough money to do full-time sales and even reached management level at Stanley before being told by the head of the company that she’d never reach become an executive because the halls of Stanley were “no place for a woman.”

3. She discovered the alluring power of being put on a waiting list

Much like a nightclub can give off the impression of being exclusive and popular by having a long line of people waiting to get inside, a good salesperson knows the value of using scarcity to make a product — even something like Tupperware — more desirable. She would take orders from customers regardless of whether the product was in stock because she knew that putting customers on that waiting list made them more eager to buy.

4. She used a glob of raw polyethylene as a good luck totem

The original Tupperware product was born out of surplus polyethylene that Tupper had procured from the military after the end of World War II.

After Brownie joined the company and showed that her sales technique worked, company founder Earl Tupper showed his graciousness by presenting her with a piece of the material. She named the blob of plastic “Poly” and considered it a prized possession that she told her sellers to touch for good luck.

“Just get your fingers on it, wish for what you want,” she’d tell them. “Know it’s going to come true, and then get out and work like everything… and it will!”

5. She was the first woman on the cover of Business Week

By 1954, Wise’s rapidly growing, mostly female army of sellers was bringing in $25 million a year to a company that could barely get off the ground before she came on board. But when she landed on the cover of Business Week magazine that year, and received much of the credit for the company’s success in the accompanying article, Earl Tupper wasn’t thrilled that she might be overshadowing his creation.

Following the publication of the Business Week piece, he left Brownie a note about the piece that read, “good executive as you are, I still like best the pictures … with TUPPERWARE!”

6. Her name was soon expunged from Tupperware history and her books were buried

The final years of her decade with Tupperware were filled with tension, as Mr. Tupper believed her extravagant events and the rewards she handed out were costing him money. He also got to thinking that Tupperware had just become a way for Brownie to market herself to the public.

So in advance of the sale of Tupperware to the Rexall Drug in 1958, Tupper fired Brownie and eventually ordered that her name be removed from the official company history. He also ordered that the remaining copies of her self-help book be buried in a pit near the Tupperware HQ in Florida.

After a legal battle, Brownie, who held no stock in the company she helped to bring to the fore of American kitchen culture, was awarded one year’s salary, around $30,000.

In spite of her meteoric rise, Brownie would never again achieve the same level of success. She passed away in 1992 at her home in Kissimmee, FL, not far from the company that tried to erase her from its memory decades earlier.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Who Has It Worse: Victims Of This Scary “Living” Poster, Or The Guy Stuck Inside?

If you want a viral advertising gimmick, there are few more reliable methods than just scaring the fecal matter out of innocent people. But after looking at this video about one amusement park’s terrifying “living” poster, we’re not sure if we feel worse for the people who soil their jeans from fright or the poor guy who is stuck inside the poster all day.

The folks at Gröna Lund Scare park in Sweden should probably not have posted the above behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the poster, which features a white display with only a few words and a QR code for people to scan with their phones.

Scanning that code triggers a horrific screaming sound from inside the display, all while some sort of ghoulish creature tries to claw its way through the white poster, which honestly has to be a pretty scary event for those not expecting it.

But as the behind-the-scenes video shows, that movement isn’t achieved through some sort of Disney-ish animatronics, but through the old-fashioned way — some poor sucker who has to stand in the display all day waiting for people to scan the QR code.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Live The Dream: Hand Out Candy Canes To Trick-Or-Treaters

Most people have bought their Halloween candy, which leaves lots of empty retail space. What’s a smart store manager to do? Fill that space up with merchandise for the next holiday. This makes retail sense, but results in horrified Consumerist readers when they see a huge display of candy canes two days before Halloween.

Liz spotted this display at a Wegmans store in upstate New York. “We can’t even enjoy Halloween anymore!” she wrote, perhaps overlooking that giving out candy canes to children on Halloween would be a fantastic way to enjoy the holiday. It might be problematic for families that celebrate Halloween but not Christmas, though, so maybe it isn’t such a good idea.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

10 síntomas de que debes cambiar de trabajo #infografia #infographic #empleo #rrhh

Hola:

Una infografía con 10 síntomas de que debes cambiar de trabajo.

Un saludo

10 síntomas de que debes cambiar de trabajo

Archivado en: Infografía, Inserción laboral, RRHH Tagged: Infografía, Inserción laboral, RRHH, trabajo



from TICs y Formación http://ift.tt/13lEUSM

via Alfredo Vela Posteado por www.bscformacion.com

Chrysler Recalls 33,000 Trucks, SUVs, And Minivans For Tire Pressure Problems

(Realph Krawczyk Jr)

Chrysler continues its recall roll this week, issuing two more notices calling back more than 33,000 vehicles for issues related to tire pressure monitoring systems.

The car manufacturer announced the recall of 10,390 model year 2014 Jeep Wranglers, Dodge Grand Caravans and Chrysler Town & Country minivans because of false warnings from the tire pressure monitor (TPM) system.

Officials with the company say recall was initiated to reconfigure a TPM module to disable a test mode that was inadvertently left on following shipment of the vehicles.

The TPM module in the recalled vehicles may not get accurate tire-pressure readings, which can result in a false warning.

The second recall, which involves 23,053 model year 2014 Ram ProMaster full-size vans, concerns a needed software upgrade in the TPM system.

According to Chrysler, the vans contain TPM sensors that lack the capability to recognize which tire the pressure data is coming from. The issue can create false signals of low tire pressure.

Additionally, if the light is already activated, the system may not properly alert vehicle occupants if tire pressure actually becomes low.

Owners of vehicles covered by both recalls will be notified next month and advised of when they can schedule service.

Today’s recalls mark the third and fourth for Chrysler this week. Yesterday, the company issued two separate recalls involving more than 566,000 trucks and SUVs that may have fuel leaks and stability control issues.

On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was opening an inquiry into Chrysler’s Dodge brand for poor communication and delays in remedying a 2013 recall of the 972,000 model year 2003-2012 light and heavy-duty Ram trucks that contain a defect in the left tie rod assembly that if fractured could cause the vehicle to lose steering control.

Statement: Tire Pressure Monitors [Chrysler]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Yet Another City Moves To Block Comcast From Taking Over Their TWC Service

(Consumerist)

Comcast’s plans to buy Time Warner Cable are obviously heavily under review at the federal level, and states are reviewing the merger plans with a gimlet eye as well. But thanks to the quirks of the way cable agreements developed, the cities that cable companies serve have the power to allow or block new companies from coming in and taking over. And a city in Kentucky this week became the latest potentially to throw a wrench in the grand Comcast/Time Warner Cable/Charter plan by doing just that.

The central Kentucky city of Danville this week took action to prevent the transfer of their cable from TWC to Comcast, according to local media.

On Monday, the Danville City Commission voted unanimously to approve the first reading of two ordinances related to the merger. The first would deny the transfer of the city’s service from TWC to Comcast. The second would deny the transfer from Comcast to Charter. The City Commission could pass the ordinances as soon as November 10.

Under Kentucky law (as in most states), cable companies must obtain a franchise agreement from a city in order to operate there. As the Advocate-Messenger explains, Danville last issued a franchise agreement in 2003, to Adelphia. Time Warner Cable purchased Adelphia in 2009, but continued to provide service under the terms of the earlier contract.

Because the franchise agreement is expired, city officials had an opportunity to address existing issues in negotiating a new agreement with TWC — one that would then be transferred to Comcast.

But TWC has apparently not been amenable to the city’s requests. The Danville City Attorney told the Advocate-Messenger that there are “serious non-compliancy issues” with the existing, expired franchise agreement. “We had been in discussion with representatives of Time Warner Cable for a long period of time,” he added, “however, we have been unsuccessful in negotiating the outstanding non-compliance issues.”

Among the issues in the negotiation between TWC and Danville were the retention of a local office in Danville, a fiber connection to the city hall, continued service of the local public access channel, and free service to local civic buildings and schools. A lawyer retained by the city also pointed to Comcast’s customer service record as a contributing factor.

A Danville city comissioner told the Advocate-Messenger, “I think the things we are asking for are very reasonable and very important for the public. We have a lot of people that rely on the public access channel for several things — people who can’t go out to church and a lot of people who watch broadcasts of City Commission meetings … It’s not a lot to ask of a company for the business we generate.”

Danville joins another Kentucky city, Lexington, as well as the central Massachusetts city of Worcester in taking steps to prevent Comcast from taking over the local cable franchise license.

In Worcester’s case, the city is currently served by Charter and would be spun off to Comcast as part of the “no, no, we’re not a monopoly, see?” customer swap the companies have arranged. Lexington, like Danville, is currently served by TWC but would be transferred eventually through Comcast to Charter as part of the same shuffle.

Danville moves to deny Time Warner Cable transfer of agreement to Comcast [The Advocate-Messenger]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist