On the Foxconn, um, factory in Wisconsin:
Such announcements are far from unusual for Gou, and often, nothing comes of them. In Vietnam in 2007, in Brazil in 2011, in Pennsylvania in 2013, and in Indonesia in 2014, Foxconn announced enormous factories that either fell far short of promises or never appeared. Just this year, the industries minister of Maharashtra, India, which aggressively pursued one of Gou’s multibillion-dollar projects in 2015, finally confirmed the factory isn’t coming, saying the state had learned a lesson about believing businesses promising big investments.
https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wisconsin-jobs-loophole-trump
In China, where Foxconn employs the vast majority of its million workers, these sorts of announcements are called “state visit projects,” according to Willy Shih, a Harvard business school professor and former display industry consultant. Officials get a ribbon-cutting photo op, the company gets political goodwill, and everyone understands that the details of the contract are just an opening bid by a company that will ultimately do whatever makes economic sense.
I wish I could explain statistics as clearly as this:
Let’s say we have 100 people who have volunteered for the trials. We’ve divided them into two groups of 50 each. One will be administered the experimental drug, the other a placebo — i.e. something that looks identical, but has no medicinal value at all. There are rules for administering a placebo correctly, and I’ll come to those. For now, let’s assume they have been followed.
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/opinion-significance-of-double-blind-drug-trials-11602211204718.html
The trial runs its course. The placebo group reports that one person has recovered, whereas the group that got the actual drug reports that five have recovered. What, if anything, can we conclude? Is this just chance? Is there a real difference between the groups? Is this enough to conclude anything about the efficacy of the drug?
Old men, friendships, and chimpanzees.
As they got older, the chimps developed more mutual friendships and fewer one-sided friendships. They also exhibited a more positive approach to their whole community, continuing grooming of other chimps, including those that weren’t close friends, at the same rate, but with a drop in aggression. Other primates don’t necessarily follow this pattern as they grow older, according to the authors. Some monkeys tend to withdraw from social relationships and their aggression levels stay high.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/science/aging-chimps-friendship.html
Krish Ashok writes a passionate (and erudite, but that’s a given, no?) defence of… maida.
Maida is technically more all-purpose than all-purpose flour because, with a little bit of food science, you can turn this unfairly maligned flour into flaky Malabar parottas, crisp luchis, fluffy naans and kulchas, airy bhaturas, pillowy soft loaves of bread, crunchy-yet-chewy pizzas and delectable cakes without having to buy multiple kinds of flours to do it all.
https://lifestyle.livemint.com/food/discover/masala-lab-why-maida-is-not-the-flour-world-villain-111603383026971.html
And while on food, this excellent, entertaining article on custard:
Corn flour comes from pounding the kernel into a white powder that forms a non-Newtonian fluid––a liquid that doesn’t change viscosity under stress––when mixed with water. Its greatest virtue is that it contributes to thickness and volume without tasting like anything.
https://fiftytwo.in/story/powder/
Its use as a food product was patented in Britain in 1854 by a man named John Polson Jr., who began manufacturing it in a factory in Paisley, Scotland owned by his father, John Polson, and his partners William Polson and John Brown. Some of their first advertisements declared that the product “was preferred on account of its plainness.”
EconForEverybody 