Pi-Consulting

Several centuries after Marco Polo introduced pasta noodles from China to Italians, that inventive race went one better and invented pizza, which promptly swept onto the fast-food menus of a grateful world. Now the tide may be beginning to reverse, at least in the UK, where Pizza Hut (700 restaurants across the country) has decided to re-name itself Pasta Hut. This startling decision is an effort to charm anew those customers whose palates have perhaps become jaded by family-sized Pepperoni Specials, Quattro Stagiones and American Hots, or are concerned about healthy-eating issues. Under its new name, the company is set to spend around $170 million on improving its restaurants, opening more outlets and developing its menu. The restaurants will still sell pizzas, but the new pasta-linked name will show that a range of healthier meals are now on offer, featuring a variety of new pasta-based dishes. Says chief executive Alasdair Murdoch: “We’re doing it to try to attract customers who probably haven’t been in for a few years”. It remains to be seen if the spirit of Marco Polo will exert the same influence over other pizza-eating countries like the USA. Source: London Financial Times, WARC News, Pi

After years of marketing fairy-tale and “princess” fantasy products to little girls, the Walt Disney Company has decided to do something for their brothers too. Hey, it’s the boys’ turn! Disney is launching new initiatives, targeting entertainment products at the hitherto elusive market sector of boy children aged 6–14. The company is rebranding its cable and digital TV channel Toon Disney (currently available in 72 million US households) as “Disney XD”, offering programs based around action and adventure themes, videogames and skateboarding. There will also be a new boy-friendly website, DisneyXD.com, featuring music, games, videos and social networking capabilities. Disney’s sports affiliate ESPN will provide sports content. Says Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide: “We looked at the landscape and felt that girls are being served, but boys really haven’t been”. The new plan should do much to even out the battle of the sexes. Source: WARC News

“Chicle! Chicle!”. The cry goes up from tens of thousands of street-sellers every day in Mexico City, hawking chewing-gum to the 25 million inhabitants of that vast conurbation. Once it has been masticated to the point where the taste is gone, where does the gum go next? Straight onto the sidewalk, where it bonds to the paving slabs, absorbs dirt and smog deposits, and reminds passers-by of someone else’s fleeting moment of pleasure, probably for years to come.

There’s your trouble. Discarded gum has a half-life almost as long as spent nuclear fuel rods. How big is the problem? A survey of street surfaces outside the city’s metro stations, and reported in the Washington Post, implies that there are around 70 bits of old gum per square meter on average. If the same concentration affects the whole surface area of Mexico City, Pi calculates that we are talking about 50 to 100 billion (yes billion) blots on the streetscape.

Where to start? The city’s co-ordinator of conservation for public spaces have vowed to scrub the historic central district clean of chicle deposits, and a crack team of gum-busters are attacking the blobs with steam jets and chemicals, starting in February. With hope in his heart, co-ordinator Ricardo Jaral Fernandez is also placing public trashcans in prominent locations, each blazoned with an exhortation to “love your city”.

Meanwhile, in a truly startling and radical development, the municipal government is giving notice that it plans to start enforcing its own recycling laws. By now, according to city planners, over 70% of the residents of Mexico City are supposed to be separating household waste for recycling. In reality, fewer than ten percent of the people in the capital do so. Entrenched attitudes are about as difficult to turn around as a supertanker in the Panama Canal.

Chewing-gum has been on sale in Mexico for over 120 years, and nearly all of it is unthinkingly spat onto the sidewalk. Changing the attitudes behind this behaviour means nothing less than re-shaping Mexicans’ attitude to civic pride. The initiative sadly sounds a little like Don Quixote tilting at gumballs. Pi wishes Sr. Jaral lots of luck with his praiseworthy attempt to change a century-old bad habit, and the shoulder-shrugging indifference that causes it.

Economic downturn? What economic downturn? Paris Hilton went on a New Year shopping spree in Sydney, Australia, spending $4,000 in less than an hour. The world’s news media erupted, fingering the self-publicizing socialite for “callous disregard” of the deprivations that ordinary folk were going through. This kind of negative coverage has resulted in a furtive change of behavior among some shopaholics who still have plenty in the bank. Kathy Fuld, the wife of the deposed Lehman Brothers chief Dick Fuld, seems to have salvaged much of the wealth he amassed before the firm’s demise, including the $13 million home he recently sold her for $10. Anxious not to draw enemy fire while trawling the mall, she has reportedly evolved a new form of “stealth shopping,” instructing sales clerks in ritzy apparel stores like Hermès to put her merchandise in plain shopping bags rather than the orange ones with the conspicuous Hermès brand name on them. It’s the return of the “plain brown wrapper”. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd acerbically comments about the anonymous shopping bags, “Americans are suffering from luxury shame. …A practice once reserved for men’s magazine pornography is now being used to mask the ‘pornography’ of spending”. Source: NYT

There are more than 100 million active blogs on the internet. Readers of blogs now vastly outnumber people who read serious unbiased news and information sources, online or offline.

At the top of the heap are those blogs written by truthful journalists, experts and informed commentators, many of whom have day jobs at reputable printed and online publications. Some of them (this one included), try very hard to propagate truth and informed commentary untainted by hearsay, innuendo and ideological baggage. They can generally be relied on to ensure that everything they publish comes from a reputable and believable source, and has been responsibly verified.

Other blogs dedicate themselves to spreading biased, twisted and often blatantly untrue “information” masquerading as “facts”. You can usually tell the latter kind by their ranting and self-justifying style, their poor spelling, and the clear impression they give that a case is being advanced for some “righteous” (that tell-tale word!) cause, sect or interest group.

But people seem to love that stuff. One of the effects of the decline of newsprint publications and the inexorable rise of the internet is that many of us can now chose only to read the ‘facts’ and opinions that actively appeal to us. Faced with the massed ranks of the crazed, the biased, the finger-waggers and those whose beliefs are more important to them than what they actually know, millions of credulous readers nod sagely, and murmur “There, just as I thought”. Lunatic conspiracy theories have never been easier to spread. Look at the amazing ease with which the Bush White House convinced America of blatant untruths, such as Saddam Hussein being behind the 9/11 attacks. Look how many American voters were gulled into believing that the future president was a practicing Muslim.

If you really want to believe something, it will not take you long to find support for your cherished credo. The trouble is, that “proof” is liable to be a pack of lies. In the minds of many, “The Truth” is being supplanted by “My Truth”. Anything that challenges or undermines “My Truth” can easily be dismissed with “well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, or denounced as a vile conspiracy against the certainties of the righteously indignant. Indeed, if you’re lazy, you can dismiss everything you disagree with as “too much information”.

In early 2009, two ideas surfaced which may push the tide back in favor of truth-telling.

The first is the idea of endowments for reputable but financially troubled newspaper publishing companies. A team of financial experts at Yale University has noted that dwindling newsstand sales and slumping advertising revenues are forcing America’s best newspapers to slash their teams of international reporters, and are even putting some papers on the endangered species list. Migration of readers to internet versions of their publications is not doing enough to keep the news and comment coming, since web-based newspaper editions operate on a different and far less lucrative business model.

In an article titled “News You Can Endow” (New York Times 01/28/09), Yale’s chief investment officer David Swensen argues that “Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance”. Endowment funds, Swensen believes, is the only sure way of keeping these valued truth-telling publications in business.

The other welcome development is at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia site. Wikipedia is a ‘wiki’, a website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit content at their whim. Being voluntary, Wikipedia was launched with no real editor. Its driving principle is “This is my truth; what’s yours?”. The aim is not necessarily truth per se, but the warm, fuzzy feeling of consensus.

The flaws in this reasoning have just been exposed. During Barack Obama’s inauguration, Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd were taken ill. Both recovered, but within minutes of the occurrences, items appeared on Wikipedia stating flatly that they had died. Whether the people posting these items were stupid, ill-informed or malicious does not really matter. Truth was the casualty. The site scrambled to correct the “mistakes”, and now appears ready to introduce a system of “flagged revisions”, which will subject newly posted “facts” to a system of screening and scrutiny. This will cost Wikipedia money, but it will do much to impede the spread of misinformation.

But the overall problem remains. Looking at the vast majority of blogs and internet bulletin boards, the innocent reader has no means of telling whether they are reading the truth, a biased message, a pile of garbage or a deliberate untruth.

Caveat lector.