WORLD Italian cheesemakers microchip parmesan in bid to fight copycats BY EMMET LYONS

AUGUST 18, 2023 / 11:45 AM / CBS NEWS

One of the world's most famous cheeses is also one of the most counterfeited dairy products on the planet.

Competing manufacturers have for years produced cheaper imitations of Italy's parmigiano reggiano, a favored topping for pasta and salad.

FILE PHOTO: A storage area for Parmesan cheese wheels is pictured at storehouse shelf at 4 Madonne Caseificio dell'Emilia dairy cooperative in Modena A storage area for Parmesan cheese wheels is pictured at storehouse shelf at 4 Madonne Caseificio dell'Emilia dairy cooperative in Modena, Italy, February 16 2016. ALESSANDRO BIANCHI / REUTERS Now, the producers of parmigiano reggiano say they have innovated a way to prevent any pretenders from ripping off their product.

Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium (PRC), the association that oversees production of the cheese, says it has been putting microchips in its product as part of a technological trial which would allow consumers to trace parmesan cheese back to its place of origin.

Under special protections designated by the European Union, parmigiano reggiano is the only kind of cheese which can be called parmesan within Europe and it must be made in a small part of northern Italy, including in the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia.

PRC are hopeful that their new technology will help to enforce that protected status. Their microchips are about the size of a grain of salt and have been inserted into the labels found on the rind of about 120,000 wheels of parmigiano reggiano. The chips work as scannable food tags with a QR code label (link)

Pouria Hadjibagheri [@Pouriaaa]. (2021, July 14). The state of the UK’s statistical system 2020/21 by @StatsRegulation Thank you! 🎊😀🎉 See the report: Https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/publication/the-state-of-the-uks-statistical-system-2020-21/pages/8/ https://t.co/dEBmVz3oTm [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/Pouriaaa/status/1415371346775838725

To drive this point home:

I sometimes get people who balk at my characterization of GitHub-style anti-wikis as being inferior to, you know, actual wikis. "You can just use the GitHub UI to edit the files", they'll sometimes say.

A case study: a couple days ago, I noticed that the lone link in the current README for Jeff Zucker's solid-rest project is a 404. I made a note of it. Just now, I reset my GitLab password, logged in to solid/chat, and notified Jeff https://gitter.im/solid/chat?at=611976c009a1c273827b3bd1. Jeff's response was, "I'll change it".

This case is rich with examples of what makes unwikis so goddamn inefficient to work with. First, my thought upon finding the broken link was to take note of it (i.e. so that it can eventually be taken care of) rather than fixing it immediately, as would have been the case with a wiki. More on this in a bit. Secondly, my eventual action was still not something that directly addressed the problem—it was to notify someone else† of the problem so that it might be fixed by them, due to the unwiki nature of piles of Git-managed markdown. Thirdly, even Jeff's reflex is not to immediately change it—much like my reaction, his is to note the need for a fix himself and then to tell me he's going to change it, which he will presumably eventually do. Tons of rigamarole just to get a link fixed‡ that remains broken even after having gone through all this.

† Any attempt to point the finger at me here (i.e. coming up short from having taken the wrong action—notifying somebody rather than doing it myself) would be getting it wrong. First, the fact that I can't just make an edit without taking into account the myriad privacy issues that GitHub presents is materially relevant! Secondly, even if I had been willing to ignore that thorn (or jump through the necessary hoops to work around it) and had used the GitHub web UI as prescribed, it still would have ended up as a request for someone else to actually take action on, because I don't control the project.

‡ Any attempt to quibble here that I'm talking about changing a README and not (what GitHub considers) a wiki page gets it wrong. We're here precisely because GitHub's unwikis are a bunch of files of markdown. The experience of changing an unwiki page would be rife with the same problems as encountered here.

ReconfigBehSci. (2022, January 6). RT @GidMK: Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is an absolutely awful study filled with issues and numeric mistakes https://t.co/hvEv5gMMn2 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1478987492552589314

Case study in equivocation.

Lots of good examples about why not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28867878

ElizabethB 🏡 on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 13 September 2021, from https://twitter.com/laughinggull6/status/1436329945773531137

Today we would like to share our experience in building a kids activities marketplace. We will lead you through the key stages of custom software product development in our company - from a discovery session to the product launch.

(20) ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘RT @martikagv: New book “Urban Informatics”, #OpenAccess https://t.co/wp45uWU9Mi Edited by @jmichaelbatty @CUHKofficial Michael Goodchild,…’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1384411081456582662

Cailin O’Connor. (2020, November 10). Using agent-based methods we show how even modest contact between disciplines can allow better methods to spread. This is because outsiders can award academic credit to those using good methods, leading to their uptake. 5 [Tweet]. @cailinmeister. https://twitter.com/cailinmeister/status/1326229762533060608

After conversion using the hypothes.is API tool: https://jonudell.info/h/CopyAnnotations/ , this annotation has been copied to a public annotation (which I subsequently edited).

Drawback: you can only use it with one user log-in and on a single web domain (so you'd have to run it for every single article someone has reviewed).

Original annotation (see in group—that one stays there, usefully!)

This annotation should be private to the group only.

Tags are permitted, they can be any free text.

Yuan, Yuan, Muzhi Guan, Zhilun Zhou, Sundong Kim, Meeyoung Cha, and Yong Li. ‘Disruption in the Chinese E-Commerce During COVID-19:A Case Study of the Beidian Platform’. ArXiv:2009.14605 [Physics], 22 July 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14605.

Blue lips and black skin: Did a standard 111 question help cause Olufemi Akinnola’s death from Covid-19? (2020, September 23). The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/23/blue-lips-and-black-skin-did-a-standard-111-question-help-cause-olufemi-akinnolas-death-from-covid-19

Chaudhry, R., Dranitsaris, G., Mubashir, T., Bartoszko, J., & Riazi, S. (2020). A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes. EClinicalMedicine, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464

Begum, M. R., Khan, S. I., Banna, H. A., Kundu, S., Hossen, M., Sayeed, A., Christopher, E., Hasan, M. T., Saba, S., & Shamsuzzoha. (2020). Mental health difficulties of adults with COVID-19-like symptoms in Bangladesh: A case control-study [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ubwxv

Baqui, P., Bica, I., Marra, V., Ercole, A., & van der Schaar, M. (2020). Ethnic and regional variations in hospital mortality from COVID-19 in Brazil: A cross-sectional observational study. The Lancet Global Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30285-0

Nguyen, L. H., Drew, D. A., Graham, M. S., Joshi, A. D., Guo, C.-G., Ma, W., Mehta, R. S., Warner, E. T., Sikavi, D. R., Lo, C.-H., Kwon, S., Song, M., Mucci, L. A., Stampfer, M. J., Willett, W. C., Eliassen, A. H., Hart, J. E., Chavarro, J. E., Rich-Edwards, J. W., … Zhang, F. (2020). Risk of COVID-19 among front-line health-care workers and the general community: A prospective cohort study. The Lancet Public Health, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30164-X

Carey, B., & Glanz, J. (2020, July 30). Aboard the Diamond Princess, a Case Study in Aerosol Transmission. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/health/diamond-princess-coronavirus-aerosol.html

Under more information about limitations and exceptions to copyright add section titled Case Studies: Case studies provide valuable information relating to the state of affairs in various countries, as well as the opposing views when debating copyright issues.

• South Africa: a case study of politics and the global economics of limitations and exceptions to copyright. The current debate in South Africa regarding proposed amendments to the Copyright Bill allows showcases the different sides of the debate, and how legal frameworks, e.g. the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa also informs decision making.

1. US Government Threatening To Kill Free Trade With South Africa After Hollywood Complained It Was Adopting American Fair Use Principles, by Mike Masnick, 4 November 2019.
2. South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill – one year on, by Denise Nicholson, 30 March 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
3. South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill Returned to Parliament for Further Consideration, Mike Palmedo, 22 June 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
4. See the light and pass the Copyright Amendment Bill, by Mugwena Maluleke, Tebogo Sithathu, Jack Devnarain, Tusi Fokane, Ben Cashdan and Jace Nair, 24 June 2020. © Mail & Guardian Online.
5. South African President’s Reservations to Copyright Bill Not Supported by Law, by Sean Flynn, 13 July 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

For a comprehensive list of materials relating to the South African Copyright Amendment Bill processes, see Copyright and Related Issues: USTR GSP trade threats re: Bill, list compiled and amended by Denis Nicholson

Jinjarak, Y., Ahmed, R., Nair-Desai, S., Xin, W., & Aizenman, J. (2020). Pandemic Shocks and Fiscal-Monetary Policies in the Eurozone: COVID-19 Dominance During January - June 2020 (Working Paper No. 27451; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27451

Leininger, A., & Schaub, M. (2020). Voting at the dawn of a global pandemic [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/a32r7

Hossain, M. M., Tasnim, S., Sultana, A., McKyer, E. L. J., & Ma, P. (2020). COVID-19 and suicide of an army soldier in India: Perspectives on psychosocial epidemiology of suicidal behavior [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/k2jgf

Bernard, P., St-Amour, S., Lachance, Kingsbury, C., & Lapointe. (2020). Dynamic patterns of depressive symptoms and sleep during the first month of strict lockdown in two women with major depressive disorder [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5enrq

Weinberger, D. M., Chen, J., Cohen, T., Crawford, F. W., Mostashari, F., Olson, D., Pitzer, V. E., Reich, N. G., Russi, M., Simonsen, L., Watkins, A., & Viboud, C. (2020). Estimation of Excess Deaths Associated With the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States, March to May 2020. JAMA Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.3391

Clark, J., Glasziou, P., Mar, C. D., Bannach-Brown, A., Stehlik, P., & Scott, A. M. (2020). A full systematic review was completed in 2 weeks using automation tools: A case study. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 121, 81–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.01.008

Meyer, B., Torriani, G., Yerly, S., Mazza, L., Calame, A., Arm-Vernez, I., Zimmer, G., Agoritsas, T., Stirnemann, J., Spechbach, H., Guessous, I., Stringhini, S., Pugin, J., Roux-Lombard, P., Fontao, L., Siegrist, C.-A., Eckerle, I., Vuilleumier, N., & Kaiser, L. (2020). Validation of a commercially available SARS-CoV-2 serological immunoassay. Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmi.2020.06.024

Kempfert, K., Martinez, K., Siraj, A., Conrad, J., Fairchild, G., Ziemann, A., Parikh, N., Osthus, D., Generous, N., Del Valle, S., & Manore, C. (2020). Time Series Methods and Ensemble Models to Nowcast Dengue at the State Level in Brazil. ArXiv:2006.02483 [q-Bio, Stat]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02483

Qian’s comments reflected Luckin’s obsessive drive to overtake Starbucks, one of the most successful U.S. companies in China. Starbucks opened its first coffee shop in the country in 1999 and now has 4,300 of them. By the time of its initial public offering, not even two years after its founding, Luckin was more than halfway to matching the market leader.

“We have done what most people do in 15 or 20 years,” Luckin Chief Financial Officer Reinout Schakel told CNBC on the morning of the Nasdaq debut.

China consumes nine times as much tea as coffee, but Qian saw that statistic as an opportunity. According to an account in Xinhua, the official state news service, she was drinking more and more coffee during long hours at her previous job and grew interested in why coffee hadn’t caught on in China as in other countries and why its cost was so high.

Until 2017, neither Qian nor Luckin’s chairman and largest shareholder, Charles Zhengyao Lu, had much to do with coffee shops. Lu studied industrial electric automation at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing and worked for the government in the northern city of Shijiazhuang for three years before getting the business itch. He started and ran a string of companies in information technology, telecommunications and automobile services.

“Entrepreneurship is like a marathon without an end,” he said at an award ceremony for China’s biggest business names in 2016.

His most successful venture at the time was CAR Inc., a car-rental company that had U.S. financing from Hertz and Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm. It listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2014, and within eight months, its stock value had nearly doubled. The boom was short-lived — the share price dropped below its initial offering price by the beginning of 2016 — but by then Lu, along with Hertz and Warburg Pincus, had sold the bulk of their stakes.

When Qian stepped up to the Nasdaq podium on May 17, 2019, Luckin had been in operation for just 20 months. Its $17 a share public offering raised another $645 million, and its underwriters included CICC, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.

On January 7, the company said it had more than 4,500 stores, enough to overtake Starbucks in China.

Howard Penney, an analyst for the online financial program Hedgeye Risk Management, summed up the optimism surrounding the company’s story line. On Jan. 15, he said that Starbucks would never be able to compete with Luckin in China, and might as well try to acquire it. Penney called Luckin “the most digitally savvy company in the world.”

Two days later, Luckin’s stock hit its all-time high, just above $51 a share, pushing its market value past $12 billion.

“China is to stock fraud,” he likes to say, “as Silicon Valley is to technology.”

The Climate Corporation is a digital agriculture company that examines weather, soil and field data to help farmers determine potential yield-limiting factors in their fields.

"That first year, in 2011, the Climate Corporation generated $60 million in sales, just from selling weather insurance to farmers. Three years later they were insuring 150 million acres of American farmland—the bulk of the Corn Belt—and teaching the farmers how to farm them more efficiently. Six years after venture capitalists valued David Friedberg’s new company at $6 million, Monsanto bought it for $1.1 billion." The Fifth Risk

Frey, R. (2020, April 26). Psychological drivers of inter- and intraindividual differences in risk perception: A systematic case study on 5G. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7a3kg

Great strategic investments + avoiding taxes + stiffing supplies with a longer payment cycle = cheaper capital + huge and growing FCF

Free cash flow (yellow line) is a bit like profit, except it doesn’t assume that Amazon has to pay for everything in the same time frame it sells it. And thanks to how Amazon’s payment cycle works, it usually gets money for selling an item long before it has to pay for that item. Last quarter, for example, it took Walmart on average two days to receive payment for goods after it paid its suppliers, while Amazon on average received payment 20 days before it paid its suppliers, according to cash conversion cycle data from the financial research platform Sentieo.

Amazon keeps profit and free cash flows artificially low by investing money right back into its business in the form of capital expenses, like building data centers, upgrading distribution networks, and creating wind and solar farms. It can do so without having to borrow money, which means it won’t incur interest costs.

Quite long but plenty of amazing advice in here from the founders of Looker (acquired by Google)

“My biggest piece of advice to early-stage founders on fundraising is don't try to raise money too early,” says Tabb. “I see so many founders out there trying to raise with just an idea on a slide. We waited almost a year to raise money, until we knew it was a venture business — not every startup is, and you don’t want to get locked in. We were cranking along with customers and revenue. And it wasn’t all nailed down, but we had figured out enough of how go-to-market might work to know that it was workable. That made our seed raise in the summer of 2012 so much easier. If you build value, it takes the fundraising process from how good you are at pitching yourself to a place where you can simply say ‘Ask the people who are using us for their opinion about it.’”

As the investor on the receiving end of that fundraising tactic, Trenchard agrees that it was effective. “When we were deciding whether or not to invest in their seed round, Lloyd sent me a list of 10 customer references — many of them were First Round-backed companies. I talked to each and every one during diligence, and I was blown away. The love they had for the products was off the charts, they would have been very disappointed without it,” says Trenchard.

Learning a new language. “I created LookML to serve as the basis of our platform. It’s an abstraction layer, the sequel to SQL. My thought was that if we could simplify the problems with SQL and evolve the data language, it would be easier to use,” says Tabb. But banking on data analysts learning a new language was anything but a surefire move. “This was a scary one,” says Porterfield. “I remember those early existential questions: ‘Can analysts learn this language? Will they want to?’ Looking back now, it seems more obvious that developer-style tooling and workflows would be embraced. These days, there’s a lot of discussion that any time you can provide tools that increase someone’s leverage, they will adopt them. But that wasn’t clear at the time.”

“For most companies in the data space, pre-sales folks are like plumbers, they're just hooking stuff together. We tried to take a different approach at Looker by asking prospects for a dataset and then putting economics or math majors to work. In the early days, they wore all the hats: They were pre-sales, post-sales, customer support. Eventually, those became separate roles as we scaled,” says Bien.

“In the early days, Margaret had a habit of saying ‘We'll be successful when we have 1,000 true fans.’ That was our driving force — figuring out how to build a fanbase in enterprise software,” says Tabb. “If you make a product that customers love, your customers will love you back. It may seem cheesy, but it was really about love — that’s the emotion we wanted to evoke in our customers. We call customer success our ‘Department of Customer Love.’ We made ‘Love Looker Love’ one of our values. I had early customers tell me that life at their company was now divided into two eras: ‘Before Looker’ and ‘After Looker.’ That’s the reaction we were always chasing,” he says.

“Back in my college days, I was really into the ideas of Robert Greenleaf, who kicked off the concept of servant leadership. Today, as a CEO, that philosophy carries forward — I view myself as a steward,” says Bien. “My role is to remove obstacles for other people and remove ownership for myself.”

They built the brand initially by using targeted Google search ads and marketing on Facebook; they eschewed television adverts, which they could not afford anyway. But the most important channel for building the brand was Instagram, the photo-sharing app. Halo Top gave free samples to thousands of “influencers” — athletes, gym trainers and healthy-living gurus — with a critical mass of followers the company thought might like the product. “We were constantly reaching out to people to try to get the word out about Halo Top,” explains Bouton.

A viral news story in early 2016 was a catalyst for the brand: a science journalist for GQ magazine ate nothing but Halo Top for 10 days and lost more than 4kg. Sales took off.

An online-only sportswear retailer that targets younger customers, it doubled annual sales this year and last, taking its turnover to about £200m.

PwC will be its strategic adviser to help bring in external funding, which could include either the sale of an equity stake or debt.

The company was founded in 2012 but now employs more than 400 people. It sells to 180 countries from its headquarters in Solihull, competing with brands like Nike and Under Armour.

It has no high street presence and does not use traditional marketing, promoting the brand instead through events and a network of social media health and fitness “influencers” with large numbers of followers.

The company is aiming to raise more than £100m, according to those familiar with the process, but will work with PwC over the next few months to decide what it needs. Until now, the business has funded its expansion from cash flow and has no debt on its balance sheet.

Ben Francis, who founded the company as a student in Birmingham to sell the sort of affordable gym wear he was looking to buy, said it generated about half its sales in the US. He wants to keep the focus on North America for the next stage of its growth.

The first two sentences briefly summarise the scenario; the last sentence of the paragraph highlights the problem -- the topic to be elaborated in the subsequent section.

We’re excited to announce that The Francis Crick Institute have partnered with our portfolio companies Symplectic and Figshare to enable richer profiles for their researchers and to make it easier for them to publish their papers and data Open Access.

Bookmarked as a reminder to get these papers which could be helpful for the participatory design study.

feature of technology with the pedagogy under SLA theory.

This could be an important experiment to use as a case study.