How Amazon can ruin your life – close your account

Who Ate My Amazon Account?
[Via The Consumerist]

Some nefarious, unauthorized person “may have” accessed Joseph’s Amazon account. If you’re thinking, “So what? it’s just an e-commerce account,” note that he not only owns a Kindle and many annotated books for it, but has also now lost his purchase history and his wish list. Sure, Amazon has offered him a gift card to re-purchase the books he lost, but he’s not really keen to trust the company again.

I received an e-mail from Amazon last week stating that someone “may” have accessed my account unlawfully and consequently they have decided to permanently close my account.

I have been a Amazon customer for the last 8 years, was an amazon prime member and have spent thousand of dollars with the company in the last couple years alone, (I have also never returned any item purchased from them or had any sort of other dispute or complaint to their customer service) yet when I asked them to do me the courtesy of explaining why they shut down my account since I am convinced it’s a mistake on their part not actual fraud they have refused to speak to me and keep sending me the same form e-mail asking me to simply open a new account with them and keep shopping….

The only problem, is that losing your amazon account after 8 years of purchases is not that simple, not only I have I permanently lost all my order history, shipping address for tons of friends and family and my 5 page wish list neither of which I have a record of anywhere else, but I soon discovered that it also meant losing hundreds of dollars of Kindle books I have purchased from them. Amazon’s solution to that is just to offer me a gift card for the amount I spent on Kindle books so I can repurchase them all individually on the new account I’m supposed to open with them.

But as I have the nasty habit of heavily highlighting, bookmarking and annotating all the books I read, it means that they just trashed the countless hours I spent reading and taking notes in my books!

As a service provider, I find it ludicrous that a company would be allowed to erase the content of a product they have sold you without ever checking in with you first, or even making an attempt to an apology and rectification.

So before you start replacing the hard copy of all your favorite books with Kindle versions like I foolishly did, keep in mind that Amazon apparently has the right to delete them all without as much as a warning or an apology.

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I’ve got a ton of contacts, a long wish list and all the purchase history. But I have not gone towards ebooks since I can not own the book.

Here we see that Amazon controls the books. Anything you add or highlight , or even the book, can be taken away at Amazon’s decision or whim.

Not worth it to me.

I am so glad I live in the Pacific NW

After Story on Monster Heat Wave, NBC Asks “What Explains This?” The Answer: “We’re Stuck in a Summer Pattern”!
[Via Climate Progress]

U.S. bakes under extreme heat, half of population under heat advisory or warning

Temperature at 6 feet above the surface for July 12, 2011 at 5 p.m. ET

The media loves to report on stories about how public concern about global warming is waning — even if the polling data doesn’t support that view.

Ahh, but when it comes to actually connecting the dots between extreme weather we’re now experiencing and global warming, well, that story is apparently too hot to handle — even when the data does support that view.

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Not a typical summer. And then there is this prediction for Sunday.

 

Heat index forecast for Sunday. (NOAA)

The only part of the US that looks nice – outside of the mountains, is the Pacific Coast.

I don’t want doctors to be cool. I want them to be efficient

NCBI ROFL: The efficacy of stethoscope placement when not in use: traditional versus “cool”.
[Via Discoblog]

Fig. 1: Traditional (left) and “cool” (right) placements of the stethoscope when not in use.

It’s CMAJ week on NCBI ROFL! All this week we’ll be featuring articles from the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s holiday issues. Enjoy!

“Objective: To determine whether the “cool” or circumcervical placement of the stethoscope when not in use is as efficacious as the traditional placement in terms of transfer time to the functional position.

Methods: Measurement of time taken by 100 health care professionals in each group to transfer stethoscope to functional position.

Results and interpretation: The cool group was much slower than the traditional group, despite their younger years. This wasted time could translate into a substantial financial burden on Canada’s health care system.”

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When are we going to have Dr. McCoy  scanner doodads that get all that information without having to resort to a stethoscope.

Quote mining. a major tool of denialists

The Australian’s War on Science 63: Quote mining
[Via Deltoid]

In a news story in The Australian Christian Kerr claims:

Former US vice-president turned climate crusader Al Gore has used footage of the Queensland floods from earlier this year as proof of climate change, contradicting the findings of the Gillard government’s Climate Commission.

A new video posted on YouTube, narrated by Mr Gore to promote his Climate Reality Program, opens with footage of the wall of water that swept through Toowoomba in January. In the video, Mr Gore says “big oil and big coal are spending big money” to distort debate on climate change.

Yet he has ignored the findings of the Climate Commission, which says the Queensland floods were probably not a product of climate change but instead a natural part of climate variability.

Commissioner Will Steffen wrote in the May report The Critical Decade: “The floods across eastern Australia in 2010 and early 2011 were the consequence of a very strong La Nina event and not the result of climate change.”

Unfortunately for Kerr, the report is available online, so we can see how Kerr quote mined it:

Sea surface temperatures (sst) have warmed nearly everywhere over the past century, including around Australia (figure 31).

This additional warmth in the upper ocean – SSTs in the northern Australian region are currently at or near record levels and are much warmer for this La Niña event than for previous strong La Niña events (Figure 24) – may possibly have enhanced precipitation and led to an even more intense precipitation event than would otherwise have occurred, although such enhancement has yet to be demonstrated.

So the report says that while global warming didn’t cause the floods, it may have made them worse. Kerr deliberately omitted the second part to make it seem like the report contradicted Gore.

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Quote mining is to use a quote in such a way as to make the author of the quote state something that is the opposite of what he really stated, when the entire passage is seen. Leaving out crucial sentences to provide context or even using ellipses to remove words can make a quote seem entirely different than the author intended.

You can be pretty certain that people who quote mine are not interested in the unvarnished examination of the data but wish to bias things for their side. Inevitably, that side is to deny the science.

Climate science and evolution are the two most obvious places were denialists routinely use quote mining to try and make their case.

This is one of the easiest ways to determine which side to believe. Quote mining – and their other ‘tool’, cherry picking of data – are routinely used by denialists.

Skeptics and scientists use neither. Logical fallacies are not the tools used by those interested in exploring the world around us. They are, however, tools of chose for those who wish to deny the world around us.

Thus it becomes easier to figure out who is right even if you know little about the topic. If one side constantly uses logical fallacies to make its point while the other uses logic, pick the side that is using logic. You’ll be correct almost every time.