Jonathan Oppenheimer Repeating Great-Grandfather’s Subsidy Demands

Chaim Even-Zohar writes about Jonathan Oppenheimer's views on Botswana's Bushmen + the concept of individual rights + community rights + constitutional rights of the government + government subsidies to cutters + other viewpoints @ http://www.idexonline.com/portal_FullEditorial.asp

Gem Testing

(via The Journal of Gemmology, Vol.10, No.1, January 1966) A E Farn writes:

Recently, a rather rubbed brown cabochon stone in a ring with a reasonable ray to the stone came in for test. At first glance the stone looked a quartz cat’s eye, by the coarse nature of the ray. However, as the stone was worn by bad usage, it could be partially the reason for a poor chrysoberyl looking like quartz. The stone was backed; this prevented one looking at the back of the stone for a hint of quality.

However, the very useful distant vision reading methods of taking a refractive index soon solves the question of quartz or chrysoberyl cat’s eye. Maybe I am going a long way round to bring the point home, but the telephone rang whilst I was looking at the stone in question, and having dealt with that matter I returned to the stone, put a spot of liquid on the refractometer and took a spot reading. I saw quite a reasonable changeover light bar at 1.74 which seemed reasonable enough—completely divorcing it from quartz. Automatically, I turned the spot intensity lamp on and tried to see the chrysoberyl absorption spectrum and could not. I was not surprised; there was a lot of glare from a reflected light (the stone was backed). Something did not seem quite right, so I took the distant vision again and got a good quartz reading.

Then the penny dropped—after answering the telephone I pulled the refractomete towards me and put on methylene iodide as a contact liquid (I have two dropping bottles and two refractometers). The methylene iodide gave a good spot pattern for itself and the quartz being rubbed it did not react as strongly as it should.

There seems to be some sort of moral here about keeping bottles separate, but actually at the moment of writing we are threatened with a telephone strike at night. Well, all I say is, let us have it by the day and get our testing done without interruptions.

Lazulite

Chemistry: Magnesium aluminum phosphate.
Crystal system: Monoclinic; pointed pyramids; often twinned or granular masses.
Color: Transparent to translucent; medium to dark violetish blue/greenish blue; massive: translucent to opaque, often mottled with white.
Hardness: 5.5
Cleavage: Indistinct: 1 direction; Fracture: brittle, uneven to granular.
Specific gravity: 3.1 – 3.2
Refractive index: 1.62 mean; Biaxial negative; 0.03
Luster: Vitreous.
Dispersion: Low
Dichroism: Strong: colorless to dark blue
Occurrence: Granite pegmatites; Brazil, India, Madagascar, USA, Australia.

Notes
Faceted stones may look like blue apatite; translucent stones may be confused with azurite, lapis lazuli and sodalite; faceted (rare).

Sweet Smell Of Success

Memorable quotes from the movie:

J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster): What's this boy got that Susie likes?

Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis): Integrity - acute, like indigestion.

J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster): What does that mean - integrity?

Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis): A pocket fulla firecrackers - looking for a match! It's a new wrinkle, to tell the truth... I never thought I'd make a killing on some guy's integrity.

Robb Report

Robb Report, announced the launch of the Robb Report Global Luxury Index to track the market performance of a representative group of public luxury goods and services companies listed on public exchanges all over the world. More info @ http://www.robbreport.com

An Indian Summer In The United States

Chaim Even-Zohar writes about the changing diamond business landscape in the United States + the special skills required to understand the game + other viewpoints @ http://www.idexonline.com/portal_FullEditorial.asp?TextSearch=&KeyMatch=0&id=25777

Nothing Like This Picasso

Thomas Hoving writes about Pablo Picasso's great 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' + the artists interpretation + its special effects on art historians + other viewpoints @ http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-hoving8may08,1,5897482.story

Blue Ocean Strategy

Good Books + New Business Models: (via Emergic) Here is an excerpt from one of the online customer reviews on Amazon.com by Peter Leerskov about the book:

What is a Blue Ocean Strategy?
The authors explain it by comparing it to a red ocean strategy (traditional strategic thinking):

1. Do not compete in existing market space. Instead you should create uncontested market space.

2. Do not beat the competition. Instead you should make the competition irrelevant.

3. Do not exploit existing demand. Instead you should create and capture new demand.

4. Do not make the value/cost trade-off. Instead you should break the value/cost trade-off.

5. Do not align the whole system of a company's activities with its strategic choice of differentiation or low cost. Instead you should align the whole system of a company's activities in pursuit of both differentiation and low cost.

A red ocean strategy is based on traditional strategic thinking - e.g. Harvard's strategy guru Michael Porter. A blue ocean is created in the region where a company's actions favourably affect both its cost structure and it value proposition to buyers. Cost savings are made from eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered. Over time, costs are reduced further as scale economies kick in, due to the high sales volumes that superior value generates.

Examples of strategic moves that created blue oceans of new, untapped demand:
- NetJets (fractional Jet ownership)
- Cirque du Soleil (the circus reinvented for the entertainment market)
- Starbucks (coffee as low-cost luxury for high-end consumers)
- Ebay (online auctioning)
- Sony (the Walkman - personal portable stereos)
- Cars: Japanese fuel-efficient autos (mid-70s) and Chrysler minivan (1984)
- Computers: Apple personal computer (1978) and Dell's built-to-order computers (mid-1990s).

Blue Ocean Strategy provides a framework to start thinking about new opportunities.

I think there must more ideas to come out of Blue Ocean Strategy + the concept is a tipping point + only time will tell whether the concept works in diverse business landscapes.

Gem Testing

(via The Journal of Gemmology, Vol.10, No.1, January 1966) A E Farn writes:

The stone in question was oval, mixed cut, set in a gold ring—the stone was about 1.75 carats in size. Viewed through the microscope I could see angular zoning of color with a small crescent-shaped feather and on the surface of the stone small zig-zag erupted fractures known as shatter or chatter marks (and doubling of the back facets).

So far as I was concerned, the test was complete. Here was a typical natural blue Ceylon sapphire. My good friend, at home in his own (very efficient) set-up, would have taken the refractive index first. Nothing wrong in doing that, of course, provided you only use your refractometer once or twice a week and there is plenty of time to clean and put it away, etc. But if you test a dozen different pieces of jewelry of all shapes, sizes and categories in a morning between the opening of the registered post and lunch time, you may well forget (we are all human) to wipe off the liquid. You may also (and I have) leave the stone on the refractometer when answering the telephone and later search frantically for a lost stone—to find later, as a result, crystallization of sulphur crystals on the soft glass prism of the refractometer. If in business you suffer no interruptions—you are obviously not doing much business. It is the unavoidable interruptions, the imperious note of the telephone bell (someone wanting to know how much it will cost to test a string of pearls is the usual—and the answer can take time). Even shopkeepers who are busy are guilty of time wasting. Witness the retailer who is offered a pearl necklace to value—he hasn’t a clue but telephones to find out how much it would cost to test.

In the middle of testing a cluster calibré ruby setting to a brooch—the telephone rings, you lose your place and then the customer starts. Usually they have not counted the pearls, they are not conversant with grain size, they did not realize it would possibly have to be cut if genuine, X-rayed if cultured. They cannot give you a lead and are appalled by the charge because they do not realize till then how much is involved. Having courteously dealt with the customer one returns to the brooch and commences again. None of this matters very much provided that along the line of stones inclusions are seen and continuity of testing takes place and you can say that all of the stones you tested are in fact genuine rubies, or synthetic rubies, as the case may be. But how about that one clean stone which gave away nothing? It was a ruby because one saw doubling of the facets and shatter markings—it looked a slightly different red to the others, but because of the nature of the mounting little else other than a vertical sighting in a stone of total diameter under 2mm could be obtained. So here you are and the customer is calling back in a quarter of an hour for the brooch and you have had a lovely time answering the telephone to a probably non-productive caller.

This is not the time for one’s friends to suggest that your methods are not ideal. These occurrences cause certain delays with which our gemological enthusiasts do not have to contend. Gemologists usually deal with loose stones of reasonable size with nice flat facets. Our testing is usually in second-hand jewelry—seldom at its pristine best, with worn facets usually and if the mount is open at the back it is usually clogged up with a fine debris resulting from the onset of talcum powder, cold cream, hand lotion, soap and all the rest of the lotions, potions and detergent deterrents with which the modern woman’s hands are often in contact. I have never had a second-hand piece of jewelry sent in which has been cleaned by the sender for the purpose of testing.

Another béte noir can be the customer who is very important (and knows it) and likes immediate attention, and can hardly bear to wait. I have had such persons who bring in, say, a ruby ring for testing. They are usually very shrewd judges of color and have bought a ring and spent a considerable time testing it in their own office, only to be baffled by perfectly clean stone. What they see tells them it is real but reluctantly they have to have a laboratory test. They then expect some immediate magic in ten seconds—as soon as it is held under the microscope they ask, ‘Is it OK?’ even before one has focused the thing. However, life is not all like that, but most of our customers like to call at least next day for their goods (tested of course).

Having said all this, it now behoves me to settle down to pointing out that despite all the know-how and gadgetry available we cannot always give a definite result while the stone is in a setting. This may seem a little feeble, but in actual fact we seldom ask to have a stone taken from its setting and if we do we usually state our opinion beforehand in order not to appear wise after the event.

Mostly, when we ask for a stone to be taken from a setting, it is a very small synthetic corundum where the curved striae (if any) are running parallel to the girdle and setting. Other difficult cases can be backed baguette colorless stones in a sunken setting precluding refractometer work—these are quite a trial to prove without any doubts lingering.

At one time when we had a colorless cluster surround to a colored center in brooch or ring, we could safely say that the colorless stones were not diamond, and usually the customer was not further interested, since money matters.

Nowadays, we usually get asked what the colorless stones are, and surprisingly quite a large number of colorless/white sapphires in Ceylon jewelry are natural sapphires, which rather goes against the usual run of colorless sapphires, which are usually synthetic.

Quite recently we had a pale-pink stone set in a very ordinary 4-claw gold ring. No shoulder stones—jut a straight-forward native-cut, slightly lumpy, rounded, cushion-shaped stone. At first glance it could be a fancy spinel, a tourmaline or perhaps a pink topaz. Doing the job the wrong way round, according to my learned friend, I looked at the stone through the microscope. Except for doubling of the back facets—a suggestion of a DR of about 0.009—that was all. It could not be topaz, since topaz does not easily or readily show DR. It was not tourmaline, because the birefringence was too small, and it did not quite have the typical color of synthetic or natural pink sapphire. A horrid thought crossed by mind—taafeite. Fortunately for the peace of the laboratory, it did in fact yield a very positive DR for sapphire. My friend, who did not like my method of approach, would have been vindicated by this since he would have put it on a refractometer first of all. Unfortunately, I have a fetish for trying to pin things down by look, color, heft, and then microscope to find DR, inclusions, dichroism, shatter-marks, etc. This pink stone ring set me back a few minutes in probing, but now I had to get started and do the obvious, test for synthetic or genuine. Back to the microscope and a dish of methylene iodide. The stone was very clean; in fact, after quite a lengthy session of turning and turning the stone in ring, lowering the condenser, closing the diaphragm and doing all kinds of useful maneuvers, I cam to a full stop. The stone was a clean pink sapphire with no sign of curves or bubbles, or any feature whatsoever appertaining to natural. After half an hour of concentrated study under ideal conditions, refiltered liquid, cleaned eyepieces, objectives and mirror, I changed my mind several times and then gave it up from a microscope point of view.

One test we often use as a subsidiary is the well known phosphorescence after fluorescence under X-ray of synthetic ruby and pink sapphire. Here, at least, we would get a lead—but no, the stone was completely inert. So it could be genuine. Unfortunately the phosphorescence was only useful to confirm a synthetic whereas the reverse was not so. Our other refinement is to take an immersion contact photograph, hoping, as is so often the case, that structure-lines not readily visible to the naked eye would be revealed by the sensitivity of the film. Once again the result was negative. Somewhat reluctantly we telephoned the customer to ask him to take the stone out.

After the stone was taken out, we found a slight indication of ‘treacle’ and I think, if my memory serves me, a few lines of silk. This was not a stone suitable for the diploma examination. We returned it to our customer finally certified as genuine.

Trouble seldom comes in small doses, for a short while after we had a succession of small insignificant rings with microscopic stones in the center of cluster or as cluster surrounds, and suddenly it seemed as if we were continually asking for stones to be taken out of their settings. However, when one considers we tackle hundreds of items a month of mounted stones, our record is very good.

Gem Testing (continued)

Kyanite

(Cyanite) (Disthene)
Chemistry: Aluminum silicate.
Crystal system: Triclinic; long flat bladed prisms; fibrous.
Color: Transparent to translucent; blue, colorless, blue/green.
Hardness: 5 – 7 (directional) 7 across the crystal; 5 along its length.
Cleavage: Perfect: 1 direction, parallel to large prism face; Fracture: brittle, fibrous.
Specific gravity: 3.65 – 3.69
Refractive index: 1.715 – 1.732; Biaxial negative; 0.017
Luster: Vitreous.
Dispersion: Low
Dichroism: Distinct: light blue, colorless, dark blue.
Occurrence: urIn schists and gneisses or granite pegmatites; Burma, India, Brazil, Kenya, USA, Pakistan.

Notes
Polymorph with andalusite and sillimanite (fibrolite); fluorescence: variable; spectral line in deep red and 2 lines in deep blue; faceted.

Nixon

Memorable quotes from the movie:

Richard M. Nixon (Anthony Hopkins): Always remember: others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

Breakfast With Gareth Provides Food For Thought

Chaim Even-Zohar shares his views about the remarks made by De Beers Managing Director Gareth Penny at a Gaborone breakfast + the new political and economic diamond map in the region + other viewpoints @ http://www.idexonline.com/portal_FullEditorial.asp?TextSearch=&KeyMatch=0&id=25802

A New Frontier For Chinese Art

Aric Chen writes about Beijing’s lively contemporary art scene + noteworthy spots + other viewpoints @ http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/travel/01surfacing.html

Casella Wines

New Business Models: (via Emergic) A review in strategy+business

The key element of a blue ocean strategy is a value innovation: a combination of differentiation and low cost that sets a product line or service apart from its competitors. Consider, for example, the story of Yellow Tail, a wine created explicitly for the U.S. market and launched in 2000 by Casella Wines (http://www.casellawine.com.au/), a small, family-owned Australian winery. Casella challenged the wine industry’s givens: that wine is a unique beverage for the informed consumer who requires a complex, wide range of products and is best reached through marketing and brand building that drips with enological terminology.

Casella created a blue ocean by introducing a fun, nontraditional wine targeted at the U.S. drinker who does not normally drink wine, a market three times the size of the U.S. wine market. Soft, sweet, and fruity, Yellow Tail appealed to beer drinkers and ready-to-drink cocktail drinkers, without the traditional focus on tannins, oak, complexity, and aging. Casella made selection easy by offering only one white and one red wine and by replacing the technical jargon with a striking kangaroo logo.

The result: Yellow Tail became the fastest-growing brand in the history of both the U.S. and the Australian wine markets and the No. 1 big-bottle (750ml) red wine in the U.S. by August 2003 and Casella Winery grew to be one of the largest wineries in Australia.

The Man Nobody Knows

Good Books: I have read the book recently; a classic account of Jesus as an entrepreneur, and here is what Richard M Fried has to say about The Man Nobody Knows.

Bruce Barton’s 1925 effort to reconfigure Jesus for the Roaring Twenties turned into one of the great best sellers of the century. In The Man Nobody Knows, Barton depicted Christ as a man’s man, not the meek, effeminate figure he had encountered in Sunday School. No Puritan or Prohibitionist, this Jesus turned water into wine and was “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem.” Here was the world’s first advertising man, whose parables sparkled as models for modern jingle writers. (Barton had co-founded the celebrated advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn). Here was Christ, the world’s greatest business executive, who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”

When in the 1950s Barton felt compelled to revise his often-reprinted book for a new generation, he blurred its focus. In this new edition, the historian Richard Fried revives the primary source in Barton’s original language. In his Introduction, Mr Fried explores the book’s rich insights into the culture of the 1920s, revealing not only the union of religion and business but changing attitudes toward consumption and leisure, sexuality and the roles of men and women.

Gem Testing

2007: Farn's views on how to run a gem testing lab as a business + working with endlessly complicated clients should provide insights for today's lab gemologists.

(via The Journal of Gemmology, Vol.10, No.1, January 1966) A E Farn writes:

Gem testing could well be the title of a book, a lecture, or merely the sum of all that gemological students imagine is the itinerary of a laboratory gemologist’s day.

Gem testing, generally speaking, is a mixture of items in infinite variety; and if variety is the spice of life—ours is spicy. We are fortunate in having no strictly routine work (in an orderly sense), but because of gemological classes, trade associations and earlier retail experience, we are fortunate in having contact with many aspects of the trade.

Gem testing to the student is usually visualized by stones being tested on the refractometer, or careful wavelength measurement by a spectroscope, crossed-filter work, immersion inspection by microscope, suspension in jars of clerici solution or density work by balance—plus, of course, the mysteries of the endoscope, that unique instrument understood only by a few and capable of use only by the very dextrous, X-rays, fluorescence, phosphorescence, short wave lamps and electro-conductivity tests on rare and pale shades of diamonds. These together with immersion contact photography, Lauegrams and direct radiographs, all join to add to the importance and interest of gem testing.

Strangely enough, a good sense of color, cut and make of stones together with a 10x lens still remain the most useful versatile and flexible adjuncts to the trained gemologists. Gemology, and by that I mean ‘jewelry’ testing, is basically a bread-and-butter science revolving chiefly round the stones which matter: stones such as diamond, emerald, sapphire, ruby, chrysoberyl, peridot, tourmaline, topaz, zircon, quartz, spinel and beryls. These together with opal, pearl, and turquoise, constitute the major importance in the world of gems.

Practically all the money in the gem trade is made by use of these stones in settings of precious metals. The occasional advent of a rare stone in jewelry is interesting to the collectors and non-trade gemologists. Here lies their skill and expertise. Many non-productive hours may be spent in the pursuit of interference figures, refractive indices, indications of positive or negative signs in uniaxial or biaxial stones. Enjoyable as these results may be, they net no cash and cash spells quite a lot of useful things even to gemologists non-trade.
However, fortunately for us, there are still a lot of people who want to know what the center blue stone in a cluster is, or whether the emerald in their Aunt Jane’s pendant is real or not. Probate valuation of deceased person’s jewelry, where the beneficiaries cannot agree as to who have Aunt Maria’s pearls, can be a very useful source of gem testing, for here even the smallest items must be detailed, if only to please the Inland Revenue.

All in all, gem testing, whilst varied, is mundane and concise—very ordinary jewelry set with usually quite small gemstones or pearls of the well-known varieties and, like many other trades or professions, it always seems more interesting to the non-participants. Like watching a plumber wiping a joint—someone else’s job always makes my fingers itch, which brings me to a case in point.

A very good friend of mine, watching with keen interest a test being carried out on a customer’s ring said, ‘You know, you go the wrong way round in your testing. You fly to the most spectacular instead of the more fundamental test in routine matters.’

Here was a challenge flung down on our own doorstep. However good an amateur may be (and he may well be ten times enthusiastic as the professional)—he does testing for love whereas the professional does it for money.

To a professional gemologist, even though he may be a little jaded, the challenge remains constant. He might be right, backed by incontestable facts. To say his facts must be crystal clear (as the gemologists punned it) are the remarks of a gemological pundit.

Gem Testing: ( continued)

Kornerupine

Chemistry: Magnesium aluminum iron boro-silicate.
Crystal system: Orthorhombic; radiating columnar habit; water-worn pebbles.
Color: Transparent to translucent; yellow green, brown, colorless; some chrome-rich green; phenomena: chatoyant (golden eye) and asterated stones.
Hardness: 6.5
Cleavage: Prismatic; Fracture: conchoidal.
Specific gravity: 3.3
Refractive index: 1.67 – 1.68; Biaxial negative; 0.013
Luster: Vitreous.
Dispersion: Low
Dichroism: Brown/green.
Occurrence: Star: Burma; Cat’s eye: Sri Lanka; Green: Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya.

Notes
Collector’s stone; constants near Enstatite; strong spectral band in the violet and a weak band in the blue 503nm; faceted and cabochon.

Rembrandt

Memorable quotes from the movie:

Rembrandt van Rijn (Charles Laughton): And of a sudden he knew that when one woman gives herself to you, you possess all women. Women of every age and race and kind, and more than that, the moon, the stars, all miracles and legends are yours. Brown-skinned girls who inflame your senses with their play, cool yellow-haired women who entice and escape you, gentle ones who serve you, slender ones who torment you, the mothers who bore and suckled you; all women whom God created out of the teeming fullness of the earth, are yours in the love of one woman. What is success? A soldier can reckon his success in victories, a merchant in money. But my world is insubstantial. I live in a beautiful, blinding, swirling mist.

Art Programs Taking Off At Airports

James Hannah writes about why more and more airports in the United States are using art to boost tourism + improve the image of the community + soothe the passengers + the phenomenon of artport + the effect on the economy + other viewpoints @ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20070723/ap_tr_ge/travel_trend_airport_art

In my view display of gemstone inclusions at the airports + bus terminals across the world should become a new phenomenon in the art world. They are stunning + inspirational + you fall in love with gemstones + the 'natural' inclusions.

Blink

Good Books: I have read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and here is an excerpt from the book.

Trust your instincts

Don’t think—blink

An art expert sees a ten million dollar sculpture and in a flash realizes it is fake. A fire fighter makes a split-second decision to get out of a blazing building just before it collapses. A marriage analyst studies a fifteen-minute video of a couple and accurately predicts whether they will stay together. A police officer reads a life-or-death situation in the heat of the moment. A speed dater suddenly clicks with the right person…..

Blink is all about those moments when we ‘know’ something without really knowing why, and how this ability is one of the most powerful we possess. A snap judgment made very quickly, Malcolm Gladwell reveals, can actually be far more effective than one made deliberately and cautiously. By blocking out what’s irrelevant and focusing on narrow slices of experience, we can read a seemingly complex situation in the blink of an eye—and discover a radically new way of understanding the world.

This book show us how we can hone our instinctive ability to know in an instant, helping us to bring out the best in our thinking and become better decision makers in our homes, offices and in everyday life. Just as he did with his revolutionary theory of the tipping point, Gladwell reveals how the power of ‘blink’ could fundamentally transform our relationships, the way we consume, create and communicate, how we run our businesses and even our societies.

You will never think about thinking in the same way again.

The concept is not new but the application is. I would very much like the concept applied in the gem and jewelry context + other businesses where 'impulsive buy' is the norm + when you see something you like, you respond. It's spontaneous. Perhaps a unique blink concept? Could be. Anyway it was fun reading the book.