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Most of us know the general (albeit simplified) story: Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov used a stimuluslike a metronomearound the dogs he was studying, and soon, the hounds would start to salivate. They had learned that the sound meant food was coming. The phenomenon, now known as classical conditioning, became one of modern psychologys foundational discoveries. It’s an unconscious process where a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a naturally occurring stimulus, eventually leading to a connection between the two. The dogs, seeing the researcher who often brings them food or hearing the noise of the cart on its way, would immediately know they were about to have a meal. Flash forward 120 years: my dog and I are riding through San Francisco in a self-driving car. Ive taken Waymos autonomous vehicles dozens of times, often with my 9-year-old chiweenie, Poppy, nestled on my lap. She usually naps peacefully, facing inward, oblivious to the world outside. Near the end of each ride, the car makes a familiar ding-dong chime, followed by a womans voice reminding me to take my phone, keys, and wallet. Poppy, unfazed, would remain in a deep sleep until the car stopped, I unbuckled my seatbelt, and picked her up to get out. Back to the world of smells and fresh air! Lately, Ive noticed something strange: As soon as the ding sounds, Poppy wakes up, turns around, and readies herself at the door without my helpevery single time. Is this . . . Pavlovs Waymo? As a serious journalist in pursuit of all the hard-hitting truths, I emailed the veterinary team at Bond Vet. The short answer to my not-so-serious question? Yes. “In practical terms, the sound acts as a cue, prompting her anticipation to leave. This behavior develops because the sound repeatedly coincides with the end of the ride, and the reward of getting out reinforces her response,” Dr. Lisa Lippman, director of virtual medicine at Bond Vet, said in an email. “Dogs are incredibly perceptive and often pick up on routines and environmental cues like this, its a great example of how they learn and adapt!” Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found in 2021 that common household noises, like a microwave beep or the chirp of a smoke detector, can cause a dog anxiety. Thankfully, Poppy doesn’t seem very anxious about the car’s noise (although humans are notoriously bad at sensing a dog’s stress or real emotions). But it made me think of the constant notifications and dings of our world. At the same time as our pets, we as humans are being classically conditioned. The microwave beep alerts us that we’re about to be rewarded with food, the “tudum” sound when you open the Netflix app prepares us for entertainment, the Waymo chime let’s us know it’s almost time to get out. Brands especially have utilized classical conditioning to associate their product with an emotion. “When we play sound feedback for Waymo riders, our guiding philosophy is to be friendly and helpful,” Waymo’s Head of Design and Customer Research Ryan Powell said over email. “That means playing sounds that feel connected and familiar, but not intrusive. We want to be thoughtful about how and when we play sound, so that riders can rely on these signals for their safety and comfort. Sometimes we’ll play sound followed by a voice explanation for more detail.”
Category:
E-Commerce
A crackdown on foreign students is alarming colleges, who say the Trump administration is using new tactics and vague justifications to push some students out of the country.College officials worry the new approach will keep foreigners from wanting to study in the U.S.Students stripped of their entry visas are receiving orders from the Department of Homeland Security to leave the country immediatelya break from past practice that often permitted them to stay and complete their studies.Some students have been targeted over pro-Palestinian activism or criminal infractionsor even traffic violations. Others have been left wondering how they ran afoul of the government.At Minnesota State University in Mankato, President Edward Inch told the campus Wednesday that visas had been revoked for five international students for unclear reasons.He said school officials learned about the revocations when they ran a status check in a database of international students after the detention of a Turkish student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The State Department said the detention was related to a drunken driving conviction.“These are troubling times, and this situation is unlike any we have navigated before,” Inch wrote in a letter to campus.President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, and federal agents started by detaining Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card-holder and Palestinian activist who was prominent in protests at Columbia last year. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week students are being targeted for involvement in protests along with others tied to “potential criminal activity.”In the past two weeks, the government apparently has widened its crackdown. Officials from colleges around the country have discovered international students have had their entry visas revoked and, in many cases, their legal residency status terminated by authorities without noticeincluding students at Arizona State, Cornell, North Carolina State, the University of Oregon, the University of Texas, and the University of Colorado.Some of the students are working to leave the country on their own, but students at Tufts and the University of Alabama have been detained by immigration authoritiesin the Tufts case, even before the university knew the student’s legal status had changed. Feds bypass colleges to move against students In this new wave of enforcement, school officials say the federal government is quietly deleting foreigners’ student records instead of going through colleges, as was done in the past.Students are being ordered to leave the country with a suddenness that universities have rarely seen, said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.In the past, when international students have had entry visas revoked, they generally have been allowed to keep legal residency status. They could stay in the country to study, but would need to renew their visa if they left the U.S. and wanted to return. Now, increasing numbers of students are having their legal status terminated, exposing them to the risk of being arrested.“None of this is regular practice,” Feldblum said.At North Carolina State University, two students from Saudi Arabia left the U.S. after learning their legal status as students was terminated, the university said. N.C. State said it will work with the students to complete their semester from outside the country.Philip Vasto, who lived with one of the students, said his roommate, in graduate school for engineering management, was apolitical and did not attend protests against the war in Gaza. When the government told his roommate his student status had been terminated, it did not give a reason, Vasto said.Since returning to Saudi Arabia, Vasto said his former roommate’s top concern is getting into another university.“He’s made his peace with it,” he said. “He doesn’t want to allow it to steal his peace any further.” Database checks turn up students in jeopardy At the University of Texas at Austin, staff checking a federal database discovered two people on student visas had their permission to be in the U.S. terminated, a person familiar with the situation said. The person declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.One of the people, from India, had their legal status terminated April 3. The federal system indicated the person had been identified in a criminal records check “and/or has had their visa revoked.” The other person, from Lebanon, had their legal status terminated March 28 due to a criminal records check, according to the federal database.Both people were graduates remaining in the U.S. on student visas, using an option allowing people to gain professional experience after completing coursework. Both were employed full time and apparently had not violated requirements for pursuing work experience, the person familiar with the situation said.Some students have had visas revoked by the State Department under an obscure law barring noncitizens whose presence could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Trump invoked the law in a January order demanding action against campus anti-Semitism.But some students targeted in recent weeks have had no clear link to political activism. Some have been ordered to leave over misdemeanor crimes or traffic infractions, Feldblum said. In some cases, students were targeted for infractions that had been previously reported to the government.Some of the alleged infractions would not have drawn scrutiny in the past and will likely be a test of students’ First Amendment rights as cases work their way through court, said Michelle Mittelstadt, director of public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute.“In some ways, what the administration is doing is really retroactive,” she said. “Rather than saying, ‘This is going to be the standard that we’re applying going forward,’ they’re going back and vetting students based on past expressions or past behavior.”The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities is requesting a meeting with the State Department over the issue. It’s unclear whether more visas are being revoked than usual, but officials fear a chilling effect on international exchange.Many of the association’s members have recently seen at least one student have their visas revoked, said Bernie Burrola, a vice president at the group. With little information from the government, colleges have been interviewing students or searching social media for a connection to political activism.“The universities can’t seem to find anything that seems to be related to Gaza or social media posts or protests,” Burrola said. “Some of these are sponsored students by foreign governments, where they specifically are very hesitant to get involved in protests.”There’s no clear thread indicating which students are being targeted, but some have been from the Middle East and China, he said.America’s universities have long been seen as a top destination for the orld’s brightest mindsand they’ve brought important tuition revenue and research breakthroughs to U.S. colleges. But international students also have other options, said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators.“We should not take for granted that that’s just the way things are and will always be,” she said. The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Associated Press writers Steve Karnowski in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Angeliki Kastanis in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Collin Binkley, Annie Ma and Makiya Seminera, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
On Wednesday, Trump announced a wide ranging series of reciprocal tariffs on imported goods from countries including China and Japan. But near the top of the list was a country you might not have thought about a lot in terms of its status as international power broker: Vietnam. With a 46% tariff, Vietnam is one of the hardest hit countries on the list. All sorts of goods are made there these days, including furniture and technological hardware. But the most sensitive industry may be apparel and performance footwearwith a special emphasis on footwear. Ninty-nine percent of all footwear sold in the U.S. is imported. And 50% of Nikes shoes are made in Vietnam, specifically. The country produces a significant number of shoes for the entire industry, including Adidas, On, Reebok, Deckers (which includes Hoka, Ugg, and Teva), and Brooks (the number one running brand in the U.S.). When asked how they planned to respond to this policy, none of these brands opted to comment for this story. Stock prices for Nike, Adidas, On Holdings, and Deckers each dropped approximately 15% following the announcement. It almost feels intentionally directed at the [performance footwear] industry, says David Swartz, senior equity analyst, consumer research, for Morningstar, who has called the tariffs potentially disastrous to the industry in an investor report published yesterday. (Disclosure: Morningstar and Fast Company share the same owner.) To be clear, Swartz sees no upside to this government decision, noting that the chances that any of this leads to substantial manufacturing of footwear and apparel in the U.S. are practically zero. And its another reason that he, like many others, simply cannot imagine that they will stick. Why the focus on Vietnam? Swartz recognizes that targeting Vietnam likely had less to do with the companies or industry being affected than it did the simple balance sheet math that drove Trumps tariffs. Vietnam does not import nearly the amount of goods from the U.S. that we do from them. But by any common sense, that imbalance is to be expected. The US economy is like 70x that of Vietnam, so it seems pretty obvious to me that Vietnam is going to buy fewer American products than we buy from them, but what do I know? says Swartz. I only have a masters degree in economics from Yale, so I dont know anything. While senseless on paper, the tariffs could have lasting repercussions on the industry if they stick. And the worlds biggest performance brands would have little recourse if that happened. The crux of the problem is that, since the 1990s, apparel and footwear has moved abroad. As Swartz explains, performance companies in particular invested billions of dollars into the roads, ports, factories, and rail lines that make up the complex supply chain feeding Vietnamese infrastructure. Its in everyones interest to keep these factories working. Vietnam relies on the business for their economy. Corporations rely on Vietnam to produce goods. Nike, for instance, doesnt own a single one of its factories globally. You cant just call a factory in India and say can you make 20 million of shoes for me, they don’t have the capacity, says Swartz. Idle factories dont exist globally. An unused factory is shut down, and its staff is fired. Furthermore, specialized production methods behind modern footwear dont exist everywhere. Sewing is simple. But injection molded foam composites, polymer production, and complex fabric weaving are other topics. A modern sneaker may have as many as 100 parts produced in different factories, and if any one component doesnt arrive in time, everything is slowed down. Building an infrastructure of factories with interdependent specialized production methodsand with workers skilled enough to operate themcan take years. So what about just shifting production across Asia? The tariffs are high about everywhere, and given the long lead time to set up necessary factories, Swartz doesnt believe it makes sense of any company to attempt to shift manufacturing to save a few percentage points in tariffs. And shifting the entirety of a business like Nike’s could take years. So what happens now? Officially, tariffs will begin on any products not on a boat from Vietnam by April 5th, according to the logistics firm Flexport. They expect consumers will see costs rise on goods as soon as April 9th. In the short term, shoes are going to keep being made. Swartz believes that the costs of these tariffs will be distributed between the factory, the brand, and consumers. The pain is gonna be spread out. I think certain companies are going to have more negation power than others. Let’s say Nike uses a factory for apparel or footwear, it works with that factory over potentially decades. They can negotiate with them[saying] we need to reduce what we pay you this year while tariffs are goingThe factory is not going to say, we wont work with Nike anymore. They can’t do that. They would go bankrupt. Smaller companies, and retailers like Macys and Kohls that produce many private label goods in Vietnam, could face less flexible factories. Their prices will either have to go up, or the thin margins of our struggling retailers will grow even thinner. Private label brands offer retailers excellent margins, which is why companies like Walmart and Target invest so much into their own lines of appliances, fashion, and home goods. (And yes, each sources private label goods from Vietnam.) Long term, no matter how things play out, Swartz sees no reality in which the industry caves and moves manufacturing to the U.S. He lists all sorts of reasons, ranging fro the price of labor (which he ballparks at $400/month for your average factory employee in Vietnama rate no American would take with our cost of living), to our lack of raw materials (90% of the world’s cotton is grown in one region of China), to our pure inability to produce these goods (the U.S. has but a handful of yarn spinning factories needed to produce textiles), to our own discomfort facing the environmental costs of consumerism. Dyeing alone takes giant amounts of water, notes Swartz. You couldnt even get it [here]. If someone said were going to start dyeing in Minnesota and were gonna drain this lake to get the water, Im pretty sure theyd say no. But in any case, Swartz imagines that, if tariffs dont change, were going to all see significantly higher prices on shoes and companies will ultimately sell less of them, especially in an economy already likely heading toward a recession. It may not be so easy for Nike to sell Lebron shoes if they have to raise the price from $180 to $240. They will sell less volume ultimately, says Swartz. Its basic supply and demand. Increase price, it reduces demand. Economic laws have not been changed.
Category:
E-Commerce
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