Day: October 3, 2000

Cathy Young has an written excellent, objective look (Dr. Bad News) at research by Judith Wallerstein, touted by conservatives and loathed by feminists, that claims children of divorced parents suffer from the effects of divorce well into adulthood.

Although concerned about the effects of divorce (who, after all, isn’t?), Young finds more smoke than fire behind Wallerstein’s claims. One of the problems with Wallerstein’s latest research, as well as her earlier material, is that the people she interviewed for her book seem to be an unrepresentative sample. Young writes,

Findings from national studies, cited by Wallerstein in the appendix, cast further doubt on her methodology. Forty percent of adult children of divorce in her sample never married, compared with just 24 percent in the same age range in a series of national surveys. In both studies, around 40 percent of the marriages had ended in divorce.

The national data, however, show only a moderately lower prevalence of divorce for people raised in intact families (35 percent) — whereas in Wallerstein’s “intact” comparison sample, only 9 percent of the marriages had broken up. And while Wallerstein found that men and women whose parents had divorced were much less likely to have children than were those from intact marriages, national data indicate no difference in childbearing rates between the two groups.

In fact Young and some of the people she interviews repeatedly note, Wallerstein’s claim that there are large differences between children of divorced parents vs. children of non-divorced parents is contradicted by numerous studies, which do find small differences but nothing of the magnitude that Wallerstein claims.

Once again Young brings her sharp mind to debunking an over-reaching claims and bringing a common sense analysis to a controversial issue.

It was supposed to be a shining monument to the wonders of British government. Tony Blair said it would “the greatest show on earth.” Instead the $1.45 billion Millenium Dome is an enormous flop that the British government is trying to unload cheap.

It almost had a sucker, I mean buyer, in Japanese investment bank Nomura. Unfortunately Nomrua pulled out of the sale at the last minute after saying it had been lied to about the terms of the sale.

It’s a sign of how valuable this government creation is that although it cost $1.45 billion to build, Nomura backed out of a deal to buy the dome for only $145 million!

The amusing thing is that although the dome is a flop, until recently Blair and other Labour ministers pretended as if it were a success. Last week for the first time the British International Development Secretary Clare Short finally broke ranks saying, “I never liked it. It was nearly a billion [pounds] and it was disaster.”

How did Great Britain ever survive without such government largesse?

Source:

UK Minister Says Millenium Dome A ‘Disaster’. CNN, September 22, 2000.

Don Larson linked to this article detailing Ameritech’s woes. How bad is Ameritech? It’s so bad that it’s really having the same effect that poor service and high costs of land lines had in much of Europe and Asia — it’s really accelerating the already high rate of cellular adoption. I know quite people who simply don’t use the poor quality land line that Ameritech offers preferring instead to go completely or almost completely cellular.

Almost everyone I’ve talked to in Michigan has one horror story or another about Ameritech, especially their snotty, annoying customer disservice representatives. Plus their hours. Find a problem with your service when you get home Friday night at 5:30 p.m.? Too bad, call back on Monday — they don’t take non-emergency customer service calls Friday nights or on weekends anymore.

There are some competitors offering competition for local service, but they are hampered by Ameritech in a number of ways (if I want to switch from Ameritech to a competitor, for example, I can’t take my phone number with me). Even with the limitations, however, I’m surprised at the number of people who have switched just to get out from under the thumb of Ameritech.

I actually came close to having my phone service shut off once because they kept sending me this bill for $800 or $900 with a name that definitely wasn’t me, though they had the correct address. I called several times and gave them the phone number and they’d tell me they couldn’t give me any information because the phone number wasn’t in my name, even though I was receiving the bill, and it was possible they would shut off the phone service if the bill wasn’t paid. Talk about a nightmare.

The entire problem turned out to be an almost year old ISDN installation that I had cancelled after finding out about hidden charges they hadn’t bothered to inform me about. They never cancelled the order in their computers and then improperly billed the charges under the name of the woman who had previously had the phone number they were going to give me for voice over ISDN.

The other thing that really annoys me is if you call customer service about the exact same problem, half the time you will get very different answers as if the people on the other end are just making up policies and procedures on their own. It’s very frustrating when someone tells you to do X and Y to resolve a problem and then when you call back a couple minutes later because they’re making the same mistake all of a sudden the person on the other end is telling you to do C and D — and, of course, they can’t believe anyone from Ameritech might have told you X and Y. Oh no, you must have misunderstood because the customer is always wrong at Ameritech.

Unfortunately since I’m probably moving to the Chicago area next fall, I’m going to be stuck with Ameritech for at least a couple more years.

Wired’s, Leander Kahney Turning CueCat Into a Cool Cat has an article on the ongoing CueCat controversy that includes an interview with Digital:Convergence’s CTO, Doug Davis.

There area lot of things I could say about CueCat, but basically I think it comes down to the fact that Digital:Convergence completely misunderstands the psychology of hardware. What the heck does that mean? Consider this gem from Davis:

Just because I give you the Cat scanner, it does not immediately give you the right to go into business against me with my own technology. We have an intended use for it.

In essence, Davis is right (though with some caveats I won’t go into here) in that the CueCat is licensed rather than outright given to people. The problem for D:C is that the idea of licensing hardware is downright bizarre to the average consumer, especially for something that is being given away.

Every so often, for example, a group of people, usually elderly men, show up on campus and station themselves in high traffic areas to hand out small green copies of the New Testament. Can you imagine how absurd it would be to open up one of those free copies to find a licensing agreement stipulating how and under what conditions this free book could be used? (Sticking with Davis’ assertion that I can’t go into business using the CueCat, imagine someone giving you a free Bible with a license saying that Protestants only use it if they first convert to Catholicism. After all, what right does a Protestant have to use a Catholic-sponsored Bible to help out the competition?)

One of my co-workers regularly receives cheap soft briefcases from Staples when she makes office supply orders. It would be absurd, and downright laughable, if one of those briefcases showed up with a license dictating what could and could not be carried in it (maybe, for example, the company who makes it manufactures a laptop bag it wants to sell and so might include a license forbidding the carrying of a laptop in the briefcase).

But this is exactly what CueCat is trying to do. Most people don’t treat software as licensed, and they’re rebelling strongly against the idea of restrictive licenses on music and e-books. There’s no way D:C is going to convince people that a restrictive license on a piece of hardware is legitimate. They have about as much chance of that as AOL would have adding a license proviso that I’m not allowed to throw away all of those free CD offers I keep receiving.

The other day Jim Roepcke linked to an excellent, and cleverly named web log convering Dungeons and Dragons, Blog of Holding.

It may not have the sort of impact that eliminating a human disease such as polio does, but The Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme plans on eliminating the bovine disease worldwide by 2010. Rinderpest is a highly infectious virus that can quickly kill huge numbers of cattle and buffalo very quickly. In the 1890s an outbreak was estimated to have wiped out 80 to 90 percent of all cattle in sub-Saharan Africa, and a more recent outbreak in 1982-84 in Africa cost an estimated $500 million.

Currently the eradication effort plans to concentrate on wiping out the last remaining pockets of rinderpest infection in the world — mostly in southeastern Sudan, southern Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Iraq. Following that will be several years of intensive surveillance to ensure that the disease is truly wiped out, with quick responses to any remaining outbreaks bringing quick, intensive vaccination efforts.

In 2002 cessation of rinderpest vaccination will commence and by 2010, if everything goes well, a declaration of the elimination of the rinderpest vaccination certified.

Source:

Way clear for global rinderpest eradication. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, June 20, 2000.