Day: October 3, 2001

Is Providing Fertility Information A “Scare Campaign”?

Marjie Lundstrom wrote an op-ed a couple months ago about an odd effort by some feminists to restrict information about female reproductive health. They objected to an ad campaign sponsored by the American Infertility Association and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to inform women about the difficulty in getting pregnant in their late 30s and 40s.

With text like, “Advancing age decreases your decreases your ability to have children,” the ad campaign was motivated by the high profile media cases of women who successfully conceive and bear children at relatively late ages. Although such stories seem rather common these days, the reality, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is that the odds of becoming pregnant in any given month drop to 20 percent for women over 30 and a mere 5 percent for women over 40.

As Pamela Madsen of the American Infertility Association told Lundstrom, “I have to speak to women every day in their late 30s and early 40s whose biological clock has pretty much tickered out, and they’re asking, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?'”

Thanks to technological advances, having children is possible now even for women 45 and up to have children, but usually only for people who can afford expensive fertility treatments and/or donated eggs.

The National Organization for Women was not pleased by the campaign. In a Newsweek article, NOW president Kim Gandy bizarrely ridiculed the idea that women could choose when to have children. According to Gandy,

The idea that you can choose what age you’ll be to have your children is a ludicrous proposition for most women, as though you can simply snap your fingers and say, “OK, I’m the right age,” and then have all the accouterments magically appear — the stable relationship, financial stability, life stability.

That is a very weird view of parenthood. Few people I know who are parents (including my wife and I) were foolish enough to wait until their lives were ideal before having children.

Source:

Should You Have Your Baby Now?. Claudia Kalb, Newsweek, August 13, 2001.

Fertility education is offending feminists. Marjie Lundstrom, Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, August 17, 2001.

Cache Me If You Can

On Monday I wrote about the phenomenal flexibility that custom fields offer in Conversant. But such metadata fields wouldn’t be much use without a sophisticated way to search those fields and present the results. The system already had a very powerful searching feature which recently received some major enhancements.

The first enhancement is that search results can now be cached. For example, take a look at a search page about the 9/11 terrorist attack. This is basically just a glorified search page that finds all the articles that have a “9/11” keyword and displays them in reverse chronological order. Since the articles on this page aren’t going to change that often, I have set this page to show a cached version of the search rather than perform the search anew every time someone access the page. In this case I’ve set the page up to keep the cached version around for at least 24 hours. This provides an enormous increase in speed, especially in pages that return a lot more results than this 9/11 page does.

The second enhancement is a new macro that allows me to insert the results of a search into a message. Let me back up here. The main building block of this site are called messages. Each essay or post on the site is a message which has a title, a date, an author, etc. This searching I’m talking about, however, is done through a separate page type that is not associated with a message. So, if I wanted to have a brief explanation about the terrorist attack before the list of articles, I would have had to either write it directly in the page template of that search page, or alternately (which I tended to do) I could create a message with the description and then use an insert message macro to automatically place the description at the top of the page.

A better solution is the new InsertQuery macro which allows me to insert the results of a search into a message, as well as make some minor modifications to how the search results will display.

For example, take a look at the message version of the search page. At the moment this message is simply one line that says, “insert the results from the search page into this message.” Because the search page is set for caching, I told the InsertQuery macro to use the cache as well (I could override this and force it to do a fresh search if I wanted to). Since I’m going to need to alter the text of this page more than I am going to need to alter the search criteria, this is a tremendous help — especially on sites where I’ve got dozens of these and the introductory text is, in some cases, an essay rather than just a short paragraph.

There are some other neat thinks that can be done with this InsertQuery macro. I was reading Jakob Nielsen’s book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, recently, and one of the things he mentioned that I really liked was the use by some sites of small boxes in the right hand side of the page that listed related stories. So a story about a new Maxtor hard drive on ZDNET might have a little box that includes links to other recent stories about Maxtor.

The InsertQuery macro has a feature that lets me limit the number of results returned. So, even though the 9/11 search page is set to return as many as 999 results, when I insert those results into a page, I can tell it just to return the first 5 or 10 or 50. This makes it easy to do a “Related Stories”-style box.

If you read my story about pacifism, for example, you’ll see a list of five other stories related to the 9/11 attack there (it doesn’t look very pretty because I whipped this up in just a few minutes, but it’s got potential).

Plus, here is where the whole architecture of the system comes into play, there is an easy way for me to do this on a regular basis. If I had to remember to type in the HTML code for that table every time (and remember to type it in slightly different versions for every other topic as well) I’d quickly give up. But Conversant includes something called Resources, which let me build text short-cuts, which seriously reduces the pain. In this case I made a resource called “recent_911.” To insert that box in any articles I write related to the 9/11 attack, I simply type |recent_911|, and the software takes care of the rest.

Now that’s powerful.

Hypocrisy at National Review

National Review Online recently fired columnist dropped syndicated columnist Ann Coulter’s column, whose post-9/11 columns were getting increasingly bizarre. For example, in one column discussing what should be done about the Arabs who were taped celebrating the attack, she suggested that the United States should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “We didn’t feel we wanted to be associated with the comments expressed in those two columns.”

Which would be understandable if Goldberg himself wasn’t in the habit of penning bizarre, borderline racist lines in his own NRO columns. For example, when there was much controversy between the United States and China over the fate of a downed spy plane, Goldberg published a column in which he actually wrote that,

In fact, I’ve got considerable sympathy for the Red Chinese — despite the fact that if my dog were a member of the American crew Jiang Zemin would have eaten him by now.

Apparently Goldberg has never heard of leading by example.

World Bank: Terrorist Attack In America Will Kill Children in Africa

The World Bank recently warned that the devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center would have far reaching worldwide impacts, including a likely increase in poverty and the deaths of children in the developing world.

The terrorist attacks helped accelerate the slowdown in world economic activity, which will ripple throughout the world and impact even the poorest countries of the developing world. As World Bank president James Wolfensohn told the BBC,

We estimate that tens of thousands more children will die worldwide and about 10 million more people are likely to be living below the poverty line of $1 a day because of the terrorist attack.

Before the attacks, the World Bank had estimated that as the developed world recovered from slow growth at the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002, economic growth in the developing world would hit 4.1 percent in 2002. Now it is projecting that growth 2002 in the developing world will fall somewhere between 3.35 percent and 3.6 percent.

That .5 to .75 difference will result in a large rise in the number of people living on less than $1/day and likely slow down efforts to control childhood diseases in those countries (since they will have fewer economic resources to deal with such problems).

Source:

Poverty warning after US attacks. The BBC, October 1, 2001.

Huntingdon Life Sciences Releases Mixed Second Quarter Financial Results

The besieged Huntingdon Life Sciences recently released its second quarter financial data which were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, second-quarter revenues from the firm were up to 16.9 million pounds — the highest level in four years. On the other hand, the animal testing company also reported widening losses, with losses per share up to 2.2p compared to only 1.3p in the first quarter. At the same time, however, the firm’s cash reserves rose from 1.22 million pounds to 2.19 million pounds.

Brian Cass, the managing director of HLS and the recent recipient of the pharmaceutical industry’s Achievement Award for 2001, sounded an optimistic note about the future of the company.

“The protests are not affecting our customers because the orders are growing dramatically,” Cass said.

HLS executive chairman Andrew Baker added,

The animal rights campaign is now recognized as being much broader and of concern to all those involved in the vital endeavor of animal research. The backing we have seen from clients and from the government, including changes to the law they have introduced, reflects that new understanding, and provides benefits for our whole society.

HLS is not sitting still. Groups like Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty have adopted a policy of targeting those individuals and companies who invest in HLS. To minimize that tactic, HLS is close to deploying a system which would essentially render its investors anonymous.

An HLS spokesman told The Times of London that they expected to launch the system before the end of the year. If it proves successful, the company hopes to return to normal trading on SEATS, an electronic component of the London Stock Exchange designed specifically for the trading of stocks of small companies like HLS.

Sources:

HLS says UK labs lift order growth. Gautam Malkani, The Financial Times (London), September 29, 2001.

HLS says revenues hit four-year high. The Financial Times (London), September 29, 2001.

HLS scheme nears launch. Mark Court, The Times (London), September 29, 2001.

Losses widen as protests dog HLS. Iain Dey, The Scotsman, September 29, 2001.

Huntingdon claims turnaround in sales. Saaed Shah, The Independent (London), September 29, 2001.

Huntingdon chief’s bravery award. The Independent (London), September 28, 2001.

Kansas State Senator: Women’s Suffrage Is a ‘Symptom’ of a Sick Society

Kansas state senator Kay O’Connor, a Republican, made headlines last week for asserting that the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake.

O’Connor had been invited by the Johnson Count League of Women Voters to attend the league’s “Celebrate the Right to Vote” luncheon. Instead of accepting, O’Connor declined and added that, “You probably wouldn’t want me there because of what I would have to say.”

After word got out that O’Connor had reportedly told the league that she didn’t think the 19th Amendment was a good idea, O’Connor confirmed and clarified her views for the Associated Press. According to O’Connor,

We have a society that does tear families apart. I think the 19th amendment, while it’s not an evil in and of itself, is a symptom of something I don’t approve of.

…

The 19th Amendment is around because men weren’t doing their jobs, and I think that’s sad. I believe the man should be the head of the family. The woman should be the heart of the family.

This radical conservative view of women as little more than children to, at least ideally, be watched over by men is as bizarre as any of the radical feminist views of relations between the sexes. It is difficult to fathom how someone living in a liberal democracy in the 21st century could seriously hold such archaic ideas.

Source:

Women’s suffrage called ‘mistake’ by conservative Kansas politician. John Hanna, The Associated Press, September 29, 2001.