Day: February 1, 2002

The Goldmember Controversy

I’ve participated in a number of Internet discussion about the Austin Powers: Goldmember movie and there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about how and why Sony was able to force the movie’s producers to change the name and pull all the marketing material for the movies (at least temporarily).

First of all, this is not a trademark issue, even though Sony is obviously not pleased with the the parody of Goldfinger. If you want to make a spy spoof film and call it Goldmember, I doubt Sony would have much of a leg to stand on in a trademark lawsuit (though it might be able to harass you with nuisance suits and make it unprofitable to continue).

One of the few good things the MPAA has done is figure that its members probably have better things to do than file trademark lawsuits back and forth with each other. So companies that are members of the MPAA can register film titles with it. This costs $300/year plus $200 for every 10 film titles.

What do you get for your money? Well, say you register the film title “Jack of Spades.” No member of the MPAA can release a film with that title without securing your permission first. Suppose instead I decide to make a movie called “Ten of Diamonds” which you think is a bit too close to “Jack of Spades.” Rather than sue each other, we are bound by our agreement with the MPAA to go into arbitration that will settle the matter.

If you follow the movie trade closely, you’ll occasionally see movie studios paying other studios, filmmakers, etc. serious dollar figures to obtain the rights to a certain movie name — Disney, for example, reportedly paid $600,000 just to use the title “Ransom” for its Mel Gibson film of that name.

Its just domain name squatting, Hollywood style.

The British National Health System vs. Kaiser Permanente

Researchers at the Institute for Global Health wanted to test the claim made by the British National Health Service that its use of resources is among the most efficient of any health care system in the world. So it compared the cost-efficiency of the NHS with the cost-efficency of Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the United States. The results were recently published in the British Medical Journal and did not reflect very well on the British system.

The researchers chose Kaiser Permanente because it was similar to the NHS in a number of ways, including the way it is organized, the amount it spends to deliver health care, and services provided.

The main findings of the study were that those covered by Kaiser Permanente had significantly better medical access than those covered by the NHS.

Kaiser Permanente patients spent, on average, more than twice as long consulting with physicians. Whereas it took 13 weeks for 80 percent of patients referred to a specialists to actually see a specialist, 80 percent of similar people in Kaiser Permanente’s system saw a specialist within two weeks. Ninety percent of Kaiser Permanente’s patients who needed inpatient treatment or surgery had such surgery within 13 weeks. Only 41 percent of NHS patients who need such treatment had received it after 13 weeks.

The interesting thing is why Kaiser Permanente was able to achieve such efficiencies. It was able to do so because of limits it places on hospitalization. After adjusting for socioeconomic factors, Kaiser Permanente had the equivalent of 327 acute bed days per 1000 population. The NHS, however, had 1,000 acute bed days per 1000 population.

Most HMO’s have policies limiting the amount of hospitalization they will cover, and such policies are generally very unpopular. But the clear implication is that the more money spent on hospitalization, the less that can be spent on providing access to other forms of care, such as specialists and surgical procedures.

As Alain Enthoven notes in a Commentary that appears with the study, a major reason for the differing efficiency is competition. People who are insured by Kaiser Permanente have a lot more options to switch to an alternative provider if they are dissatisfied, whereas customers of the NHS have very limited options, since the NHS is supported by their taxes regardless of whether they would prefer an alternative system.

Source:

Getting more for their dollar: a comparison of the NHS with California’s Kaiser Permanente. Richard G A Feachem, Neelam K Sekhri, Karen L White, British Medical Journal, 2002;324:135-143.

January 2002 Statistics

The log files for January 2002 show almost 276,000 page views in January. The first three weeks of the month were very slow — around 7000-8000 page views a day — but traffic started picking up a couple weeks ago and is now averaging close to 11000 page views a day. The goal for this year is to get that up around 17,000 pages views a day, and I’ve got a long list of things to do to that end.

Jeff Nelson Finally Gets Something Right

I did not think I’d ever find any sort of common ground with VegSource.Com’s Jeff Nelson, but then I stumbled across an article he wrote early last year that forced me to change my mind.

Nelson goes on and on about how many gallons of water it takes to produce a pound of beef (he claims 2,500 gallons; cattlemen claim 441 gallons) when he finally has some insight saying,

So what’s the beef with beef, when it comes to water?

Simply put: it’s wasteful and irresponsible to squander our precious resources on a luxury item like meat.

Hmmm… meat a luxury? Turning to my dictionary I find luxury defined as “sumptuous living or equipment : great ease or comfort : rich surroundings.” That definitely describes meat.

Is it really irresponsible to use so much water to produce such luxurious beef? Don’t we, after millions of years of evolution, finally deserve to bask in such luxuries? If Nelson wants to deprive himself of life’s pleasures that is his business, but I think I’ll still occasionally partake of a sumptuous, luxurious steak.

BTW, just as an example of how separated from reality Nelson is, he goes on about all the water used in producing beef and then adds,

How, as a vegetarian, do you feel about paying astronomical water rates when your lifestyle choices mean you’re likely consuming a fraction of the water each month that your meat-eating friends are guzzling each day?

I would like to know where in the United States Nelson is that he is paying “astronomical water rates.” The major problem with water in the United States is that it is almost always subsidized by federal, state and local officials and is far too cheap (because the subsidized price discourages conservation efforts). Regardless, water is hardly allocated in any sort of functioning market, so the idea that the amount of water that cattlemen use drives up the price of water is absurd.

(To get an idea of just how low the price of water is, the average price for water in the United State is just over 52 centers per cubic meter, or about one cent for every five gallons used.)

Source:

How much water to make one pound of beef? Jeff Nelson, VegSource.Com, March 1, 2001.

California Activists Receive Jail Sentences; Anti-Stephens Protesters Receive Fines

In October, Peter Schnell, 21, and Matthew Whyte, 18, pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges. The two animal rights activists were caught in possession of 11 gallons of gasoline, matches and other paraphernalia which they planned to use to firebomb several dairy trucks in Capitola, California.

The two were sentenced in January with Schnell receiving a two-year sentence and Whyte a 14 month prison term. This was the minimum possible sentence U.S. Circuit Court Judge James Ware could have given the pair. Ware apparently thought the statements of regret that both defendants offered in court were sincere.

Meanwhile, an Arkansas court is beginning to dispose of the charges against anti-Huntingdon Life Sciences protesters who were involved in a riot-like protests against Stephens back in October organized by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. All of the arrested protesters were from outside of Arkansas.

Alicia Skeats, 20, of Coffeyville, Texas, and Michael Durschmind, 41, of Chicago, were convicted of misdemeanor disorderly conduct and were fined $100 and ordered to pay $100 in court costs. The fines will be deducted from a $300 cash bond each of them posted. Both Skeats and Durschmind plan to appeal their conviction.

Josh Harper plead guilty to violating a city public assembly ordinance and was fined $100 and $100 in court costs, though the fines were suspended on the recommendation of the prosecutor.

Source:

Animal rights activists get prison time. San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 2002.

Two activists fined $100 for disorderly conduct. The Associated Press, January 26, 2002.

Identical Training Regimen for Military Men and Women Leads to More Injured Women

Great Britain’s army used to have a sexually segregated training regimen — men and women were held to different physical requirements for strength and other conditioning. The problem was that it turned out many of the women were leaving their basic training without the conditioning necessary to accomplish the tasks they were required to do.

In 1998, the army switched to a policy where the training and physical requirements are identical for both men and women. One of the results of that is apparently an increase in the number of injuries among women.

The BBC reported in early January about a study by Lt. Col. Ian Gemmell, an army occupational physician, about injury rates in the old and new regimens. Under the so-called ‘gender fair’ policy, where women trained by themselves and were not expected to meet the same physical fitness as men, the proportion of women discharged do to injuries such as stress fractures, tendonitis and pack pain was about 4.5 percent.

In the 2 years after the ‘gender free’ principle in which women trained alongside men and were required to meet the same physical fitness levels, the proportion of such medical discharges rose to 11 percent.

The main reason is that biological differences make women, on average, more susceptible to such training injuries. The lower muscle mass on average increases stress on the skeleton of women, women tend to emulate men’s generally longer stride in marching, etc. This sort of phenomenon is also seen in injury rates among women athletes, who are generally far more prone to these sort of injuries than are male athletes.

Source:

Army training ‘too tough for women’. The BBC, January 3, 2002.