Day: February 21, 2002

North Carolina Boy Wants Tryout for Girls Softball Team

Josh Godbold is in an odd position — the 8th grader desperately wants to obtain some experience so that he can have a shot at trying out for a high school baseball team next year. There’s only one problem. The middle school Godbold attends has a girl’s softball team but no boy’s baseball team — and the school and state law forbid him from trying out for the team.

Although there are a few hundred female athletes playing on boys teams in North Carolina, where Godbold live, Title IX has never been interpreted by courts to allow boys to participate in girls sports, even in cases such as Godbold’s where the school does not offer an equivalent boys version of a girls sport.

NewsObserver.Com notes that North Carolina relies on a 1994 interpretation of Title IX written by the then-director of the Southeast regional director of the Office for Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Education. In language that is purely Orwellian, that interpretation maintains that,

For example, a male may not argue that his opportunities to play on a female volleyball or softball team have previously been limited because his school has never offered these sports for males. … Overall athletic opportunities for males are not limited because, at a particular school, females may be permitted to try out for all teams while males may not try out for female teams.

Godbold’s father, Ricky, offered a much more common sense interpretation of fairness saying, “He’s being discriminated against playing a sport because he’s a boy. If a girl has a chance to try out for any sport at a school, he should, too.”

Laws to alleviate sexual discrimination should, at a minimum, be symmetrical when it comes to sex — if it is wrong to sexually discriminate against women in a given situation, it should also be wrong to sexually discriminate against men in a similar situation. Godbold should be allowed to try out for the softball team.

Source:

Girls’ team only option, boy says. T. Keung Hui, NewsObserver.Com, February 15, 2002.

The Beginning of the End for PayPal

MSNBC reports that less than a week after its IPO, PayPal has been hit with a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of people who claim that the company wrongfully denied them access to their money. PayPal is an interesting experiment, but in the long term I think it is doomed.

Quite a few people seem to have had bad experiences with PayPal, but most people seem to ignore the fact that PayPal’s behavior is also one of the reasons it can offer such relatively good terms — i.e., it keeps its costs per transaction and the amount of fraud in its system extremely low. The problem is that in order to accomplish this, PayPal resorts to a whole host of customer unfriendly policies.

In that respect, PayPal is a lot like a small commuter air company. It’s not that PayPal couldn’t be nicer or have more reasonable policies, but rather that the second it does it will no longer have much of a competitive advantage in its market. The lawsuit against PayPal concedes this point, arguing that,

As a result of its inability to set up an adequate and effective anti-fraud mechanism and its attempt to compensate for such inability, PayPal adopts an aggressive and grossly over-broad anti-fraud policy that persistently causes erroneous and wrongful restrictions of access to be imposed on user accounts — causing economic damage and financial loss to a significant number of innocent PayPal account holders.

Between lawsuits and attempts by state and perhaps even federal officials to regulate PayPal as a bank, PayPal will have to raise its fees and institute more selective criteria for the accounts it takes on — i.e., it will have to become more like a traditional bank. And at that point, traditional banks who have been busy working on their own competitors to PayPal will likely eat it for lunch.

Source:

PayPal sued over frozen funds. Lisa Napoli, MSNBC, February 21, 2002.

Lawrence Lessig’s Brilliant Idea

He’s still wrong about Microsoft, but Lawrence Lessig has a brilliant idea with his Creative Commons initiative (there’s not much at the web site now, but supposedly it will launch in a few months).

The idea is simple — offer intellectual property licenses that are a) relatively airtight and b) allow people to customize the level of control they want to maintain over their creations. Think of it as a DIY copyright. As a profile of Lessig summarized Creative Commons,

In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain.

That’s something I’d use immediately. I have a pretty liberal reproduction policy for people who want to reprint things I’ve written, but I’d still like to have a more formal license to protect my rights.

The Role of the Barcode in Human Progress

The BBC has fascinating account of the role of the humble barcode in human progress. The barcode made its debut 25 years ago in Great Britain — just a year after the first bar code appeared in the United States.

The barcode is ubiquitous today and, as the BBC documents, has revolutionized retail stores. For example, the BBC interviews a consultant to supermarket chains who notes that in the early 1970s the average store only stocked a couple thousand different product lines. Today the average supermarket in Great Britain stocks 25,000 different product lines. The efficiencies gained by using bar codes for pricing changes and inventory made it possible to dramatically expand the goods that stores could profitably sell.

It is clear from the article that, at least in Great Britain, they also led to the much-demonized consolidation of supermarkets and the emergence of enormous chain stores. The improvements in supply chain management that barcodes allowed also increased the economies of scale and allowed giant supermarkets to pass on the savings to their customers.

Barcodes are also used in other businesses, including to track raw materials and products in factory settings. The BBC notes that experiments are under way to use radio tags that have pricing and other information embedded so that a box of corn flakes can ring itself up at the register automatically. There are also experiments under way to use small barcodes to tag produce and similar goods.

Ah, the sweet smell of progress.

Source:

In praise of the bar code. Mark Ward, BBC News, February 16, 2002.

The European Union Enacts Toothless Sanctions Against Zimbabwe

The European Union finally took official action against Zimbabwe‘s Robert Mugabe after Mugabe ejected a Swedish diplomat who was heading a mission to observe Zimbabwe’s upcoming election. The EU’s sanctions, however, will have no real effect on Mugabe.

Mugabe is now banned from traveling to European Union nations, any assets he has in the EU will be frozen, and Zimbabwe is barred from buying arms from the EU. As The BBC’s Paul Reynolds summed up the likely reaction by Mugabe,

The European Union has therefore played its card. But it is not a particularly strong card, since Mr. Mugabe is unlikely to be much moved by not being able to travel to Europe.

These sort of sanctions might have been a little more helpful 18-24 months ago, but the situation in Zimbabwe is way beyond being influenced but such tepid sanctions. Or as Reynolds eloquently put it,

The European Union has huffed and now it has puffed.

But it is unlikely to bring Robert Mugabe’s house down.

Source:

Analysis: EU sanctions lack teeth. Paul Reynolds, The BBC, February 18, 2002.

MMR Vaccination Has Been a Worldwide Success

As I mentioned earlier this week, Great Britain is experiencing an outbreak of measles because of declining vaccination rates. Some parents fear having their children vaccinated using the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine because of unsubstantiated claims that it is linked to autism. Worldwide, however, the MMR vaccine has been extremely successful.

The BBC reports that since it was introduced in the United States in 1975, over 500 million doses of the MMR vaccine have been administered around the world — equivalent to about 10 percent of the world’s population receiving the vaccine.

A major success story with the MMR vaccine has been Finland where the three diseases have been almost wiped out by an aggressive vaccination program that began in earnest in the 1990s.

One of the demands of British parents who fear the MMR vaccine is that their children be offered separate vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella rather than the combined vaccine. That is precisely how things are handled in Japan where an MMR vaccine was withdrawn in 1993 after a high rate of post-vaccination meningitis cases. But according to the BBC, after the switch from a single vaccination to multiple vaccinations, the disease incidence rate rose markedly and there were 79 deaths from measles in Japan from 1992 to 1997.

One of the problems with multiple vaccinations is that it is far more expensive and, of course, inconvenient, reducing the number of children who will receive all three.

Source:

MMR’s global success. The BBC, February 6, 2002.