Day: April 8, 2002

Should Great Britain Discriminate Against Female Doctors?

The BBC reported on an odd trend in British medicine today — there are too many female doctors. One of the central planners of Great Britain’s medical system touched off a controversy by suggesting that medical schools might have to start discriminating against women in order to boost the number of male doctors.

The problem with female doctors goes to the heart about debates over why men earn more, on average, than women. Female physicians in Great Britain end up working significantly less than male physicians do. According to statistics from the Royal College of General Practitioners, female physicians work an average of 24 years versus 31 years for men.

What are they doing during those 7 years? They are temporarily leaving the profession or entering part-time work, probably to accommodate other priorities such as raising children.

Add to that the fact that about 60 percent of students in medical school are women, and the result is an almost certain shortage of doctors in Great Britain during the next decade. The government says it will find a way to scrounge up 2,000 extra physicians, when the British Medical Association estimates that at least 10,000 more physicians are needed.

So, should medical schools in Great Britain start discriminating against women? Of course not. The problem here has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with Great Britain’s National Health System.

In the United States, the health care system deals with shortages through the free market. For example, over the past several years there has been a pretty marked shortage of nurses. Competition for available nurses has driven nursing salaries higher, in turn enticing more people to become nurses. Eventually the number of nurses available will meet or exceed the demand and nursing salaries will likely level out and likely decline in some places.

Much of Great Britain’s health care system is controlled and centrally planned by the state. The National Health System is perpetually short of cash and cannot afford to pay market rates for doctors. This means that talented doctors open up expensive private practices or else go into other fields or emigrate to other countries. The result is the shortage seen today which the British Medical Association wrongly associates with simply a decline in the number of men seeking to be general practitioners.

Source:

Medicine ‘may have to favour men’. The BBC, April 8, 2002.

Horrible UI for Radio Shortcuts

It’s good to see Userland adding a shortcuts capability to Radio, but the interface for doing so is horrible — all shortcuts are surrounded by quote marks.

The problem is that quote marks are frequently used characters. So what do you do if you have a shortcut that looks like this, “My Summer Vaction”, and decide at some point you just want to be able to show My Summer Vacation in quotes (i.e., not resolved as a shortcut,

Sometimes there will be a shortcut for something that you want to refer to in double-quotes without it becoming a link. You can prevent Radio from processing the shortcut by putting a backslash before each of the quotes like this: “My Summer Vacation”. More information about backslashes is here.

Ugh. How un-user friendly is that? Why not just use a relatively infrequently used character? Conversant uses the pipe character (“|”), and a whole host of other characters such as the “~” or “+” or even “^” could be used. Why settle on something as common as the quote mark and then force users to mentally maintain a list of shortcuts in their head that they need to backslash out of if they just want to show the words in quotes? (After all, how often is someone going to want to dislay +My Summer Vaction+ or ~My Summer Vaction~ — never, except when explaining how the function works, and in that case its just easier to look up the HTML character codes).

Daniel Pipes on Fighting Terrorism

In an op-ed for the New York Post, Daniel Pipes hits the nail on the head when it comes to the problems with the ongoing war on terrorism,

Since Sept. 11, America has waged war against a tactic. When President Bush declared a “war against terrorism,” he ignored the real enemy – militant Islam, a brutal, totalitarian ideology.

Not explicitly targeting militant Islam has been costly, hindering everything from airline security to sensible immigration policies. It renders Washington unable to explain why U.S. troops are only fighting in theatres in and around the Muslim world, or why certain Muslims warrant special attention from law enforcement. Worse, it means not identifying potential allies, especially moderate Muslims.

Sleaziest Web Advertising Scheme Yet

So-called pop-up downloads have to be the sleaziest Internet advertising scheme yet — far more pernicious than even the ubiquitous spam or moustrapping. According to News.Com,

In recent weeks, some software makers have enlisted Web site operators to entice their visitors to download software rather than simply to view some advertising. For example, when visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security warning with the message: “Do you accept this download?” If the consumer clicks “Yes,” an application is automatically installed.

I do not think it will take more than a few months to see a class against lawsuit against the companies using this sort of advertising. For example, one company in the News.Com article, Gator, explains that it is okay to do this because the dialog box that pops up says “Would you like to try this application? Click here if you do.” I’m sorry but that is not nearly enough information to gain consent for installing an application on my system.

Only on the Internet is advertising that infuriates its target audience considered a wise business move.

Ivory Coast Tries to Make Amends to Soccer Witch Doctors

The BBC has one of the oddest sports stories I’ve read in a long time.

It seems the Ivory Coast has never had much success in the African Nations Cup football tournament aside from 1992, when it won it all by beating Ghana in the final.

Before that final match, the Ivory Coast’s sports minister retained several witch doctors to give the nation’s team an edge over Ghana. But after the team won, the sports minister never followed through on the promises of financial reward that were made to the witch doctors. Some of the witch doctors threatened to curse the team.

Since then, the performance of the Ivory Coast team has been dismal — in both 2000 and 2002, it was eliminated in the first round from the African Nations Cup competition.

Now, the government has had a change of heart with Defence and Civil Protection Minister Moise Lida Kouassi saying that the country wants to make amends for “the promises which weren’t kept after the 1992 Nations Cup.” He’s offering them $2,000 and a bottle of liquor to once again favor the country’s football team and bring it success on the field.

Stop E-Mailing Me or I Will Sue

Over the last couple months I’ve been threatened three times with lawsuits from people who are angry that they keep receiving an e-mail newsletter that I put out weekly. The problem is, I’ve never actually e-mailed my newsletter to any of these people directly.

Rather, they are subscribed to various e-mail lists that I post the newsletter to. In each case, though, I only post the newsletter because the person who maintains and/or moderates the list has requested I do so.

But there are quite a few people who just don’t understand that distinction. Even when all e-mail that goes out from the list has the list name included in the subject line, I still get e-mail from people wondering why I’m spamming them. Some of them still don’t get it after I explain that I’m not e-mailing them directly and that if they think the newsletter is inappropriate, they should take that up with the list owner/moderator.

Pain in the neck.