Monthly Archives: February 2003

Organ Donation: Should National Origin Matter?

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I didn’t really follow the Jesica Santillan case very closely, and missed an interesting fact about Santillan — she was apparently in the United States illegally. According to a number of reports, her mother smuggled her into the country hoping that she would receive better care in the United States than in Mexico.

Doing a Google search on Santillan turns up a number of opinions on this state of affairs. There’s the hardcore anti-immigrant folks who think Santillan’s case is a tragedy because it will just encourage more people from Mexico to take the often dangerous step of illegally crossing the border. There’s also plenty of sentiment that it doesn’t matter — here’s a young woman who needed a transplant, and her nationality be damned.

Of course Santillan is a very sympathetic figure. In the 1980s, there was less sympathy for a number of wealthy foreign nationals — including the wife of a prominent Saudi Arabian diplomat — who came to the United States for organ transplants.

In response United Network for Organ Sharing decreed that transplant centers must limit to 5 percent the number of transplants they do for foreign nationals. In 2002, 936 of the 22,709 organ transplants operations in the United States were performed on foreign nationals.

One of the major problems with this system us that UNOS appears to have no serious guidelines for deciding when an organ should go to a foreign national over a U.S. citizen. The American Society of Transplant Surgeons proposed giving U.S. citizens first shot at any organs, with foreign nationals qualifying only if there were no citizens who could take the organ (and, to be fair, something like that appears to have happened in the Santillan case), but UNOS appears to have never formally adopted that guideline, leaving such decisions up to whatever policies transplant centers themselves want to formulate.

Sources:

Immigration, organ issues mix: Medical community faces quandary of who is most deserving recipient. Scott Dodd, Charlotte Observer, February 21, 2003.

ClubPhoto.Com

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Back in December, Seth Dillingham posted about his experiences with SnapFish.Com on his web site. I’d never really looked seriously at businesses such as this which develop film, produce prints, and post scans on the web, but Seth’s post piqued my interest.

I finally settled on giving ClubPhoto.Com a try for a number of reasons — the major one being that I wasn’t really interested in prints of my film, and ClubPhoto.Com seemed to have the cheapest rates for simply processing and posting high quality scans (they then snail mail me back the negatives).

Overall, I am satisfied with the service I’ve received from ClubPhoto.Com. As Seth noted, these sorts of shops are obviously using automated processes and the developing quality you’ll find here is comparable to what you’d get if you drop your film off at the local drugstore or supermarket.

On the positive side, the turnaround for film processing is very quick even via snail mail. When I mail the photos from my office in Kalamazoo it usually takes only about 4 business days before ClubPhoto.Com (which is headquartered in Texas) has scans of the photos posted.

The only negative is that ClubPhoto.Com’s idea of a high quality scan usually ends up being a 400kb JPEG. My idea of a high quality scan is a 17mb TIFF file. But then, I guess they wouldn’t be able to offer their service that cheaply if they had to absorb the bandwidth charges that would accompany files that large.

But the service is otherwise almost perfect for people like me who don’t want to deal with (and pay for) prints, but aren’t quite ready to ditch their film camera for a digital model either.

HP ScanJet 5500c

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One of the many projects I’ve been working on is converting all of the pieces of paper I have hanging around into digital versions (and then safely hiding the paper versions away). A couple years ago I tried using a cheap film scanner to take care of the thousands of pictures I’ve accumulated, but ran into a number of problems (the operative word turning out to be cheap film scanner).

I’m having a bit more luck with HP’s ScanJet 5500c. The ScanJet 5500c has a photo document feeder — essentially a document feeder that is designed to accommodate stacks of photographs up to 4×6″.

Over the last two months I’ve scanned in about 2,000 photographs and so far have few complaints. I have run into some problems with jams, but for the most part those involved either a) photographs that were somewhat warped or b) photographs that were not cleanly cut during developing.

I generally scan the photos at 600 DPI and the highest color setting, which usually results in TIFF files of 17mb to 20mb. I use those files to generate smaller JPEGS for my web site and then archive the TIFF files on CD-R (still waiting to buy a larger hard drive to store all of the photos in one place).

All Your Bonsai Kittens Are Belong To Us

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One of the things that fascinates me — largely because I don’t understand the process at all — is how some hoaxes and memes spread like wildfire throughout the Internet, while others just crash and burn.

I cannot understand, for example, why BonsaiKitten.Com still attracts such outrage among people almost three years after it first appeared on the web.

The first time I saw it I thought it was somewhat clever, but assumed that it is so obviously a hoax that the furor over it would soon die down. Apparently I vastly overestimated the general level of knowledge about mammalian physiology.

So as maintainer of a site about the animal rights movement I receive about 6 or 7 emails a week asking me to spread the word about this horrible site. Several times a week, people forward me one of a number of petitions against the site. For the most part I ignore these e-mails because of the odd responses I would get from people after I told them the site was a hoax — many of my correspondents simply refused to believe the site was a hoax. Look, you can see the pictures there for yourself, they would write back.

I’ve come to have a grudging admiration for whomever is actually behind the BonsaiKitten.Com site for their ability to really strike a nerve. Connie Bloom, a writer for Ohio’s The Beacon Journal, recently devoted a long column to what she calls this “disgusting work of a former student at [MIT].”

And like a lot of people, Bloom on the one hand understands why the site exists, but on the other hand, can’t help but herself in giving the author of the site what he or she was looking for. Early in her column, Bloom notes that back in 2000 BonsaiKitten.Com had to jump from provider to provider after getting kicked off various ISPs, but “the student was encouraged by all the negative attention and has continued to promote it on a series of Web hosts, one after another, citing his right to free speech.”

But she ends her column with a flourish noting that even the Humane Society of the United States recognizes that BonsaiKitten.Com is protected speech but, Bloom adds, “That doesn’t make it any less offensive or infuriating.”

Infuriating and offensive enough to devote 900 words to it in a newspaper column three years after it was obvious the site was a hoax? Again, I’ve got some grudging admiration whose rather tame satire is so successful at getting underneath people’s skin.

Source:

‘Bonsai Kittens’ in jars cause stir with pet lovers. Connie Bloom, Beacon Journal (Ohio), Feb. 15, 2003.

Alterman, Limbaugh and Apologies

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While doing a little research on Eric Alterman’s wish in Esquire that Rush Limbaugh had gone deaf, I came across this post on a blog that makes an erroneous statement about one of Limbaugh’s more reprehensible statements.

During his television show’s run, Limbaugh told a story about a mythical White House dog and at the end of his bit a picture of Chelsea Clinton was displayed (Clinton was 12 or 13 at the time). According to the weblog linked to above. Alterman mentions this incident in his apology about his Limbaugh comment, and the blogger linked to above has this to say,

But since Limbaugh has apologized for the quip directed at Chelsea Clinton (which Alterman quotes), and Alterman clearly still holds it against him regardless, it’s fair to have the same standard for Alterman’s own apology.

But Limbaugh has never unequivocally apologized for his comments about Chelsea. As far as I can tell, the closest he’s come to apologizing was December 2002 when both he and Hillary Clinton were at the same wedding and the New York Observer reported that Limbaugh had privately apologized to Hillary Clinton about his comments about Chelsea.

Instead, at the time Limbaugh tried to pass off his insulting comments as a mistake by a staffer who supposedly showed the wrong picture — which is why his alleged apology to Hillary Clinton, if it actually happened, would have been news.

Conspiracy Theories About Google

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Dave Winer is apparently impressed by Daniel Brandt’s anti-Google rantings. But as this Salon.Com article documents, Brandt is a nutty conspiracy theorist (just go a few links deep at his NameBase.Org who is pissed off because *his* page about Donald Rumsfeld, and a whole host of other people, doesn’t show up very high in Google searches.

I particularly love the brief explanation Brandt offers of why Google’s PageRank sucks,

It’s democratic in the same way that capitalism is democratic. You could have the cure for cancer on the Web and not find it in Google because ‘important’ sites don’t link to it.

But, of course, if there were a cure for cancer posted on the web, then it is likely that lots of people would link to it, much like many scientists would end up citing a paper that outlined a successful cure for cancer.

What Brandt wants is for Google to be democratic in the same way that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is Democratic.

In fact, as Salon notes, Brandt believes that if you search on “Donald Rumsfeld” his page about Rumsfeld should be shown before Rumsfeld’s DoD biography page, even though it is largely useless and almost impossible to navigate (the main problem with NameBase is that it is an index of citations largely of the conspiracy literature which Brandt has personally read).

Update: A good example of one of Brandt’s nutty conspiracy theories his his speculation about China’s blocking of Google in which Brandt argues that “China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security” because Google may be sharing data about Chinese users with the National Security Agency which would, in Brandt’s mind, “put the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.”

Stupid Slashdot Tricks

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Every time I see someone online talking about the accuracy of traditional media vs. weblogs — and usually extolling the virtue of the latter — I think of Slashdot. A few errors could be forgiven, but often it seems like they actively try to avoid reading the actual articles that they post about and link to.

For example, Slashdot has a story on its front page that is headlined,

Circuit Court Okays Vote Swapping Site

The text of the post and the headline lead many of Slashdot’s readers to think that the 9th Circuit Court has ruled that it was legal for a web site to facilitate the trading of votes for Al Gore and Ralph Nader (the idea was that a Nader voter in Alabama would vote for Gore, and in exchange a voter in California — where Gore was going to win by a large margin anyway — would vote for Nader).

But the court said absolutely nothing in its ruling about whether or not what the web site did was legal. All it did was reinstate a lawsuit that the web site owner and the ACLU had filed against California’s Secretary of State, Bill Jones.

Jones threatened the web site with prosecution if it didn’t bring a halt to the vote trading. The web site and the ACLU in turn sued saying their First Amendment rights were violated. A lower court dismissed part of the lawsuit and found against the web site on another part.

All the 9th District Court did was reverse those decisions and told another lower court to take a fresh look at the lawsuit.

Yes, the details are buried at the bottom of the CNET story that Slashdot links to, but would it really kill Slashdot editors to read the whole story before posting?

Salon.Com Impressed by 9/11 Push Poll

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This Salon.Com article attempts to draw all sorts of lessons over what is, to my mind, an obvious push poll. In January, Princeton Survey Research Associates asked 1,200 Americans this question,

To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?

Only 17 percent of respondents answered correctly that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. From this, the Salon writer concludes that the Bush administration’s plot to association with Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda has been so effective, that less than two years after the most devestating terrorist attack in American history, Americans are confused about the basic facts of the attack.

This is ridiculous. The problem with this question is that many people who are asked it will simply assume that they are being told that Iraqi citizens were among the hijackers, and that they are simply being asked to supply the correct numbers of Iraqis.

I would be very surprised if the following two questions didn’t result in similar levels of misidentification,

To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Libyan citizens?

To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Palestinians?

To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Afghanistan Citizens?

In fact, I’d guess that very large numbers would answer that at least one of the hijackers were Palestinian or Afghanistan citizens.

Salon.Com seems shocked that large numbers of Americans have not committed to memory the nationality of the 19 hijackers. But is it so surprising that 17 months later most people likely just remember that all of the hijackers were Middle Eastern men?

And from this poll we get a rehash of Marxist false consciousness,

It was Marx who described religion as the opiate of the people. Twentieth-first century Americans have television as a general anesthetic. Our collective attention deficit disorder — a disease of morbid intellectual laziness — has permitted the careful packaging of pseudo-information by Madison Avenue to assume an illusion of reality.

To the behavioral psychologist, the truth about the hijacker’s nationalities might seem a victim of a chronic state of inattention. Conditioning has rendered Americans hyper-responsive to emotional and sensory dynamics triggered by the news media, and relatively uninterested in intellectual content. Nobody understands this better than Rupert Murdoch, who has created an empire out of punchy anti-intellectualism. And few understand better how to use it to their advantage than the Bush White House. George W. Bush is, after all, the anti-intellectual’s president.

I’ve never understood why liberals and leftists resort to this argument since it is the classic elitist argument against democracy. If people are really as gullible as Salon thinks, then democracy is a hopeless project. We’d be better off asking the Salon.Com vanguard to rescue us from ourselves and the proletarian mobs.

CNN vs. Fox on Breaking News Coverage

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Henry Hanks links to this story noting that CNN beat Fox for a change during the coverage of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

The weird part is that the story itself dwells on the location of the anchors. For people who haven’t heard this extreme inside baseball story, CNN anchor Aaron Brown was at a golf tournament and couldn’t make it back to CNN until late in the evening. Tom Brokaw and other anchors managed to drop what they were doing to make it on the airwaves.

This might come as a shock to media analysts, but people watch the news, well … to watch news, and on CNN kicked Fox’s butt when it came to shuttle coverage.

I flipped back and forth between the two for awhile, but it was no contest — Fox was about 20 to 30 minutes behind CNN. Fox’s anchors and reporters were offering uninformed speculation on matters that CNN had already provided uptodate information on. CNN was airing the infamous contrail footage while Fox anchors were still on the air describing second hand reports of the apparent breakup of the shuttle. In fact I found myself thinking, “Aren’t they monitoring CNN?”

Frankly, I’ve never been impressed by Fox’s abilities at covering news events as they happen. They’re much more interesting for their political commentary and analysis after all the facts have been settled, but they really need to improve their ability to handle breaking news.