Day: August 2, 2004

PCRM Wants an End to OSU's Spinal Cord Classes

Ohio State University, like a number of other institutions, offers a three week Spinal Cord Injury Training Course to familiarize students and professionals with the methods and techniques used in spinal cord research. Since much spinal cord research is animal research, the course includes instruction on techniques to injure the spinal cords of mice and rats.

Not surprisingly, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wants the courses shut down. In a press release urging activist to contact the university, PCRM said,

Ohio State University is offering what may be the most inhumane course ever taught: A class in injuring the spinal cords of rats and mice.

Participants in OSUÂ’s Spinal Cord Injury Training Course will be taught how to systematically injure the animalsÂ’ spinal cords by major surgery and blunt trauma. OSU rationalizes the course by claiming that more standardized techniques are needed among spinal cord researchers. The three-week course will subject 189 rats and 60 mice to multiple painful surgeries, laboratory procedures, and distressing behavioral exercises after the injuries.

The course is going forward even though nonanimal research on spinal cord injuries is yielding exciting results. For example, relevant data are being obtained through tests on human neural cell lines in culture, impact studies using human cadavers, clinical observations and trials, and other techniques that do not require the use of animals.

Of course PCRM leaves out any mention of the ground breaking work on spinal cord injuries currently taking place in animals (in fact many of the advances that PCRM refers to were possible thanks largely to the sort of basic research with animals that PCRM opposes here).

Sources:

Action Alert: Help Stop Inhumane Spinal Cord Classes at OSU. Press Release, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, June 11, 2004.

Experimental spinal cord injury (SCI) course. Press Release, Ohio State University, March 15, 2004.

Howard Dean Is an Embarassment

Saw New York Governor George Pataki on Fox today. Someone asked him about Howard Dean’s comments to the effect that the Bush administration times the release of information about terrorists threats to disrupt the Kerry campaign. Pataki had the right response saying, “Governor Dean is an embarassment” and moved on. What’s the point of giving more airtime to yet another Dean conspiracy theory?

In a related topic, Henry Hanks points out that some on the Left, such as Al Franken, have attempted to soft pedal and revise Dean’s earlier airing of claims that Bush might have been warned by Saudi Arabia about the 9/11 attacks ahead of time.

Franken said on his radio show (emphasis added),

He said on the Diane Rehm show, “The problem about redacting everything about Saudi Arabia is that it gives, uh, it gives conspiracy theories some credence.” He said, “For example, I saw an interesting theory on the internet that said that oh, uh, you know, that, uh, the Saudis warned Bush about 9/11. Now there’s absolutely no evidence for that,” etc.

But what Dean actually said was,

REHM: Why do you think he’s suppressing that report?

DEAN: I don’t know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I’ve heard so far, which is nothing more than a theory, I can’t — think it can’t be proved, is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now, who knows what the real situation is, but the trouble is by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not, and then eventually they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the clear — the key information that needs to go to the Kean commission.

You have to think Karl Rove is still kicking himself that he didn’t find a way to get the Democrats to nominate Dean.

Hasbro Releases new LazerTag Toys

The official LazerTag.Com site is up and down more than a kids on a trampoline, but there’s a lot of good information from one of the developers about new Lazer Tag toys that should be in stores now from Hasbro.

The cool thing is they ship with goggles that give a configurable HUD. Awesome. According to the developer,

(1) All scoring is completely automatic, and changes depending on the type of game played (11 basic game types in the first offering)

(2) There is no way for “cheats” to annoy honest players (other than blatantly covering the receiver).

(3) Physical areas like rooms or car-ports can become actively scored to make a zone of contention.

(4) The Host can set a whole variety of options such as: time limits, number of reloads available, number of tags until tagged-out, number of seconds of shields time, whether or not friendly fire counts, and whether or not teammates can give “medic assistance” to each other in
the event one player becomes badly tagged or needs to be “pumped-up” for a strike mission.

(5) Players receive proximity warnings, “lock-ons,” and Identification-Friend-or-Foe information about the other players.

(6) Players receive audio and visual feedback as to whether or not a fired tag landed on the target player.

(7) The receiver is integrated with the transmitter in one unit — there is no extra vest or cap to wear.

(9) The LCD display allows the user to select which game information he/she is most interested in viewing at any time, rather like a soft-screen display in a modern fighter jet.

(10) Sound effects can be “muted” for stealth mode, played audibly to all, or played only through a headset worn by the player.

(11) Headset also includes a transflective Heads-Up-Display which projects images of 3 “Alert Icons” in space in front of the user — one for “Locked-On,” one for “Scored Hit,” and one for “Hit by Opponent.”

And only $60 for a 2-player set – excellent.

JVC DVD Player with DiVX Support

My five year old DVD player is starting to show its age, so this weekend I bought this JVC DVD player (XV-NP10SL) largely because it includes support for playing DiVX files.

I don’t download copies of DiVX movies off the Internet like some people I know, but I have converted all of my DVDs and a lot of private video to DiVX. I was kind of curious just how well DiVX playback would work. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it handles pretty much every file I throw at it. I tend to encode at very high bit rates, and although I can still tell the difference between DVD and DiVX, I don’t see any difference between DiVX files and what I see on my digital cable, which is more than adequate for my purposes.

I was glad to see that even though the player is only certified to work with DVD-R, it had no problem handling any of my DVD+Rs.

Add in the ability to show MP3s and JPEGs off of CD-Rs, and for only $129 this was a steal — one of my better gadget buys in a long time.

Memo to Bloglines — Please Ignore Dave

Dave Winer posts today:

Question for Yahoo, Google, Bloglines, anyone else who wants to run a centralized aggregation service. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the user interface I want is the one in the Convention Bloggers site. It’s derived from Radio’s aggregator, which was derived from My.UserLand. It’s designed to let the reader skim over hundreds of articles in just a few minutes. It works. Why mess around emulating three-paned email interfaces. In my humble opinion, if you just emulated this interface you’d clean up.

You think Dave might think to ask once in awhile if his method isn’t broken when so many other popular sites use different methods.

As I’ve said before, the problem with Radio is that this simply doesn’t scale. I didn’t check my Bloglines account at all since late Thursday, so there are currently more than 27,000 unread stories there across almost 300 different feeds. Simply lumping them altogether in one single scrolling display would be a horrible interface — and one of the reasons I and others stopped using Radio in favor of sites like Bloglines (actually I’m still waiting for a deal breaking feature to be fixed in the otherwise excellent FeedDemon).

Instead, I have my feeds divided into a couple dozen categories and I can quickly get to information I really need to see while ignoring and marking as read the rest. WHy do Bloglines, etc. use the three pane system — because it just works for users, even if a handful of developers still don’t like it.

UK Court of Appeals Finds Animal Rights Activists' Sentences "Excessive"

In July, Great Britain’s Court of Appeals cut in half the sentences of two animal rights activists after finding they were excessive.

Paul Leboutillier, 44, was originally sentenced to five years, but his sentenced was lowered to 30 months. Paul Holliday, 38, was originally sentenced to 18 months, but had his sentence lowered to 9 months.

Between the two of them, Leboutillier and Holliday made more than a thousand telephone calls to facilities owned by Covance and Huntingdon Life Sciences. Most of the calls were made in an attempt to jam the telephone systems of the two companies.

The justices apparently bought in to Holliday’s contention that he himself was a victim of the animal rights movement. Mr. Justice Herniques noted that Holliday was a “vulnerable individual” who,

[Had] fallen under the influence of more militant members of the animal rights movement . . . and rued his involvement.

The judges also found that the judge who sentenced Leboutillier and Holliday had been influenced “by what he thought was a connection between the appellant and the person responsible for a campaign of letter bombs when in fact there was no such connection.”

Once again, the British legal system strikes fear into the hearts of animal rights extremists.

Source:

Jail sentences halved for animal rights activists. Laura Scott, Press Association, July 9, 2004.