Day: January 23, 2005

Why Is Birth Control Use Declining in U.S. Women?

In late 2004, the National Center for Health Statistics released a report analyzing contraceptive usage in the United States from 1982-2002. The report discovered an interesting statistic — the percentage of adult women who had sex in the previous three months but did not use contraception rose from 5.4 percent in 1995 to 7.4 percent in 2002.

The increase was statistically significant and occurred only in adult women over the age of 20 — contraceptive use by teens was unchanged.

The Washington Post reported on the increase noting,

Because the survey is so large (more than 7,600 women) and known for its accuracy, “an increase of even two percentage points is worrisome,” said John S. Santelli, a professor of population and family health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Even as he cheered the news that a growing number of teenagers are using contraception, Santelli wondered whether doctors are neglecting women.

“Maybe we’re failing with women over 21,” Santelli said.

Much of the speculation about the increase centered around the possibility that women are finding the cost of birth control to be too expensive,

Jeffrey Jensen, director of the Women’s Health Research Unit at Oregon Health and Science University, said he regularly encounters patients who have trouble affording birth control, even if their private insurance covers it.

“It is absolutely unconscionable that women have a co-pay of $20 or $25 [month] for contraceptives and men are getting off scot-free,” Jensen said. Drug companies “have cut way back” on free samples and many women turn to less effective types of birth control because of cost, he said, “running a greater risk of pregnancy as a result.”

Not sure why Jensen feels the need to turn this into a men vs. women thing (men “get off scot-free”). The last time I checked, no major insurance company covers the primary male contraceptive — condoms.

Another speculation is that there was a decline in comprehensive sex education as the abstinence movement gained steam in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the Washington Post,

Several recent studies found that as the abstinence-until-marriage movement surged, there was a “considerable drop” in comprehensive sex education from 1988 to 2000, Santelli said. “Women in their twenties have probably gotten less effective information about contraception,” he said.

Or it could simply be a one-time outlier in the sample. After all, the difference between 1995 and 2002 women who had sex without using contraception was only 129 out of the 6,493 women 20 or over interviewed in the survey.

Sources:

More women opting against birth control, study finds. Ceci Connolly, Washington Post, January 4, 2005.

Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing, 2002. Joyce C. Abma, PhD.; Gladys M. Martinez, PhD.; William D. Mosher, PhD.; and Brittany S. Dawson, M.P.P., Division of Vital Statistics. December 2004.

Two Cool Things About Blue LED Inventor Winning $8.1 Million

The Register recently reported that the man who invented the blue LED, Shuji Nakamura, reached an $8.1 million settlement with his former employer, Japanese chemical company Nichia.

Its still a lot less than the $189 million Nakamura was initially awarded, but a decent deal considering.

Second, the headline the Register uses for this story is, “Blue LED boffin wins $8.1m from ex-employer.” I’d just like to add my long-held opinion that the word “boffin” to refer to “a scientist, especially one engaged in research” is simply the coolest word ever in the English language (well, at least the coolest clean word). It is a shame that the word is not used widely in other English-speaking countries besides Great Britain.

According to WordSmith.Org, the term is considered slang and its origins are partially obscured,

If a pocket protector could be considered an official accessory of a nerd, white lab coat, glasses and clipboard would be the equivalent for a boffin. The term first appeared as a moniker given by members of Britain’s Royal Air Force to scientists doing research on radar. But like most slang, the how and why of this are unknown.

Source:

Blue LED boffin wins $8.1m from ex-employer. Tony Smith, The Register, January 13, 2005.

Holographic Storage from Hitachi In 2006?

InfoWeek reports that Hitachi plans to begin sampling a 5″, 200gb holographic disk in 2005 and incorporate the technology into drive system in 2006. According to Infoweek, Hitachi hopes to increase capacity to 400gb in 2007.

Tom’s Hardware has more technical details about InPhase, the holographic disk company that Hitachi acquired and which will actually be producing holographic drives for the company. According to Tom’s Hardware,

The prototype drive records data into InPhase’s patented two-chemistry photopolymer WORM material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic disk substrates, the company said. The prototype can arrange more than one million bits of data into a single page, which is recorded with a single flash of a 407 nm laser beam, according to InPhase. Multiple pages of data, referred to as a book, are recorded in one spot on the disk providing approximately 12 MByte of data in a single book location.

The holographic disk will apparently be available eventually in sizes up to 1.6 TB.

Cory Doctorow’s Problems with American Airlines

Cory Doctorow posted last week about a bizarre encounter with American Airlines in which an AA attendant tried to convince him that a Transportation Security Agency regulation required him to write out a list of the names and addresses of everyone he planned to stay with while in the United States (if I remember correctly, Doctorow is a Canadian national who has recently been working in the UK for the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Then this guy writes a letter to AA to see if this is true and gets the following response from AA spokesman Tim Wagner,

That said, our contracted screener veered from standard procedure when she asked for Mr. Doctorow to write the addresses of his destinations in the United States. She did clearly state that once the interview was completed, the address list would be destroyed in front of Mr. Doctorow or that he could have the list to keep. American Airlines absolutely does not register or record that type of personal data.

Although the agent concerned is very promising, this incident clearly showed a lack of experience in the questioning process. The agent will go through additional training and supervision. Through daily briefings, the remainder of the station will benefit from the experience gained from this incident.

Doctorow replies that,

At no time did the screener or her supervisor ever state that the list would be destroyed in front of me, nor that I could keep the list. In fact, all three AA security people I dealt with — the screener, her supervisor and the terminal manager — told me that they didn’t know what would be done with the list after the interview, that they had no idea what AA’s document-retention and data-privacy policies were

The AA response doesn’t pass the smell test. What would be the point of asking a passenger to write out the names and addresses of who Doctorow is staying with in order to simply destroy that list in front of him?

Source:

Cory Doctorow and Secondary ‘Secondary Screening’ Classes. SecondaryScreening.Net, January 21, 2005.

Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers’ friends? Cory Doctorow, Boing! Boing!, January 19, 2005.

Is There Really A Market for Day-Old NFL Radio Broadcasts?

Audible.Com and the NFL have reached an agreement so that recordings of radio broadcasts of playoff games will be available for download the Monday after the game. And for a low, low price of $10.

Huh? Is there really that big of a market for listening to day-old radio broadcasts of sporting events? I could understand the deal if they were offering delayed video, but audio only? For $10? I just don’t get that.

Source:

NFL games heading to your iPod. News.Com, January 18, 2005.

Fun With Viruses

This past week has been absolute hell. First, I’ve got a number of important, deadline-driven projects that I’m trying to finish at work. So it was inevitable that the entire family would come down with a flu-like virus. I can handle that — I’m used to working through feeling like crap and getting things done anyway (I have extremely talented people who work for and with me).

But then my daughter had to go and contract some sort of viral infection in her eye and then pass that little gift along to me. Ugh. I can work through a lot, but it’s a bit hard to get work done when I’m sitting at my desk and my eyes are involuntarily crying like a baby.

Thankfully, the eye virus seems to have finally left my system, though the rest of me still feels like crap.