Day: March 15, 2005

Google Toolbar, Greasemonkey and Butler

The debate over the Google Toolbar’s Autolink feature — which adds links to ISBN number and other text — has now moved on to debating the merits of Greasemonkey and Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Greasemonkey script Google Butler.

Google Butler is like Google Toolbar on steroids. Load it up and it strips the text ads from Google pages, adds links at the top of Google pages to perform the same search on Yahoo! and a number of other search engines, and makes some other changes.

This apparently drives people like Danny Sullivan up the wall and wants tools like Greasemonkey to allow web publishers to opt out. Yuck. Web publishers are just going to have to get used to the idea that they have no control over what happens once a page hits their web browser. Either don’t publish in HTML (go to an all-Flash site, for example) or deal with it.

Ken MacLeod has an interesting dialogue here on the futility of trying to prevent user modification of web pages,

FF: So let me get this straight, this tag will prevent any alteration of your page from being displayed?

PIA: Yeah.

FF: No image blocking, no pop-up blocking, no scaling fonts for readability, no screen readers for accessibility, stuff like that?

PIA: No, no, no, all of those are OK.

FF: The pop-up publishers don’t want us changing their content, blocking pop-ups […]

PIA: That’s different, pop-ups are evil.

It was kind of amusing to see Dave Winer complaining about people modifying his content with the Google Toolbar and then see him talk in a later post about ripping a bunch of Beatles CDs to his IPod. You know, the music industry would like to opt-out of having their CDs ripped, and the owners of the Beatles catalog have especially been opposed to even selling compressed versions of their songs. yet. I didn’t see Winer’s notice that he obtained the RIAA’s or The Beatles’ permission to modify their content.

Opt out for me, but not for thee.

The Joy of Search

Somebody really needs to write a book called “The Joy of Search.” Heck, maybe I’ll do it.

Anyway, what I’m really excited about here is ThinkSecret’s claim that Apple is going to release OS X 10.4 aka Tiger sometime in April. If Tiger lives up to the hype, I’m seriously considering switching at least for a good portion of the work I do.

The number one problem I face day-to-day is organizing the tremendous amount of information I capture and generate. In my current Wintel setup, I’ve got a decent solution using a high-end search application, DTSearch, that gets me a great deal of what I need. I’ve got about 100gb worth of text, RTF, Word, HTML, PDF, MBOX, etc. files that I regularly need to drill down into to find specific bits of information.

TSearch is great, with lots of neat features, but it has obvious limitations. The most obvious is, its an add-on application rather than being part of the OS. Second, it handles text well, but doesn’t do non-text files so well (it won’t, for example, index metadata in .jpg files, though it would be possible to write a plug-in for it that would do so if I was so-inclined).

What I really want is something like Spotlight which looks like it will combine full text indexing of files in combination with the ability to tag files with metadata and then do some really cool searches/application off that (imagine, for example, tagging a variety of files as being about “Project X” and then creating a virtual folder that will automatically collect all files labelled “Project X”. Add boolean operators in there, and things start to get very interesting.

I’m fortunate to have a dual G5 machine in my office, and while I prefer Windows XP just because I’m more familiar with it, there’s not much on one platform you can’t do on the other when it comes to the sort of production work I do (obviously I’d have to keep the PC around for the gaming).

I’m going to do a lot of testing with Tiger and if it lives up to its billing, grab a Mac mini to use initially as a networked box where I can throw all of my archived files for indexing and organizing, and then gradually switch to a Powerbook.

Yes, search is that important to me. And, frankly, at this point I doubt that MS is ever going to deliver WinFS in a form that’s going to do what Spotlight can and/or with the same ease of use.

British Prison Service Settles Complaint with Lesbian Guards

Great Britain’s Prison Service reached a settlement with nine lesbian prison guards who had accused the Prison Service of sexual discrimination.

Back in March 2002, the nine prison guards were transferred out of Holloway Prison after a five-month investigation claimed they were part of an organized group that was sexually harassing female staff at the prison.

At the time, the women were accused of harassing heterosexual female staff and trying to pressure them to become lesbians. Martin Narey, then director general of the Prison Service, said at the time,

The findings of the investigation report into bullying and intimidation of staff at Holloway have deeply concerned me. The findings reveal that sexual harassment, bullying and intimidation of staff have taken place, and have not, until now, been properly challenged. Behavior of this kind will not be tolerated in the prison service. Management should be tough. It should be robust. But it should never be intimidating. Bullying and sexual harassment are totally unacceptable. These staff who have been there some time effectively established themselves as an alternative management structure. They turned Holloway into an unhealthy place in which to be going to work.

Former Holloway staff member Terry White went further, telling The Observer,

They wanted the challenge of turning straight women. They would target the best looking and most feminine of the new recruits, especially the young ones from outside London.

The women responded with a complaint calling the allegations unfounded. In January, the Prison Service reached a settlement that explicitly stated the sexual harassment claims were in fact unfounded. The Prison Service also agreed to a six-figure settlement with the nine women and allowed them to apply for jobs at Holloway Prison in the future.

Sources:

Damages for lesbian prison guards. The BBC, January 28, 2005.

Lesbian Prison Officers Disciplined. The Observer, March 18, 2002.

Lesbian prison officers claim sexual discrimination. Dan Thomas, Personnel Today, January 13, 2005.

Blaming the Victim in a Domestic Violence Case

When is it okay to blame the victim in a case of domestic violence that leads to murder? When the victim is male.

Consider the case of Ruth Anne Willis and her ex-husband Russell Bailey. Willis and Bailey were divorced in 1996 and Willis was granted sole custody of their two daughters, and Bailey was granted visitation every other week and one evening per week. Ms. Willis later relocated her daughters in the Summer of 2001 over Bailey’s objections.

As divorce lawyer Larissa Fedak told the Dundas Star News, the family law process worked very well for Willis until recently when a dispute arose about where her youngest daughter would attend the Canadian equivalent of high school.

The daughter wanted to attend a private school near Bailey’s residence. Willis apparently was vehemently opposed to any sort of private education. After discussing with his daughter her desire to attend the private school, Bailey decided to file for sole custody of his younger daughter in order to allow her to attend the school. Apparently Willis believed that he was likely to succeed.

So on one of the weekends in which Bailey’s younger daughter was visiting him, Willis drove with her 15-month old baby to confront him. While Bailey was on the phone with a 911 operator, Willis put the baby down in its seat, picked up a semi-automatic gun, and shot Bailey 8 times, including once in the head while he was on the ground. Willis tried to continue shooting, but the gun failed to fire on the 9th shot.

Willis was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first 13 years of her life sentence. She is considering appealing the sentence.

Anyway, what caught my eye was this assessment from Sally Palmer, professor emeritus of McMaster University’s social work program, who told the Dundas Star News,

The seeds for the murder are in the violent relationship that started long before the custody issue, and it’s really impossible for us to know whether one parent contributed more to this than the other. But they were both guilty of putting their own needs before those of their two daughters by engaging in mutual violence.

Color me skeptical, but I can’t imagine Palmer making the ludicrous claim above if Bailey had murdered Willis rather than vice versa. It’s amazing how there’s no excuse for interpersonal violence . . . except, of course, when there is.

Source:

Dundas shooting highlights emotion of custody battles. Craig Campbell, Dundas Star News, January 28, 2005.

Oregon Researcher Finds Young Women More Likely to Engage in Interpersonal Aggression than Men

Research involving domestic violence has suggested that men and women tend to be equally likely to engage in acts of violence, though due to size and other differences women are more likely to sustain a serious injury from such violence. Deborah Capaldi, a researcher at the Oregon Social Learning Center wanted to study interpersonal violence in a controlled setting and was surprised by the results — young women in her study were four times more likely to initiate physical aggression such as slapping, poking and kicking.

Capaldi brought young couples in to her lab and gave them problem-solving exercises they had to work together to solve. Capaldi then recorded their behavior and analyzed who initiated physical aggression. She found that women aged 18 years old were four times more likely to initiate aggression than men. This effect gradually went away with age, until 26 when women initiated aggression only slightly more often then men.

Capaldi told The Register-Guard (Oregon),

Who were the primary initiators of such slaps, pokes and kicks? The women. . . . Women engage in aggression and we’re not doing them any favors by denying they have any part in it.

According to The Register-Guard, Capaldi was surprised at some of the acts of physical aggression they observed in a laboratory setting,

Capaldi said she and her colleagues expect some verbal arguments but were surprised by the extent of slaps, pokes and kicks as partners discussed such assigned topics as planning a party, where to go on a date, or how to deal with such issues as jealousy and lack of money.

If hit or poked, the men and women were about equally as likely to respond in kind. None of the physical aggression was severe, which researchers would have halted, Capaldi said.

Capaldi’s research is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Family Violence.

Finally, The Register-Guard interviewed for its story Margo Schaefer, who runs Womenspace which is a domestic violence shelter. Schaefer told The Register-Guard that there is a difference between men and women when it comes to violence,

The most common cause of injury for women between the ages of 15 and 44 is domestic violence — you don’t see that for men.

The claim that domestic violence is the number one cause of injury for women or some subset of women is one of those myths that simply won’t go away. In fact, the number one cause of injury for both men and women are accidental falls. Domestic violence doesn’t occupy the second spot either, with that being claimed by automobile accidents. In fact, only about 1 percent of women’s injury-related visits to the emergency rooms appear related to assault by a male intimate.

It doesn’t benefit anyone to either downplay or exaggerate the extent of domestic violence as Ms. Schaefer and other domestic violence advocates routinely do.

Source:

Fingering the aggressor. Jeff Wright, The Register-Guard, January 29, 2005.

Villanova University Backs Down on Honoring Baby Killer

Villanova University found itself the focus of controversy in February over its plans to honor a professor who killed her 6-month old baby and then committed suicide in jail in August 2003.

Mine Ener had been a professor of history at Villanova and director of the school’s Center for Arab American Studies. In 2003 she gave birth to a baby girl who suffered from Down’s syndrome. According to police, Ener suffered from postpartum depression, for which she received medication, and did not want her daughter to “go through life suffering.”

So she slashed the baby’s throat. Later, while in jail awaiting 2nd degree murder charges, she killed herself by reportedly placing a plastic bag over her head and suffocating herself to death.

In 2004, a Villanova committee decided to honor Ener by creating the Mine Ener Memorial Study Space in the school’s Falvey Library. The space was designed to “commemorate Ener’s life and work” according to Villanova’s history department. A plaque was to be erected in the library, but before it could be put up, the national media got hold of the story.

The main problem with the plaque was that the university and Ener’s colleagues seemed to be skipping over the whole episode of Ener murdering her infant as if it was all but irrelevant. For example, here’s the text of the invitation that Villanova sent out for the ceremony at which the plaque was to be unveiled,

Villanova students are cordially invited to attend a brief ceremony to dedicate the Mine Ener Memorial in the Study Lounge on the first floor of Falvey Library, to take place on Thursday, January 20, at 9:30 am in the Library. Refreshments will be served.

A popular teacher and widely published specialist on the history of the modern Middle East, Dr. Ener joined the History Department faculty in 1996, and was associate professor and Director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies from 2002 until her death in August 2003.

The Memorial has been funded by donations from her many friends, family and colleagues to the Mine Ener Memorial Fund Committee, consisting of Rev. Kail C. Ellis, O.S.A., Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences;Dr. Barbara Wall, Special Assistant to the President for Mission Effectiveness; Dr. Adele Lindenmeyr, Professor and Chair of History; and Dr. Seth Koven, Associate Professor of History. The funds have been used to purchase furnishings for the new student lounge in the Library.

Many of the people who knew Ener defended the plaque claiming that the idea was to honor and remember the Ener they knew and worked with, not the person whose mental faculties progressively slipped to the point where she could murder her infant. As Dom Giordano told Cybercast News Service, however, the circumstances surrounding the murder and suicide certainly make sympathy toward her and her family understandable, but celebrating such a person is simply unacceptable.

In fact, Villanova University itself has taken the same stance in the past. In 1997, a major donor to Villanvoa — John du Pont — was convicted of the 1996 murder of Olympic wrestler David Schultz. Like Ener, du Pont was found guilty but mentally ill (he suffered from schizophrenia).

Did Villanova prefer to remember DuPont the way he was before his mental problems drove him to kill? Not exactly. Instead it quickly stripped his surname off of the basketball court/gymnasium which until then had been named after DuPont in gratitude for all the money he gave them.

And they were right. Despite what DuPont may or may not have been like before his mental illness drove him to murder, killing another human being is not just something you can cast off to the side over refreshments at a ceremony honoring someone.

Villanova eventually caved, and removed the plaque honoring Ener.

Sources:

Catholic University honors popular teacher who killed her baby. Kathleen Rhodes, CNSNews.Com, January 27, 2005.

Villanova Removes Plaque. WPVI.Com, January 31, 2005.

Silent reminders in Villanova halls. John Grogan, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 18, 2005.

Mom Kills Infant Daughter With Down Syndrome, Then Kills Self. Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express, September 3, 2003.

John du Pont Convicted of Murder. Ginny and John Dover, Schizophrenia.Com, 1997.