Month: December 2000

Okay, now I think I’ve heard of everything. Typically when student newspapers gets stolen its done by disgruntled students who are angry at the paper or don’t want people reading one story or another, but Editor & Publisher reports that Albright College officials seized copies of the student newspaper, apparently to keep visiting parents from reading a reprinted story about Albright College’s poor rankings in a Barron’s survey.

The seizure of the papers is insane for one very important reason — it actually increases any future liability of the school for any lawsuits brought by the paper. The college claims it was concerned the newspaper was violating copyright laws, but in fact the newspaper had permission to reprint the story about the Barron’s profile. The problem is that the college is setting a precedent that it is the final arbiter of content in the paper, which means if someone ever decides to sue the paper for defamation or whatever, they’ll have a strong case for going after the college’s deep pockets as well.

Most colleges and universities set up student newspapers as semi-autonomous units with independent boards of directors specifically in order to avoid such liability. Albright might want to think about such an arrangement.

According to The BBC what was believed to have been one of the best examples of Icthyosaurus turned out instead to be a fake.

The forgery, which was done during the Victorian period, was discovered when curators decided to clean the skeleton and realized the fossil was, in fact, a combination of bones from two separate animals along with bones made out of plaster to make it appear as a perfect Icthyosaurus specimen (insert cliche here about how things that seem to good to be true usually are).

At the end of October an almost surreal story about Africa’s obvious lack of presence on the Internet made the rounds of the usual news agencies. What were they thinking?

Okay, here are the bottom line statistics. Although 10 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, less than 1 percent of the world’s Internet users are Africans, and 40 percent of those live in South Africa.

Don’t worry, though, the usual suspects have a solution to this “problem.” The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are prepared to ride to the rescue and make sure Africans have Internet access. Given how unsuccessful the World Bank and IMF have been at putting the economies of developing world on a solid foundation, by the time they get finished with Internet access, Africans will be lucky to have even spotty telephone service.

The Associated Press captured the surrealist of the World Bank and IMF devoting itself to getting Africans on the Internet when it actually included this sentence in the lead paragraph of a story on the report: “…A million South Africans have access to the Web, but practically nobody does in war-racked Congo.” What a surprise! The next thing you know, we’ll learn that people in war-torn Ethiopia and Eritrea also have almost no Internet access.

The bottom line is that where civil society has taken hold in Africa, and democracy and free speech have replaced dictatorial rule and indiscriminate power, telecommunications services have taken off. Ghana is well on its way to being a wired country, for example, because it privatized its telephone services in 1994, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo is likely to remain off the Internet for the foreseeable future as its ongoing decade-long civil war will make building up a telecommunications infrastructure all but impossible.

The focus on Internet access in Africa seems to be the worst sort of case of offering Western technologies as the solution to the continent’s problems.

Sources:

Report shows African Internet use disparity. The Associated Press, October 30, 2000.

I knew some women experienced morning sickness while pregnant, but nothing prepared me for what my wife had to go through while pregnant with our daughter. Every morning for literally six months was a routine of vomiting that was so severe at one point that her doctor considered having her hospitalized. The sad thing was a perfectly save medication could likely have prevented her vomiting, but trial lawyers had driven it off the U.S. market in the 1980s.

The drug was benedictin and it had been widely prescribed to pregnant women since the mid-1950s as an anti-nausea agent. In the 1970s, however, some women began to complain that the drug had caused or contributed to their children’s birth defects and sued. By 1983, the manufacturer of the drug, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, threw in the towel on the drug and said the litigation over the birth defects was simply too costly to justify continued production of the drug. No longer would women with morning sickness have access to the drug in the United States.

Ironically, that was about the time when numerous studies demonstrated what a close look at the evidence hinted in the 1970s — benedictin was completely safe. About three percent of all infants born in the United States suffer from birth defects, and the children of women who took benedictin had the same rate of birth defects as those born to women who didn’t take the drug. Even teh Food and Drug Administration exonerated the drug and declared it safe.

But it was too late. Nobody was willing to take on manufacturing the drug and risking the inevitable lawsuits over birth defects. Now, though the drug seems to be making something of a comeback thanks to a Canadian company, Duchesnay Inc., which is seeking FDA approval to sell a generic version of benedictin. Duchesnay’s diclectin has been available in Canada since 1975.

Hopefully women in America will soon have the choice to use the same drug that women in Canada and the rest of the world have been using safely for the past couple decades.

Source:

Once maligned morning sickness drug prepares for comeback. The Associated Press, October 10, 2000.