Month: July 2004

Damned Library Patron

The Salt Lake Tribune reports on a very odd case of a still-unidentified library patron performing an interesting case of mutiliation.

First, the patron is for some reason targeting novels based on “Murder, She Wrote.” Second, the mutilation involves crossing out all of the “hell” and “damn” words and replacing them with “heck” and “darn.”

The patron, if caught, could face up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Damn!

Source:

Library user cutting ‘bad’ words from popular book series. Lori Buttars, The Salt Lake Tribune, July 21, 2004.

Attendant at The National Gallery Stops Woman from Breastfeeding

Earlier this month it was a Texas mall that was in trouble after a guard asked a woman to take her infant into the bathroom if she wanted to breastfeed. A few days later, however, Great Britain’s The National Gallery was hit with a similar controversy after an attendant asked a woman breastfeeding her 11-month-old daughter to move to what the BBC describes as a “mother-and-baby room” if she wanted to continue breastfeeding her daughter.

Of course, as pro-breast feeding advocates were quick to point out, this was a bit odd considering that many of the paintings in The National Gallery depict infants breastfeeding. The woman asked to leave, Catherine Gulati, was quoted by the BBC as noting that,

I thought it was ironic because in another room there was a picture of a bare breast with milk squirting out of it called the Milky Way.

As in the Texas mall incident, The National Gallery blamed the incident on an overzealous attendant and said that breastfeeding is allowed anywhere in the gallery.

Source:

Gallery regrets breastfeeding ban. The BBC, July 9, 2004.

China Offers Aid to Parents of Girls In Efforts to Stem Sex Imbalance

One of the major side effects of China’s one-child policy has been the widespread use of sex-selective abortions by couples who want to have male children. As a result, China has one of the most unbalanced sex ratios in the world and in the next couple decades could wind up with tens of millions more adult males than adult females of marrying age.

In an effort to rein in that problem, Knight Ridder reports that China is offering financial aid and support to families who have one or more daughters. Knight Ridder quotes Fujian province official Bai Pian as saying of the incentive plan,

According to tradition, most parents after having two daughters still want to have a boy. But the government wants them to stop. So that’s why it started the ‘Caring for Girls’ action plan.

The plan offers free education all the way through college for girls in such families as well as direct support, such as financial aid to help build a house or seed money to start a business.

Source:

China encouraging parents of girls. Tim Johnson, Knight Ridder Newspapers, July 8, 2004.

Developing World Going Mobile

Mobile telephone services continues to route around damaged state-run landline systems in the developing world.

In India, only 7 percent of the population has a telephone. But that has increased from 1 percent compared to a decade ago, thanks in large measure to cellular service that is cheaper and easier to obtain than India’s state-run landline system.

The BBC reports that usage costs for mobile phones in India hovers at around 1 cent a minute, making it much more affordable than traditional telephone services, and that as many as 1.5 million Indians sign up for mobile phone service every month.

Meanwhile the BBC reports that Africa has the world’s fastest growing mobile phone market, expanding at an annual rate of 65 percent. About 6 percent of people in Africa use mobile phones and that number is expected to expand to as much as 20 percent by the end of the decade.

Source:

A mobile vision for Africa. The BBC, July 5, 2004.

Mobiles outstrip India landlines. The BBC, July 2, 2004.

Incredibly Stupid Software Design Decisions #63

Extensis‘ web site says “We call it digital asset managment.” Funny, I call it dumbass design.

I’m really sick of using Adobe’s latest dumbed down version of Photoshop Album, so I downloaded Extensis Portfolio 7 to evaluate it. The program is great — it has a much better interface for cataloging photographs (which is what I’d be using it for mostly) and I like the ability to embed keyword and other metadata in my digital pictures, which is one of the major features missing from Photoshop Album.

But along with all this power, Extensis Portfolio has one of the dumbest “features” I’ve ever seen. Like many other such programs, you can double click on a picture (or video or whatever) to edit it. But you can’t tell Portfolio to open pictures in Photoshop or whatever editor you’d prefer to use. The manual actually claims that the software guesses which program it should open, though on my machine it appears to simply open a photo in the default application I’ve set for viewing such files (which is not an editing program).

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t believe a $200 program can’t include a simple preference to let me choose which program I’d like to use to edit JPEG files when I double-click on them.

Cheap Anti-AIDS Drugs Hit Asia — Is That a Problem?

The New York Times recently reported on an odd problem — that there are too many companies making too many generic anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV.

Typically, the complaint has been that anti-retroviral drugs made by pharmaceutical companies are too expensive for the developing world, and that what is needed are cheaper, generic drugs. But a report by Treat Asia finds that there are so many companies and drugs that Asia is at risk of rapidly creating drug-resistant versions of HIV.

According to the report, there are at least 27 companies in Asia manufacturing anti-HIV drugs, only three of which have met the World Health Organization’s quality standards.

In addition, throughout Asia there are few doctors to treat AIDS patients, so those who can afford the anti-retrovirals often obtain the drugs over-the-counter and self-medicate.

Kevin Robert Frost of Treat Asia told The New York Times,

Our point is if there is proliferation of the generic drugs, as many are calling for, where is the infrastructure to deliver them? In Asia, the availability of drugs is far outstripping the capacity to deliver them.

Source:

AIDS drugs’ fast rise in Asia risks resistant strains. Lawrence Altman, The New York Times, July 8, 2004.