Month: July 2004

The Developing World Needs More Condoms

At the XV International AIDS Conference in Thailand, Population Action International released a report claiming that developing nations are only receiving about 10 percent of the condoms needed to make a serious dent in the transmission of HIV.

In its 2004 update to its Condoms Count report, Population Action International estimated that the developing world needed 10 billion condoms in 2002, but aid agencies supplied only about 2.5 billion condoms.

It notes that in South Africa between 1998-2002, the number of donated condoms amounted to only 2.6 condoms per man per year (in contrast, more than 60 condoms are produced each year in the United States for each man).

PAI and others blame the United States in part for the Bush administration’s emphasis on abstinence as a solution to the AIDS crisis.

Source:

World falling short on condom provision. NewScientist.Com, July 12, 2004.

Counting Condoms: Donors Coming Up Short. Press Release, Population Action International, July 14, 2004.

India On Pace to Become Most Populous Country

For World Population Day this month, a number of news outlets noted that India is currently on target to surpass China as the most populous country in the world by 2035. But a lot of the reporting typified the sort of errors that the media have long made about population growth. As an example, consider The Scotsman’s take on population growth in China compared to India (emphasis added)

According to figures produced for the United Nations World Population Day, which falls today, China is currently the world’s most puoplous country with 1,289 million, followed by India with 1,069 million, and the US third a long way behind with 292 million.

The main reason is that India has never followed China’s Draconian “one child” policy. At the height of the birth control campaign by the Chinese communist government couples who stopped at one child were given preferences in education, healthcare, housing, and jobs. Couples who produced an “out-of-quote” child could be fined or lose access to education or other privileges.

Though the policy has been softened, the impact of the period when it was applied most harshly is now being felt.

“Between the 1960s and the 1980s, China experienced one of the most rapid declines ever recorded in a national population. In just 15 years, the number of children a woman would expect to have fell from about six to just over two,” says Professor Nancy E. Riley, an expert on population and social change in China at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine.

As a democracy India has not been able or willing to use coercion, though it has tried persuasion. A study called India Project by a team of experts from the London School of Economics, led by Professor Tim Dyson, estimates that on current trends India’s population will touch 1.4 billion by 2026, 1.5 billion by 2036 and could approach 1.6 billion by 2051.

It’s truly amazing that a newspaper can produce such pathetic reporting.

First, the reporter emphasizes that China’s total fertility rate has fallen, supposedly due to coercion there, and gives the impression that India has not see comparable gains because it is unwilling to adopt a one-child policy. But in the same period, without any coercion, India’s total fertility rate fell 42 percent. The current rate is 3.1 and falling. That was a very impressive feat, but one you would never know about from reading The Scotsman.

Second, The Scotsman attributes the large decline in fertility from the 1960s to the 1980s to the one-child policy. But since the one-child policy wasn’t instituted until 1979, it’s ridiculous to attribute all of the drop to the one-child efforts. In fact, the bulk of the large drop in fertility in China occurred before the one-child policy was instituted. The TFR in China fell from 6 in 1970 to 2.8 in 1979, all without the draconian policies that The Scotsman asserts is singularly responsible for the decline.

Third, The Scotsman sets up a classic false dichotomy that just won’t go away. In this world, countries have only two choices — dictatorship and declines in population growth or democracy and increases in population growth. But the countries with the lowest total fertility rates in the world are democracies — countries like Italy and Spain.

Reporters might actually want to look at the data instead of simply inserting every population story into the same erroneous molds.

Source:

India to overtake China as most populous nation. Ian Mather, The Scotsman, July 11, 2004.

Salon.Com’s Low Ethical Standards

Salon.Com displays an inexcusable ethics lapse in this story about Ambassador Joe Wilson. Wilson’s taken a beating the past few days after the 9/11 Commission’s report on intelligence failings suggests that Wilson lied on a number of key points about his mission to Niger to investigate whether or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from that country.

The Salon.Com article basically defends Wilson, saying the attacks on him are part of choreographed Republican campaign (got that — if Wilson lies, those lies are made public, and then a bunch of conservatives point it out, that’s a new vast right wing conspiracy). The article certainly lives up to Salon’s usual standards, but it also represents an inexcusable ethical lapse on the part of Salon.Com.

Nowhere in the article defending Wilson is it disclosed that Salon.Com has a business relationship with Wilson. He is the featured speaker at a Salon’s “1st seminar cruise” scheduled for September 4-11. It’s just inconceivable that no one at Salon.Com thinks that such an obvious conflict of interest doesn’t need to be disclosed in the article itself (well, okay, this is Salon.Com after all, so no I guess it’s not inconceivable, but it certainly marks a new low).

Oz for a Day in Second Life

The other day Boing! Boing! pointed to these awesome screenshots of the results of numerous Second Life players turning a private island in the game into a Wizard of Oz theme park for a few days. Awesome.

I keep trying to convince my wife that I need my own private Second Life island (“as if I ever see you now just with the blogging” she yells from the living room).

The Sims 2 Fans: We Want Our DRM

On September 17, Electronic Arts will finally release The Sims 2. I’m going to buy a new desktop later this month specifically so I can run it when it comes out (my laptop doesn’t have the requisite 3D hardware needed to run the game).

One of the things that made The Sims such a great game was all of the custom content that users made and uploaded to fan sites. Getting the custom content to work could be tricky in some cases, though, so Maxis really overhauled the in-game method for downloading and managing custom content. EA itself will host a Showcase area where users can upload and download custom content for the game. In the opinion of some custom content creators, however, Maxis and EA have gone too far and made it too easy to get content in and out of The Sims 2.

This thread at The Sims Resource is one long rant by those who want to create custom content for the game that boils down to this — Maxis didn’t build any sort of digital rights management into the game, so anybody can steal or take credit for someone else’s creation rather easily. Just as with any other moddable game out there.

The funniest examples are those who are upset at the idea that people might take credit for their rip-off of copyrighted characters. One person, for examples, offers up the horrific example of someone stealing a popular Gollum character skin and falsely taking credit for it. The poster downloads the skin and uploads it to show just how easy such “theft” is using EA’s Showcase (and no one in the thread mentions the obvious hypocrisy in that particular worry.)

Others propose the sort of bizarre DRM schemes that only the RIAA could love. So, for example, a couple of people float copyright flag suggestions where each uploaded file would have a flag that creators could set that would allow the creation to be downloaded but not uploaded again. Right, because the same folks who will have cracks for the game CD the day The Sims 2 is released will find writing utilities to reset those flags completely beyond their ability. Such a system would be hacked and cracked by the end of the first week of release.

There are a number of variants and alternatives to that system that all involve programs checking and storing copyright metadata, all of which would be hacked ridiculously quickly and simply interfere with legitimate uses of the program.

The change has real world financial consequences. One of the reasons that there is so much carping is that a number of fan sites planned to pay for bandwidth charges, etc., by charging visitors for access to exclusive content for The Sims 2 that could only be downloaded from that site. There are a number of excellent sites like Sim Freaks that use this model for The Sims.

But with the Showcase area and now DRM for custom content files, someone could simply download files from sites like that and instantaneously upload them to the EA Showcase area. I doubt EA is going to want to do any serious policing of the Showcase and, if it is smart, will included an EULA that basically grants the company at the least nonexclusive rights to all custom content to avoid having to worry about this.

Of course the EULA for the building tools is quite clear that they are offered for producing non-commercial mods, so these sites don’t really have much to complain about. Frankly, though, don’t think they have much to worry about. If I’m serious enough about the game to be willing to track down sites like Sim Freaks, I’m going to be willing to pay to have all of that excellent content in one place — there is, after all, a huge opportunity cost to wading through the large numbers of repetitive and uninteresting materials that will inevitably be posted by newbies and others in EA’s official Showcase area.

One thing that the thread didn’t mention but is closely related is how EA is going to react to copyright-infringing materials being posted on the Showcase. I have on my hard drive, for example, dozens of skins for The Sims that are various characters from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Want a Season 3 Willow and a Season 7 Anya? I’ve got ’em. Is EA going to look the other way at posting those sorts of skins and custom content (especially since some companies, especially comic book companies, have of late been cracking down on unlicensed custom content for computer games, apparently out of ridiculous fears that it dilutes the value of their licensed games). With 17,000+ Sims uploaded to the Showcase area a full two months before the game’s scheduled release, they’re going to have a nice headache on their hands with these sorts of issues.

Kalamazoo Gazette Rewrites Election Rescheduling Controversy

My hometown paper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, has an editorial today about the controversy over whether or not the Nov. 2 election should be rescheduled if there is a major terrorist attack immediately before the election. But the editorial makes no sense since it is based on a ridiculous misunderstanding and rewriting of the controversy.

In the Gazette’s version, “[Homeland Security Secretary Tom] Ridge had asked DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, about whether it is possible to change the election date in the event of a national emergency. Soaries replied that no federal agencies has the authority to postpone an election. He asked Ridge to ask Congress to give the Election Assistance Committee the power to do so.”

This is factually incorrect on almost every point. As Newsweek, which broke the story, and other news outlets reported, the request for an opinion about who had the authority to postpone an election originated with Soaries who sent letters to Ridge and Condoleeza Rice.

Neither Rice nor Ridge ever responded to those letters and they were apparently ignored. As Soaries complained to the Associated Press this week, “I am still awaiting their response. Thus far we have not begun any meaningful discussion.”

So, contrary to the Gazette’s assertions, Ridge and other Homeland Security officials apparently haven’t been seriously looking at the example in Spain and contemplating how they would react if there was a major attack immediately before the election.

Of course, if there is a major attack say in the heart of New York late on November 1st, you can bet that papers across the country the next day will be demanding to know why the administration didn’t have extensive contingency plans in place to handle the inevitable disruption to the election.