Month: July 2004

The Register reports that Lacie will being selling a 1.6 TB firewire drive this summer retailing for $2,199. It looks like this will be four 400gb drives in a single enclosure that will mount as a single drive. I’ll have to add that to my Christmas wish list.

The National Education Association released a study this month suggesting that the number of Americans who read fiction, poetry or drama has declined to in recent years, especially among younger Americans. A lot of news stories on the study, however, insist on spinning this to mean a general decline in all reading, leading to hilarious nonsense like this from the Christian Science Monitor,

As with any good detective novels, the usual suspects are here — but surprises are, too. As websites and talk radio proliferate, reading is no longer the only way, or even the primary one, of getting information.

Yeah, if only the Internet was dominated by text rather than being exclusively a video/audio media, then maybe more people would be reading.

LOL.

I have a hypothesis, by the way, on the literature finding. Personally, I read far fewer novels than I did a decade ago. Why? Because story telling can be replicated in large part by video/audio media whereas text is (and will likely remain) still superior to video/audio for nonfiction. Plus I can tell when a movie or TV show is crap pretty quickly, whereas you might have to read several hundred pages before learning the novel you’re reading is crap.

(Not to mention the fact that the last 3 or 4 novels I’ve read were all on my PDA, and the only one that wasn’t was a tie-in novel to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Somehow I don’t think either of those count in the NEA’s book).

Source:

New on the endangered species list: the bookworm. Christina McCarroll, The Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2004.

Investment banker Morgan Stanley this week reached a settlement with hundreds of women who claimed they had been sexually harassed and denied raises and promotions at the company. Morgan Stanley agreed to pay the women $54 million in total.

Since most Wall Street firms require employees to sign contracts requiring that they use arbitrators to settle legal disputes, Morgan Stanley’s trial would have been the first such trial of a brokerage firm had it proceeded.

Forty million dollars of the settlement will go directly to the 340 complainants, while $14 million will be earmarked for anti-discrimination training at the investment firm.

Morgan Stanley settles sex case. The BBC, July 12, 2004.

The Associated Press reports that New Jersey governor James McGreevey this month signed a bill requiring private health insurance companies pay for mammograms for covered women under 40 who have family histories of breast cancer.

Most health insurers already pay at least partially for mammograms, but some do not citing the ongoing medical debate about the effectiveness of mammograms in screening for breast cancer. With New Jersey’s change, 47 states now require insurance companies to pay for screening of at least some women under 40.

Regardless, mandates like this are simply a backdoor way of raising insurance rates which helps put basic access to health insurance further out of reach. Women and/or their employers should be free to negotiate whatever terms they like with health insurance companies free of such state-sponsored micromanagement.

Source:

NJ law: Insurance must cover of mammograms for women under 40 with history of breast cancer. Associated Press, July 8, 2004.

A 100-year-old British man was recently sentenced to just 12 months “community rehabilitation” after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of his 87-year-old wife.

Bernard Heginbotham, 100, confessed to slitting the throat of his wife Ida, 87, on April 1 of this year. Ida was living in a nursing home due to her poor health and was scheduled to be moved to a different nursing home.

Bernard apparently believed that his wife would not receive proper care at the new nursing home and killed her in what he believed was an act of mercy. The BBC quoted prosecutor Hilary Banks telling the court that,

He [Bernard] admitted that he went to the home with a weapon and injured his wife which resulted in her death. He didn’t want his wife to be moved again and didn’t think she was going to receive the care he wanted her to have.

In sentencing Bernard to only 12 months community rehabilitation, the judge in the case said,

Bernard Heginbotham, the killing of your wife, to whom you had been married joyously for some 67 years, followed by your attempt to take your own life, was an act of desperation. It was carried out in an effort to end her suffering while you were under intolerable pressure. It was in truth an act of love and I have no doubt you suffered a medical disorder at the time and the responsibility which you bear is substantially reduced.

Sources:

Cutting Wife’s Throat Was ‘An Act Of Love’. Patrick Mulchrone, Daily Mirror, July 9, 2004.

Wife killer, 100, spared prison. BBC, July 8, 2004.

Resource Shelf is an information junkie’s dream. Compiled by librarian Gary Price, Resource Shelf has a lot of cool info-heavy links. Today, for example, I learned that GPOAccess.Gov now has the full text of many Congressional hearings going back to the 105th Congress. Gotta download ’em all.