Month: January 2005

What Is Conversant?

Seth Dillingham recently created a nice, long summary in outline form to answer the question he hears from clients — What Is Conversant? Its pretty exhaustive, and I don’t really have anything to add to the specifics.

To Seth, Conversant is groupware. To me its a sophisticated toolbox for categorizing, arranging, ordering and indexing information that really is realtively easy to use.

There are some very nice, very easy-to-use blogging software platforms out there like Movable Type. They’re very good and very powerful for what they do, but its difficult to do things outside the blogging model with them.

On the other hand, there are extremely powerful but also extremely difficult-to-use (at least for non-experts) content mangament systems like Mambo. I don’t have time to take a course in PHP to administer my web site.

Conversant lives in the happy middle with all the power of a system like Mambo but with a much shorter learning curve. If you need a site that goes beyond the blogging basics, but don’t want to deal with learning programming or hiring someone to install and code the specifics (as I would have to do if I were going with something like Mambo), Conversant hits the sweet spot in the power vs. convenience tradeoffs.

Should A Paternity Test Require the Mother’s Permission?

In a position that defies all common sense, the ruling Social Democrats in Germany want to make it illegal for men, including married men, to carry out a paternity test on a child without the written consent of the mother. Under the proposal, the man and the lab that conducted the test would both be liable for criminal prosecution.

The German Federal Court of Justice earlier this month ruled that paternity tests carried out in secret are inadmissible in a lawsuit, strengthening the case of the SDP to ban such paternity tests outright.

Deutsche Welle quoted Dr. Karin Jackel puncturing the idiocy in this position,

It cannot be that, as a woman, I have the right to make my husband pay to support a child that is not his own, or to deny children the right to know who their real father is. Men are, in every respect, held responsible for their children under our laws, which is why they have the right to know who their children are.

Wolfgang Zeitlmann of the Christian Social Union told Agence-France Presse in January,

A man must be able to find out whether he is the father or not. Making this right dependent on the agreement of the woman is not fair.

And, make no mistake, the express legislation of this goal is to prevent men from carrying out paternity tests without having to go through the courts. German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries originally proposed this legislation in 2003, complaining that men were seeking secret paternity tests and then divorcing their wives when they discovered that they were not, in fact, the father of the child they had thought was their’s. It being better, presumably, for German marriages to rest on a foundation of lies and deceit.

Zypries said at that time,

Secret paternity tests violate the rights of the child and the mother. They also violate data protection laws.

Sources:

Proposal to ban secret paternity tests divides German government. Agence-France Presse, January 7, 2005.

Who’s Your Daddy?. Deutsche Welle, September 12, 2004.

Father’s rights suffer setback. Deutsche Welle, January 13, 2005.

Are Computers Ruining Chess?

The New York Times had a story earlier this month about the problems faced by high level players in the computer age. This story wasn’t about computers beating humans at chess, however, but rather about whether or not lesser human players are obtaining unfair advantages because of the proliferation of databases of chess games that make it possible to study their play with computers and occasionally beat them by finding obscure flaws in their game.

The Times opens with the case of international chess master Jay Bonin. According to the Times,

Mr. Bonin is more active than most elite players, but he is doing what most serious players have long thought is necessary: playing frequently to stay in peak form. Now, however, because of the widespread availability of databases of games and the growing strength of chess software, such activity may actually be making it easier to beat him.

Mr. Bonin said that he recently lost a tournament game to a weaker player who had not competed in years, but who had sprung a surprise move on him in one of Mr. Bonin’s favorite openings.

“The line he played reeked of preparation,” he said.

This is obviously not cheating, but quite a few people including Gary Kasparov and international chess master Gregory Shahade tell the New York Times they think it has made chess openings less fun and creative. As The Times reports,

Before people started using databases, a player who came up with a new move in an opening might be able to use it several times before enough people found out about it to start preparing for it. Now innovations are known almost as soon as they are played. “The profit maybe is very small,” Mr. Kasparov said. “You can only use it one game.”

Of course, as The Times points out, it was in large part due to the urging/suggestion of Kasparov that the preeminent chess database, Chessbase, added sophisticated searching so people can easily find all the games where Kasparov or any other players ends up in some specific position and then analyze how the player reacts, making preparation that much easier.

There are some contrarians. Estonian grandmaster Jaan Ehlvest contends that rather than allowing weak players to beat stronger players, the major effect of computers has been to accelerate the speed at which players realize their potential. According to The Times,

Mr. Ehlvest added that in any case he did not believe that computers made people better than they otherwise would be. Instead, they can help them reach their potential sooner.

“Now you see 14-year-old grandmasters because they accumulate information much faster than in my day,” he said.

Source:

Chess players give ‘check’ a new meaning. Dylan Loeb McClain, The New York Times, January 13, 2005.

Dave Winer, Derek Powazek, and Search

This post in combination with this post certainly should win Dave Winer some sort of award. I’m thinking, though, that it would be the Internet equivalent of the razzies.

Derek Powazek mentioned on his weblog that in 2000 Winer referred to him as “brain dead.” Winer took umbrage at that on Scripting.Com, saying,

Anyway, I’d love to see the pointer to where I supposedly said he was brain-dead. If I said it, I apologize, that would be a really mean thing to say, and obviously not true. On the other hand, I probably said his design was brain-dead, which is an opinion, a way of saying it could stand a lot of improvement. I’ve done tons of brain-dead design myself, and lived to tell the story. And here are all the citations for Powazek on this blog. You can see there’s a good mix of praise and criticism.

One of the brain dead things Dave does, IMO, is rely on Google for searching his own weblog. So the citations link above uses Google to provide a list of all the blog posts he’s done which mention Powazek.

The kicker is that the “brain dead” comment occurred on Scripting.Com right here, but because of the way he’s configured the Google search’s output, it doesn’t show up unless you actually visit the archive page. In fact, even if you search for the exact text, “brain damaged” (not brain dead — Winer apparently edited the post), the post still doesn’t show up in the results.

And for this, Winer (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) thinks he deserves an award,

Anyway, I don’t get awards, but I wish I did. Given a chance I would certainly nominate this site for best technology in a weblog, if only for the cool Google-powered search, illustrated above in the post about Powazek. Did you know it uses the Google API in conjunction with the local content database to only give you the bits you’re looking for. It’s a big thing, and as far as I know, of all the millions of weblogs they’re tracking at Technorati (thanks to weblogs.com, by the way), this is the only one that has such a cool search command.

Yeah, it really helped him drill down to “only give you the bits you’re looking for” in this case. There’s a reason millions of weblogs aren’t using “such a cool search command.”

And still, Winer will never understand why people treat him with such hostility when he greets them with sentences like, “Your site [Powazek’s] is the most brain-damaged weblog I’ve ever seen.”

Gee, it’s so surprising that negative bickering sucks up all the energy among folks concentrating on syndication.

Do Breast Implants Increase Risk of Suicide — Or Are Suicidal Women More Likely to Choose Breast Augmentation?

U.S. News reported this month on a Danish study designed to examine the effect of breast implants for cosmetic suicides on suicide rates.

The researchers studied the records of more than 10,000 women — 2,788 who had cosmetic breast implants; 7,071 who had breast reductions; and 1,736 who had cosmetic surgery other than breast implants.

Of the 2,788 women who had implant surgery, 14 had committed suicide. Of those, half had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems before having implant surgery. In comparison, only a quarter of the women who had breast reduction surgery and committed suicide had a history of being hospitalized for psychiatric problems. According to U.S. News and World Report,

This supports the hypothesis that breast implants don’t drive women to commit suicide but that women who choose to have breast implants may be more likely than the average woman to have underlying psychiatric problems, the authors write.

Unfortunately, U.S. News and World Report doesn’t put that small number of suicides in context. The suicide rate of women in Denmark is only about 11 per 100,000. The suicide rate among the women with breast implants in this study was a whopping 502 per 100,000. So even the rate of suicide among women who had not been previously hospitalized was still an incredibly high 251 per 100,000 — over 22 times the overall level of female suicide in Denmark. It is possible, of course, that the women who had not been previously hospitalized nonetheless had a higher rate of emotional/psychological problems, though it would be impossible to say one way or another with this study’s methodology.

The study also found an overall much higher death rate among women who had breast implant surgery, largely because those women were far more likely to be smokers.

Source:

Breast implants: Are women who have plastic surgery more likely to commit suicide? Helen Fields, U.S. News and World Report, January 12, 2005.

Australian Politicians: Put Your Sperm Where Your Legislation Is

I recently mentioned that Great Britain will soon do away with anonymity for sperm and egg donors — fertility clinics in the UK will soon be required to reveal the names of donors to children once they turn 18. This has led to dire predictions of a steep fall in donors.

Australia passed a similar law in 1998 and has seen those predictions come true. Now a Melbourne fertility clinic has written to all male politicians under the age of 45 asking them to put their sperm where their legislation is and serve as donors.

The Monash IVF clinic reports that whereas in 1998 it had about 20 donors a year, in 2004 it could only round up five such donors. So the clinic’s medical director, Gab Kovacs, wrote a letter to male politicians in Victoria saying,

We hope that if some of the leading role models within our community become donors, others may follow suit.

Kovacs says he was inspired by recent drives to improve organ donation in Australia.

Apparently this isn’t the first clinic to think outside the box to obtain sperm donors. According to the BBC, in December an Australian fertility clinic offered Canadian students a free two-week vacation in Australia if they’d agree to be sperm donors.

Source:

Australian MPs’ sperm in demand. The BBC, January 13, 2005.