Month: January 2005

The ‘Enterprise’ Death Watch

Via Slashdot, on-again, off-again rumors that Star Trek: Enterprise is being cancelled . . . or not. I’m not a big Enterprise fan, but it’d be sad if its the case, as some Slashdotters opine, that its poor ratings are because geeks are watching Stargate and Stargate: Atlantis on Sci-Fi instead. The last season of Stargate on Showtime was bad enough — the Sci-Fi channel episodes have been unwatchable. And Stargate: Atlantis just fills me with disgust. It’s not necessarily the worst sci-fi tv show ever, but it certainly tries very hard to be, with ever possible sci-fi cliche and ridiculous conceit thrown in the mix.

On the other hand, I have been impressed by Sci-Fi’s take on “Battlestar Galactica.” Very well plotted (reminds me a bit of “24” with the plot twists) and surprisingly good acting for a sci-fi series.

Source:

‘Enterprise’ Not Cancelled Yet. TrekToday.Com, January 18, 2005.

The Baby Or The Dog: Which Would You Save If You Could Only Save One?

If there were both a dog and a baby dying, and you could only save one, which would you choose?

People are always asking variations on this dilemma in the context of animal rights because for most people the answer is simple — our moral intuitions tell us that regardless of what sort of moral principles or system we subscribe to, the answer is clearly the baby.

Animal rights types tend to disagree. Tom Regan was famously asked if he were aboard a lifeboat and had to throw either a dog or a baby overboard, which one he’d choose. He answered, “(If) it were a retarded baby, and a bright dog, I’d save the dog.”

That was bad enough, but University of Texas-El Paso philosophy professor Steven Best apparently won’t even be bothered with concerns over whether or not the infant is retarded and/or the dog is especially bright.

According to the Daily Iowan, Best recently appeared at the University of Iowa and,

His statements generated a flurry of questions and criticism from the audience, which was made up of doctors, psychology students, animal-rights activists, and medical students. “If you saw a baby dying and a dog dying, which would you save?” one audience member asked.

“You need to be more specific with your question,” Best replied. If a house with his dog and someone he didn’t know was burning, he said he would save his dog, prompting another wave of gasps.

Best was talking at the University of Iowa — and I’m not making this up — as part of that university’s celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. According to the Daily Iowan,

Demanding the “total pursuit of animal emancipation,” he praised the front’s actions and compared the freeing of animals to the Boston Tea Party and the Underground Railroad. Best said no progress can come about without a large movement, even if it means violence, but called death threats toward researchers “problematic.” He contended that the Animal Liberation Front was not violent.

“The animal-rights movement is growing whether you like it or not – it’s unstoppable,” he said in his opening remarks at the IMU. His lecture, “The New Abolitionism: Civil Rights, Animal Liberation, and Moral Progress,” drew an audience of more than 100 as part of the UI Martin Luther King Human Rights Week.

“Real violence is what people do to animals,” he said, acknowledging that his definition differs from King’s. “Violence is not always right – yet it’s not always wrong, either.”

The sad thing is that the people in attendance were apparently shocked that such views are held by people in academia. In fact I’ve had a number of academics complain in e-mail that I’m invoking a straw man when I claim that it won’t be long before you have biologists and others at universities under siege from animal rights terrorists, while across campus animal rights philosophers and others will provide an intellectual defense that such violence is, in fact, peaceful protest.

Hopefully these folks will wake up before its too late.

Source:

Animal-rights speaker provokes disbelief. Julie Zare, The Daily Iowan, January 21, 2005.

Why Is Birth Control Use Declining in U.S. Women?

In late 2004, the National Center for Health Statistics released a report analyzing contraceptive usage in the United States from 1982-2002. The report discovered an interesting statistic — the percentage of adult women who had sex in the previous three months but did not use contraception rose from 5.4 percent in 1995 to 7.4 percent in 2002.

The increase was statistically significant and occurred only in adult women over the age of 20 — contraceptive use by teens was unchanged.

The Washington Post reported on the increase noting,

Because the survey is so large (more than 7,600 women) and known for its accuracy, “an increase of even two percentage points is worrisome,” said John S. Santelli, a professor of population and family health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Even as he cheered the news that a growing number of teenagers are using contraception, Santelli wondered whether doctors are neglecting women.

“Maybe we’re failing with women over 21,” Santelli said.

Much of the speculation about the increase centered around the possibility that women are finding the cost of birth control to be too expensive,

Jeffrey Jensen, director of the Women’s Health Research Unit at Oregon Health and Science University, said he regularly encounters patients who have trouble affording birth control, even if their private insurance covers it.

“It is absolutely unconscionable that women have a co-pay of $20 or $25 [month] for contraceptives and men are getting off scot-free,” Jensen said. Drug companies “have cut way back” on free samples and many women turn to less effective types of birth control because of cost, he said, “running a greater risk of pregnancy as a result.”

Not sure why Jensen feels the need to turn this into a men vs. women thing (men “get off scot-free”). The last time I checked, no major insurance company covers the primary male contraceptive — condoms.

Another speculation is that there was a decline in comprehensive sex education as the abstinence movement gained steam in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the Washington Post,

Several recent studies found that as the abstinence-until-marriage movement surged, there was a “considerable drop” in comprehensive sex education from 1988 to 2000, Santelli said. “Women in their twenties have probably gotten less effective information about contraception,” he said.

Or it could simply be a one-time outlier in the sample. After all, the difference between 1995 and 2002 women who had sex without using contraception was only 129 out of the 6,493 women 20 or over interviewed in the survey.

Sources:

More women opting against birth control, study finds. Ceci Connolly, Washington Post, January 4, 2005.

Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing, 2002. Joyce C. Abma, PhD.; Gladys M. Martinez, PhD.; William D. Mosher, PhD.; and Brittany S. Dawson, M.P.P., Division of Vital Statistics. December 2004.

Two Cool Things About Blue LED Inventor Winning $8.1 Million

The Register recently reported that the man who invented the blue LED, Shuji Nakamura, reached an $8.1 million settlement with his former employer, Japanese chemical company Nichia.

Its still a lot less than the $189 million Nakamura was initially awarded, but a decent deal considering.

Second, the headline the Register uses for this story is, “Blue LED boffin wins $8.1m from ex-employer.” I’d just like to add my long-held opinion that the word “boffin” to refer to “a scientist, especially one engaged in research” is simply the coolest word ever in the English language (well, at least the coolest clean word). It is a shame that the word is not used widely in other English-speaking countries besides Great Britain.

According to WordSmith.Org, the term is considered slang and its origins are partially obscured,

If a pocket protector could be considered an official accessory of a nerd, white lab coat, glasses and clipboard would be the equivalent for a boffin. The term first appeared as a moniker given by members of Britain’s Royal Air Force to scientists doing research on radar. But like most slang, the how and why of this are unknown.

Source:

Blue LED boffin wins $8.1m from ex-employer. Tony Smith, The Register, January 13, 2005.

Martin Schwimmer Is Right

It is kind of weird to see all sorts of blogs commenting on Martin Schwimmer’s anti-Bloglines rant while apparently purposely ignoring the salient point and the (potential) problem with Bloglines (emphasis added),

It was brought to my attention that a website named Bloglines was reproducing the Trademark Blog, surrounding it with its own frame, stripping the page of my contact info. It identifies itself as a news aggregator. It is not authorized to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does. In response to my inquiry to Blogline’s CEO as to whether they sell advertising, he indicated that they ‘are not currently running advertising.’ Nevertheless, the Blogline’s home page currently is soliciting ‘targeted advertisements.’ I would also assume that Blogline is accumulating commercially-useful mailing lists (its privacy policy appears to allow it to sell information). The privacy policy also has a provision entitled ‘mergers and acquisitions’ clearly allowing it to sell its lists.

The advertising issue gets to the heart of the matter — just how much altering of an RSS feed is an aggregator legally permitted to engage in? In an RSS feed like Schwimmer’s, which is licensed under a non-commercial Creative Commons license?

I would not want anyone taking my RSS feed(s) and inserting their own ads, or republishing a full article feed with their ads inserted, anymore than I appreciate the idiots at About.Com framing my content with their ads. If Bloglines is planning to insert ads in my RSS feed, I would definitely ask them to remove my feed from their service.

Finally, Russell Beattie is being a jerk as usual in this matter, but raises an important point — the folks at Creative Commons (which Schwimmer uses to license his RSS feed) needs to clarify exactly what is meant by non-commercial.

I have always interpreted non-commercial to mean that including advertising on such content was not permitted. Beattie disagrees, saying that this leads to a number of absurdities. Creative Commons needs to resolve this one way or the other.