Month: May 2006

Lucy Aikin In Multiple Syllable Words

For the past couple years I’ve subscribed to the Project Gutenberg RSS feed, mostly to watch for books related to subjects I’m interested in, but also because occasionally I’ll run across some very odd books and authors. Lucy Aikin certainly fits that bill.

According to Wikipedia, Aikin was a novelist born in the late 18th century who published a number of children’s books pseudonymously under the pen name Mary Godolphin, and then several apparently a novel and several court histories under he own name.

It’s those children’s books that I ran across on Project Gutenberg. Among other things she did under the Mary Godolphin pen name was take popular adult books, like Robinson Crusoe, and create children’s versions of them. But Godolphin went beyond simply abridging the books and editing them so they would be readable by a younger audience — no, she went whole hog and rewrote books Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss Family Robinson, and Pilgrim’s Progress using only words of one syllable.

So the opening paragraphs of Robinson Crusoe now reads like this,

I was born at York on the first of March in the sixth year of the reign of King Charles the First. From the time when I was quite a
young child, I had felt a great wish to spend my life at sea, and
as I grew, so did this taste grow more and more strong; till at
last I broke loose from my school and home, and found my way on
foot to Hull, where I soon got a place on board a ship.

When we had set sail but a few days, a squall of wind came on,
and on the fifth night we sprang a leak. All hands were sent to
the pumps, but we felt the ship groan in all her planks, and her
beams quake from stem to stern; so that it was soon quite clear
there was no hope for her, and that all we could do was to save
our lives.

And it goes on from there. What a peculiar task that must have been.

How’s That Marketing War Going for Creative?

Back in 2004, Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo said that not only was his company going to overtake the Apple’s popular iPod, but that it would do it by out-marketing Apple,

I’m planning to spend some serious money – I intend to out-market everyone. The MP3 war has started and I am the one who has declared war.

At the time Hoo said that, Apple had 42 percent of the market in portable MP3 players. After making MP3 players the company’s focus and spending upwards of $100 million in that marketing campaign where does Creative stand today?

Apple has about 75 to 80 percent of the MP3 player market. In the 3rd quarter of 2006, Apple sold about $1.7 billion worth of iPods. During the same period, Creative’s total revenues (which includes products other than MP3 players), was a mere $228 million and the company posted a $114 million loss.

Instead of focusing on marketing, Creative should have thought about building a better product — or perhaps less of them. At one point, Creative had upwards of 25 different models of MP3 players for sale. Moreover, most of them suffered from feature creep and were complicated as hell for consumers compared to the relatively simplified features and UI of the iPod.

Sources:

Creative declares ‘war’ on Apple’s iPod. Tony Smith, The Register, November 18, 2004.

Creative’s Loss Surges on MP3 Woes. Ed Oswald, BetaNews, May 3, 2006.

iPod sales drive Apple earnings. iPod sales drive Apple Earnings. Tom Krazit, CNET, April 19, 2006.

TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is a free, open source tool for creating encrypted hard drive partitions as well as virtual encrypted disks.

The cool thing about TrueCrypt is it offers tons of options that let you choose your level of paranoia. For example, for the really paranoid, TrueCrypt can create a hidden volume inside an encrypted volume, so even if you’re forced to give up the password to the encrypted volume, the hidden volume is still password protected and undetectable.

You’ve also got your choice of encryption algorithms including, AES-256, Blowfish, CAST5, Serpent, Triple DES, and Twofish.

My kind of software.

When Is a Dead Baby Not a Dead Baby? (When It’s Born Outside the United States)

Save The Children has released a report on infant mortality that, among other things, claims the United States has the second highest infant mortality rate among industrialized countries. The problem with this claim, however, is that the United States and other countries can’t quite agree on what counts as a dead baby. As such, infant mortality rates aren’t directly comparable between the United States and other countries.

The problem lies in a fact that, as the Save The Children report notes, most infants who die in the industrialized world die because they are either a) born too early or b) have a very low birth weight (and, of course, the earlier the delivery, the lower the birth weight tends to be).

In the United States, an infant born prematurely and weighing less than 400 grams will receive intensive medical interventions to try to keep it alive. If, as is likely, such expensive interventions fail, the event will be recorded as a) a live birth and b) a death.

In much of the rest of the world — including the industrialized world — such extreme medical interventions would never be attempted. Moreover, this would not be recorded as a live birth or as a subsequent death.

The Save The Children report simply relies on World Health Organization statistics, and the WHO itself recommends that births of less than 1,000 grams not be registered as live births in official records. Most countries follow this definition, whereas the United States doesn’t.

How big of a difference does this make? According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2003 infants weighing less than 1,000 grams accounted for 48.7 percent of infant deaths in the United States.

Assuming that rate holds for the 2004 U.S. statistics the Save the Children report covers, that results in a >1,000g infant mortality rate of 3.5 per 1,000 births for the United States. That rate puts the United States barely behind countries like Japan, Finland, and Sweden which clock in at 3 deaths per 1,000 births. Not bad, especially given the largely mono-racial nature of those societies as compared to the United States.

Of course, why should we expect advocacy groups or the media to bother with such arcane statistics when U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world, report says makes such a good headline?

Star Trek vs. Star Wars

Via Youtube, Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Only problem is that Star Trek is represented by the lameass TNG crew. Picard vs. Darth Vader? Give me a break — while Picard was having an existential crisis over the Prime Directive, Vader would chew him up and spit him out.

Not Kirk vs. Vader — that would be a real fight. The toupee vs. the helmet. Phasers vs. light sabers. And, of course, who picks up more hot chicks — Kirk or Han Solo.