Author: Brian Carnell

Why Isn’t War-Ravaged Congo on the Internet?

At the end of October an almost surreal story about Africa’s obvious lack of presence on the Internet made the rounds of the usual news agencies. What were they thinking?

Okay, here are the bottom line statistics. Although 10 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, less than 1 percent of the world’s Internet users are Africans, and 40 percent of those live in South Africa.

Don’t worry, though, the usual suspects have a solution to this “problem.” The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are prepared to ride to the rescue and make sure Africans have Internet access. Given how unsuccessful the World Bank and IMF have been at putting the economies of developing world on a solid foundation, by the time they get finished with Internet access, Africans will be lucky to have even spotty telephone service.

The Associated Press captured the surrealist of the World Bank and IMF devoting itself to getting Africans on the Internet when it actually included this sentence in the lead paragraph of a story on the report: “…A million South Africans have access to the Web, but practically nobody does in war-racked Congo.” What a surprise! The next thing you know, we’ll learn that people in war-torn Ethiopia and Eritrea also have almost no Internet access.

The bottom line is that where civil society has taken hold in Africa, and democracy and free speech have replaced dictatorial rule and indiscriminate power, telecommunications services have taken off. Ghana is well on its way to being a wired country, for example, because it privatized its telephone services in 1994, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo is likely to remain off the Internet for the foreseeable future as its ongoing decade-long civil war will make building up a telecommunications infrastructure all but impossible.

The focus on Internet access in Africa seems to be the worst sort of case of offering Western technologies as the solution to the continent’s problems.

Sources:

Report shows African Internet use disparity. The Associated Press, October 30, 2000.

Scientists Busy Decoding the Fugu Genome

Animal rights activists like to claim that non-humans are simply too different to serve as models for human beings, but scientists at the Energy Department’s Joint Genome Institute hope that decoding the genome of the fugu, a poisonous fish considered a delicacy in Japan, will yield important clues about how human genes work.

The JGI hopes to have the a preliminary version of the fugu genome finished by spring of 2001. Why the fugu?

“The fugu has a small and compact genome, on the order of a tenth the size of the human genome, and yet whenever researchers have gone into the fugu and looked for human genes, by and large they’ve found them,” Trever Hawkins, director of JGI, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

While the human genome consists of about 3.4 billion different chemical building blocks, the fugu’s genome only has about 400 million different chemical building blocks. Since both fugu and human beings must have had a common ancestor, the working hypothesis is that any genes that the fugu and human beings share in common are likely to be extremely important ones. JGI scientist Paul Predki told the Chronicle, “The intent is to use the fugu sequence as a comparison. We believe it contains essentially the same complement of genes as human DNA.”

Over the next couple decades, medical research is likely to be revolutionized by a knowledge gained by comparing human and non-human genomes combined with the increasingly sophisticated ability to manipulate and modify genes.

Source:

Fishing for clues: the genetic map of the lowly fugu could help scientists decipher the human blueprint. Tom Abate, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 2000.

NOW and the Voting Gender Gap

The National Organization for Women keeps making a claim in its press releases about the recently concluded election that while technicaly true completely glosses over the reality of the election. Here’s a random sample by Tanya Melich,

Unlike Florida, the proof of our power is not sullied with statistical probabilities. Nationally, women gave Gore their vote by an 11-percent margin while Bush won men by 11 percent. In Florida, the margins mirror this national vote with women backing Gore and men Bush. Whether by age, education or economic status, the pattern holds.

This paragraph is disingenous. Yes the pattern holds by age, education or economic status — unfortunately it does not hold by race and by marital status.

The so-called gender gap is in fact largely a racial gap. Black and Hispanic women broke overwhelmingly toward Gore, while depending on which polling data you rely on, Bush barely won or barely lost the white female vote. If, in fact, NOW had been able to deliver its core constituency of white women to “fight the right,” Gore would have won in a landslide.

Bush also beat Gore among married women (as well as men). NOW activists may indeed “have begun outreach in their communities to tell the cold, hard truth about the threat that George W. Bush, if elected, poses to the nation” early in the campaign, as one of their press releases claimed, but if they did a lot of women simply weren’t buying what they were selling.

Source:

Anti-Women Backlash Strategy Dwindling. Tanya Melich, WomensENews, No date given.

New York City to Allow Civil Suits for Gender-Biased Crimes

Feminist Daily News Wire recently reported that the New York City Council approved a new law on November 30, 2000, that will “allow victims of rape, domestic violence, and other crimes motivated by gender bias to sue the perpetrators in civil cases.” According to The New York Times, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is expected to sign the bill.

This is basically a rehash of the federal Violence Against Women Act provisions that were thrown out as unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court a few months ago. The goal here is to codify into law the radical feminist construct that there men as a class oppress women as a class.

As an example, the Feminist Daily News wire notes that for a civil suit to be allowed under this law, it must be accompanied by evidence of gender bias such as the act “perpetuated stereotypes of women’s submissive role.” Under this law, then, a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a woman could find himself in civil court, while a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a man would not have to worry about a suit under this statute because the criminal act couldn’t be construed as an example of “gender bias.”

The ultimate message such laws send is that crimes of violence committed by men against women are much more serious than crimes of violence committed by women against men or by men against men, since only the crimes in the first category are part of a society-wide conspiracy against women.

At one time, feminists might have saw such unequal protection before the law for men and women as a sign of overarching paternalism, but today it’s just business as usual.

Source:

NYC Establishes Civil Rights Remedy for Victims of Gender-Biased Crime. Feminist Daily News Wire, December 1, 2000.

CNN Uses Florida Math in Reporting on Michigan Case

CNN correspondent Ed Garston wrote a story about the contest for township supervisor in the Michigan township of Fire Lake that simply doesn’t add up. According to Garston, “Two candidates for the office, incumbent Dave Stremlow and challenger Toni Larson, were tied at 600 votes each,” but then near the end of the story Garston reports that, “There are 1,038 registered voters in this town about 30 miles southeast of the northern Michigan resort of Traverse City.”

Huh? I’m not quite sure how 1,038 voters could cause a 600-600 tie unless there are multiple township supervisor seats, which doesn’t seem to be the case from the context of story.

The AlphaSmart 3000 Arrives

The AlphaSmart 3000 is a portable word-processing device aimed at the education market. It’s cheap — about $200 — and can potentially go for hundreds of hours on a few AA batteries. I know some people who swear by them as a cheap, truly portable writing device and decided to take the plunge and order one the other day.

The unit arrived via FedEx today and after playing with it for awhile I’m am very impressed with the device — for a change, I think I actually got my money’s worth on such a device.

The AlphaSmart weights practically nothing — the computer keyboard I’m writing this on weighs more than the AlphaSmart. Rather than a big color LCD screen as you would find in a laptop, the AlphaSmart 3000 has a four-line, 40-character monochrome LCD like you might find in a high-end calculator. This was my single biggest concern about the unit, but the screen is more than serviceable for word processing. The only serious problem is that the screen angles slightly and I could easily see it getting scratched or marred while being put into a briefcase or carrying case. Some sort of hinged or sliding cover for the screen would go along way to reducing such problems.

The keyboard is very nice. The keys are bigger than most desktop keyboards, although the keys tend to be a bit too springy for my taste. The AlphaSmart includes a spell checker, which works well, as well as the ability to search for specific words or phrases.

The AlphaSmart connects to a PC or Mac via a USB cable. Transferring files was extremely quick and without any problems.

If you do a lot of writing or note taking away from your desktop computer, the AlphaSmart is an excellent alternative to lugging around a heavy, power hungry laptop.