Author: Brian Carnell

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.

Benedictin Makes A Comeback

I knew some women experienced morning sickness while pregnant, but nothing prepared me for what my wife had to go through while pregnant with our daughter. Every morning for literally six months was a routine of vomiting that was so severe at one point that her doctor considered having her hospitalized. The sad thing was a perfectly save medication could likely have prevented her vomiting, but trial lawyers had driven it off the U.S. market in the 1980s.

The drug was benedictin and it had been widely prescribed to pregnant women since the mid-1950s as an anti-nausea agent. In the 1970s, however, some women began to complain that the drug had caused or contributed to their children’s birth defects and sued. By 1983, the manufacturer of the drug, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, threw in the towel on the drug and said the litigation over the birth defects was simply too costly to justify continued production of the drug. No longer would women with morning sickness have access to the drug in the United States.

Ironically, that was about the time when numerous studies demonstrated what a close look at the evidence hinted in the 1970s — benedictin was completely safe. About three percent of all infants born in the United States suffer from birth defects, and the children of women who took benedictin had the same rate of birth defects as those born to women who didn’t take the drug. Even teh Food and Drug Administration exonerated the drug and declared it safe.

But it was too late. Nobody was willing to take on manufacturing the drug and risking the inevitable lawsuits over birth defects. Now, though the drug seems to be making something of a comeback thanks to a Canadian company, Duchesnay Inc., which is seeking FDA approval to sell a generic version of benedictin. Duchesnay’s diclectin has been available in Canada since 1975.

Hopefully women in America will soon have the choice to use the same drug that women in Canada and the rest of the world have been using safely for the past couple decades.

Source:

Once maligned morning sickness drug prepares for comeback. The Associated Press, October 10, 2000.

Flexible Database-Driven System + Creativity = Awesome Web Building Power

Jorn Barger, whose Robot Wisdom web log I visit every day, recently had an interesting essay on an idea that seems to be gaining speed; namely that the huge processor speed + huge hard drives + broadband = a revolution in how people store and access information.

Managing all that information, however, starts to be a problem. In fact, managing the relatively small amount of information I post on the web is often a big problem. I estimate I post an average of 5 articles a day overall, with many different themes and topics. Figuring out how to organize them is an enormous headache, much less actually finding the time to do it.

Barger apparently has the same problem. Barger writes,

Webloggers have a headstart on the challenge of building their own, because they’ve started archiving the best links, with annotations. They can go back thru these archives and sort the links by topic– my netlit portal was a first try at this, using the categories: fun, art, media, issues, net, tech, science, history, search, shop.

But I feel like that experiment was a near-complete failure– I hardly ever use them myself. Esthetically, they’re just too noisy. (I trimmed almost all the pullquotes when I sorted them, which may have been a mistake, and I started rewriting my blurbs, but it didn’t help that much, imho.)

A big problem that Barger hints is also the fact that often relations between topics are “fuzzy.” Sometimes I want to view information on Cuban executions as part of a Cuba topics page — other times I want to read about it as part of a death penalty topics page (not to mention as part of a Fidel Castro biography page). Once you get more than a few of these, the whole endeavor becomes a nightmare.

Conversant goes a long way to solving this problem with what it calls an Advanced Query Page type. The search page on this site is a simple Advanced Query Page, but there is a lot of power behind the hood. For example the new books page I added the other day looks like a typical web page, but it in fact is an Advanced Query Page and is dynamically generated.

In this case, all the page does is perform a search looking for anything I’ve categorized as being about “Books”, and then returns the web pages it finds in a neat ordered list. I could easily insert prefatory text explaining my love of books, etc., as well. And once I’ve got it set I don’t have to worry about updating the page — it will take care of itself.

Plus, I could easily do more refined pages. For example, if I had written a lot of articles about a specific computer game such as “Diablo II,” I could easily create a search that simply looked for that phrase where it occurs in web pages and return a list of them.

This makes it very easy to take any HTML document base and quickly create a very detailed, sophisticated directory of those documents. Powerful stuff.

Let the Firefighters Have Their Christmas Tree

Separation of church and state is certainly a bedrock principle for maintaining a liberal society, but once you get lawyers and anti-religious extremists involved, the principle sometimes gets twisted into absurd shapes.

In Eugene, Oregon, for example, the city has forbidden firefighters from putting up Christmas trees in city-owned fire stations on the grounds that it constitutes a violation of the separation of church and state. What nonsense. Even firefighter Matt Steinberg, who tells Fox that he is Jewish, understand what is really going on here,

I just shook my head and thought it was too bad that it had come down to that. What we’re really striving for is blandness. It’s not like people are running around being particularly religious all the time.

We’ve gone as a nation from rightly ensuring that our government doesn’t tell us how to worship to persecuting people who want to put a cross or Star of David or, god forbid, a Christmas tree in their workplace. This reminds me of the sort of absurd extremes that groups like the American Atheists used to go to with their regular claims that “In God We Trust” on coins violated the First Amendment.

Moreover, these bizarre edicts will over time tend to erode support among Americans for the principle of separation of church and state. A few weeks ago another case made the news when crosses were removed from a World War II memorial in a national park because various groups had threatened to sue on First Amendment grounds. This sort of nonsense does nothing to protect religious freedom in the United States, but adds to the growing perception among some religious people that the separation doctrine is largely a club used by liberal and left wing groups to rid public life of religious expression altogether.

Does Google’s Anti-Banner Ad Creed Make Sense?

In an article for Business Week (Will Google’s Purity Pay Off?), Kalpana Mohan reports on Google.Com‘s future financial outlook. Google does accept paid text advertisements — and makes about a penny a search from various revenue sources — but is adamant that it will not accept banner advertisements.

But as Mohan points out by not accepting banner ads, it’s unclear how Google will ever achieve the sorts of profits that its investors are certain to begin demanding at some point. And banner ads are a lot less intrusive than some of the other schemes for making money off of search engines, such as selling high level placement in keyword searches (paying money, for example, so that this site comes up first if anyone searches on “Carnell.”)

As a heavy user of Google, I’d much prefer they sell banner ads and (hopefully) become profitable rather than end up having shareholders demand they do something more intrusive like sell search placements or turn into another one of those horrendous looking portals.