Russian Population Continues Decline

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s population and life expectancy have been spiraling downards. The Hindustan Times has an article summarizing a soon to be released report by the Russian Health Minister on the health problems experienced in that nation. Here’s an excerpt:

The report shows that Russia’s population shrunk by more than half a million people in the first eight months of this year, the steepest drop ever during peacetime.

According to the study, Russians have been dying younger and having fewer children due to a post-Soviet cocktail of bad news, including rising rates of poverty, illness, stress, alcoholism, civil conflict and industrial accidents.

Experts say drug abuse and sexually-transmitted diseases are potent new factors in declining male life expectancy, which has plunged from 64 years in the 1980’s to less than 59 years today.

Other dire indicators include the news that Russian women currently have 1.17 children, far below the 2.5 kids per woman that would be required to maintain the population.

There is no question that the Russian government has severely mismanaged its transition from Communist dictatorship to democracy.

Source:

Russia may soon be empty of people. Fred Weir, Hindustan Times, October 25, 2000.

Some Universities Announce They Won’t Carry RU-486

In several weeks, the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 drug will hit pharmacy shelves — but not at the pharmacies of health centers at many colleges and universities. Already, Emory University, The University of Georgia, Boston University, and the entire Florida public university system have announced that their health centers will offer RU-486.

There are several reasons for these decisions, perhaps the biggest begin the ridiculous restrictions that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration slapped onto the drug. Health facilities that are very close to hospitals might be able to meet the strict requirements, but most university health systems simply don’t have the sort of facilities to meet the FDA’s requirements.

An option not mentioned, but certainly on the minds of universities must also be the possibilities of lawsuits. RU-486 has a number of occasionally severe side effects and university systems might be afraid of becoming the deep pocket victims of lawsuits.

And, of course, some colleges and universities simply want to avoid getting caught up in the abortion controversy. You can bet that many state legislatures will consider bills in the coming years to withhold funds for state-sponsored universities and colleges that offer RU-486, along with heightened abortion-related protests at institutions regardless of what decision they make (with the pro-lifers being outraged if they offer it, and the pro-abortion contingent outraged if it’s not offered).

Source:

Many Campuses Won’t Offer Abortion Pill. Kris Osborn, Fox News, October 24, 2000.

Wicca Continues to Go Mainstream

As some of you know, my wife, Lisa, is a Wiccan. I am most definitely not, but it’s been interesting to watch the religious movement go from off the radar to mainstream over the past decade or so.

When Lisa started a campus Wiccan group seven years ago there were very few similar groups around the country. Now there are so many that the Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article on the phenomenon.

The other day we were in the mall and I spotted some very tacky looking Wiccan-oriented books being prominently displayed at the B. Dalton store. But what really hit home was watching Cartoon Network on Saturday which the 1999 animated film, “Scooby Doo and the Witch’s Ghost,” whose plot centers around Wicca.

Once you’ve been featured as part of a Scooby Doo cartoon, you know you’ve hit the big time.

Spam for the Rest of Us

Ugh. CNNFn has a story about what John Sculley is doing these days. The short answer — he’s turned into a vulture capitalist fronting for Gizmoz.

Gizmoz, it turns out, is one of a small group of companies with a vision — spam for the broadband age. That’s right folks, now rather than just getting those “Girls, girls, girls” and “Need some easy money?” spam in plaintext or HTML, Sculley and company want to send you full motion audio and video.

Here’s own CNNFn summarizes the plans of one of Gizmoz’s competitors, RadicalMail,

At the heart of the Radical approach is a small applet written in the Java programming language and delivered via e-mail. When a user clicks on the mail icon to open the message, the action pings the Radical computer servers to deliver a video file, Flash animation, an audio clip like a pop song — whatever the client wants to send. This content comes to life most often within the e-mail window.

You just got DSL and now the spammers want to make it unusable by clogging up your Internet connection with their crappy ads. This is progress?

Of course the spammers see it differently,

Such technology holds the promise of giving companies unprecedented access to information about their customers — and raises the threat of unprecedented privacy intrusions. The marketer can tell, for instance, when clients open their e-mail, whether they stay with the streaming media file, and whether they follow through on a transaction.

As a result, the competitors are careful to emphasize that these e-mails are not unwanted “spam” spewed at random across the Internet. Instead, they say they rely on “opt-in” mailing lists and “permission-based” marketing programs, in which consumers request the information they send.

Yeah right. Most opt-in marketing schemes are bogus because, a) they default to opting you in, and b) they make it too difficult to get out.

Sometime in the past couple years I installed Quicktime on one of my computers and now regularly get updates from Apple about its upcoming products. Similarly, several years ago I signed up to receive some updates via email from Wired owned sites, and could not for the life of me figure out how to unsubscribe later. Finally the stupid e-mail stopped when Wired’s internet properties changed hands and the part I’d been subscribed to got dropped.

One of the people quoted in the CNNFn story is still using yesterday’s buzzwords, extolling the virtue of e-mail as push media. Except when it comes to spam like this it’s more like pushing and shoving.

WWJD?

Salon.Com has look at how the WWJD? phenomenon became big business and how the person who started the craze is trying to trademark the phrase in order to stop some of the tackier products featuring the phrase.

How tacky? A couple weeks ago my wife and I were buying groceries for my grandmother. In the checkout line they were actually selling WWJD? hanging air fresheners for cars. Yuck.

Richard Dawkins Letter to Prince Charles

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, recently wrote an open letter to Prince Charles regarding Charles’ opposition to genetically modified food. The letter says in part,

On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning–and hence the very possibility of stewardship–is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.

Pretty sound advice, except that in his book Weaving the Rainbow, Dawkins has pretty clear animal rights sympathies and repeats the animal rights canard about speciesism being the last acceptable form of bigotry. Of course the rights view is completely incompatible with the stewardship view of nature, so I’m wondering just where Dawkins comes down on this debate (and after reading Weaving the Rainbow it is clear he doesn’t always invest the sort of time and energy in other issues as he does into evolutionary biology issues).