Just another nerd.
Am I the only one who thinks it a bit odd that three British Members of Parliament fasted in London yesterday as a way of urging India to pass animal cruelty legislation?
Of course it all becomes a bit more understandable when you read the article and learn the three are apparently affiliated with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Cathy Young has an written excellent, objective look (Dr. Bad News) at research by Judith Wallerstein, touted by conservatives and loathed by feminists, that claims children of divorced parents suffer from the effects of divorce well into adulthood.
Although concerned about the effects of divorce (who, after all, isn’t?), Young finds more smoke than fire behind Wallerstein’s claims. One of the problems with Wallerstein’s latest research, as well as her earlier material, is that the people she interviewed for her book seem to be an unrepresentative sample. Young writes,
Findings from national studies, cited by Wallerstein in the appendix, cast further doubt on her methodology. Forty percent of adult children of divorce in her sample never married, compared with just 24 percent in the same age range in a series of national surveys. In both studies, around 40 percent of the marriages had ended in divorce.
The national data, however, show only a moderately lower prevalence of divorce for people raised in intact families (35 percent) — whereas in Wallerstein’s “intact” comparison sample, only 9 percent of the marriages had broken up. And while Wallerstein found that men and women whose parents had divorced were much less likely to have children than were those from intact marriages, national data indicate no difference in childbearing rates between the two groups.
In fact Young and some of the people she interviews repeatedly note, Wallerstein’s claim that there are large differences between children of divorced parents vs. children of non-divorced parents is contradicted by numerous studies, which do find small differences but nothing of the magnitude that Wallerstein claims.
Once again Young brings her sharp mind to debunking an over-reaching claims and bringing a common sense analysis to a controversial issue.
Apparently before the Olympic games began, the International Olympic Committee forecasted that 35 million people would visit the official Olympics web site. According to the BBC, only about 15 million people did. The BBC reported that “They [IOC Marketing spokespersons] said the figures showed that the Internet still had a long way to go before it could rival television as a mainstream broadcasting medium.”
This is a backward way of putting it. If I want my site to get half a million visits a month and it tops out at 350,000 visits a month, typically I look to things that I could have done differently: was the content not up to par? Were there other marketing methods I could have used to reach my target market?
The IOC, however, turns around and says “sheesh — the Internet turns out to be just a bunch of hype” (and I don’t mean to pick on the IOC because I think this is not an uncommon attitude). One of the things that would be interesting would be to find out the Olympics-oriented hits that major news and sports web sites received.
Personally I checked out the results of many events online, but only went to the IOC site once, before the games. I suspect many sports fans rather than visiting the official site got their Olympics update along with other sports news from CNN, ESPN, the BBC, or other news oriented web sites, since the IOC site really didn’t add anything to the experience beyond what you could get in a straight sports news site (in fact in this case, sports news outlets typically had added value thanks to the commentary and analysis which I didn’t see a lot of at the IOC site).
I was excited to learn that Eden Studios is bringning Mayfair’s board game, Rail Empire: Iron Dragon to the computer. Then I downloaded the demo and my excitement vanished pretty quickly.
I’ve never played the board game version, but it’s got quite a following and a fascinating premise: build a railroad across a fantasy continent complete with dwarves, trolls, dragons, gold, gems, etc. Railroads are cool and building one across a Tolkein-esque landscape sounds like fun.
The problem is that the computer game is a straightahead conversion of the board game, down to the onscreen shuffling and drawing of event cards, etc. Boring. Maybe that would have been interesting 6 years ago, but today what’s the point? After all the reason cards and other abstractions are used in board games is precisely because they are not computer games. There are limits to the amount of information that can be cramemd into a board game as well as the sort of interactions that can occur and still have the game be fun.
The upshot being that what might be a lot of fun playing with a bunch of friends over a table usually stinks big time when adapated as is for the computer. I was hoping for more of a fantasy version of Railroad Tycoon. If all Mayfair wanted was a straightforward translation of the game on the computer, there are already a number of programs out there that do a good job of letting people play board and wargames over the Internet to which could have easily adapted the Iron Dragon ruleset.
One of the constant drumbeats from animal rights activists is that animal models of HIV have given surprisingly little information. This is incorrect on many levels — in fact HIV tests themselves are nothing more than sophisticated animal tests. Now comes news from the Journal of Infectious Diseases that three chimpanzees infected with HIV in the 1980s are finally progressing to full-blown AIDS-like symptoms, giving researchers a prime chance to get a better handle on how and why HIV progresses to AIDS in human beings.
Most chimpanzees infected with the disease don’t progress to disease symptoms. There are several theories as to why this is the case, one of which is that the chimpanzee’s immune system evolved to simply ignore HIV-like diseases. Since chimpanzee immune systems don’t attack the disease, HIV is unable to latch on to the T-cells it needs.
If this is the case, the three chimpanzees progressing to AIDS may have deficient immune systems or may have contracted a form of HIV that their immune system does elicit a response to. Either way researchers hope comparing the chimpanzees that develop AIDS to their brethren that don’t will provide a better understanding of how the disease runs its course and perhaps offer clues to how the disease operates and can be counteracted in human beings.
Source:
Chimps may hold important piece of HIV puzzle. Amy Norton, Reuters, September 20, 2000.
The Journal of Infectious Diseases 2000; 182.
Guidestar, a web portal for information about charitable organizations, recently updated their site with recent tax return information for several animal rights organizations: