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Tuesday, July 13, 2004 |
USA, or USSR?. This startling report in The Scientist today depicts an International AIDS Conference almost entirely devoid of American scientists. Here's a longish excerpt:
"It came from above [Secretary of Health and Human Services] Tommy Thompson," said one US researcher who was told not to present her paper and had to find funding from other sources to attend. Although her work was cofunded by her university, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) component meant she was forbidden to present or talk to the media, she told The Scientist. "So I'm not going to give you my name."
US officials have cited cost factors in the decision to impose a limit of 50 scientists attending from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the CDC. Among the missing, for example, is Jonathan Kagan, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Division of AIDS—despite the fact that NIAIDS accounts for half the US spending on AIDS research.
Other top scientists from CDC and NIH have had to come without their coworkers, who were to present papers, compromising the scientific content of the meeting.
"You hardly see an American speaking here. Just one spoke this morning," said Gregory Chan, a physician from Trinidad and Tobago treating HIV/AIDS patients in prisons.
I don't think it's unfair, at this point, to draw an analogy between the restrictions placed on U.S. scientists of late and the practices of totalitarian countries, including the former Soviet Union. We are behaving in much the same way, and our goverment higher ups seem similarly terrified by the free exchange of ideas. [Chris C. Mooney | The Intersection]
5:37:09 PM Permalink
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PHP 5.0.0 Released!. The PHP team is proud to announce the final release of PHP 5! Some of the key features of PHP 5 include: The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features. XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/). A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa. A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services. A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL's new features, such as prepared statements. SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website. Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams. And lots more... For changes since Release Candidate 3, please consult the ChangeLog. [PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor]
Woo hoo! I've been meaing to take a good dive into this, but don't have the time now, and I certainly won't want to deploy it for some time.
3:53:27 PM Permalink
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Epstein on Gay Marriage. Reason regular Richard Epstein makes the case for gay marriage over at the Wall Street Journal (this link should work even for non-subbers). His main point:
conservatives' plea for democratic federalism in defense of traditional values, and then for a constitutional amendment, is wholly misguided. Restore individual liberty to center stage, and this state restriction on same-sex marriages falls to the ground with the same speed as the full panoply of employment regulations, and the extension of antidiscrimination laws into ordinary social and religious affairs.
The path to social peace lies in the willingness on all sides to follow a principle of live-and-let-live on deep moral disputes. Defenders of the illiberal FMA [Family Marriage Amendment] should look to their churches, not Congress and the states, to maintain the sanctity of the marriage.
Whole thing here. [Hit & Run]
12:18:06 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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