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Thursday, June 12, 2003 |
Code change requiring windows that are stronger and more insulating than the walls of the house itself!
6:05:27 PM 
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I was never a big Mo Dowd fan, even when she was skewering someone I disliked, because she is all style and no substance. She never seems to have anything constructive to say. Apparently I am not the only one: "THE FOURTH IMMUTABLE LAW OF DOWD: The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths." I think this one also applies to Anna Quindlen, except more so. She seems completely incapable of writing an opinion piece in her bi-weekly, back page of Newsweek column, that doesn't contain the words "I" and "my", repeated several times, within the opening paragraph. Quite a contrast to George Will, the columnist with whom she alternates.
6:03:04 PM
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Good article
in the NYT on increasing prescription costs. If there is to be
any hope of containing runaway healthcare inflation, indivdiual
consumers need to be more informed and involved, and usually
the best way to get people's attention is to affect their pocketbooks.
>>As out-of-pocket expenses have gotten bigger, consumer behavior
has definitely changed," Mr. Long said. He added that factors
including weak demand for cold and flu remedies and the switch
of some popular drugs to nonprescription status also contributed
to the slower growth in costs.
>>Mark Rubenstein, human resources director at Evergreen, said
he persuaded his doctor to switch his own cholesterol treatment
from Zocor to Lipitor, a preferred brand, rather than pay half
the $117 monthly cost of Zocor. "The new plan does encourage
employees to assume some responsibility for knowing what medications
they are taking and that they are getting the best bargains for
themselves," he said.
and this mindset definitely has to change:
>>The volume of prescriptions soared over the years as drug makers
spent heavily on marketing..."Patients expected a prescription
when they walk out," he said. "The doctors satisfied them."
6:03:02 PM
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Wow, a Stanley Fish op-ed I can unreservedly applaud. "[Exercising editorial judgement, of various kinds] is quite a different thing from silencing or self-censorship. No one is silenced because a single outlet declines to publish him; silencing occurs when that outlet (or any other) is forbidden by the state to publish him on pain of legal action; and that is also what censorship is." (my italics) It is really pathetic that this point even needs to be made to well-educated and well-read people, but seemingly it does. You often hear the same, incorrect charges of censorship when there are protests and calls for de-funding of a controversial artist who receives government grants. This link was first on Google's results for the notorious "piss Christ". Similarly with charges of "ethnocentrism", which, in common usage, is almost invariably pejorative Here is a good summary of common usage: "This kind of [disparaging] response is now routinely applied to anyone who does not accept the intellectual package offered by multiculturalism. It says that if you disagree with me, and support anything other than my position on ethnocentrism and cultural diversity, you are a morally bad person who will open the way to a bleak future for the human species." "Ethnocentrism" is an epithet frequently resoted to by those who wish some sort of moral pedestal to stand upon when decrying some disliked aspect of (their own) contemporary culture. If you want to knock such a person off that pedestal, ask them whether saying unkind words about, say, female genital mutilation constitutes ethnocentrism. Here is a thougtful article exploring what ethnocentrism really is.
6:02:59 PM
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Idea for using tools to combat linkrot prophylactically
Phase 1: Functionality for Authors
When I commit an item in my weblog, I would like Radio (my blogging
tool) to traverse each link and copy-and-paste the linked text
into meta-data underlying the corresponding link (or the first
5000 characters, if the target text is very long). So if linkrot
occurred, and I, the author/maintainer of the linking site, were
alerted to it, I could at least have some chance to manually
recover from the problem.
Recovery option 1 would be to determine the URL of the new, correct
link. (Assuming that feat is even possible; i.e., that there
exists a new link for the same thing.) It is sometimes easy to
do this, but sometimes it isn't, because you just can't remember
enough key words to re-find your target. BUT, if you had all
the original text from which to cull key words (better yet, phrases),
you would have much richer raw material for searching out the
target, in its new location.
Of course, if you have the raw material, then you also have the
recourse of copying rather than linking (so long as there are
no copyright concerns, of course), in the event that Option 1
fails!
Phase 2: Functionality for Browsers
This phase 2 would be much more ambitious (and maybe too much
complexity to even be desirable), but here's how it could, in
theory, work...the browser recognizes underlying "copied content"
in a link. If all goes well, the copied content is ignored. However,
if the browser gets a 404 error, then it substitutes the copies
content in some clearly recognizable fashion. Of course I know
that there are undoubtedly flaws with this idea, and it would
never come to pass (Phase 2, anyway), but hopefully the idea
at least has some theoretical merit.
6:02:56 PM
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People talk all the time about how XML may be a lingua franca,
but without agreed-upon semantics, it may not deliver anything
like the benefit that was expected. The same problem applies
to certain very common web design features.
For instance, it is common to provide an option to format an
article for printing, as opposed to on-screen viewing. The most-common
semantic for this is "printer-friendly version" So, you can do
a intra-page (CTRL-F) search for "friendly" and you usually quickly
find what you are looking for. But some pages just show an icon
of a printer--unfindable.
Another example is finding the nearest store location. The common
term "store location". But sometimes you see things like "find
stores", so when you search for "location", you miss out.
Yet another example is the search box itself. Search is the
overwhelmingly acknowledged term, but you still see sites that
use "find" instead.
I'm sure there are more examples that I am not thinking of. Anyway,
this would be a great area in which to standardize.
6:02:51 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Erik Neu.
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