samedi 17 janvier 2004

Gender gaps, stats and sociable browsers "Italy and Spain have the largest gap between men and women who are online (...) Twenty-one percent of urban Internet users in China say the Internet helps them increase contact with people who share their political interests. The next highest was also a totalitarian state, Singapore, at 8.6 percent of all users. Italy and the United States were both at about 8 percent. Across the board, Internet users in the surveyed countries watch less television." So says a survey by UCLA, according to AP (Yahoo news). That comes after a week in which we learned what a friendly, outgoing bunch we net freaks are: "The typical Internet user -- far from being a geek -- shuns television and actively socializes with friends, a study on surfing habits said Wednesday. The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of the average Netizen that contrasts with the stereotype of the loner 'geek' who spends hours of his free time on the Internet and rarely engages with the real world. Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says" (Reuter, also Yahoo). This whole World Internet Project thingie is a brainchild of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy and academic partners in Italy and Singapore. "Potentially the Internet represents change on the order of the industrial revolution or the printing press. Believing this, our Internet Project is designed to get in on the ground floor of that change and to watch and document what happens as households and nations acquire and use the Internet." Reassuring. Isn't it? 11:08:35 PM  link   your views? [] The Zavos claim: a hell of a tough choice A new claim that 'Doctor "implants cloned embryo"' (BBC Health) glued my ear around dawn to a heated debate (Listen Again, RealAudio clip, 11'27" and worth the time). Professor Richard Gardner, a fellow of Britain's scientific Royal Society who's done pioneering work in developmental biology and got up early to have his say, has strong views on why "reproductive cloning in the human should not be undertaken at the present time. While many within these communities share similar ethical concerns to other professionals and to the public, their call for a moratorium, or even an outright ban, of this mode of cloning is motivated primarily by unresolved issues of risk that have become apparent through its application to other mammals. Nevertheless, statements of intent to clone humans, and even claims to have succeeded in this endeavour, have been made recently, but invariably through the media rather than the scientific press. The originators of such statements have not exposed to peer-review either their justification for embarking on human cloning at this juncture or, indeed, evidence of their competence to undertake it" (from a paper at Cardiff Centre for Ethics, Law and Society). The man declaring that it's too late to argue with the inevitability of progress is Doctor Panos Zavos, founder of the Andrology Institute of America, who got his initial degrees at Emporia State University in Kansas and a Ph.D. from Minnesota. Zavos was hoping to see a cloned baby born last year, Rachel Rivera wrote at Gene-Watch in October 2002: "The United Nations has initiated groundwork for an international treaty to adopt a global ban on reproductive human cloning, but its 191 member states have yet to agree on the extent of the ban. The president of US-based human cloning firm Clonaid [founded by 'His Holiness Rael'], which is linked to a UFO cult, said Wednesday that it had implanted cloned embryos in several host mothers and that viable pregnancies were in progress. Zavos dismissed Clonaid's claims as 'a farce' to promote their Geneva-based cult, known as the Raellians. Raellians believe extraterrestrials populated the earth with clones of their race and that it is incumbent upon humans to continue the tradition of cloning. Zavos also discounted previous announcements by Italian researcher Severino Antinori that he had implanted cloned human embryos that ended in miscarriages. He said unlike the other researchers, ZDL [Zavos Diagnostics Laboratories] would provide proof of its results. According to Zavos, cloning is the only choice for infertile couples when artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization fail to produce results." The issue is tough enough even when you leave religion out of it. The cloning debate tends to be reduced by people on both sides to a battle between science and ethics, which it isn't. Some potential ramifications of cloning were imagined in Michael Marshall Smith's disturbingly good novel 'Spares' (which I briefly reviewed in March). Numerous other "sci-fi" writers have tackled the prospect intriguingly. But right now, the technology may be outstripping the moral debate, though there's no lack of the latter. A Google search on the "ethics of cloning" will give you more religion than anything else, but a news aggregator known as 'Surfwax' gives you headline coverage. It also links to more about ethics than anybody could sanely read. Micro-biologist Gina Kolata got good reviews for her accessible introduction, 'Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead' when Penguin published it in 1998. Five years later, Britain's Science Museum said "Goodbye Dolly". She had a progressive lung disease. But then, so do other sheep. She had arthritis at six-and-a-half, "barely 40 in human terms" (Guardian report). "Improving success rates is not going to be easy," reckons the Roslin Institute in 'progress AD (After Dolly)' -- part of an excellent scientific read by the people who "made" Dolly, technical but accessible. I'm no expert. But they are. Gardner is. Maybe Zavos is. The only safe prediction is that if Zavos or anybody else "births" a human clone and proves it, all hell is going to break loose. There may be no fence left very soon for any of us to sit on. 10:35:47 PM  link   your views? [] 'Hotel Rwanda' - grim subject for a good film in the making? Actor Don Cheadle (IMDb) on 'Hotel Rwanda', due to start shooting in South Africa in March: "'I see many scripts every year and most of them are dreck. If I'm lucky two or three have genuine quality and two of those usually go to Will Smith. 'But this is a love story and a thriller that will keep audiences entertained. Too many films try too hard to educate the audience and that's a turn-off. 'This is a story with real-life lessons and emotional situations we can all recognise, but it sweeps you up into a drama that makes you understand the truth of what happened in Rwanda and the evolution of that tragedy.' Director Terry George, who made In the Name of the Father (Rotten Tomatoes), said he wanted to make a film that 'conveyed the hopelessness, fear and frustration' of African wars. 'Rwanda was Africa's Holocaust and most people have no idea what really happened there,' he said." That's part of a story in last week's Johannesburg 'Sunday Times' (sometimes slow to load; via 'allAfrica'). George, from Northern Ireland, has written and directed more for TV than the big screen. 'In the Name of the Father', which in fact he co-produced, was Jim Sheridan's very good 1993 film about wrongful imprisonment, based on Gerry Conlon's 'Proved Innocent' (MouthShut). Big star Nick Nolte, according to George, will play "the UN commander whose force could have halted the conflict in the first month, but he was ordered by the UN not to do anything and it escalated into the fastest genocide in modern history." He means Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire ('Canadians.ca'; with good links), who retired from the Canadian army in 2000, and went public in July that year about the nightmare of the "peace-keeping" operation that disintegrated because of inaction by the United Nations. Such foreign assignments, Dallaire said, were "dangerous and at times devastating operational missions where Canada is not at risk, but where humanitarianism is destroyed and the innocent are being literally trampled into the ground" (BBC Africa). Given the credentials of those involved, I reckon 'Hotel Rwanda' may be a much better film about a recent African tragedy than Ridley Scott's 'Black Hawk Down' (those Tomatoes again). That was a well-made war film; it gave virtually none of the background to the disastrous made-for-CNN US intervention in Somalia -- the very event that made the sole superpower and key UN Security Council member so strongly opposed to lifting a finger over the Rwandan genocide. There has been worse than 'Black Hawk Down': had it got the everybody dies ending the film-makers planned for it rather than what Hollywood felt would suit the public, last year's 'Tears of the Sun' (IMDb) might have been less awful. 'Hotel Rwanda' may prove to tell an appalling tale, but it's the best chance for western money to invest in a decent big budget movie about Africa I've spotted in a long time. And that's increasingly important given the continent's current place on most people's maps of the world. 8:29:06 PM  link   your views? [] Silence became golden No entries of late because on Tuesday night my intestines turned into painful knots and a few other old friends among symptoms of the Condition were back. Life was arduous. It seems all this was mainly an allergic reaction to one of the treatments. I had to extend my absence from work for an unexpected couple of days. Apologies to all affected. Nevertheless, when I could get out, plenty got done, especially with the Mind Juggler. We've completed the batch of closely spaced, intensive sessions, which called for much "homework" on my part with considerably more laughter on hers. The "programme" included deepening my passing acquaintance with the views of D.W. Winnicott, along with Native American worldviews and shamanism. Then a wee bit of reclusion and the sound of silence did me further good as my insides began to sort themselves out. Meanwhile, guess who made a sudden reappearance in my life and perhaps consequently -- we shall see -- in the blogosphere? zzz As for Natalie's 'Secrets of the Worshipped Male' (Joy review page), I'm extremely hesitant about reviewing it myself. I might yet, but doing so would be very dangerous. My friend in London lets far too many cats out of bags, while making me more acutely aware than ever of the almost unfathomable depths of my own ignorance, obtuseness and stupidity. 1:52:34 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.