Friends don't let friends buy HP

Boing Boing: HP faces lawsuit for inkjet cartridges with expiration chip

The allegation:

H-P ink cartridges use a chip technology to sense when they are low on ink and advise the user to make a change. But, the suit claims, those chips also shut down the cartridges at a predetermined date regardless of whether they are empty. 'The smart chip is dually engineered to prematurely register ink depletion and to render a cartridge unusable through the use of a built-in expiration date that is not revealed to the consumer,' the suit said.

I soured on HP after buying some of their sheet feeder scanners that doubled as paper shredders. They seemed to be making poor quality devices and punishing anyone foolish enough to buy from them.

Now this. If it's true then:

1. Does everyone do this? (I've got a Canon printer, I liked the separate ink wells.)
2. I won't be buying anything from HP. (Ok, so I wasn't going to anyway

More things I did wrong in my practice

Another day, another thing I did wrong when I practiced medicine:

TheMilwaukeeChannel.com - Health - Study: Hormone Therapy Makes Incontinence Worse, Not Better

By some estimates, up to half of all women over 50 will suffer from urinary incontinence. Many women take hormone replacement therapy because doctors believe it can reduce the risk of urinary leakage, but according to a new study, the opposite is true.

... Hendrix and her colleagues tracked the health of more than 27,000 post-menopausal women for one year to see if hormones reduced incontinence.

The study, published in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that women who hadn't had leakage before taking the hormones were more likely to become incontinent, and women who were already incontinent were more likely to see their condition get worse...

... Women taking estrogen pills for one year were 53 percent more likely to develop urinary incontinence than women who took dummy pills. Women taking pills containing both estrogen and progestin faced a 39 percent higher risk.

I stopped doing clinical practice about 4-5 years ago, and it's been more years than that since I saw women for incontinence. Back then, however, a 50 yo woman with incontinence was a great candidate for estrogen therapy (w/ progestins usually): build up bones, reduce incontinence, reduce fracture risk, reduce heart disease risk, less dementia ...

Except none of those things, except the fracture, are felt to be true nowadays. Maybe this study is wrong (the design doesn't sound very robust), but I gather it's not the only study with similar results. It seems unlikely that estrogens are a great treatment for incontinence, and given their other issues I wouldn't use them for urinary incontinence today.

Sigh. Things wouldn't be so bad if I were confident that the newer therapies will hold up significantly better than the nostrums I was taught eons ago ...

Child atheletes in America - a bit crazy

The New York Times > Sports > Other Sports > Doctors See a Big Rise in Injuries for Young Athletes

High school students apply the technology and methodologies of the 1990 olympics. Grade schoolers are applying the technology and methodologies of the 1970 olympics. The NYT reports on one outcome -- exotic injuries:

A competitive swimmer since she was 7, Alex Glashow of Barrington, R.I., logged 8,000 yards a day in the pool, until her arms ached. She learned to dislocate one shoulder intentionally to ease the pain in the water, but after shoulder surgery and a year of physical therapy, Glashow quit competitive swimming forever when she was 15.

Jeret Adair, a top young pitching prospect from Atlanta who started 64 games in one summer for his traveling baseball team, last year had Tommy John surgery, an elbow reconstruction once reserved for aging major leaguers.

Ana Sani of Scarsdale, N.Y., a 13-year-old budding soccer star, practiced daily until she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee...

...Dr. Lyle Micheli, a pioneer in the field of treating youth sports injuries and director of the sports medicine division of Boston Children's Hospital, said that 25 years ago, only 10 percent of the patients he treated came to him for injuries caused by overuse. Back then, most childhood injuries were fractures and sprains. Dr. Micheli said overuse injuries now represented 70 percent of the cases he sees...

... "It's not enough that they play on a school team, two travel teams and go to four camps for their sport in the summer," said Dr. Eric Small, who has a family sports-medicine practice in Westchester County. "They have private instructors for that one sport that they see twice a week. Then their parents get them out to practice in the backyard at night."

... It is not uncommon for the damage done by an overuse injury to be irrevocable, and the doctor's advice is to quit the sport.

"That's usually not received too well," said Dr. Michael Busch, an Atlanta orthopedic surgeon. "The parents will ask if there isn't some kind of surgery that can be done, so their child can keep doing the things that brought this injury on in the first place...

"To tell you the truth, the kids usually take it better than the parents. Many kids are relieved. They can be kids again."...

This is seriously crazy. Some of those parents seem to qualify as an odd variant of child abuser. The real problem, however, is not misplaced parental pride. It's a society that's become obsessed with excellence. Get over it guys. There's always someone faster, someone smarter, someone better. There are maybe 6 billion people on earth; 6,000 of them are "one in a million".

More importantly, the most significant injury is not to these child atheletes. It's their inactive peers who are really hurt and hurting. If the standard for sports participation is an elite athletic ideal, then 95% of children can't even imagine participating. We aren't going to do anything about obesity if 95% of kids are sidelined from first grade onwards.

Sports is important. For some people it will be the most important thing in their lives. (I make no value judgment, for all I know God is a quarterback. If I'd had the talent to attract girls by athletic display I'd have fully exploited that opportunity!) But like everything else in America, we carry it to absurd extremes.

We need to slow things down, and we need to broaden the experience to include all children -- including the slow and clumsy. Get a grip America!

How I use Gmail and why it really is so great

Gmail - Inbox

Gmail is getting ready to go public. I have about 50 "invitations" to handout. Good time to mention how my use has evolved.

1. My desktop email has become a repository and backup store. I do most of my work in Gmail. Messages go out with a return address to my public (spamcop) account but my Gmail account is well known to spammers so this is not critical.

2. I don't use the "labels" much. I thought I'd use 'em more. I'm very post-hierarchy these days. (Labels are an attribute that can be used to emulate a non-hierarchical folder with multiple inheritance.)

3. I "fork" my mailstream. (Relatively few people can do this, I control my mail domain.) Mail to my primary address is replicated to my POP box and to Gmail. So there are two copies everywhere. Works very well with two downsides:
- I have to remember to cc myself if want my replies or messages to be in both repositories. (I wish auto-cc was a Gmail feature, it's not.)
- I have to deal with spam twice, fortunately the filtering I use works pretty well. Gmail keeps a steady level of about 6000 spams in my spam box -- about 30 days worth.

4. Gmail is also a repository for files of less than 10MB that I want to quickly backup or pass around.

5. I use the "star" feature quite a bit.

6. My Inbox is emptied on reading. If I want to come back to a message I "star" it.

Things I really like about Gmail:

1. speed, speed, speed.
2. did i mention search speed?
3. no filing
4. keyboard shortcuts (see speed)
5. smart address book and adress completion
6. elegance
7. reliability
8. useful and interesting ad links

Things I want:

1. auto-bcc feature so I can copy replies to my personal repository
2. IMAP support (I'd pay)
3. more capacity -- 1GB will last me about another 2 years. (I'd pay)

Udell on screencasting

InfoWorld: Let's hear it for screencasting: February 11, 2005: By Jon Udell : APPLICATION_DEVELOPMENT : APPLICATIONS : BUSINESS : DATA_MANAGEMENT

Udell (uber guru) writes about screencasting:

I’m now using screencasts — that is, narrated movies of software in action — to showcase application tips, capture and publish product demonstrations, and even make short documentaries. And I’m seeing others around the Net starting to do the same. Now’s a good time to explain why I think this mode of communication matters and will flourish.

Experts use software far more effectively than novices. This knowledge is very rarely communicated in manuals; only a few books are good at providing this information. Sharing brief task-based usage is a valuable tool for building effective users.

Google's one page guide to becoming a Google Guru

Google Help : Cheat Sheet

This is very impressive. It's a single page summary that captures the key high value user interactions with a range of Google services. Memorize it and impress ... ummm ... ok, impress noone. But get more done faster.

The tedious response to having one's identity stolen

Has Your Identity Been Stolen? - What to do if it happens to you. By Daniel Engber

Next: a web business that outsources the response to identity theft. Fill out a form with the specifics, enter your credit card number, and sign stuff in the mail.

Since identity theft is becoming rather prevalent, we might as well automate the response to it.

Ajax: thickening a web client

adaptive path » ajax: a new approach to web applications

It's not easy to make JavaScript do all this stuff, and Safari is missing some of the key pieces (shame on Apple), but it is astounding when it works.

There's a fair bit of history here. Years ago we used to speak of "thin clients" (Citrix) and "thick clients" (conventional apps). Thin clients were easy to deploy but put a lot of processing burden on servers and suffered from communications latency.

Web browsers were thicker than Citrix but still suffered the effects of latency and had a much more limited GUI than a Citrix thin client. Both Sun's Java and Netscape's Javascript/HTML extensions were supposed to address the GUI and latency issues, but Sun and Netscape stupidly fought tooth and claw; two dogs fighting while a tiger chuckled nearby. Once Sun and Netscape had just about done in each other in Microsoft waltzed off with the browser. IE's DHTML framework threatened to finish what Netscape had started, but then the Office/.NET vs IE wars started at Microsoft. Office won and it looked like .NET would be the only path forward. Nonone could trust Microsoft to keep IE/DHTML healthy; it was a platform without a future.

But the vestiges of the old wars survived , in the IE/W3C document object model and in Javascript that was slowly getting less buggy. Different people in different places and times figured out how to get this rickety architecture working. Then came the rise of Firefox. Now even if IE stopped supporting this .NET alternative, it could still work on Firefox.

Of course it might also work even better on gBrowser ...

And now we have Ajax vs .NET for the variable weight browser-client title.

And so it goes.

Update: a colleague mentions the alternative approach to reducing latency - unbelievable server and network performance:

I would point out that several of the techniques Google is using don't require an
elaborate client side DHTML approach. They are, instead, leveraging
their incredible load capacity and low latency server array. Google maps is
a perfect example of relatively low tech client, plus an incredible tech
server architecture. If you look carefully you can sometimes see upwards of
20 GET requests being spun off, each with a latency response that is way way
sub second.

Update Again 2/23: Udell has much more on this topic, including more on how Google got its server latency to unprecedented levels.

Right wing fruitcake's "most unwanted" page

A guide to the political left

I loved the photo of Ted Kennedy. It has to be among the least flattering of the 250,000 pictures taken of him in the past 50 years. Among his many crimes: "Described the 2003 war in Iraq as “a fraud”".

This site hosts a right-wing fruitcake's "most unwanted" list. It has links to the Zawahiri and Betty Friedan. A Java applet is supposed to allow one to browse the network of connections (degrees of separation) but it didn't work on Safari.

I realize I'm just encouraging these folks by linking to this type of page, but it's a good reminder of how many reasonably intelligent people are really quite nuts.

Sheesh.

Dedication: Free Mojtaba and Arash Day

BBC NEWS | Technology | Global blogger action day called

Free Mojtaba and Arash Day.

From the BBC (with link):

The global web blog community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the 'Free Mojtaba and Arash Day'.

Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

... The group has a list of actions which it says bloggers can take, including writing to local Iranian embassies...

Taller babies and confusing correlation with causation

BBC NEWS | Health | Taller babies earn more later on

A study shows 1 yo height correlates with income. Interesting, but then the study's author is quoted saying something startling:

Report author Professor David Barker said he hoped the findings would make people realise the first year was critical in a child's development.

I can't imagine how this study, as reported, could possibly support this conclusion. He's making all kinds of logical leaps to get from a relationship to causality to therapeutic intervention.

When we have studies showing that interventions in wealthy nations in the first year of life affect later income, or even 1 year height, then let's talk along these lines ....

Grand Old Payola Party

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

Frank Rick looks at at how much money the Bush administration paid for PR/propaganda. Based on the numbers, the fake journalism scandal may be quite large. A quarter of a billion dollars would pay for a several thousand mouthpieces. Lawyers are doubtles looking for ways to open up the Ketchum budget, and tell us what portion of that fortune was paying for illegal propaganda.

... The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers" tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?

... The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press...

The Bush policy wouldn't work if we had an aggressive and active free press left. I don't see any evidence of that -- outside of a few old pros like Frank Rich and the under financed and unread blogosphere. We, the American people, just aren't interested any more. We'll get the nation we deserve.

The top 100 gadgets of all time

Mobile PC - Features - The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

Find out where your favorite gadget is. This is a terrific site and will be insanely popular.

Planet sorrow

A Devastating Decision for Ill Ethiopian Mothers (washingtonpost.com)

A world of sorrow.

...Six-year-old Radeat Behonegn used to spend hours at the window of the Hope for Children orphanage, waiting for her parents to return. They left her here two years ago, and soon afterward died of AIDS related illnesses...

...Children dropped off at the orphanage can grow hysterical, sending others into a panic. Recently, Tamrat had to start a new policy, telling parents they should bring their children in to play a few times and then, on the last day, just leave quietly. Later, the children are told that their parents are dying.

The fathers in these stories are often despicable. CARE is open for business.

Bush the deity

Salon.com News | Among the believers:

Indeed, Goebbels is topical:

In January, Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page, published a damning column in the progressive Z Magazine about fascist tendencies in the conservative movement. 'In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush,' he wrote. 'Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush … Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy.'