This article on the growing trend of marketing consumer products via their spiritual benefits pulls together some interesting common threads in the way people at least think they want to interact with the world. [via Alt-log]
Calling it "contextual advertising", this software that peppers the webpages you visit with links to advertisers seems way too simplistic to me to be effective. Advertisers pay to have certainly words get linked back to them. The software, which usually gets installed as a side effect of another download someone installs, then turns all occurrences of purchased words into links to the purchasing site. Besides seeming way beyond annoying to the user, I can't believe they actually think the context of these words is going to be positive for encouraging sales. Do the same advertisers who won't run their ads in magazines unless they can control the editorial content really want to use the entire web as a backdrop for product placement? [via RRE]
I can't remember if I've linked to the Harry Potter Weblog before, but with the first movie due out in a couple of months, and speculation continuing on when the fifth book will come out (July 2002, is the latest rumor...), it's as good a time as any to link to it again. Really, all hype aside, if you like magical adventures, these are fun books. [via Eatonweb]
I missed this article at the New York Times originally, so it might expire soon: Rocket Science, Served Up Soggy talks about the guy who invented the Super Soaker and his work to develop, patent and market it.
Invited to the company's headquarters outside Philadelphia, Mr. Johnson impressed his future partners by blasting coffee cups off the table and firing across the boardroom. "I'd never seen anything like it," Mr. Davis said.There's a cute little interactive "How It Works" display on the page too. [via RRE]
A couple of answers to my questions below about Bush's stem cell funding decision:
From a Washington Post article:
"NIH has contacted all the companies, organizations and individuals in the United States and other countries that possess the existing colonies of stem cells and secured promises to share their cells with government-subsidized researchers, [Health and Human Services Secretary] Thompson said."
From an LA Times article:
"Last month, the National Institutes of Health conducted a detailed survey and found 30 cell lines, some of which did not come from embryos and which therefore might not be as useful. Douglas Melton, a leading researcher and chairman of Harvard University's department of molecular and cellular biology, said that only 10 of those lines had been described in scientific publications and that little was known about the others.
"And some of those 10 cell lines don't grow well at all and are largely useless," Melton said. "There are only one or two that I know of that are helpful." Moreover, he said, private companies hold the rights to some of the existing cell lines, and they are not willing to share them on terms that academic researchers can accept."
From a Newsday article (which also has a decent little Q&A on stem cell research):
It was unclear last night whether the cell lines mentioned by Bush all meet the stringent certification guidelines proposed by the National Institutes of Health during the Clinton administration, guidelines that were suspended by the Bush administration while it deliberated the future of stem cell research.
Thomson has said that his cell lines probably do not meet the National Institutes of Health guidelines and he was prepared to produce additional lines from surplus embryos that did meet the standards. Melton said it appears that Bush may be willing to allow use of the existing Wisconsin lines, but such questions will have to be clarified.
It sounds as if there is uncertainly about how many stem cell lines are out there and of what qualities. And the comment that the conditions private companies are putting on use of their lines is more restrictive than academics will accept makes me wonder in turn what those restrictions are, and whether companies promises to share, mentioned in the first quote, include those restrictions. I'm guessing a bunch of researchers and politicians are going to be sitting around for the next couple of weeks trying to understand exactly what's been decided. [links via Sigma Xi: In The News]
We've got some products around the house that are labeled in both English and French, and I've noticed that the French tends to use prepositional phrases where English uses adjectives - something I didn't think about much when I actually studied French. It surprises me that this doesn't lead to more ambiguity that it does. For example, how do we know that "skin cleanser" is "cleanser for skin", rather than "cleanser (made) of skin"? Well, context, obviously. But I have trouble believing English is a more context dependent language than French. Clearly, this is pointing out a hole in my linguistics background that I should look into.
Also, I've got some links for you...
The ratings of Dante's Inferno Punishments continues. There are some good ones in this one.
CNN reports on a study finding that multitasking is counterproductive. Rather than adding efficiency, asking people to switch back and forth between tasks makes the tasks take longer to accomplish, because of the time to process what the new goal is and to refamiliarize oneself with the task. [Thanks, JRE!]
In one sense, this is obvious. It's more efficient to spend the thirty minutes to get a task completely done, get it off your desk, and then move on to the next thing, than to keep shuffling back and forth between two tasks every five minutes. But I wonder when the effects of boredom or loss of concentration from repetition come into play, or how multitasking effects the quality of the work being done, as compared to the speed with which it is done. I can definitely write a better page of text if I write a draft for half an hour, do something entirely different for a while, and then return to the document fresh. That isn't purely multitasking, but on a smaller scale, I can write a paragraph, or a function, or an e-mail in five minutes and return a phone call before continuing on. Some tasks definitely require long-term concentration, but an across the board condemnation of multitasking without looking at job satisfaction, quality of product, and types of tasks being merged seems as shortsighted as a managerial style that requires multitasking of all of its employees.
If you ran a website called Being Girl, ("'cause being a girl rocks"), wouldn't you think it needed an extended animation featuring flowers, stars, hearts, and dancing tampons? Well, when Tampax and Always are sponsoring the site, I guess things like that just happen. Somehow, the things that they think rock about being a girl all have to do with breasts and menstruation. Funny, that. [via PCJM]
Is your pizza delivery always late and frequently wrong? Maybe your driver is dropping off drugs on his way to your place, like this Arizona Pizza Hut made its drivers do.
Of course, the Carter's deny it, and most of the case is what the employees say versus what the owners say, but it sounds like a plausible way to cover up drug sales. [via Alt-log]In particular, some ex-employees are claiming that Rick asked his drivers to deliver crystal meth in pizza boxes, where they would encounter shadowy characters who handed them mysterious envelopes, and that members of the Carter family also repeatedly manipulated time cards, resulting in chronic underpayment of his staff.
Google Zeitgeist made the rounds quite a while ago, but in case you missed it, this page summarizes Google search patterns, including the weeks queries that are gaining and declining in frequency the most. [Thanks, AG!]
Finally, Bush announced his decision on whether to allow federal funding for stem cell research tonight - he'll allow funding for research on already created cell lines, but not for creating new lines. Two types of comment here:
Regarding Bush's address, first, the guy has got to learn to read off of a teleprompter. And he did not move his body through the entire thing. Is it possible he was tense??? I was also surprised he spent so long describing the various sides of the debate and so little time discussing his decision (by my estimate, at most four of the twelve minutes were about his decision). My guess is that he wanted to demonstrate that he had heard and understood the various sides of the issue before he made his decision. And that was probably important, given that I expect very few people will be happy about this compromise. And while it slipped by me, the friend I watched with pointed out that Bush said he had two questions he reduced the issue to (Are the embryos human life, and is it ethical to use them if they will be disposed of anyway?), he never said what conclusion he came to on either question.
So, about the decision... I've got a few questions that I ought to research (but which I'll probably wait until I visit a biologist next week and get him to explain it). When Bush says he'll only allow funding for research on existing cell lines, does that mean only on the 69 existing lines he referred to, or if a 70th line is created by private funding, can federal funding support research on that line as well? Bush claimed that a stem cell line will last indefinitely, but I've also heard that the lifespan of the line is about two years. Is "indefinitely" really two years? Depending on the answers to those two questions, this could just be delaying a fuller response for a couple years. Now, if his goal is to wait and see if embryonic stem cell research pans out as compared to other types of stem cell research, he can try that, but I doubt two years is long enough to really determine it, particularly since the public money isn't out there tonight - it's just forthcoming.
Also, I've heard some of the lines aren't available for public use; they are basically the property of whatever public funding source created them. How many of the 69 lines are available for public research? Because I image that could make a significant difference as well, particularly if funding is only available for work on the old lines.
And finally, the whole moral component Bush raised at the end of his address was weak. Putting aside my reservations about his assertion that the president has an obligation to promote values such as respect for life among his constituents, his argument that using stem cells that have already been harvested is acceptable because the embryos are already dead is contradictory to ethical principles already in place in law, and contradicts what he said minutes earlier in his address. As my friend pointed out, if the police get evidence you're a serial killer through an illegal search, even though the wrong was already done, and even though great societal good would be done by allowing the results of that wrong to be used, we still say that the court has to throw that evidence out. In fact, any evidence obtained solely from the tainted evidence is tainted as well. Bush admitted that it isn't a clearly ethical choice himself, when he recounted that an ethicist told him it would be wrong to take stem cells from embryos that were going to be destroyed because one shouldn't take a being's life just because it is going to die anyway.
Personally, I don't find the use of embryonic stem cells problematic. But if you think, like Bush seems to, that you are taking a human life by using embryonic stem cells, you can't draw the clean moral line that he seemed to want to close on. He didn't end up safely on the ethical side. It would be more honest for him to admit that there are times when he thinks the government can finance taking a human life for the sake of a larger purpose and then discuss the principles to use in deciding whether this is such a case or not. I, for one, would be very interested in what principles he thinks are relevant to such a decision.
On a somewhat tangential issue, Bush did mention his opposition to human cloning in his speech, which was at least timely given the ban on cloning the House (and many other countries) have passed. Some are also pushing to get such a ban endorsed by the UN as well. Realistically, I suspect there will always be someplace cloning researchers could go. I wonder if the best response to some of the horror-story fears (how to deal with seriously flawed but living human clones, the potential for organ farms, consent required to clone individuals, requirements on designating clones' guardians, etc.) is to legislate these issues now, while there is still time to shape how the research is done. Otherwise, you get a situation like attempts to legislate the internet without being able to control how the internet was built. (Not that I think the need to legislate the internet and the need to legislate cloning are analagous; rather, it is the lack of understanding of what the technologies and issues are on the part of legislators and citizens that I think are analogous).
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