Quotulatiousness

July 6, 2011

“Scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:55

Facebook really, really doesn’t want you leaving for Google+ — in fact, they don’t even want you looking too closely at your friends’ personal data:

With the introduction of Google+ last week, the search/ad giant is finally in direct competition with Facebook. Or it will be, once Google gets over the opening week willies and reopens the service to allow the teeming hordes inside.

The biggest barrier to Google+’s success? All the time and effort we’ve already put into building our Facebook posses. Personally I am too old and cranky to start over from scratch. I just want to be able to click a button and automatically add everyone from Facebook to Google+.

That is, of course, exactly what Facebook does not want you to do, as an open source developer named Mohamed Mansour just discovered.

[. . .]

As Mansour noted (on his Google+ page, naturally):

     “This is what happens when your extension becomes famous :sigh: Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field.

     “No worries, a new version is on the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.”

It turns out that scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Nice, eh?

Restricting your salt intake? It may not help you

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Media — Nicholas @ 12:36

Rob Lyons recommends you take the constant barrage of advice about lowering your salt intake a bit less seriously:

The advice to reduce our salt intake has been so ubiquitous for so long that it simply must be correct, right? Those white crystals may make our food taste better, but it’s a Scientific Fact that salt increases blood pressure and, therefore, cutting back on it will reduce blood pressure and we’ll live longer. Trouble is, while this seems to make sense, the evidence keeps failing to back it up — and a study published today raises further questions about this simplistic advice.

The new study is the latest Cochrane Review, an effort to revisit the evidence on a wide variety of healthcare interventions to provide clearer guidance to medical practitioners and patients. The review took in seven studies involving 6,489 patients. ‘Intensive support and encouragement to reduce salt intake did lead to a reduction in salt eaten and a small reduction in blood pressure after more than six months’, according to the article’s lead author, Professor Rod Taylor of the University of Exeter. But the real question was ‘whether this dietary change also reduced a person’s risk of dying or suffering from cardiovascular events’.

And the answer was ‘not really’. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Previous studies have come to a similar conclusion: reducing salt does seem to reduce blood pressure a little, but the effect on cardiovascular disease is so small as to be hardly worth bothering with. If your blood pressure is high enough that you’ve been prescribed drugs to reduce it, then there may be some benefit in also reducing how much salt you eat. But that’s about it.

Having it all? Not without sacrifices

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

Scott Greenfield wastes little sympathy with the plaintifss in this case:

How grand would life be if you could enjoy the perks, the glory, the importance and power of being a big shot executive with a major multinational, but got to stay home and play with the kids rather than work? I know, me too. So too the six women suing Bayer for sex discrimination.

While there are plenty of other causes of action that suggest they have some very real gripes. This [. . .] is not their strongest point:

The few women who have advanced beyond the director level and into the highest echelon of management have achieved this rank by sacrificing their personal lives and abandoning work-life balance. Female Vice President of Global Health Economics and Outcomes Research Kathleen Gondek is unmarried with no children, female Senior Director Susan Herster has no children and female Vice Presidents Shannon Campbell and Leslie North have others who serve as primary care-givers to their children.

Can you imagine the sadness at the loss of work-life balance by these women in the “highest echelon of management?” How sad. How wrong. They shouldn’t be there are all if they haven’t figured out that anyone elevated to that position is required to sacrifice their personal lives to perform the heavy burdens that come with the heavy paycheck.

Not worth it for you? That’s cool. Don’t do it. And don’t get the title, or the car, or the paycheck. But you can’t have it all. No man can. No woman can. No one can. And don’t whine about the choice you made, to go for the career at the price of a family life.

Perhaps they should call themselves the Canadian Fundraising Society?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:21

As it appears that they only have a sideline in cancer research these days:

An Ontario cancer researcher is concerned that the Canadian Cancer Society has proportionally shifted funding away from research and is spending more of its dollars on fundraising and administration costs.

“Most scientists don’t realize that the budget has been going up and up, and donations have been growing, but the budget for research has been shrinking,” said Brian Lichty, a researcher at McMaster University who is looking into treating cancer with viruses that kill tumours. “So they are surprised and disappointed when they find out that this is the case, and the trend.”

CBC’s Marketplace analyzed the Canadian Cancer Society’s financial reports dating back a dozen years. It discovered that each year, as the society raised more dollars, the proportion of money it spent on research dropped dramatically — from 40.3 per cent in 2000 to under 22 per cent in 2011.

The amount of money spent on research has increased slightly over the years, but as a portion of the Cancer Society’s growing budget, it’s almost been cut in half.

That lack of historical perspective, again

Filed under: Cancon, History, Humour, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Mark Steyn pokes some fun at Tim Naumetz who managed to confuse the Vichy regime with Vimy Ridge, in an attempt to portray Stephen Harper as a history-distorting warmonger:

As Lilley points out, it was the Liberal Defence Minister John McCallum who made Vichy “a household name” in Canadian history when he confused France’s Second World War collaborationists with Canada’s greatest First World War battle: Vimy, Vichy, what’s the diff? (The Defence Minister made his error in seeking to explain an earlier confession that he’d never heard of the Dieppe Raid.) After blog-mockery from Lilley and others, Mr Naumetz and/or his somnolent editors have belatedly corrected his piece, although without acknowledging the error, never mind addressing the broader question of the cultural void in which he’s operating. I mean, it’s not even a particularly Canadian question: If you don’t know what Vichy is, it’s hard to figure out Casablanca.

[. . .]

I have no idea who “Tim Naumetz” is. (Any relation to Admiral Naumetz, whom the Bush-Cheney warmongers singlehandedly made a household name in the Pacific?) But truly he is a child of Trudeaupia. He belongs in the same category as Miles Hopper and Jason Cherniak, apparently grown men who write stuff like:

Canadians have a right to Freedom of Expression. We have that right because the Trudeau Government negotiated and passed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Gotcha. So before 1982 Canadians had no right to Freedom of Expression? Thank you, Boy Genius. As I said of young Mr Cherniak:

One can only marvel at the near Maoist elimination of societal memory required to effect such a belief.

For these guys, Charter Day 1982 is Year Zero in Trudeaupia, and that’s that. You get a lot of that on the review pages, of course. When a critic says “This is the best sitcom since ‘Seinfeld””, all that means is “This is as far back as I remember.” But it’s the collectivization of “this is as far back as I remember” that’s so creepy about this crowd, as if they all went through the same historical vacuuming in school.

Which is presumably why it never even seems to occur to them that “this is as far back as I remember” is an inadequate argument when you’re attempting to argue that the current regime is attempting a wholesale makeover of national identity. I have no particular views on that one way or the other, but I notice that, consciously or otherwise, Mr Harper seems to have a tonal preference for pre-Trudeaupian language. For example, he welcomed Their Royal Highnesses to “our fair Dominion”. How often did that word pass Martin’s or Chrétien’s or Trudeau’s lips? I suppose Mr Naumetz would find that a bit déclassé, too, even though, in its political sense, it’s one of the few genuine Canadian contributions to the English language.

The fine distinction between actual disaster relief and mere tokenism

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:26

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Japan, many nations offered assistance and supplies to help the battered area. Some of these offers were both timely and appropriate. Others, however. . .

Stranger still was the arrival on May 11th, a full two months after the earthquake and tsunami, of Sri Lanka’s Disaster Relief Team. Some 15 officials from Colombo’s Ministry of Disaster Management came to help clear debris, via a local NGO called Peace Boat. An extremely decent gesture, likewise. But the flights to and from Japan must have cost the ministry a fortune, relatively. This follows an equally quixotic donation by the Sri Lankan government of 3m tea bags.

Then there is the matter of blankets. Since the disaster some 17 countries as well as the European Union have offered blankets as part of their emergency relief supplies. In March this made sense. Some 25,000 blankets from India, 25,000 from Canada and 30,000 from Thailand were donated within days of the disaster. But did Chile really need to deliver 2,000 blankets on May 31st, by which time the temperatures were balmy to say the least?

Earlier Chile donated 100 kilograms of rice, purchased in Japan, to the city of Minamisanriku. Yet considering the Japanese government stockpiles about one million tonnes of rice in case of a crisis—which it buys under World Trade Organisation commitments, keeps off of the market to support local farmers, and burns after it rots—Chile’s altruism was more likely symbolic than satiating.

In the aftermath of natural disasters, the media usually makes a big, hairy deal if the head of government for the region, state, province, or country isn’t immediately seen touring the area. While it makes for useful video footage for the TV news shows, it’s often counter-productive for the people whose lives have been overturned by the disaster. Heads of state, in particular, don’t just jump in a taxi and head off — there’s a huge entourage that have to precede and accompany the leader. This takes up cargo space, landing slots, and flight paths that might be more usefully devoted to providing help to the afflicted area.

It may be useful psychologically for the victims and the relief workers to see the prime minister or the governor, or whatever, but between the TV and other media folks, the dignitaries themselves, their security detachments, and the other support staff, it almost certainly delays the disaster-struck area actually recovering.

Powered by WordPress