Microsoft’s Own Social Network Under Development

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

As an avid Apple afficianado and advocate of all things open source, my stance on Microsoft is usually clear-cut: I don’t care for it.  Everything about Microsoft’s business practices rubs me wrong.  With that said, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft has been toying with its own little pet social network since the beginning of the year.

Well “social” might not be quite the right term for Microsoft’s baby network, which is called TownSquare.  Consider it a more elite community of Microsoft nerds.  Perhaps a better term would be the anti-social network.  Townsquare is an intranet-based social network currently open to all Microsoft employees, and shares many similarities with Facebook.

All the normal social goodies - pictures, bios, updates, feed are included on TownSquare for each user and shared with the Microsoft community.  Additionally, Microsoft employees can see when documents and files on the intranet have been updated  or modified.  The whole thing is designed on enterprise newsfeeds to compile various public information about employees on the network.

Microsoft is also sharing TownSquare with a group of select consumers who are responsible for testing Townsquare.  All the testing and restructuring can’t possibly be for Microsoft’s own good time, though; it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft did a revision or two and marketed the intranetwork social structure to businesses.  As one of the main features is updating users on document and data revision on the intranet, many businesses could, no doubt, benefit from such advances.

Which brings me back to my original issue with Microsoft.  What could be a fantastic tool developed by some no-name third party developer will undoubtedly be marketed for sale by Microsoft to small business owners who will buy into the product simply because it has Microsoft’s stamp of approval.  If anything, I would be delighted to see a third party developer replicate the social structure for viewing profiles and updating intranet-public documents as open-source freeware, available to all.

The entire reason I believe that Microsoft will continue to spiral downward is because the who’s who in Microsoft’s management will never be able to adapt to the new, very open style of program sharing and development, and leave behind the monopoly mindset. In the end, Microsoft will have to buy into a little Darwinian theory and adapt and evolve, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

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Developers Praise Android at Google I/O

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Developers praised the programming experience and the potential of Google’s Android mobile platform at the Google I/O conference as the company emphasized its flexibility and showed cool new features.

There was a lot of buzz around Android at the conference, which covers all areas of Google development, and an “Introduction to Android” session was full. Google wants the technology to open up the mobile industry, where developers have faced hurdles getting applications ported to many different operating systems and approved by carriers. But Android will enter the fray as just one mobile platform among many, including the Apple iPhone SDK.

The latest prototype version of Android drew comparisons to the iPhone after it was demonstrated during a keynote session Wednesday morning. Google showed a home screen with colorful widgets similar to the Apple iPhone’s, plus a compass and a status bar that can be pulled down in any application to view messages. The compass, which could be built into a handset along with an accelerometer, would be able to orient maps according to which way the user was facing. As demonstrated with Google Maps Street View, it could show the exact view that a user was looking at, with street-name and address information built in to the map. Videos of the demonstrations were posted by the Android Community blog.

Aside from features on high-end phones, Android will reach far more people than the iPhone platform, if it meets its potential, said Atif Iqbal Chaudhry, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who attended the conference. The platform could be extended to inexpensive phones with a smaller set of capabilities for average consumers, he said.

Android is an easy way to begin developing a mobile application, because Google provides all the pieces required, unlike some other platforms, such as PalmOS, Chaudhry said. He has been developing location-based applications through the PC-based emulator software for Android and said he is looking forward to trying out the software in the field on a real handset.

Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance are pushing Android as more open than other mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Developers won’t need to get Android applications certified by anyone, Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen told the Android breakout session. In addition, there won’t be any hidden APIs accessible only to handset makers or mobile operators, he said.

Developers will also be able to modify core elements of the interface and come out with replacements for the basic building blocks that come with Android, such as the address book, Chen said. Even the look of the home-screen widgets will be customizable. For users, that will mean being able to control their own experience by downloading their favorite third-party versions, Chen said.

Google expects the first Android-based devices to hit the market in the second half of this year and will make the finished software platform available to developers after that, so anyone can create their own phone platform, Chen said. The core elements of it will be released under the Apache open-source license.

Until all parts of Android are complete, Google won’t start translating the platform and documentation into languages other than English, Chen said in response to a question. The team doesn’t want translations to lag behind the current information, he said. But he welcomed an attendee to help Spanish-speaking developers by translating materials or participating in message boards.

Developers praised the platform, in which applications are written in the Java programming language and then compiled for the Dalvik virtual machine.

“It’s sweet,” said Free Beachler, owner of Longevity Software, in Boulder, Colorado. Beachler wrote an entry for the Android Developer Challenge, a competition to find the 50 best Android applications. His software, designed to store itineraries, contacts, destinations and other travel information for users on their phones, didn’t make the top 50. But he’s working on two projects for Android Developer Challenge 2, which will take place after handsets are out and the platform are complete.

Beachler, a Web developer, said it took time to learn to use Android but once he did it was logically organized and easy to use. He compared it to languages such as PHP for Web development.

Enterprises are asking R Systems International, a software services company in El Dorado, California, to write applications that work on any mobile platform, said Harsh Verma, vice president for global innovative research at R Systems. One way to do this is on browsers, but there are problems with that, including differences among mobile browsers and the need for a network connection, he said. Verma hasn’t yet started working with Android but believes it could reach a broad range of devices.

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How Fiction Works

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.

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Facing the acid test

Monday, April 7th, 2008

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75 per cent of
net surfers (although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has
never been close to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s
poor standards compliance causes significant extra work for web
designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

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How Fiction Works

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.

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Health site blocked 'abortion' searches

Monday, April 7th, 2008

BALTIMORE A prominent public health school has restored the word “abortion” as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.The restriction on the POPLINE Web site - “population information online” - had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.”I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately,” Klag said in a statement. “The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.”USAID officials did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment Saturday.POPLINE is a free database containing citations and abstracts of scientific articles, reports and books about population, family planning and related health issues. It contains nearly 360,000 records.Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, applauded Klag’s action, saying the restriction denied “researchers, students and individuals on all sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information.”Wayne Shields, president and CEO of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, said in a statement that restricting access to the information could possibly jeopardize patient care, because it prevented doctors and women from linking to scientific literature on the topic.”Removing abortion as a search term on a publicly funded reproductive health database is clearly a decision driven by ideology - and not based on the medical or scientific needs of the reproductive health professional community the database exists to serve,” Shields said.

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Health site blocked 'abortion' searches

Monday, April 7th, 2008

BALTIMORE A prominent public health school has restored the word “abortion” as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.The restriction on the POPLINE Web site - “population information online” - had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.”I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately,” Klag said in a statement. “The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.”USAID officials did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment Saturday.POPLINE is a free database containing citations and abstracts of scientific articles, reports and books about population, family planning and related health issues. It contains nearly 360,000 records.Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, applauded Klag’s action, saying the restriction denied “researchers, students and individuals on all sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information.”Wayne Shields, president and CEO of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, said in a statement that restricting access to the information could possibly jeopardize patient care, because it prevented doctors and women from linking to scientific literature on the topic.”Removing abortion as a search term on a publicly funded reproductive health database is clearly a decision driven by ideology - and not based on the medical or scientific needs of the reproductive health professional community the database exists to serve,” Shields said.

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Facing the acid test

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

DEEP in the bowels of a Las Vegas hotel, a smiley face and the
words “Hello World” display on a web page. Applause breaks out. The
page is called the Acid2 Browser Test, and the web browser is a
preview of Internet Explorer 8, presented by its platform
architect, Chris Wilson.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” says a member of the
audience to more applause from about 3000 web designers and
developers at the Mix08 conference, where Microsoft showed its
latest internet technology.
The Acid2 page (webstandards.org/action/acid2/) was created by
the Web Standards Project to test whether a browser conforms to the
official standards for describing page layout, mainly focusing on
cascading style sheets (CSS).
The reason for the applause is twofold: first, until now
Microsoft’s web browser, used by an estimated 75% of net surfers
(although Firefox has been eroding that hold), has never been close
to passing the test; second, Internet Explorer’s poor standards
compliance causes significant extra work for web designers.
When users navigate to a web page, they expect it to look and
work the same whatever the browser or operating system they are
using. Achieving this is difficult. Different browsers display the
same page differently, with IE often the worst offender.
Web developers now hope they do not have to insert conditional
code to account for these differences, but can deliver a standard
page to all browsers. “CSS support in IE8 looks thus far to be
very, very promising,” says Eric Meyer, an independent expert in
the field. “It’s very important, because the level of CSS support
in IE7 and IE6 has served as a brake on advanced CSS adoption by
authors, limiting them to less-advanced techniques and
capabilities.”
Internet Explorer has a curious history. Six versions were
released between 1995 and 2001, the time of the “browser wars” with
Netscape. Microsoft won the war and then did not release another
major version of the browser for five years - long enough for it to
become thoroughly outdated.
IE’s CSS implementation fell far behind that of other popular
browsers. In late 2006 Microsoft released IE7, which fixed some
problems but still lagged behind its rivals. “Differences between
browsers simply waste too much developer time,” says Dean
Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, without
mentioning the extent to which Microsoft created the problem.
Mr Hachamovitch, who has led the Explorer team since 2003,
explains why Microsoft took so long to address these deficiencies.
“It comes down to what we were doing with our time,” he says.
“Between 2001 and 2003 we were building what you experience now as
Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.”
These technologies display not HTML, the language of web pages,
but XAML, Microsoft’s proprietary code for creating rich visual
content.
“In 2003 and 2004 we were making IE secure,” he says, referring
to the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Security remained the theme in IE7. The dilemma was that fixing
bugs introduced compatibility problems. “You can’t just flick a
switch and have all the browsers in the world change, or have all
the servers and services in the world change,” Mr Hachamovitch
says. The result was that some websites looked worse than before,
because they detected that IE was accessing them and delivering
content that took into account presumed peculiarities.
Microsoft’s answer was to build “compatibility modes” into IE8.
The manner in which this was done remains controversial. The
question was whether to default to the IE7 compatible mode, or
default to the better standards mode, Mr Hachamovitch says. “(We
found in) releasing IE7 that web developers were slow to modify
their sites. We wanted to keep the web working.”
Microsoft initially announced that IE8 would behave by default
like IE7. Page designers would have to include special code to turn
on IE8’s standards support. The decision was greeted with a hail of
protest because it might perpetuate a non-standard web.
Earlier this month, Mr Hachamovitch announced that Microsoft had
changed its mind. “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default,
interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it
can.”
Apparently the key to that change of heart was a separate
strategic announcement last month, covering what Microsoft calls
interoperability principles and promising “open connections to its
products, support for industry standards and data portability”.
According to Mr Hachamovitch, Microsoft now had “a more
interoperable way; a more compatible way”.
It sounded good, but what about browser scripting. The context
is important. Mr Hachamovitch had already stated that Microsoft
spent three years neglecting IE for the sake of a more proprietary
technology, which is now appearing on the web as a browser plug-in
called Silverlight.
This is similar in some ways to Adobe’s Flash, and supports rich
multimedia effects within web pages as well as the ability to run
applications written in Microsoft’s .NET Framework.
Silverlight and Flash applications in effect bypass the browser.
Web standards advocates are wary of them because they replace the
open web with content that depends on a proprietary plug-in.
The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the cross-platform Firefox
browser, prefers to upgrade the capabilities of the browser itself.
A key component of this is JavaScript, the programming language
that runs in the browser and that is standardised by ECMA, the
European standards body, under the name ECMAScript. Mozilla is keen
to see the current JavaScript upgraded to a far more powerful
version called ECMAScript 4.0.
“Why do we care about ECMAScript 4.0?” asks Mozilla’s
vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. The answer is that
JavaScript is the language of the net. We want to keep pushing that
technology forward to make it easier for people to build bigger,
faster, more secure websites.”
Asked if Microsoft will implement ECMAScript 4.0, Mr
Hachamovitch prevaricates and talks about competing demands on the
IE development team.
“Right now there isn’t really an ECMAScript 4 offering to
implement, there is an ECMAscript for discussion.” he says.
The Guardian

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No guarantees for Google in its mobile mission

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

With half the world’s population soon owning a mobile phone, the opportunity to reach more people on the web via a mobile device is huge. Research firm Gartner predicts that worldwide mobile advertising revenue will grow from less than $1bn last year to $11bn in 2011. Google has already been adapting its web search, mapping service, and advertising tools to work on mobile phones. And it’s even bidding in a US auction of wireless spectrum and developing software for mobile phones.

The company has also spearheaded the Open Handset Alliance ?which advocates open standards for mobile software ?in an effort to co-ordinate its work with that of handset makers, chip developers, application developers and mobile-phone operators.

Because Google has dominated search and advertising on the traditional internet, the expectation is that the company will also take the mobile market by storm using the same tools and the same strategies. But shoehorning its existing web tools and applications onto a tiny mobile phone isn’t going to be easy. If Google is not careful, it may find itself chasing some new, innovative start-up that figures out how to out-Google Google in mobile.

“In some ways Google is now the incumbent,” said Farhad Divecha, director of the search and mobile marketing firm AccuraCast. “Their search products and advertising tools aren’t the best right now, so there’s a good chance someone could come in and do it better.”

Back to basics with search Google first came on the scene a decade ago with a new search algorithm that could serve up better and more relevant content to users than had ever been done before. So while other companies, such as Alta Vista and Yahoo, had been in the search business for years before Google came along, it was this giant leap forward in the user experience that catapulted the company to success.

It is not surprising that search was one of the first tools Google adapted for mobile phones. And by most accounts the tool works fine. When used with the Google Maps application, mobile users can even search for local restaurants and get directions to each establishment.

But critics of Google’s mobile search tool say its results aren’t always as relevant as results from a desktop Google search. Another common complaint is that Google provides search results from regular web pages and tries to trans-code them for mobile phones. Often these sites don’t render well on certain phones.

Yahoo Go, a similar application, is considered more robust and more user-friendly than Google’s search tool.

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Letters to the Editor

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

NUCLEAR ENERGYAsk for the full clean up
Do you remember the nuclear waste deal in 1995? Colorful ads promised this nuclear deal would “say no to leaving waste over the aquifer.” They promised if we import tons of foreign spent nuclear fuel, this deal would “guarantee that the federal government must come up with the money to clean-up existing INEL waste for disposal outside our state.”The final plan is out for official public comment now, quietly released during the holiday season. The “preferred alternative” #4 does not come even close to removing 10 percent of the buried plutonium.Why is the state not demanding alternative #5, which removes “all” the buried plutonium?The final plan concludes a full clean-up is too expensive! Have you ever seen an Idaho politician refuse $8 billion in nuclear jobs? Why are the politicians refusing to demand a full clean-up?Do you remember the infamous Pit 9? In 1993, that was chosen as the worst plutonium pit. Now, this final plan cherry picks just a very small portion of Pit 9!When God blessed Idaho, there was no man-made plutonium in our water. Please call your silent politicians. Ask for the full clean-up proposed in Alternative 5 at Brandt.Meagher@icp.doe.gov.DR. PETER RICKARDS, D.P.M., Twin FallsWhere did the West go? Keep Idaho green
Coming up nuclear plants?What ever happened to “green” - windmills, solar and vouchers for fuel cell-natural gas homes, buildings and electric cars and trucks? “Keep Idaho green,” don’t put us, our aquifers, the Tetons, Yellowstone, our farms, our tourism under a dark cloud, or worse a disaster.We have to ask, would housing costs go down, sales, would people move away? What ever happened to common sense … smelling the roses, or our Snake River, the gas? Where did the West go?Help save Idaho, all us Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, Christians and non-Christians! It’s a no-brainer to my way of thinking. We haven’t yet even used “traditional” energy sources. Slam the door on nuclear power.”Keep Idaho green.”MONTY STIPP, MeridianHEALTH CARESave money, go to Mexico for dental work
Imagine a country where the majority of the people have no health insurance and they cannot afford to go to the doctor or the dentist.Image a country where the majority of people hope they die before they have to go to a nursing home because of the cost.The last four years I have been going to the dentist in Algodones, Mexico. I was happy with my local dentist, but I could not afford the cost. I am almost 70 years old, my teeth are worn down and I had a few teeth missing. This fall I went to Mexico to a dentist that I have 100 percent confidence in, and got 28 new porcelain crowns, including three bridges. The whole process took three days. The total cost was less than what my daughter paid a specialist to get one crown. I now have teeth better than my originals.Millions of Americans go to Mexico for major operations, dental work, and prescription drugs because they cannot afford the price in the US. Millions of Mexicans come to this country and go to our hospital emergency rooms and receive free health care. What kind of country would let this happen?If you need dental work, check out this Web page, www.sanidentalgroup.cjb.net.GARY WILLSON, ReubensEAGLE FOOTHILLSCity Council put best interests of Eagle first
Power (city voters) and knowledge (North Ada County Foothills Association) helped lead City Council to approve a far more responsible M3 Company Foothills development agreement than what Council was ready to approve just two months ago. The Nov. 6 Eagle city election results proved that knowledgeable Foothills’ advocates are not a “relatively small group of critics” with a “significant self-serving negative bias that does not truly represent breadth of the community.” (Councilman Bandy’s October campaign quote.)Congratulations and gratitude go to John Petrovsky’s NACFA for pursuing a course of public leadership, persistence and informed advocacy for a responsibly managed foothills growth plan, during the past five years at the county and city levels. NACFA stepped in where elected city officials feared to tread with developers.Gratitude goes as well to the recent successful and influential Preserve Eagle campaign platform. City Council subsequently switched to damage control mode to regain leadership credibility on the major issue of city growth. Thanks go to Council for deciding on Nov. 20 and Dec. 11 to put the best interests of the city of Eagle first rather than those of a Foothills developer. Well done, City Council.PATRICIA MINKIEWICZ, EagleBARACK OBAMAStop spreading political rumors as facts
Most will agree that politics is too partisan; but what to do about it? First, stop spreading “Patriot Police” rumors as fact. Clarice Wright stated that Barack Obama attended a radical Muslim school as a child, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance with his hands at his side, his back to the American flag.CNN investigated the charge of attending a radical Muslim school, a “madrassa.” Not true. He attended the Basuki school, a general school, from 1969-1971. Students dress in school uniforms and teachers in Western attire.A photograph of Sen. Obama’s alleged pledge infraction was taken on Sept. 16, 2007, at Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry festivities in Iowa. The photo was taken during the National Anthem not a recitation of the pledge. The area was covered with American flags so while he had his back to the one in the picture he was facing a flag as were the others in the picture.To diminish the partisan nature of our system, Clarice, stop spreading false rumors. When anyone allows themselves to be used by the “Patriot Police,” partisanship is magnified. So what will it be? Furthering the problem or becoming part of the solution?ED LONSDALE, Boise

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