Bill Gates is getting serious about crap

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is apparently sponsoring research to reinvent the toilet!

I think it's fabulous.

A couple of years back, BBC reported that public sanitation was considered by doctors the best medical advance in over a century. It's really sad that it's not available for a large portion of the world. Toilet technology improvements could really make inroads into that. In particular, the ability to process sewage locally, with minimal access to water infrastructure could make huge improvements in quality of life.

Apart from health considerations, the other big benefit they are looking into is use of raw sewage for energy generation (possibly using the energy for processing the waste, to recover water and minerals). Why should it only be cattle whose waste products produce power?

Staying motivated

Annapurna pointed out a nice link. 33 Ways to Stay Creative.

Fortune cookie du jour

"Be a Winner."

Glad we cleared that up. Next, I expect I'll get one that says "Buy Low, Sell High."

And the cookie was stale, too. Maybe that was the problem. Do fortunes go bad after a while?

Suffocating women

Picture worth 1000 words.

Shame on the SCOTUS.

No vacation nation

Oh yeah... and while we're at it... another reason it's not so hot being a (working) US mom: not enough vacation time.

CNN has a piece on how lame our national vacation policy is, compared with other "advanced" nations.

Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries -- from Australia to Slovenia to Japan -- that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.

Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.

But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don't have access to it, government figures show.

That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled "No-Vacation Nation" by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group.

For the record, mandatory (paid) leave is not just good for your mental health. It's a must from a computer security point of view -- it's one tool for detecting fraudulent activities -- the vacationer's backup will be exposed to the vacationer's records and may come across fishy transactions.

It's not so hot to be a US mom

In fact, "The United States ranked number 31 out of 43 developed countries," according to this article. It goes on to say,

Only 58% of U.S. kids go to preschool compared with 98% in Iceland, 95% in Norway and 82% in Australia.

Compared with other developed countries, U.S. scored dead last is in the issue of paid maternity leave, Powers said. In the U.S., the typical family leave is 12 weeks compared with six months to a year in Europe, where mothers can bond with their babies and establish good breast-feeding practices.

The CNN article is based on statistics Save the Children's 12th annual Mothers' Index, which "analyzes health, education and economic conditions for women and children in 164 countries". It is worth taking a look at. Among the other horrifying statistics, we have

• An under 5 mortality rate of 8 per 1000 live births -- only 10 "developed" countries countries do worse (places like Albania, Belarus, Romania, etc.)
• A lifetime risk of maternal death of 1 in 2100, higher than any of the 43 developed countries except Albania, the Republic of Moldova and the Russian Federation

It never fails to amaze me how we manage to be the richest country on earth, and yet take such poor care of women and children.

NY Times Paywall -- reprise

I did some experiments this afternoon. I'm pretty sure it's cookie-based, as I thought it would be.

'Nuff said.

For what it's worth, I just found Cory Doctorow's analysis/prediction of what the paywall would be, posted on the same day as mine. True to form, he came up with a much darker, deeper, hacker-oriented set of possibilities for how the paywall might work, but makes some of the same points as I did.

Ever wonder where all your energy is going?

This is a very interesting interactive graphic. It shows how much energy was produced in 2009 by various sources (e.g. solar, coal, petroleum, etc.), how it was used by various sectors (residential, industrial, commercial, transport), and how much was used vs. wasted. It's a little hard to read, at first, but stick with it.

A total of 94.5 quadrillion BTU (QBTU) was produced, of which solar was, by far, the smallest source (0.1 QBTU), and petroleum the largest (35.9 QBTU). Of these, 38.2 QBTU was used to produce electricity, with the remaining 56.3 used directly. (Though I'm a little confused -- the solar link doesn't show it being used to produce electricity.)

I think there must be some policy lessons in there, but I'm sure they won't be learned.

Le Philosophe speaks

The other day, Sidharta says to me, "In your opinion...what is life FOR?"

I thought about it for fifteen seconds. What do you answer to something like that? How do you explain that sort of thing to a kid? My first instinct was to answer something flip like "Why do you assume it's FOR anything?" My neighbor, who I told the story to later, said "It's for keeping your parents happy...that's what!"

But I held my tongue.

Instead, I said, "Why? What do YOU think it's for?"

He hesitated. "Life..." and then, I could see the wheels turning as he struggled to articulate his thoughts. "It's for learning and loving."

And I had thought about trying to answer him! What hubris!

New York Times goes paywall

Ok, so the much threatened paywall for the New York Times seems set to go in the US on March 28 (as of today, March 17, in Canada). The gist of it is that "visitors" will get free access to up to 20 articles on line per month, but after that, you will be barred from accessing articles. Except when you access them through Facebook links.

Sulzberger's letter, and the accompanying FAQ is a bit thin on the details. They don't, for example, tell us how they're going enforce that limit of 20 articles per month. I suspect that's because if they did, every script kiddie in the universe, not to mention a fair number of minimally computer-savvy readers would figure out how to circumvent it before it even gets rolled out.

I have some very fundamental questions about the new subscription based service.

Is that limit of 20 person-based? computer-based? IP address based? If it's computer based (i.e. each PC gets access to 20 articles per month), that could mean that I as an individual get access to almost nothing, if I'm sharing the computer with, say, my spouse and kids or roommates. Is that what they really had in mind? If it's individual-based, how are they going to track that I personally accessed 20 this month, without making me log in first? I can't see "visitors" wanting to register for a free account and then logging in just so they can access those 20 articles. I don't think the NYT can see that, either, so I imagine that the tracking mechanism will be minimally invasive, and therefore easy to get around. I'd have to guess it will either be cookie-based (circumvent by deleting cookies?) or IP based (which will have the unpleasant effect of limiting the number of accesses to 20 spread out over all users, but circumventable by going to a different computer -- especially good if using wireless access, I imagine).

Also, does 20 articles mean 20 distinct articles, each of which I can re-read as often as I like? Or does it mean that if I return to re-read the same article 20 times (I sometimes like Paul Krugman or Roger Cohen that much :-), I can't read anything else?

I find it very interesting that they have explicitly excluded links accessed from social media from the 20 articles/month limit. I would have to guess that there is some money flow from Facebook to the NYT -- I'd love to know what the agreement is. But the text of the letter does not provide an exhaustive list of social media sites, which would lead us to believe that it's a blanket policy.

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.

I just can't believe they'd allow something like that for Joe's Pizza and Social Networking Emporium, without some financial agreement in place. So perhaps it won't hold for some social media sites.

Guess I'd better go catch a leprechaun, to start paying for digital subscriptions!