kw: book reviews, nonfiction, media, social media, news, fake news, sharing
Everything has a life cycle. I can't recall what I expected when I saw All Your Friends Like This: How Social Networks Took Over News. It has three authors, Hal Crawford, Andrew Hunter, and Domagoj Filipovic, who were colleagues at nine.com.au, formerly ninemsn, an Australian online news website that is a lot like Google News might be if it were on its own.
Folks in the vaunted Northern hemisphere pay little attention to what goes on "down under", but these fellows appear to have gotten a finger on the pulse of a generation, learned what it means, and run with it. How do you measure the relative effectiveness of a new style of media? There is the obvious metric: newspapers are going broke, broadcast media are scrambling to keep from dropping off the ratings chart, newsroom staffs are shrinking, and even mediocre podcasts are apparently reaching larger audiences than large TV networks.
These guys wanted something more, and hit upon measuring Shares on FaceBook and related vehicles (I used to think the "News Feed" at FB was a bit of a joke, but I've noticed that its news content is growing). They produced a site (or method?) called Share Wars, and Mr. Filipovic developed a software system, Likeable, that scrapes social media news feeds to gather sharing statistics. It was available for public access until mid-2016, but is now in the background of the trends they report.
The book chronicles these aspects of the replacement of "push" media with "personal push" media, driven by the Share buttons we find on every web site purporting to convey newsworthy items. Publishing is now so easy and pervasive, it has of course greatly increased the production and distribution of lies and scams including "fake news" (which isn't news at all: a lie by any other name is still a lie). When one of the authors spoke of his "War of the Worlds" moment, I realized that "fake news" has been around as long as "real news".
I don't know what else to say. It is a very interesting book, but didn't resonate with me the way I'd hoped. Buggy whips are still being manufactured, but as a specialty item for history buffs and collectors of horse-drawn vehicles. The Times (of wherever) will be with us for a long time, but the introduction of Sharing has changed the landscape of all media, forever, or at least until something even more compelling arrives. Maybe Crawford, Hunter and Filipovic can help us see the next big change coming.
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Burning their own book
kw: islamic extremists, news
The news is full of reports about troubles in Afghanistan over a few copies of the Q'uran being burned. Two servicemen were killed earlier today in the violence.
Isn't it strange...the Muslim population of New York City is 2-3%, and there were more than fifty Muslims among the victims who died when the twin towers were destroyed in 2001. Is it reasonable to assume that most of them, or perhaps all, had a copy of the Q'uran either on their person or in their office? The collapse of the WTC destroyed them all. Nobody said a peep about that, or about the roughly 2,000 Holy Bibles that were destroyed in the same event…and of course there were a couple hundred Jews killed, and many of them would have had scriptures handy for their reference.
The Q'uran is worthy of respect, as are the Torah and the Bible. But to go into a killing rage over any such book being destroyed, well, doesn't it prove that the Muslims (at least in Afghanistan) are idolators?
The news is full of reports about troubles in Afghanistan over a few copies of the Q'uran being burned. Two servicemen were killed earlier today in the violence.
Isn't it strange...the Muslim population of New York City is 2-3%, and there were more than fifty Muslims among the victims who died when the twin towers were destroyed in 2001. Is it reasonable to assume that most of them, or perhaps all, had a copy of the Q'uran either on their person or in their office? The collapse of the WTC destroyed them all. Nobody said a peep about that, or about the roughly 2,000 Holy Bibles that were destroyed in the same event…and of course there were a couple hundred Jews killed, and many of them would have had scriptures handy for their reference.
The Q'uran is worthy of respect, as are the Torah and the Bible. But to go into a killing rage over any such book being destroyed, well, doesn't it prove that the Muslims (at least in Afghanistan) are idolators?
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The bid is 8.7, do I hear 10?
kw: news, biology, evolution
Just a week ago (8/23/2011) it was announced by scientists at Census of Marine Life that the new, best estimate of the number of eukaryote species on Earth is 8.7 million, distributed as shown here in a graphic from ScienceDaily.
(Some group the Chromista among the Protozoa. All Chromista are photosynthetic, and colored golden or beige by pigments in addition to Chlophyll a and c, which are green.)
One detail in the announcement is that the estimate is "plus or minus 1.3 million". That is just enough that, if the estimate is a tad low, it could reach as high as 10 million species. I think it very unlikely that the estimate is high, and in fact, I tend to believe that 8-10 million is still quite an underestimate.
A few times (I don't have the references), scientists have fogged an entire tree in a rain forest with insecticide, then meticulously counted and classified every insect that fell out. There are typically 300 species just of beetles, and most of these are reported as "endemic to the tree". That is a dry way of saying that each such experiment caused the extinction of 100-200 species of beetle, because the entire species lived in that single tree.
How many trees are there in a typical acre of rain forest? A hundred or so? Can it be that every square mile of Amazon or Congo forest is host to nine or ten million beetle species? I think it quite possible. Then there are the ant species, and there could be ten or twenty species of little ant that are "endemic" to a single tree. There's another million animals species per square mile.
Yes, I think 8.7 million is still a bit of an underestimate.
Just a week ago (8/23/2011) it was announced by scientists at Census of Marine Life that the new, best estimate of the number of eukaryote species on Earth is 8.7 million, distributed as shown here in a graphic from ScienceDaily.
(Some group the Chromista among the Protozoa. All Chromista are photosynthetic, and colored golden or beige by pigments in addition to Chlophyll a and c, which are green.)
One detail in the announcement is that the estimate is "plus or minus 1.3 million". That is just enough that, if the estimate is a tad low, it could reach as high as 10 million species. I think it very unlikely that the estimate is high, and in fact, I tend to believe that 8-10 million is still quite an underestimate.
A few times (I don't have the references), scientists have fogged an entire tree in a rain forest with insecticide, then meticulously counted and classified every insect that fell out. There are typically 300 species just of beetles, and most of these are reported as "endemic to the tree". That is a dry way of saying that each such experiment caused the extinction of 100-200 species of beetle, because the entire species lived in that single tree.
How many trees are there in a typical acre of rain forest? A hundred or so? Can it be that every square mile of Amazon or Congo forest is host to nine or ten million beetle species? I think it quite possible. Then there are the ant species, and there could be ten or twenty species of little ant that are "endemic" to a single tree. There's another million animals species per square mile.
Yes, I think 8.7 million is still a bit of an underestimate.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
The worst remaining
kw: psychopaths, news
The neighborhood had a 2-day internet outage, so a few potential posts have gone by the wayside. If I don't write down ideas I forget them.
In Friday's paper the front page had a quote by Muammar Gadhafi (the name is still spelled several ways in the press) of Libya: "People who do not love me do not deserve to live." Assuming this is an accurate translation, it is clear proof that the man is a psychopath, of the sort that must be removed from the human race. This statement is absolutely characteristic of the way the worst humans think. May all such be eliminated from the gene pool!
It is very rare for me to advocate assassination, but in this case it is more than justified, and I do so without a trace of guilt.
The neighborhood had a 2-day internet outage, so a few potential posts have gone by the wayside. If I don't write down ideas I forget them.
In Friday's paper the front page had a quote by Muammar Gadhafi (the name is still spelled several ways in the press) of Libya: "People who do not love me do not deserve to live." Assuming this is an accurate translation, it is clear proof that the man is a psychopath, of the sort that must be removed from the human race. This statement is absolutely characteristic of the way the worst humans think. May all such be eliminated from the gene pool!
It is very rare for me to advocate assassination, but in this case it is more than justified, and I do so without a trace of guilt.
Friday, October 08, 2010
Newer news
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, news, social trends
What happened to these? Gone the way of the buggy whip, for sure! You can still buy a buggy whip, particularly in Amish country, and you can still obtain a Mergenthaler Linotype, if you want to produce printed text the way it was done from 1886 to about 1975. But technology has advanced, and few people alive today have even seen one of these, though our libraries are full of older books and other materials that were typeset on them.
One of my father's first jobs, as a teenager, was to hand-set the headlines for a newspaper, in the compositor's corner, where the rest of the room was full of Linotype operators. My first paying work was as a paperboy, from age 11 to 15, when I could get a "real" job. We paperboys (and a girl or two) got the chance to visit the newspaper production floor yearly to Ooh and Aah over the machines. In the 1950s, Linotypes and roll/web presses still ruled.
Now we can all publish at will, using MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or OpenOffice Writer and a laser printer or inkjet printer. Or we can do virtual publishing, like blogging, tweeting, or filling our Facebook Wall with our thoughts. It may not be long before lithographic offset printing is completely superseded. If you take a daily newspaper, it is still printed on a roll/web press, though the ink plates are produced by phototypesetting machinery. But there aren't any 11-year-old paper carriers any more; they've joined the Dodo.
What about this guy? Also going the way of the buggy whip, or of the Dodo? Not so fast! News is changing, and changing fast, but we still need someone to gather it and write it up. There will probably always be a place for the professional journalist, but they are getting competition from the amateurs, and the thought of journalism as a "day job" is definitely on the way out, even though the profession itself remains with us.
Journalistic trends and technology's impact on the news form the core of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get by Ken Doctor. The author has formulated his thesis as twelve "laws"; as listed on the back cover of the book:
First, Darwinian content: The news has escaped the newsroom, and is all over the Web. Stewart Brand once made complementary statements: "Information wants to be free" and "Information wants to be expensive". Based on the proverb that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, once information is produced and distributed to a few, it is bound to get out to all. On the other hand, producing information is not free. If it takes someone a couple of hours to gather the material for a short news item, and another hour to type it up and proofread it (something not many will do), who is going to pay a few hundred dollars for the time spent? Bloggers like me write because we love to write, and enjoy the interaction from readers, in the form of comments and e-mails. But I have a day job to pay my bills. If I had to live from my writing, I'd firstly monetize my blog, and you'd begin seeing banner ads or pop-ups, so I could get click-through revenue. I'd do a few other things differently also, such as write freelance material for magazines.
But someone, paid or not, wrote 72,000 news articles containing the word "recession" in the past hour, according to Google News, which I just checked a few minutes ago. Making the same search at Yahoo News yields only 137 articles, but they have been curated and edited, rather than aggregated by a search algorithm. Even 137 is an overwhelming number. No matter how a certain four or five stories make their way to the top of Google or Yahoo's list, those are all I am likely to read. On average, among avid readers such as myself, that is all anybody is going to read. The rest are "selected against", in Darwinian terms, and their ideas, worthy or not, die a-borning.
Many of those articles may be from "citizen reporters" (the Pro-Am model), but at least some of them were written for pay. They are free to me because some advertisers are hoping I'll click on their ads, which tightly surround the list of search results, and maybe buy their stuff.
So if I can get all of this stuff free, why do I still subscribe to the daily newspaper? To tell the truth, I spend more time on the daily crossword, Sudoku and cryptogram than I do reading. But I do read, and I read mostly from the Local section. My wife, not a puzzle worker, spends about an hour a day, and reads mostly national and world news from the A section. She tells me what she finds interesting there, so I let her read first.
This brings us to local reporting and special interest reporting. Back at Google News, if I enter "recession" and the city where I live, this more focused search brings back just eight articles written in the past week (and none for today, yet). Now that I can read. Half of these articles, or edited portions, are likely to wind up in the newspaper, where I'll read them anyway. So focused content is of interest to me, such that I pay for it. This is likely to continue, which is what "Itch the Niche" is all about. If the Google Search robot has been gathering my searches (I use three computers, so it is harder for them), it knows my interests by now, and can target news stories to me. Or I can be nice and go to the Google News Agent and get articles e-mailed to me about search items of interest to me (I wonder if they'll ever figure out the Hong Kong connection, though). By the way, "niche" does not rhyme with "itch", though the author seems to think it does. It rhymes with "wish". But I guess the alliteration was too good to pass up.
Finally, as the giant news operations have been breaking up, journalists have been returning to the 1880's model of working as a stringer, doing all freelance reporting. This is the Darwinian model of the journalism job market. How is an honest reporter to make a buck? The best ones are getting richer than if they'd kept their day job, but most of them are scraping by while doing their own marketing, which takes time away from writing. They are also blogging and tweeting up a storm. The biggest category of blogs has always been News or Current Events (depending on which blog aggregator you look at).
We are part way (probably much less than halfway) through a transition, but the current shake-out is this:
What happened to these? Gone the way of the buggy whip, for sure! You can still buy a buggy whip, particularly in Amish country, and you can still obtain a Mergenthaler Linotype, if you want to produce printed text the way it was done from 1886 to about 1975. But technology has advanced, and few people alive today have even seen one of these, though our libraries are full of older books and other materials that were typeset on them.One of my father's first jobs, as a teenager, was to hand-set the headlines for a newspaper, in the compositor's corner, where the rest of the room was full of Linotype operators. My first paying work was as a paperboy, from age 11 to 15, when I could get a "real" job. We paperboys (and a girl or two) got the chance to visit the newspaper production floor yearly to Ooh and Aah over the machines. In the 1950s, Linotypes and roll/web presses still ruled.
Now we can all publish at will, using MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or OpenOffice Writer and a laser printer or inkjet printer. Or we can do virtual publishing, like blogging, tweeting, or filling our Facebook Wall with our thoughts. It may not be long before lithographic offset printing is completely superseded. If you take a daily newspaper, it is still printed on a roll/web press, though the ink plates are produced by phototypesetting machinery. But there aren't any 11-year-old paper carriers any more; they've joined the Dodo.
What about this guy? Also going the way of the buggy whip, or of the Dodo? Not so fast! News is changing, and changing fast, but we still need someone to gather it and write it up. There will probably always be a place for the professional journalist, but they are getting competition from the amateurs, and the thought of journalism as a "day job" is definitely on the way out, even though the profession itself remains with us.Journalistic trends and technology's impact on the news form the core of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get by Ken Doctor. The author has formulated his thesis as twelve "laws"; as listed on the back cover of the book:
- In the age of Darwinian content, you are your own editor
- The Digital Dozen will dominate
- Local: Remap and reload
- The old news world is gone—get over it
- The Great Gathering; or, the fine art of using other people's content
- It's a pro-am world
- Reporters become bloggers
- Itch the Niche
- Apply the 10 percent rule
- Media learn how to market, marketers learn how to make the most of media
- For journalists' jobs, it's back to the future
- Mind the gaps
First, Darwinian content: The news has escaped the newsroom, and is all over the Web. Stewart Brand once made complementary statements: "Information wants to be free" and "Information wants to be expensive". Based on the proverb that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, once information is produced and distributed to a few, it is bound to get out to all. On the other hand, producing information is not free. If it takes someone a couple of hours to gather the material for a short news item, and another hour to type it up and proofread it (something not many will do), who is going to pay a few hundred dollars for the time spent? Bloggers like me write because we love to write, and enjoy the interaction from readers, in the form of comments and e-mails. But I have a day job to pay my bills. If I had to live from my writing, I'd firstly monetize my blog, and you'd begin seeing banner ads or pop-ups, so I could get click-through revenue. I'd do a few other things differently also, such as write freelance material for magazines.
But someone, paid or not, wrote 72,000 news articles containing the word "recession" in the past hour, according to Google News, which I just checked a few minutes ago. Making the same search at Yahoo News yields only 137 articles, but they have been curated and edited, rather than aggregated by a search algorithm. Even 137 is an overwhelming number. No matter how a certain four or five stories make their way to the top of Google or Yahoo's list, those are all I am likely to read. On average, among avid readers such as myself, that is all anybody is going to read. The rest are "selected against", in Darwinian terms, and their ideas, worthy or not, die a-borning.
Many of those articles may be from "citizen reporters" (the Pro-Am model), but at least some of them were written for pay. They are free to me because some advertisers are hoping I'll click on their ads, which tightly surround the list of search results, and maybe buy their stuff.
So if I can get all of this stuff free, why do I still subscribe to the daily newspaper? To tell the truth, I spend more time on the daily crossword, Sudoku and cryptogram than I do reading. But I do read, and I read mostly from the Local section. My wife, not a puzzle worker, spends about an hour a day, and reads mostly national and world news from the A section. She tells me what she finds interesting there, so I let her read first.
This brings us to local reporting and special interest reporting. Back at Google News, if I enter "recession" and the city where I live, this more focused search brings back just eight articles written in the past week (and none for today, yet). Now that I can read. Half of these articles, or edited portions, are likely to wind up in the newspaper, where I'll read them anyway. So focused content is of interest to me, such that I pay for it. This is likely to continue, which is what "Itch the Niche" is all about. If the Google Search robot has been gathering my searches (I use three computers, so it is harder for them), it knows my interests by now, and can target news stories to me. Or I can be nice and go to the Google News Agent and get articles e-mailed to me about search items of interest to me (I wonder if they'll ever figure out the Hong Kong connection, though). By the way, "niche" does not rhyme with "itch", though the author seems to think it does. It rhymes with "wish". But I guess the alliteration was too good to pass up.
Finally, as the giant news operations have been breaking up, journalists have been returning to the 1880's model of working as a stringer, doing all freelance reporting. This is the Darwinian model of the journalism job market. How is an honest reporter to make a buck? The best ones are getting richer than if they'd kept their day job, but most of them are scraping by while doing their own marketing, which takes time away from writing. They are also blogging and tweeting up a storm. The biggest category of blogs has always been News or Current Events (depending on which blog aggregator you look at).
We are part way (probably much less than halfway) through a transition, but the current shake-out is this:
- Tweets yield the most immediate news.
- Blogs are next with more content and sometimes decent writing.
- News aggregation sites archive either the best (AP and Yahoo, for example) or nearly everything (Google, the Hoover vacuum of content), in case we missed a story on Day 1.
- By the time a story hits newsprint or the radio or TV, it is pretty old news in today's culture.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
More on sleeping the weight off
kw: dieting, news, sleep
A bit more accurate information has been released about the Annals of Internal Medicine article regarding sleep deprivation and weight/fat loss. The study is termed a "crossover" study, meaning some participants slept the longer hours the first weeks and the others did so the latter weeks. That was not made clear in earlier news items. This is a key point, because it removes one possible cause of confusion. Please see my post this morning for the rest of what I said about it.
A bit more accurate information has been released about the Annals of Internal Medicine article regarding sleep deprivation and weight/fat loss. The study is termed a "crossover" study, meaning some participants slept the longer hours the first weeks and the others did so the latter weeks. That was not made clear in earlier news items. This is a key point, because it removes one possible cause of confusion. Please see my post this morning for the rest of what I said about it.
Sleeping the weight off
kw: news, dieting, sleep
The article is titled Dieting? More Sleep Helps Burn More Fat. It is one of about 700 news articles on this topic in the past day or so that are based on a study reported in Annals of Internal Medicine (I would link to the article, but it is embargoed until the issue goes on sale).
Ten volunteers on a low-calorie diet spent four weeks confined to a lab. For two weeks, they slept about 8.5 hours nightly, and for two they slept 5.5 hours. The key finding? During the latter two weeks the volunteers lost twice as much lean mass (muscle) and half as much fat, as compared to the first two weeks. The total loss each two-week period was the same, about 3kg. One more effect was that during the low-sleep weeks, the subjects reported feeling more hunger, and they had raised levels of ghrelin, a "hunger" hormone that also causes fat retention. It is not stated whether the study participants had the opportunity to exercise while confined to the lab.
Naturally, I find this upsetting. I have been reducing by dieting all Summer, and have so far lost about 12kg. I sleep very little, but that has long been true. A "good night's sleep" for me is 6h, and 7h is superb. I haven't slept an 8h night in thirty years.
In the article linked above, they do mention a few questions the study raises. Primarily, how does amount of sleep affect metabolism in general? But my key question is not raised, not only in this article but in a few others I perused: What was the effect of reducing sleep during the latter half of the experiment, rather than the other way around? The experiment needs to be repeated with low sleep first and more sleep later, to ferret out the effect of sleep from the effect of already having lost some weight. It is known that during a period of weight loss, the level of ghrelin rises.
It is necessary to distinguish correlation from causation. Based on this study and on what else is known, we cannot yet draw a conclusion that sleep deprivation was the primary cause of the shift from fat loss to lean loss during the study. I was very disappointed to find that the study had no control. The author of the article, Lynne Peeples, quotes the conductors of the study, who state that more and larger trials need to be performed to answer the questions this study raises. I heartily agree. A properly controlled study needs at least these four groups:
Hoo, boy! Things proliferate. For each possible confounding effect you want to control for, you have to double the number of groups! For example, the same eight groups could be split according to
The article is titled Dieting? More Sleep Helps Burn More Fat. It is one of about 700 news articles on this topic in the past day or so that are based on a study reported in Annals of Internal Medicine (I would link to the article, but it is embargoed until the issue goes on sale).
Ten volunteers on a low-calorie diet spent four weeks confined to a lab. For two weeks, they slept about 8.5 hours nightly, and for two they slept 5.5 hours. The key finding? During the latter two weeks the volunteers lost twice as much lean mass (muscle) and half as much fat, as compared to the first two weeks. The total loss each two-week period was the same, about 3kg. One more effect was that during the low-sleep weeks, the subjects reported feeling more hunger, and they had raised levels of ghrelin, a "hunger" hormone that also causes fat retention. It is not stated whether the study participants had the opportunity to exercise while confined to the lab.
Naturally, I find this upsetting. I have been reducing by dieting all Summer, and have so far lost about 12kg. I sleep very little, but that has long been true. A "good night's sleep" for me is 6h, and 7h is superb. I haven't slept an 8h night in thirty years.
In the article linked above, they do mention a few questions the study raises. Primarily, how does amount of sleep affect metabolism in general? But my key question is not raised, not only in this article but in a few others I perused: What was the effect of reducing sleep during the latter half of the experiment, rather than the other way around? The experiment needs to be repeated with low sleep first and more sleep later, to ferret out the effect of sleep from the effect of already having lost some weight. It is known that during a period of weight loss, the level of ghrelin rises.
It is necessary to distinguish correlation from causation. Based on this study and on what else is known, we cannot yet draw a conclusion that sleep deprivation was the primary cause of the shift from fat loss to lean loss during the study. I was very disappointed to find that the study had no control. The author of the article, Lynne Peeples, quotes the conductors of the study, who state that more and larger trials need to be performed to answer the questions this study raises. I heartily agree. A properly controlled study needs at least these four groups:
- Sleep a lot, get lots of exercise
- Sleep little, get lots of exercise
- Sleep a lot, lay around
- Sleep little, lay around
Hoo, boy! Things proliferate. For each possible confounding effect you want to control for, you have to double the number of groups! For example, the same eight groups could be split according to
- Get plenty of sleep or get too little, all 4 weeks,
- Sleep lots 2 weeks then too little 2 weeks versus sleep too little the first 2 weeks, then sleep a lot, and
- Exercise or not.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Flash! - See new Google Maps
kw: news, software
OK, you can't quite see the words "Georgia Aquarium" in this image, but you can in the full size clip you'll see by clicking. The "Earth" enhancement to Google Maps just came out today, in the past hour or two. It is Google Earth running inside Maps. You can get directions, then have the blue track shown in 3D, with 3D buildings in the cities. The green symbol is the end of a trip I plan to take in a few weeks, to see the new aquarium in Atlanta.
Google Maps has become indispensable to me in recent years. This adds the ability to preview in even more realistic ways. I can take a look at a hotel I might stay at, if it isn't already shown on Street View. As in this case, I can verify that the target shown is in the right place. Very cool!
OK, you can't quite see the words "Georgia Aquarium" in this image, but you can in the full size clip you'll see by clicking. The "Earth" enhancement to Google Maps just came out today, in the past hour or two. It is Google Earth running inside Maps. You can get directions, then have the blue track shown in 3D, with 3D buildings in the cities. The green symbol is the end of a trip I plan to take in a few weeks, to see the new aquarium in Atlanta.
Google Maps has become indispensable to me in recent years. This adds the ability to preview in even more realistic ways. I can take a look at a hotel I might stay at, if it isn't already shown on Street View. As in this case, I can verify that the target shown is in the right place. Very cool!
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Have newborns been too large?
kw: observations, news
In the local newspapers and a radio program or two it was reported today that babies have been getting smaller since about 1990. The present average newborn weight in 2005, nationally, was 7 lbs 7.5 oz, down 2 oz over fifteen years. That actually compares well with the average weight of my generation at birth: 7 lbs 6.3 oz (I was born in 1947. Our own son, who is now 21, weighed 7 lbs 10 oz, and came out "naturally").
I actually read in one article that a doctor thinks "optimum" birth weight is nearly nine pounds! Very few women can have a baby that large vaginally. Again, when I was born, weights between seven and eight pounds were considered normal. Nine pounds was a much-talked-about rarity.
I finger as the primary cause a major trend that became prominent in the 1980s: Scheduled birth by Caesarian section. By definition, such a procedure is performed before the baby is ready to be born, so the baby is always pre-term. The tendency to set the schedule earlier and earlier, and the tendency for a growing proportion of all births to be scheduled, work together to produce smaller babies.
A secondary trend is the ability to save earlier and earlier preemies. I can't be sure from what I have read whether the genuinely premature births were included in the averages, but consider this, if they were: in 1950 it was rare for a baby lighter than 4.5 pounds to survive, but now it is considered routine for babies born weighing one pound or less to survive. Think how a large number of such births will skew an average! Much of this trend toward saving the very early occurred since 1980.
The statistic I want to see is the average weights, in several key years (1950, 1980, 1990, 2005 at the very least), of babies born vaginally who suffered no complications and needed no special interventions at birth. I suspect there will be very little difference over the years.
In the local newspapers and a radio program or two it was reported today that babies have been getting smaller since about 1990. The present average newborn weight in 2005, nationally, was 7 lbs 7.5 oz, down 2 oz over fifteen years. That actually compares well with the average weight of my generation at birth: 7 lbs 6.3 oz (I was born in 1947. Our own son, who is now 21, weighed 7 lbs 10 oz, and came out "naturally").
I actually read in one article that a doctor thinks "optimum" birth weight is nearly nine pounds! Very few women can have a baby that large vaginally. Again, when I was born, weights between seven and eight pounds were considered normal. Nine pounds was a much-talked-about rarity.
I finger as the primary cause a major trend that became prominent in the 1980s: Scheduled birth by Caesarian section. By definition, such a procedure is performed before the baby is ready to be born, so the baby is always pre-term. The tendency to set the schedule earlier and earlier, and the tendency for a growing proportion of all births to be scheduled, work together to produce smaller babies.
A secondary trend is the ability to save earlier and earlier preemies. I can't be sure from what I have read whether the genuinely premature births were included in the averages, but consider this, if they were: in 1950 it was rare for a baby lighter than 4.5 pounds to survive, but now it is considered routine for babies born weighing one pound or less to survive. Think how a large number of such births will skew an average! Much of this trend toward saving the very early occurred since 1980.
The statistic I want to see is the average weights, in several key years (1950, 1980, 1990, 2005 at the very least), of babies born vaginally who suffered no complications and needed no special interventions at birth. I suspect there will be very little difference over the years.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Back in pocket
kw: news
Shortly after my posting five days ago, we lost internet service in my area, which was only fully restored this morning. I had just taken the week off for a "staycation", and found myself with unusual amounts of time on my hands.
I went to a nearby church conference site and sat in on meetings in another language, listening to an interpreter through headphones. Because much of the subject matter involved the underground church in a "closed" country, that's all I can say about that.
We take our freedom of conscience for granted in the U.S., to the point that it is rather easy to casually put the life of a Christian from another country in danger. Those who hate us ("yanks") actually fear our freedoms, for in the light of freedom many dark deeds cannot be done. The "world" is still full of those who hate light and love darkness.
Shortly after my posting five days ago, we lost internet service in my area, which was only fully restored this morning. I had just taken the week off for a "staycation", and found myself with unusual amounts of time on my hands.
I went to a nearby church conference site and sat in on meetings in another language, listening to an interpreter through headphones. Because much of the subject matter involved the underground church in a "closed" country, that's all I can say about that.
We take our freedom of conscience for granted in the U.S., to the point that it is rather easy to casually put the life of a Christian from another country in danger. Those who hate us ("yanks") actually fear our freedoms, for in the light of freedom many dark deeds cannot be done. The "world" is still full of those who hate light and love darkness.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Junk politics getting junkier, a small example
kw: opinion, news, politics
I just saw this blurb on an online news article:
Let's think about that. If it is illegal, there is no law that allows it. If the Patriot Act is law (it is), and specifies that it may be done, it isn't illegal. It's legal until that law is repealed. The blurb is an oxymoron.
I just saw this blurb on an online news article:
Top Democratics and Republicans say they prefer oversight, rather than repealing part of Patriot Act used by FBI for illegal monitoring.
Let's think about that. If it is illegal, there is no law that allows it. If the Patriot Act is law (it is), and specifies that it may be done, it isn't illegal. It's legal until that law is repealed. The blurb is an oxymoron.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Plan Would Move African Animals to U.S.
kw: news, ecoidiocy
Plan Would Move African Animals to U.S. at Yahoo! News recounts the latest and most extreme piece of ecological idiocy so far proposed. Here is the basis: At the beginning of the Holocene, the "modern era" of about the last 12,000 years, most species in a diverse population of large mammals became extinct. It is likely that early people had a lot to do with this, though the radical climate change had to play a rôle.
In addition to the several deer species (including moose), bovines (bison), gazelles (pronghorn), bears, pumas, wolves and coyotes, there were cousins of modern camels, rhinos, cheetahs and elephants. However, the 20,000-year-ago cheetah analog that chased pronghorns was actually in a different family of cats, and was not a cheetah, the mammoth and mastadon species were adapted to a cold climate, similar to Baffin Island today, and and the predator-prey mix had a balance similar to that now seen in the Yukon.
An African ecosystem overlaid on today's North American? Dumb.
Plan Would Move African Animals to U.S. at Yahoo! News recounts the latest and most extreme piece of ecological idiocy so far proposed. Here is the basis: At the beginning of the Holocene, the "modern era" of about the last 12,000 years, most species in a diverse population of large mammals became extinct. It is likely that early people had a lot to do with this, though the radical climate change had to play a rôle.
In addition to the several deer species (including moose), bovines (bison), gazelles (pronghorn), bears, pumas, wolves and coyotes, there were cousins of modern camels, rhinos, cheetahs and elephants. However, the 20,000-year-ago cheetah analog that chased pronghorns was actually in a different family of cats, and was not a cheetah, the mammoth and mastadon species were adapted to a cold climate, similar to Baffin Island today, and and the predator-prey mix had a balance similar to that now seen in the Yukon.
An African ecosystem overlaid on today's North American? Dumb.
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