Soundbites on YouTube

Politicians around the world are gingerly using YouTube to make policy statements, or maybe just to get their soundbites out there while avoiding having to have a press conference.

Now some Catholic seminarians have parodied the Mac vs PC ads (which I already loathed anyway) to convey the Vatican’s doctrine on Natural Family Planning vs Contraception.

They’ve got three videos up now, with more planned.

Now I disagree with the practicality of Natural Family Planning, although I applaud much of the sentiment: avoiding excessive chemical intervention with bodily functions, increased communication and intimacy between partners about avoiding unplanned pregnancies etc. Increased communication about sex before it actually happens can only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, NFP requires abstention during ovulation, which is the woman’s peak time of sexual desire, thus NFP involves a lifetime of women acquiescing to sex outside their peak period of desire and being forbidden from other forms of attaining orgasm during the peak period of sexual desire. Sounds like a recipe for frustration and resentment for me.

I notice that these videos simply don’t mention at all that NFP works (as far as it does work) only for people who are in monogamous committed relationships, which of course to the Church means marriage. So they’re simply not addressing the rather large population of adults who are not yet married but who are interested in sexual intercourse anyway. The unsaid only option for unmarried adults is abstinence. I’m not surprised that they’re not addressing that.

Anyway, it’s a very interesting exercise in propogating a set of policy soundbites. I await the replies that will surely multiply in the next few weeks with great interest. I also wonder when various lobbying groups on various social issues are going to fully embrace the viral aspect of YouTube etc for getting their soundbites more effectively out into the social consciousness. Let’s face it – I’m blogging about the videos above because they were put together with a modicum of wit about a controversial issue. Other people will do the same. If other groups do similiar things, those videos will be viraled and generate discussion. Get your issues out there, folks.

crossposted at LP

Filed under: Media, activism/charity, culture wars, netgeek, performance, religion, reproductive freedoms, technology

Friday Hoyden: Grace Hopper

“I invent the Future”

USN Rear Admiral “Amazing” Grace Hopper (1906-1992), mathematician, computer pioneer, marketing innovator, academic and above all guru of the importance of embracing change, has a special place in the heart of many a female nerd/geek. She was also known as the Grand Lady of Software and Grandma COBOL.

As a child of seven she notoriously took not only her own alarm clock apart, but then another six alarm clocks in the house trying to figure out how to put her own clock back together: when she was discovered she was restricted to tinkering with just one clock. This charming story is an early sign of a love of gadgets, fully supported by her parents, that never left her.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper helped to develop an early computer, invented the compiler making possible higher level computer languages, and helped to define the design of the programming language COBOL. First a member of the WAVES and the US Naval Reserve, Grace Hopper retired from the Navy several times before returning and gaining the rank of Rear Admiral. (about.com)

Amazing Grace was one of the pioneers of viewing computers as more than just giant calculators, and advocating their potential as key elements of information systems. She was also a renowned mentor of all information technicians, and particularly of women in maths and science careers.

Filed under: Friday Hoyden, technology, urban legends

NASA hits the trifecta

Astronauts Flying Drunk.

Sabotage of Computer for the ISS.

Embezzlement.

A seriously bad week. NASA gets the hairy eyeball eyeing its budget from the current US Administration enough as it is – they really don’t need this negative publicity.

Filed under: Media, technology

Your friends make you fat

(Subtext: so if any of your mates are a wee bit plump you better drop them quick smart or you’ll be rooned, rooned! Yay, let’s make fat people even more socially isolated and scorned!)

So say all the headlines and radio shows this morning, based on a study in America that has found a correlation between gaining weight and having friends who also gain weight. The talkback shows especially are full of all the talking heads of the Diet Industry sagely shaking their heads and wagging their fingers at the ‘obesity epidemic’[1].

Most of the discussion I’ve heard has focussed on “individuals”, but you know what? The study found that the “friend” correlation only holds up for men.

Filed under: fat-hating, health, moral panics, skeptics

Political outreach online

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about just what online strategies could be most effective for political parties in getting their message across to the voters. I’ve run across a lot of interesting views, and thought on them (in between reading chapters of HP7) so here’s a summary of major points.

Disclaimer: I’m not a member of any political party, but I do want the Liberal-National coalition to lose government, or at least lose control of the Senate.

Political parties in Australia don’t have to “get out the base” i.e. motivate them to turn up at the polling booth. The voters already have to turn up or face a fine – so the message isn’t about making them want to get out the door, it has to be tailored to where they’re actually going to put their mark, and tempt them into being an active supporter who volunteers time and money. Thus the recent efforts from pollies of all stripes to suddenly get themselves pages on the social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube, some more impressively than others.

So how do the high-profile parties in Australia (i.e. the parties who already have successfully elected federal parliamentarians) stack up in attracting the attention of the casual political websurfer, and how do they rate in funnelling them towards a firmer voting intention and maybe a donation of time and/or money?

Filed under: elections, netgeek, technology

Cymru!

Three Welsh inventors are touting their Greenbox system that would replace car exhaust systems with an emissions capture system. It uses algae to absorb the emitted gases and hold them inertly so that the boxes can be easily transported for centralised processing of the car wastes.

The three, who stumbled across the idea while experimenting with carbon dioxide to help boost algae growth for fish farming, have set up a company called Maes Anturio Limited, which translates from Welsh as Field Adventure.
[...]
Through a chemical reaction, the captured gases from the box would be fed to algae, which would then be crushed to produce a bio-oil. This extract can be converted to produce a biodiesel almost identical to normal diesel.

This biodiesel can be fed back into a diesel engine, the emptied Greenbox can be affixed to the car and the cycle can begin again.

The process also yields methane gas and fertiliser, both of which can be captured separately. The algae required to capture all of Britain’s auto emissions would take up around 400 hectares.

The three estimate that 10 facilities could be built across the UK to handle the carbon dioxide from the nearly 30 million cars on British roads.

It’s a damn fascinating idea, so long as they can make replacing the box each time you fill up the tank a simple enough clickety-click type procedure.

Iechyd da.

Filed under: environment, technology

Disabled in a disaster? Just wait until we’ve helped all the real people, all right?

Lauredhel had a post a few days ago noting the plight of a quadriplegic man abandoned while the ablebodied passengers were evacuated during the train breakdown on the Sydney Harbour Bridge recently and told he would be evacuated “in two or three days”. (Luckily nearby construction workers showed some initiative and rescued him using a forklift.)

Apparently this was not just a regrettable lapse or someone’s wires getting crossed about emergency procedure, it’s standard operating procedure for CityRail: CityRail’s new generation of passenger carriages have been designed with no facility for evacuating wheelchairs at all.

A CityRail spokeswoman confirmed last night wheelchair passengers would not be able to access the evacuation ramps and must wait for a stretcher in an emergency on the new public-private partnership-funded trains.

The Paraplegic and Quadriplegic Association of NSW and Spinal Cord Injuries Australia fear the system will place wheelchair passengers at greater risk than able-bodied passengers.

They are worried that disabled travellers would be forgotten in a terrorist incident like the July bombings of the London Underground.

ParaQuad spokeswoman Deborah Schofield said evacuating wheelchair passengers from the side of the train posed a problem inside tunnels.

Filed under: disability, economics, health, sheer incompetence, technology

“Perhaps the simplest way to begin is to plunge a knife into the male urethra”

“Anatomy is one of the key sites for the production and maintenance of sex and gender as embodied dualities, as these excerpts imply. It offers an institutionalized discourse rife with vivid representations which claim the body for medicine and then insist on simplification and universalization.”

[Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke, "Clitoral Conventions and Transgressions: Graphic Representations in Anatomy Texts, c1900-1991", Feminist Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), pp. 255-301.]

Inspired by ladoctorita’s “sins and virtues in medical education, part 2: pornification”, I’ve been contemplating genital anatomy as it was taught in twentieth-century medical school.

My medical school used Grant’s Method of Anatomy. A relative of mine went to the same school in the mid-twentieth century, so I have a 1989 edition and a 1958 edition to compare.

1958

The 1958 edition describes the male perineum first. For nine pages. This section isn’t labelled “The male perineum”, however – it’s just “The perineum”. The natural, default body is the masculine body. There are segments on the anal triangle, the urogenital triangle, two pages on the penis, the superficial perineal muscles, the deep perineal pouch, the nerves and vessels, and how to expose the prostate.

“The Female Perineum” follows. (Yes, intersex bodies are invisible.) The female genitalia are described not as anatomical structures in their own right, but as simplified, mutilated male genitalia. Homologous parts in the female are rudimentary, simplified, diminutive. You can’t just describe something like this – so I’ll regale you with the author’s words, and some of the accompanying illustrations:

Filed under: Science, birth, medicine

Fundiewatch: a Catholic prenatal diagnosis “counselling service”

Two of our local Catholic hospital networks have collaborated to offer a new so-called “counselling service, dubbed “Mamreh”. These two hospitals combined have a lot of community credibility already, as they provide the vast majority of private-hospital maternity services in this State. Baby-catching (or baby-cutting-out, for over half the births in these hospitals) is big business around here.

Mamreh has been taking out full-page ads in the local medical rags pushing their “counselling service” to doctors. The advertisements make no disclosure of the Catholic-medicine rider that the service operates under – which means no condoning, recommending, or counselling on termination of pregnancy, except in cases where the mother’s life is at substantial risk.

This service’s stated purpose? Counselling on prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis. Stating the bleeding obvious, the ad I’m looking at says, “Prenatal genetic screening and diagnostic test information can have profound medical, psychological, and social implications”. No kidding. It goes on, “To add to this there is often only a limited time in which to make critical decisions about a pregnancy.”

This window of defencelessness is crucial. Fundies want to ensure that women are rapidly bustled by their trusted doctors or midwives into a “counselling service” whose primary goal is to hide information from them. The ultimate goal of this type of counselling is to obfuscate information on options and to coerce women into continuing a pregnancy whether they wish to or not – or at least, to delay them just long enough so that the window for a readily accessible termination of pregnancy closes.

Fundies have been pulling this crap in Australia for years, first with tacit government approval and now with open government funding and encouragement, thanks to our papist Health Minister. Attempts to get fraudulent “unplanned pregnancy counselling services” to declare their “faith-based” bias up front have thus far failed.

And now these malignant woman-hating godbags are expanding their vile game to even more vulnerable women – those who are in the initial throes of learning that their fetus has a severe medical problem.

The Mamreh ad veers from there into outright sleight of hand:

“Mamreh Counselling Service explores self, motivations, beliefs and faith in the context of a patient’s own personal, cultural and social situation.”

Would you read this as saying that if your belief system allows termination of pregnancy in the event of severe congenital defect, the service would offer unprejudiced counselling on, and referral for, termination of pregnancy? Well, stop right there. This is not the case. Not remotely.

Do NOT go to this service, or any service like it, unless your goal is to be railroaded into continuing your pregnancy come what may. If a friend or relative has been referred to this service, make sure they know what they’re in for BEFORE they cross the threshold and the forced-birther brainwashing and guilt trips begin. A woman in this awful situation needs absolutely unqualified, unconditional support throughout her decision-making process.

Lying lies and the lying liars who tell them. We hatesss them, we does.

Filed under: ethics, fundies, medicine, obstreperation, reproductive freedoms

New study results: recent global warming not due to solar effects

From The Australian (!):

THE key plank of a controversial British documentary has been discredited by new research showing that the sun is not causing global warming.

The findings are in stark contrast to claims made in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is to be shown on ABC television on Thursday.

The program dismisses the widely held conclusion that greenhouse gases from human activity are driving global warming, instead claiming that changes in solar activity have triggered recent warming.

“Manmade global warming is unmitigated nonsense,” the program’s writer and director, Martin Durkin, wrote in last Saturday’s The Weekend Australian.

But solar physicists at Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Southampton, along with colleague Claus Froehlich of the World Radiation Centre in Dorf, Switzerland, have found that while solar activity may have played a role in climate change in the first half of the last century, it is not driving the recent rapid warming.

Their conclusion was based on a study of all the available solar data for the past 100 years.

They found no correlation between total solar radiation, the number of sun spots or cosmic ray intensity and global warming since 1985.

“Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability,” they will report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Filed under: Science, culture wars