Bleeding Heart flower photo details on its album page.
See more photos of this flower on the cultivated plants pages of my photo albums.
Support Libel Reform in the UK
The libel laws in the UK are heavily weighted in the favor of scam artists, frauds and other evildoers. These laws allow them to very easily silence the critics who are trying to save peoples money, health and even their lives. This really needs to change, so please head on over to The Libel Reform Campaign website and sign the petition. It costs you nothing to sign and people from outside the UK are most welcome.
In a recent email and post Simon Singh outlined some of the reasons why everyone who believes in free speech, human rights, liberty and honesty should make haste and sign the petition.
(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights Committee.
(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to discuss matters of genuine public interest (and public health!).
(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws are so hostile to responsible journalism. (In fact, it is exactly because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome signatories to the petition from around the world.)
(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically runs to over 1 million.
(e) Three separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and two medical researchers raising concerns about three medical treatments. We face losing 1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar concerns? If these health matters are not reported, then the public is put at risk.
I urge everyone to please go sign the petition and stand up for free speech.
Help out HPC:Factor
The HPC:Factor website has been one of the top resources for Windows based Handheld PC’s for over a decade. With great articles and a very helpful support community they have made maintaining these still very useful HPC’s a reality. Although Microsoft dropped these devices a long time ago the good people at HPC:Factor have been filling the gap by archiving materials no longer available from Microsoft.
They need to upgrade their server and can’t afford to do it on their own so please head on over to the post HPC:Factor needs your help and donate what you can afford, Thanks.
Apple Believes Love = Money
Steve Jobs & Co. sent me proof this morning that you can tell how much someone loves you simply by how much money they spend on you for Valentine’s day.
Favorite Photos 8
Autumnfest 2008 in Woonsocket, RI.
Photograph details on its album page.
See more Autumnfest photos on the Autumnfest pages of my photo albums.
New Strategy for Wireless Service Operators
iBurst (Pty) Ltd. a wireless ISP in South Africa has tried a new strategy in overcoming tower installation objections due to claims of electromagnetic hypersensitivity. They turned the tower off completely without telling the neighbors for over a month and observed as the complaints of EHS continued. This proves conclusively, to anyone capable of the most basic critical thinking, that the tower is not the cause of the reported symptoms.
Unfortunately the neighbors still want to try to have a court shut down the tower showing that the neighbors aren’t thinking logically. The company did what is considered the gold standard in EMI/EMF effect testing by every regulatory agency, standards organization and decent engineer. Once you turn off the power to any transmitter, bringing the power output to zero, anything still happening is clearly not from that transmitter.
This incredibly simple and essentially infallible disconnect test is about as good as it gets. Many people should be familiar with this type of test from their own experience. The most common example I can think of is when you’re sitting in a parked car and hear a noise that seems to be coming from the engine. You turn off the engine and if the sound goes away the engine is the culprit, if the sound remains it’s not the engine. No functional human being should be able to deny the results of this test and the radio transmitter variation is just as reliable.
It is clear that EHS is a very real disorder but it is also very likely to be a psychogenic illness. Many studies and tests of EHS have been made over the past decades and the evidence points squarely at this being psychogenic. Sadly, as this iBurst case so clearly demonstrates, no matter how good the evidence is, some people refuse to believe and instead fall back on standard pseudoscience tactics.
Links to some full free access journal articles on this topic:
Happy MLK Jr. Day
Today we celebrate the life and work of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Take some time to check out the posts written by bloggers I regularly read:
- Ed Brayton from Dispatches from the Culture Wars
- Bob Riel the North American Travel Examiner
- GrrlScientist from Living the Scientific Life
I also recommend reading more of his words at the The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute website or this old post of mine from a couple years ago.
Firefox Research Extension
I’ve been using the Zotero research extension for Firefox for about six months and find it extremely helpful. Zotero makes it easy to store, organize, annotate, search and cite internet references for any research project. Zotero comes form the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and is sponsored by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
For me the most important reason to use Zotero is to protect your research sources against disappearing from the net. This aspect saved my butt quite a bit last year when GeoCities was closed and a number of good information sources I had found vanished. With copies of the references safely stored in Zotero on my local PC I didn’t have to worry about manually scraping the sites before they closed or trying to find them in the WayBack Machine at Archive.org.
To help keep multiple projects organized I use Firefox profiles to give me separate Zotero databases for each project. I use my default user profile for Blackstone Valley research and then created new profiles named GWPresTour and WorkResearch for my two other active research projects. To use the other profiles I created desktop shortcuts with command lines like this: “C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe” -P “GWPresTour”.
I did find one feature of Zotero a little bit annoying, the annotation toolbar that gets added to Firefox whenever you view a saved snapshot. It takes up a bit too much screen real estate and can not be toggled on and off with Firefox’s toolbars menu. A fix for this is in the last message of the Hide annotation toolbar thread at the Zotero Forums. By using the Stylish Firefox Extension I can toggle the annotation toolbar on and off easily now.
Televangelist in Training
Lying to the public, breaking copyright laws, keeping money intended for charities, lying to his parents to get more money, bigotry against Jews and the disabled, raising lots of money. Yep he’s well on the way to becoming a televangelist. If a religious professional is accumulating money, THEY’RE DOING IT WRONG. Every good, honest religious professional I’ve known (including my Dad) gave up huge income potential to serve those less fortunate than themselves.
Blogroll Update
I’ve updated my blogroll and linked it to Google Reader to simplify maintaining the list. The following blogs have been added, most I’d been reading for a while but hadn’t remembered to add to my blogroll. OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas, Gruts, Allusions of Grandeur, OpenOffice.org Ninja, Skeptical Software Tools, ZooBorns and EFF.org Updates. Actually I think Allusions had been on the list before but had fallen off due to inactivity. I’ve also added a separate category for comic strips that includes these new listings, Jesus and Mo and SketchBlog!.
One blog has changed, Steve of the IntelliAdmin blog has split the old blog by adding Network Steve, read Steve’s explanation here. Finally two blogs have gone silent for a long time now so they have fallen off the list, 95% Of You Are Morons and Hyphoid Logic. I’m keeping them on my readier subscriptions so if they come back I can put them back on the list quickly.
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 