MMR - Triple Trouble

>From Private Eye (UK), 9 July - 22 July 2004, not available online. Thanks
to Nigel Thomas.

    The 300 families seeking to sue manufacturers of the MMR vaccine over
a range of disabling conditions other than autism - they include epilepsy,
encephalitis,  the paralysing Guillian-Barre syndrome and childhood
arthritis - have, like other MMR parents, been thwarted by having their
legal aid cancelled (Eyes passim).

    Even though some of the conditions complained of are acknowledged as
rare side-effects of the vaccine, and others were associated with an early
MMR vaccine that was withdrawn in 1992 by the government because it caused
mumps-meningitis, it seems the legal services commission (LSC) has made a
generalised ruling not to continue to support any of these cases either.

    Each family has responded in detail to the LSC's requests to "show
cause" why their child's case should continue, but their legal aid
certificates were nevertheless cancelled at the end of last month because
LSC claimed "there was no reasonable prospect of success".

    The LSC seems to want it both ways. A statement from the commission
said that as the non-autism and bowel disease cases were part of the MMR
litigation group, they were linked to the success or failure of the group as
a whole. While on the other hand it maintained that "all the responses
received were considered individually".

    When some of the families sought written reasons in order to appeal,
they were told that a general decision had been taken by the multi-party
action committee and no written reasons were available, making something of
a mockery of the entire process.

    Withdrawal of legal aid leaves the families in a precarious position.
Next month there is a progress hearing in the high court into the stalled
legal action. Not only do the families no longer have legal representation
and face the costs of appearing at court in person, but they are also now at
risk of having to pay the drug companies' court costs too. As Eye readers
will recall, Lovells, the solicitors acting for Merck, one of the three
defendant vaccine manufacturers, have already been accused of wrongly
forcing parents to sign away any future rights to sue by threatening them
with a huge bill for costs.

    While the stalling of the legal action has muted debate over MMR in
Britain, in the US vaccine safety is high on both political and news agenda.
A new US study, published in the Journal of American Physicians and
Surgeons, is the latest in a series from Andrew Wakefield, the
gastroenterologist at the centre of the MMR controversy. It shows measles
virus in the spinal fluid, as well as in the guts of children with autism.
He and fellow author Dr Jeff Bradstreet argue that the presence of the virus
at two sites suggests evidence of active replication of virus and they are
calling for more research into any relationship between persistent measles
virus infection and regressive autism.


* * *

From: 	xxxx@dsl.pipex.com
Subject: 	RE: Hello
Date: 	6 September 2004 16:02:00 BST
To: 	  alex_tea@R107.co.uk

“Where London's column, pointing to the skies,

“Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.”

The words are these: “This monument is erected in memory of the burning of this Protestant city by the Popish faction, in September, A.D. 1666, for the destruction of the Protestant religion and of old English liberty, and for the introduction of Popery and slavery. But the fury of the Papists is not yet satisfied.”
From here

Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries.

"We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said.

"There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don't think it's extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities."

Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us." [...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1299444,00.html

hq4x Magnification Filter

Test Case 2:

original image	nearest neighbour 4x	hq4x

Test Case 3:

original image	nearest neighbour 4x	hq4x

Files:

Note that the entire process of making sound probably took about one minute. These heat thermography photographs were taken during that time...

http://www.healingsounds.com/research/heat-thermography.asp

update British regulatory agency Ofcom has begun to map out the future of commercial Net phone services.

And while some issues are as yet unresolved, the organization issued a key ruling Monday that was popular among carriers.

The communications regulator announced that Net phone service providers will be able to offer subscribers both geography-based phone numbers and numbers that aren't tied to location.

Geography-based numbers will begin with "01" or "02," as do the United Kingdom's existing fixed-line telephone numbers. This will let consumers choose numbers that indicate where they are located. It will also allow a consumer to shift onto a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service plan and retain his or her existing number.

Nongeographic numbers, which will begin with "056," will be suitable for people who want to use their Net phone service from many locations. For example, a subscriber could install the necessary software on a laptop and connect anywhere over a GPRS or 3G link.

Ofcom predicted that Internet telephony, which it calls voice over broadband, will enable consumers to access features typically seen today solely in enterprises--including sophisticated messaging options, video calls and large conference calls.

In a statement, Ofcom Chief Executive Stephen Carter said his agency intends to "keep out of the way," while still encouraging the development of new voice services.

Regulation of Net phone service has also been a big issue in the United States, where debates have raged over how the services should be taxed to whether they must comply with the federal wiretap rules that govern fixed-line services.

This is Ofcom's first significant move in the Net phone sector, and it appears to have found broad approval within the industry.

"It's looking quite good so far," a representative for the Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) said, lauding the availability of both geographic and nongeographic numbers. "There was a concern that Ofcom might go with either one or the other. This gives flexibility to users."

Ofcom also announced that it will run a public consultation into the tricky question of how functional and reliable a VoIP service should have to be.

Under U.K. law, any company offering telephone service must adhere to a set of provisions called PATS (publicly available telephone services). A service that complies with PATS must be able to continue working after a disaster, and it must always be able to connect users with with emergency services, for example.

Complying with PATS can be expensive. To comply, a VoIP provider would have to pay for a gateway to the public switched telephone network, which would be more costly than just routing calls over the Internet.

In addition, anyone using VoIP over a home computer would not be able to use the service during an electrical blackout, unless they also ran a generator or an uninterruptible power supply.

ISPA has been lobbying hard that Net phone services should not have to comply with PATS. The organization recently claimed that this would "effectively deliver a death sentence to the U.K.'s emerging VoIP industry."

Ofcom's consultation will run until Nov. 15.

Graeme Wearden of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[...]

How can this be described as "cheering"?
And no one can "Map out the future", especially when it comes to software. Like Joel says below, many people thought that Ebay would never become popular.

Also there seems to be a fundamental mismatch between what they think a telephone service is and what I think a telephoneservice is.

I think Skype is a telephone service. I use it to make phone calls all over the world. What OFCOM thinks about this is none of my concern. The bogus rulings that it might make from on high will not affect my use of Skype, and they will not have any bearing on all the people that use skype with me.

All of this assigning of numbers, PATS the Feds barking about tapping, all of it is irrelevant. No one can control IP telephony. No one. Read this from here:

The Skype Group is headquartered in Luxembourg with offices also in London and soon in Tallinn.

Instead of trying to set up a framework to control it, HMG should be doing everything it can to make Skype base itself here. They do this by:

• Guaranteed 25 year tax free operation.
• Guaranteed 25 year zero regulation.
  

The software skills, jobs and tangential opportunities that will arise from having an innovative company like Skype in the UK are obvious...well, obviously not so obvious to OFCOM. But then again, they call VOIP "Voice over broadband"!

Now, let's look at a successful social interface. Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.

Another social software success is ebay. When I first heard about ebay, I said, "Nonsense! That will never work. Nobody's going to send money to some random person they encountered on the Internet in hopes that person will out of the goodness of their hearts actually ship them some merchandise." A lot of people thought this. We were all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ebay made a big bet on the cultural anthropology of human beings and won. The great thing about ebay is that it was a huge success precisely because it seemed like a terrible idea at the time, and so nobody else tried it, until ebay locked in the network effects and first-mover advantage. [...]

I REALLY like Joel's writing.

Washington politicians are once again seriously considering imposing a
national identification card - and it may well become law before the end
of the 108th Congress. The much-hailed 9/11 Commission report released
in July recommends a federal identification card and, worse, a "larger
network of screening points" inside the United States. Does this mean we
are to have "screening points" inside our country where American
citizens will be required to "show their papers" to government
officials? It certainly sounds that way!

As I have written recently, the 9/11 Commission is nothing more than
ex-government officials and lobbyists advising current government
officials that we need more government for America to be safe. Yet it
was that same government that failed so miserably on September 11, 2001.

Congress has embraced the 9/11 Commission report uncritically since its
release in July. Now Congress is rushing to write each 9/11 Commission
recommendation into law before the November election. In the same way
Congress rushed to pass the PATRIOT Act after the September 11 attacks
to be seen "doing something," it looks like Congress is about to make
the same mistake again of rushing to pass liberty-destroying legislation
without stopping to consider the consequences. Because it is so
controversial, we may see legislation mandating a national
identification card with biometric identifiers hidden in bills
implementing 9/11 Commission recommendations. We have seen this
technique used in the past on controversial measures.

A national identification card, in whatever form it may take, will allow
the federal government to inappropriately monitor the movements and
transactions of every American. History shows that governments
inevitably use the power to monitor the actions of people in harmful
ways. Claims that the government will protect the privacy of Americans
when implementing a national identification card ring hollow. We would
do well to remember what happened with the Social Security number. It
was introduced with solemn restrictions on how it could be used, but it
has become a de facto national identifier.

Those who are willing to allow the government to establish a
Soviet-style internal passport system because they think it will make us
safer are terribly mistaken. Subjecting every citizen to surveillance
and "screening points" will actually make us less safe, not in the least
because it will divert resources away from tracking and apprehending
terrorists and deploy them against innocent Americans!

The federal government has no constitutional authority to require
law-abiding Americans to present any form of identification before they
engage in private transactions. Instead of forcing all Americans to
prove to law enforcement that they are not terrorists, we should be
focusing our resources on measures that really will make us safer. For
starters, we should take a look at our dangerously porous and unguarded
borders. We have seen already this summer how easy it is for individuals
possibly seeking to do us harm to sneak across the border into our
country. In July, Pakistani citizen Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed, who is
on the federal watch list, reportedly crossed illegally into Texas from
Mexico. She was later arrested when she tried to board a plane in New
York, but she should have never been able to cross our border in the
first place!

We must take effective measures to protect ourselves from a terrorist
attack. That does not mean rushing to embrace legislation that in the
long run will do little to stop terrorism, but will do a great deal to
undermine the very way of life we should be protecting. Just as we must
not allow terrorists to threaten our lives, we must not allow government
to threaten our liberties. We should reject the notion of a national
identification card.

Norman Kirk Singleton
Legislative Director
Congressman Ron Paul
203 Cannon
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-2831

Sorry to be the ones to say. You are just not Essex
You are about as Essex as Steve Urwin. Try wearing a baseball cap back to front now and then, and consider getting an earring. You may want to get some alloys put on your sensible car and subscribe to Max Power before ever attempting our Essex Test again.

You are 10% an Essex Boy!

In states where Bush won a popular majority in 2000, the average woman bears 2.11 children in her lifetime -- which is enough to replace the population. In states where Gore won a majority of votes in 2000, the average woman bears 1.89 children, which is not enough to avoid population decline. Indeed, if the Gore states seceded from the Bush states and formed a new nation, it would have the same fertility rate, and the same rapidly aging population, as France -- that bastion of "old Europe."

If Gore's America (and presumably John Kerry's) is reproducing at a slower pace than Bush's America, what does this imply for the future? Well, as the comedian Dick Cavett remarked, "If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either." When secular-minded Americans decide to have few if any children, they unwittingly give a strong evolutionary advantage to the other side of the culture divide. Sure, some children who grow up in fundamentalist families will become secularists, and vice versa. But most people, particularly if they have children, wind up with pretty much the same religious and political orientations as their parents. If "Metros" don't start having more children, America's future is "Retro." [..]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54700-2004Sep1.html

It is self explanatory.

Exercise: For Muscles, It's All Downhill

xercise helps diabetics improve their ability to metabolize sugar. But for those patients who don't feel up to the Stairmaster, a new study offers some comfort: the exercise involved in walking downhill, the researchers found, leads to even bigger improvements than hiking up.

The study was presented last week at a conference of the European Society of Cardiology and was led by Dr. H. Drexel, a cardiologist at the Academic Hospital in Feldkirch, Austria.

The study tried to find out if there was a difference in the effects of the two main forms of muscle use, concentric and eccentric, on glucose tolerance.

In concentric exercise, muscle cells shorten to exert force on an object, as in lifting a weight. In eccentric exercise, muscle cells are lengthened as they resist a force - for example, opposing gravity by lowering a weight more slowly than it would fall.

The study involved 45 healthy but sedentary adults. Half of them were assigned to climb a route that included a rise in elevation of 600 meters (about 2,000 feet) three to five times a week, taking a cable car back down. The others took the cable car up and walked down the same hill. After two months, the groups switched, performing the opposite of their original trek for another two months.

Dr. Drexel said that both forms of exercise improved glucose tolerance, but that the downhill hike had a bigger effect - a 25 percent change in tolerance compared with 9 percent after the stint of uphill climbing.

He did not speculate on the reason for the difference. But other research has raised the possibility that eccentric exercise may increase blood flow more than concentric exercise does. [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/health/07exer.html

You cant make this shit up!

Coming next, a Stairmaster excersise machine that creates a perpetual downhill walking experience.

Really.

It will be easy to dismount wont it?

But Sweetie, You Love Lima Beans

f only that very first bite of asparagus had inspired delight, and the first taste of jelly doughnut caused a stomachache. If children's happiest food memories were baked and not fried, leafy green rather than beefy, think of the difference in what people might eat.

Now, think of what it might mean to change those memories - as an adult. Psychologists in California and Washington were studying false memories when they stumbled on a surprisingly easy target for manipulation: foods. In a study accepted for publication in the journal Social Cognition, the researchers describe how they fooled college students into thinking that as children they had become sick when eating certain foods.

The students answered questions about their early eating memories. A week later, they were presented with a bogus food history profile that embedded a single falsehood - that they had gotten sick when eating pickles or hard-boiled eggs - among real memories.

"This is called the false feedback technique, where you gather data from the subjects and use it to lend credibility to this false profile," said Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine who led the research.

But about 40 percent of the 336 participants confirmed in later interviews that they remembered getting sick or believed it to be true. Compared with a control group, the believers said on questionnaires that they would be much more likely to avoid eating pickles or hard-boiled eggs if offered them at a party. In another study, just completed, the researchers found that people who were told that they loved asparagus as children were much more drawn to that slender delicacy than those whose memories were left alone.

Proust's reflections on tea and cookies notwithstanding, the earliest experience of taste is as open to tampering as other memories, Dr. Loftus said. If these revisions became permanent, they might affect how and what people eat. "What we'd like to do now," Dr. Loftus said, "is take the students out for a real picnic and see what happens." [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/health/psychology/31psych.html

Do I really have to say anything about this? Of course not.

Savings Found in Vaccinations for Chickenpox

HICAGO, Sept. 6 (AP) - Vaccinating children against chickenpox saves the American health care system nearly $100 million a year in reduced hospitalizations for severe cases, a study has found.

Though most people who get chickenpox can be treated at home, complications requiring hospitalization can include severe skin infections, encephalitis and pneumonia.

In 1993, two years before the government licensed the vaccine for routine use in early childhood, about 14,000 Americans were hospitalized for chickenpox-related complications at a cost of $161 million, compared with 3,700 hospitalizations and $66 million in related costs in 2001, the researchers estimated.

Routine vaccination has reduced cases in young children who get the shots and has helped keep the disease from spreading to unvaccinated older children and adults, in whom the disease tends to be more severe.

god bless matti pellonpää

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Sony lawyer enslaved worker, apparently 



Explains much

By Nick Farrell
Monday 06 September 2004, 08:49
       
ONE OF THE brains behind the music industry's moves to drag old
ladies, children and other file-sharers through the courts has just
lost a slavery case. A court found that the maid of James Jackson, a
vice president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures Entertainment, was
entitled to more than $850,000 to settle charges of enslavement and
assault and battery.

The jury found that Nena Ruiz was kept against her will and paid her
only $300 for a year of work at his Los Angeles home. Associated Press
reports Jackson's wife has additionally been held liable for slapping
Ruiz and pulling her hair. Ruiz claimed the Jacksons had nicked her
passport and threatened to call immigration officers if she tried to
leave.

Nena Ruiz told hacks that slavery still existed and that victims
should not tolerate it and should not be afraid to seek help.

The Jacksons have denied the charges and suggested they could appeal
the jury's decision.

Apparently Sony has already suspended Jackson and plans to fire
him. After all it does not want its image of a tough pirate fighting
for the forces of good tarnished by having one of its principle
proponents being a known slaver.
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How can I get MSN Music downloads to play on my iPod?

Unfortunately Apple refuses to support the popular Windows Media format on the iPod, choosing to only support their own proprietary DRM format. If you are an iPod owner and are unhappy about this, please send feedback to Apple and ask them to change their policy and interoperate with other music services.

There are more than 70 portable audio devices that support MSN Music today, and we hope that someday Apple decides to join with the industry and support consumer choice.

Let’s unspin this.

First, the Windows Media format is described as “popular”, but Apple’s “own format” (apparently AAC/FairPlay is that-which-shall-not-be-named in Redmond) is a “proprietary DRM” format. The truth is that all three words — popular, proprietary, and DRM — apply to both formats. But the only one they choose for themselves — “popular” — is the least apt for Windows Media, given that Apple’s AAC/FairPlay has 70 percent market share.

(Admittedly, there are millions of unprotected Windows Media audio files out there, and the iPod doesn’t play those either — but this FAQ is about the DRM-protected music you can buy from MSN Music, not Windows Media in general.)

The second paragraph could effectively be rewritten as:

There are more than 70 portable audio devices that depend on technology licensed and controlled by Microsoft today, and we hope that someday Apple gives up on their own market-leading technology, bends over, and uses ours.

The “consumer choice” championed by Microsoft involves no choice at all regarding:

• Media format (Windows Media)
• Operating system (Windows)
• Web browser (Internet Explorer)

But other than that, Microsoft is all for choice.

Daring Fireball

Figure 2: Hardly anyone uses the QuarkXPress's Space/Align (top) or Merge (bottom) features because of their poor interfaces. Corresponding features in InDesign (middle) are generally clear and require little brain activity to achieve powerful results.

Even if you don't care about typography or the elegance of a program's user interface, InDesign still offers far more than XPress. For instance, after all these years, QuarkXPress 6 now gives us multiple undos. But there are still many features that are not undoable, like moving a guide, drawing a starburst, or making a change to a master page. Actually, it's worse: Most undoable actions in XPress also stop you from undoing any previous actions. So much for multiple undo. Conversely, not only is everything undoable in InDesign, but even if you crash (let's face it, all software crashes sooner or later), InDesign protects your document -- even unsaved documents -- and you lose hardly any work. [...]

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20604.html

Oh dear me. We love Quark Xpress, and have done for ages. We tried InDesign years ago, and found it to be a bloated, slow piece of garbage. Whats more, none of the repro houses we used would touch files made by it. It was just a pretender, an upstart application, used by people with no sense. Now, AT tells me that it rulz over Xpress.

If anyone other than AT said those words we would'nt have paid much attention, but since we KNOW that you have a brain, we have to look at InDesign again. What is certainly true is that Xpress is lacking in what you see above, and the space align is one of our personal "points of displeasure" with Xpress. Having said that, the output Xpress generates is 100% reliable, in every way, you KNOW that every repro house can output its files flawlessly, and your work will not be ruined, delayed or munged by a rip, its operator or any other Murphy factor.

Having said all of that, having declared our love of Quark Xpress, if InDesign really has improved that much, we have to try it.

How does Hello work?

Hello is a new program that lets you connect directly with your friends to share your digital pictures. If you’ve used an instant messenger program before, you’ve already got the idea—Hello is special because it lets you share your pictures along with your messages.

With Hello, you just pick what pictures you want to show off, and click “Send.” That’s it. Hello takes care of all the hard work. And you and your friends can download full resolution, print-quality pictures from each other, while you’re doing more important things, like talking about your pictures.

I can already send pictures with email. Why do I need Hello?

Hello is designed to let you send high-quality pictures instantly and securely over any speed connection, even dialup. With Hello, you can send hundreds of high quality pictures to your friends in just seconds—you can’t do that with email.

When you share pictures with Hello, you get feedback from your friends right away. Also, Hello automatically encrypts all your pictures and chat before sending, so it’s safer and more secure than email. [...]