The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported that the American Chemistry Council, a trade association and lobbying organization representing the chemical industry, wrote much of the FDA's August assessment of bisphenol-A.
A day after the Journal Sentinel ran its story, a group of scientists criticized the FDA for allowing this obvious conflict of interest.
The Environmental Working Group has been criticizing the FDA's position on BPA since this spring and offers this brief review of the conflicts of interest involved.
See all Mediocre Polymath posts about bisphenol-A.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
I got to play with a Kindle
I was sitting on the plane last weekend when the late 30-something woman to my left opened her purse, took out a Moleskine notebook, and opened it. I instantly pegged her as an English nerd. I didn't realize how right I'd be; it wasn't a Moleskine, it was a Kindle.
I blurted, "So howww do you like it!?".
"I love it!", she said. "Would you like to check it out?"
"Yes, yes I would."
She gave me the walkthrough, beginning with her list of books, one of which was some sex counseling thing -- little awkward.
After a minute of Kindle network connection troubles, she let me buy Friday's New York Times, which took seconds to download. All the while, she gave me Amazon's party line on battery life, usability, etc. I never thought to ask her if she worked for Amazon, though I did confess to working for a publisher.
I flipped through some pages, noting the reassuring heft of this machine. The screen clarity really isamazon, er, amazing. I found the refresh rate to be a little slow. The screen going black as it refreshes unsuspended my disbelief, and I can see this being a problem for the ebook reading experience. Perhaps one gets used to it as we're all used to flipping pages.
I held the Kindle with both hands, one on either side. I asked her if she accidentally flipped pages.
She admitted to such frequent unintentional page turns that she used the Kindle's "placemark" feature about every five pages just to avoid...something. I'm not sure what, though. Maybe you can fast-forward a Kindle? Either way, it sounds as if the page turn bars could use more than a little fine tuning.
The scroll bar, just right of the right thumb in this photo, needs work as well. The scroll bar is the main navigation device when the Kindle is not in a book. In other words, you choose what book to read, what chapter to open, what newspaper to purchase, etc. using the scroll bar, which you thumb up or down. To make a selection, you press down onto the scroll bar. Many times during my 15 minutes with this Kindle, I accidentally scrolled when I meant to select.
An exacerbating flaw is the slow processor speed. Pages "turn" with reasonable speed, but to do anything other than turn a page -- to navigate between books or to browse the Amazon Kindle store -- the page takes more time to load. So with every click of the scroll bar, I had to wait to see if I'd clicked or scrolled. If I'd accidentally scrolled-then-clicked, I had to navigate back to where I was and try again. The speed is definitely not as quick as, say, browsing the web on a computer. I found it a little tedious.
So hopefully Amazon will eliminate these flaws in the Kindle 2, which seems to be imminent.
I blurted, "So howww do you like it!?"."I love it!", she said. "Would you like to check it out?"
"Yes, yes I would."
She gave me the walkthrough, beginning with her list of books, one of which was some sex counseling thing -- little awkward.
After a minute of Kindle network connection troubles, she let me buy Friday's New York Times, which took seconds to download. All the while, she gave me Amazon's party line on battery life, usability, etc. I never thought to ask her if she worked for Amazon, though I did confess to working for a publisher.
I flipped through some pages, noting the reassuring heft of this machine. The screen clarity really is
I held the Kindle with both hands, one on either side. I asked her if she accidentally flipped pages.
She admitted to such frequent unintentional page turns that she used the Kindle's "placemark" feature about every five pages just to avoid...something. I'm not sure what, though. Maybe you can fast-forward a Kindle? Either way, it sounds as if the page turn bars could use more than a little fine tuning.The scroll bar, just right of the right thumb in this photo, needs work as well. The scroll bar is the main navigation device when the Kindle is not in a book. In other words, you choose what book to read, what chapter to open, what newspaper to purchase, etc. using the scroll bar, which you thumb up or down. To make a selection, you press down onto the scroll bar. Many times during my 15 minutes with this Kindle, I accidentally scrolled when I meant to select.
An exacerbating flaw is the slow processor speed. Pages "turn" with reasonable speed, but to do anything other than turn a page -- to navigate between books or to browse the Amazon Kindle store -- the page takes more time to load. So with every click of the scroll bar, I had to wait to see if I'd clicked or scrolled. If I'd accidentally scrolled-then-clicked, I had to navigate back to where I was and try again. The speed is definitely not as quick as, say, browsing the web on a computer. I found it a little tedious.
So hopefully Amazon will eliminate these flaws in the Kindle 2, which seems to be imminent.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
An Internet without ads?
I remember the first time I logged onto the world wide web. It was back in 1994 in the college computer lab. A friend of mine had returned from the computer lab that week all excited about the world wide web, Internet Explorer, something called "Yahoo", and the Pearl Jam website.
At the time, my total experience with the Internet had been using the Pine email... um, software. I hesitate to call it software since it was basically a command line program: the screen was black and the text was green, a la The Matrix. I was no Neo; checking Pine for email from my three friends who were using email required at least 15 minutes of fumbling clumsily through botched commands and login attempts.
Oh, and I should mention that I was "MUDding". MUDding was the ultimate nerd activity. It was black-screen/green-text Dungeons & Dragons without any extraneous or potentially embarassing face-to-face human interaction. It was also terribly boring after about two weeks.
So I went to the computer lab after dinner one night with hype in my head and very low expectations. I sat down at a terminal, much as I do today when I'm forced to use a Mac, and stared at the screen, not knowing what to do. I opened up the command line and typed "internet". Then "world wide web". Then "yahoo" and "pearl jam". Naturally, a lot of cryptic error messages. How was I supposed to know to double-click on the big, blue, lowercase "e" on the desktop?
I finally tried the "e". It opened and there was Yahoo.com, not terribly different from today's Yahoo portal. And there, greeting me with epileptic glory, were animated gifs (Flash not yet having been invented).
That same friend introduced me to Google.com in '99 or '00.
Since that time, as we all know, the web has been slowly but surely taking over the desktop computer. And the desktop computer is slowly but surely replacing traditional office hardware, like fax machines and phones. With a web browser and broadband internet connection, you can check email, write a novel, create a spreadsheet, design a presentation, touch up photos, assemble a video, phone a friend--all without paying a single penny.
How? The web today, as it was in 1994, is ad-supported. There are two types of ads:
Using extensible web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera, it is now possible to block image-based ads. Here's how:
Something like 75% of internet users are still using Internet Explorer, which to my knowledge, doesn't yet have any easy, browser-based ways to block ads. Given the drubbing Microsoft's taken from the web 2.0 movement, I imagine it's only a matter of time before Redmond opens up IE to add-ons, a la Firefox. (Google plans to do this with Chrome soon, too.)
This leaves the Internet with 25% of its users able to block ads on the web. And why wouldn't users block image advertising? It can be pretty obnoxious and really slow down the web-surfing experience. If trends continue and more people move to Firefox and Chrome, the web business model might be in serious danger. What happens then?
A few ideas (updating with new ideas as they occur to me):
At the time, my total experience with the Internet had been using the Pine email... um, software. I hesitate to call it software since it was basically a command line program: the screen was black and the text was green, a la The Matrix. I was no Neo; checking Pine for email from my three friends who were using email required at least 15 minutes of fumbling clumsily through botched commands and login attempts.
Oh, and I should mention that I was "MUDding". MUDding was the ultimate nerd activity. It was black-screen/green-text Dungeons & Dragons without any extraneous or potentially embarassing face-to-face human interaction. It was also terribly boring after about two weeks.
So I went to the computer lab after dinner one night with hype in my head and very low expectations. I sat down at a terminal, much as I do today when I'm forced to use a Mac, and stared at the screen, not knowing what to do. I opened up the command line and typed "internet". Then "world wide web". Then "yahoo" and "pearl jam". Naturally, a lot of cryptic error messages. How was I supposed to know to double-click on the big, blue, lowercase "e" on the desktop?
I finally tried the "e". It opened and there was Yahoo.com, not terribly different from today's Yahoo portal. And there, greeting me with epileptic glory, were animated gifs (Flash not yet having been invented).
That same friend introduced me to Google.com in '99 or '00.
Since that time, as we all know, the web has been slowly but surely taking over the desktop computer. And the desktop computer is slowly but surely replacing traditional office hardware, like fax machines and phones. With a web browser and broadband internet connection, you can check email, write a novel, create a spreadsheet, design a presentation, touch up photos, assemble a video, phone a friend--all without paying a single penny.
How? The web today, as it was in 1994, is ad-supported. There are two types of ads:
- epileptic seizure inducers: static images, animated gifs, Flash videos, etc.
- text-based ads: ads that appear to the right of a Google search, for example
Using extensible web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera, it is now possible to block image-based ads. Here's how:
- use Adblock to block ads in Firefox
- prevent ads from appearing in Google Chrome
- remove ads in Safari
- create your own list of ads to block
- stop ads in YouTube
Something like 75% of internet users are still using Internet Explorer, which to my knowledge, doesn't yet have any easy, browser-based ways to block ads. Given the drubbing Microsoft's taken from the web 2.0 movement, I imagine it's only a matter of time before Redmond opens up IE to add-ons, a la Firefox. (Google plans to do this with Chrome soon, too.)
This leaves the Internet with 25% of its users able to block ads on the web. And why wouldn't users block image advertising? It can be pretty obnoxious and really slow down the web-surfing experience. If trends continue and more people move to Firefox and Chrome, the web business model might be in serious danger. What happens then?
A few ideas (updating with new ideas as they occur to me):
- Text-based search advertising becomes the only viable revenue generation model on the web, Google totally dominates.
- Online privacy becomes impossible as web 2.0 companies demand more information in exchange for their free, non-ad-supported services.
- The web divides into classes. Stone age Americans, poor saps, are left sucking advertising while savvy users enjoy an ad-free web.
- Image ads fade away. Congress legislates against more intrusive privacy policies. Still without any source of revenue, Web 2.0 sites crumble. Broadband fees rise to offset the lack of ad revenue, much like the early days of cable TV.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)