tisiwoota

So.

Once upon a time earlier this evening, I was innocently going through my bloglines when I came upon a new entry on IP Watch about how some US official is demanding that the World Health Organization withdraw a publication that’s critical of US trade policy, and calling for a comprehensive review of WHO’s publication policies.

Well, that’s not too shocking. I seem to remember the US complaining about various aspects of WHO work over the past year.

What _was_ surprising was reading a few paragraphs down, where the article provides the name of the report at issue.

Which happened to be the EXACT REPORT that I researched developing country patent legislation for when I interned at WHO.

The language of the report itself is admittedly strong, but is also not inaccurate… and the complaint that the report “singles out several member states” is beyond me– how would one analyze the impact of policies on developing countries, without naming whose policies they were? Say that there are issues related to the policies of “certain” countries of whom we will not speak (nudge nudge wink wink)”? Yes, that sounds like an effective approach to policy analysis…

Naturally, I have googled my complaint-lodging nemesis, a senior official who was involved in negotiating the US/Australia FTA (which some argue imposes overly harsh IP terms), has ties to the sugar industry (he previously criticized the WHO’s action plan on obesity)… and, as the post-title gives away, is the godson of George HW Bush.

In other words, I don’t seriously expect Homeland Security to haul me away and “disappear” me in the middle of the night for my tangential connection to something that pissed off said Bush-godson… But just in case: It’s been been a pleasure to be your very-occasional reading source, and well, it was a good life while it lasted…

Two days since the last weekish– Go new math, huh? (Oh if only it were a two-day week…)

But I’ve gotten up to five links again, so here goes:

1. An Experimental Approach to the History of Science via MixingMemory

2. Voodoo and Faulty Causation

3. Bhutan: Where Ads are on People, Not Billboards. As I understand it, Bhutan has laws that severely restrict most forms of advertising in public spaces, but as they move towards democracy capitalistic memes are starting to creep in…

4. A Yo-yo powered mp3 player. The obvious question here is: Why not?

5. Fox Freaks Out Over Clinton Vids. Funny how fox cries “copyright” every time it loses control over popular interpretation of its content… (There really ought to be a term for this move by now.. copysulking?)

It’s been less than seven days since the last of these, but hey, it’s been that kind of week-ish.

1. Men Cooperate More When There’s an Enemy (while women’s cooperation levels remain unchanged)

2. Wave of Party Switchers Hit Republicans

3. Exclamation Points Mean FRIENDSHIP!!!

4. Fruit Flies Sleep More After they Socialize

5. The Office as Cultural Barometer

1. Water Shortages Hit Darfur

2. Top Apps that Slow Down Windows

3. Revenge Homicides on Stingrays Sparked by Steve Irwin’s Death

4. For-Profit Philanthropy?! Google’s new venture…

5. The Influence of Irrelevant Emotions on Moral Judgment

“It seems that when we encounter a moral problem, we’re unable to distinguish the emotions that are elicited by the problem, and those that are a result of other properties of the context in which we encounter the moral problem.“

“Schooler isn’t sure exactly how being grossed out by your back hair translates into unprotected sex.”

context

1. NY Times Op-Ed on workers control over their own time (compares the academic life to 19th century laborers, sort of)

2. Evangelical defends separation of church and state– or at least, the justice of abstaining from official prayer– after attending a football game in Hawaii preceded by Buddhist/animist prayers.

3. Serpentes on a Shippe (review of Snakes on a Plane, in Chaucerian English (via Heaneyland)).

4. Aging = Trade-Off for Cancer Protection (FuturePundit)

5. Teenage Brains Less Capable of Empathetic Thought than Adults (FuturePundit)

Rest in Peace
by Frederic and Mary Ann Brusatt
(inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh)

I am a World Trade Center tower, standing tall in the clear blue sky, feeling a violent blow in my side, and I am a towering inferno of pain and suffering imploding upon myself and collapsing to the ground.

May I rest in peace.

I am a terrified passenger on a hijacked airplane not knowing where we are going or that I am riding on fuel tanks that will be instruments of death, and I am a worker arriving at my office not knowing that in just a moment my future will be obliterated.

May I rest in peace.

I am a pigeon in the plaza between the two towers eating crumbs from someone’s breakfast when fire rains down on me from the skies, and I am a bed of flowers admired daily by thousands of tourists now buried under five stories of rubble.

May I rest in peace.
(more…)

So a crafty friend of mine is having a 50%-off sale of everything on her website (where she sells “all manner of pretty things”) from now until 9/21…

For example:

folk bags

“hedgehog the larger”

a lithograph of persephone

The Union of Concerned Scientists is sponsoring a global warming cartoon contest.

A great entry that was pointed out to me:

Just came across this Economist article on the challenges of making YouTube Profitable. (Which makes it sound as though the founders didn’t have much of a business vision going into it).

What puzzles me is the focus on an AdSense-type strategy. As the article notes, that model doesn’t seem to translate so well into the world of YouTube. IMHO, it would make far more sense for YouTube to model itself off of the flickr model: ie, give users the opportunity to buy DVDs of clips they made or like. And why not have advertizing for equipment to make better videos (I mean, there’s not so much as an ad for a webcam anywhere on the site)? And it can’t be too hard to find/create a photojojo for videos… you would think YouTube would be a great place to advertize film-making classes for amateurs…

1. “The Risk Pool” (Gladwell on the pension predicament)

2. Patent Review goes Wiki

3. Wiki textbooks for developing countries

4. Global Water Scarcity comes 20 years earlier than expected

5. New brain cells die without a job to do (communication is essential for survival )