Archive for the ‘Original’ Category
Agencies consider new kidney transplant rules
The rules that determine who goes to the top of the list for a kidney transplant could change dramatically under an idea working its way through federal health agencies.
Some transplant specialists and medical ethicists say the idea — which is under discussion and hasn’t been formally proposed to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network — is likely to be controversial if it is eventually adopted.
The complicated formula would give higher priority for access to the “best” kidneys to younger and healthier patients with a greater chance for long-term survival. That would be a significant shift from current first-come, first-served rules that, broadly speaking, favor patients who have been on the waiting list the longest, with less regard to age.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Schools cut lunch options for kids who struggle to pay
New federal nutrition regulations are in the works that could put an even bigger strain on the finances of already-struggling school meal programs. To encourage eligible children to sign up for federally subsidized free or reduced-price meals, some meal programs are serving them shrunken “alternate” lunches, often just two slices of bread, a slice of cheese and a 4-ounce juice cup.
If a school can get more eligible children enrolled, its direct costs go down because the federal government picks up more of the bill. Slenderized lunches, administrators say, are simply part of an aggressive campaign to make families aware of the benefit and get them signed up.
“If they need assistance, we give them assistance,” said Wayne Nagy, the Lee County district’s food and nutrition services director. But “if they don’t need assistance, we expect them to pay.”
Is that a creative way to address a shortage of school funding, or is it just punishing lower-income children? Hit the comments and let me know.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
States seek to copy Arizona immigration law
This co-production was reported with Vanessa Hauc of Telemundo and cross-posted from msnbc.com. Read the original in context, with a state-by-state box.
Arizona’s hot-button immigration law is on hold, pending court appeals, but its effects are rippling across the country as state legislatures reconfigured by the November elections begin their new sessions.
The disputed Arizona law would allow law enforcement officers to demand proof of legal immigration status from anyone they stop.
In July, a U.S. district judge granted the Obama administration’s request for an injunction blocking parts of the trailblazing law, which raised many legal questions, including whether local officials can legally enforce federal immigration law and whether such local enforcement could lead to unconstitutional racial profiling.
Why you should ignore crowd estimates
(Miguel Medina / AFP - Getty Images)
Cross-posted from World Blog. Read this post in context.
Update 1:10 p.m. ET: Al-Jazeera has now cut its estimate in half. Earlier: “up to two million.” Now: “more than a million.”
Wired, meanwhile, offers a way to guesstimate a big crowd.
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Estimating crowds is a notoriously inexact science, so much so that the National Park Service stopped doing it for protests in Washington many years ago. That leaves it up to news organizations to make their best guesses.
So it’s no surprise that estimates of the crowd that gathered today in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are very imprecise and wide-ranging:
• Washington Post: “Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.”
Live-blogging Egypt
I’m live-blogging the protests in Egypt today for msnbc.com’s World Blog. Here’s a roundup to get you started.
Right: Egyptian soldiers and civilians gather Monday in Al Tahrir Square in central Cairo. (Felipe Trueba /EPA) Full slideshow.
‘This is about social networks that are beyond the reach of Mubarak’
Cross-posted from Technolog: read in context
Large parts of the Internet essentially went dark about midnight Egypt time after the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of Washington, ordered service providers and cell phone companies to shut down.
While it looks like Egypt has been cut off — attempts to get to pretty much any Web site in Egypt are unsuccessful, and Twitter.com is unavailable inside the country — protesters and sympathizers have been able to get their message out through a variety of means because “what the government does is very effective for stopping the most basic users, meaning average users, the folks who probably aren’t Twitter users,” says Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington and author of “The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.”
“Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.”
Here’s the text of our full conversation with Howard:
State of the Union: Obama urges cooperation and innovation
Declaring that the nation faces big decisions like those it confronted at the dawn of the space race, President Barack Obama called for sweeping bipartisan “investments” in science, education and infrastructure in his State of the Union address Tuesday night — all without increasing government spending.
In a 61-minute address from the House chamber, Obama pleaded for a cooling of political tensions to help him reach that goal, saying America faced a crossroads that demanded a cooperative effort “bigger than party and bigger than politics.”
At “our generation’s Sputnik moment … we will move forward together or not at all,” the president said, recalling the massive U.S. mobilization of money and resources to catch the Soviet Union after it launched the world’s first satellite into space in 1957.
At the same time, Obama acknowledged that he must accommodate conservatives’ demands for restrictions on overall government spending and taxes, proposing a freeze on “annual domestic spending for the next five years.”
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
The Twitter Snowball Effect, the Zodiac and NPR
(Commons.Wikimedia.org)
Update, Saturday, Jan. 15, 1:40 p.m. ET: At the bottom, I’ve appended a response from a Minnesota Planetarium Society board member.
Twitter has resounded with the news this week that there’s now a 13th sign of the Zodiac, called Ophiuchus. Regardless how you feel about astrology itself, it’s easy to demonstrate that the “news” is bunkum — a textbook product of what I call the Twitter Snowball Effect.
Tracing the story back, we find that the excitement was sparked Thursday by items in Time.com’s NewsFeed and the Huffington Post, which reported that “astronomers from the Minnesota Planetarium Society” had found that because of the moon’s gravitational pull on Earth, the alignment of the stars was pushed by about a month.
With the Minnesota Planetarium Society as the only attribution, the items printed the new Zodiac, which slotted Ophiuchus into late autumn between Scorpio and Sagittarius (and transformed me from a Cancer into a Gemini).
In fact, the Minnesota Planetarium Society said no such thing.
Fractured Android leaves orphans behind
If tablets are the stars at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, then the headliner is Google, whose Android mobile operating system runs most of the devices getting so much attention this week in Las Vegas.
The iPad is still the king, but Apple isn’t here — as usual. This gives Google’s little green robot command of the spotlight almost by default. Nearly every major computer maker already has an Android tablet or is debuting one (or more) at CES; by the end of the year, Android will have grabbed a third of the tablet market to go along with half the smartphone market, analysts Piper-Jaffray projected this week.
But by mid-year, consumers will have to wade through a half-dozen different Android operating systems on tablets. Those on earlier releases will essentially be stranded — Google orphans left to rely on the cleverness of an already-thriving community of hackers who fill in the holes in Android on their own. Meanwhile, developers must weigh whether it’s worth the resources to bring out yet another version of their applications for yet another version of Android.
Hardware is back
The iPad, right, changed the game for manufacturers of mobile technology. Its simplicity helped create devices defined by what their hardware will — and won’t — let you do. Google’s Chrome notebook, left, has no obvious file system or desktop. The eLocity A7, center, is just one of dozens of Android-powered tablets that try to mimic the iPad’s intuitive look and feel. (John Brecher/msnbc.com)
When was the last time you referred to your computer as a “486-DX66”? When was the last time that you even thought about what microprocessor was beating at the heart of your PC/laptop/phone/game?
Computer processing has leaped so far so fast that sometime in the past decade it became commodified. Consumers no longer pay attention to what’s inside their devices because just about any computer they can buy is guaranteed to be far more powerful than they probably need for everyday browsing, storage and media.
This is odd if you stop to consider it. Think of it in terms of cars: Sure, there are gearheads who obsess over things like fuel injectors and cubic capacity, but normal humans just pick a general category and trust that whatever they buy has the appropriate engine for their needs and it will get them from Point A to Point B with the greatest efficiency.
What determines buying decisions are the personal choices drivers make that are peripheral to actual driving. You might be raising a family in the suburbs, so you buy an SUV with a DVD system to keep the kids occupied. Or maybe you’re single and looking, so a sporty convertible is more your speed, or you want to save the world, so you seek out a hybrid or even an electric car with no air-conditioning. If you’re like most people, you’re not interested in a turbocharged racing car to get you to the grocery story.
It doesn’t work that way with computers, which mostly come in two racing classes that all look alike, like Formula 1 (desktops) and NASCAR (mobile computers). The odds are you’re computing on the equivalent of a Ferrari when all you really need is a nicely detailed Honda.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 