Right-handed yoghurt

in July I wrote about discrimination against left-handed people. At the time my post attracted a small amount of ridicule and several invitations to get over myself.

The point I was making was not that left handed people suffer significant inconvenience, simply that there are assumptions made in the design of things which are relevant only to right-handed people.

Today I have another example: a yoghurt pot.

How can a yoghurt pot exhibit a right-handed bias? read on...

A picture's worth a thousand words, so here's the offending item

Inspecting the lid closely we see the promise of "easy pour corners":

Indeed, two of the corners appear to have been slightly squared off, to facilitate easy pouring and hopefully reduce the incidence of mess and wastage. Very thoughtful...

So I like to have yoghurt on my muesli at breakfast. Now I can pour the yoghurt straight out of the pot:

Marvellous. See how the corner I'm pouring from, and the one diagonally opposite it - are squared off?

Now - what happens if you pour with the other hand:

Oh dear! Now I'm pouring from the rounded corner. You can already see the increased potential to make a mess here.

If I want to pour from my left hand and use one of the ever-so-helpful easy-pour corners, I need to twist my arm around:

Admittedly a minor inconvenience, but an annoying one. Because honestly, how hard would it have been to have all four corners squared off? Or else two corners at one end - one for the rightys, one for the leftys.

The answer is that it would have been trivially easy, had the designer thought of it. But as usual, left handed people don't get any consideration.

My wish is simply that designers of objects that are intended for manual manipulation give some thought to the idea that 10% of the population will use the other hand for it.

There is hope - there are some products which would have been easy to inadvertently bias toward right handed people, had their designers not stopped to think, and consequently eliminated these problems from the design. These are the exceptions, but prove that it is possible.

Vaccines and autism

There’s currently a very active debate raging regarding vaccination and its relationship to autism, since a link was suggested in 1998 by a British researcher in a paper published in a medical journal.

The research didn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it did get a lot of attention and immediately began polarising people. On one side were the medical and health authorities, researchers, peer review committees, pharmaceutical companies, and other persons who consider themselves to be rational and informed

On the other side are sceptics - parents of autistic children and others, and some high-profile celebrity endorsements, some of whom have an enormous amount of influence over public opinion.

The debate has all the makings of a good Conspiracy Theory – a subject which most people aren’t experts in but will have a strong opinion on, the possibility of unstated agendas, and unseen threats to vulnerable children. In fact it would have made a good movie script.

This is probably why there is so much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Dread) on the subject. The real question though, is what is the fertilizer that allows FUD to take root? In the past we have seen that Conspiracy Theories usually arise from a lack of Trust. In this case, parents are told that the vaccines are safe, by governments, the Medical profession, and the pharmaceutical companies. The real issue is the transparency - or lack thereof - of these agencies.

These are the same people who prescribed Thalidomide for pregnant women. Events like this indicate that medical knowledge is constantly evolving. What's regarded as being completely safe now may later be found to be unsafe with new knowledge.

This is just pure common sense - a simple admission that we don't know everything. Which is fine - but to confidently proclaim that something is harmless with certainty, and dismiss those who doubt or question it, is simple arrogance.

The nature of people is that they will identify most strongly with those parts of the argument of most direct relevance to them. Ask anyone who has lost a child to a preventable disease and they will be in favour of vaccination. Likewise you’ll find the highest degree of scepticism among parents of autistic children – particularly those whose condition has regressed since vaccination (whether that be due to the vaccination or not – which I contend is largely unknowable anyway).

With regard to autism, the problem is that a definitive cause – or set of causes – has so far eluded discovery. We do know its prevalence is rising rapidly, more so than could be explained by a lower diagnosis threshold. The best tool we have at the moment to try to identify a cause is statistics. Statisticians will tell you "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" This incidentally is what the FUD surrounding cellphone towers is based on - just because they haven't killed anyone yet, doesn't mean they’re not going to! They'll also tell you that correlation is not the same as causality - for example young male drivers have more crashes, and young males don't (usually) listen to Bing Crosby. So if you're the type of person who likes listening to Bing Crosby, you're probably less likely to be in a crash, but not because of your musical taste.

If the Medical profession wants to squash the FUD surrounding vaccines and autism - the single most effective thing they could possibly do is find a definitive cause, or set of causes, for autism, and why its prevalance is increasing so rapidly. This would be the best way to end the ill-informed speculation. Unless and until such a discovery is made, the issue needs to be handled with some respect for those parents who – without a scientific background in most cases, will want to find a cause and a cure. Ridiculing their concerns is not going to gain their trust; quite the opposite.

There’s a lot of discussion about this on the internet, for further reading, use the Wikipedia article on the subject as a portal and click through to the citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy

Final quote: “It’s really difficult to know who and what to believe, isn’t it?” – mother of an autistic child.

Disclaimer: The author is the parent of an autistic child

Where is New Zealand?

New Zealand is a small country (about the same size as the state of Colorado) in the South Pacific. It's a part of ROW (Rest Of World).

Despite what appears to be a very widely held misconception, New Zealand is NOT and never WAS a part of Australia.

Australia is another country in ROW. By coincidence they speak the same language and have a similar sounding accent, at least to foreign ears.

Australia and New Zealand are 1180 miles apart at the nearest point.

That's about the same distance as:

• Los Angeles to Dallas
• New York to New Orleans
• London to Reykjavik
  
• London to Gibraltar

They are separated by a big bit of water. There is no bridge. There is no Land Border.

To get between Australia and New Zealand, you have to get on a plane and fly for three hours.

So. If I am a visitor in your country, please do not ask me when I am returning to Australia.

Don't get sick in America

This is about Medical Insurance. It's a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide, and there are significant differences between countries in terms of how it works. I'm making a comparison between how it's done in NZ and my understanding of how it's done in the USA - which may be flawed. I would especially invite any comments from American readers who can correct my understanding.

In New Zealand, as in many countries, we have what we call a "Public Health" system. This is what Americans would call "Socialized Medicine". Everyone is covered by the Public Health system, and it's Free (paid for by your Taxes).

The public system will come to your rescue if you injure yourself. An ambulance will come and take you to hospital A&E ("Accident & Emergency" = American "ER"). There, you will be treated according to the severity of your condition, along with the other people also there for treatment.

Very few people die from waiting too long for treatment, so for emergency care, the "Public System" is generally acceptable.

Its track record slips a little for chronic conditions however. If you have an ongoing condition - but not one that's immediately life-threatening, you will have to run the gauntlet of waiting lists, which in some cases can be months long, to see a specialist or get a surgery date. There is a theoretical risk that your condition may deteriorate to the point where it is Terminal while you are waiting - although in practice this is quite rare. It does mean that quality of life is impacted, sometimes severely, while waiting for surgery.

For non-ER type consultations and surgery there is an alternative: Private medicine. Put your hand in your pocket and you can see a specialist immediately, and have your surgery next week, provided you can afford it.

This is where Medical Insurance in NZ comes in - you can buy "SurgicalCare" or similarly-structured insurance, which will not cover trips to the optometrist, dentist or regular Doctor visits, but if you unexpectedly need to fork out thousands at short notice to have a cancerous organ removed, it means no waiting.

I have such a policy for my family: two adults and one child, for which I pay around $140 per month. (that is about $US 90)

This policy will also cover any scans, X-rays, sonograms or other tests ordered by the specialist.

Contrast this to the American way of doing it. For a start, Medical insurance there is horrendously expensive and would come as a very rude shock to anyone migrating there. My understanding is that for similar cover to that mentioned, for a family of two adults and a child, it would cost something in the order of $1500 per month.

Also there is no "socialized medicine" in the USA, which means (in practice) that unless you have Medical Insurance, you are somewhat screwed. I hear tales of people being patched up after accidents and then being left with immense debt.

A lot of corporations in America offer medical insurance as one of the benefits. To the point where it's a very strong consideration in choosing a job. Americans would turn down a great job offer in favour of a lesser one if it had "great Medical" [insurance benefits].

The real kicker in this debate is that of switching insurance companies: If you develop some medical condition during your life, then later on move to another employer, you will inevitably end up switching medical insurers. Most medical insurance policies will exclude pre-existing conditions, which means that by switching employers, you are essentially degrading your medical cover.

It's easy to see how you could go through your life and career, carrying insurance policies which would become progressively more limited and worthless to you.

It would be very interesting to see some statistics on the number of deaths in the USA due to chronic medical conditions, for which treatment was refused or delayed due to the subject having been essentially forced to switch insurers throughout their career.

Any Americans out there care to correct my understanding??

Seagull Management

I thought this was my own creation but apparently not... for the longest time I've been expounding this as Original Thinking on my part - but a quick google search proves otherwise. Oh well...

It's too good not to link to here though. Straight from the Dilbert school of Modern Management, we have the organizational theory of Seagull Management.

Adam's definition: An incompetent (usually senior) manager who flies in from "on high", makes a lot of noise, 5h1ts all over everything then flies away again.

Wikipedia definition: a management style of interacting with employees only when a problem arises, making hasty decisions about things they have little understanding of, then leaving others to deal with the mess they leave behind.

wikipedia link

Plasticized Agression

Walking through a toy shop today I came across the Transformers toys section. There I noticed this toy:




Transformers "Revenge of the Fallen" Power Bots - complete with Battle phrases and Blasting sounds.

Doesn't take genius level intelligence to work out the intention of this toy - targeted at impressionable young boys, the figure is based on a hyper-exaggerated humanoid shape designed to serve as a mobile weapon of awesome firepower, intended to scare the living crap out of his enemies.

My question is simply this: What the hell are modelling to our kids with these toys? Might is Right, and the side with the biggest guns always wins? Violence is the way to solving problems? Justice is delivered by smashing your opponent with brutal force? Great. And then we worry why bullying and aggression are so common in our schools.

Isn't it high time we abandoned the ways of our cave-dwelling ancestors and consigned to history the idea that disputes must always be settled by force?

We tell our kids not to hit each other but then we buy them this kind of shit, which is nothing more than cosmetically packaged violence.

It's time we evolved. We are capable of better.

Man living in NZ among dead

So says the headline in the newspaper.

I took this to be a ghoulish story about some mentally ill homeless person who had made his home in a cemetery... but no! It's about a British man who emigrated to NZ being among the dead in the ferry that sank in Tonga.

WHO teaches these people how to write headlines??!