Social

It's Happened Again

Submitted by tarvid on Tue, 2008/04/15 - 16:25.

      It's happened again.
      In April, 2007, it happened again. April, the month of rebirth and renewal, should be anticipated, prized and protected perhaps like no other month.
      And yet, it isn't. April, instead, must be feared. She is, of course, the cruelest month.
      In April of 1865 American poet Walt Whitman mourned the death of his "Captain," Abraham Lincoln, assassinated on April 14 by bedeviled Southerner John Wilkes Booth, even as Lincoln was again finding joy in life following the end of the harrowing Civil War. Whitman's tribute poem, "When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd," captures his grief at Lincoln's death in the midst of budding beauty.

Remembering Virginia Tech

Submitted by tarvid on Tue, 2008/04/15 - 16:22.

Twelve months ago this Wednesday, on the bucolic campus of
Virginia Tech, a very disturbed young man unleashed his confused
and twisted fury on his unsuspecting classmates in a hail of
bullets leaving 32 students and professors dead and scores more
physically and emotionally wounded. And then he killed himself.
On that day a cloud of chaos, concern, and sadness stretched
beyond the tiny town of Blacksburg, Va. and covered the globe.

When I heard of the shooting, I immediately thought of Genesis
1:2, "The earth seemed a formless void and darkness covered the
face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of
the waters." It was of no comfort.

In the initial moments my thoughts were of darkness and
frustration: frustration with the notion that more guns on
campus would have prevented this tragedy; frustration with a

The right to be wrong

Submitted by DeepGeek on Mon, 2008/03/24 - 23:53.
The right to be wrong -

“One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.”

P. J. O'Rourke

Unless eternity is deterministic, every carnate soul has certain inalienable rights. These inalienable (or natural) rights are birthrights; these are not granted by mortal agents. Such rights cannot, by any compact, be deprived nor divested. Every living soul has the right to recall a past experience. Every living soul has the right of confidence. Every living soul has the right of responsibility. These fundamental, inherent rights are the foundations of free will.

The wholesome soul

Submitted by DeepGeek on Tue, 2008/03/18 - 21:33.
The wholesome soul -

The world offers more than black and white — and scales of grey. Jeffrey Miller embodies an attractively rich palette.

Attractiveness is more than visual; Jeffrey is pleasantly beholding. Attractors include wit and humility. Attractors include consideration, stewardship and charity. Attractors include reliability, warmth, honesty and attentiveness. Mr. Miller has integrity — he is the attractor paragon.

A reassessment of the cost-effectiveness of water and sanitation interventions in programmes for controlling childhood diarrhoea

Submitted by tarvid on Thu, 2007/12/27 - 11:05.

Cost-effectiveness analysis indicates that some water supply and sanitation (WSS) interventions are highly cost-effective for the control of diarrhoea among under-5-year-olds, on a par with oral rehydration therapy. These are relatively inexpensive "software-related" interventions such as hygiene education, social marketing of good hygiene practices, regulation of drinking-water, and monitoring of water quality. Such interventions are needed to ensure that the potentially positive health impacts of WSS infrastructure are fully realized in practice. The perception that WSS programmes are not a cost-effective use of health sector resources has arisen from three factors: an assumption that all WSS interventions involve construction of physical infrastructure, a misperception of the health sector's role in WSS programmes, and a misunderstanding of the scope of cost-effectiveness analysis. WSS infrastructure ("hardware")

Everybody's Got a Water Buffalo

Submitted by the_Old_Woman_i... on Wed, 2007/12/19 - 08:34.

So I got this catalog in the mail. And before I even get this blog underway, I want to plug Heifer International with great enthusiasm. It is a great charity, a worthy charity, one of the most fantastic charitable endeavors I know of. You should ante up for Heifer I. this very minute via their web site, http://www.heifer.org. My church youth group once solicited funds to buy a cow to send to an impoverished family in the developing world, and I ponied up $50, which bought a shank of cow or maybe even a hindquarter. Or maybe it was a pair of goats we sponsored, in which case I supplied at least a third of a goat. With any luck, it was the front third.

Analyzing Contraceptive Use Dynamics as a Simplified Markov Process Using Demographic and Health Survey Data

Submitted by tarvid on Fri, 2007/11/02 - 11:07.

Background

This analysis was performed as part of preparing the "Strategic Plan for the Bangladesh National Family Planning Program 1995-2005", Abul Barkhat et al, Technical Review Committee, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Bangladesh. The data for the analysis was derived from the "Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 1993-1994", S. N. Mitra et al, Macro International Inc. (BDHS94). Perhaps unique in this regard, all of the parameters used in the model were obtained from indigenous data. No reliance was placed on international sources.