Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Tools: Fast Flipping Out
Cool new tool from Google Labs: Fast Flip. It's kind of a redesigned iGoogle with visuals of the hard-copy laid-out pages of your favourite news and information sources. You can customize it according to the publications of your choice or various subject headings ("politics," "business," "sports") and flip through pages as you would in a magazine. A little gimmicky, but still somewhat potentially useful for the busy info hound. But also, read this take from the Online Journalism Blog on what Fast Flip could mean for the troubled news industry.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Investigations: Guard Misconduct at U.S. Embassy in Kabul Reportedly Included Prostitutes, "Deviant Sex Acts"
Private-contractor guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reportedly engaged in such lewd behaviour - including allegations that they abused Afghans and hired prostitutes - that dozens of their former colleagues blew the whistle to the Project on Government Oversight, according to this investigation by the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit. The reported misconduct was so serious it apparently resulted in a chronic turnover of staff and jeopardized the embassy's security in the warzone.
See photos of the lewd, booze-fuelled parties at this ABC News item. The network said one guard claimed his colleagues were pressured to engage in "deviant sex acts" in order to get promotions or desired shifts. I can see at least one position in those photos that's not in the Kama Sutra.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Investigations: Health Workers Won't Get H1N1 Shot Amid Side-Effect Concerns
Only half of health-care workers in two separate studies in the UK and Hong Kong plan to get the vaccine against the H1N1 virus that is now being fast-tracked to be ready by mid-October. So says this story in Britain's leading medical weekly Pulse - a survey of 115 UK doctors - and this item in the British Medical Journal on a Hong Kong poll of 2,255 health employees. And a poll by Nursing Times cited in this BMJ story found just 37 percent of nurses planned to get vaccinated. The Hong Kong respondents refusing the vaccine cited fear of side-effects and concerns about efficacy.
The Pulse piece also cited a study in the journal Emerging Health Threats that found the public is skeptical about novel vaccines introduced amid epidemics, citing concerns about lack of safety testing.
The studies follow these stories in the Times of London and Daily Mail on concerns about the fast-tracked vaccine at the UK's Health Protection Agency. The agency sent a letter to neurologists noting that an earlier vaccine rushed into use amid a similar swine flu outbreak in the U.S. in 1976 may have led to an eight-fold increase in cases of a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which causes paralysis and can be fatal. That flu outbreak caused one death, while side-effects from the vaccine killed 25. The vaccine was withdrawn after 10 weeks of use, and the U.S. government had to compensate claimants.
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