ARTS & FARCES internet

One of the great temptations of online publishing—especially when a Content Management System (CMS) is integrated into the workflow, making changes easy—is to continually edit one’s work. The large news sites do it extensively, and it started with the pre-Internet newswire services. It’s called “writethrough” and it presents an ethical problem.

Some changes are minor, but some changes are so extensive that the story completely reverses direction.

The issue received a good bit of discussion on Slashdot last week, but it seems to have died down without any sort of general consensus.

Maybe it’s my age, but my gut tells me that once a story is published, readers deserve at least an audit trail of any editorial changes, no matter how minor. On the other hand, writethroughs allow a story to develop more fully, and the process is arguably at least semi-transparent so some argue no harm no foul.

The way I’ve handled this in the past—and I’ve only done it once, but it was a major change to a major essay—was to include a complete and specific revision history at the end of the document.

There have to be better ways to do this, and I’d like to explore them.

Readers: Is this an important issue for you? If so, how would you like to see it handled?

Authors/editors: How do you handle this, and what sorts of policies and methodologies have you implemented?

[Update 14 Feb 2004: The convention on this website is to use the del tag (which appears graphically as strikethrough text) to indicate text that has been removed and/or updated.]

Unsolicited bulk email (”spam”) is not protected by the First Amendment, although it may not be long until it is. Last month a court struck down the federal “junk fax” law, and the Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting pharmacies from advertising “mixed-to-order” drugs, for example. Both of these cases indicate that a corporation’s “right” to market trumps the government’s interest in protecting the citizenry.

A disturbing trend in constitutional law—led primarily by conservatives like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—is to blur the line between commercial (unprotected) and noncommercial (protected) speech, as Adam Cohen points out in a New York Times editorial published last Sunday.

Until relatively recently, commercial speech enjoyed no First Amendment protection at all. Cohen cites a 1942 case where an owner of a former Navy submarine was prohibited from distributing advertising flyers because the flyers littered the streets. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case was clear: “purely commercial advertising” is not protected by the Constitution.

Since then, the Supreme Court’s absolutist position with regard to commercial speech has moderated. Courts now regularly assess the value of commercial speech in arenas such as false or misleading product claims.

Lately, Cohen notes, corporations have begun pressing equal protection for advertising under the First Amendment. The result would be that advertisements would be afforded the same protections as political speech.

Highly recommended.

A higher dialysis dose and special dialysis filters provide no additional benefit to ESRD patients; the minimum dialysis dose recommended by current treatment guidelines is adequate. That’s the finding of the first major National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical trial for dialysis in more than 20 years. The study was conducted primarily because of the high death rates and frequent hospitalizations of hemodialysis patients.

Dr. Garabed Eknoyan, the study’s lead investigator, announced that the study indicated that hemodialysis patients who received a higher dialysis dose than the minimum recommended dose or who used high-flux dialysis filters neither lived longer nor stayed out of the hospital longer than hemodialysis patients who received the minimum recommended dialysis dose.

Appearing to contradict the conclusions of the study’s researchers are two interesting findings:

• Higher dialysis doses appeared to reduce the risk of death and hospitalization among women.
• High-flux dialysis filters appeared to reduce the risk of death among patients who had been on hemodialysis for more than 3.5 years.

This week, two congressional committees—the House Ways and Means committee and the House Energy and Commerce committee—are scheduled to vote on a new Medicare bill. If passed, the bill would move to the full House of Representatives for a vote. The draft bill includes a provision that would increase the level of payment to dialysis centers. The payment increase would be funded by lowering the payments for home dialysis by 20 percent. Currently more than 340,000 people are on dialysis or have a kidney transplant in the United States and total treatment costs are US$17 billion each year.

The proposed payment level increase is problematic for hemodialysis patients for a variety of reasons. Most of us currently dialyze in dialysis centers—only about ten percent of U.S. end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients dialyze at home—but the home dialysis technology improvements are promising. Most disturbing is that lower home dialysis payments will likely create a disincentive for dialysis centers to continue their home dialysis programs. Such a situation would, in turn, create a disincentive to the continued development of innovative home dialysis technologies.

While I have no plans for home dialysis, it’s important to me as a treatment option, especially since I’ve seen the level of care I receive at the dialysis center steadily decrease over the past two years. Dialysis technicians that six months ago seemed grossly incompetent—and obviously so—now bring relief when I find they’re on duty. It’s not because they’re suddenly competent, it’s just that some of the newer technicians are even more incompetent.

Joanna Glasner reports in a Wired article that the U.S. citizenry is plenty grumpy about a recent law—the Financial Modernization Act of 1999—that requires them to opt-out if they want to prevent financial institutions from sharing their personal information.

Opt-out notices buried in junk mail, confusing legalese, and potentially invasive sales tactics are the specific problems most cited in a survey conducted by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision over the past two months.