ARTS & FARCES internet

Hemoglobin variability is a strong predictor of death risk in hemodialysis patients, according to a study—“Hemoglobin Variability and Mortality in ESRD” (.pdf; 208Kb)—published in the December issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Hemoglobin carries oxygen in the blood to every part of the body. Anemia—low hemoglobin levels—is one of the most frequent complications of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and a common cause of death in hemodialysis patients.

Treatments for anemia in hemodialysis patients included erythropoietin and intravenous iron.

Data from 34,963 hemodialysis patients was used to analyze variations in hemoglobin levels. The new metric, “Hb-Var,” measures hemoglobin variability independently of their absolute values and trends over time.

The study found that high Hb-Var, or a high hemoglobin variability, predicated a greater risk of death. For each 1 gram per deciliter (g/dL) increase in Hb-Var, the risk of death increased by 33 percent. A drop in hemoglobin levels impairs the body’s ability to transport adequate levels of oxygen to the organs, causing damage. According to the study, the heart and autonomic nervous system may be especially vulnerable to wide variations in hemoglobin levels.

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Jon Hart has filed a lawsuit against Comcast in California Superior Court, Alameda County, alleging the cable and internet service provider’s secret use of traffic-shaping technology to limit file-sharing applications, specifically BitTorrent, is an unfair business practice and violates federal computer fraud laws, the company’s own user contracts, and federal advertising laws.

Hart wants the court to certify the lawsuit as a class action in California, requests unspecified damages, and requests that Comcast be forced to stop interfering with internet traffic on its network.

Independent analyses show that Comcast intentionally limits BitTorrent traffic on its network by sending forged reset packets. Comcast has thus far denied that it blocks access to BitTorrent or alters the internet traffic of its customers. Technically correct, possibly, but most certainly incomplete.

Perhaps most interesting of all is that Hart’s lawsuit alleges that Comcast’s discrimination against BitTorrent traffic violates established Federal Communications Commission policies on network neutrality.

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I thought the tables v. full-CSS issue had been settled in the favor of full-CSS long ago. But I keep bumping up against resistance to the use of full-CSS page layouts in Web design. So, here are eight notes to myself about why full-CSS is far superior to using tables for Web page layouts.

1. Accessibility: For textreaders, a page’s intended layout—which is obvious to sighted users—is far from obvious, especially if the user has to find her way through layers of nested tables to reach the content. This is also true for users of non-computer devices (smartphones, PDAs, and devices yet to come). Sooner or later someone’s going to get sued over this issue. Oh, wait, someone already has.
2. Search engine visibility: Many search engines grab the first 20-30 words of text they encounter and use that for the description of the site. Whatever is contained within the top left table cell becomes the page’s description. CSS allows absolute positioning of page sections, allowing the page’s main content well to be placed first.
3. No spaghetti code: Properly laying out a page requires all kinds of specifications: text alignment, margins, leading, line lengths, etc. When tables are used, all of these specifications must reside in the tags, resulting in code that is hard to read, difficult to maintain, and virtually impossible to enhance. Tables are for tabular data, not page layout.
4. Code is separated from content: As stated above, the table-based layout spaghetti code is embedded within the content. With a full CSS-based layout, code is separated from content. This makes redesigns much easier as many times all that’s required is editing of the .css files. For an example, see the CSS Zen Garden Web site.
5. Improved page load times: HTML is much more compact with full CSS layout control than with tables (plus the .css files are cached on the server, loading even faster). This can dramatically reduce page load times. This isn’t as apparent on the University network but is appreciated by those accessing the server from outside.
6. CSS can be turned off: If the page is designed semantically and CSS is turned off or overridden, the page degrades gracefully with the content still being displayed in the appropriate hierarchy and in an accessible manner. Tables cannot be turned off; if the page doesn’t render properly, there’s nothing the user can do about it. Similarly, different classes of users can specify their own CSS, overriding the page’s settings to make text larger, etc.
7. CSS is more powerful: Margins, absolute positioning, line spacing, etc. are all relatively easy to code in CSS. Better yet, the code resides in one place, so changes and updates are just as easy. Overlapping layers are impossible to code in a table-based layout, yet can be implemented with CSS.
8. Browser support: CSS is partially supported by Internet Explorer 3.01 and later, Netscape 4.6 and later, and Opera 3.6 and later. Internet Explorer 5.5 and later support more than 90% of the CSS-1 specification; Netscape 6 and later and Opera 5 and later support more than 98% of the specification.

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The Wall Street Journal (save for the op-ed page) is one of the best newspapers on the planet. Unfortunately, because its content was locked behind a paywall, few knew. That’s changed now as new owner Rupert Murdoch says he’s changing business models from subscriptions to advertising: “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth.”

While there’s lots hedge room there, and nothing will happen until Murdoch’s News Corp. actually acquires the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Company, this is almost surely the final nail in the pay-per-view coffin.

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In 1983, a Virginia doctor proposed buying kidneys from the indigent and selling them to those who could afford them. Al Gore (then a representative from Tennessee) introduced legislation to ban the sale of organs. Gore’s bill became law in 1984, the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which allows “reasonable payments associated with the removal, transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, and storage of a human organ.” Currently, several states offer a tax deduction of up to US$10,000 for expenses associated with donating an organ.

Now comes another doctor, Arthur Matas—a transplant surgeon from the University of Minnesota—with a plan disturbingly similar to the one proposed in 1983. Matas wants to see a regulated kidney market and “doesn’t rule out financial incentives for the families of deceased donors,” according to Laura Meckler’s report in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Francis Delmonico, a Harvard transplant surgeon who vigorously opposes his friend Matas, has helped determine a national transplant policy in the US. Until last June was the president of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). His greatest fear is that with an organ market, “altruistic donations might wither away,” according to Meckler. “Payments eventually result in the exploitation of the individual. It’s the poor person who sells.” [....]

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