Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Downs Syndrome or Not

Blood tests to determine if a baby has Down Syndrome are only 60-80% acccurate. The rate of Down syndrome births has not changed, but 80-90% of women told their baby will have it agree to abort their child. What's going on? How many "normal" babies are we killing because of faulty science?

Drudge gets competition

CBS MarketWatch:
Matt Drudge has owned the online news/gossip/investigative reporting/scaremongering Web space for almost 10 years. That may be set to end Wednesday, as blog publisher Nick Denton is launching Sploid.com, a tabloid Web site for breaking news with attitude.

"Sploid is a news site with a tabloid mentality -- top stories up top, played big, as fast as they break," Denton said in an e-mail. "If there's a political line, it's anarcho-capitalist -- sniffing out hypocrisy and absurdity, whether from salon left or religious right."

Befitting with Web style, headlines on Sploid.com link to the full stories on other sites. In a preview this morning, little original reporting was evident, other than an editorial comment roasting CNN for being too "perky" in its Wednesday broadcast. Straight stories like "Halliburton Gets Billion-Dollar Payday" and "Iraq's Got a Prez" were accompanied by a sensational item, "Ms. Wheelchair Runner-Up Blasts Pageant."
I've been checking the site today and it's finally up. We'll see how long it lasts -- as Drudge told the Observer, the news is an exhausting, all-consuming business.

China's Labor Shortage Woes

Capitalism at work in China! Workers of China Unite!

China remains a country where migrant workers are routinely exploited. But after a decade of stagnant wages, these workers are showing more willingness to demand their rights. Last year, factory workers rioted and held strikes in Guangdong. Other workers just left.

Matrix: The Postmodern Organization of the Church

Describes "the four identifiable cultural-intellectual eras in the history of Western civilization", postmodernism being the latest, and how the church organizes itself in response to the changing culture. Also an interesting list of trends which he thinks will emerge and/or continue through postmodernism at the end.

Bloggorhea

Lots of interesting stuff about the current state of the news biz outside of the MSM: Drudge, Gawker, Sploid, Wonkette, the "Huffington Report", etc.

The report will probably rotate off soon...