Bloggasm

You ever have one of those instances in elementary or middle school that you look back and wish you knew what you know now so you could raise your hand and argue with the teacher? When I was in middle school and we were having our second installment of sex education (the first was in fifth grade), a stocky, butch PE teacher told us about how sexually transmitted diseases could not only be given through broken condoms, but that they could actually slip THROUGH THE FIBERS of unbroken condoms. Therefore, nothing but abstinence was safe. Boys just wanted sex and you don’t have to prove your love by having sex. I’m sure you’ve heard all this before.

But the great thing about propaganda being shoved down your throat while you’re young is the fact that when you get older, you can figure stuff out on your own (this is why I don’t know why conservatives are getting their panties bunched up over teachers toting their liberal beliefs in the classroom). If I could travel back in time, I could ask the teacher, “What about people who don’t ever want to get married? Which partner should they have sex with?” or any number of rebuttals. But alas, I can’t. Like everyone else in the world, I grew up to learn that sex wasn’t so bad and it didn’t destroy lives and that people have sex all the time (average age of males for losing virginity is 16, I think, and girls are 17).

Realizing all this, conservatives are now pushing their ideology towards a much more dangerous student body: Medical students.

Conservatives teach sex ed to medical students. Thanks, Congress.:

As Michael Specter pointed out in The New Yorker last month, the Bush administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars touting the benefits of abstinence. Most abstinence-promoting programs waste the government’s money funneling misinformation directly to adolescents. But one such group, the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, has another audience in mind—medical students. With the help of Congress, the institute has finagled $200,000 out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop a sexual-health curriculum for doctors in training. It’s a small bit of pork, but it represents the hijacking of a government agency that normally funds research based on merit. And the CDC’s imprimatur could persuade medical schools to use the institute’s work.

As most people know, abstinence-only programs are not only ineffective, they’re dangerous as well. Because all they do is promote ignorance and misinformation, students are unable to take necessary safety precautions and instead end up pregnant or with an STD. Now that this ignorance is being pushed towards medical students, things have gotten so much darker.

The program is headed by Dr. Joe McIlhaney, someone who Feministing has accused of rape and denying emergency contraception to women.

I want to be outraged at all this, but instead I’m just sad.

With the new legislation passed in South Dakota banning abortion, many are worried that this might be the Right’s best chance at overturning Roe v Wade.

Some questions are going through our heads: How then will women be able to get safe, healthy abortions? What is the best method to do so?

Well, I have managed to find one alternative: Frank’s Home Abortion

via mikey

LiewCF.com is a personal tech site on latest technology, gadgets, softwares, computing tips and tricks, product reviews and some interesting stuffs. The author, Liew Cheon Fong, is a full time blogger, one of the first few Malaysians who blog for a living.

Simon Owens: Do you get a lot of feedback from your readers in regards to technology news? How active is your readership in communicating through your comments section?

Liew Cheon Fong: Generally, my readers are reading my blog for tech news but they will take part in discussion for some interesting topics. Basically, I get less than 10 comments for each post.

Simon Owens: What are some of your main sources for the latest gadget and technology news? Do receive a lot of press releases and tips from techology companies?

Liew Cheon Fong: News feeds. I subscribe to a lot of website feeds as my news sources. I seldom receive press releases from technology companies.

Simon Owens: Would you say that your blog is mainly geared towards a tech-geek audience or do you have a lot of readers from a more mainstream audience?

Liew Cheon Fong: My target readers are general computer users, not tech geek. The initial purpose of the blog is telling some interesting tech news and some useful computing tips to computer home users. That’s why I usually write blog posts in simple language and complete with screenshots.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed you’re part of the Gadget Blog Network. How did you become part of that network and do you find that it’s good at directing advertisers towards your site?

Liew Cheon Fong: I was invited by the BlogAds’ Gadget Blog Network founder, methodshop because I am one of the gadget blog in BlogAds. Joining the network has increased the BlogAds sales on my blog.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that your blog partly focuses on making money through blogging. How successful have you been at this and which niches do you think are the most profitable?

Liew Cheon Fong: I am now a full time blogger (a.k.a problogger). All of my income is generated from my blog. In my opinion, tech related niches are still the most profitable but the competition is very high. You need to do some research for low competition tech niches.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

Liew Cheon Fong: It is difficult to suggest a blog for everyone. Personally, I recommend the following blogs:
- http://www.performancing.com/
- http://www.problogger.net/
- http://www.lifehacker.com/
- http://adsense.blogspot.com/
- http://www.engadget.com

Back in middle-school something happened that turned me away from Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy forever. An aunt of mine visited my family and brought with her a bag full of books by a guy named Robert Jordan. The books were, of course, his best-selling Wheel of Time series. You know, the series where every single book is a thousand-page tomb? Because back then I was willing to read just about anything, I began the long trek through the series. The first book was kind of interesting, and so I moved onto the second one. After that I moved onto the third. By the time I got to the fourth, things began to slow down, and I almost didn’t finish it, but because back then I finished almost every book I started (oh, to have that patience now!), I did. By the time I got to the fifth, I read the first sixty or so pages and then chucked the book across the room.

Why? Quite simply, Robert Jordan was a hack. Even my seventh-grade self could realize this. Because he had to make every book a million bajillion pages, he would have all his main characters split up and go on these long journeys. Each chapter he would switch from character to character and write ten pages on them even if they were simply stopping in a town to eat. So if you have five characters and each must stop at ten towns before reaching his or her destinations, there’s fifty fucking chapters of them just stopping in towns with absolutely nothing happening. It was just a bunch of filler, and even my read-a-book-every-three-days seventh-grade self couldn’t take it anymore. For those who are still keeping up with the series, I applaud you.

When the show “Lost” came out awhile back, I saw a bunch of my fellow bloggers talk about how great it was. So pretty soon I sat down and watched an episode. I wasn’t amazed (the scenes that were supposed to build in suspense and mystery just merely annoyed me) and didn’t really make an effort to watch anymore.

But now I have a friend who really likes the show, and every now and then whenever I’m over at his place I’ll watch it with him. Since then, what was once a mild “eh” feeling from viewing the show has now turned into a strong dislike. The reason?

I’m utterly convinced that one of the main writers for the show is Robert Jordan.

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Whenever you read blogger advice, they say that you should make sure you have a catchy title to your post in order to entice feed readers or new visitors to read through the entire entry. Unfortunately, newspaper can’t use this same tactic because they have to worry about Google News search engine bots: This Boring Headline Is Written for Google

JOURNALISTS over the years have assumed they were writing their headlines and articles for two audiences — fickle readers and nitpicking editors. Today, there is a third important arbiter of their work: the software programs that scour the Web, analyzing and ranking online news articles on behalf of Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The search-engine “bots” that crawl the Web are increasingly influential, delivering 30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites. And traffic means readers and advertisers, at a time when the mainstream media is desperately trying to make a living on the Web.

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

via collision detection

In this week’s segment of Bigots R’ Us, we have a person who has been discriminated against through Myspace. Notice how the term “gay” has been once again linked to “deviant sexual practice,” since we all know gay lifestyle is centered around sex:

The headlines have come fast and furious in recent months about kids being busted for everything from threatening teachers to plotting to burn down churches on their MySpace and Facebook pages. But at a small Christian liberal arts university in

Williamsburg, Kentucky, last week, 20-year-old Jason Johnson was expelled not for a threat, but for admitting he is gay.

University of the Cumberlands spokesperson Larry Cockrum said he wasn’t allowed to discuss matters pertaining to students or faculty, but the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper confirmed that the expulsion happened recently.

Cockrum said the 117-year-old school has a policy that allows administrators to expel a student who “promotes sexual behavior not consistent with Christian principles.”

For those who don’t know, Myspace is open to anyone who wants to see it. For awhile, Facebook only allowed students in, but now it allows professors to create accounts, and there’s been some instances where cops have managed to log on and find out about college parties. Is it just me, or is there something off about your professor combing through your Facebook photo albums to see what you do on your weekends?

Bill O’reilly, eat your heart out. In our continued war on missing and/or abused children, West Virginia is leading the fight.

Starting this fall, on school picture day, students in West Virginia will have to ‘say cheese’ twice. Two pictures will be taken, one straight on and one profile photo. Those two pictures will be combined using the AmberView technology, to create a 3-D image of that person.

The image will then be loaded into a computer that can alert police, media and other organizations in just a few minutes after a child is reported missing. When the Amber Alert goes out, the missing child’s 3-D image will be immediately posted on the AmberView website.