Xblog

It turns out I’m effected by a bug in one of the updates that appears to be effecting a lot of people. I’m not surprised. If my BSOD is to be believed, my AHCI driver is busted. I can’t imagine what it is like for people who have their system set to automatically install updates, but at least I was able to recover quickly by reverting to a previous configuration.

I’d love to hear the inside scoop on what was going on there.

So, what has gone well? The case has been nice and compact, although this would be better appreciated by those that I live with if I kept my desk clear. The power supply on the case died (the main improvement of the updated NSK1380 seems to be the enhanced 80 PLUS Certified PSU). The cheesy slot fan they provide started to die on me, so I took that out. I haven’t yet measured the thermal impact of that, but I must acknowledge that the air flow in the case, what with my two hard drives, DVD-RW and the passively cooled 7600GS video card is somewhat lacking, and I have noticed the case gets quite hot at times (though that might have something to do with stacking junk on top of it, inhibiting airflow out the top vent). My two gripes about the case are a) the front panel doesn’t do advanced audio, instead using a funky variant of the AC’97 standard interface (it has both front and rear audio channels, but there are only two mini-stereo plugs in the front, one for headphones and one for a microphone… what gives?), and b) the sata power connector on it is so short it can’t really reach any of the drive bays unless the drive cage is all the way in, making opening and closing the drive bay tedious.

The graphics card remains an excellent investment (thanks for the pointer Danny). I get zippy performance, stable drivers in both Linux and Windows, and generally no complaints. I will say that for such a compact case it might have been wiser to go with a smaller card with an active cooling system, as it would improve airflow.

The Patriot memory did end up having one stick go bad on me. I’m going to retest it shortly to see if it really was the memory stick that was the problem. The extra voltage needed by the RAM has been an annoyance and probably the source of additional heat. Note to self: pay more attention to voltage needs of sticks when purchasing RAM. In practice I don’t stress the memory subsystem much, so having slower RAM that just works as is is probably the better call.

The Zalman CNPS-8000 continues to plug away. It isn’t doing a great job of cooling the CPU, which might partially be driven by the fact that a chunk of it is jammed directly under the PSU, and partially driven by the fact that the rest of it is right between the PSU and a hard drive, with a CD-ROM right above it. It might also have something to do with the paste I used for it, which doesn’t seemed to have spread as well as it should have. I wish Zalman had bundled their “Super” thermal grease that they bundled with my other Zalman HSF, as it was less viscous and spread easily. Someday I may pick some up along with something else and reapply it to see how CPU temperatures are effected.

My cheap mechanical mouse gave out on me, so I replaced it with a Logitech wireless mouse. It is a very nice mouse with one feature I despise: the fast scroll wheel. I’m sure gamers love it, but it makes it difficult to use the scroll wheel to scroll through web pages precisely. It also seems to not work as a middle mouse button. I’ve been left-right pairing it so far, but at some point I need to read the manual to see what the deal is with that. I’m going to kill someone if this thing doesn’t have a middle click button at all.

Those of you watching carefully have probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned the motherboard. Even shrewder observers will recall I mentioned that the motherboard seemed “a bit touchy”. Well, you can scratch the “a bit” part. It is was ultimately died on me. Reading reviews elsewhere, it seems I am not the first. Things I didn’t like about this motherboard:

• It would periodically fail to power on. If anything this got worse over time. Thank goodness I wasn’t using Windows much, so I could just leave the machine running all the time.
• The IDE connector is horribly positioned. This is an ongoing problem with modern uATX motherboards for some reason, but the F-190 takes the cake for worst positioning yet. It’s pointed to the front of the case, even though no self respecting uATX case would have drives or optical disks anywhere but above the motherboard, with the connectors probably hovering over the middle of it.
• No firewire. This is supposed to be a high performance gaming/AV system. Heck, it has an HDMI connector, but no firewire? Are you kidding me?
• The network controller seemed to not be well supported by Linux. It would work with some kernels (Ubuntu’s in particular), but not others (like vanilla kernels).
• Similar problems with the USB controller. *Every* USB driver I tried with it would eventually hang with large data transfers. No problems from Vista, so it appears to be a software issue. This seems to just be part of ATI’s SB-600 southbridge. It’s so rarely used that nobody cares.
• The built in graphics is too lethargic to be considered for anything other than MAYBE playing videos. uATX folks seem to insist on always having a built in graphics controller, but the built in ones are always too weak to be of much use for anything but basic graphics. This makes sense for some uATX boards, but for a “high performance gaming” board, you should expect people will use the PCIe slot.
• The smaller second ATX connection on the board is placed very close to the CPU socket. This makes it get in the way of non-OEM HSF’s like the one I had. Doubly painful with the NSK-1300 because you’ve got the PSU hanging over it too.
• The board reputedly resets its BIOS settings for RAM voltage from time to time. I never saw this happened, but just having to consider this possibility annoyed me.
• Poor support. The a-bit USA web site never seemed to have any information on BIOS’s/drivers/etc. for this board. It’s almost like they aborted the launch. I had to go to the Taiwan website’s english section to find what I was looking for.
• Ultimately, the board died on me and just wouldn’t boot at all, even thought POST was passing.

After much hemming and hawing, I ended up getting an Asus P5E-VM HDMI. I was originally going for Gigabyte’s GA-G33M-DS2R, but the board appears to have been discontinued, with no apparent heir. I really don’t need the benefits of the G35 chipset, but the G33 uATX boards all seem a little suspect after reading reviews (Intel boards seem like the best bet, but they seem to have low tolerance for high voltage RAM, which I have 4GB’s worth of…), and I just wanted a board that was going to work perfectly after all the F-190 hassles. This board probably cost $30 more than I could have spent with other boards, but that seems like money well spent for piece of mind.

Things I am liking right away about this board:

• It works
• See above
• Asus Q-connector makes it easier to handle all those pesky little connectors from the case
• The secondary ATX connector isn’t too close to the CPU.
• The IDE connector is still inconveniently located, but at least it is pointing in the right general direction (“up”).
• Comes with built-in firewire.
• Comes with fancy enough graphics that I might just consider unplugging the Gigabyte card and maybe use it for another machine. It’s still not good enough for gaming, but it appears to be good enough for everything else.
• Speaking of graphics, how about VGA text not losing a column on the left side with my monitor? ;-)
• It has a nice little mode where it will pause for ten seconds on the BIOS boot screen where it dumps out all that it found out about your system.
• Overclocker’s paradise. I’m not really a big overclocker, but it is nice to know that it is possible.

Things that have annoyed me so far:

• It has 6 internal SATA ports. Come on! This for a **u**ATX box. I can’t imagine a uATX case I’ve seen that could fit 6 SATA devices. Why not move a couple of those SATA ports to the back plate as eSATA ports like some other boards have done?
• Two of the fan connectors are awkwardly positioned by the CPU, this isn’t nearly as annoying as the F-190’s secondary ATX connector, because those wires tend to be long.
• When the BIOS is set to automatically set the correct voltage for RAM, etc., it doesn’t provide any feedback as to what settings it decided to go with. I may just need to read the manual more to figure out how to do this, or set it all manually.
• Vista wouldn’t boot. I need to “repair” the system to fix it. I almost don’t care, so I haven’t investigated this more, but it is entirely likely that this is really a Vista problem, and not a P5E-VM problem.

So the problem that a number of commenters have pointed out is that these TSO’s are making up arbitrary rules, potentially violating the law and even constitutional rights of passengers, and the TSA lacks an effective mechanism for dealing with it. It’s great that they are capable of recognizing an error when it was reported, and in this case I don’t think any laws were broken (other than laws of rational thought perhaps ;-), but as far as I can tell, they could have been.

Here’s the thing: I expect local TSA offices to come up with their own procedures and policies. You need to give offices enough autonomy that they can adapt to local situations and/or come up with innovations. Security needs to flexible and adaptable. So a changing landscape at each office is par for the course and a sign the TSA is actually doing their job. The problem is, there are rules and laws that simply cannot be violated, no matter the rationale of the local office.

Simple straw man: on the off chance that passengers might carry an explosive in their stomach, it is not okay for TSO’s to punch each passenger in the gut as they walk through the security line (hmm… I’m sure there is a the makings of a good comedy sketch in there somewhere). Let’s just say for a moment, this were to actually happen. I’m going through the line and I notice TSO’s punching everyone in front of me. When it’s my turn, I protest, saying they can’t hit me, and if they do, I’ll charge them with assault. They then counter that they are required by law to punch each passenger in the gut before allowing them to board. I say, “I’ve never heard of something so ridiculous in my entire life. Show me the law that allows you to do this.” Guess what the answer is? Sorry, we can’t show you the law. In fact, not only can we not show you the law, but if you continue to protest this, we’ll arrest you. Either let us punch you or leave the airport. Even if I call the ACLU and start to file legal complaints, the case won’t be allowed to go forward. The only hope of getting this mess resolved is to contact the TSA, hope that someone with the right authority listens to me and agrees with me, and then acts. As seen in the “electronics” case, while the TSA can respond quickly, we’re still talking about weeks here, and that’s if I catch a sympathetic ear. With all the people that go through airports each day, we’re talking about potentially thousands of violations of people’s rights.

TSO’s wield a rather significant amount of authority. They have the power to keep you from making your flight. They have the power to arrest you, and can justify it simply on the grounds that you are creating a disturbance! This is very intimidating for most passengers, making it hard for them to defend themselves. A published set of laws would provide a mild counter balance to this, and make it easier for passengers to anticipate and accept new, innovative security procedures. Yes, there is a security advantage in hiding the rules of the game from your adversary, as it makes it harder for them to assemble a plan with a high degree of confidence it will work, but we’re talking about a “secret” shared by the thousands of employees of the TSA, which in my book is a secret only to citizens who don’t have the resources or the inclination to compromise a secret shared by thousands… and the courts (convenient that). To a well organized attacker, obtaining a secret known to so many people is trivial. The other thing is that I’m not expecting to have the actual procedures published (although the TSA frequently does this with new polities), just the laws governing what they can and cannot do. That way, if a TSO gets out of line, you have recourse.

The movie has the Bowling for Columbine trifecta: it’s about life and death, it’s about how America is worse than the rest of the civilized world, and it has a celebrity sponsor (in the form of Ricki Lake). Now, having grown up in Canada and generally being of the liberal persuasion on social issues, in theory I should be predisposed to embrace discussions about what’s wrong with the US, and in particular those that involve health care. However, as I watched the trailer, I had a bit of a sick feeling in my stomach.

First of all, I have to embarrassingly admit here that I am not sufficiently well informed on midwifery and/or home birthing to really be able to discuss the matter one way or the other. When it came to our own child I don’t think the issue ever came up (although there was discussion about a Doula), and I guess I lacked sufficient curiosity to investigate it myself.

That said, I have some first hand (and no, I’m NOT trying to suggest I have a clue what it is like to physically give birth to a child!) knowledge of the institutional birthing process and cultural norms in Canada and the US, and that is where I take issue.

The killer bit of the trailer for me was the bit where it was suggested that the US “stands alone” in the prevalence of “institutional” births. They are of course comparing the US with Japan and Western Europe, but the US’s friendly neighbour to the north is about even more fond of institutional births.

The trailer states “The United States has the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world”, and talks about a “maternity care in the United States is in crisis”. The implication being that these things are all related. Once again though, there’s the Canada problem. When you look at infant mortality rates worldwide you will notice that the US is one of the worst performers of what we traditionally think of as first world nations, but it isn’t like it is way outside the average for the first world. So, while it sounds ominous to be “second to last in the developed world” (and looking at the stats you might see how a number of nations have to be asking why they don’t count as developed), in reality there isn’t a huge statistical gap pointing to a “crisis”. Secondly, you’ll notice that Canada scores better than the US, pulling ahead the UK, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and South Korea, while giving Australia and Austria a run for the money.

An amateur statistician will look at this data and say that if anything it suggests that prevalence of institutionalized birth has at best a limited relationship with infant mortality, and certainly there is little evidence of a causal relationship. A professional statistician might demand to look at actual data on medical intervention rates in other countries and observe that many of them have nearly comparable if not equivalent levels of various medical interventions, including Cesarean births (the rise of which may actually have more to do with factors unrelated to preferences of doctors *or* patients). Indeed, staring at the data, I imagine a few factors that seem far more likely to be the key factors attributable to the US’s higher rate:

• Socialized medicine. On the chart I found, the US’s infant mortality rate for 2007 is 6.4. The top country on the list is Sweden, with a 2.8. So, the difference between the US’s “bottom” ranking and a top rating is 3.6 deaths per 1000 births. As such, factors which primarily effect only a small minority of the population can have a pronounced effect. So right away, I’m thinking that the very nature of the US’s private health care system implies that poorest people in the country will get substandard health care. In fact, I’ve read about all kinds of problems with pregnant women basically not seeking health care until after their contractions start (and sometimes not even then) due to fears about medical bills, let alone those who receive substandard care because of their limited means. This of course hampers effective medical intervention for births with complications. This factor is actually highlighted in the press kit that the movie hands out, although there doesn’t seem to be a connection made to how this would explain differences in infant mortality rates relative to other developed nations. It’s a tragedy and needs to be better addressed (sadly, this is often more a problem of educating the public than an actual economic problem), but this problem is almost the opposite of overuse of hospitals and doctors for birth. Looking at the list, I can’t find a single country without socialized medicine that ranks above the US.
• Immigration. Each year, the US accepts more immigrants per capita than any nation in the world, and that’s only counting the legal immigrants. That means, you’ve got a comparatively (to other nations) large segment of the population who weren’t born and raised in your medical system, weren’t treated by your public health initiatives, haven’t enjoyed your standard of living, weren’t subject to your public health education campaigns, and weren’t subject to your general public education system. Now, in some cases their public institutions at home will have better prepared them than their adopted country, but it can’t help but skew your statistics towards the global average (which is *substantially* worse than the rate for “developed nations”). Again, looking at the data, I see “developed” nations which I tend to associate with high rates of immigration (the US, Canada and Australia) ranking lower than those I tend to associate with low rates of immigration (Sweden, Japan, and Norway).
• Aggressive attempts at viable births. This is one of those “lies, damn lies, and statistics” bits. There is no uniformity in how infant mortality data is collected. Each country reports its own statistics, and what counts as births and deaths is heavily impacted by political and social standards and agendas. It’s a tricky problem, where you get penalized for trying: what do you count as a birth? If you’ve got a child that for whatever reason needs to be born prematurely at say 25 weeks, the odds are really not good. In the US, they’ll give it a go anyway and their success rate under such circumstances is, AFAIK some of the best, if not the best, in the world. The thing is, if you just give up and don’t record it as a birth, you’re going to look a lot better than that other guy who gives it a go and fails three times out of ten. I found this article looking at Cuban vs. US infant mortality rates which makes exactly this point. Now, this is partially a function of the US’s institutionalization of the birthing process, but I have a hard time accepting criticism of it beyond the notion that perhaps these heroic efforts drain medical resources that might otherwise be directed towards births in poorer families with better chances for viable births.

The film also wonders why insurance companies freak out about home births (duh! when you are an insurance company you don’t care much about marginally –from an economic standpoint– better outcomes in the normal case: what you’re scared about are those really bad outcomes where “you could have done better” that involve trial lawyers, massive jury awards, and completely blow your actuarial tables to smithereens!). It talks about various medical mistakes made over the years, from X-rays to thalidomide, without recognizing the extend to which modern medicine has learned from these examples (there’s a reason why almost every medication on the planet says, “pregnant women should consult their physician before taking this medication” and why hospitals are now cautious about overly invasive mechanisms for monitoring births that are without complications). It also talks about the dramatic change in the rate of institutionalized births from 1900 to present day, but fails to mention the improvements in infant mortality rates that occurred concurrently (I’m sure this was to avoid having the audience make assumptions about correlation being causation with regards to infant mortality rates ;-).

This is the kind of analysis and discussion that often is conveniently overlooked by advocacy films, which by their nature are focused on the emotional core of a story more than facts. This is exactly why I find it so hard to treat such films much differently from pure fiction.

I have little doubt that there are issues with our cultural and medical norms with regards to childbirth. I know that medical liability is so skewed that doctors are often better off ordering tests and prophylactic procedures and medications that address 1% cases, even if there are negative outcomes for the patient (I have to imagine a doctor’s worst nightmare is working on the birth of a child whose parents are trial lawyers ;-). I know that pressures from increased medical care costs have lead to patients being pushed in and out of hospitals at faster and faster rates. I’m sure there are things that could have gone better with my own child’s birth. However, much as I’m aware of the dangers of judging a book by its cover, I have a hard time feeling like the best way for people to become informed about these issues is by watching this film.