Daily Archives: 18 Aug 05

Blogger for Word

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Google unites Blogger and Microsoft Word: “Blogger for Word is a free downloadable plug-in that enables users to easily save a Word document as a post to their Blogger blog without having to open a browser, as well as save drafts of blogs and edit their work offline for later posting.

…Apparently, Google got the idea from watching those pioneering, prolific bloggers try to post their writings online during the Democratic National Convention last year.

‘Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn’t look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation, spelling and grammar are important,’ Product Manager Jason Shellen wrote in a Google blog on Tuesday. ‘That got the Blogger team thinking about how to help Word users to become bloggers.'” (C/NET)

You can get the download here.

Maybe You Figgered This Out Before I Did

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Have you ever wanted to search back for something you read in the past on FmH? Many of the site-specific search strategies don’t work because Follow Me Here doesn’t have its own domain and gelwan.com, which you may use to get here (http://gelwan.com/followme.html) is just a virtual domain pointing to http://theworld.com/~emg. So Atomz, which I used to use here, has stopped indexing FmH posts properly. You could use the syntax that limits Google’s search to one domain by adding “site:theworld.com” into your search box, but you would have to wade through content at all the other pages hosted by The World which are not mine, since all FmH posts are at http://theworld.com/~emg/ and you can’t put a subdomain (i.e. you can’t use “site:theworld.com/~emg”) into Google’s ‘site:’ specifier, only a top-level domain. But, duh, I just realized there is a simple solution. Putting “~emg site:theworld.com”, along with your search phrase, into the box, works fine.

Update: Actually, and I can’t figure out why, you do much better if you use The World’s parent domain, std.com. For example, I get 13 hits if I search in Google for “Iraq ~emg site:theworld.com” but 53 hits if I search for “Iraq ~emg site:std.com”. I get 18 hits on “Bush ~emg site:theworld.com” but 61 for “Bush ~emg site:std.com.” This is even though DNS translation of std.com and theworld.com (and world.std.com) all go to the same IP address. Next question: I’m sure I have referred to Iraq in more than 53 posts here, and Bush more than 61 times (even if you allow for the fact that I usually use an epithet instead of his proper name…). Anyone able to illuminate me on any of this?

Health Mystery in New York

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Heart Disease: “Death rates from heart disease in New York City are among the highest recorded in the country, and no one quite knows why.”

‘Some speculate about the potential role of stress. It is widely believed that life in New York is more difficult, and stress has been linked to higher heart disease mortality. A 1999 study showed that people were more likely to die of a heart attack in New York City than elsewhere. The authors suggested stress could play a role because the excess death rate affected both visitors and residents; they found no other explanation.

“There’s an acute effect of being in New York,” said Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego who did the study. “You’re wired the whole time.” But stress is difficult to measure, and there is no proof that life is more stressful in and around New York, despite the popular notions.

There is also a growing volume of research showing that heart disease death rates are higher in places with big gaps between the rich and the poor. Metropolitan areas with less income inequality – Seattle, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City – have lower heart disease death rates. New York’s metropolitan area ranks at the top in income inequality.

“There’s something about inequality in communities that affects all residents, not just the poor,” Dr. Strogatz said. But the studies, while tantalizing, have not yet explained why there is a connection. Are there psychological issues that increase stress in places with unequal income distribution? Are there fewer services available to the poor in places with more income inequality? The answers are not clear.’ (New York Times )

WWASS? (What would Andrew Sullivan say?)