Monthly Archives: February 2007

Investigating NFP: How Effective is It?

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You know what they call people who use Catholic-Church-Approved methods of birth control?

“Parents”

– comment on a Championable post

Boy, I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard that. Studies have been done before that have shown the periodic abstinence aspect of NFP to be as effective or more effective than artificial means of birth control. However, those studies weren’t widely accepted because they were regarded as Church propaganda. It seems that secular science has finally come to the Church’s defense, though.

Natural family planning as good as pill, study finds

The Catholic-backed sympto-thermal method of natural family planning has been found by a German study to be as effective in preventing pregnancies as the contraceptive pill, with researchers also surprised to find a low rate of unintended pregnancies among women who had unprotected sex during their fertile period.

The study was published on 21 February in an online report in the European reproductive medicine journal named “Human Reproduction Today” by researchers from the University of Heidelberg, Earthtimes reports.

An Information Science Solution to Pittsburgh Public Transit Woes

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Bob Firth, Informing Design
“The Long Squiggly Line That’s Killing Our Transit System and an Information Science Solution”
February 21, 2007, 3:30 pm
Room 501, 135 N. Bellefield Ave
School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh

The recent proposed cuts to funding of the Pittsburgh Authority
Transit system have led Bob Firth and his company, Informing Design,
to consider a radical redesign of bus routes based on efficient
transportation systems that are being used in Washington, DC, Los
Angeles, Cleveland and even Curitiba, Brazil. In this talk, Bob Firth
will present his ideas for developing a cost-effective and efficient
bus system, based on years of experience in studying transportation
flows in Pittsburgh and applying basic information science principles
to solving problems of navigation and wayfinding.

Bob Firth is founder and president of Informing Design, which is an
innovative company that has designed a number of novel wayfinding
tools including the colorful Pittsburgh Wayfinder signs and the
www.bigburg.com collection of print-on-demand maps. The talk is
sponsored by the Spatial Information Science Research Interest Group
of the School of Information Sciences and will be followed by a
reception in Room 522.

The Ontological Status of Tobacco

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Tobacco Regulation Smokescreen

Have you ever seen anyone sit down at the breakfast table and pour themselves a big ol’ bowl of cigarettes? Of course not. Why not? Because cigarettes aren’t food, that’s why.

Have you ever seen someone at the drug store waiting for their prescription of Marlboros? Of course not. Why not? Because cigarettes aren’t drugs.

Fatuity, thy name is Chuck Muth. Lots of things – chewing gum and lip balm, for instance – are neither breakfast cereal nor prescription drugs, but they’re still regulated for the sake of public safety. Of course protecting public safety couldn’t possibly be the reason being efforts to regulate tobacco as food and/or drug. Nope; the boogymen in the DNC are to blame.

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