mfsch

The impact on aquatic life and on humans can’t be compared directly. First of all, toxicity is often related to body mass, i.e. the lethal dose is approximately proportional to the weight. This means, that a lot more of a substance is needed to have the same effect on a human than for a tiny fish. Second, and perhaps more importantly, aquatic animals are immersed in water and they are so from the very beginning. While we drink for water intake, fish “breathe water”, i.e. they constantly have water flowing into and out of their body. This makes them more susceptible to contaminants in water.

Let me give some more information on that: It is true that pharmaceuticals, personal care products and endocrine disruptors are not really addressed by clean water rules, but that doesn’t mean that they are ignored. The reason that they aren’t regulated is, to quote EPA: “To date, scientists have found no evidence of adverse human health effects from PPCPs in the environment.”

Of course there are a lot of substances in the water, their concentrations are rising and it is difficult to assess their effects on humans. However, there is also a lot of dilution in the water system and the concentrations found in drinking water are still far from the concentrations where we would expect any adverse effects on human health. In fact, one of the reasons that PPCPs have become an issue is that improved measurement technologies make it possible to detect them at the small concentrations (some parts per trillion) that they are at.

Some PPCPs have now entered the EPA contaminant candidate list (CCL), which means that they are evaluated in more detail and a maximum contaminant level (MCL) might be enforced in the future. The issue is not as simple as adding more regulation, doing a bit more treatment and be safe. There are hundreds of different substances and most of them are difficult to remove. The most effective treatment method, reverse osmosis, is extremely energy intensive and thus very expensive. It is also important to know that “removal” doesn’t mean that we pick the molecules out of the water and disassemble them into their atoms, it usually means that we transfer them from one medium into another. They still have to go somewhere and likely they still end up in the environment.

So, to sum it up: PPCPs are found in water at low concentrations which are a problem for aquatic life and this problem cannot be solved easily. There is not a lot of evidence pointing to human health problems at the moment, so expensive, somewhat effective treatment methods aren’t enforced at the moment. The problem is not ignored however, the EPA regularly reevaluates the issue and research is being done on possible health effects.

To use the same analogy used in the article: A random person would not be qualified to participate in the discussion about medical procedures used in an emergency room, sure. But if I had worked in an emergency room for 12 years, even without a medical degree, I would feel like I had at least something to contribute to the discussion.

I agree with the article that we should value the teacher’s input to the debate and that it’s way easier to tell teachers they are doing their job wrong than to do it better yourself, but that doesn’t mean other people cannot have a valid, meaningful opinion on schooling.

There are two parts to both “merit” and “cracy”. Merit can be thought of as your abilities and talents or as your willingness to work hard. “Kratein” means to rule (i.e. have responsibilities, make decisions), but in this context it’s often seen as earning money (i.e. having a comfortable life style).

I would say that in an ideal meritocracy, the people with the most knowledge, abilities and intelligence should be the ones making the decisions and carrying the responsibilities. The willingness to work hard, however, should determine income, luxury and comfort.

The problem, of course, is that the powerful usually try to make themselves and their friends wealthy, but maybe this separation of the idea of meritocracy into (knowledge/ability = power/decisions) and (hard work = wealth/comfort) is what we as a society should strife for.

Thoughts?

The point is, in web design there are a lot of different aspects that have to be balanced. One of them is accessibility & speed, an other one is visual design and identity. The choice of a web font over one of the ~6 standard fonts affects both of these and there is a choice to make.

This choice can be: I use a web font because this allows me to convey 80% of my visual identity with the text, I can put the text (and content) as the central element of the page and include no images on the page except for a small logo, leading to a fast loading page. For this, I accept that the user has to wait a little bit until the text is displayed when he/she visits the page the first time and the font isn’t cached yet. On a decent internet connection this might not be noticeable but on a bad 3G connection it might take the page load from 4s to 6s. Do the benefits outweigh the risks/disadvantages?

I do agree though that this decision is often not made consciously and a lot of times a web font is slapped upon a site just because we can. Way too often, visual designers create pictures of websites in Photoshop with no idea about the implications. On the other hand, I have seen that the rise of web fonts has made designers shift away from creating designs that are basically a frame with the visual identity where they slap in some random content. A lot of sites now treat the content as the main element of the site, reducing all other elements to a minimum. I would argue that this change greatly improves the quality of web sites and that the rise of web fonts is one of the main drivers of this change.

Your argument can be extended to most of website design. The identity of a design and the impact on accessibility are two factors that constantly have to be weighted against each other in web design. Do you choose a slightly gray text color which improves the overall appearance of the text but reduces the contrast? Do you include images? There are hundreds of excellent text fonts out there and the more you work with them, the more you realize that they do have different characteristics other than the serif/non-serif distinction. Only a handful of fonts are installed on most computers, so the decision becomes: Do you choose a font that doesn’t really fit the design in order to safe a moment when loading the page or do you go with a web font and optimize the loading procedure (CDN…) and get a coherent design? Can you express more of the visual identity by removing an image and including a web font instead?

> Mobile visitors often have a very different set of objectives for visiting your site.

In my experience, this is not true anymore and continues to be less and less the case. I thought this was the case before I started really using a smartphone. Now I want to do exactly the same things than on a desktop computer and the best mobile sites are the ones that let me do everything I do on a larger screen and make me forget that I’m using a different device with less comfort.

I would say though that responsive design is less of an issue for these sites as they are popular enough that people are willing to use them through an app. The app has a mobile optimized design and can offer functions that a responsive website cannot offer.

For less popular sites and sites with different usage patterns, people might not be willing to install an app and app development might be too expensive. In these cases, responsive design is an option to provide a smooth mobile experience without too much extra work.

Of course, this doesn’t change the point that you should evaluate the need for responsive design without bias, but comparing your site with popular websites might not give you the full answer.

It’s also important to remember that the total rate of death is constant at 1 death/person. Some death types going down will automatically result in others going up, so an increase or decrease in one type might not necessarily mean that the risk has changed.

I guess the goal is to reduce the deaths we can do something about.