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Doctors Study Effects of Poverty
The British Medical Association is launching a study of the effects of poverty on health that is likely to be completed in about two year’s time – close to the eve of the next general election.
The move, agreed at last week’s annual meeting of the association in Plymouth, comes after concern among consultants and family doctors that real poverty is re-emerging with the effects of long-term unemployment and health is suffering as a result.
Dr Jeoffrey Cundy, clinical director of anaesthetics at Lewisham Hospital in southeast London, who proposed the study, said that what brought the issue to a head for him was an old man admitted to hospital with gangrene as a result of frostbite because he was unable to heat his home properly.
‘We commonly get people in with hypothermia in winter because they cannot heat their homes properly,’ he said. ‘I put this to our family doctors locally and they said there did seem to be a real problem now, there does seem to be more proverty.’
General practitioners, he said, were seeing more undernourishment in the elderly and more problems with single-parent families, and drug abuse was spreading among the young unemployed.
The proposal was put to the conference with the support of consultant committees from both the south-east and north-east Thames regions, which stretch from Essex through London to the south coast.
The study, he said, would need to draw on the Black report on inequalities in health, commissioned by the Government and shelved soon after its publication in 1980. It would also need to take evidence from voluntary organizations, doctors and others.
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The new window is seldom as the user want
A forced new window has seldom the dimensions or the position on the screen the user like. The new window is typically too small. Most web pages require a maximized or an almost maximized window to work properly. Small windows tilt the layout and make horizontal scrolling necessary.
Forced new window requires that the user consciously or unconsciously waste her time figuring out how the new window relates to the old and what it means for the ongoing navigation. The user has to waste her time resizing, positioning, maximizing and closing the new window.
All this could have been avoided if the user could have just continued in the same window. The user should only spend her time dealing with new windows, when the user thinks it’s a good idea in a given situation and actively decides to open one.
In extreme cases new windows are used for advertisement often opening automatically and in the background. Such advertisement is first thrown into the face of the user, when she closes all the other windows forced upon her blocking up the computermaking further navigation impossible.
Some web pages even use “pop-up”-windows as a way to hi-jack the user’s attention. The windows open again and again, when you try to close them down. The more you click to close, the more windows open up.
Pop-up windows used for advertisement and hi-jacking, practices similar to spam and computer virus, make many people mad. It’s so destructive both to experienced and inexperienced users that such practices have called many people to active opposition.
Some users have even downloaded and installed software made to prevent pop-up windows the user has not asked for. Some browser like Opera have similar software integrated in the browser.
Software preventing pop-up windows can be setup to work in several ways. New windows can be blocked completely. Links opening new windows will no longer work at all. The software can also be set up to protect the user against automatic pop-up windows, but accepting new windows when clicking a link.
Software protecting users against forced new windows, can be set up to neutralize all new windows even new windows used for external links. Web sites opening links in new windows risk to turn some marginal users away. They will leave the website because many links are just dead.
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