Drapetomaniac

When George Clooney was admitted to a hospital recently, several medical professionals took a peek at his records for curiosity sake.The workers were suspended for a month, but both Clooney and the hospital union say that the punishment was too harsh. Mind you, they could face jail time for the federal crime they committed, but suspensions are too harsh.

The ethical problems alone are a cause for concern, but this is also a clear violation of the law. Clooney’s statement was, “while I very much believe in a patient’s right to privacy, I would hope that this could be settled without suspending medical workers.” The best thing for people who violate ethical situations is when the victim who spends very little time considering such matters excuses it.

The bigger problem is the union. This is an established organization that is basically forming a thin blue line in the face of criminal activity. At least the hospital is on record

These folks have been suspended

I’ve learned Spanish for heritage reasons, Portuguese for recreational reasons and have recently started learning Arabic to learn a non-western language with a lot of ties to the languages I’ve already started to learn.

In early interface testing, I would always type in my name with the accented -xC3xA1- in order to see if whatever field I was typing in had a weak interface. Often times the program would GPF and would break and other times the letter would get mangled.

Luckily, over the years as the market depended more on non-English speakers, these interface problems started to disappear. I always watch for services that deliver multiple language interfaces and how they perform in that field.

Google has had a decent run at language accomodation although I thought for their capital and reach was still slow.

While following recent language news I found Google encouraging people to explore their growing language features, including changing the entire interface to another language.

I actually do this every once in a while to force myself to language practice a language.

However, google doesn’t warn you to be proficient in a language. They say in their entry, “Hyperpolyglotic Gmail“, “If you’re multilingual, feeling adventurous, or if you just want to test how well you know the Gmail user interface, try changing your account language settings.”

My favorite part is the warnign, “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy.” Remember that the next time you’re doing something dangerous. “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy.” Walking on the outer edge of a bridge? “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy.” It’s as comical as it is bizarre.

Seeing if they had a safeguard in place, I changed my interface to Arabic. Something I really not proficient in. There was no warning, or timed function to revert it back, or any other function to make it “easy” to undo your risk. Luckily, I familiar enough with the interface to change the language back, but it wasn’t immediately at my disposal. There wasn’t a link on the page back to the language settings after I changed the language. I had to follow the links deep back into account settings.

If anyone ever offers the advice, “Sound a little risky? Don’t worry – it’s easy – think twice. Google offers advice that probably provided a usability denial of service to at least a handful of their blog readers.