Problem with entering gender and birth date.

After playing around a bit with CiviCRM in a prerelease version of Civicspace 0.8.2, I think I've come across a bug, or at least an interface problem. I tried creating a CiviCRM profile so that site visitors can enter and view their own contact information. The profile I created included fields for First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Gender, Birth Date, Street Address, Supplemental Address 1, City, State, Postal Code, Phone, Email, and Home URL. When I tried entering this information for myself via the path "/user/1/edit/user", everything worked except Gender and Birth Date. I entered "male" for gender, and "8/4/1957" for Birth Date. It apparently recognized "male," because when I look up my entry via the path "civicrm/contact/view?reset=1&cid=1", I'm listed as male. However, my birth date is listed as "Array". And, when I look for my user account information via the path "user/1", the Gender and Birth Date fields show as blank (even after I entered a birth date for myself using CiviCRM directly.

Also, I should note that the entry form via which I entered gender and birth date gave me no guidance about how to enter the information. For gender, I didn't know whether I was supposed to enter "male" or "M" or whether case mattered. For date of birth, I entered "8/4/1957" but could just as readily have entered "8/4/57" or "August 4, 1957" or any of a number of other textual representations of the date. Without some way of constraining and validating data entry for these fields, I think CiviCRM will have problems collecting this information consistently.

While I'm offering suggestions, it would be nice if we could specify a default country to be preselected when creating new contacts. The country list is pretty long, and United States is near the bottom alphabetically, so it's a bit of a nuisance for me to have to scroll down to it.