Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Considered Harmful To Swine-Flu Panic
judgecorp writes "Twitter is being criticized for spreading panic about swine flu. This is not just knee-jerk Luddism 2.0: it's argued that Twitter's structure encourages ill-informed repetition, with little room for context, while older Web media use their power for good — for instance Google's Flu Trends page (which we discussed last winter), and the introduction of a Google swine flu map." On a related note, reader NewtonsLaw suggests that it might be a good idea, epidemiologically speaking, to catch the flu now vs. later.
Does anyone recall the "racial caution" given to asian people (and by asian, I mean oriental, not the rest of asia that is usually ignored when people say asia) when SARS was the big worry?
Now it will be avoiding anyone of hispanic decent and of course anyone would just couldn't keep away from "spring break fever?"
In any case, looking at the google tracking information so far, it's pretty darned slight. Given that there are plenty of people who have already recovered from it, I would have to estimate that this is still little more than an ordinary flu.
People die more often of other diseases that are more easily treatable than this. I think the usual fatalities will apply -- the extremely young and extremely old. A vaccine will be put out before too long but I think with all the quarantine activity going on, it is already pretty well contained. (There may be times when the directed focus of the people is useful... now if we can just direct the focus of the people on civil liberties and the governments gone wild problems something might be accomplished.)
Bull. I work at the second-largest newspaper in Alaska and pick wire stories based on what people are interested in and what folks need to stay informed. Regardless of what you might think, I'm not a part of a conspiracy or the Illuminati.
and also, if healthy people start congregating around hospitals they're more likely to catch the thing - you know, cause hospitals are the places where all the sick people are
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Ok I got it, appearantly now clicking a tag in slashdot opens all articles with that tag. The last months it wasn't like that, and the months before that it gave an overview (which was the best behaviour). Anyway that confused me into thinking all articles of today were XKCD related. MAKE UP YOUR MIND SLASHDOT. If I click a tag, do something SIMPLE, not weird too advanced javascript loading things that open confusing pages.
There are over 50 airports in Madagascar, recognised by the ICAO and IATA, including three paved over 7000ft long which would be fine for landing large civil aircraft.
Link:
http://canonical.org/~kragen/costs-lives.html
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
More like art imitating life. This story has been around since last week.
I'm not sure what the problem is with the #amazonfail thing. People make mistakes. It wasn't a lynch mob. It was a bunch of people discussing something on Twitter with a hashtag. Big fucking deal. Go on to Twitter Search and type in the name of a game or a programming language. Are all those people part of an angry mob?
I remember the amazonfail. Most of the posts were pretty sceptical. They were like: this is a bit weird - Amazon have deranked all the gay-themed books. If this is legit and not a hack, Amazon aren't getting any more business. (Note the conditional word "if".) There was also some discussion about how much of our lives are stored on Amazon servers - pointing out that if #amazonfail turned out to be true, it might actually be quite a bit of work to untangle all the Amazon Web Services stuff (S3, EC2 etc.). Thankfully, it turned out to have a perfectly reasonable explanation. I think the level of belief on Twitter was pretty proportional to the evidence.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
People tend to be interested in the latest celebrity gossip, so papers print celebrity gossip because it sells newspapers. I don't call that keeping people informed (note: I'm from the UK that's how it works here if the USA is different then I apologise).
No, it's pretty much the same here. Some of the faces are different, but otherwise it's just a bunch of gossip. Bread and circuses, my friend...
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
If it's any consolation, I read this story on CNN and had the same reaction: Pot, meet Kettle. What the GP doesn't seem to grasp is that local Fox station != Fox News.
Don't you know that a licking kid is what started this?!
How about the Randi 1 million dollar challenge?
Most preliminary tests are filmed (and everyone so far flunked the preliminaries badly) and looking at some of them, the requests weren't unreasonable, the test setup wasn't stacked against the claimant in any way, etc. I haven't seen any where it would even matter whether he's set to disprove those claims or not. Either you see auras through walls, or you don't. Either you can tell the history of an object by touch, or you don't. Either you can dowse or you don't. Those people just plain old didn't have the powers they claimed to have.
I mean, seriously, when you see a group of Australia's best dowsers manage to average 1 in 10 guesses right for 10 pipes out of which only 1 has water, it's hard to take it as anything else than dumb guesswork. I don't see how Randi's agenda can affect the fact than when asked to guess the right 1 in 10, those people averaged 1 right guess in 10.
Some are really just smart people. You don't have to be a psychic to do _some_ predictions. E.g., since we're in a sub-thread about an XKCD comic, as I was saying, you don't have to be a psychic to predict that in any scare there'll be surrealistically dumb posts on twitter. (Or generally on the Internet.)
Some are just lucky guesses. Due to the nature of random numbers and events, if you have enough people rolling a die, someone out there _will_ get 10 sixes in a row.
Some are just vague enough that they can be interpreted to apply to a few billion different people, and to a thousand fundamentally different events. See, horoscopes, for example. Take some horoscopes and randomly change the star signs, e.g., take the personality description or daily prediction for a pisces and give it to a libra, and see if they notice. Invariably it's just as good.
Actually, both the USA and the Russians _tried_ using all sorts of paranormal stuff. None of them actually delivered any useful results.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Can someone please tell me why Fox News is always singled out on Slashdot? Is CNN and MSNBC any better? If so, explain.
Fox News tends to have a right wing agenda. Fox was on when I was at the gym yesterday afternoon. They were interviewing some ex-mayor from someplace in New Jersey who was advocating closing the US/Mexico border and was basically claiming that we needed to crack down on illegal immigration because, you see we have hundreds of thousands of these Mexicans sneaking into our country and they would be the biggest threat to the US in spreading the swine flu. Fox News idea of fair and balanced is to give voice to this xenophobic racist crap. That is why many here don't care for Fox News.
The account hanneloreEC has been run by Jeph Jacques of the webcomic Questionable Content for a while now. Hannelore is one of the characters in the comic. I believe the other accounts already existed as well, though it looks like they hadn't made their swine-flu post.