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.

Comments

Re:This just in

[TFer_Atvar]

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.

Re:Is this going to lead to racial profiling?

[balloonhead]

It's not just the very young and very old dying. That's part of the worry. It's early days, and what we know changes by the day at the moment. What we do know is:

- there is evidence of person to person spread (unlike bird flu, which seemed to be just animal-person)
- the people dying are over-represented in the 20-40 age group (unlike most flu)
- mortality so far has been around 7-8% (probably lower as a lot of cases probably never present for medical care and so are not included in the survival statistics
- the viral genetics are a mix of 4: human flu, swine flu, avian flu, and human/swine flu (apparently a separate one)

This might be bad news
Information source for anyone interested: I am an emergency doctor, we had a presentation this morning from a public health specialist and an infectious diseases specialist detailing the regional response plan for swine flu, so it's about as up to date as is available.

Randi?

[Moraelin]

Either way, some proper research from a reputable scientist that isn't setting out to disprove psychic abilities, just wants to see if anything is happenin, would be really nice.

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.

I'm not a believer in many things, so call me a sceptic that has an open mind. I'm still convinced though that there is *something* paranormal at work with some people's minds. The average tea-room women, probably not. But every now and then you get someone who's predictions are too good, too spot-on time after time, that there is most likely something at work there

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.

Then you've got the remote-viewers; some of them had success rates so good both the Russians and the Americans employed them in the Cold War (and probably still do) to telepathically spy on the enemies missile bases.

Actually, both the USA and the Russians _tried_ using all sorts of paranormal stuff. None of them actually delivered any useful results.