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Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki

sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

58 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. I recently needed to learn how to set a live trap by Vandil+X · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...to catch a critter that got into my basement.

    God bless mobile Internet.

    --
    Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
  2. The Yahoo answers version by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    how is babby delivered?

    1. Re:The Yahoo answers version by jameskojiro · · Score: 2, Funny

      "Yahoo" lives up to it's namesake again.....

      --
      Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
    2. Re:The Yahoo answers version by bmecoli · · Score: 5, Funny

      how girl get labor?

  3. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by maxume · · Score: 5, Funny

    Was it a boy or a girl?

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  4. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by jameskojiro · · Score: 4, Funny

    I learned how to clean up forensic evidence from my basement....

    Thank you Wikipedia!

    --
    Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
  5. I want his mobile data service by dave562 · · Score: 3, Funny

    The AT&T EDGE service on my Blackberry would have delivered the information by the baby's 1st birthday if I was lucky. That is making the assumption that the built in browser could actually load the webpage.

  6. A geeks geek... by FrankSchwab · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anyone faced with a woman about to deliver, and their first thought is "I know, I'll go search around on google" is my hero.

    --
    And the worms ate into his brain.
    1. Re:A geeks geek... by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Funny

      Kids today! In my day, we didn't need Google for this. All we had was a swiss army knife and a mullet.

    2. Re:A geeks geek... by newcastlejon · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because Macguyver without the Mullet isn't Macguyver at all!

      --
      If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
  7. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Brandee07 · · Score: 4, Funny

    The internet can be used to answer all sorts of questions! I recently left my laptop unattended in the living room, and when I came back "How to get a threesome in Dragon Age" was in the search box.

    The only question now is which one of my roommates needed to resort to a FAQ to figure that one out...

  8. Wife now loves Blackberry by Caffeinated+Geek · · Score: 2, Informative

    Leroy said before the birth of Mahalia on December 1, his wife disapproved of his BlackBerry because he was always playing with it but now she has "changed her tune".

  9. Re:Blackberry? by potscott · · Score: 4, Funny

    There was, but Apple pulled it after complaints. It was called Shaken Baby or something similar...

    --
    I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
  10. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by skine · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think your sig actually paraphrases what the article said.

  11. I'm inclined to suspect... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That, if all the medical training that daddy received was a few minutes on Google, and things didn't go badly, the real headline ought to be: "Mother ejects baby in uncomplicated delivery"

    The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea; but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.

    1. Re:I'm inclined to suspect... by jamesh · · Score: 5, Funny

      the real headline ought to be: "Mother ejects baby in uncomplicated delivery"

      What on earth has the mother got to do with it???

    2. Re:I'm inclined to suspect... by pwfffff · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah I'd like to hear the stork's side of all this.

    3. Re:I'm inclined to suspect... by SuperBanana · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea; but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.

      We've already got a sky-high miscarriage rate, a fun fact nobody likes to talk about in public. Something like 1/3rd of all pregnancies in the US result in miscarriages. Though I am aware of no science supporting this, I suspect it has to do with 2-3 generations full of people being born that otherwise were not healthy enough for one reason or another. Nature kinda takes care of this on its own.

      I know it sounds cruel and insane, but part of me really thinks that we're fucking ourselves over long-term by providing such "excellent" health care. We're almost completely bypassing natural selection...

    4. Re:I'm inclined to suspect... by moonbender · · Score: 5, Informative

      Bullshit. From fittingly/where-else Wikipedia:

      Determining the prevalence of miscarriage is difficult. Many miscarriages happen very early in the pregnancy, before a woman may know she is pregnant. Treatment of women with miscarriage at home means medical statistics on miscarriage miss many cases.[28] Prospective studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests have found that 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period).[29][30] Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies.[30]

      The risk of miscarriage decreases sharply after the 10th week LMP, i.e. when the fetal stage begins.[31] The loss rate between 8.5 weeks LMP and birth is about two percent; loss is “virtually complete by the end of the embryonic period."[32]

      Likelihood of miscarriage drastically increases with the mother's age; the average age of mothers at childbirth has steadily increased in the past decades, although I was very surprised to see it's still at 25 in the US. So it's got fuck all to do with "bypassing natural selection".

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  12. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The most annoying bit is that Wikipedia has latched onto this... it had nothing to do with Wikipedia... but was in fact "WikiHow", completely independent.

  13. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 2, Funny

    If one doesn't know how to, how does one learn to google something on the internet?

  14. The information revolution has begun. by Fished · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For years I told people, "the information revolution has not yet begun." About six months ago, while eating breakfast at a little, podunk diner in a town of around 500 people, I got curious about what causes Tidal Locking. So, without thinking about it, I whipped out my iPhone and looked it up using Wikipanion.

    Then, I realized what I was doing. I, as someone who knows basically nothing about orbital mechanics, was sitting in a little diner on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and had access to more information than I could possibly use on an obscure, orbital-mechanical phenomenon. All on a whim. That's when I decided that "the information revolution has begun." It's not well-begun, it's not finished, it's not even fully taken shape yet. But it's begun.

    --
    "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
  15. WHAT!?!? by ignitionxvi · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Wait...babies come from a girls...OMG"

  16. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now, I think it's a little early to start imposing roles on it, don't you?

  17. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Just Bing it.

  18. Re:Cool by NotBornYesterday · · Score: 4, Funny

    The baby didn't cry at first. Then it realized that its own father had just used a user-editable, non-authoritative guide to performing a life-and-death medical procedure, and it hasn't stopped crying since.

    --
    I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
  19. Looks like an urban myth / tabloid madeup story. by zombie_monkey · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is form the British tabloid The Sun. I googled a few keywords and found no other mention of this except for a similar story in pravda.ru from 8th April this year, a Russian tabloid, with appropriately Russian names of the people involved and details.
    http://english.pravda.ru/society/family/08-04-2009/107373-deliver_baby_mobile_phone-0

  20. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wait, if you were home, why would you need mobile internet? Or were there other circumstances keeping you from accessing your home net connection?

    Because he did not want to have to Goggle "how to clean afterbirth off of a laptop"...

    --
    You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  21. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Arancaytar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Which is particularly annoying because deletionists will be happy to tell you that Wikipedia Is Not A Manual Or Guidebook, so this could never have happened with Wikipedia in the first place.

  22. Re:This guy walked a very fine line by jason.sweet · · Score: 2, Funny

    Glad he got it done!

    At that point, neither he nor his Blackberry had much to do with the proceedings!

  23. Actual article by saibot834 · · Score: 3, Informative

    He probably read this wikiHow article

    1. Re:Actual article by mariushm · · Score: 2, Funny

      You would think in all those nine months of labor the thought to read about delivery would cross his mind...

    2. Re:Actual article by Zordak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Um, I have three children, and each time, the only thing I thought about the delivery beforehand was, "Gee, I sure am glad a doctor will be handling this."

      --

      Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
  24. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Sethumme · · Score: 3, Funny

    Follow these easy instructions.
    LMGTFY

  25. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by iamacat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I previously challenged anyone to link to a wikipedia article which is provably wrong in a key fact presented and hasn't been corrected for more than a week. The best people came up with are spelling errors and questionable references. So as far as I am concerned, peer review system makes Wikipedia more reliable than an average printed manual or guidebook where any mistakes couldn't have been corrected since I bought it.

  26. Childbirth? by PhasmatisApparatus · · Score: 5, Funny

    There's an app for that.

  27. Anyone willing to take the bet... by NoPantsJim · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...that Wikipedia played a part in the conception as well?

  28. Good thing it wasn't a Blackberry Storm by Peregr1n · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's a good thing he didn't have a Blackberry Storm to mash his query out on, or he would have been confused by the instructions on "how to slither a navy"

  29. Re:Cool by Rene+S.+Hollan · · Score: 2, Informative

    Until the first hospitals for deliveries were set up the death rate for women in childbirth was around 16%.

    I'd say those would be dicey odds for anyone delivering without emergency equipment or trained medical staff nearby,

    Now, if a midwife was to have performed the delivery, this mother to be was likely deemed "low risk", so sampling bias will apply if we look at "home births where the midwife was late", but giving birth is not exactly risk-free.

    --
    In Liberty, Rene
  30. Fourth baby by DrYak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea

    According to the article, the "google-delivered" baby-girl was the mother's fourth pregnancy and fourth birth.
    That means that all previous 3 of them went ok, and that the mother has quite some experience.

    Also, as the whole story happened in a country were medical assistance is available and as the parents seem not to be against assistance (the mother seem to be checked by a midwife on a regular basis. they even called the midwife back - she just didn't manage to arrive soon enough), we can presume that they had pre-natal assistance (Echography, etc.) and we can assume that the doctors and mid-wife saw nothing peculiar or dangerous in advance either.

    If there's no peculiar bad luck (like the unlucky baby entangling herself in the umbilical cord while exiting), chances are high that everything will go ok this time too. The father needed only to assist the mother, not to be able to react and start an emergency resucitation or whatever.

    So although a medical support would have helped in case of some catastrophic event, the chance of such a catastrophic event where pretty low in this peculiar couple's situation.

    but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.

    Well, on the other hand humans have a couple of problem. Unlike carnivore mammalian, our women tend to give birth to a rather single huge fair-developed baby instead of several small partially developed kittens/puppies. This size-problem is further worsened by the fact we are the only bipedal, upright-walking mammals and thus have pelvises which are optimized for a different bio-mechanical everyday use as the other mammals.
    So quite a lot of thing can go wrong. Slightly more than with cats and dogs, for example.
    On the other hand, we're social animals and have probably lived in small packs and tribes for quite a long period. Chances are high that, even with our cavemen ancestors young first-time mother could receive help from more experienced members of the tribe. (Supposedly, prostitution isn't the only job which could be called "the world's oldest profession")

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  31. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Jason+Earl · · Score: 3, Funny

    [citation needed]

  32. Yes, and ? by DrYak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We've already got a sky-high miscarriage rate, a fun fact nobody likes to talk about in public. Something like 1/3rd of all pregnancies in the US result in miscarriages.

    Yes, miscariages seem to naturally occur often in humans, 40% according to the sources that wikipedia cites. (specially with older parents, where the gametes had accumulated more mutations).

    Well, you know what ? Mutation DO happen. A child has NOT a carbon-copy of the same genetic material as the parents.
    A mutation could be catastrophically bad, slightly bad, neutral, slightly good or miraculously good.
    The slightly good/bad and the miraculously good is what make evolution work, no matter how much the Creationists want to believe in Intelligent Design.
    The catastrophically bad usually doesn't survive. There's only a rather minuscule amount of them that is able to survive up to certain advance point (trisomy 21 is an exemple of a catastrophic mutation that can still nonetheless reach into adulthood).
    Given how many things could go wrong, it's rather a surprise that so much of them can go on a least long enough to be noticed as a miscarriage. (Most of the mutations die rather quickly, do not go beyond a few division and are reject in the next menstruation. The rest dies as miscarriage. Only a tiny fraction of the mutations are delivered - there's research supporting this, I'm just to lazy to dig the sources).

    It has nothing to do with 2-3 generations of parents born with medical assistance. In fact, genetic counselling can, on the contrary, help better understand the risk for the baby and better plan the parenting and the birth, thus lowering the medical risks associated with it.

    I know it sounds cruel and insane, but part of me really thinks that we're fucking ourselves over long-term by providing such "excellent" health care. We're almost completely bypassing natural selection...

    If you are afraid that modern medicine is, on the whole, working against natural selection, you can think of it as not selecting gene-based health any more, but selecting civilisation :
    Civilisation which are more advanced live on the average better than those without medical technology. In a way, we're now selecting better memes instead of better genes (to use Dawkin's terminology), memes for advanced (medical) technology.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  33. Congrats, you google bombed "afterbirth" by formfeed · · Score: 2, Funny
    So, guess what comes up when you really do google

    "how to clean afterbirth off of a laptop"

    Yep, this story. - Pretty disruptive for people who need a (quick) answer and not your stupid comment.

  34. UPS by DeadDecoy · · Score: 2, Funny

    Handling charges included.

  35. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wait, if you were home, why would you need mobile internet? Or were there other circumstances keeping you from accessing your home net connection?

    Because he did not want to have to Goggle "how to clean afterbirth off of a laptop"...

    Can't clean laptop! The goggles, they do nothing!

    --
    I am not a crackpot.
  36. Re:A cat will still do by Cazakatari · · Score: 2, Funny

    Have you ever seen what happens when cat's mate? I haven't, but I've heard it. Sure sounds like death to me.

  37. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Antaeus+Feldspar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, you could try wiggling out of this one on a technicality, insisting on an article that is provably wrong in key facts and has been for more than a week, rather than one where that exact situation occurred but the article was later corrected after more than a week. But I'm sure you wouldn't do that, since that would be an artificial limitation.

    So perhaps you should look at this version of an article about Colin Pitchfork, a convicted child killer: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colin_Pitchfork&oldid=141669223 . Among the other false key facts presented in the article for twenty-five days (over three weeks):

    * the city and the county where the murders occurred;
    * the years where they occurred;
    * the existence of a third murder;
    * the year of Pitchfork's confession;
    * the date and year of Pitchfork's sentencing;
    * the name of the initial incorrect suspect;
    * the affiliation of the scientist who developed the technique that identified Pitchfork;
    * how Pitchfork's ruse to defeat forensic testing failed.

    That's a bit more than "spelling errors and questionable references."

    --
    If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
  38. Re:Cool by jim_v2000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Giving birth, in most cases, is not life or death. In fact, the mother's body is going to go through with it whether or not anyone helps.

    --
    Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
  39. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by adolf · · Score: 2, Informative

    Mars XXX. Google it: The first hit is a Wikipedia article describing Mars candy bars, which says that the XXX variant is gold-wrapped and filled with bourbon. Every other hit for "Mars XXX" relating to candy is a copy of the Wikipedia article. This part of the Wikipedia article hasn't changed for months (at least).

    I'd like to think that if Mars were selling bourbon-filled candy bars, that someone would've mentioned it outside of Wikipedia. Alas.

  40. Re:Cool by Dun+Malg · · Score: 2, Informative

    Reduction in the infant mortality rate had more to do with improvements in nutrition and hygiene (germ theory). The early-mid 19th Century is when the modern hospital concept really spread, but there wasn't a significant improvement in infant mortality until the turn of the century. Having a baby is not a medical procedure. More good was done for the IMR (and the expectant mother MR) by getting whoever it was delivering the baby to wash their damn hands than anything else.

    --
    If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  41. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Nazlfrag · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Except the point the GP was making is that the content wouldn't be in Wikipedia in the first place, so it's accuracy is hardly relevant.

  42. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Nazlfrag · · Score: 2, Funny

    I tried that, and now I'm just scared.

  43. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by rockNme2349 · · Score: 3, Funny

    The reliability of Wikipedia articles is considered by most to be uncertain, as sources find that many errors are produced by editors who clean-up articles. Most errors go undetected for long periods of time. [1]

    --
    Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
  44. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by ThreeGigs · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ok, I'll bite:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_iron_cookware#Seasoning

    Seasoning isn't magnetite formation, it's amorphous carbon formation. Someone got blueing confused with seasoning. Not too many people at home boil their pans in potassium nitrate and lye to season them. Worse, the article says something about oil protecting the metal from the oxygen in the air so that rust won't form, yet the formation of magnetite requires oxygen to react with the iron.

  45. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 2, Funny

    A friend of mine once changed the article for the movie Beaches to indicate that Arnold Schwarzenegger had a small, and uncredited cameo.

    Wikipedia is the best thing to happen to gambling since rigged dice and double sided coins.

    --
    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
  46. Re:I recently needed to learn how to set a live tr by Sobrique · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's reliable enough and credible enough for the average netizen. Sure, you won't get browny points citing it in academia, but when I want to know something about something, I check Wikipedia first.

  47. News at 11... by bracktra · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Mom gives birth to baby, dad gets credit for the hard work.

  48. Re:Study Up by Gilmoure · · Score: 2, Funny

    I do that a lot.

    --
    I drank what? -- Socrates