We had a power cut today. Our house — and indeed the entire village — was without electricity from before noon until late afternoon. Sobering experience. And a salutary reminder of how much our lives depend on stable electricity supplies. Basically, nothing in our house worked: no lighting; no heating; no cooking; no hot water; no TV; no broadband; no chargers for mobile phones. I lit a blazing log fire, so we wouldn’t have frozen, and we could always have gone out to restaurant if there had been no power for cooking. As I say, sobering. And also a reminder of why, global warming or not, no democratic government is going to allow electricity supplies to falter. So we’ll have nukes, or whatever else it takes to keep the lights on.
Monthly Archives: November 2008
Dr Internet
This morning’s Observer column
A detailed academic study some years ago estimated that 4.5 per cent of all internet searches were health-related, which at the time translated into 16.7 million health-related queries a day. Again, I’m sure that number has gone up.
All of which suggests that people worry a lot about their health and see the web as a great way of becoming better informed. The medical profession is, to put it mildly, not over the moon. The more literate practitioners shake their heads and quote Mark Twain’s adage: ‘Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.’ But others are more righteous and wax indignant about what they see as the errors and misinformation peddled by many sites that purport to deal with health issues…
LATER: I had a moving email from a correspondent who lives on the other side of the world. I’m quoting it verbatim except that I’ve anonymised it.
In 2005, my second son, arrived in a hurry. We were living in Southern Japan at the time.
Following what had been another wonderful pregnancy, my wife and I were not at all prepared for the shock of his arrival and his condition.It turned out our son was born with congenital cytomegalovirus. Once I learned the name of what it was that had ravaged his body, I obviously turned to the Internet, including PubMed. Alright, so I am familiar with research, indices, journals et cetera, I was at the time an Associate Prof., and I am fairly well read. So perhaps I am not your average punter, but nevertheless within 24hrs I had read almost all there was on the research and treatment of cCMV.
The good folks at the National hospital, had similarly gone off to look this one up. But their research was almost entirely based on what was in-print in Japanese.
We had both come to similar, but not identical conclusions. One, and only one treatment was available, a chemotherapy over the course of 6 weeks may save his sight and his hearing. The Registrar wanted to begin immediately. I said No.
I had read about the dangers of the chemo in seriously compromised infants, and through the internet had managed to reach doctors at Mayo, U. of Alabama, Melbourne Sick Kids, Sydney Royal, and Great Ormond Street, never mind almost 100 parents of kids with cCMV, through a list-serv.The overwhelming advice, albeit guarded, and with lots of back-out clauses, essentially said, ‘Wait, let the infant recover from the trauma of birth, treat some of the minor conditions, and in a week or so’s time – then start the chemo. If you start it now – he will die.’.
It was a very hard call – going against the doctor’s advice in Japan. But I did. To say they were not happy is a bit of an understatement. I subsequently moved my son a few days later to a newer prefectural hospital, and another NICU team.
He began the chemo course at 10 days old, in a much stronger condition, and he got through it. He can see, and despite being told he was going to be severely deaf, he can hear.While I could have rung around using old fashioned telephones, there is no way I could have been as informed, and armed with knowledge without the Internet.
I have no doubt it saved his life.
My son is now 3, and is truly the happiest child you could care to meet.
STILL LATER: Jeff Jarvis picked up on the column and added:
In my book, I argue that – as with other apparent problems in industries – there is opportunity here. Doctors should act as curators, selecting the best information for their patients and making sure they are better informed.
Missing links at Princeton
For years Ed Felten of Princeton has been one of the best (most thoughtful, smart, informed, perceptive) bloggers on the Web. His Freedom to Tinker, has become a must-read for me and thousands of others. But in recent times, Freedom to Tinker has morphed from Professor Felten’s personal property into a collective blog hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research centre devoted to the intersection of digital technologies and public life. The blog now publishes comment and analysis written by the Centre’s faculty, students, and friends.
All of which is fine and dandy. There’s still lots of great stuff on Freedom to Tinker. But in the process of morphing from a personal space to a collective blog, Professor Felten’s archive seems to have gone awol. The result is that all the links I have to his writings — and use in my teaching and journalism — no longer work.
The problem applies inside the blog itself also. For example, its search engine returns two of the archive entries to which I had linked.
But when one clicks on either link, one is taken to the top page of the blog. So it seems that deep linking to content on Freedom to Tinker has effectively been disabled.
This is the kind of thing one expects from clueless media organisations. But one would have thought that Princeton was a cut above that.
Just give him the money
Willem Buiter doesn’t see why he should be left out of the bailouts.
My wife and I are the proud owners of all the common stock in a small company, created originally as a vehicle for supplying consultancy services. Because we are both US citizens, the company is registered both in the US and in the UK. Over the years since its creation, an awareness has grown inside me, that what we really own is a bank: money goes out (quite a lot) and money comes in (not quite enough). All we lack to be a proper bank is leverage and a marble atrium.
To remedy this obvious deficiency, I have decided to submit a request to the US banking regulators (cc’d to Hank Paulson) to grant bank holding company status to our enterprise. If G-Mac can aspire to this status, which gives the qualifying institution access to all the Fed troughs and to what’t left of the TARP, then so can we.
Unlike G-Mac, which provides financing for crappy, environmentally unfriendly vehicles that no-one really wants, our would-be bank holding company is a model of family values at work. Sure, we don’t make loans. But show me a bank today that does. You may wish to point out that the two principals involved have no experience running a bank. You would be correct. But what really is worse, having no relevant experience or having an extensive track record of running multi-billion enterprises into the ground? Make a choice between a definite risk and the certainty of abject and costly failure.
JJ profiled
The New York Observer has a long profile of Jeff Jarvis.
To meet Mr. Jarvis is to wonder how he can have become the bogeyman to so many in his profession. He is tall with that recessive posture that is meant to compensate, the body repelling the attention his ideas so readily attract. He has a good face, not a frightening one; when he speaks on anything, however small, the circumspection and intentionality ripples around his gray-stubbled, professorial face.
But his is a model of journalism that gives a lot of old-school journalists a vague feeling of nausea…
Can Google Flu Trends Be Manipulated?
Interesting contribution to the discussion by Ed Felten.
My concern today is whether Flu Trends can be manipulated. The system makes inferences from how people search, but people can change their search behavior. What if a person or a small group set out to convince Flu Trends that there was a flu outbreak this week?
An obvious approach would be for the conspirators to do lots of searches for likely flu-related terms, to inflate the count of flu-related searches. If all the searches came from a few computers, Flu Trends could presumably detect the anomalous pattern and the algorithm could reduce the influence of these few computers. Perhaps this is already being done; but I don’t think the research paper mentions it.
A more effective approach to spoofing Flu Trends would be to use a botnet — a large collection of hijacked computers — to send flu-related searches to Google from a larger number of computers. If the added searches were diffuse and well-randomized, they would be very hard to distinguish from legitimate searches, and the Flu Trends would probably be fooled.
This possibility is not discussed in the Flu Trends research paper. The paper conspicuously fails to identify any of the search terms that the system is looking for. Normally a paper would list the terms, or at least give examples, but none of the terms appear in the paper, and the Flu Trends web site gives only “flu” as an example search term. They might be withholding the search terms to make manipulation harder, but more likely they’re withholding the search terms for business reasons, perhaps because the terms have value in placing or selling ads.
Cyberchondria
Wow! Microsoft Research has just published a research study on what happens when people seek health information on the Web. Abstract:
The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and disease, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms. However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a large-scale survey of 515 individuals’ health-related search experiences. We focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms. Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.
The Obama rebound?
Sometimes, it’s ifficult to know what to think. This morning the Today programme carried a chilling article about the upsurge in US gun sales since Obama’s election. On the other hand, here’s an interesting reflection Mark Anderson.
The old adage says, The darkest hour is just before the dawn.
It’s hard to be upbeat these days, when every statistic is worse than the last. But the other day, as I was considering predictions for the coming year, a thought occurred to me: we are experiencing the waning days of the administration I have repeatedly called the worst in US history. Of course things look dark.
Is it possible, once the new administration is in place, that hearing daily announcements of LIPs (leadership, ideas and plans) put forward by people who are both smart and qualified, will have the opposite effect on the public from the constant drumming of fear we continue to have today?
Of course.
Is it also the case that markets react more to perception than to ground truth?
Generally, yes.
So I asked myself, what will the state of mind be of the average American, say, three weeks into the next administration – let’s say, by Valentine’s Day, February 14th?
If their house has just been foreclosed and their car repossessed, we know what they’ll be thinking. But otherwise, I expect it will be radically more optimistic than it is today.
Is that enough to provide a market rebound? It could be.
The future of news
Interesting long post by Jeff Jarvis…
It’s fair to expect me to put forward scenarios for the future of news. In a sense, that’s all I ever do here, but there’s no one permalink summarizing my apparently endless prognostication. So here is a snapshot of – a strawman for – where I think particularly local news might go. What follows is just a long – I’m sorry – summary of what I’ve written here over time and an extension of the one model I think we need to expand coming out of the conference, where one lesson I took away is that news – on both the content and business side – will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative…
Those Obama appointments
From David Brooks
Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).
The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).
This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.
Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line…
Lovely piece which, in the end, is not quite as cynical as its opening paras might suggest.