Category: Future Chat

Future Chat: Science 3 – Vaccinations

Future Chat
Future Chat
Future Chat: Science 3 - Vaccinations
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Outbreaks in North America of measles (red), mumps (brown), and whooping cough (bright green). Source (retrieved 2014-07-02).

So, The handsome gentlemen co-host of Future Chat and future new-media baron Rob Attrell has asked me to write a brief summary on vaccinations in preparation for Future Sci Chat #3.  I told him I’d do what I can, and you may see the results below.  For those of you wishing to read the post I wrote in 2011 on the very same topic, have a link.

So what’s a vaccination?

They’re a good thing.  A vaccination is often an injected dose of a live, or sometimes dead virus.  The virus has either been sterilised (no reproduction means no infection) or treated in such a way that it will not be able to harm the patient.  The body then produces the antibodies required to fight off the virus, which are then able to fight off or otherwise discourage a future infection of the same virus.  It is not uncommon for the patient to experience symptoms similar to viral infection such as elevated temperature, fatigue, and/or soreness because the body earnestly believes it is fighting off an infection.

Sounds unpleasant, why bother?

Short answer?  Because people die.  Significant investment was made by North Americans in the mid-twentieth century to cure things like polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough because those diseases cost lives.  Further, when governments are on the hook for health care costs (as is the case for the Canadian provinces), vaccinating the citizenry is a lot easier than dealing with hoards of sick and potentially dying people.  This is compounded by the fact that diseases can spread through hospitals, which is why health care professionals are the first to be vaccinated.


So what’s the catch?

You have to deal with a needle and the associated symptoms for a day or two.  There are some instances in which people have had adverse reactions to vaccinations, but this is usually due to an allergy to one of the ingredients (or often a preservative agent), or due to a pre-existing complication.  Healthy people are not normally in jeopardy.


Doesn’t the MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella) vaccine cause autism?

No.

But Jenny McCarthy said –

Jenny McCarthy isn’t a doctor, nor is she in any way trained to formally review or interpret the relevant literature.  The medical journal The Lancet published a since-[thoroughly]-discredited paper suggesting a causal link between the MMR vaccine and onset of childhood autism.  Recent research has indicated that autism develops while the baby is still in the womb, and therefore cannot be caused by vaccinations.

What if I don’t vaccinate my child(ren), aren’t they safe because all the other kids get vaccinated?

Ah, I see you’ve heard of “herd immunity.”  See that map at the top of the page?  That’s what those parents thought, too.

NM

You will be able to watch Future Sci Chat episode #3, on Vaccines, live at 12:30 PM EDT on Saturday, July 5th, either here below, or by clicking on the link that is this sentence.

Reaching into the Future

I’m holding myself to keeping this short, but this is an issue which has come up multiple times for me in the last few months, has been covered by media establishments, and tested by people like Derek at +Veritasium.

The issue, which affects most of us, but especially those of us who like to make things on the Internet, is that getting through the noise on the Internet is very difficult. Especially on sites like Facebook, where there is lots of advertising money at play, it is very important that only the “best” content gets through our “social filters” and makes it to our eyeballs. For people who manage Facebook pages, this means that we are vying for an increasingly smaller slice of time-pie. As networks like Facebook reach total permeation in a society, we are bombarded with important stuff from friends, family, advertisers and others all the time.

Facebook has allowed brands to purchase additional promotion for their posts for some time now (at least a year or two) and in the last year has also decidedly limited the number of people who see unpromoted posts. I hope you can see how the simultaneous ideas are in conflict here:

Facebook only wants to show you posts you’re likely to comment on or like (ideally there would only be 3-4 of these at the top of the news feed, given the size of our friendship networks) so you’re basically guaranteed that you’re not going to see content from everybody, especially with default settings where nobody is given any preference over anybody else.

However, sometimes, Facebook brands are BAD at advertising, which means that posts which companies pay to have people see will not reach very many people organically, and will not be liked very much. In those situations, the choice Facebook has made is to send those posts to only people who like content from all kinds of pages blindly (either spambots, or clickfarms).

For the average person trying to be seen on Facebook, this means that they end up paying money to outsource likes overseas, where people are paid to click like or follow Twitter accounts, but don’t actually engage at all with the content. Obviously, this looks the same on the surface, as your pages are being viewed, but interaction goes WAY down on those posts compared to those which are organically popular.

It is exactly this reason that I don’t want to pay for promotion of my content, because I know that it is cheap and will not result in anything positive except people who aren’t real liking my content. However, I also want real people to see what I am working on, even though I do have a very limited budget and time, we obviously all want the best for the stuff we make/do.

Really, the only way to get stuff seen on social networks is the same way it has always been, getting people you know to help you by sharing what they see, and by sharing it yourself, either from the page or manually. This is unfortunate, but nobody said making stuff was easy, and making stuff people actually want to see is WAY harder.

I’d love to hear from you guys about this issue, if you think there’s something I could improve about +Future Chat or my other projects, feel free to drop me a line in the comments, or on Facebook, Twitter (@_FutureChatFM) or by email at [email protected] or to my personal email at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you!

Future Chat: Tech 17 – Sunday News Edition

Future Chat
Future Chat
Future Chat: Tech 17 - Sunday News Edition
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This week on Future Tech Chat, we will be slowing down a little bit, taking some time to relax. This week has featured a TON of news from Google Inc. (as we discussed in the I/O predictions episode), so we will definitely reflect on what we saw from I/O, and how our predictions fared.

We’ll also be taking a look at some of the biggest news stories of the year from Microsoft, Apple and others, and how they might affect the tech world over the next 6 months. May/June is technology conference season, so there have been quite a few different announcements about new products and features. This week is also a great opportunity to answer a few questions from viewers and talk a little bit about our technology backgrounds. It’s going to be a great episode!

News stories

I hope you’ll tune in live at 12:30 PM EDT on Sunday, June 29th for the episode, and you’ll be able to watch it in full above live or after it’s aired.

You can direct any questions you might have to the Q&A on the event page (https://plus.google.com/events/c03kvc0burjbci0jitev73ug5fs), or on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. We look forward to seeing you here live!