Please join me in welcoming a new author to the Suburban Panic! bomb shelter. Scooter Grant is a friend, law school colleague and veteran blogger. Nobody knows exactly what sinister plans are percolating in her brain*, but we’re excited to have her participating in this project.
As you might have noticed, I have a MySpace page. I’m not a big fan of webcam whores, adult dating spam and illiterate teenagers, but it’s convenient for keeping in contact with some old friends. I occasionally even meet someone new who I might like to make an Internet friend, and MySpace is good for that too.
A few dozen people have elected to connect to me on MySpace, and I wanted to let them know that I’d moved my web-spewings here from Ask LBB. Unfortunately, MySpace has decided that I’m a dirty, baby-eating spammer, and it keeps blocking links when I try to post them.
I tried sending a bulletin, and it replaced my link with a link to a page warning about phishing and viruses. Plan B was a blog post, which resulted in the same electronic gelding.
Why can’t I communicate my news with these people who have chosen - wisely or not - to connect to me? I managed to send a customer support email (without profanity, for once), but so far I haven’t heard back. Further bulletins as events warrant.
From the Computers Are Awesome/Creepy file, Discovery News is reporting on a website tracking infectious diseases offline.
Every hour, HealthMap, an infectious disease-tracking Web site, culls through news Web sites, public health list servs, the World Health Organization’s online pages, and other Web sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on.
So far the program identifies about 95 percent of all disease outbreaks, sometimes days before the World Health Organization or the Centers of Disease Control announce them.
The system is designed to look at words in context, so that a plague of locusts is distinguished from good old fashioned plague. The company is receiving funding from Google, which apparently wasn’t content to map streets. Someday, they may be able to pair a blurry photo of your neighbor’s house with a warning about when he gets the clap.
