Rusty's Blog

For purposes of this entry, social media will be any resource that is suceptible to meme’s. The obvious ones are sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, identi.ca,  and the tools that connect them with other systems, such as iPhone apps, etc. However we should not discard ‘mem’ related systems either. Where’s George for example, as they can provide independent corroberating evidence.

At one level or another the CDC already tracks communicable deseases such as HIV, Ebola, and variations on the Rhinovirus and Influencza. The standard means of tracking is to get reports from medical professionals regarding when the first symptoms of a communicable disease enters a community, and what the experience within that community is for propegation within the community. As best they can they try to determine the vector, but that is not always as simple as it seems. An example of a disese that we know is communicable, but do not know well how it enters into a ommunity is the Ebola virus. The last I read we had a strong suspicion that it exists and is innocuous within some animal, though we do not know well which one, and we only have theories as to how it first transitions to humans where it has a malevolent response.

As a result of the reporting that the CDC is already getting, we can see patterns in propegation, and hopefully get doctors and the medical communities prepared for the influx of paitents they will see, though accurately predicting when ior even if it will hit a community are still rather dicy.

The  big problem a tthe moment is that asside from self reporting of social contacts within a medical report, which is rarely going to give you useful information, knowing where a bug is only peripherally tells you where it is going. Will it arrive by plane tomorrow? On the train later this week? Or will it suddenly appera within one ethnic community and completely miss everyone else for a couple of weeks?

The Holy grail of prevention is being able to identify accurately the vectors. If you tried to explain how a disese got from one place to another based on medical reports, you would very likely see a pattern of early reports showing up first around clinics and hospitals, so those are ‘likely’ to be the vectors. Right? Maybe. What you would really like however is a way of tracking how a disese is propegating without it being bound to a single reporting mechnism. Ideally it would have a way of identifying relationships between people within the reporting system that already is in place. And that is where social media could come in.

You may have seen reports about, or even participated in ‘memes’ such as the ’25 things about me’ or ’1 word’ memes that have hit several social media platforms over the past few months. If you look at what happens, someone somewhere inserted the meme from one system into another. Perhaps they saw a blog entry on a blog agregator, and decided that it would be fun to try that on Facebook where they could tag their friends. And their friends tag others, and after a few itterations you litterally have millions of people posting inane facts about themselves, and a the meme dies away. Or perhaps someone from Facebook takes the meme over to MySpace, and it flares up again.

If you watch the pattern you see that the first one is extreamly virulent, and the ones following are less so. 25 things hits millions, one word hits hundreds of thousands, ‘alphabet’ may have gotten to tens of thousands. Which is also of interest in contemplation of how the various propegation mechanisms can adjust over time. There was no imunity to the first meme, but the second time around people were less interested, and by the third or fourth time around people were actively opposing the meme. A primary vector becomes identified and people either block that vector or filter it against similar events.

Chain letters are another example, as are other e-mail messages with images, etc. In fact it’s been used to actively propegate computer viruses, which are another example.

Those examples however are essentially models. And they provide useful information about how vectors can work, but don’t necesarily give us useful information about how to map that information onto medical situations. Our imune systems, both internal and external have gone through several very deadly propegations, such as a couple variations on Plague, the Spanish Flu, etc. We are not fully immune to those, as we have learned that each of these do change over time.

Given that we can model diseases, can we use that information to perhaps identify vectors for new disease outbreaks? This is where Social media sites get to be very interesting, and potentially very controversial. Interesting because if you can track a real disease across a social network, see who is reporting what sort of symptoms, and see how those symptoms then show up across various relationships, you can potentially identify the sorts of vectors those diseases use. This can be useful information in helping to prevent an outbreak in the first place. As an example, if you spot that the first people affected by salmanela food poisoning all are close to supermarkets, and it seems to take a few days before people around regular grocery stores are affected, you can look at what might sell first at supermarkets, then sells later at grocery stores. If you see that people on vacation to the Camen Islands are comming down sick a week later, but people who are there on business only trips there are mostly fine, you might consider looking at resort related activities.

Social media can be broken down into thre or four ‘types’ of relationships. First of all you have direct relationships. This might be work related social sites, company/vendor type sites, or sites that cater to families. While these are handy for looking at relationships that probably involve physical contact between the members, it’s less likely that someone like the CDC is going to be able to have access to the information, and also somewhat unlikely that such information will be available as they tend to discuss specific non health related information. If you do have access, you may see patterns of propegation in how people interact however. Bob usually responds immediately, but didn’t respond to anything on Monday or Tuesday this week. Turns out he called in sick. And so on.

Another variation is the ‘completely open’ social site. For some people these are the ‘best’ types. It gives someone like Robert Scoble, or Jason Calicanus the opportunity to market to litterally millions of people at a time. Friend the person and you immediately have a way to distribute information about your business, and you are more likely to end up with customers than by just advertising on a web site.

Between the two are ‘restricted’ social sites. In some way relationships are restricted here. You may have to identify how you are ‘related,’ (Family, work, hobby, neighbors, school chum, etc.) or you may only be allowed to have a certain number of friends (Friendster, Facebook)

For the moment we won’t get into other variations on the ‘restricted’ sites. There really are too many to mention. However another type of site to consider are the ‘dating’ sites. In most cases you are going to be looking here for either budding, or transient relationships, and in some cases there will be various levels of intimacy involved that may very well give you some very useful vector information.

As noted earlier the ‘closed’ relationship sites are of limited utility to someone like the CDC. I have to admit that I think the ‘completely open’ varieties are also of very limited utility. This because while they may provide a lot of relations, it is very likely that most of those relations do not provide a mechanism of transmitting communicable diseases. One could spend thousands of hours trying to figure out how to use a collection of MySpace or Twitter relationships, only to discover that the person you are ‘tracking’ with all those relationships only ever personally interacts with a very small subset of the collection.

Limited social media then are where you really would like to focus. Here however you run into other problems. Most of the limited sites do not have a means of looking at everyone’s updates. You very well may be albe to see that Bill is married to Marry, and works fro Walt, but if you can’t view their communications, you may never see how Walt was sick on Monday, Bill ended up taking a sick day Thursday, and Mary missed going to church on Sunday.

One thing you can ddo with such a site thour is develop an application where people ‘share’ information with each other. Perhaps you build an ‘I’m feeling…’ app that allows you set a ‘health’ level with detailed information. Headache, blury vision, lethargic, sneezing, coughing, racing heart, feaver (potentially with temp) muscle ache, shivering, pins and needles in feet/fingers. and so on. You set that level, and you invite your friends to use the same app. Additionally you get a related app for your cell phone, so you can set this information wherever you hapen to be, and it tags the update with where you are. Perhaps a ‘nudge’ feature to get people to tell each other ‘Hey I feel great!’ and so on, again tracking where you are when you post the update.

Since we have gone ‘cross platform’ the information has to be maintained outside of the primary social media site. This can cause some very significant privacy concerns. Especially since we are dealing with health information. In fact the tracking of such information is very tightly regulated under law. I’ll leave HIPPA concerns out there, but they are very real, and need to be designed in from the get-go.

The big problem with the privacy concerns is that unless you have some way of distributing relationship information amoungst users, you simply have another means of tracking where a disease may have been. It’s important information, but in a way it puts you in no better of a position than you started out being.

In computer science there is a concept called a graph. This is not the plotting of stocks over time, or the charting of population growth, though both are variations or a graph. A graph consists of ‘nodes’ and ‘vectors’ Vectors connect nodes, and have various properties, such as distance, direction, flow, Nodes usually have location information, but may have other characeristics. Using that concept, you can show how money flows from one person to another, Or you could build a family tree and track how genetic problems progress.

The thing to consider for this situation is that if you can watch how vectors change, for relationships, and can find some way of gathering helpful information about the people involved in the relationship without tieing identifiable information to the node. you could gather a lot of useful information for watching how an illness propegates, and provide public service information specific to that illness.

The next problem is who should track that, and can they be trusted to not gather un-necessary information? Some would suggest that this is a ‘Homeland Security’ issue. We need to be albe to prevent and protect against diseases that may affect the safety of the country and our military forces. Perhaps, but history of late suggests that this might not be a very trusted situation. USAMRID and the CDC are much more likely to be able to properly handle the information, and already have means of distributing advisories to the medical community. I would like to think that at least the CDC is more trustworthy, but that is largely dependent upon who is in charge, and can also be variable based on internal policies. USAMRID has the perception problem of being the military, with all the legacy of Military Intelegence, and the fact that over the years it has come to light that they did non-consentual comunicble disease testing on large populations in several major cities.

That means that the CDC would have to be a customer of ‘scrubbed’ information. They may get to know about what types of relationships are involved in the graph, and may get demographic information about the people, but someone else has to be trusted to convert the information from the raw social site data to something that the CDC can make use of without it being personally identifieable. Some people I would strongly oppose having this power would be any medical site related to insurance. I would recommend that insurance companies should not even be allowed to sponsor, much less advertise here. Yes being ahead of the game could help reduce medical expenses, however there is entirely too great a likelyhood that people will be rejected for coverage as a result. (or worse.)

I don’t know who would make the best resource for this. Commentary welcome.

Want to?

Why don’t you? Most of us don’t really know why. Oh, we experience pain, and a lot of us think that such pain is ‘bad’ for us, or should prevent us from feeling ‘good.’ That doesn’t have to be the case.

Some of us are undere stresses that affect us emotionally. Holidays, Family members passing away, new house, finances, Work presure, family members doing ‘wrong,’ even falling in love. They all place one form of stress on our emotions, and as a society in the US, we don’t tend to teach pwople how to respond to those stresses.

What? You though I was going to tell you to imagine feeling good? Or suggest it first? We’ll get to that. Imagining ‘feeling good’ really is a great way to end up feeling good. However without figuring out how to address the rest of what’s going on in our lives, it’s a feeling that lasts till the world invades again.

Let’s start with the physical. Perhaps you remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc where Indie has been beaten up, and he hurts just about everywhere? It seams that no matter where Marion goes to touch him, he feels agonizing pain until she asks him where it doesn’t hurt. For most of us there is almost always a part of our body that doesn’t hurt. And some people have tricks they do to themselves to ignore pains and injuries. If you’re familiar with them, and they work for you, great. For the rest of us, the idea is to take a few moments, and feel a part of our body that is not in pain. Is it touching something that we think is sensouous? Can we feel the texture of something around that spot that makes us feel good?

Another element is to make sure we are treating any injury properly. If it deserves medical attention, has it gotten that attention? Also we tend to go through some low times as our bodies go off of any pain medication that we have been on. Part of that is the body wanting the pain medication back, and part of it is the body responding to the fact that it was injured and has been going through a lot of work in recovering.

Keeping in mind something that you really want to do in the future, or that you have loved to do in the past that recovery is going to let you do again, may help.

“May help?” you ask. OK as with visualizing yourself feeling good, or putting a broad smile on your face and looking in a mirror at yourself and saying “I Like You. You make me feel Great!” a few times, these suggestions are ideas you can consider, use, or even disregard On your own terms. This means that it’s entirely possible that you will go through this entire missive, and will never do anything that helps you feel better. Along with everything else, I am not a doctor. That’s why I suggest that if there is something medically wrong, that you will have to take it upon yourself to seak out help for that. And that applies both to physical ailments and mental and emotional ailments. I am not licensed to practice medicine, and an not a psyciatrist. I’m not even a Psychologist, though I am very interested in why people do the things they do.

We know pretty well that when people have experienced a significant loss in thier lives that they have to go through the entire mourning process. Oddly enough most of us think that celebration has no similar process. Really? Think about a couple of “celebration” events. A married young lady finds she’s pregnant. Most people would consider this an event worthy of celebration. Let’s presume that Lady and Hubby have been trying to have a baby, and all the family is in accord. What’s the first thing that happens? “No! I’m Pregnant? Am I ready? Are we ready financially?” Sond familiar? Denial and Doubt. How about someone winning the Lottery? Shock? Surprise? And so on. In short we go through a gamut of emotions for both positive and negative events in our lives.

And Just because they are scheduled does not mean that major holidays are out either. The fact that they are sceduled doesn’t change the fact that we experience sadness over people who are not going to make it, or places we are not going to get to.

There are so many traditions in the US, that I won’t say that “It is a tradition at most holidays..” but I will note that for many of us Food is an important part of many celebrations, as well as more than a few events like funerals and going away parties. That often gets hooked up with ‘feeling good’ and the result is that for many of us, there is an emotional component of eating, and when we don’t feel good, or we experience something that makes us sad, we go and eat to try to make ourselves feel better. Is it no wonder we tend to gain weight?

In other words, I’m not about to tell you to go eat something comforting to feel better. What I will say is that when you are under emotional stress due to loss or gain, you very likely need to find some place or way that you can go through the process of recovery. Go do that. If that involves being with someone and sharing the experience with them, then do that. Then come back and you can work on going from feeling OK, which is fine, to feeling Good. which is better.

At the extreams of peole who feel that the perhaps shouldn’t feel good are those people who feel ‘sorry’ for other people who’s lives they have no impact on. The “How can you celebrate when there are people in _insert country here_ who are starving _or whatever sufferance they experience_?” Well, let’s be honest with ourselves. If I feel bad about that situation today, does it help them? How? On the other hand if I’m aware that there are people who are suffering in _wherever_ and I donate for some cause to help them, or pray for them, or whatever, should I still feel bad myself as a result?

In short, If you are in a situation where you need help, then you should seek it out and get that help.

OK, so by now you should be at the point where you may not feel ‘good’ but you feel OK. This may still include some fairly high stress from work, or family. That’s generally OK, as long as you are expecting the stress and working with it. Some people have a lot of trouble understanding this, but in every thing you do, there will be stress. The ‘Stress Free Lifestyle’ doesn’t really exist. You make thousands of decisions every hour, and some people every minute. Some of those decisions will be wrong, and hopefully you will have the opportunity to learn from them. Some of those decisions will have an impact far beyond what you are doing now, some of those impacts you will know about as you make the decision, others you won’t know about even after the fact. If you’re not OK with that level of stress, then perhaps you should be looking to do something different, but no matter what, you will have stress in your life.

Let’s go beyond that. Did you get some exercise today? I don’t mean did you take your dogs out to the dog walk and bring them in once they did their thing. I mean did you get some exercise in today? Go for a walk? Lift weights? What doesn’t really matter, what matters is going out and getting some blood flowing through your veins at a higher rate than ‘normal.’ Well? Did you? Perhaps now is a good time to get up and go for a walk. No worries on comming back to this, feel free to set a bookmark, or write down the URL for this page. Come on back when you have done some exercise. I’ll be here. If you are wondering, half an hour of walking, or the like, is all you should look at specifically doing today. Just go for a walk.

Feel better? Good that’s a start. Now you’ve probably spent the day binding muscles into knots. Do you have a tub, or a shower massage? Go make use of it. Run a warm or hot soaking bath, and relax for a bit. think about how good the warmth feels as it releases the tension in thos muscles. If you have access to a spa or hot tub, so much the better.

Feels pretty good doesn’t it. Heck even thinking about it probably has put a smile on your face. Just those two things, a half hour walk, and a relaxing soak in the tub, if done every day are likely to make any day about 10% better. And that can tip the scale from feeling OK to feeling Good.

Can’t go for a walk? That’s OK. walk over to the fridge, and pull out 2 20 oz pop or water bottles. Do some curls, hold your arms straight out while holding onto the bottles, press them, imagine they are a bar bell and do a full clean and jerk. Spend 20 or 30 minutes doing that, with 5 or 10 reps of each exercise you can think of, then put one bottle of watter back in the fridge, and sip down the other. Put the cap back on the bottle and go watch the news.

Ever wondered what you would do with a stress ball, but thought it was really stupid to pay $4 or $8 for one of those things at the sporting goods store? Take note of that 20 oz bottle in your hands. It fits your hand pretty well right? And with the lid on, you can squeze and release it OK right? And it’s not very heavy. Well, every time the news anchor says something you think is either really stupid, or really inappropriate, (I won’t tell you what network to watch, I know people who feel that way about newrly every anchor out there.) Squeeze the pop bottle. If you start breaking these, it might be a good idea to move up to a $4 stress ball, but it’s also likely that you’ll find another 20 oz bottle ready for use before tomorrow.

Now limit yourself to about half an hour of news, if that. I’m pretty sure that you will have worn the bottle out about then. So now it’s time to start visualizing and imagining, and feeling really Great.

I’m going to presume that you had a ‘normal’ childhood. Your folks didn’t drop $2500 on an Outward Bound experience for you when you were in 8th grade summer vacation. You may have gone to summer camp, but more likely didn’t. There was probably a ‘Reading Is Fundamental’ program at your local public library, but to be honest right now you don’t know where the closest library is, or what hours they are open. You probably spent Saturday morning with the box of cereal in front of the TV watching cartoons. Now if you are in your early 20′s, that may translate to you got home from school and curled up in front of Nickalodian, and told your friends about the Cartoon channel a few years later. Or perhaps you spent the last 3 years of HS watching the Family channel after school. I don’t know. We’ve gotten to the point however where most of us don’t associate having a good time with being outside. Playgrounds and parks? You mean the soccer field where all those kids were being hen pecked by their moms? Well, no I don’t. Oh, you mean that place where that woman got beat up and raped last year? Well, that’s sort of the place, if not the situation.

Entirely too many of us have no idea what a park is, or why we might want to go there. I happen to live in the ‘greater metro area of the Twin Cities.’ New York set asside a relatively large area of the city space as Central Park. That’s not quite what happened in the Twin Cities and surounding areas. It just happens that within the TC area, it’s almost impossible to go any significant distance in any direction without finding a place to go for a walk. We have walking and biking trails throughout the area and where we don’t have sidewalks, it’s because traffic is light enough that one can safely walk on the side of the road.

All that said, Most of us grew up in a climate of fear of strangers in public places. Or rather our parents had us come home right after school, and we didn’t get to go out and play sandlot baseball or neighborhood scale cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, etc. So for entirely too many of us, if it wasn’t part of an organized system, be it little league, boy scouts, girl scouts, or 4-H, Soccer, karate or the like, we ended up staying inside and watching the tube. Or experience of pleasure was all too often watching Wyle E Coyote run out of road when chasing the road runner.

Change that. Start by finding someone in your area who you can relate to, and can talk with. Say “Hey, I don’t really think there’s anything worth watching on TV tonight. Are you up for a walk down to the park and back?” If they are not, say “Ok, Thought I would ask, and was hoping for someone to walk with. Have a good evening.” If you would rather, check with your local city parks and recreation department. They may know of some organized events you can get involved with, if your more comfortable with that.

Strange as it may seem, Being involved with other people tends to be the simplest and fastest way to really feeling good about yourself, and about others. And that will leave you feeling good.

Now it’s possible, if unlikely, that there is someone reading this, saying ‘this is stupid.’ If you already feel good, or great regaring what you are doing, or where, that’s fine. Well, great actually. It’s not like this was written for you. But there are a lot of people these days who have no idea what ‘feeling good’ even feels like. Give yourself a chance. We are social animals. For some that means competitive, and ‘have to be Alpha.’ For others, it means that in order for us to have a healthy mental state, we have to spend some part of each day interacting with other humans. If you can do so in person, you will find that it operates on a whole lot more levels than reading blogs and stories online.

That said, if you have found some activity, online, in person, or on your own, that really makes you feel good, I want to know about it. Yes this can include anything from meditation, to fantastic sex. Leave a comment. I have enabled OpenID, and there are a lot of places that provide that authentication now. However I also accept people leaving comments annonymously. I do ask that you leave an e-mail address, but it’s not going to be posted, and I’m not going to check it before your comment is approved.  And yes, I do want to hear back from readers.