{"id":73,"date":"2005-05-22T15:44:36","date_gmt":"2005-05-22T15:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=73"},"modified":"2005-05-22T15:44:36","modified_gmt":"2005-05-22T15:44:36","slug":"following-h5n1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"Following H5N1"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Ron Nigh and I have been exchanging bits of news about H5N1 for the last 18 months, starting from the monitoring of press coverage<\/a> that I began in January 2004, and following the discovery of the issue by people better equipped than ourselves (Effect Measure<\/a>, Pathogen Alert<\/a>, The Coming Influenza Pandemic?<\/a>, Henry Niman’s Recombinomics<\/a>, and Connotea’s AvianFlu tag<\/a>…) . Yesterday I forwarded to him a couple of links to stories about death of migratory birds in China, who seem to have come from India… Ron responded:<\/p>\n

\nThis is such a fascinating subject for anthropology and I will be forever
\ngrateful to you for pointing me to it way back when. It has so many
\ndimensions, from the genetic, species diversity issues ,biomedical
\nissues to the social and political… All that is lacking is some GIS! Do you know if anyone is mapping bird
\nflu? It would be great to take this as a case for my anthro students in 2006. By
\nthen it may well be a big story or may have faded away like SARS. Anyway it
\nwould be fun to come up with some mapping and statistical exercises to do
\nwith the students on the Internet, etc. An idle dream, I suppose.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I replied with some comments on the prospects for mapping:<\/p>\n

\nConsider the myriad problems of mapping, which simply make the whole
\nthing even MORE ideal as a multidimensional whatever for anthropology:
\nthere are so many actors (individual and corporate) whose Interest is in
\nNOT allowing Information about H5N1 to be public, and\/or in distorting
\nthe “facts”, that the inbound data stream for maps is completely
\ncompromised –we can’t even know how bad (or good…) the data are. Sort
\nof like mapping gypsies. And that’s a good metaphor for the whole
\nproblem of Data and Objectivity, innit? What we’d like is some proxies,
\nideally overlapping proxies, for the data we’d really like but can’t
\nget…
\nA lot of the stories I read via those blogs say pretty much the same
\nthing: the world of officialdom is bumbling and slow to get it, and
\nbasically interested in not being caught in Type II Error (having cried
\nWolf with public monies, when there was no lupine personage…), so the
\ntesting that MUST be done to provide the data we need isn’t being done,
\nor is being suppressed, or in any case isn’t being fed into the channels
\nwhere troublemakers like Niman can get their mitts on and
\nmisrepresent… etc etc.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ron sez:<\/p>\n

\nI don’t think anyone has said it quite as clearly as you. At least put your
\nthoughts on oook…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…so here they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Ron Nigh and I have been exchanging bits of news about H5N1 for the last 18 months, starting from the monitoring of press coverage that I began in January 2004, and following the discovery of the issue by people better equipped than ourselves (Effect Measure, Pathogen Alert, The Coming Influenza Pandemic?, Henry Niman’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}