Only slightly bent

It’s been almost a decade since I went to the army – a compulsory waste of time, courtesy of the Finnish government. While cleaning up yesterday, one photo appeared from somewhere that brought back some memories. You see, my job at the army was mostly to take photos and write articles. I think the photo here is an excellent visual story of army food. Notice the private’s very telling facial expression as he is rationing the food.

Of course, when you’ve spent some time in the forest and are hungry, any food tastes good.

And to people who make fun of me photographing food, this is likely the first surviving example of that..

Communities have for some time been all the craze; everyone wants to build a community, whether it’s around an idea, a hobby, a company or some theme. Even many blogs are – or want to be – based on the idea of a virtual community. Beginning the process is always difficult; very few people are willing to spend time talking to mostly themselves in an empty forum. So it should be a source of joy when you get a place up and running.

But soon after that point is reached, things often fall apart. I’ve witnessed several communities (which have had a great start) splitting or getting destroyed purely because of personal arguments. Administrator(s) who become arrogant from the success end up destroying the place (hint to these egomaniacs: it’s the people who make a place, virtual or not, valuable and unique, not the “owner” of the place). Sites collapsing under their own weight when the founders realize it actually costs money to run a popular community. Countless discussion forums becoming useless when the signal-to-noise ratio takes a nose-dive. And so on.

Getting caught in the middle of witnessing the destruction of a previously successful online community is a somewhat surreal thing. Being an outside observer, it’s all too easy to see how childish the arguments are. First sign of irrevocable trouble is often a wave of fed-up people leaving. Then comes public fighting. And then another wave leaves. When all is said and done, what’s left might be a community, but one that often bears little resemblence to the original place.

The sad thing is that there aren’t many places that manage to keep together a large group of active participants conversing in a civilized manner for what could be considered a long time. Instead, most can be characterized as shooting stars.

The H5N1 aka the bird flu is, for a good reason, something everyone is now talking about. The human tragedy aside, fascinating subjects are being discussed ranging from the safety of the food supply to closing all borders to the functioning of a society in case of a pandemic. A pandemic, or even the threat of one, clearly has the potential to show the greatest – or the worst – sides of humanity on an enormous scale.

All of this aside, I have a related small-scale concern that I haven’t seen being debated anywhere. When the pandemic hits, the health care system in every country of the world is going to have a crisis on their hands. Severe staff shortages will be imminent. This means that not even nearly everyone will get treated by an expert – instead, you might get an intern making life-or-death decisions under panicky circumstances. So what happens if a patient knows more about the treatment he or she should receive than the doctor, but is unable to self-supply this treatment? Will the patients treatment opinions be respected?

Consider some simple basic facts about H5N1 as an example:

• How many GPs or interns know that one possible reason for high mortality with H5N1 is a not-well-understood phenomenon called cytokine storm?
• Moreover, how many know how that is treated? (There are no guidelines, but blocking OX40-receptors seems to work and lessons from treating SARS with corticosteroids, interferons etc. should be remembered.)
• How many know that tamiflu may have to be given in higher dosages and for a longer time than the current guidelines to be effective?
• Has the more widespread emergence of H5N1-variant resistant to oseltamivir (Tamiflu) been taken into account?

The point is that I hope the healthcare professionals have efficient communication systems in place to distribute the required information to everyone and fast. The problem is that in many parts of the world, there are no such communication systems in place. There’s a danger that the latest information on treatment is only available in the so-called western countries.

Of course, the education must take place on the general public also. For one, since antiviral drugs work only if given early enough on the disease onset, it’s essential for each and every one of us to be able to identify the symptoms of a possible influenza at an early stage. On a larger scale, I wonder what stage the pandemic is really at.. WHO says 3, Recombinomics says 5 or 6. Given that 6 is the final stage, there’s more than a slight difference in those estimates.
Update: The tourist infections were a false alarm, and it appears calling the pandemic to be even at stage 5 was typical recombinomics exaggeration.

Link recap:

• Virulence May Determine the Necessary Duration and Dosage of Oseltamivir Treatment for Highly Pathogenic A/Vietnam/1203/04 Influenza Virus in Mice, Journal of Infectious Diseases
• Cytokine Storm at FluWikie
• A Critical Role for OX40 in T Cell–mediated Immunopathology during Lung Viral Infection, Journal of Expiremantal Medicine
• SARS Treatment at SARSReference
• The Use of Corticosteroids in SARS, New England Journal of Medicine
• Human infection by avian influenza A H5N1
• Oseltamivir-resistant H5N1 virus isolated from Vietnamese girl, CIDRAP
• CDC Information about pandemics and their phases
• Casual Transmission of H5N1 in Thailand and Indonesia, Recombinomics

In Finland, there was a big hype around Avant-smartcards some years ago. This particular chip, integrated to your debit/credit card, is capable of storing money loaded at ATMs. It was introduced in the early 1990s and is now being phased out – no new Avant cards have been issued since last summer. Exaggerating only very slightly, nobody ever used the system and even fewer use it now. While the demise was by no means unforeseeable, it’s interesting to see what exactly went wrong. Some of the most fundamental problems included:

• Yet another account for storing money. It’s a royal pain to manage a number of “virtual” accounts. And of course you don’t get paid any interest on the money.
• If you lose the card, you lose all the money stored in it. What a convenient way to lose potentially hundreds of euros.
• Loading money on the card and returning it to the account costs money. This makes any purchase made with the card more expensive than other, established and well-known methods – a cardinal mistake for a payment system that does not offer dramatically more convenient transactions such as enhancing the speed of the transaction at the POS significantly.
• And the final killer, no merchants supporting the system: Avant is accepted at a whopping 25 merchants in Helsinki. These include such essential places such as Snack Bar C17, AK Electrical shop, Sex Shop Finland and Massage Harjula. The list, surprisingly, does have some genuinely useful participants also like the city library. But 25 after all these years? What a joke.

The sad thing is that most or all of the problems mentioned above could’ve been avoided. Even though I hope the mistakes would be taken as a learning session, I’m fairly confident we’ll be seeing the same mistakes in other initiatives in the future. Along these lines (while it hasn’t fallen for all the same mistakes), I would predict that the next payment scheme in Finland to go belly-up is Mobiiliraha, a mobile payment system that is also accepted… well, nowhere.

Photo by freefoto.com

Tele2 (a Swedish company operating, among other things, a prepaid-only MVNO in Finland) announced some months back that it’s withdrawing from the Finnish market, citing fierce competition. They were never really incredibly popular, but now in addition to joining the crowd of failed MVNOs in Finland, they’ve also become an example of how not to treat customers – even ex-customers.

Anyhow, on October 24th, Tele2 announced that they will terminate all subscriptions. While in theory they’re respecting the one-month notice period and the connection will work until November 30th, in practise they’re being nasty – the automatic and manual loading of pre-paid minutes was terminated immediately, potentially leaving most customers with much less than a month to find a new subscription.

With a smooth transition to another operator, the customers would’ve been saved from all this trouble. And, making an educated guess, Tele2 could’ve made some money from mass-migrating their customerbase to someone else – considering customer acquisition costs are a significant expense to the operators. This is what Tele2 was planning on doing, too – but apparently the negotiations weren’t fruitful. Now they’re saying that for reasons beyond Tele2’s control this was not possible. Beyond their control my… You would think they would’ve been happy taking any money out of the transition.

No I didn’t have a Tele2-subscription nor was I ever a user of any of their services. I just feel sorry for those who do/did.

Every now and then, when roaming about, we all encounter weird things in scale of large and small. We often forget the small weirdness soon after thinking to ourselves “well that’s weird…”, so in the interest of remembering some of them, below are some of the small weird things I’ve lately ran into.

Railway station learning to speak

One afternoon I took the local train downtown. Entering the station, I heard that all the PA loudspeakers in the station – usually used for informing about unusual traffic situations etc – were emitting a strange irregular sound. Kind of like radio static. I even recorded a short clip. It was fairly loud – not shouting level but very clearly audible throughout the station.

It was funny at first, but’s now that it’s been going on for three days, it’s starting to get just a little bit annoying.

Pits for kids?

East Pasila, a part of Helsinki gone architecturally berserk, is not what you’d call a beautiful place. For the past several months, an interesting addition to the concrete-landscape has been added: several large concrete pits, open for months. Trees used to be planted in them, but now they’re positively dangerous. While they’re not too deep – a meter or so – the edge is so low that kids could easily fall into them more or less by accident.

Happy vegetables?

For years, eggs have been advertised as coming from “happy” chickens, referring to free-roaming and other more pleasant rearing conditions. While it’s questionable whether the chickens are actually happy, they must be happier than those grown in cages. Anyway, now the same sales tactics are used to sell, of all things, vegetables! Tomatoes, in this case. Happy organically-grown tomatoes.