Burning Lemons

Note: This post will probably be out of date by the time I post it. I had to revise it twice in the 5 minutes I spent writing it.

• Death toll so far – 86 (All in Mexico)
• 1,300 Mexicans suspected of having illness given “all-clear”. Unclear if this means they have recovered or if they never had the disease at all.
• Most public facilities in Mexico city closed until May 6 - includes churches, schools and other major gathering points
• US cases confirmed in Texas, Ohio, New York and California
• Texas to close 14 schools in the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City district
  
• 6 cases confirmed in three separate parts of Canada
• 6 cases suspected in Spain
• Possible that cases have developed in Airdrie, Scotland and Northampton
• Further suspected cases in New Zealand, France and Israel
• Governement spokesman says it is: “Highly likely” that New Zealand cases are swine flu but “there is no guarantee”
• Health emergency declared in US (government playing down seriousness of declaration. Claims that the decision is for mainly bureaucratic reasons).
• WHO Emergency meeting on Tuesday to co-ordinate international response
• 100 students ill with “flu-like” symptoms at New York prep school – 5 students at same school confirmed to have disease. However symptoms described as “mild”
• Several countries have begun medical screening of passengers arriving from Mexico

Quick end of day roundup

So far despite the wide spread of suspected cases across 3 continents there have only been confirmed cases in North America. The only deaths so far have been in Mexico and all patients in other countries are displaying “mild” symptoms and many are said to be progressing well.

The UK governement has not issued any advice against travelling to Mexico and the country’s borders and airports remain open as normal although many countries are now carrying out very basic checks on travllers arriving from Mexico these mainly consists of a few simple questions.

The raising of the threat level to emergency by the US governement is so far only for administrative reason and does not represent any major change in the governements view of events.

Above all in all locations but certain areas of Mexico the public are being urged to go about their lives as normal unless they develop flu-like symptoms in which case they are urged to stay at home. People displaying such symptoms should not go to a hospital unless they are displaying symptoms that would cause them to seek treatment under normal circumstances to avoid over-burdening hospitals. General precautions such as hand-washing are advised. The US governement have also pointed out that so far it does not appear that one can catch the disease by eating infected pork

That’s all for tonight - I will have another post tomorrow in the mean time stay with the excellent @BreakingNews account on Twitter @klustout presenter of CNN International’s CNN Today morning programme from Hong Kong will also be posting updates.

All the information in the post above is (to the best of my knowledge) correct and current as of 21:55 GMT on April 26 2009.

Update 1: Added information on new outbreak in Canada
Update 2: Added information about health screening
Update 3: Added New Zealand and Israel to list of countries with suspected cases and revised total number of cases in Canada down to 6 (my mistake)
Update 4: Added information about case statistics in Mexico
Update 5: Added information about closure of facilities in Mexico city and schools in Texas
Update 6: Removed word “possible” from information about patients in Scotland following Nicola Sturgeon interview and added details of Northampton case
Update 7: Added additional information about case in France
Update 8: Added wrapup

Data collected from @BreakingNews, @felix85, @mpoppel, @rosemaryCNN, France 24, BBC World Service, BBC News Channel and Reuters

In case you haven’t heard (and seriously that would be unlikely) tonight at 20:30 local time we’re meant to switch all our lights off for an hour in an attempt to save the planet or something.
Now while I believe that global warming is a pressing issue I personally will not be taking part tonight for the following reasons

1) All the lightbulbs in our house are low energy and use a pitiful amount of energy compared to the TV, this laptop, the microwave and all the other things I’m still allowed to run
2) It’s dark outside during Earth Hour and I need to work tonight
3) Scotland are playing The Netherlands and I’ll be depressed enough

Instead of taking part I’m going down the much more worthwhile route of avoiding waste - turning computers off properly, not leaving things on standby etc - rather than not using energy I really need to.

Comments/long posts telling me why I’m wrong welcome as always

One of my Twitterfriends Tales recently wrote a great blog post on What Happened to Twitter so I’ve decided to chuck in my two cents as well. The fall of Twitter has been one of the great internet debate topics over the last month or two, of course the technical problems of Twitter go way back to its first explosion in popularity in round about early 2007 when web celebrities such as Leo Laporte began to use the service.

Unfortunately the nature of a service such as Twitter where messages are recieved by a central server, archived and then pushed out to a bunch of “followers” does not lend itself to scaling. Every time Digg founder Kevin Rose Twitters the message has to be pushed out to over 48,000 people, a number which is growing on a daily basis. Twitter has also to an extent complicaed this by also pushing out messages over SMS a potentially huge undertaking. If just 1,000 of Kevin’s followers want to see his Twitter then 1,000 messages have to be sent (at Twitter’s expense) to mobiles all over the world.

The real strain has been seen since about May this year when after multiple downtime issues the IM service was withdrawn in an attempt to improve the stability of the service with a promise to return the service “as soon as possible”. Three months on the service has yet to return and little progress appears to have been made in improving the stability of the service. Important services such as being able to see posts beyond the most recent 20 and being able to view replies were also unavailable for days at a time

However up until the end of June little progress appeared to have been made in finding a successor to Twitter, Kevin Rose’s own Pownce didn’t seem to be going anywhere and the most obvious Twitter-competitor Jaiku had been bought by Google and essentially shut down with no new members being allowed to join. The someone (Leo Laporte) discovered Plurk, twittered about it and suddenly we seemed to have our knight in shining armour. As Plurk’s own blog post shows the levels of traffic exploded overnight.

But contrary to the expectations of many people liked what they saw and didn’t just migrate back to Twitter after the weekend was over. While an obvious Twitter clone plurk does have enough features to distinguish it from Twitter such as the horizontal timeline and buit in replies.

So is this the end of Twitter? The orgenisation behind Twitter just recieved $15 Million in venture funding and says it plans to spend the money to shore up the service. But unless there are any big changes over the next few weeks and months I would have to say that it is pretty much over for Twitter, before now it may have been possible for Twitter to stave off its death. But now many of its most loyal users are jumping ship the oppertunity seems to be slipping from Twitter’s grasp

When a close friend once told me that it was his intention to join the army I was genuinely taken aback. While I have the greatest respect for people willing to put themselves in the line of fire I see absolutely no reason to put myself (and by extension people I care about) In front of the open end of a gun with someone willing to kill me clutching the trigger.

So it was with mixed feelings that I read the news that  Prince Harry has been serving in Afghanistan for the past 10 weeks.While I have few feelings for the Royal Family I did have to congratulate the young prince for doing it and yet at the same time I questioned why he had been sent there at all. Harry with the gratest will in the world is not the best person to have serving next to you. While I’m amazed that the news blackout at this end lasted so long I find it impossible to believe that no rumours were circulating in the vicinity of the area he was deployed in. This begs the question was this a stupid risk? After all Prince Harry was pulled from an Iraq deployment for this very reason.

After considering this I believe that the decisions taken were poor. Not those made by Harry himself but those made by the people sending him there. The reporting of his presence has brought renewed attention to the troops in The Region and has arguably set back the campaign against The Taliban. While Harry cannot be thrown out of the army for this kind of reason the decision should have been made to keep him away from the frontline.