Tag Archives: technology

Lies about the Boston Bombing

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Conspiracy theories about the Boston bombing continue to be posted today.

Please don’t be gullible enough to fall for this stuff, folks–anyone who claims to know what happened at this point is not being truthful.

Many of these claims are ridiculous and easily debunked. Others aren’t as obviously false, but still don’t pass the smell test –a claim about an eight-year-old supposedly running a marathon in which children are not allowed to run, for example, or a picture of a woman killed at Sandy Hook that’s been manipulated by a photo program and incorrectly labelled as a Boston bombing survivor.

If something seems fishy, just don’t pass it on until you are sure, especially if it comes from an unknown or an single-agenda-driven source.

Please do not spread lies.

Here are five viral stories about the bombing that are not true. In any event like this you are going to get untrue stories, partly because initial reports later turn out to be untrue. That’s normal. Just make sure you read the followup reports, too.

Evil, Good, and the Boston Bombing

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I realize that I’m about to anger a lot of people right now, but I saw a few things about the Boston bombing last night on social media that were upsetting, not just to me, but to others as well.

And these are just my opinions. They don’t reflect anyone else’s, nor my company’s opinions.

Also, I must note, anybody is allowed to say whatever they want. Freedom of speech is important. However, just because you can say something does not mean you should, especially not in the immediate wake of a horrific event. Why not wait a day or two?

People were saying these things long before the death toll was known and long before others could find out if their loved ones were still alive, with intact limbs. They could have waited 24 hours for families to be notified of death and maimings.

Why not wait a day or two? Think it over from the victims’ point of view, and then if you still think it’s important enough to post, and unlikely to hurt someone, post it then.

1. It is totally inappropriate to immediately use the bombing to make snide remarks about guns, whether you are pro-gun or anti-gun or in between and ambivalent.

In the immediate wake of a massive epidemic of ebola that killed three people, you wouldn’t be posting things about how “Well this goes to show that measles is/is not totally harmless,” would you? (It isn’t, by the way. Measles can and does kill and maim people on a fairly regular basis. But that’s beside the point.)

2. It is totally inappropriate to immediately be claiming these people were actors, or that the government did it, or any other conspiracy theory about the bombing.

The plain fact is, at this time no reputable information has been released about who did it, and much of the other conspiracy talk is actually garbage, easily debunked for those who take 10 seconds to check Snopes.com.

I do think it is particularly awful to accuse actual victims of being actors. I talked to several people who were either there themselves or had relatives there yesterday. They’re real people and they were really frightened. And real people have lost their lives or their limbs to this bombing.

3. People were also posting graphic images on Facebook, of blood-strewn streets. That’s fine with me, but it’s not fine with everybody–there are some very squeamish people out there, and again, this was long before everyone knew their relatives were safe. And the phones were shut down for a long time too, so they couldn’t necessarily check.

How would you like to be looking at a photo of a bloody street and wondering if that blood or limb is your daughter’s or husband’s? It doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?

All that said, there’s a nice Mr. Rogers meme going around Facebook right now about how whenever something terrible happens, people try to help, and that you will always find helpers. I’ve seen a few stories about the helpers already, and will be collecting them here.

Boston Marathon explosions attract an outpouring of help from city’s residents

Overwhelming kindness follows Boston Marathon blast

The good outnumber you

How A Decade Of Disasters Helped Boston Hospitals Handle The Marathon Bombings

IRS extends tax deadline for Boston bombing victims

Canadian runners lace up to show support for victims of Boston Marathon bombings

Athletes Going the Extra Mile to Support Boston Marathon Bombing Victims

How to help after Boston Marathon bombing: Relief funds spring up

Facebook Fear Factor: Cake and Pancake Mixes

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What the warning (incorrectly) says: When they get old cake mixes grow spores that can kill you, which is why it’s so important to throw out your expired cake mix — it is toxic.

What the warning leaves out: Cake mix does not develop spores over time, but cake mix that isn’t sealed (like lots of other things left unsealed) can get moldy if exposed to mold spores. People who are allergic to mold can have serious reactions in the presence of mold. But old cake mix is itself not toxic.

Very important thing: If you are allergic to mold, you can have a severe reaction to eating anything with mold in it. And if you do not seal your cake mix, your cake mix can get mold in it.

Therefore, if you’re allergic to mold, you should take precautions and make sure your cake mix doesn’t get mold in it. Usually it comes in a sealed plastic bag anyway. Pancake mix might be a bit trickier–maybe mold-sensitive people could put it in a sealable plastic or glass canister immediately, or simply buy small packages and make and eat it quickly.

More information: Snopes.com.

Scare Tactics on Facebook: BVO

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Lately it seems like Facebook is trying to scare us all to death with ominous warnings about brominated vegetable oil, deadly cake mix, killer brown recluse spiders and child-abducting men in silver cars, or cops who beat up civilians and might get their jobs back.

Then there’s the “fun facts” type posts about the main ingredients of WD-40.

The problem? All the stories about these things are only partially true at best. Each one leaves out vital pieces of information or includes vast swathes of incorrect information.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t repost information when you get it or when you see it on Facebook, but please take the 30 seconds it requires to check it out on snopes.com or otherwise verify it.

Don’t add to the vast array of bad “information” out there. Don’t help make the world a little more ignorant. It only takes a moment to determine some of these things are not accurate.

Brominated Vegetable Oil

What the warning says: I’ve seen two warnings about this substance, which is found in Mountain Dew. One of them attempted to terrify people by asking “Do you feed your children flame retardants?” To which the answer is, of course, “Yes,” because water is a very effective flame retardant, and it is required to keep the human body functioning.

The other warning calls BVO a “poisonous, corrosive chemical.” The same can just as accurately be said about water: it can act as a poison in large enough quantities and its corrosive action is easy to see if you leave an iron object in the water for a while. And of course, everything is made out of chemicals, from good old H20 (water) to the oxygen we breathe, O2. (Oh, and that oxygen is explosive, by the way.)

What the warning leaves out: No studies have shown serious health issues caused by moderate consumption of beverages containing BVO at the concentrations typically used in those products.

That said: there have indeed been cases in which people have suffered ill effects from BVO in soft drinks, so there’s a grain of truth in the fear-mongering. However, those people were drinking 2-8 liters of soda in a day.

Dose makes the poison, and there are no toxic substances, only toxic doses. In sufficient amounts, water is a poison too, and excessive amounts of vitamin D can be very harmful. And drinking 2-8 liters of soda in a day is probably not a good idea anyway, BVO or no BVO. Caution and moderation is definitely called for; pouring out all your Mountain Dew really isn’t.

More information: snopes.com, wikipedia.org

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

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It’s Ada Lovelace Day, a good day to celebrate women in technology careers!

If you don’t know who Ada Lovelace is, check out this wonderful Science Chicks blog post.

She was the first computer programmer. Not the first woman programmer, the first programmer, and she did it without having a computer to program anything on. She wrote for Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was still theoretical.

Incidentally, until I started keeping an eye on Science Chicks, I had no idea there were so many women scientists throughout history.

I wish they’d been in the curriculum when I was in school; I might have ended up in quite a different field altogether, or at least, I might have a stronger science journalism background now.

The Brogrammer Problem: Keeping Geekery a Boys’ Club

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“Men invented the internet! Because they were men! And manly! And they were geeks but they were male geeks! Because that’s what a geek is! A man!”

Okay, that’s not actually what the New York Times article says, not even close. But it certainly seems to imply it, and in the second paragraph it seems to imply that the MEN who invented the Internet are the only ones who are going to be involved in its future. Because, you know. They’re MEN.

What it really says is this:

MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.

But are these men trapped in the past even as they create the future?

This prompted Xeni Jardin to get a bit ranty on BoingBoing (includes cursing, including the F-bomber, so be warned), but not, I think, without justification.

Part of the reason is probably that we girl geeks hear this sort of thing all the time–casting doubt on our capabilities because of our gender, and denying us a seat at the geek table. Women in technology get hit especially hard.

And you can’t deny that the opening paragraph in that story indicates that nerds and geeks have to be men. I guess someone should have told that to all the people who mocked me using those terms when I was a kid, huh? “Oh, she’s a girl, not a geek.”

News flash: If you were gonna make a Venn diagram, “Female” and “Geek” would overlap quite a bit, thank you very much.

Apparently this sort of thing is becoming a problem in Silicon Valley lately, with the rise of the “brogrammer.”

Urban Dictionary has a couple of definitions of “bro” but here’s one: “An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer, drives a jacked up truck that’s plastered with stickers, has rich dad that owns a dealership or construction business and constantly tells this to chicks at parties…”

A “bro” is not a good thing to be.

Protip: Most women actually find bros repulsive. And quite a few men do too.

(Incidentally, who doesn’t idolize Mr. Spock?)

Defending Sexual Harassment

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I had no idea there were actually people who would defend sexual harassment.

Maybe I’m a little naive, but I really believe most people aren’t deliberately being sexist jerks when they make fun of a man for knitting, or a woman for working on an oil rig. There are these cultural norms, ya know? They get embedded in your head whether you want them to or not. You have to fight against your own sexism sometimes, and sometimes, you slip.

And while the gaming communities I’ve been a part of have been majority-male, they’ve been fair and decent.

By contrast, there’s this ugly incident in which a gamer actually defended sexual harassment and said it was “part of the culture.” Worse, this person was supposed to be coaching a team of gamers, one of whom was female. She was shouted down when she tried to protest, and she was told to “let the man speak.”

This incident, and how people reacted to it, goes well beyond the vague feeling that booth babes are creepy, or that the gaming community should be, in general, nicer and less sexist.

Yes, free speech in America means you can say just about anything you want. This person has every right to his opinion, and every right to state it.

And other people have every, every right to be horrified by his sexist, creepy behavior, call him out on it, and try to stop it through civilized means. That’s what real communities do, whether online or in meatspace.

Underwear Mini-Golf Babies in Japan

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I had a virus on my personal laptop over the weekend, and while I was running a virus scan I noticed a number of thoroughly bizarre file names in the temporary internet files folder. These files get automatically saved, I think, when you browse.

I’m assuming most of the weird file names were from ads, because I’m very certain I’ve never actually deliberately looked for “organics for babies.” I don’t have any babies. If I did, I’m not sure I’d give them organics anyway. I don’t know why a file with that name was in my temp file.

There were weirder things in there than that, though. There was a file called “wonderputt.” I haven’t golfed since high school, and I was pretty bad at putting when I did, given that we practiced on sand greens. Then again, maybe that’s why advertisers spontaneously decided I needed a wonderputt, whatever that is.

Then there was a file called “kanji,” which I think means my computer is hanging out in Japan, or at least in the Japan-loving part of the Internet. It’s doing that behind my back, by the way, and has never offered to share any sushi with me.

And then there was that file called “underwear.” I haven’t ever looked that up online either, and can only presume that it was an ad on Target.com or somewhere I do go.

Either that, or my computer is sneaking out during the day to play mini-golf with an underwear-wearing baby who loves organics and is learning to speak Japanese.

Booth Babes: Living in a Geek Boys’ World, Part 2

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Look, it’s pretty girls in tight clothing at a tech trade show!

Now tell me what product they’re selling. Or whether it matters.

I’ve never been to a trade show, like the one shown at left, or to a convention. I would very much like to. At the same time, the prevalence of so-called “booth babes” would be off-putting to me. These women are typically models hired for the day to hang around a booth hawking a product. Because they’re only there for the day, their knowledge about said product is generally pretty sketchy, and the women are really only there to get people to the booth.

If there are male booth babes, I haven’t ever heard of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised. That said, the term is generally understood to refer to the female of the species.

The photo above is from a great post by Glenn Fleishman, who wrote a piece detailing the problem. (Check it out.) Do booth babes attract enough people to make it worth repelling other people?

I’m not just talking about women here–the audience for this particular trade show is apparently about 60-40 male/female split. Some men avoid booths with booth babes because they feel uncomfortable around them. They might feel uncomfortable with that level of objectification, or they may simply dislike being blatantly manipulated. Some people feel companies that hire booth babes are sleazy.

And yes, it can make women feel uncomfortable, too.

Is that any different from hiring attractive people on a permanent basis and putting them in ordinary (but still attractive) business attire?

I’m just wondering if booth babes might not be counterproductive in the long run, especially given that 40 percent of the intended audience is female anyway. And it seems that more and more women are making technology purchasing decisions.

Living in a Geek Boys’ World

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I’m not really a girl gamer, because I’m not truly a gamer. I play video games, but only a very few of them, and most of them, I use more as a venue for socializing and storytelling than as games.

Much has been made, however, of the gaming world’s treatment of women and minorities–often sexist, homophobic and creepy. And when that’s pointed out, the reaction is generally squelching of criticism. There’s a good post on Kotaku about the subject, and of course there’s also an immediate attempt to crush the criticism in the comments, and an ensuing flame war.

I’ve noticed a bit of a trend in these articles. While I agree with their main point–generally, something along the lines of “the gaming community needs to be less sexist, homophobic and creepy” — I do want to emphasize that these articles often assume that there is any such thing as “the gaming community.”

It’s a catch-all term, casting a very wide net over a very diverse set of games that appeal to very diverse gamers. It’s a bit like using the term “media,” which not only includes Fox news and CNN but also Saveur magazine and the Jackson Pilot, as well as Disney and blogs about the WWE. Is there really anything meaningful and yet true that you can say about “the media,” keeping that in mind?

The “gaming community” is a little similar to that. I’m not even talking about the way people marginalize casual games as “not real gaming.” I’m talking about what people normally consider the gaming community.

While I have watched plenty of games and heard talk about “raping” and various homophobic and sexist slurs, I have also played plenty of games myself where that kind of behavior is rare and frowned upon when it does happen. It didn’t happen to me a lot when I played Aion. It didn’t happen to me a lot when I played City of Heroes either.

It’s not happening to me much now that I play the Star Wars game “The Old Republic.”

In fact, I have a female character at level 35, and she’s been fully clothed like a normal woman (well, Jedi do wear robes, so maybe not that normal) for about 34 and 1/2 levels, and even during that half-level where she had a questionable outfit, it actually looked more like what someone would wear to go jogging on a hot day than something a prostitute would wear.

What’s sad about that is how unusual that is. I have a woman character who isn’t dressed like a bimbo and this was a remarkable thing. In fact, most of the women characters in TOR seem to be fairly well-covered, with the exception of, well. Exotic dancers. Who still wear more clothes than some of the armored fighter women in Aion.

The gaming community does need to get better, but generalizing about “the gaming community” as if it were one place with one type of people in it isn’t really a very good idea.

There are bad pockets within the gaming community and even within each individual game. There are also good pockets, though–I know several groups that make sure not just women and ethnic minorities but also gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are welcome.

My gaming communities are pretty good, overall. The few jerks are more than counterbalanced by the quiet majority of nice, polite, friendly people, many of whom are, in fact, women. We’re a growing group in the larger “gaming community,” whatever that really is.

Of course, if my gaming communities weren’t pretty good, I wouldn’t stick with them. What fun would that be?