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Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

independent.co.uk

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Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#81

Post by anigbrowl »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
ceejayoz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Centralizing this data is a very dangerous thing and could have un-intended consequences for the donors. Such as...?

Let's see: - your blood contains your DNA, so you not only give out something to help others, you also give out your biological finger-print - insurance companies might use lab results + identifying info to deny insurance - your blood contains information on your heritage And I'm sure there are many more examples like that. Maybe I'm over-sensitive to data collected for no particular purpose but NL has a pretty bad r…

All reasonable concerns, but your identity is connected to blood donations anyway in many places anyway, not least because of disease management as discussed above. If any bad actors in the scenarios you describe want access to your DNA and you are int he habit of donating blood, it's trivially easy for them to get it anyway. In the US you have to give your name, show ID, and give your SSN to donate blood (at least to he Red Cross), so any idea you had of anonymity is already long gone. I don't feel like researching it on a country-by-country basis right now but I don't think that IDing yourself is exceptional.

The only new thing I'm seeing here is that you get a text message when your donation is used, and it's in that context I'm saying it's a good thing. I can't donate blood in the US (have spent too much of my life in Europe, so it's possible my blood is too socialist) but I wouldn't have had any expectation of privacy if I did so beyond normal confidentiality laws.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#82

Post by qtheninja »

notNow wrote: post #51

Hasn't the gamification and the application of Pavlovian behavior online gone already too far? I mean this trend of employing FB notifications like Dopamine/Serotonin rewarding systems is getting out of hand and we need to address it properly.

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Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#83

Post by kryptiskt »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
kryptiskt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that if a donor is diagnosed with an infectious disease you have to throw away all blood in the centre? There are good reasons to track the provenance of blood.

No, but you will have to throw away all blood products from that donor and you will have to pass the message back to the collection point so they can alert the donor. So yes, you need to be able to track the provenance of the blood but the final recipient of the product should not have the ability to contact the donor directly, nor should the donor have knowledge of when and/or where their blood was used. This can al…

It's not centralized, just tracked. If you want centralized, there's a biobank in Stockholm that contains tissue samples from everyone born in Sweden since 1975.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#84

Post by vonklaus »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
minot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about? This is why taxes cannot be donations. Indeed, they are not donations. I remember the people at institutional giving at my old college say that nobody wants their name on a parking lot.

I'd much rather have my name on a parking lot than on a landmine.

America has pledged not to use anti-personnel landmines(APL) anywhere outside of the Korean peninsula. I suspect (although obviously can't confirm) America has reserved this right but probably does not exercise it.

> The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, which includes not only clearance of landmines, but also medical rehabilitation and vocational training for those injured by landmines and other explosive remnants of war. Since the United States Humanitarian Mine Action Program was established in 1993, the United States has provided over $2.3 billion in aid in over 90 countries for conventional weapons destruction programs.[0]

While I am quite cynical and definitively against a lot of the ways our military has been employed, the degree of safety and the diplomatic security I receive as a result of it, provides more utility to me than a parking lot.

More broadly, roads and localized infrastructure are quite important, as is the military. I agree that personally I would allocate more money for infrastructure than to the military, and agree if this is the point you were making. I do want to illustrate the counterpoints that many people (once again, not me personally) would "Rather have their names on the bombs that kill terrorists"[1], than on a highway.

[0] http://www.state.gov/t/pm/wra/c11735.htm

[1] This is a dramatic characterization and hyperbole. However, I do suspect a large swathe of the country believes this.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#85

Post by [deleted] »

spiritplumber wrote: post #16
logicallee wrote: post #8

Life hacks. On a date in Sweden? Arrange your buddy to send you a text message saying you just saved someone's life. Watch jealousy turn to desire when you get a text message (another girl??), and say, "Oh - I just saved someone's life. See?" I'm just kidding. My real point is that a mailed letter (or email) sounds more appropriate than a text message. But then again maybe not!

Wouldn't work in the US, I find that the social value of having saved someone's life is somewhere between zero and negative, unless that someone belongs to your interlocutor's subculture. You tell an investor in SF, in passing, "I talked a junkie off the bridge and took her away before the cops showed up, and let her stay at my place for six months until she cleaned up", and they'll think you are mad, not honorable.…

[deleted]

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#86

Post by jacquesm »

vonklaus wrote: post #84
jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather have my name on a parking lot than on a landmine.

America has pledged not to use anti-personnel landmines(APL) anywhere outside of the Korean peninsula. I suspect (although obviously can't confirm) America has reserved this right but probably does not exercise it. > The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, which includes not only clearance of landmines, but also medical rehabilitation and vocational training fo…

I don't live in America. And my country makes all kinds of crap. Clusterbombs and what not. The landmine was meant as an illustration, not as a particular item, it could just as well have been a clusterbomb or some other intrinsically negative item.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#87

Post by cdcarter »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
Trombone12 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You try turning up at ha hospital with a bag of blood and saying "here's some blood, but I won't say who it's from".

I'd hope that would get you arrested in short order and held until you come up with a very good and verifiable explanation about where the blood came from. Who donated the blood is important at the point of capture, where you want to analyse the blood and make sure that neither the plasma nor the cells carry anything other than benefits to the eventual recipient. But who exactly sourced the blood should be of no conc…

This may well be what happens. The hospital informs the agency that they've used SN547825482 and that agencies database triggers a text message.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#88

Post by vonklaus »

jacquesm wrote: post #86
vonklaus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has pledged not to use anti-personnel landmines(APL) anywhere outside of the Korean peninsula. I suspect (although obviously can't confirm) America has reserved this right but probably does not exercise it. > The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, which includes not only clearance of landmines, but also medical rehabilitation and vocational training fo…

I don't live in America. And my country makes all kinds of crap. Clusterbombs and what not. The landmine was meant as an illustration, not as a particular item, it could just as well have been a clusterbomb or some other intrinsically negative item.

Sorry, that was a pretty ethnocentric assumption on my part. A case could be made that landmines are intrinsically negative as they are non-discriminating hazards that render large portions of land unsafe well after a conflict has ended. Bombs, missiles tanks etc, I am not so sure of. I would appraise them as neutral, with the potential to be negative or positive.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#89

Post by AriaMinaei »

jessriedel wrote: post #67
AriaMinaei wrote: post #14

This could work not just for donating blood, but for pretty much any kind of service. Imagine if you could see, in real time, how your job affects other people's lives, even in the most mundane way. It would let you see the value of what you do, and give you a reason to do it better.

I think it's a very important idea that will be most useful in incentivizing people to produce open content or otherwise donate their time and money. It's the idea behind the new StackExchange user pages: >How many people have you helped? > “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one lo…

Well, I have an unbaked thought that says assigning numbers to people's contribution to the world is going to create the wrong kind of incentives.

The problem is that it's (probably) impossible to summarize someone's effects on other people into a number. We're seeing that even quantifying school performance ends up being counter-productive.

For me, the ideal is that instead of seeing how many people you've helped, or how much you've helped them, or any other quantified view of your work, you are just somehow able to see the story of how you helped them. Who did you help, in what situation? And it doesn't have to be something big like saving lives. Just, mundane, everyday stuff.

Re: Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

#90

Post by jessriedel »

AriaMinaei wrote: post #89
jessriedel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a very important idea that will be most useful in incentivizing people to produce open content or otherwise donate their time and money. It's the idea behind the new StackExchange user pages: >How many people have you helped? > “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one lo…

Well, I have an unbaked thought that says assigning numbers to people's contribution to the world is going to create the wrong kind of incentives. The problem is that it's (probably) impossible to summarize someone's effects on other people into a number. We're seeing that even quantifying school performance ends up being counter-productive. For me, the ideal is that instead of seeing how many people you've helped, o…

I think that's more of a concern when there is a principal-agent problem. Yes, if you pay me X $/widget but are unable to measure widget quality well, then I may try to maximize number of widgets produced at the expense of quality. (And it may make sense to use other incentive structures.) But if I'm trying to help people, it's much less likely that I'll stupidly maximize a metric (# of page views) by lowering quality. What have I to gain? (This of course because a problem as soon as you start tangibly rewarding me based on the metric, or if the metric influences my public reputation, etc.)
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