Scary Potter

Katie Leung at the Harry Potter premiere in Leicester Square. Nice dress. I checked out the movie yesterday and thought that it was really good. It's freaky stuff though. It's been given the 12A rating in the UK, meaning if you're a good parent (the model surburbian mom, like Bree from Desperate Housewives if you like), you won't let your under-12s watch it.

Speaking of scary stuff, I'm sure most of us have gotten an email like this before:

Dear Family and Friends,

This message is serious and has been passed to us from Cheshire

Could you please cascade as quickly as possible as this came through.

For your information, a couple of weeks ago, in the odeon cinema Festival Park, a person sat on something sharp in one of the When she stood up to see what it was, a needle was found poking through the seat with an attached note saying, "you have been infected'' The Centres for Disease Control in Birmingham,reports similar events have taken place in several other cities recently ALL of the needles tested HAVE been found positive for HIV. The reports that needles have been found in the coin return areas of phones and coke machines. Everyone is asked to use extreme caution when confronted with these types of situations. All public chairs should be thoroughly but safely inspected prior to any use. A thorough visual inspection is considered the bare minimum. Further more, they ask that everyone notify their family members and friends of the potential dangers, as well. The previous information was sent from hanley police station to the local councils in the Staffs area and was interdepartmentally dispersed. We were all asked to pass this to as many people as possible

Intermediate Care Tudor CourtRochdale

PLEASE PASS ON TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE

This electronic message may contain information from Shrewsbury Telford Hospital NHS Trust which may be privileged or confidential. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual(s) or entity named ;above.

Now, this would be pretty scary if it were true.

I read Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner some time back and they posed a very interesting question:

"Why are real estate agents like the Ku Klux Klan?"

Well to cut a long article short, what they've got in common is information.

The Ku Klux Klan sort of lost their momentum and cool-factor when some dudecalled Stetson Kennedy infiltrated their ranks, learnt all their secret passwords and agendas and convinced a radio show to secretly work them into the plot and script of The Adventures of Superman, a popular broadcast during that time. Klan members began to see their own kids playing a new version of catch: instead of the traditional cops and robbers, it became Superman versus the Klan, not knowing that their own dads were part of this pillowcase-wearing ordeal. It was a humiliating blow for the gang of bullys who thought of themselves as a social elite because they "put niggers in their place". By making a mockery of the Klan's secrets, Kennedy has been praised for being "the single most important factor in preventing a postwar revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the North."

Now about real estate agents: During pre-Internet years, people looking for homes basically had limited avenues for comparison of house prices. Say you're looking at a house which was selling for X dollars. If your agent told you that a similar house down the road was worth (X+1000) dollars you'd believe him. But it would most likely be the case that the agent grossly hiked up
the price of that other house so you'd think that you'd be getting a good deal on the one he was trying to sell you. What the authors were trying to get at is the fact that the widespread use of the Internet has enabled house prices to be available online now and so because there's perfect information in the housing market, you wouldn't get exploited by your lousy, no-good agent.

The bottomline:

"The Ku Klux Klan was a group whose power -much like that of real-estate agents- was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. Once that information falls into the wrong hand (or right hands) much of the group's advantage disappears." [pg 66]

Anyway, back to the bogus forwarded email. I don't understand why people would lie about stuff like this and spread this sort of trash around. As seen from the bried freakonomics tutorial above, information is a very powerful thing, regardless if its true or false.

How can you tell if claims like these are true or false?

If you're as anal about spelling and gramatical errors as I am you'll notice that the email is heavily-laden with these. People with proper, correct information always know how to spell wright.

If you're as jobless as I am, you'll Google "Centres for Disease Control" and "Shrewsbury Telford Hospital NHS Trust" and the knock-out punch, "email scams: aids".

Mission accomplished, hypothesis proven, Stef is indeed a sad loser who needs to go out more.