Kill or cure?

As Ben Goldacre wrote:

The Daily Mail, as you know, is engaged in a philosophical project of mythic proportions: for many years now it has diligently been sifting through all the inanimate objects in the world, soberly dividing them into the ones which either cause – or cure – cancer.

The Daily Mail frequently brings us news of which objects have been discovered to cause cancer, and which have been shown to prevent it. In some cases, they do both.

In order to make sense of this vast resource of clinical information, I’ve scraped the Daily Mail’s website for articles mentioning cancer. To distil this wisdom down into an easily comprehensible form, though, I need your help.

I’ve written a simple application to distribute (crowdsource, if you will/must) the process of classifying these objects. You simply need to look at an article summary and title, and decide what it’s about and whether it causes cancer or prevents it.

Head on over and help out with the effort!

Incidentally, I’ve deployed the application using Heroku. It’s my first time using the service, but I’m really impressed so far. It’s by far the easiest way of deploying a Rails app I’ve seen, and it’s ideal for this.

Well, that was quick! As of about 11:15 on Monday morning, each article has been classified at least three times. I’ve put up some interim stats, and I’ll present the data properly later.

2009-07-12 22:52 UTC. Comments: 7.

Comments

Skip to the comment form

  1. Strawp

    Wrote at 2009-07-13 09:44 UTC using Firefox 3.5 on Windows XP:

    A noble endeavour!

  2. Paul

    Wrote at 2009-07-13 10:01 UTC using Safari 530.17 on Mac OS X:

    Err http://www.thiscausescancer.com/ is kind of already doing this no?

  3. Paul Battley

    Wrote at 2009-07-13 10:04 UTC using Firefox 3.5 on Mac OS X:

    It is, but they’ve only written 21 posts. There are thousands to work through.

  4. Chris Applegate

    Wrote at 2009-07-13 10:37 UTC using Firefox 3.0.11 on Mac OS X:

    Brilliant! I’ve been slogging away a one-man effort at this since January at http://dailymailoncology.tumblr.com/ but never thought to crowdsource it. Sir, I salute you.

  5. Mike B

    Wrote at 2009-07-15 22:39 UTC using Firefox 3.5 on Windows 7:

    Brilliant Paul! Finally the office will know what I’m going on about!

    All we need now is a headline “Swine flu may cure cancer” and they’ll disappear in a puff of righteous indignation…

  6. Jessica

    Wrote at 2009-09-01 13:38 UTC using Safari 525.27.1 on Mac OS X:

    I like this list, but I think it would be more scientifically honest if the titles said “may cause cancer”, because until we know exact mechanisms, we can never definitively say that something causes cancer. Theory says also that cancer can be caused by multiple influences. In fact, we grow cancerous cells everyday, it’s just when our body is too burdened does it miss that one cell that takes over.

  7. papa

    Wrote at 2009-09-01 15:14 UTC using Internet Explorer 8.0 on Windows XP:

    Hello!

    There is an error on the first page: it is aflatoxin instead of alfatoxin. It is also mistyped/wrong in the linked article.

    papa

Leave a comment

Please read the comment guidelines before posting. Comments are Gravatar-enabled. Your email address will not be published.

To prove that you’re human, type human in the Bot check field.

Trying to post some program output or a long code sample? Please use a paste service and link to it instead.