This is illustrated with my little stick people below (the red ones are “infected”):

Beginning of the game	After the first handshake

After the second handshake	After the third handshake

Now, let’s take it to a real world: the adult entertainment industry. Those in adult entertainment, by the nature of their jobs, are “connecting” with all kinds of people. Once you throw a disease into the mix, as our teacher did hypothetically in my Health class, it’s vitally important to track who else is in their network in order to keep the disease from running rampant through the group.

This situation came to light when adult film star Darren James tested positive for HIV in 2004 (see Porn Faces Reality from the Village Voice of 30 April 2004). Like the rest of the industry, James tested every 30 days (if not more often), tests generally supervised by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM). The AIM not only handles medical testing and care for porn stars, it also acts as the independent authority, verifying and distributing results to producers, agents and other filmmakers. They are the Verisign of the porn industry.

Because they have the “industry standard” position of overseeing most, if not all, of the adult industry’s testing, and are connected enough to the film production to know who’s been acting with whom, the AIM was in the “all seeing” position of being able to draw a similar chart to the ones I have above: Who had Darren James slept with?

They pulled the records of everyone James had worked with since his last clean test and then those of everyone that list had worked with. (Two degrees of separation.) Once notified, these 53 performers voluntarily quarantined themselves until they could be tested and verified. From the articles I’ve seen, only one person in this network has tested positive.

Very much like Friendster and LinkedIn will show you your network, and the people you are connected to through them, and so on, AIM acts as a “network manager”, keeping track of who’s been with whom in order to track (and hopefully prevent) the progression of diseases.

But this is all old news. Similar to how the porn industry drove the development of the VCR and quality improvements on online video streaming, this is yet another necessity-born technology that is now benefitting the mainstream. Wired News is reporting that the medical brains behind AIM have brought the technology model to the rest of us.

SxCheck is a joint project between Stanford Computer Science graduate student Doug Whiteman and AIM, and is intended to be an AIM for the masses. “The SxCheck process is simple. You decide which STIs you want to be screened for, order your test online, go to a local blood draw station, and access your results on the website. It differs from its sister AIMCheck in one way: Your results are not sent to producers and agents,” says the article.

Whiteman hopes that having results available web-based will allow people to share them with potential partners before having sex. He expects that ultimately we’ll embed our SxCheck status on dating sites and use them as criteria for judging partners. While I think he may be a bit optimistic on how much we’ll share and how quickly, the independent authority idea could be useful.

Stimulating dialogue on the subject also can’t hurt. “We don’t want to force anything down anyone’s throats, and by no means are we reinventing the wheel,” Whiteman says. “We want to encourage people to get tested and share their results, to promote dialogue and understanding.”

(Note that yesterday’s news featured recent findings that Britain is now the fattest country in Europe.)

King accepted some responsibility on behalf of supermarkets for helping us all eat well (which shows the UK socialist perspective that says that the government — and big companies — should be looking out for the common good. I’m sure Sainsbury’s is looking to earn some “good guy points” by trying to help out with the public health issue of obesity). But when asked if Sainsbury should be steering people away from bad food, he replied, “There is no such thing as bad food, only bad diets.”

This statement caught my attention. Does it hold water? Does it work here because the UK doesn’t have Twinkies or Cool-Whip? While the US may boast (to my view) a larger market for food that is pretty devoid of nutritional value, what about UK favourites like Jaffa cakes or pork scratchings that seem to offer little to a functioning human body? (Not to mention are disgusting)

Putting aside the fact that I’m sure Sainsbury’s make significant profits from their junk food and probably wouldn’t want to jeopardise that by steering away the munchie-prone, I’m not sure the recommendation actually has the public’s best interest at heart.
Mr King has implied that we can enjoy our mayonnaise with chips, our pasties and our clotted cream. As long as they’re diluted by enough fruits and veggies, Sainsbury’s will rest secure in the knowledge that they’ve done their bit to look out for our wastelines. It’s nice to know that they’re looking after us, but somehow I don’t feel great at the prospect of a full diet of fat and junk, plus then the good stuff. Funny equation he’s recommending.

It’s probably the American capitalist in me speaking, but maybe we should leave nutritional recommendations to the Food Standards Agency and let the grocery companies get on with their own agendas: generating profits. Just a thought.