Work

Ok, so when you were here, you read a story I wrote about a king who was trying to prevent his people from getting sick. You didn't understand what it was about, so I promised to tell you about what we're doing at work this summer.

Before I start, I'll let you know that all the links lead to pages in Opasnet that are in Finnish. However, you can find links to corresponding pages in English on those pages. Though I'm not sure how much anything there is on them.

As you know, I'm working for dad. Again. It's my sixth summer, which seems unbelievable. This year we are doing two things. One is pretty much done already. We organised some conversation that was had about a future plan of the traffic and communications ministry that they're doing getting ready for next year's governmental election.

The bigger thing we're doing this year is assessment about pneumococcal vaccines.
The background info is this: Streptococcus pneumoniae are bacteria that cause all kinds of things from a simple ear infections to meningitis and pneumonia. In 2010, they added a vaccine for pneumococcal diseases in the national vaccination program, which means that in Finland every child born gets it with all the usual vaccinations when they're under 1 year.
The state had a contract to get the vaccines for the four first years (I assume four, since that's how long it's been since it was taken into use). Now they're wanting a new contract. However, everyone making decisions about vaccinations is completely fed up with fighting with the same anti-vaxxers after every single decision they make. So what they're doing now is they're doing is making the decision and conversation leading to that decision publicly from the very beginning. So that's what we're doing. Organising conversation about pneumococcal vaccines, so that the people choosing between two vaccines can make a good decision that everyone can have had a say on, so they won't come complaining later.
Or, well. That's what we would be doing, if there was any conversation going on. Which there isn't, because no one knows about what we're doing, because the people in the Institute of Health and Welfare's PR-department think it's not worth starting to send info about this to newspaper and stuff, because participating in the conversation would be too difficult for normal people, even though the whole point of doing it like this is to give the normal people a chance to participate. So there's nothing to organise.
During the time we've spend not organising the conversation we've for example made a questionnaire about some questions having to do with the decision that have more to do with ethics than actually factual information about the vaccines or the diseases they're trying to prevent. We're doing this to have a simple, easy and quick way for anyone to participate in the decision-making, so we can try to prove the PR-people wrong. You should go answer that. You all should go answer that. Though there's a chance it might still change a little bit after we get some feedback from people about stuff like the clarity about the questions. The content will pretty surely stay the same, though, so go. Answer. Give us opinions about ethics.
And that's how we come back to the story I wrote. Last week when we were planning the questionnaire with dad, we came to the conclusion that we need to clarify question 2. Dad spent the whole time talking about how we should write a story to make it clearer. Or course, he didn't mean an actual story, but a bit of text that is now in Q2. Well, below the questionnaire.
But since he was talking about a story, I decided I wanted to write the same thing into an actual story anyway. So that's what I did. And that's what you read and didn't understand. So go check the questionnaire. The story will make a lot more sense, since it's actually just a different version of the second question.

So that's what I'm doing this summer.

Or at least trying to. There isn't all that much work to do since there's no one participating in the conversation. Also the sun and temperature of about 30  degrees Celsius (in the shade) is pretty distracting. I'm not complaining, mind you. I like these temperatures. It just makes concentrating on stuff I should be doing more difficult.
On the other hand, I checked out classes for myself for next year (journalism, biotechnology, and I'm thinking if I should take some French. I'd prefer Italian or Portuguese, but those aren't options here. And maybe I'd actually be able to speak French after studying it from the beginning for the second time.)

So that's what I'm doing this summer at work.
If someone wants to read the story I could post it here as a separate extra post. Or put it somewhere up on Opasnet.

~matu