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Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus from the 9cm-edited dept.
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

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Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki More

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki

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  • I recently needed to learn how to set a live trap (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:31PM (#30450140)
    ...to catch a critter that got into my basement.

    God bless mobile Internet.

  • The Yahoo answers version (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:33PM (#30450176)

    how is babby delivered?

  • I want his mobile data service (Score:4, Funny)

    by dave562 ( 969951 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:37PM (#30450254) Journal

    The AT&T EDGE service on my Blackberry would have delivered the information by the baby's 1st birthday if I was lucky. That is making the assumption that the built in browser could actually load the webpage.

  • and with the story posted on slashdot, the article will soon be updated to lead dad-to-be to the strip club as a necessary part of birthing preparation....or tell them it actually comes out of a different hole

    • or tell them it actually comes out of a different hole

      That's how you know it's going to be a lawyer. ;)

      (apologies to NewYorkCountryLawyer and cpt kangarooski)

  • A geeks geek... (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrankSchwab ( 675585 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:38PM (#30450266) Journal

    Anyone faced with a woman about to deliver, and their first thought is "I know, I'll go search around on google" is my hero.

    • Between Balls and Stupidity.

      Glad he got it done!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by martin-boundary ( 547041 )
      Kids today! In my day, we didn't need Google for this. All we had was a swiss army knife and a mullet.

    • Anyone faced with a woman about to deliver, and their first thought is "I know, I'll go search around on google" is my hero.

      I don't know. FTA:

      Five minutes after the delivery the midwife arrived to cut the umbilical cord of their fourth child.

      What kind of geek is he when he can't master delivering a baby the forth time around? I would have memorized the wiki-article by now.

    • Lois was stuck at home giving birth. Her geeky co-worker / neighbor Craig tries to help, so the first thing he does is Google 'baby' - "OK, I've got 24 million results, let's see..."

      And this was in 2003 - way ahead of the curve!
  • Leroy said before the birth of Mahalia on December 1, his wife disapproved of his BlackBerry because he was always playing with it but now she has "changed her tune".

  • I'm inclined to suspect... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:43PM (#30450358) Journal
    That, if all the medical training that daddy received was a few minutes on Google, and things didn't go badly, the real headline ought to be: "Mother ejects baby in uncomplicated delivery"

    The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea; but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.

    • Re:I'm inclined to suspect... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jamesh ( 87723 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:59PM (#30450618)

      the real headline ought to be: "Mother ejects baby in uncomplicated delivery"

      What on earth has the mother got to do with it???

    • Re:I'm inclined to suspect... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @06:17PM (#30450898)

      The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea; but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.

      We've already got a sky-high miscarriage rate, a fun fact nobody likes to talk about in public. Something like 1/3rd of all pregnancies in the US result in miscarriages. Though I am aware of no science supporting this, I suspect it has to do with 2-3 generations full of people being born that otherwise were not healthy enough for one reason or another. Nature kinda takes care of this on its own.

      I know it sounds cruel and insane, but part of me really thinks that we're fucking ourselves over long-term by providing such "excellent" health care. We're almost completely bypassing natural selection...

      • Re:I'm inclined to suspect... (Score:5, Informative)

        by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbenderNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @06:33PM (#30451078)

        Bullshit. From fittingly/where-else Wikipedia:

        Determining the prevalence of miscarriage is difficult. Many miscarriages happen very early in the pregnancy, before a woman may know she is pregnant. Treatment of women with miscarriage at home means medical statistics on miscarriage miss many cases.[28] Prospective studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests have found that 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period).[29][30] Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies.[30]

        The risk of miscarriage decreases sharply after the 10th week LMP, i.e. when the fetal stage begins.[31] The loss rate between 8.5 weeks LMP and birth is about two percent; loss is “virtually complete by the end of the embryonic period."[32]

        Likelihood of miscarriage drastically increases with the mother's age; the average age of mothers at childbirth has steadily increased in the past decades, although I was very surprised to see it's still at 25 in the US. So it's got fuck all to do with "bypassing natural selection".

      • Yes, and ? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DrYak ( 748999 )

        We've already got a sky-high miscarriage rate, a fun fact nobody likes to talk about in public. Something like 1/3rd of all pregnancies in the US result in miscarriages.

        Yes, miscariages seem to naturally occur often in humans [wikipedia.org], 40% according to the sources that wikipedia cites. (specially with older parents, where the gametes had accumulated more mutations).

        Well, you know what ? Mutation DO happen. A child has NOT a carbon-copy of the same genetic material as the parents.
        A mutation could be catastrophically bad, slightly bad, neutral, slightly good or miraculously good.
        The slightly good/bad and the miraculously good is what make evolution work, no matter how much the Creat

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Yes, but isn't it cool that if you found yourself in a scenario where a woman is giving birth you could quickly find out what you should do?

    • Fourth baby (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @07:11PM (#30451534) Homepage

      The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea

      According to the article, the "google-delivered" baby-girl was the mother's fourth pregnancy and fourth birth.
      That means that all previous 3 of them went ok, and that the mother has quite some experience.

      Also, as the whole story happened in a country were medical assistance is available and as the parents seem not to be against assistance (the mother seem to be checked by a midwife on a regular basis. they even called the midwife back - she just didn't manage to arrive soon enough), we can presume that they had pre-natal assistance (Echography, etc.) and we can assume that the doctors and mid-wife saw nothing peculiar or dangerous in advance either.

      If there's no peculiar bad luck (like the unlucky baby entangling herself in the umbilical cord while exiting), chances are high that everything will go ok this time too. The father needed only to assist the mother, not to be able to react and start an emergency resucitation or whatever.

      So although a medical support would have helped in case of some catastrophic event, the chance of such a catastrophic event where pretty low in this peculiar couple's situation.

      but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.

      Well, on the other hand humans have a couple of problem. Unlike carnivore mammalian, our women tend to give birth to a rather single huge fair-developed baby instead of several small partially developed kittens/puppies. This size-problem is further worsened by the fact we are the only bipedal, upright-walking mammals and thus have pelvises which are optimized for a different bio-mechanical everyday use as the other mammals.
      So quite a lot of thing can go wrong. Slightly more than with cats and dogs, for example.
      On the other hand, we're social animals and have probably lived in small packs and tribes for quite a long period. Chances are high that, even with our cavemen ancestors young first-time mother could receive help from more experienced members of the tribe. (Supposedly, prostitution isn't the only job which could be called "the world's oldest profession")

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      And, though the detail is missing, I'm assuming they intended a home birth. Rather than going in to a hospital when labor started, they called the midwife and waited nearly an hour. The midwife was there in 45 minutes, and no one ever intended to go to the hospital.

      "Couple planning home birth get it, midwife arrives late"

      Nope, not nearly as interesting as "in vitro insertion of Blackberry causes healthy birth, baby's first word 'lol'"

  • The information revolution has begun. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fished ( 574624 ) <amphigory@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:48PM (#30450424)

    For years I told people, "the information revolution has not yet begun." About six months ago, while eating breakfast at a little, podunk diner in a town of around 500 people, I got curious about what causes Tidal Locking. [wikipedia.org] So, without thinking about it, I whipped out my iPhone and looked it up using Wikipanion.

    Then, I realized what I was doing. I, as someone who knows basically nothing about orbital mechanics, was sitting in a little diner on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and had access to more information than I could possibly use on an obscure, orbital-mechanical phenomenon. All on a whim. That's when I decided that "the information revolution has begun." It's not well-begun, it's not finished, it's not even fully taken shape yet. But it's begun.

    • Ack (Score:2)

      by Fished ( 574624 )
      That should be this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking [wikipedia.org]. That'll teach me to flap my gums without pressing preview.

      • (GP forgot the /wiki/ between the hostname and the article title.) I was about to write about how dumb it is that they don't simply redirect into the "subfolder" because I'm sure this happens all the time. Then I noticed that they do redirect. So now I'm going to complain that they don't auto-redirect for a capitalisation error like Tidal Locking vs. Tidal locking. ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      it's not finished

      If the information revolution ever finishes, you won't read about it on the internet. ;)

      FWIW, IMHO, the "information revolution" as you call it, has begun, has taken shape and is beyond the hype.
      Sure it'll change in the future; information may become easier or quicker to access, information may get different qualitative properties, but right now any information can (atleast technically) be shared with anybody around the world.

      Nobody would say the industrial revolution is "not well-begun, not finished and no

    • No, you're not correct. Being able to look up useless information isn't helpful. That's mostly useless. You could very well have waited until you got access to a public library and had the same effect.

      It's being able to have instant access to information that you can then use to further your goals that you will be empowered to affect change. And I think we've been there for a little while, eg stock research. It used to take subscribing to paper information, and the speed of your reactions were dictated

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ivoras ( 455934 )

      There is another side of the story, though I'll agree it's effects may not be as important: in ages past, you, being Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, would be intrigued by that idea and would think about it, learn some math, tinker with it and eventually maybe produce something of monumental importance. I imagine someone like Einstein asking himself "what happens if you travel the speed of light?" then looks it up in Wikipedia and reads "Nothing much." then shrugs and continues with his merry life...

      Tho

    • And now I'm installing Wikipanion on my iPhone, continuing the revolution.

      Seriously, thanks for mentioning this. I didn't know about this app but it's going to make wasting time on Wikipedia while on the can^Wtrain so much easier.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zouden ( 232738 )

      That's when I decided that "the information revolution has begun."

      You mean that's when you realised the information revolution had begun. We've been able to access wikipedia on our phones long before the iPhone came around - and I'd argue that the 'revolution' didn't begin just because you're reading about orbital mechanics with your phone instead of your laptop.

      When will the revolution be finished? Perhaps when we can access the internet with a neural interface?

  • WHAT!?!? (Score:2, Informative)

    by ignitionxvi ( 1701152 )
    "Wait...babies come from a girls...OMG"

  • I just looked up the article. Not that I exactly plan on doing things this way, but in a pinch the information could prove useful in a couple of months.

  • This is form the British tabloid The Sun. I googled a few keywords and found no other mention of this except for a similar story in pravda.ru from 8th April this year, a Russian tabloid, with appropriately Russian names of the people involved and details.
    http://english.pravda.ru/society/family/08-04-2009/107373-deliver_baby_mobile_phone-0
  • Better than the usual "using the internet to google poison because I hate my wife" scenario.

  • ...what followed was the most perverted and erotic delivery ever outside of hentai.

    Ah well, atleast ONE thing google helped bring into the world that is no longer in Beta.

  • How stupid are we (Score:2, Insightful)

    by scorp1us ( 235526 )

    That we have to google how to have a baby. Your deity must be proud! Or Darwin. Here I was thinking we're the smartest we've ever been... and we need instructions on how to reproduce. Never mind that 2000 years ago, even 200 years ago, most everyone was illiterate. And 20,000 years ago, they probably didn't even realize babies come from sex. (Actually many tribes consider the baby in proportion to the number of contributing men). What ever would we do?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      No, he was finding out what he needs to do to deliver a baby. It's not about her having a baby.

      Add to that there are a myriad of things that can go wrong.

      You might not how very few babies in industrialized nations die at birth.

      It seems to me using science to get better survival rates is a good thing.

      • No, he googled how to make a baby 9 months ago. Yes even though this was number 4. I have 4 at home and still don't know where they came from. I think from the gym since my wife gets really fat then comes home one day skinny and with baby.
    • Yeah and 20,000 years ago a lot more babies and mothers died in the process. He presumably wanted to deliver without harming the baby or mother. If you've ever delivered a baby or been involved in it, you'd know it's not as easy as it sounds. The hardest part is knowing what to do when something goes wrong. Is the baby in the right position? Is the umbilical cord wrapped around his head? Are his lungs cleared? What if she can't push? What are the indicators for the most common problems?

  • Childbirth? (Score:5, Funny)

    by PhasmatisApparatus ( 1086395 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @06:31PM (#30451060)
    There's an app for that.

  • Anyone willing to take the bet... (Score:3, Funny)

    by NoPantsJim ( 1149003 ) on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @06:35PM (#30451110) Homepage
    ...that Wikipedia played a part in the conception as well?

  • Good thing it wasn't a Blackberry Storm (Score:3, Funny)

    by Peregr1n ( 904456 ) <ian.a.ferguson@gmail.com> on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @06:42PM (#30451210) Homepage

    It's a good thing he didn't have a Blackberry Storm to mash his query out on, or he would have been confused by the instructions on "how to slither a navy"

  • Why would you want to start your child's life with an increased risk of death?

    Idiots.

    http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2975 [sciencebasedmedicine.org]

    http://getbetterhealth.com/homebirth-risks-babies-three-times-more-likely-to-die/2009.11.12 [getbetterhealth.com]

    the data is very good.

    • Heck, man. Just being born guarantees death.

      But I can just imagine myself trying to look up how to deliver a baby on my phone's Internet browser. I wouldn't even get "how to" entered with T9 before I passed out.

  • as BlackBerry is already trademarked and taken ;-)
  • Man, there's nothing they can't do with that console! Provided you have the right controller.

  • Most people would simply deliver a baby through a vagina...

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