But she's asleep now so Anna and I are going to have dinner.
So I read today that Google is sending information to the CDC about searches for flu-related symptoms in order to track the spread of the flu this season. Google has taken out any sort of personal information, so it is just general numbers for locales, but it is supposed to be way more efficient than anything the government is doing right now. Pretty sweet hey?
here is the full text of the story:
(I don't know if copying and pasting is legal, so here is my citation: Big Red Headline, The Drudge Report, drudgereport.com, 11 November 2008)
SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
Tue Nov 11 2008 15:34:50 ET
GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness".
"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!
GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."
Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.
Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity."
Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence."
Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning."
Developing...
Google has done it again. This is so cool. Imagine you could watch the spread of disease in real time on a map or something.
And then run...
4 comments:
When I see pictures that people have copied from the internet to put on their blogs (like the picture of that woman with blood on her) I like to try to guess what key word or phrase they searched for to find that picture. I guessed "disease victim." I was wrong.
Uh, oops. That last comment was actually Anna (so is this one). I just didn't sign out of Chris's account.
isn't that map showing where the highest concentration of heart attacks are? it's funny that most of them occur in Mississippi and Alabama, where they fry everything.
chris, get a life!
hahaha get it? like, a zombie doesn't have a life, cause it's DEAD! and you have a picture of a zombie on your thing... so you're....a zombie...haha.....
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