Monday, July 26, 2010
Where's George?
Some of you might already be familiar with Google's flu trends which uses search terms to track the prevalence of flu. Although this might seem like a crude tool it is actually surprisingly accurate and gets the data much faster than the CDC does because it has such a huge volume of data to mine.
The video above shows the results from the project by Northwestern University grad students that uses data from the Where’s George? website that tracks the movement of U.S. paper currency. Again, this surprisingly crude tool is able to amass so much data (they have over 200 million bills in their system!) it has revealed valuable lessons about the movement of people and therefore for the way that diseases like flu might spread. There was an article in the New York Times about the project last year.
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1 comment:
Thanks for reading.
Which information do you find misleading? You say:
'There is some great information there, except for the whole rash thing.'
but I'm not sure what you are referring to. Do you not think that the erythema migrans rash is associated with Lyme? It certainly is not seen in all cases but there's no doubt that it is something people should be aware of so they seek early treatment.
Please note that this blog is supplemental to the lecture course. I try to present a fairly balanced viewpoint in class where appropriate but that does not mean that every post to the blog presents all sides of every issue. If you look at the blog as a whole though I think you'll find it covers a range of viewpoints.
Maybe you should start linking to the documentary "Under our Skin" as well, and get a grip on reality.
If you check out the blog you'll see that there are actually several posts that refer to this movie:
Under Our Skin
and
Under Our Skin again
You'll also find them both, along with numerous other posts exploring many aspects of this disease, if you click on the Lyme disease tag.
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