Noosphereoogle Detects Flu Outbreaks Faster Than CDC
November 12th, 2008It’s the Noosphere. It’s Google. It’s the Noosphereoogle.
Here are some comments from a previous post called, Astonishing Security Breach at South African Nuclear Facility:
There’s a google tool anyone can use to observe meme saturation over time. It’s interesting stuff.
http://www.google.com/trends
Maybe .mil/.gov has a way of excluding the influence of crap culture and media induced noise. That would be critical. You’d have to have some kind of structured set of popculture memes to exclude from the tasking package. Otherwise, how do you know that you’re not just picking up on some crap that millions of idiots saw on a TV show the night before?
…
Actually, internally, google has the capability to spot semantic weirdness appearing out of the ether.
Look at the lower part of the graph on their Trends thing. It plots news reference volume.
In a few minutes, a program could be written that would look for spikes in searches for terms with no corresponding increase in news story references.
Now, what I’d really like to know is if any .gov/.mil SEAS projects are dipping their tentacles into this data?
Via: Boston Globe:
There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers, and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call the doctor. That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early-warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks called Google Flu Trends.
Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In early February, for example, the CDC reported the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states.
But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out.
Its new service at www.google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.
Whoa, the data bit is really interesting and deserves a whole dimension of further discussion, but this particular instance is troubling. Have you followed the “warnings” of the Natural Solutions Foundation (whose founder is cited in The Esoteric Agenda)? They’ve been warning about a manufactured avian flu pandemic for quite a while now, maybe this is it. Maybe laying off a few tens of millions will help the USA keep it AAA bond rating.