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Preventing Epidemics with STEM

Posted by Zonk on from the stop-em-where-they-live dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "IBM has released a Linux based technology enabling spatiotemporal modeling of infectious agents across the United States, providing scientists and public health officials with a powerful tool for understanding, and potentially preventing, the spread of infectious diseases. The new STEM technology provides Geographic Information System (GIS) data for every county in the United States supplied by TIGER files."

3 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting Project by ianturton · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I haven't had a chance to play with this yet, but it certainly seems interesting. This sort of tool is becoming ever more useful as a way of dealing with natural and man made epidemics. While of no real use during an epidemic, they do provide a useful tool to help emergency planners decide what strategies will be best when it does happen. It has to be better to carry out these experiments before hand rather than during an emergency.

    Ian

  2. Modelling != understanding by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Of course I didn't RTFA, but this package is, it seems, a modelling tool. Models don't always help understanding because they're based on assumptions. If the assumptions don't fit reality then they break down. The bad thing is that often the people start believing the models more than reality and if the field evidence starts to disagree with the models (which look very scientific with graphs etc) people start to doubt the field data.

    While the models (assumptions) hold true, they can provide some nice "what if" input, but they can never replace field data.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  3. other uses by sfcat · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Not that disease modeling isn't a good use of technology, but Tiger is a modeling tool that integrates geographic and temporal data (spacio-temporal is just a fancy word for that). But I think there are alot of other good uses for it. Some more popular and some much less. Let's see here:

    • Modeling historic data about
      • economic development
      • spread of religons
      • spread of political organizations
    • Modeling the spread of specific ideas
    • Modeling company sales data
    • Modeling battlefield deaths
    • Modeling a crime spree

    Basically any thing that spreads over time can be modeled and viewed this way. Kinda neat.

    --
    "Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."