Web Game Helps Predict Spread of Epidemics

An anonymous reader writes "Using data from the web game wheresgeorge.com, which traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease."

Comments

Oddly enough...

[Hindustu]

The only dollar bill I remember possessing with the "Where's George" stamp on it came from a man working at a pizza shop with gigantic cold sores.

Shades of Psychohistory

[Entropy248]

This article is really light on details, but the concept sounds strikingly like something that would be predictable through Seldon's psychohistory. Was Asimov right in his premise? Are human beings nothing more than complicated animals working through complex, predictable behavior? I wonder how much of what we do on a daily basis is a result of free will when I hear about science like this. Am I just a statistic? Governments would love equations that predict human behavior on a macroscopic scale.

Re:Shades of Psychohistory

[mattjb0010]

I wonder how much of what we do on a daily basis is a result of free will when I hear about science like this.

Overall statistical laws don't say much about free will or not. There are always going to be regular patterns in behaviour (caused by things like the fact that most people don't want to walk 10 miles to work every day).

Governments would love equations that predict human behavior on a macroscopic scale.

The Australian Reserve Bank uses equations to predict macroeconomic conditions and adjusts interest rates accordingly.

Re:Shades of Psychohistory

[houstonbofh]

"The physicists were intrigued: Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. " The problem is that you give a bill to only one person. Most disease is not like that.

Re:Shades of Psychohistory

[DavidTC]

That is exactly why Asimov said psychohistory had to fail, and he made it do so.

Although the fact it failed due to a genetic mutation was a bit silly.

And note psychohistory couldn't predict everything, even outside genetic mutation. The First Foundation was to 'change history' by keeping a storehouse of knowledge, without any psychohistory at all, but the Second wasn't only to fix any minor problems that crop up, but to narrow the possiblities to one that were predictable.

If you want an analogy...everyone else thought they were playing roulette, but the psychohistorians figured out a way to make everyone play blackjack, and only they knew it. The fact they were counting cards and knew optimal betting patterns was trivial to the fact they were defining the game.

You can read it and get the impression Seldon predicts the exact events of the un-altered fall for thousands of years, and he likewise predicts the exact events after he changes them, but he really just predicts the long fall itself, we have no indication he can figure out stuff to any extent within it. And he rigs the new future history so he can control it.

Re:Shades of Psychohistory

[Stan Vassilev]

"Was Asimov right in his premise? Are human beings nothing more than complicated animals working through complex, predictable behavior? I wonder how much of what we do on a daily basis is a result of free will when I hear about science like this. Am I just a statistic?"

You're not a statistic, but statistics work because people in the same groups as you think in a similar fashion and do similar stuff. This is why statistics can work with a representative sample versus every single unit from the group they study, and still guess pretty close.

There's nothing scary or new about this, it's been known for ages to the people doing said statistics.
As a matter of fact, you gotta be happy about it, because our similar and mutually redundant behaviour ensured our success.

If everyone was truly unique and on his own mind, we'd still not have a common language, let alone civilisation and technology.

Also, of course we're animals, what did you think we're plants or something? We're mammals, but we have larger capacity to learn new shit and more advanced communication. That's it.

Maybe you gotta realize that animals aren't "just animals". They dream, have nightmares, are curious, eager to learn and explore, can get depressed, happy, anxious and so on.

So a human is nothing but an animal, but I don't see where's the problem with that.

Re:Shades of Psychohistory

[NichG]

Hey, it works for atoms when we can't even solve the three body problem analytically. And yet somehow when there's 10^23 of the things, we can get the scaling laws, phase diagrams, equations of state, etc with pen and paper. I don't find it hard to believe at all that while one person's behavior may be very hard to predict well, the average behavior and even scale of the fluctuations in behavior of a few billion people would be very easy to predict.

Population density seems to be a good place to start... so many things seem to be tightly coupled to population density. If you look at political affiliations in the US for example, there's a correlation between liberal/conservative and population density. Crime, etc of course scales with population density.

In a sense its a measure of 'how much am I affected by other people'. In a low density area, encounters with other people that have a significant unintentional and undesired effect are low. In a high density area, you can't help but press up against dozens of people a day who might mug you, smoke near you, transmit a disease to you, or whatever.

So thats one variable; there's likely to be two or three that are really important, and the rest are sort of small perturbations. Second might be economic level perhaps? Or technological? Get some output data like crime rate, distribution of causes of death, education levels, job occupancies, population density, tech level, economic level, and so on and do a principle component analysis on that. Maybe it'll reveal the significant contributors, or maybe not, but it's probably worth a shot for some grad student doing social science.

Then you can do fun things like construct a phase diagram from your data and find out little factoids like 'if the population density rises above X, dictatorships become fundamentally unstable!' that let the more power hungry analysts set up a perpetual dynasty with rules controlling population growth or something like that.

Isn't statistical mechanics fun?

The real reports

[MonkeyBoyo]

Here is the blurb in Nature, Nature's Editor's Summary
and here is the PDF research paper The scaling laws of human travel.

Woohoo!

[NathanBFH]

I remember coming across this site several years ago (2001? 2002?) and just for fun entered a couple bills to see how it worked. Since then, I totally forgot about it until this Slashdot reminded me! I'm very curious to find out how 'my' bills are doing these days. I do remember, however, reading somewhere that the average lifespan of a one dollar bill is less than a year or two, so the chances my bills made it past the few months I handled them may be slim.

Obligatory...

[mshiltonj]

Zombie Infection Simulation Machine!

Brians! Must eat brains!

Urban Dead

[Saeger]

Urban Dead gets no love? That webgame is truly infectious -- what with its "243,575 dead and rising" :)

Re:Business model

[OfficialWheresGeorge]

The is no "business model". The site DOES NOT SELL RUBBER STAMPS. It stopped selling rubber stamps in 2000 at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.

It's also not "these guys"... it's "this guy".

Please stop spreading this disinformation.

Load of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a bunch of crap science. They're trying to track movement of people by where dollar bills show up?! WTF? When you buy something at a store that bill might go back into circulation immediately but its just as likely to be deposited in a bank. From what I understand, banks send cash to regional counting facilities. From there it is redistributed. It's impossible to track this movement. A bill deposited in San Francisco could easily turn up in LA, Portland, or Seattle without it being transported there by an individual traveler. What if a person in Seattle then gets that bill from the bank, hops a plane to New York, but doesn't enter it's information into that website and then spends the money in New York where it isn't recorded and then through a similar process the bill ends up in Kansas City? IF someone in Kansas City knows about the site and gives a rats ass about it and actually enters the bills serial number it now looks like someone in San Franciso travelled to Kansas City. How does this help understand the movement habits of humans? Like I said, this is crap science and does absolutely nothing to further our understanding of how diseases spread.

Re:whereisgeorge took itself offline

[tomhudson]

... because they're converting to dollar coins, to help prevent the spread of epidemics.

This way, you can legally launder your money ...

Re:erm? is the data even legit? Yes, it is.

[OfficialWheresGeorge]

I spend a significant amount of time EVERY DAY to ferret out fake data. I have several automated processes that search for and remove any data that does not fit certain criteria. I take this site, and the data integrity very seriously, so I take personal offense to your offhand, unfounded, and ignorant comments.

-Hank

/. diseases

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Maybe if we give diseases websites and /. them we can wipe them out.

Now where's my Nobel Prize for mdicine?

Sociology vs Psychology

[cgenman]

Thank you.

It is the difference between Sociology and Psychology, and a lot of people seem to take it personally.

If food stores in a given country drop below a certain level, you can make a reasonable prediction of the chances of open rebellion breaking out. That's Sociology. If socioeconomic indicators drop X%, you can predict with relative accuracy an increase in suicide rates of Y%. That's Sociology. If you put a million people in a trust game, you know roughly how many of them are going to stab eachother in the back for a given payout level. That's Sociology.

If you tried to make the same predictions about an individual person, you'd find that you had no fucking clue what that one person was going to do. That's Psychology.

Sociologists aren't making predictions about you, they make predictions about the average behaviors of average groups of people.

But you're not average. You're special. Everyone is special. That's fine, and not far from the truth. But people have weights pulling them towards one decision or another, and maybe you will say no and two of your friends will say yes. And you're all special. And throw a thousand people into that decision, and 60% will say no and 40% will say yes. And throw a million people in there and 64% will say no and 36% will say yes. And throw a billion people in there and 63.3% will say no and 36.7% will say yes.

Every individual person is special and unique, but take lots and lots and lots of people and patterns emerge. No one can predict what one person is going to do anymore than anyone can predict where a molecule in a cloud of gas is going to go. But you can still make accurate predictions about which way the wind is blowing.

i dunno

[syle]

Using games to track people is tricky though. I did a lot of research on this, and my findings showed that 80% of the population of the world are Night Elf females who just turned 18 and want to chat.