Slashdot Mirror
Google Can Predict the Flu
An anonymous reader mentions Google Flu Trends, a newly unveiled initiative of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm. The claim is that this Web service, which aggregates search data to track outbreaks of influenza, can spot disease trends up to 2 weeks before Centers for Disease Control data can. The NYTimes writeup begins: "What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in? That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool ... unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like 'flu symptoms; or 'muscle aches' into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states."
Thats a seriously great idea ...
It totally sidesteps the problem of early symptoms not typically getting people to the doctor where it can potentially be reported/tracked.
There's probably a lot of trends that can be detected the same way beyond just disease.
Buy stock in companies that sell treatments for Beri-Beri, Trench Foot, and Jungle Rot, and then have your botnet look them on on google.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Because it's giving it to everyone it has sex with. Watch out for open sores, and DO NOT HAVE SEX WITH MSN LIVE!
In the future, Google will be able to record your eating habits and predict when you are going to poop.
This, of course, won't work on female users since we all know that girls don't poop.
Some CDC guys in biohazard suits make someone "disappear" for searching for some rare, deadly disease?
That's great. Let's see if it's of any use other than fear mongering.
Note the FLU SHOT finder on the page. I've recently noticed there is SO MUCH pushing of the flu shot, it's unprecedented. And you know what? The damn shot has been useless for the past 6 years because they've guessed the incorrect strain to prepare a vaccine for.
If you've received a flu shot in the past 6 years the only thing you got was a chance at a bad immune reaction and a concoction of mercury, detergent and some other nasty compounds.
Liberty.
Now big brother can track outbreaks of penis enhancement and epidemics of monkey punching.
The flu isn't exactly a major killer, it just makes people be a little ill for a few days, even the CDC says that only about 250 people died from it in 2001 in the USA, not the 36,000 that is promoted.
on antivirus software.
For starters, most people's first reaction to getting sick isn't to google their symptoms. It's to hit the medicine cabinet or go to the drug store and get some cold meds, and then call into work sick. And right after that, he spends his afternoon staring at the "Whoa cowboy, slow down!" screen on slashdot, wishing he had friends to call. On a slow news day, he might watch 'Oh, My Goddess!' or slave away on stumbleupon for hours, occasionally laughing and then dribbling snot onto the keyboard. Then they ask for another Dew.
If you want to track a flu outbreak, talk to the employers or the drug store clerks, not google. But don't ask the annoyed girlfriend, she's too busy figuring out if that story about putting a keyboard in a dishwasher is true...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What if people start searching for "impeach Obama" or "repeal PATRIOT Act" or terms like "ELF" or "NRA" ? Will Google start reporting that to the government and selling that type of info to the media ? Will they sell the IPs ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If Madagascar detects anyone googling "flu" they'll close their ports.
So what point will a "national emergency" of some kind emerge and compel them to turn over data? Could the Government then force Google, yahoo, etc, to turn over the requested search results for say...aids clinics?
Handguns?
Recounts?
Recall election?
How long until we see people getting subpoena's for google's information about a user for things like divorce cases (e.g. husband with a vasectomy subpoenas wife's search history for info on condoms in order to prove she has been having an affair for years).
I'm sure some proto-libertarian is going to say "well, just don't use google if you don't want that information to be collected about yourself" but a real libertarian would respond with "'don't use google' is not an answer that helps google's business, so what are they going to do about it?"
How about Google Ebola, or maybe Google Gangrene? Google Dirty Bomb?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
if microsoft did this, the story summary would be:
MICROSOFT RAPES YOUR PRIVACY FOR THE GOVERNMENT
but google did it, so the slashdot story summary is:
Google Can Predict the Flu
massive slashdot bias, alive and well
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For "Dirty Slut"... probably indicates to google that whorehouses are low on soap?
Do to the /. effect thousands of /.ers started googling flu symptoms causing the predictor to indicate a flu outbreak.
Thousands of hypochondriacs responded by checking themselves into hospitals complaining about flu-like symptoms.
1. Invest in Tamiflu (the leading medication to treat flu symptoms)
2. Organize a massive effort to do web searches for "flu symptoms"
3. Wait for Google to sound the flu alarm
4. Profit!
or else!
Either they don't have a problem or they don't use the google and those internets.
Every time I say it I get modded down, but I won't let that deter me because this is just a message board.
Google does 2 things really well:
- Search (including getting advertising revenue from search, and specialized search tools and engines like scholar)
- Maps - Google Earth and Google Maps
I haven't seen another product or service from Google that I like. That includes Chrome, Picasa, Mail, Apps, Web Toolkit. It's all just buggy junk and typically it collects information about your usage of the product (sometimes in shady ways such as installing an update app that's hard to get rid of even if you uninstall)which raises privacy concerns).
Yet everything I hear, here and elsewhere is propaganda about how Google is revolutionizing this or that, or how it's such strong competition to Microsoft etc. That's just plain bullshit. I'm getting very tired of the Google propaganda, and even more tired of the attitude here that criticising Google means you should be modded into oblivion as a troll.
Look at how ridiculous this latest claim is. It should be reported as nonsense but instead it gets put on the front page as if it was a credible news story. I think Google could claim to cure cancer, find God and have a chat with him, end poverty and achieve world peace and there would still be people defending the claims. Google is just a company with a funky motto and a decent search engine that happened to appear at the right time. All you fan boys just get over it already.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
My concern here would be the potential to cause a public panic. I recall a google bot malfunctioning once before. To wit: Google's automated search engine's crawlers brought a news story from December 10, 2002 that detailed United Airline's file for bankruptcy to the top of its listing and confused a large amount of UAL shareholders, causing them to sell their shares and drop the value of UAL significantly. (Reference: http://www.googlechromeboard.com/post193.html)
Let's say their automated data mining for flu information goes wrong. The google public page erroneously reports this data. The CDC (and other health organizations) now have to respond to "Well, Google says this..". Hopefully, large groups of people would critically think over information they read and not panic. However, the previous example shows differently.
Compounding this is the tone of the page. Google's arrogant statement that "...Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems" I infer to mean "Don't trust those slow-pokes at the CDC; trust us!" If GOOG really wanted to help the CDC, offer free colo, bandwidth and security for their public facing servers so they can broadcast to the public.
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
As a capitalist, and an incubator, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars (per project) on market analyses. For me, finding if a particular good or service, even a niche or very specific on, is desired in a given area is expensive. It's often the MOST expensive thing I do before starting a business.
I've always harbored the idea that Google's grasp of data, even just raw data, is their most important resource. As they make this information available, the market will prosper. I've been able to use Google Trends (national, not local) to profit from the so-called "long-tail" and enter a business market I might otherwise not have.
When Google starts making trend data available based on region, it will be a huge boon for guys like me -- the risk takers. I'd love to know if a certain term is growing in popularity in given regions, or even in given regions at certain times (say "Where can I get vegan food?" in Chicago after 10pm but before 4am). I'd love to know if it's from a desktop or mobile, or even a Mac versus PC. By digging deeper into a customer-base's desire, Google trending can offer me a profitable business, but it can also offer the customer base more competition (or even a product that isn't readily available in their market).
The flu trending is just an eyewash to push Google's strength in raw data retention over time. That's their reason for doing it. Will it help people? Certainly. But to those anti-capitalists, this is exactly where capitalism reaches those in need, but still can provide a profit for the charitable person or company.
Go away, racist!
m!m
5-10 years ago I had a somewhat similar idea:
We all know that animals act odd, hours or days before things like earthquakes. The morning before a 6.8 quake in Washington State in 2001, my neighbors dog that normally will do anything to force it's way out of the front door and run for hours when the door is opened the slightest bit, wouldn't even get close to the door when the neighbor opened it. By itself, 1 animal acting weird means nothing, but a large group of animals over a localized area acting weird at the same time would point to something about to happen. The problem is that it is always after the "catastrophe" that people say, "You know sparky was acting odd this morning". If there was an online database that you could quickly go to and report that at your address your pet is acting weird at this moment, you might be able to predict the event by looking for groups of "odd acting" pets. I know it seems like a weird & far fetched idea, but tell me why it wouldn't work.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Seriously, everyone in the Slashdot crowd needs to read Wired. It is a fantastic magazine, which wrote about this like two months ago.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's a flugle bomb!
At least over the last two weeks I've noticed a sudden increase in people who either out sick, or are running around the office with suspicious coughs, sniffles, etc. Of course, bring up the possibility of the flu and you are met with adamant denial- "it must just be allergies," "nah, it's way too early for flu season".
So, it was no big surprise to see that the graphs for several midsouth states (Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana) have jumped recently, while other parts of the country (and the US overall) remain fairly level.
Nice map, Google! Does influenza not happen anywhere outside the United States then? Excellent.
This is fascinating, but it does make me wonder what else they could be predicting.
For example, if they're correlating searches from at-work employees, I bet they could turn up all manner of interesting things - predicting layoffs or other adverse business conditions, see who HR is googling (are they interviewing Google employees?).
Or keeping tabs on start-ups that are doing research into areas that Google is looking to make acquisitions. (Imagine when you're trying to sell your company to Google, they pull your employees' search history to see how long you've really been working on your flux capacitor.)
Sounds a lot like the early pages of "Rainbows End"
This reminds me of the fellow that used google records for his area to prove in court the "Community Standards" relating to obscenity were not as conservative as one would think.
So long as it's anonymous and stays that way(isn't that always the rub), I'm all for google using their info like this.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Mondays
I posted models of it almost three years ago.
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/dailymeme/2005/Aug/coughcoldDejanews.png
Web searches are co-incidental indicators.
Want to see something that Google hasn't shown you?
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entry=sars_versus_avian_flu_meme
It's quite likely that the Internet retains knowledge and alters its behavior over time. Compare the group reaction time between the SARS and avian flu viruses.
There are actually many programs out there tracking this exact same thing. Many retailers/grocery stores provide data on sales of pharmaceuticals to track possible biohazards like the flu.
Other very successful projects have utilized the wisdom of crowds, and I think google has a good chance of success considering how many data points it can track.
"That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool... unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like 'flu symptoms; or 'muscle aches' into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states.""
Hmmm. *types in Google "Dick falling off"*
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Sounds like Larry Brilliant's TED Prize-winning idea is starting to bear fruit. The ultimate goal is "To build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares." I'm not sure I'd call influenza one of our "worst nightmares," but clearly Google.org's focus since bringing Dr. Brilliant on board seems to pointing in the right direction. Good going, guys.
If any of you are more interested in this and aren't familiar with the TED conference or of Brilliant's work, both are featured in Daphne Zuniga's 2007 documentary about TED 2006, TED: The Future We Will Create . And yes, it is that Daphne Zuniga. For U.S. subscription TV viewers, Showtime shows this documentary occasionally.
Everybody knows influenza symptoms and we are bombarded with cold and flu remedies on TV. I cannot imagine that anyone will do searches on that.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
risk in Oregon: low
Being sick is not fun, stay home if you are sick!
Now... Time to play some more left4dead.
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
...I'm just getting over the flu now. Sucks to be an early adopter.
I was actually a little skeptical, until I saw that my state is one of the 4 they highlighted, despite being somewhere you wouldn't expect to find a lot of "wintertime illnesses"
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
So, if people start relying on google warnings, two things will result: Increased searches for "flu symptoms" after a google warning (increasing the size and scope of a warning), and almost no searches for "flu symptoms" when no warnings are issued (reducing the frequency of the warnings).
This sort of thing has been floated around for a while under the banner of 'syndromic surveilance'. I spent most of the last three years working on a research project that involved gathering data on water quality and developing statistical software to find subtle indications of contamination. The intent was always to extend the approach to syndromic data, incorporating things like over-the-counter medicine sales, ER visits, and so forth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that none of us on the team knew enough about statistics to manage a fantasy football league. I'm now happily self-employed doing stuff absolutely unrelated to statistics. I think some of my hair has grown back, and I hardly even cringe when someone says 'generalized least squares'.
If you're interested, though, here is a paper from the CDC on the subject. I'm pretty sure they have a better idea what they're talking about. Or at any rate, they've got nicer graphics.
I'm not commenting on who of the two is the lesser evil. If you want to know my political views, read my other posts or ask me. I claim to be indifferent to race; I'm a white male in a white culture and an independent observer is a better judge of whether my behavior matches my thoughts, so take it with a grain of salt, but at the same time compare it to people who explicitly say they prefer one race over another in some way.
Sorry for the self-reply. I just don't want people to be unclear about whether I'm only joking or also bringing out implicit racial slurs. I'm only joking :)
Some animals seem to have "Extra Sensory Perception" (the cat Oscar, for example, seems to be able to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients (Oscar_(cat))), although I am more inclined to the opinion that these animals are paying attention to (for them) quite obvious things which we just have not identified yet.
It works only for US. Just because there are 46 million people in US without health insurance, who can't go to the doctor, therefore they consult Google instead. See?
Really, their unique access to web search logs, the content of the Internet and the free access to Goggle mail content, allows Google to know just about every trend before the rest of us know about it.
Knowledge is power and Google already have too much of both.
Well, if they're just paying attention to obvious things, then that wouldn't be extrasensory.
If ESP exists, there is no a priori reason to believe humans are unique among animals in lacking ESP abilities.
Also, no conclusive proof of ESP, either in humans or in animals, has ever been discovered. As the decades pass, and the tiny statistical effects studies subscribe to ESP get smaller as the studies get done more thoroughly, there comes a point when absense of evidence does become evidence of absense.
Here is the page for for Dr.Jim Berkland, director of the Syzygy project. He uses collated "odd animal" stats, spikes in pets lost and found postings (dogs and cats seem to either hide and cower or go nuts and run away before quakes), along with other stuff like tracking tidal influences and whatnot for earthquake predictions.
Here is a well researched and referenced article on anti-vaccinationism that you might want to read:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-06/novella.html
(Article discusses it mostly from an autism angle, since that's where most of the anti-vaccinationists are at.)
Yes, vaccines can contain thimerosal (which contains mercury). And lots of other scary sounding things. But scary sounding and harmful are not the same thing, and there is always the question of dose, and whether the negative effects, if any, outweigh the negative effects of cancelling vaccine administration.
If you still maintain there are good reasons not to vaccinate, then you had better present us with something better than a silly YouTube video. You've got to back up your claims with evidence, especially when you say things like 'WHO, the worldwide eugenics organization'.
Which brings me to another point: your whole post has all the tell-tale signs of a typical conspiracy theory. A big organization that conspires to something nefarious and everyone you meet - 'sheeple' - is with them. If people would just look at it, they would see. Anyone denying your claims is just part of them. That kind of thinking has lead you to take a position that is both ridiculous in the extreme (the same author of the article above has discussed conspiracy theories as well) as conspiracy theories always collapse under their own weight, and sort of pre-immunised (oh sweet irony) against reality by being constructed as a totally circular and unfalsifiable belief system.
almost pathetic that its even attempted.
That's great! Google strikes again... We can now "predict" a flu season when it is already happening. The timing of a flu season is more or less regular for a particular place (one of the mysteries of flu) and the big problem is not to predict when it will happen, but what will be the strain of choice for this year. This is the effort of CDC/WHO and it is a tricky problem because the flu virus mutates a lot (hence the need to be vaccinated every year). The mutation sometimes is such that an avian and a human virus combine to produce a new human virus. That's when bad things happen (predicted vaccines fail, 1918 pandemic, etc.). Google's idea is at best very interesting as a tool for monitoring the spread of flu amongst people with access to internet, but I fail to see its predictive power in general.
I'm no expert, but it was something like a particular flu season's flue hit elsewhere in the world first, or first inklings of it happen a few months ahead of the big wave. By keeping close watch on new and early flu cases around the world, they can establish a trend on which ones are going to spread widely.
or something like that, and as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion, they sometimes get it wrong.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Google: I know Kung-Flu.
User: Show me.
In Russian "Oh sh*t we're all gonna die!" sounds like "Chert poderi! Mi vse umrem!" Pronounce as "chyort po-deree, mi vse umryom".
Any knowledge derived in this way can be manipulated.
I would have thought that with the stress of the holidays and people traveling all over, that there'd be a peak around Christmas/New Years. But it actually seems to dip in that period. I wonder what to make of that.
Since when is western Michigan connected to eastern Wisconsin?
A nearly identical study from Yahoo!, Harvard, and the University of Iowa was published on October 27:
Using Internet Searches for Influenza Surveillance
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/593098
Google seems to have a profound inability to deal with color in their overall impressive graphs.
Why for example do we have green, yellow, red color coding in the lien chart, but in the interactive country map we do have different shades of blue?
Why do in Google Analytics colors in a pie chart change by rank and not by type. That means if search is this period the largest share, it is blue. If next period referrals are the largest share it is also blue and search becomes green. That is sooooo not user friendly. When do we get a Google Usability lab?
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
This only works when the searcher uses the correct "medical semantics" and specific clinical terminology. "Muscle aches" do not equal "flu outbreak." There was actually a task force sponsored by Consumers Union and HHS/Disease Prevention several years ago that studied this, found Google searching was too uncontrolled and random to actually predict an outbreak (see: http://www.urac.org/savedfiles/URAC_CWW_Health_Search_White_Paper1203.pdf).
This is the sort of shit that continues to seriously impress me about Google. Every now and then, beyond simply serving excellent web search results (and ads), they roll out some project that by its nature turns raw, incomprehensible data and statistics into user-parsable information. They're creating the William Gibson data matrix in realtime.
I just wish they'd bring back Google Answers. I am more than willing to shell out $10-$50 (plus tip) to have a group of expert researchers find the answer to the few questions that can't be wrung out of their own search engine. Quite frankly I simply can't understand why they axed the project, as it seemed to have a fair amount of activity and most questions were answered successfully, despite their lack of advertising and promotion of the service. I daresay it was a better business model than spending however many kabillion overinflated dollars they spent for YouTube.
clearly, my friends and I are going to spend the next three weeks googling flu symptoms daily..