Slashdot Mirror
Mapping Hidden Twitter Data For Epidemiology
jamie found this visualization of air travel, which might be usable in some sort of proxy for the spread of flu virus (to choose a random application). Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada (and a former geneticist), searched Twitter for the phrase "Just landed in" and obtained lat/lon coordinates for both the indicated airport and the Twitter user's home location, as recorded in their Twitter profile. He then produced videos of multi-hour stretches of air travel that had been latent in the Twitter information stream.
This illustrates the enormous shortcomings in systems like Twitter. While people can usually figure out what airport they've just landed in, they have no idea whether or not they have swine flu. More than that, you're gonna end up with lots of repeats, false positives, jokes, and whatever. To listen to Twitter, everyone on the planet has already died twice of swine flu.
jail.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I wonder what fraction of these are 'retweets' biasing the sample. And how many people will be inspired to pollute the data stream with tweets about 'Just landed at Luna Base' and so on...
This looks less like a visualization of air travel and more like what will happen when Skynet goes online, cracks the safety measures on our nuclear arsenal, and begins methodically annihilating the human race.
Of course, those of us with access to the internet will have our impending death announced to us in 140 characters or fewer.
Correct me if I'm wrong but all it does is probing on traffic by airplane by people who speak English and use Twitter. So it's a very vague approximation of people going from one place to another by airplane, am I right?
In other words you could have gotten something much better by using flight information from travel companies online, using a bunch of factors (like airplane type, route, time/date) to estimate how many people are in each flight. Which would still be of dubious use because we already know how much people transit between which airports.
So basically this new thing is useless in that it only gives a poor approximation of how many people go where, and it's of little relevance to virus spreading anyways, the only reason why it's on Slashdot's front page being the "cool" factor of using data mining on a service such as Twitter and using "epidemiology" as a poor excuse. Or am I missing something?
You just got troll'd!
According to their representation, the Pacific Ocean either is a no-fly zone, or the Earth is flat. I can't think of any other reason why American flights to Australia would fly above Africa.
You just got troll'd!
..have nothing better to do but to broadcast their every move to others via Twitter? I just don't get it. Can someone explain it to me?
Do people really feel a need to be hyperconnected at all times? And what I really want to know is, do they broadcast when they take a crap??
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It seems to be slashdotted. However, the main blog page has some screenshots of the app and, as of the time of this post, still loads in my browser (albeit slowly) http://blog.blprnt.com/
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
For Fun! -- Signed Mrs Tables
How about reminding someone of a long lost friend that lives in the area you are visiting.
Your friend has a MySpace page and is on twitter live right now, would you like to send them a Direct Message or Twit (DM/T/N)?
That guy you were chatting with last week on FriendFinder lives 4.6 miles from the airport, here is a google map to the closest IN/Out, that you two were chatting about, near their location. Would you like to invite him to join you there? (Y/N)
The possibilities are as invasive as they are endless.
Someone travels to your location allot for business, perhaps you can lure them to your hotel instead of another one, treat them right and secure a new long term customer.
This twitter user shows his GPS coordinates, they are in the car next to you right now, do you want to wave (Y/N)? It could even be hands free and talk to you like GPS devices do. lol,
Ideas, ideas, ideas....
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
Who would have thought these self absorbed narcissists actually could serve a useful purpose in spite of themselves.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You certainly seem unduly concerned about privacy. Perhaps you've got something to hide? Would you like to speak to one of our friendly FBI agents? [Modal dialog box has only "OK" option.]
Some colleagues recently informed us that they use Twitter to track whether or not people feel earthquakes. By scanning Twitter reports and correlating them to their seismic measurements they can build a map of how far away people actually felt the event. Thanks to tweet time stamps they can build a rough map of the felt area in about a minute. By using a longer time horizon they can build a more accurate map of the felt area.
Mapping the area of felt earthquakes is done anyway. Scanning Twitter just provides a supplemental way of doing that.
Oh fun. Everybody with a Twitter account, use the phrase "bleeding from my anus" in the next 10 minutes and see if you can't trigger a CDC Ebola alert.
I know how I can bring their system down: "I've just landed in N/0" Good luck mapping your division by zero!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would argue in the reverse - Twitter is useless as a "microblog" and a discussion platform, but it's great for status messages and location updates. Also, if you prefer to not tell everyone where you are - don't tweet it.
The problem is that people are starting to use it for things beyond it's intended purpose, like blogging about their lives as they happen, etc. Couple that with the fact that away messages already exist for Facebook, Live!/AIM, and IRC, and you really don't need Twitter other than a centralized updating platform which can coordinate between multiple channels, even most of the time it's pretty weak at even that.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Just landed in is nice, but pretty vague. It seems to really only cover US flyers leaving the place. It might work to add a few more search patterns such as 'Just landed from', 'Took a flight from' etc. Perhaps even more stalking data mining can be done to track high profile individuals, going 'to' and 'from' places. Hmm?
People seem to get swept up in the fascinating technical aspects of targeted advertising based on social networks. Gee, look what those statistics reveal, and look how they've tied those stats with those stats, very clever.
What nobody seems to recognize is that the very word "advertise" means to get people to do what they do not want to do. Everyone thinks ads just present options for people to carry out motivations they already have. No, that would be called divertising, the diversion of motivation. Advertising advocates the adverse of motivation.
In any other industry, such a misnomer would probably be acceptable, but think of the billions spent globally annually on advertising, and they express in no uncertain terms the most despicable aspect of their craft openly in their title. And these guys get paid billions to make others look good. Physician heal thyself.
Some of my lyrics for your amusement:
Do you work in there? Do you know what they do?
They twist letters into knives to steal your voice from you
I've given up on words, I can't find no good ones left
They all stab at me, those billboards pushing theft
How dare you justify to me your sick rhetorical craft
You preach the adverse of our needs, and you say I am daft?
Take your suitcase back upstairs, prepare the staff for a distraction
Set the office chairs ablaze and watch adversity in action
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Searching for the term "swine flu" would lead one to believe 90% of Twitter users have contracted it.
Then again - maybe they have! Could be natural selection at work...
Is a way to graphically map what everybody ate for lunch. Since lunch data is about the maximum density of useful information that can be gathered by a collective of narcissists. There's valuable sandwich-related data mining to be had here. If we cross correlate it with people who say "NOM NOM NOM", we may just have found an audience dumb enough to sell *anything*.
Ok that's what I understood twitter to be for, but why? Are people that lonely and bored with their own lives that they need constant updates of others? Are people that egotistical that they think other people care? I don't even care where my WIFE is all minutes of the day, never mind some friend and or stranger...
I dunno, personally I think if people need to be that attached to others, then there are serious psychological issues happening.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
From the biggest and busiest airport in the world.
Arrivals - http://www.atlanta-airport.com/forms/passenger/frmpassengerinformation_trak_a_flight.aspx?FIDSType=A&SearchAirline=&SearchFlight=&SearchCity=
Departures - http://www.atlanta-airport.com/forms/passenger/frmpassengerinformation_trak_a_flight.aspx?FIDSType=D&SearchAirline=&SearchFlight=&SearchCity=