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.
P.S. Where do you get the information as to how many people fly from which airport to which airport daily?
Airport arrivals data is often available on line. You would have to guess the number of passengers but your guess would be better than using twitter anyway.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Check for yourself:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=taking+a+crap
Mark413: Taking a crap...contimplating lifes simple pleasures lol
srsbznss: First I cleaned the toilet, now I'm taking a crap on it. Kind of reversed, but when you got to poop...
RRJJ: eeeewwww, i just took a crap that looked like Susan Boyle
I.O.U One Sig.
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=
Skynet had modpoints.
That, or the moderator was working around deficiencies in Slashdot's moderation system. Or both...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"