Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mapping Hidden Twitter Data For Epidemiology

Posted by kdawson on from the just-landed dept.

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.

11 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What this looks like by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wouldn't it be a whole lot faster just to launch all the missiles at once and detonate them just above their launch sites, which are of no use to anyone but a nice spot to spread a lot of radiation and fallout from? Anyway, I'm pretty sure Skynet is already here and has figured out it's more economical to let us poison the biosphere ourselves. If you plan to live forever, what's another few years or so?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Down? by Prune · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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."
  3. Re:Long commute by Cimexus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Haha yeah. I guess it would have been more complex to render that map on a sphere.

    I travel between Australia and the US regularly and I can assure you we do not go over Africa. In fact we don't go over any land at all other than a part of New Caledonia. It's literally Sydney Airport (which juts out into the ocean), to LAX (which is right next to the shore as well).

  4. Re:Long commute by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There be dragons... uh, there.

    Just take a look - apparently a couple of flights from Indonesia and one from New Zealand decided to take the chance and just disappeared mid Pacific. Going the other way, a couple of flights from North America that seemed to be heading in the general direction of Japan appear to have also disappeared.

  5. Talk about serving the right ads to the right peep by lamapper · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Am I the only one who sees how easily it would be to tie in this type of information with adverts to get someone to visit your restaurant while in town. Or take advantage of being a specific location and see in person Joe Blow at their new book signing, who just happens to be in the same area.

    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
  6. Re:Nothing to do with the virus? by shird · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or use the location services of mobile phones (ie google's location service with google maps). Sure, you need to opt-in to allow your location to be public, but that's a restriction put in place by google. If the mobile phone companies all worked together, you could easily have an accurate mapping of everyone with a mobile phone with far more detail than this - if this data were ever needed.

    --
    I.O.U One Sig.
  7. Other scientific uses for Twitter by BearRanger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Other scientific uses for Twitter by RJFerret · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Some colleagues recently informed us that they use Twitter to track whether or not people feel earthquakes.

      Oh interesting, just the other day on the Science Channel's "Weird Connections" show, an earthquake researcher (Jim Berkland apparently) talked about how he correlated increased missing pets with impending 'quakes by checking lost pet ads in the newspaper (which nearly doubled according to the data in "The man who predicts Earthquakes" starting on pg. 39).

      Here is a search of Twitter messages since 5/12/09 of missing dogs or cats.

      Since searches can also be refined by area, I imagine it would be easy to monitor regularly for a sudden increase and heck, a bot could then "Tweet" a warning!

      Probably the easiest, least expensive, most accurate earthquake predictor imaginable.

    2. Re:Other scientific uses for Twitter by NathanWoodruff · · Score: 0, Interesting

      I wonder how relevant it would be to add that information to this web page? http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/ Nathan

  8. Re:Nothing to do with the virus? by c_forq · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Really? How many people had a lay-over in MSP on their way back from Mexico?

    --
    Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
  9. Re:Twitter RT by umghhh · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Even if made for a joke "where's George" helps model spread of disease so such data may be useful albeit not the way one may think. Whether tweeter can be used similar way I am not sure - I would think that site is just to fluffy for such purpose but maybe not.

    For those uninformed here is Where is George wiki.