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.
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??
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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....
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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.
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.
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*.
Doesn't the latest version of swine flu also have bird flu DNA? Obviously it's a serious problem for those who tweet.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.