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.
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!
For Fun! -- Signed Mrs Tables
The Hudson River.
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.
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.