Slashdot Mirror
When Google Got Flu Wrong
ananyo writes "When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches, had drastically overestimated peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy, experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But with flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data and on social media taking off, Nature looks at how these potentially cheaper, faster methods measure up against traditional epidemiological surveillance networks." Crowdsourcing is often useful, but it seems to have limits.
Actually, that's kinda the goal. When it comes to the expenditure of time and money, if you don't come in with a Chicken Little, people are just going to ignore you. With the Chicken Little, you get people to fall in line and the effects of major epidemics or problems are mitigated.
Slashdot-friendly example: Today, people will say that the Y2K issue was completely blown out of proportion. Airplanes didn't fall out of the sky, bank accounts were there on Jan 1, 2000, and everything was just fine. Of course, that ignores the teams of coders working in even-then-archaic coding languages to adapt old software to work beyond their expected lifespan. Who knows what Y2K would have been had we just done nothing, but we're all better off with the purse-string-holders getting concerned.