There Is a Fly In My Tweet: Tracking Food-Borne Illness the Crowd-Sourced Way

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 10, 2013 @02:24AM from the persistent-deliciousness-tracked-separately dept.

First time accepted submitter kraken9 writes "New research shows that online chatter can help you avoid food poisoning. Leveraging a statistical language model of Twitter users' online communication, nEmesis finds individuals who are likely suffering from a foodborne illness. People's visits to restaurants are modeled by matching GPS data embedded in the messages with restaurant addresses. As a result, each venue is assigned a health score based on the proportion of customers that fell ill shortly after visiting it. The paper shows that this score correlates with the official inspection data from the Department of Health, and argues that 'nEmesis offers an inexpensive way to enhance current methods to monitor food safety (e.g., adaptive inspections) and identify potentially problematic venues in near-real time.' Similar techniques have been used before to predict the spread of flu from GPS-tagged social data."

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people tweet when they have the runs ? really ? by vpness · 2013-08-10 03:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

really ?
1. Re:people tweet when they have the runs ? really ? by Nrrqshrr · 2013-08-10 03:12 · Score: 2
  
  Are you one of those lucky persons without a friend who feels obliged to tweet every plate she eats?
Re:Said it before... by ebno-10db · 2013-08-10 03:37 · Score: 2

Those little buggers might know how to travel, but they can't beat the speed of the internet.
Evolution is an endless arms race - tachyon based pathogens will evolve.