This is a good place to drop general and weird news, entertainment, and general show prep material that might be interesting to air talent or producers. Hot dog threads ALWAYS welcome.
SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
Tue Nov 11 2008 15:34:50 ET
GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness".
"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!
GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."
Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others.
Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity."
Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence."
Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning."
Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning."
Google wants to know all, know your every move (in addition to wanting to be in your GPS-enabled cell phone, Google's official position is that plug-in hybrids [read: "cars that report in"] must be mandatory), keep all your medical info, and tell you what job to have....
....and Schmidt, who just made the above threat (er, comment), is in the room with the Obama economic and transition teams.
I'm amazed that people can't see....but, then again, "amazed" and "surprised" are not the same.
"I don't know the same things you don't know."
"Yes, you do; you just won't admit it!"
"Yeeee...it looks like a 'Belt Buckle & Ball Cap' convention in here......"
In the stated application, It is no different than analyzing sales at chain drugstores.
What makes you think that big brother has not been doing this for years anyway.
If you searched for Anthrax, detonators, anfo or Meth recipes you are on a list somewhere.
And should be.
"Everyone Should be aware that you're just a screen grab away from infamy."
The problem is, ALL of your searches are on a list... they just don't go looking through them unless you've already been identified and doing something wrong... or something goes wrong and the feds want to know who, in a certain locale, may have been searching terms that apply to the crime at hand.
Google recently announced that they were purging that data at the 18 month mark now, instead of the 36 month mark... so you only have to worry about your searches for a year and a half now.
Google is kinda creepy. Having vials of blood drawn at a doctors office and having it sent to a third party lab for analysis is downright scary. Do you know what that company is doing with your blood and what they are sending to the CDC??????
Sorry. Google does not come close to worrying me.
The first step in a successful revolution is to defeat all competing revolutionaries.
