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That behavior is exactly what the folks at Google are counting on. Since last fall, the search-engine giant has been nurturing a spin-off service called Google Flu Trends, which aims to identify outbreaks by tracking searches for flu-related terms and provide health officials with early warnings of potential epidemics. The reasoning is that if people are searching for information on the flu, they're probably sick themselves or know someone who is - and a geographic cluster of like-minded Googlers could represent a burgeoning outbreak or, worse, the roots of a new pandemic. (In the case...
...well ahead of potential pandemics, prepare local populations with appropriate prevention and treatment, and reduce overall illness and deaths. The Google Flu Trends service, which was launched in the U.S. in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is now working with Mexican officials to track search trends in that country. The goal is to help authorities discern whether and where the disease is spreading, getting worse or starting to subside...
Compared with Veratect, Google Flu Trends' metric is somewhat simpler. From 50 million potential search topics, Google engineers narrow down a relevant grouping of flu-related search terms, which they track each fall at the start of the annual flu season. When analyzed side by side with CDC records of confirmed flu cases for the past five flu seasons, Google Flu Trends was 97% to 98% accurate in tracking the disease. And because Google's analysis is in real time, its estimates of cases come about a week or two before those of the CDC. "Each flu season...
...year, his salary will be raised to $221,000, and after two years, it will be raised to $227,000. These amounts are lower than his present salary in Newton, according to school committee member Luc D. Schuster, who also served as the co-chair of the superintendent search committee. Young is currently paid approximately $248,000 as superintendent of Newton Public Schools. Although Young’s term is set to end in 2012, the agreement allows for the school committee to vote to renew his contract in July 2011. Although Simmons was one of two school committee members...
...would “test the predictions of general relativity,” O’Leary said. The cluster is expected to be highly compact and the “black hole will give the stars higher speeds.” O’Leary has started the search for these compact clusters using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Database—a program that maps the Northern Hemisphere’s sky. The objects should have already been detected in the database, but since no one has been looking for them, they haven’t been identified...