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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...
Some public-health experts say this kind of user-fueled data-tracking may start to help government health officials' efforts to recognize outbreaks. Real-time warnings would allow authorities to stay 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...
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...
...department, which will be effective July 1, will administer the concentration in human evolutionary biology and the biological anthropology track of the concentration in anthropology...
Industry officials now want governments to start looking at the sector not just as a symbol of the frothy good times - but as a way to get economies back on track. "What are governments trying to do in a recession? They're trying to create jobs," Lipman says. "They say, 'Let's bail out the car manufacturers, let's do something about the banks,' and they forget about the major opportunity they have with the travel sector...