Web Game Helps Predict Spread of Epidemics 201
An anonymous reader writes "Using data from the web game wheresgeorge.com, which traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease."
whereisgeorge took itself offline (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad, imagine the influx of data if they got everyone who reads slashdot to participate.
Shades of Psychohistory (Score:5, Insightful)
Business model (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:2, Insightful)
If the government wants to learn patterns of human transport and interaction in the name of preventing the spread of communicable disease, it could try to subpoena records from credit card companies and have an enormous resource at it's disposal.
Inversely Related? (Score:4, Insightful)
Load of nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:3, Insightful)
You're missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Diseases SUCCEED in poor places because the lack of nutrition/clean water/medicine/education/rape-prevention etc. A new (or significantly different variation of a current) disease, however, that is transfered by, say, touch or close proximity (airborn transmission with a short life outside the host's body, for instance) would not be nearly as ghetto-ized as our current treatable-but-not-treated-in-poor-places diseases.
This won't be perfect, obviously, but statistics and Where's George are a match made in heaven.
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not a statistic, but statistics work because people in the same groups as you think in a similar fashion and do similar stuff. This is why statistics can work with a representative sample versus every single unit from the group they study, and still guess pretty close.
There's nothing scary or new about this, it's been known for ages to the people doing said statistics.
As a matter of fact, you gotta be happy about it, because our similar and mutually redundant behaviour ensured our success.
If everyone was truly unique and on his own mind, we'd still not have a common language, let alone civilisation and technology.
Also, of course we're animals, what did you think we're plants or something? We're mammals, but we have larger capacity to learn new shit and more advanced communication. That's it.
Maybe you gotta realize that animals aren't "just animals". They dream, have nightmares, are curious, eager to learn and explore, can get depressed, happy, anxious and so on.
So a human is nothing but an animal, but I don't see where's the problem with that.
Re:Load of nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Sociology vs Psychology (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the difference between Sociology and Psychology, and a lot of people seem to take it personally.
If food stores in a given country drop below a certain level, you can make a reasonable prediction of the chances of open rebellion breaking out. That's Sociology. If socioeconomic indicators drop X%, you can predict with relative accuracy an increase in suicide rates of Y%. That's Sociology. If you put a million people in a trust game, you know roughly how many of them are going to stab eachother in the back for a given payout level. That's Sociology.
If you tried to make the same predictions about an individual person, you'd find that you had no fucking clue what that one person was going to do. That's Psychology.
Sociologists aren't making predictions about you, they make predictions about the average behaviors of average groups of people.
But you're not average. You're special. Everyone is special. That's fine, and not far from the truth. But people have weights pulling them towards one decision or another, and maybe you will say no and two of your friends will say yes. And you're all special. And throw a thousand people into that decision, and 60% will say no and 40% will say yes. And throw a million people in there and 64% will say no and 36% will say yes. And throw a billion people in there and 63.3% will say no and 36.7% will say yes.
Every individual person is special and unique, but take lots and lots and lots of people and patterns emerge. No one can predict what one person is going to do anymore than anyone can predict where a molecule in a cloud of gas is going to go. But you can still make accurate predictions about which way the wind is blowing.
What I Don't Understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:2, Insightful)
The motion of a molecule within a gas is random. The gas follows the ideal gas law as the aggregate average of all the randomly moving molecules.
You yourself are no more predictable as a physical object than the average of the probability functions of all your subatomic particles.
Predictable macro behavior does not imply predictable micro behavior.
Am I just a statistic?
What happens if you remove the word "just" from this sentence?
KFG
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:3, Insightful)
Because you give more than one bill to more than one person. Doorknobs and money are the most common way to transmit contact diseases.
If you wish to follow the flu virus. .
Follow the money.
KFG
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:2, Insightful)
If you toss a coin, in the LONG RUN, it will be 50-50 for heads and tails. But the fact of that matter is that you CANNOT predict what the result of the next toss is.
This is similarly extended to the dice.
While you are a composite part of population statistics, you are NOT "just a statistic". Individuals differ from person to person, but statistics hold true for aggregate events.
And why be so scared of its implications on free will? There is no real implication of it from statistics. Assuming that humans really do have free will, it doesn't change the fact that we are creatures of habit, and have several strong constants in our lives (day-to-day jobs, families, travel routes, etc). Statistical prediction is not an indication of a lack of free will, and if the push comes to the shove, it is but a repetitive exercise of free will.
But I am quite puzzled about several comments on free will that I have spotted in past /. comments.. worrying about it even in the philosophy of mind discussion. Take a good read of some philosophical texts and get some real considered opinions by great thinkers.
Re:What I Don't Understand (Score:3, Insightful)
They are basing their findings on people who remembered to take the time to report their bills on this website? What about the thousands or millions of people who don't? That would make for a pretty big error margin wouldn't it?
That depends. You can predict the behavior of a large group by measuring only the behavior of a small subgroup, provided the small subgroup is representative for the whole. That's how statistics works.
So the question is, do people who remember to take the time to report their bills move about the country in a significantly different way from the whole population?
I'd say that if you think they do, you'd need to argue that.
Three kinds of lies... (Score:2, Insightful)
"There are three kinds of lies. Plain lies, Damn lies, and Statistics."
Obligatory M. Twain Sig:
"Post No Bills"
Re:Shades of Psychohistory (Score:3, Insightful)
A phase plane plots quantity vs. rate of change, and from that we can visually examine contours that represent dynamic behavior. Oscillations look like swirls, equilibrium points look like focal points, chaos looks, well, chaotic. It is a more general techinique than LaPlace Transform analysis, which is limited to linear differential equations, (or Eigenfunction transforms, for Sturm-Liouville problems generally, of which LaPlace transforms are for the subset of S-L systems that have a constant as the sigma function, and therefore have sinusoidal eigenfunctions).
Getting back to Asimov's psychohistory, the analogy with physical systems is flawed. Physical systems are well-behaved and modelable by reasonably tractable laws because, on a micro scale, the behavior is linear. Human behavior (and much natural behavior like snowflake formation and turbulent gas flow) tends to be non-linear.
That's not to say there is nothing useful in this analysis. We can make statistical conclusions about climate, like 99% of the time the annual snowfall will not exceed X, so we need this many snowplows, and so on. But Asimov's plot device, being able to plan future history with an intelligent tweak here & there, is no more realistic than Jules Verne's moon cannon. Economists can't get instantly rich on the stock market, chemists can't control the shape a snowflake will take, and metorologists can't control predict the long-term weather.