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22 May 09

"Swine Flu" vs "H1N1" terminology - tweets show that people do not adopt the new term

Gunther Eysenbach has used monitoring of Twitter to show that the attempt to change public discourse from the use of "swine flu" to H1N1 has not really worked.

gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/...s-h1n1-terminology-tweets.html - Preview

microblogging crowd mining social media surveillance science2.0

21 May 09

Emergency Information Patterns and Thoughts on Swine Flu

A well thought-out summary of the the general ways that social media has been used to track, display, and disseminate information related to swine flu and what that could/should mean for crisis communication in the future.

blog.ushahidi.com/...erns-and-thoughts-on-swine-flu - Preview

microblogging social media surveillance crowd mining science2.0

How we could have stopped swine flu

The short answer: Spend less time trying to track disease outbreak online and instead spend more time "in the jungle."

www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php - Preview

microblogging social media surveillance crowd mining science2.0

But it has also begun to use sophisticated new software to trawl the internet for reports of unusual disease outbreaks.

This approach to spotting pandemics early has powerful backers. Last November, Google became the latest organisation to throw its weight behind the war on emerging infections diseases (EIDs) when it launched Google Flu Trends, a site which aims to predict annual winter flu outbreaks simply by tracking around 40 common terms people search for when suffering flu-like symptoms. (Google launched the site after its engineers found the results accurately tracked flu reports from doctors’ surgeries and clinics, but without the normal one to two week reporting lag.)
- Google is not the only "backer" of the approach; nor was it Google engineers who discovered that search trend data can be used to predict disease outbreak. Rather, there is support from scientists who have published articles in peer-reviewed journals indicating that these techniques hold great promise. Framing it as Google being the big backer and the research being an inside job is meant to diminish the idea. But this framing is patently false. - on 2009-05-21
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But for all their ingenuity, the worry is that these amount to little more than technological tricks.
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- What is needed is a fundamentally different approach, in which rather than waiting for the viruses to come to us, we go and find them first. This is the theory behind “deep viral mining”—essentially traveling to the jungles of Africa and Asia and gathering data on animal viruses before they leap the species barrier to humans.
  - False dichotomy. There is no reason why we need to choose one or the other. We can and should do both. Additionally, both techniques would provide coverage along a greater stretch of the disease outbreak timeline, all while serving slightly different purposes as well (i.e. prevention vs. early-stage detection and ongoing monitoring). - on 2009-05-21
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- Viral mining will do nothing to stop an outbreak like swine flu once it is spreading in the west. But it could stop the next threat. One obvious place to start would be the live animal markets where Asians shop for chickens, ducks and more exotic fare.
  - And what is proposed here would haven't have prevented swine flu either. 1) It didn't start in Aisia. 2) It didn't start in a jungle or with wild animals, but in domesticated animals in a non-jungle area of Mexico, which is not in Asia. Next, "viral mining" will do nothing to provide indications of when preventive efforts fail--i.e. when the disease makes the transition from the jungle animals, through Asian markets, to people. What's more, it would do nothing to help public health officials track the spread of the disease once we have identified that it has passed to people. Again, the two techniques/approachs and associated tools, server slightly different purposes and are in no way mutually exclusive. - on 2009-05-21
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Twitter mining vs deep viral mining

Evgeny Morozov's latest, totally uninformed ramblings about the lack of usefulness of social media in general, and Twitter in particular, as tools for public health surveillance.

neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/...twitter_mining_vs_viral_mining - Preview

microblogging social media surveillance crowd mining science2.0

Twitter-disinformation aside, there still remains an important question of whether we could actually use the Internet to spot new epidemics. I haven't yet formed a firm opinion; perhaps, once data from mobiles is well-integrated into our tools this would be possible -- but for now, we are, probably, still are quite far fromfiguring out how to predict epidemics with the Web tools alone (the point being that epidemics usually break out in places with limited internet access).
- Haven't made up your mind, huh? Actually, it sounds like you have made up your mind...you think it doesn't work. Luckily, people who actually know something about public health and "infodemiology" (a term and area of research you don't even know exists) have made up their minds. And they think, and have in some cases demonstrated in published, peer reviewed scientific articles, that these techniques hold great promise. - on 2009-05-21
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Reports on Twitter Fueling H1N1/Swine Flu Fear and Misinformation Are Vastly Overstated

Gunther Eysenbach, "medicine 2.0" guru and author of the first published, scientific study using Google search trends to predict and track flu outbreaks, responds to the claim that Twitter is spreading panic and misinformation about the swine flu. Survey says? Nope. Twitter is not primarily serving to spread misinformation.

gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/...witter-fuelling-h1n1swine.html - Preview

microblogging social media surveillance crowd mining science2.0

20 Mar 09

26 Dec 08

Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish

www.readwriteweb.com/...ish_in_wikipedia_or_perish.php - Preview

science2.0 collaboration

01 Nov 08

Scientists Use Social Media

Overview of recent survey of scientists' use of social media.

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/...scientists-use-social-media - Preview

social_media social_networking science2.0 scholarship2.0

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- One of my normal conceits around what works and what doesn’t is “workflow.” Things should fit into a user’s workflow.
- What is surprising to me is that social media designed specifically to “socialize” traditional workflow functions aren’t used as much. In fact, Connotea, 2collab, and ResearcherID rank lower than most.
  
  These results actually make me question the workflow mental model. Nature Network isn’t about workflow. BioMed Experts is about browsing social networks and connecting, so isn’t much about workflow. Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn? I don’t care how much you force-fit those into workflows, they aren’t about work. (LinkedIn can be about finding a job, but not about doing a current job.) Each one is about social connections.