Zero to One-Eighty » public

Blu in Bogotá

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:35:39 +0000

New work from the artist known as Blu, begun on November 11 (Armistice Day) and completed the day after.

Flu trends comparisons

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:08:09 +0000

U.S. flu prevalence 2009–2010, as at October 30, vs. 2003–2004 (Image: Google.)

According to data provided on Google Flu Trends comparing to this year to 2003–2004 (a particularly severe year) the rate of estimated flu cases has climbed high and early. As for severity by state, this is what the map looked like in November last year:

Estimated USA flu severity map as at November 11, 2008 (Image: Google.)

And here’s what it looks like this year as of the end of October:

Estimated USA flu severity map as at October 30, 2009 (Image: Google.)

Finally, here’s a chart showing a comparison of Google estimated prevalence data and CDC prevalence data since the 2003–2004 season:

Yellow: CDC data. Blue: Google data. (Image: Google.)

How valid is this information (i.e. how much is it a reflection of actual rates of influenza infection)? It appears that Google’s flu prevalence estimate data based on search counts (a form of “syndromic surveillance”) are accurate predictors of reported rates of influenza in the United States. The Flu Trends About page (linked above) mentions the Nature study that Google undertook with a CDC researcher, and links to a free, Google-hosted version of the paper as a PDF file if you’re interested. This is further corroborated by the modest paper “More Diseases Tracked by Using Google Trends” that was published in the CDC web journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (Volume 15, Number 8–August 2009)^† though this is more of a research note than a detailed study.

I did find one interesting statement on this by the CDC, in answer to a direct question from a reporter. At a press briefing on May 5 Alice Park from Time posed the following to the CDC’s Richard Besser:

I just wanted to ask you about your opinion on some of the new flu tracking, surveillance service out there. I know that the CDC has worked with Google flu trends, for example, can you talk a little bit about how helpful that type of information is particularly now to get a better sense of the dynamics of the outbreak, you know, where it might be increasing or what the ebb and flow of it and is it getting worse, is it tapering off, can you comment a little bit about how useful those kind of methods are.

Besser replied:

In terms of our ability to detect emerging infectious disease, new infectious diseases, we’re constantly looking for what we call situational awareness. I mean what’s going on out in the communities. And we’re looking at you know, many, many different sources of information. The Google flu tracking information, there was a study done with Google in conjunction with CDC to look at can you use that information, can you use people going on the web to find information about flu as an indication of where flu is taking place? And the first year looking at that in terms of looking back, it was very helpful. The question is looking forward can you see that? As of two weeks ago, Google hits on flu on H1N1 are just off the charts. And so our website gets 8 million hits a day. So looking for a signal of increased activity on the web in a particular place isn’t very useful. But we’re open and are continually looking at various approaches to early detection because the sooner you can detect a problem, the sooner you can understand it and implement appropriate control measures.

Translation: I’m comfortable saying, with the benefit of hindsight, that Google Flu Trends in its first year of operation has done a pretty good job, but you are not going to hear me endorse it as a predictive tool for tracking H1N1. Or: it’s been shown to be valid, but we don’t yet know how reliable it is from year to year (or, for that matter, how much it might be influenced by special kinds of flu or fears about flu).

So, for what it’s worth, I’m going to go ahead and take it all with a grain of salt for now. I’ll say one thing though: it makes for some interesting graphics, and you have to admit that we’ve had a lot of graphs going down these past 18 months…

The follow-up article for Time by Alice Park, “Is Google Any Help in Tracking an Epidemic?” published on May 6, 2009.

† Be warned: the CDC web site is even slower than your Toyota Yaris.

Administrator, please

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:18:09 +0000

John Strand on Verizon store customer terminals:

As you can see the system is logged in with an account that has Administrator Privileges. There is no “hacking” this box…. You just walk up to it.

When he returned, without the adapter I needed, he noticed that I had the command prompt up. He asked me the basic questions like, “What the hell are you doing?” Which I answered truthfully with the necessary mitigation steps. You see, I am a pathetic, hopeless white hat. I spent a few seconds re-explaining the problem to him while his eyes glassed over. When I was done he said that he would need to take my name and a copy of my drivers license so he could run this “incident” by the management and possibly the police. It was my turn for my eyes to glass over and quickly leave the store. The irate store clerk was shocked that I would just walk away without complying with a perfectly sound and logical request to hand over my PII to a store that cannot secure a simple terminal.

To my horror, all of the Verizon stores in my area were set up the exact same way.

The moral of this story is not to use public terminals wherever you may find them, as the people who set them up ~~may not~~ usually don’t know what they are doing. (Read back through this year’s Philosecurity posts for more examples.)

A beautiful day in the River City

Adrian Cooke — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:54:25 +0000

Elena on the Citycat, en route to the Queensland Art Gallery:

View the Brisbane Citycat set on Flickr

‘Time and Tide’ by Ken Worpole and Jason Orton

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:08:14 +0000

Ken Worpole reflects on Tidal Pools:

There is something mysterious and even disturbing about these pools, located on the border between land and water. There is a muscularity and even brutalism to most structures that engage directly or indirectly with the sea—not just tidal pools but also harbor walls, esplanades, piers, lighthouses, military lookouts and gun emplacements. All such constructions tend to be great works of public engineering, although they possess a distinctive architectural mass and form. For the sea is a powerful force of nature, and while the daily tides can bring pleasure and replenishment to coastal settlements, they are also agents of destruction and chaos. In the late 2Oth century, many maritime towns in Britain turned their backs on the sea and embraced the urbanism of popular consumer culture; lately, they are looking to the sea once again in order to rediscover their historical identity. This return to the water may yet save tidal pools from extinction.

I remember the first time I saw a tidal pool: it was at Bondi Beach in Sydney in the late 80s or early 90s. Worpole’s description reminded me of how I reacted: uneasy, fascinated, a bit grossed out, and most of all wondering why? This essay is a good primer, and Orton’s photographs are beautiful.

What’s next for EveryBlock?

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:52:10 +0000

EveryBlock’s grant ends on June 30. As project lead Adrian Holovaty explains, they are going to open source their code and they are looking for ideas from the community on viable business models:

We have a number of ideas for sustaining our project beyond a dependency on grants, like building a local advertising engine and/or selling hosted versions of the open-source software, but we’re sure there are other ways for EveryBlock to be a successful business. That brings me to the reason I’m posting this—we’re looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch with me. I’m confident we’ll make something happen; it’s just a matter of how.

EveryBlock’s core innovation is to take existing public information (civic and municipal data, journalism, photographs, user reviews, etc.), and to expose it on the web based on the physical locations to which that information applies. Among other things, EveryBlock has played a key role in opening up government data on the web; Daniel X. O’Neil:

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we’re experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It’s a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data.

If you have thoughts I urge you to share them with the development team. EveryBlock is a point of genuine innovation that has produced a useful new service, in a landscape increasingly littered with irrelevance.

Update: On August 17, 2009 Adrian Holovaty announced that EveryBlock has been acquired by MSNBC.com:

We’ll continue to run the first and best microlocal news Web site on the planet, with the same six people, with the same logo and design, with the same everyblock.com domain. MSNBC.com has hired our whole team, and they’ve made it clear to us that we’ll be driving the site’s strategy and implementation, and that our site will remain an independent destination as a community service.

Sounds like good news.

Google Flu Trends

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:34:15 +0000

Google Flu Trends looks like an excellent example of the wisdom of crowds principle. Many individuals use Google Search when they experience flu symptoms. Google pairs this data with information from the Centers for Disease Control to predict flu activity across the country:

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

They claim that this gives results two weeks earlier than existing methods. I wonder if you could predict an election with data like that…

Edited to add: What a difference a day makes. This screenshot shows that several states have moved from “low” to “moderate” flu activity based on data from the past 24 hours:

Compare this to Lydia’s screenshot which shows how the map looked yesterday. “Moderate” now includes Vermont, West Virginia, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and Nevada has moved from “minimal” to “low.” Here comes that spike.

Waiting for Obama

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:52:22 +0000

Some shots I took in Times Square around 7 p.m. on election day. I love the Not Voting Sucks billboard next to McCain. That’s Rod, from the musical Avenue Q. Here’s an aerial shot of the scene, taken in August.

Banksy strikes again

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 15:01:49 +0000

Pickaxed phone booth by Banksy

Has Banksy been hanging out with Christo and Jeanne-Claude? His latest piece appeared in Soho Square one morning earlier this month: a pickaxed BT telephone booth, bent double and bleeding. Banksy’s political signals are usually easier to decode than this (check out his web site for some fine examples), but my guess is that he’s not a huge fan of mobile phones. While he has previously favoured the “public-wall-as-canvas” aesthetic, the phone booth installation takes his work into the 3D realm (something of a trend amongst spray-can artists perhaps?). It’s no wrapped Reichstag or Central Park Gates, but then neither were those pieces any pickaxed phone booth… Now there’s an artistic collaboration I’d love to see. Perhaps they could start ~~collecting people~~ creating likenesses of people who like to keep their mobiles on speakerphone (you know, to improve everyone else’s reception?), and then wrap them up somewhere central and go to town on them with gardening equipment. Just a thought. Then again, maybe it’s not cell phones at all. Could be that Banksy’s just not a David Tennant fan.

Via UnBeige.