A new Tweetment may prevent food poisoning

[AussieNeil]

Finally, a good use of the GPS (location) data attached to Tweets:

"We present nEmesis, an end-to-end system that “listens” for relevant public tweets, detects restaurant visits from geo-tagged Twitter messages, tracks user activity following a restaurant visit, infers the likelihood of the onset of foodborne illness from the text of user communication, and finally ranks restaurants via statistical analysis of the processed data."

cs.rochester.edu/~sadilek/p...

And if you are going further afield than a local restaurant;

How To Use Twitter To Avoid Illness Outbreaks Traveling Abroad:

evaser.com/2012/07/26/how-t...

Neil

[PaulaS Volunteer]

Is this a joke? (Like the wonderdrug "Unobtainium"). I can hardly believe it is real, with all those complicated equations etc.

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to PaulaS]

I very much doubt this is a joke. It really is quite amazing what you can derive from analysing large amounts of data. The paper mentions Google's Flu Trends, which I've been using successfully for years to give me an indication of when to be extra cautious when going out. This works on the assumption that searches for 'flu', 'flu remedies', 'flu symptoms' and so on correlates with the level of flu infections in a community. That makes sense and indeed Google found that there is a good correlation.

google.org/flutrends/au/#AU

This is available on a per state basis in Australia and a per city basis in some parts of the world, but unfortunately, it is not available in any form in the UK, though it is for France, Germany and the Netherlands. Google even show trends for previous years so you can get a feel for the relative risk of infection.

[PaulaS Volunteer in reply to AussieNeil]

Sorry I was suspicious, Neil. It was partly the title "Tweetment" that put doubts in my mind - along with what I've noticed of your sense of humour in the past! But in fact it sounds like a very useful tool.

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to PaulaS]

No need to apologise PaulaS. You are very sensible to have a healthy degree of scepticism when it comes to IT products, particularly if they are available free. A good adage to keep in mind with free apps and programs is that if the app/program is free, then you are the product that is being sold.

Neil