Google tool uses search terms to detect flu outbreaks

"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 found 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.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports."

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Banksy Defends His Guerrilla Graffiti Art

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Fredric Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System

While the anxieties about privacy seem to have diminished, in a situation in which its tendential erosion or even abolition has come to stand for nothing less than the end of civil society itself.

It is as though we were training ourselves, in advance, for the stereotypical dystopian rigors of overpopulation in a world in which no one has a room of her own anymore, or secrets that anybody else cares about in the first place.

But the variable that gears the rest, as always, is the more fundamental transition from the private to the corporate, the latter unmasking the former and thereby problematizing the very judicial system on which it is itself constructed.

How there could be private things, let alone privacy, in a situation in which almost everything around us is functionally inserted into larger institutional schemes and frameworks of all kinds, which nonetheless belong to somebody – this is now the nagging question that haunts the camera dollying around our various life-worlds, looking for a lost object the memory of which it cannot quite retain.

the plan

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Behavioral Setting

Tom Markus, in his masterful study of the way buildings relate to systems of power and domination, has used this form of analysis most persuasively (Markus 1993). When we consider the question of surveillance and supervision, such geometry is likely to be quite critical in determining the success or otherwise of a spatial organization. Markus shows that prisons and hospitals have mostly been designed with a topology that centralizes control and facilitates supervision. In fact, the so-called Nightingale hospital ward was first suggested by Florence Nightingale entirely from the nurse's perspective (Nightingale 1860) - such layouts make it easy to see all the patients from a single nurse's station, thus minimizing effort...It does seem quite likely that this very simple idea of the topology of space has a strong impact on the synomorphy - how the physical and social structures are in harmony - of spaces in which such social arrangements are of prime importance.
- The Language of Space, Bryan Lawson p. 241

photosynth | microsoft live labs

Big companies like microsoft and google are searching for efficient technologies to map the earth. photosynth will be able to sift through millions of flickr pools and metadata(*.exif), to create a 3d point cloud of nearly every photographed space on earth harvesting our collective memories and organizing them for us in a hybrid 2d/3d environment. It's only a matter of time before some software genius figures out how to harvest high-def youtube footage, live streaming cellphone feeds from qik.com, traffic cams, google street-view, and live-satellite imagery.

Will this program fullfill David Brin's dream and provide a new medium for the "transparent society", or will this just add to the goverment's fine arsenal of surveillant technologies?

The Unblinking Eye

Tracking Big Brother's movements over the past decade.

Back in December 1996, sci-fi novelist David Brin warned that street cams would soon be everywhere ("The Transparent Society"). In his dream for the future, every citizen would have full access to the image stream. So far, the authorities have enjoyed a one-way view. But Brin was right that each year, surveillance tech would get tinier, more mobile, and more clever.
-Clare Baldwin & Wired magazine