Haystack Blog

Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, claims it can predict flu outbreaks about ten days before the CDC can.  Through this site, you can determine the severity of flu outbreaks in your area.  Google bases their predictions on a spike in search terms such as “flu symptoms” on the Google search engine. [Thanks NYTimes]
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We know that online collective intelligence can achieve incredible things — for example, the ESP Game, Wikipedia, Mechanical Turk.  But many of these systems assume that individuals make independent assumptions and that these judgments can be aggregated.  Neither of these are true in Wikipedia, where “truth” is generated through an intense combination of coordination and [...]