The New York Times highlights some fascinating work by Northwestern University and Indiana University (separately) that improves upon some of the Swine Flu map mashups we’ve seen and predicts its geographical spread until the end of May 2009. As opposed to the then-and-now mashups we’ve seen.
Both projects are using different algorithms and initially arrived at similar predictions although Northwestern is now a bit closer (projections were calculated May 1). Also, both projects are using human mobility datasets, such as car and truck traffic patterns and air traffic patterns, in their supercomputer-crunched predictive algorithms. Northwestern also makes use of Where’s George?, a website started more than 10 years ago that tracks dollar bills around the globe.
The article, and the respective university project pages, are both interesting and definitely worth the time it’ll take to check them out. But in the end, keep this quote from Northwestern University engineering professor and project team lead, Dirk Brockmann in mind:
“People have a very weird perception of large numbers,” he said. “If you have 2,000 cases of flu in a country of 300 million, most people think they’re going to be one of the 2,000, not one of the 299,998,000.”