This is a syndicated post. Original article from NYT > World, available at NYT > World.
China is leaping forward in the sciences, but academic fraud and limited Web access are hurdles.
Google is a pretty damn innovative company. Powerful too.
One of their new projects is called Google Flu Trends. It tracks trends in distribution of the flu virus based on searches that individuals conduct in the search engine. How is such a thing possible? Consider this:
Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.
The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.
For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.
Put simply, Google is able to track potential pandemics before they break out, using sophisticated statistical techniques.
Truly amazing. What will they come up with next?
Ok, forget the promise. I can’t stop blogging about Palin. And the reason is that I just cannot understand why anyone would vote for this person. It is a mystery to me and I really would like to figure it out. So, readers please help. The best explanation I have to date is that Republicans who vote on social issues, like those exemplified here, don’t care about her qualifications.. they only care about her stance on social issues. Using this frame the GOP could nominate anyone (literally) who was congruent with their social interests and folks would vote for them. Remarkable.
But in any event, today’s brilliance from Palin is about fruit-flies. She gave a policy speech (why does the RNC let her do that?) on autism and made some interesting claims:
For many parents of children with disabilities, the most valuable thing of all is information. Early identification of a cognitive or other disorder, especially autism, can make a life-changing difference.
So far so good. Then she goes on to talk about the money used for such research:
Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.
The problem, of course, is that fruit flies have been used in autism research. Very effectively, too, I might add:
[S]cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly.
The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.
So once again we have Palin speaking on a subject that she knows nothing about and making erroneous claims. Can’t we do better than this? Don’t we want someone in the VP slot with more intelligence than this?
Do we really want “Joe Six Pack” in office if Joe is an idiot?
Watch the thing here:
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight does a very nice job of explaining the problem with some of the likely voter polls:
1. Among people who have already voted, Democrats lead overwhelmingly. Zogby pegs Barack Obama’s advantage at 27 points among people who have already voted. The New York Times details how Democrats are overperforming, sometimes dramatically, in states where early voting is underway. (By the way, the New York Times’ data on Florida is wrong, as it includes absentee ballot requests as well as early voters. According to an Open Left diarist, Democrats have a 24-point advantage among those who have actually voted early in Florida).
Pollsters ought to make certain that they’re asking people whether they’ve already voted. Moreover, they ought to be putting these early voters through their likely voter models as a sanity check. That is, they should be testing to see whether a substantial number of people who have actually voted would in fact have been excluded by their likely voter screens. If the answer to this question is yes, they ought to be asking themselves whether their likely voter models have any basis in reality.
2. Enthusiasm is much higher among Democrats than among Republicans. The latest Diageo/Hotline numbers show that 72 percent of Democrats are enthusiastic about voting for their candidate, as opposed to 55 percent of Republicans.
3. Most likely voter models are unlikely to distinguish newly registered voters from what I would call lapsed registered voters. If someone is registered, and has been registered for a long while, but has not cast a ballot since they pulled the lever for Ross Perot in 1992, there is good reason to be skeptical about their intentions. On the other hand, voters who are newly registered have quite literally demonstrated their interest in the 2008 campaign; they are in fact quite likely to vote. Barack Obama’s advantages are principally from among the newly-registered voter group.
4. There is an enormous discrepancy in the strength of the Republican and Democratic turnout operations. In past elections, such as 2004, this advantage favored the Republicans; in this one, it favors the Democrats. Barack Obama has somewhere between a 2:1 and a 4:1 advantage in field offices in most battleground states. He is relying almost exclusively on volunteers (the exception are a couple of cities like Philadelphia and Detroit, where Obama will most likely pay ’street money’ to canvassers on Election Day). McCain, meanwhile, has already had to hire paid canvassers in Florida, and perhaps he will also in several other states.
5. Turnout among ‘unlikely’ voter blocks was substantially up during the Democratic primaries. Youth voters (18-29 year olds) increased their share of the Democratic electorate by 52 percent. Latino voters increased their share by 42 percent. Black voters increased their share by 8 percent.
I would like to issue a challenge to those pollsters like Franklin & Marshall and GfK which in spite of all the facts above, are showing a substantial shift toward the Republicans when they apply their likely voter models. E-mail me — my contact information is at the top of the page — and tell me why you think what you’re doing is good science.
It’ll be very interesting to see if any of the pollsters take him up on his challenge.
Perhaps an evolutionary explanation for homosexuality?
Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan.
