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SciShow News explains how Wikipedia has been used to track, and even predict, outbreaks of disease all over the world, and then introduces you to the most complete naturally mummified bison...
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Can public health experts tell that an infectious disease outbreak is imminent simply by looking at what people are searching for on Wikipedia? Yes, at least in some cases.
Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory were able to make extremely accurate forecasts about the spread of dengue fever in Brazil and flu in the U.S., Japan, Poland and Thailand by examining three years worth of Wikipedia search data. They also came up with moderately success predictions of tuberculosis outbreaks in Thailand and China, and of dengue fevers spread in Thailand.
However, their efforts to anticipate cases of cholera, Ebola, HIV and plague by extrapolating from search data left much to be desired, according to a report published Thursday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. But the researchers believe their general approach could still work if they use more sophisticated statistics and a more inclusive data set.
Accurate data on the spread of infectious diseases can be culled from a variety of sources. Government agencies typically get it from patient interviews and laboratory test results. Other data sources include calls to 911 lines, emergency room admissions and absences from work or school.
The problem with these methods is that they can be time-consuming and costly. By the time the numbers are crunched, an outbreak may be in full swing.
If you want to stop an outbreak before it starts -- and if you want to save lives and money, you certainly do -- what you need is a forecast that is both accurate and timely. And so the Los Alamos researchers turned to the treasure trove that is Wikipedia.
In addition to the about 30 million articles on topics ranging from quantum foam to the First English Civil War to Kim Kardashian, Wikipedia also collects data on the approximately 850 million search requests it gets each day. In previous studies, researchers have used this publicly available data to predict ticket sales for new movies and the movement of stock prices.
When it comes to health, people have found correlations between interest in certain health topics on Wikipedia and sales of medications. Others have linked searches for flu-related topics by American Wikipedia users to actual flu spread in the U.S.
Five members of the LANLs Defense Systems and Analysis Division thought they could do more. Their goal was to get a read on current and future trends not just for flu in the U.S. but for several diseases in several countries. Ideally, they hoped to come up with a model that could be trained with data from a place where its available and then applied to another place where it wasnt.
The researchers decided to focus on seven diseases (cholera, dengue fever, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, influenza, plague and tuberculosis) in nine countries (Brazil, China, Haiti, Japan, Norway, Poland, Thailand, Uganda and the U.S.). They mixed and matched to get models for 14 location-disease contexts.
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Scientists use Wikipedia search data to forecast spread of ...
MOSCOW Fri Nov 14, 2014 2:51pm EST
Wikipedia webpage in use on a laptop computer is seen in this photo illustration taken in Washington, January 17, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Gary Cameron
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia plans to create its own "Wikipedia" to ensure its citizens have access to more "detailed and reliable" information about their country, the presidential library said on Friday.
Citing Western threats, the Kremlin has asserted more control over the Internet this year in what critics call moves to censor the web, and has introduced more pro-Kremlin content similar to closely controlled state media such as television.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia assembled and written by Internet users around the world, has pages dedicated to nearly every region or major city within Russia's 11 time zones, but the Kremlin library said this was not good enough.
"Analysis of this resource showed that it is not capable of providing information about the region and life of the country in a detailed or sufficient way," the state news agency RIA quoted a statement from the presidential library as saying.
"The creation of an alternative Wikipedia has begun." It was not known whether the project might affect Russians' access to the existing Wikipedia in any way.
President Vladimir Putin has branded the Internet a "CIA special project", and the Kremlin has said it must protect its online realm from threats from the West, as ties between the Cold War-era foes have hit a new bottom over the Ukraine crisis.
Since August, bloggers in Russia with more than 3,000 followers must register with the Moscow's mass media regulatory agency and conform to rules applied to larger media outlets.
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Russia plans alternative version of 'Wikipedia' | Reuters
A system is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole.[1]
Every system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning.
Fields that study the general properties of systems include systems science, systems theory, systems modeling, systems engineering, cybernetics, dynamical systems, thermodynamics, complex systems, system analysis and design and systems architecture. They investigate the abstract properties of systems' matter and organization, looking for concepts and principles that are independent of domain, substance, type, or temporal scale.[citation needed]
Some systems share common characteristics, including:[citation needed]
The term system may also refer to a set of rules that governs structure and/or behavior. Alternatively, and usually in the context of complex social systems, the term institution is used to describe the set of rules that govern structure and/or behavior.
The term is from the Latin word systma, in turn from Greek systma, "whole compounded of several parts or members, system", literary "composition"[2]
"System" means "something to look at". You must have a very high visual gradient to have systematization. In philosophy, before Descartes, there was no "system". Plato had no "system". Aristotle had no "system".[3]
In the 19th century the first to develop the concept of a "system" in the natural sciences was the French physicist Nicolas Lonard Sadi Carnot who studied thermodynamics. In 1824 he studied the system which he called the working substance, i.e. typically a body of water vapor, in steam engines, in regards to the system's ability to do work when heat is applied to it. The working substance could be put in contact with either a boiler, a cold reservoir (a stream of cold water), or a piston (to which the working body could do work by pushing on it). In 1850, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius generalized this picture to include the concept of the surroundings and began to use the term "working body" when referring to the system.
One of the pioneers of the general systems theory was the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. In 1945 he introduced models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relation or 'forces' between them.[4]
Significant development to the concept of a system was done by Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby who pioneered the use of mathematics to study systems.[5][6]
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System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
November 16, 2014
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online
Wikipedia page views could help predict potential disease outbreaks weeks before official health advisories are issued, researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory report in a recently-published study.
Their research, which was published Thursday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, indicates that they were able to forecast flu and tuberculosis outbreaks four weeks in advance by monitoring articles on the collaboratively-edited online encyclopedia.
Dr. Sara Del Valle and her Los Alamos colleagues said they were able to successfully monitor outbreaks of influenza in the US, Poland, Japan and Thailand, dengue fever in Brazil and Thailand and tuberculosis in China and Thailand. They also said they were able to forecast all but one of those outbreaks at least 28 days in advance.
Their findings suggest that people have the habit of searching websites such as Wikipedia for disease-related information before actually seeking medical attention, and shows the potential for training computer models using public health data in one location and then implementing it in another part of the world.
A global disease-forecasting system will improve the way we respond to epidemics, Del Valle said in a statement. In the same way we check the weather each morning, individuals and public health officials can monitor disease incidence and plan for the future based on todays forecast.
According to BBC News, Del Valle and her colleagues tracked the page views of disease-related Wikipedia pages from 2010 and 2013. They tracked the languages that the information on those pages was written in, using that as a way to approximate where those individuals lived.
The data was then compared to actual disease outbreak information provided to the research team by various national health surveillance officials. In eight out of 14 cases, the British news organization said that there was a clear increase in page views in the four week period before health officials declared an outbreak.
Furthermore, the model was able to predict every outbreak except the tuberculosis one in China, but as Del Valle explained, the goal of this research is to build an operational disease monitoring and forecasting system with open data and open source code, and that their new study shows we can achieve that goal.
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Can Wikipedia Be Used To Track Disease Outbreaks?