Where’s George Helps Model Epidemics

Slashdot and World Changing (finalist for a bloggie) reference an article to appear in Nature that explains how the bill tracking “game” Where’s George helped model the spread of epidemics.

The press release and a cool map are availble via Eurekalert. An excerpt:

The physicists were intrigued: Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. They found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws (from local to regional to long-distance scales). Using the game data, they developed a powerful mathematical theory that describes the observed movements of travelers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometers to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.

“Since we can’t track people with tracking devices, like we do animals, we needed to get data that provided us with millions of movements of individuals,” explained Hufnagel. Scientists are already familiar with similar scaling laws from physical and biological systems. “What is amazing about these particular scaling laws is the fact that they are determined by two universal parameters only. This result surprised us all.”

It’s a good day when the “game” one plays turns out to help humanity.