Google announced a Public Alerts page on Jan 25. The idea is to keep you informed of emergency alerts for floods, tornadoes, winter storms, and other dangers that may be headed your way. But, it's completely query driven, not location-based in this first attempt. Google is seeking feedback. Mano Marks noted on Twitter he'd worked on this project in the past.
- Google Blog
MapQuest launched an HTML5 client.
- press release
Adam Sadilek of the University of Rochester has developed a tool to predict one's location based on friend's locations known through Twitter. How well? It can locate you to within 100 meters with up to 85% accuracy.
"You can actually infer a lot of things about people, even though they are pretty careful about how they manage their online behaviour," he reports.
- New Scientist
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/26 at 05:30 AM |
Comments |
URISA reports that 25 GISCorps volunteers have recently been deployed to 9 new missions in 7 countries including Libya, Indonesia and Samoa.
- URISA News (not sure why it's not a press release)
The Cultural Heritage Administration [Korea] said Thursday it will launch a new information service in March that will pinpoint the location of historic sites and give users information on regulations in places where construction is scheduled.
The service is a revamped and expanded version of the existing Cultural Heritage GIS Service (http://gis-heritage.go.kr). GIS stands for geographic information service. The CHA will finish a pilot run of the new service by next month and officially launch it on March 1.
- Chosun Ilbo
Twitter activity in Africa is tops in South Africa, followed by Kenya, per a study by Portland Communications .
South Africa is the continent’s most active country by volume of geo-located Tweets, with over twice as many Tweets (5,030,226 during the fourth quarter of 2011 followed by Kenya at 2,476,800.
Nigeria 1,646,212), Egypt (1,214,062) and Morocco (745,620) make up the remainder of the top five most active countries on twitter. African Twitter users are active across a range of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.
- Business Daily Africa
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/26 at 04:53 AM |
Comments |
A Penn State professor turned to Twitter to gather information about attitudes toward vaccinations to compare them to actual local rates.
A unique and innovative analysis of how social media can affect the spread of a disease has been designed and implemented by a scientist at Penn State studying attitudes toward the H1N1 vaccine. Marcel Salathe, an assistant professor of biology, studied how users of Twitter -- a popular microblogging and social-networking service -- expressed their sentiments about a new vaccine. He then tracked how the users' attitudes correlated with vaccination rates and how microbloggers with the same negative or positive feelings seemed to influence others in their social circles. The research is considered the first case study in how social media sites affect and reflect disease networks, and the method is expected to be repeated in the study of other diseases. The results will be published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.
- Penn State Live
The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health reveals some interesting patterns:
- rural women had more problems accessing medical services and seeing specialists or a dentist.
- rural more likely to use alternative medicines and be satisfied with their lives compared to those in urban areas.
- Nine News
In research published today in the journal Open Biology, scientists at the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme in Vietnam and the Oxford University Clinical Research Units in Kathmandu, Nepal, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, have found a way to accurately map typhoid outbreaks in the city. Their research combines DNA sequencing technology and GPS signalling, and maps the data onto Google Earth.
The study involves blood tests and GPS devices (suprisingly similar to maralia work I saw in South Africa in 1995!). The results?
The researchers found extensive clustering of typhoid infections in particular locations. Yet, perhaps counter-intuitively for a disease that spreads amongst humans, this clustering was unrelated to the density of the local population. In fact, the study showed that people living near to water spouts, for whom these provide their main source of water, and people living at a lower elevation are at substantially greatest risk of contracting the disease.
Typhoid incidence is likely to be associated with faecal contamination of ground water during the monsoon. As S. paratyphi A (a strain of S. paratyphi found in Nepal) appeared to spread downstream from the main focal point, this would put people living in areas with low elevation at higher risk. These two variables, elevation and water spout proximity, are likely to be interconnected, as the water spouts are more common in low lying areas.
Just like John Snow!
- press release
by Adena Schutzberg on 10/17 at 03:00 AM |
Comments |
Narrow your search further:
australia,
h1n1,
health,
john snow,
obesity,
penn stte,
rural,
twitter,
typhoid,
vaccination rates,
water spout,
wellcome trust
The New York Times is building a map of places to breastfeed babies in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. If you think there should be a map of something, there probably is, or it can be crowdsourced.
- NY Times
BMW's Ultimate Drive app for Android and iPhone lets users search for, create, and share their favorite drive routes. The navigation app is less about how to get where you're going, and more like a travel guide for Sunday drives.
C|NET found adding the routes tedious and since the app is only a few days old there are few routes. The big request: uploading routes from Google Maps created on a computer. Creating routes on a phone (if they are not captured by GPS) can be quite challenging.
- C|NET
I saw an interesting new, low-tech crowdsourcing idea over the weekend. A while paper ad, the kind with paper strips at the bottom to tear off, was tacked to a tree on one of my favorite streets in the city. The text: "Would you raise a child here?" The rip off strips were printed half with "yes" and half with "no." Three "yes's" were gone and all the "no's" remained.
- eye witness account, Hancock St. in Somerville
Back in June for UK Bookseller's Week the Guardian crowdsourced a map of independent book sellers (and hoped reader would buy books there). It was an update of a Flickr map project from the year before.
This week we're building a tweet map of our book-buying hive mind. Just tweet us @guardianbooks with the title of the book you've bought, the name and postcode of the bookshop where you bought it and the hashtag #indybooks, and we'll assemble a map of independent action.
- The Guardian
by Adena Schutzberg on 08/16 at 03:56 AM |
Comments |
Narrow your search further:
bmw,
breastfeeding,
crowdsourcing,
favorite routes,
google maps,
independant book stores,
low tech,
mobile app,
new york,
the guardian,
twitter,
vgi
NTT DoCoMo Inc has partnered with US social networking service Twitter Inc to jointly develop a location based alert service for smartphone users based on tweets, according to the report in the Nikkei business daily.
- E-Commerce Journal
The research, from comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), found that in the U.S. in March, 16.7 million people used check-in services on their mobile devices. But that’s not actually a very big number: it works out to only 7.1 percent of all mobile users.
- MocoNews
- press release
Samsung and SCVNGR are hosting a citywide treasure hunt in Kansas City where the winning team can take home $20,000.
- GPS Biz News
by Adena Schutzberg on 05/18 at 05:11 AM |
Comments |
