Twitter and Disease Outbreaks

I read an article that says that Twitter can be used to track Disease Outbreaks.  While not a lot of useful information for such a thing comes out of twitter, everybody on twitter like to complain that they are sick or can't go into work etc. and some people even have GPS locations attached to their tweets.  This gives researchers a very good resource so they can see when multiple people from an area start tweeting about the same symptoms.  They can monitor the progression of the disease by seeing from which locations the tweets come from over time.  But sometimes people complain but do not have a location attached, so such information can often be found from their profile.  The article says though that some people will mess the surveys up will traveling or if on their homepage it says that they are located in: "Somewhere in my imagination" or in "Gondor, Middle-Earth" etc.  So sometimes it's tricky, and the researchers don't get nearly as much information as they wanted to, but with what they have they can potentially help a lot with.  One of these ways is when they are tracking a disease they can tell Twitter about it and they can send a kind of warning message to everybody telling them about the progression so as to prevent so many people from getting sick.  While such a power could potentially be abused, I have faith that the Researchers at BYU will not abuse the power they have discovered.

Article: http://news.byu.edu/archive13-jan-twitter.aspx

Remain watchful!

People can be so ignorant and arrogant.  They assume that because they do not know something exists, then it does not.  A tricky statement, but very true.  This happened in the book The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.  The people in the book refused to learn about the existence of computer insecurity, and so they assumed it just didn't exist.  To those who did learn to believe, most of them assumed nothing bad would ever happen to them.  I like to sit back and laugh at how foolish they were, but at the same time, I fall victim to the very same thing.  I assume that bad things won't happen to me, and so I'm often not prepared or I haven't taken the necessary precautions to protect myself from harm.  Sometimes it is monetarily or time expensive to do so, and so these people in the book who were the victims of the hacks were justified in their course of action until disaster hit. Now suddenly the disaster has hit, and all of a sudden it is a lot more expensive to fix the damage than it would have been to prevent it from ever happening.  While we as humans see this all the time--and it happens to us a lot individually--we still sometimes fail to grasp this concept of being prepared. Don't waste too many hours protecting yourself from hackings and other such attacks.  The author spent too much time chasing down this hacker, and while the ends may have justified the means, he almost lost his job, his relationship with his girlfriend, and the many other things that should be more prominent in our lives.  We need to look out for ourselves, always keeping one eye looking forward and one eye looking back.  We must always remain wary.

Women and Computers

Why don't we see too many women in the Computer Science field?  The question doesn't make a whole lot of sense because, in my family, there are a lot of Computer Science majors.  I have six sisters, and a third of them (two) are CS majors, and my younger sister might do it as well (so that would be half of them).  So to me it has always seemed normal.  But why?  Well, I read the article called Women, Mathematics, and Computing by Paul De Pamla. He spoke a lot about how he thought it was because CS isn't a very mature field, and not as precise as mathematics, etc. and he proposed a way to fix it by making it more like mathematics and like.  However, my older sister Melissa hates math.  She hates it so much, in fact, she detests it and she can hardly stand to look at it.  Why is she a CS major then?  Well, I believe it's attributed to her creative and puzzle-solving nature.  Even as a young girl Melissa (and my other two sisters who are doing or might do CS) loved puzzles.  Melissa would work into the night on these huge puzzles of 1000+ pieces.  Why?  Because she loved it!  A puzzle can be solved many ways, put together different pieces at a time, but it still looks and works the same at the very end regardless of the approach, but different approaches are faster than others.  This is very similar to programming, which is what I think drove them to it.  So the question is still open.  The women in CS are growing, but so are the men, and maybe the men are just growing faster.  I don't think the studies have gone far enough to figure out why.  It might even be because of the quality of the men in the field.  One of my CS teachers once said (talking to the women): "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CCsQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.95.812%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=DePalma%2C%20%22Why%20Women%20Avoid%20Computer%20Science%22&ei=TZuzTLreKoeisQOx37yzCA&usg=AFQjCNHmZ1QHV0_ugH64A2qDh7o3oEwoSg&sig2=WP8JIFLGG5yDnhz9vgn_4w&cad=rja  (the link to download the pdf of the article)

Google and Security

When the Government demands information from Google, Google yields 88% of the time.  Interesting huh?  We could be under investigation and not even know it!  I read that there are certain pieces of information that they do not give up / cannot give up to them.  Although, if the Government wants to get traffic information about you, or what you have queried, then they need a search warrant, the same privacy that applies to the documents in your own home also apply to your online documents.  The same measures are required to obtain them if they can be obtained at all.  It's interesting. The Government is reaching farther and farther into companies, which in turn leads the Government's hand to reach into people's lives.  It's an intriguing idea, one that I'm not sure will ever stop growing.  It's the nature of our Government right now.  I think they have good intentions, and it's a smart idea, but it needs to be controlled, before our world turns into I-Robot or Eagle Eye....


http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/google-celebrates-data-privacy-day-discussing-its-practice-turning-over-data-government_698164.html