Karie's shared items

Americans love to take their vitamins. More than 150 million Americans take dietary supplements annually, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a supplement industry trade group.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/us/...

Due to security concerns and record-keeping laws, Barack Obama will need to give up his BlackBerry and stop using email. Poor guy.

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I'm a huge animal lover, so when I came across Dogpile, a search engine site that is trying to raise $1 million before 2009 to donate to animals in need, I wanted to get involved immediately. With the way the economy is right now, charities often suffer and people are more apt to give away pets due to financial woes. Similar to GoodSearch, which donates money to the charity of your choice, Dogpile will donate a portion of its search revenue to helping our furry friends.

And on Wednesday, Dogpile launched a new search engine aggregator site called Dogpile Search and Rescue that will donate money to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) whenever you conduct a search. Don't expect Google, but just know how much you're helping out, just by doing what you would naturally do on the net!

Two precincts in South Boston and one in Dorchester, according to Matt O'Malley, who provides some interesting Boston numbers from this year's election. Overall, of course, Obama won big in Boston - O'Malley says one Roxbury precinct went for Obama by a 99.5 - 0.5 margin.

Bonus fun fact: There is a Harbor Islands precinct, with nine registered voters, none of whom bothered to vote.<!--break-->

Who loves black and white photography? The correct answer is: EVERYONE loves black and white photography!

Now you can shoot in romantic shades of gray on your iPhone — with the App Vint B&W.

Nothin' fancy, just simple black and whites, fit for a modern geek. And, totally free.

TECH BUZZ: Another step towards video chat ubiquity? Sadly, it may one day be impossible for slobs like me to hide behind the comfortable veneer of cellphones, email and IM, and our pathetic grooming habits will be on display for all to see.

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The Best Links:

1. Gmail Adds Voice and Video Chat
2. The Requisite, Cornball Intro Video to Gmail Video Chat

Like many Googlers, we're fascinated by trends in online search queries. Whether you're interested in U.S. elections, today's hot trends, or each year's Zeitgeist, patterns in Google search queries can be very informative. Last year, a small team of software engineers began to explore if we could go beyond simple trends and accurately model real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries. After meeting with the public health gurus on Google.org's Predict and Prevent team, we decided to focus on outbreaks of infectious disease, which are responsible for millions of deaths around the world each year. You've probably heard of one such disease: influenza, commonly known as "the flu," which is responsible for up to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. If you or your kids have ever caught the flu, you know just how awful it can be.

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.

We shared our preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC throughout the 2007-2008 flu season, and together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we're hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year.

We couldn't have created such good models without aggregating hundreds of billions of individual searches going back to 2003. Of course, we're keenly aware of the trust that users place in us and of our responsibility to protect their privacy. Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week. The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.

Flu season is here, so avoid becoming part of our statistics and get a flu shot! And keep an eye on those graphs if you're curious to see how the flu season unfolds...

Posted by Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Software Engineers