I give up; where is he?
One guy's "quirky idea" of tracking currency via www.wheresgeorge.com may help us prepare for future pandemics.
I ran across this article in today's Orlando Sentinel, and think it's a great example of that lightbulb moment when ideas connect. I've never been a "Georger" but I definitely will find the time to do it now.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orange/
orl-george3106may31,0,2321534.story?
coll=orl-home-headlines
. . . or just Google the words where's george pandemic and you should get several versions of the story.
posted by Kathy at 5/31/2006 09:03:00 AM
6 Comments:
That's a very interesting article. I'd never heard of the whole 'where's George' phenomenon but what a cool idea! It reminds me of that old story about a gun and all the hands it passes through over the course of its 'life,' if you will.
But I think I'm missing something here. How does this tie in, or rather, how are they going to apply this to tracking the bird flu? I re-read the article and I still don't understand. What exactly do they plan on tracking using this idea?
I'm not sure I really understand it but it seems to be tied to following patterns of human travel, and apparently there is a parallel between the movements of the currency and the movements of human travellers. If they can identify travel patterns and vectors, they can predict the paths a disease would use to spread. Previous pandemics occurred before people were as mobile as they are now so old models and rules don't apply.
"Over time, as different people enter the same bill, the game builds up a picture of how the money is moving, said Dirk Brockmann, Ph.D., of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization here.
But since paper money -- like viruses -- travels with people, the game also allowed the researchers to model how humans move through the world, without actually tracking them, Dr. Brockmann said
"The enormous amount of data, as well as the geographical and temporal resolution of bill-tracking, allows us to draw conclusions about the statistical characteristics of human travel," he said.
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I'll take his word for it.
So I think how it works is that I write (in pencil) the where's george address on the edge of any bills I have (some people have stamps made up), enter the bill info on the site, and then go spend 'em. And when I get a marked bill, I enter its info.
So are they saying they will be able to predict where a pandemic might spread, based on known patterns of human movement and travel?
It's an interesting concept but surely there would have to be other factors taken into consideration. Say a flu starts in Germany and then Canada stops allowing flights into the country from there.
But I'm sure they've thought of that.
Yeah, I think that's basically it; but say you did know some travel patterns of people going in and out of the German town that was Ground Zero, from having followed the money. This might tell you much more specific places to quarantine in hopes of early containment -- the weekend market one town over, a traveling vendor who could carry it on his route, etc. etc. I can kind of see how the money paths could reveal information not as obvious as the need to shut down flights. Of course this could be an illusion on my part!
Okay, the light bulb is going off somewhat dimly over my head now. So they're actually going to use the money-tracking itself to try to predict where the disease might spread to. I thought they were just going to use the basic concept and apply it in a different way somehow.
"Dr. Brockmann and his colleagues got records of almost a half-million currency movements from the website, which they then analyzed to produce a set of rules that could guide epidemiologists and public health officials as they prepare for the spread of a disease such as avian flu.
"Once they had the data, it was a matter of finding the right mathematical equations to describe the movement of money ... or people, people who might carry disease."
Thank heaven it's not up to me to do that.
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