There's a lot of noise out there on the internet!
The shear volume of information that people are now posting on the internet has opened the door for actually valuable trends to be found within the data. This data creates an amazing cross-section of human kind and everything that it is. That being said humans being the greedy animals that we are this data has been used far more for things like advertising strategies, stock market predictions, and political polls, but we may finally gain actually value of life for posting our collective lives for the world to see.
University of Pennsylvania psychologists have pretty accurately predicted heart disease rates in 1,347 counties by looking at over 148 million tweets from those areas.
Can you blame me that when I first saw the article title "Twitter Can Tell If You're More Likely To Get Heart Disease" in Popular Science I immediately assumed #BigMac or would have something to do with their prediction? However according to the researchers, they ignored obvious facts like eating habits and instead relied upon determining the emotion of a tweet; where negative, stressed or lack of sleep resulted in a higher risk. Their analysis took the seeming randomness of life's emotions and outcomes and found that it wasn't so random, in fact entire neighborhoods were profiled for creating or enabling certain effects on the inhabitants. Now what sort of other applications could this be used for? I think we are on the verge of realizing that the constant chronicling of our lives could give us more than "likes" but rather medical diagnoses and even preemptive health warnings.
If my unnecessary knowledge of science fiction can be useful at all; we have a tall task ahead of us to responsibly use this information. The human imagination has dreamed up amazing hypotheticals, ranging from crime prediction (which is well on its way to happening, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428354/la-cops-embrace-crime-predicting-algorithm/), to computers organizing to usurp power from humans (like movies I, Robot, The Matrix, Terminator). These are just ideas people came up with to sell a few books and make a couple million at a box office, I shiver to think what people will do when true predictive power is available. That being said I don't see the world's desire to share with strangers of the internet changing anytime soon, I'm glad there's some good being done with all the noise.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI really liked what you wrote here. Since I am not an avid tweeter, Facebook poster, or instagramer I never really see all that people post out there. It never even occurred to me that information people put out there could be used to come to a medical conclusion. Based off of what I have read online or have been told is out there, I think this same line of thinking could be used to help people struggling with depression. There are so many ways that people these days can cry out for help, and still it is ignored or unnoticed. If there was a way read the emotion of tweets or posted to track those who could be possibly depressed I think it could help other greatly and even save lives. This was a very enlightening post, who would have thought that what might seem to be useless information that people post could actually be helpful in bettering their lives.
This is a pretty good article Matt, I like what you have here. When I heard "predict heart attacks," I was thinking the same things with #BigMac. But it is incredible that they have this technology. As you mentioned, they are working on several other prediction algorithms including crime prevention, it really makes you think what they will be able to do in a few years. I also liked when you talked about the "noise" out on the internet. I realized this for myself about 2 years through my twitter. I couldn't take it anymore so I ended up just deleting it. The funny thing is, Facebook is probably worse in regards to "noise", but I can't seem to get myself to delete that.
ReplyDeleteMatt, One thing that stood out to me about your article was a small comment you made. I am addicted to Instagram and can plead guilty for not disconnecting with those people I barely know online. I don't know what the feeling is, but like you said, it says more about me than the internet. And it's an interesting thing that you pointed that out.
ReplyDelete