Author Archives: David

Google Flu Trendspotting

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Goog_trends_oz_die_hardGoogle Insights have been available publicly for some time. Users can enter multiple search terms and Google will report the search trends for these terms over time, and correlate it with major news articles, geographic source of search. It was typically associated with entertainment (“OZ”, “Die Hard”) variety, or perhaps political campaigning (“Joe the plumber”, “chartered school” etc.).

More recently though the underlying technology of mining the gazillions of Google searches each day was tuned towards a more social-good topic by Google.org (the charity arm of Google). One of the examples are tracking flu trends.

CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] uses a variety of methods to track influenza across the United States each year. One method relies on a network of more than 1500 doctors who see 16 million patients each year. The doctors keep track of the percentage of their patients who have an influenza-like illness, also known as an “ILI percentage”. CDC and state health departments collect and aggregate this data each week, providing a good indicator of overall flu activity across the United States.

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.

Here you can see the comparison of the results – it does seem like there’s a strong correlation between the actual medical report compiled by the CDC and Google’s terms. Could this be extended to a whole range of applications – epidemic outbreak, humanitarian situations, etc.?

google-trends-flu

Go to the Google.org article for a more detailed explanation.

Major League Baseball Logo

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major-league-baseball-logo

Did you know that the Major League Baseball logo was designed 40 years ago (1968) and have never been updated since?

Did you know that the baseball player in the logo was designed so that he can either be a right or left-handed batter?

I didn’t know either of those – this logo looked contemporary so I’ve always thought it was done or at least updated recently. Made me think about classic designs that can stand the test of time – all ye glossy bevels and reverse shadows, die!

And the left-right handed thing is somewhat like the arrow in the Fedex logo – once you know it you can’t un-see it.

Here’s an ESPN interview with the unacknowledged (officially) designer of the logo Jerry Dior, a 76-year old retired graphic designer.

[via Brand New]

LG Japan Concept Phones

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LG Japan organized a design competition for concept mobile phones – and the aesthetic mock-ups were shown at the Tokyo Design Week sometime back. The winner (pictured at the top) is called the Planet Phone:

[It is] a circular clamshell-style handset that features numerous LEDs embedded into the top half of the phone. Each of the small lights represents one of your friends. Those you keep in contact with remain near the center, but as you slowly lose touch with people they drift towards the edge and eventually off the display altogether. It’s supposed to prompt you to keep in touch with friends and remind you when you haven’t spoken to someone for a while.

At least in the concept phone arena, there does seem to be a trend towards making the phone less like a digital, consumer electronics but more poetic and metaphorical, such as those qualities displayed here by the Planet Phone.

Personally for me some of the other concepts didn’t feel too fresh – there have been concepts like these for some time now (at least from what I can see and infer from the image/descriptions. From top left, “Temperature” phone where your contacts are in the format of physical tiles that can be exchanged and used to compose your own unique phone; “Ring” with a rotary dial that doubles up as the camera viewfinder; “Tap” where you can switch between modes by flipping it like a light switch and “fbt” with Braille input/output.

[PC World has the write-up]

Amazing Gear Heart

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Wow, this is simply an incredible motion sculpture. Initially it looks like it’s simply a heart composed of carved gears of various proportions coming together to form a shape – but when the motion starts magic happens, as gears of various ratios engage each other in a most harmonious way.

If you look closely enough you’d also notice that on each gear the spacing between the teeth are also varying to accommodate for the variation due to turning. It must have taken gazillion tries (or, genius mathematical calculation) before the gears can be totally in sync – and even reform back to the heart shape after a few cycles.

Magnificent!

Touchscreen moves out of the Screen

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While the world’s ooh-ing and ah-ing with Microsoft Surface some time ago for its engaging and intuitive interaction, researchers within the campus are moving on to yet another interesting interface – touch control but out of the screen.

Called SideSight, the interface allows you to control a phone placed on a table by wiggling your fingers in the space around it. This helps to solve the problem that a touch screen is limited by the need for fingers to touch it – thereby limiting how small the screen can go.

Personally I see application of this more outside of the phone though – how often do you place a phone down on the table? But think about things like ultramobile laptops and stuff – a virtual trackpad if you will – and things start getting more interesting.

[via New Scientist]

Magic Wand

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Mmm… cool toy! Cool science behind – check; Easy to use – check; Effects that make others go WOAH – check!

“Todays magic is tomorrow’s science”… as we always say here at ThinkGeek. Now you can get a bit of magic for yourself with this amazing Fly Stick Van de Graaff Levitation Wand.

This battery powered wand features a mini Van de Graaff generator inside. Push a button on the handle and the static charge built up in the wand causes the included 3D mylar shapes to levitate at your command. You can also do some cool tricks causing the shapes to jump back and forth from your hand to the wand. Not quite Harry Potter… but hey, we do our best for you.

Get it at ThinkGeek or at Amazon.

Body Motion Signature

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body-motion-signature-green-dot-project

As if there aren’t already enough biometric identification information – from the basic fingerprint, to iris scan, voice and speech patterns, etc. – experts are developing a new way of identifying people – by their unique body motions:

Titled the Green Dot Project:

To identify who is in the video, the computer first looks for movement in the scene. Green dots indicate motion. As the video plays, and the computer collects motion data, it can eventually isolate and identify the human. The moving bar chart shows a comparison of the motion signatures of Senator Obama, Senator McCain, and President Bush as the computer is collecting data.   The blue bar represents “Obama-ness”. Red represents “McCain-ness”. White represents “Bush-ness”. By the end of these short clips, the computer can tell us which person is in each video. You can choose to listen to the audio, but the computer uses only movement data to detect the body signature.

Check it out!