Digital early-warning health system
TED Prize winner, Dr. Larry Brilliant: public health guru (he helped eradicate smallpox), visionary technologist (co-founded The Well, a legendary online community), activist, author, and founder of the Seva Foundation wants build a powerful new early-warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares. The system is to be called INSTEDD (International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection).
In his own words, 'I've been in conversations with WHO, CDC, Johns Hopkins and the other universities from the Pandefense "consortium" about using the prize to build a virtual earth with multiple webcrawlers, infobots, comparative historical databases, hi-res coordinated satellite photography, IM and text messaging - for the earliest possible detection of new outbreaks of bird flu, novel diseases like SARS and ebola, as well as new emerging biological threats, whether bio-terror or bio-error.
The world would not today be playing catch up with new pandemics if we had such a system in place 30 years ago; governments would not be able to hide cases of bird flu or genocide, they would not be able to delay reporting cases of polio and the world would have an entirely different view of emerging new communicable diseases if such a system were operative.
I don't know if you know that SARS was first discovered by a group in Canada following up on reports from a webcrawler about cases of fever, even though the first cases were in China.'
Rachel pointed me here. Check it out. It's very interesting.
Declan Butler, the person behind this effort, developed a visualization of avian flu outbreaks in the first online map of each of the more than 1800 individual outbreaks of avian flu in birds that have been reported over the past two years. It also provides a geographical overview of confirmed human cases of infection with the H5N1 influenza virus. There is also an accompanying paper on Nature.com but unfortunately, only for 'Premium plus subscribers'.
Too bad. That's doesn't help but still, it's a great start. Maybe Declan will open the paper up - kudos if he does!
What's interesting about this - apart from the novel idea of spotting outbreaks around the physical world by scanning the information shadow they leave in the digital cyberworld - is that to work it depends critically on having free access to as much information and as many scientific and medical reports as possible.
Indeed, this seems a clear case where it could be claimed that not providing open access in relevant areas - and the range of subjects that are relevant is vast - is actually endangering the lives of millions of people.
Something for publishers and their lawyers to think about, perhaps.
In his own words, 'I've been in conversations with WHO, CDC, Johns Hopkins and the other universities from the Pandefense "consortium" about using the prize to build a virtual earth with multiple webcrawlers, infobots, comparative historical databases, hi-res coordinated satellite photography, IM and text messaging - for the earliest possible detection of new outbreaks of bird flu, novel diseases like SARS and ebola, as well as new emerging biological threats, whether bio-terror or bio-error.
The world would not today be playing catch up with new pandemics if we had such a system in place 30 years ago; governments would not be able to hide cases of bird flu or genocide, they would not be able to delay reporting cases of polio and the world would have an entirely different view of emerging new communicable diseases if such a system were operative.
I don't know if you know that SARS was first discovered by a group in Canada following up on reports from a webcrawler about cases of fever, even though the first cases were in China.'
Rachel pointed me here. Check it out. It's very interesting.
Declan Butler, the person behind this effort, developed a visualization of avian flu outbreaks in the first online map of each of the more than 1800 individual outbreaks of avian flu in birds that have been reported over the past two years. It also provides a geographical overview of confirmed human cases of infection with the H5N1 influenza virus. There is also an accompanying paper on Nature.com but unfortunately, only for 'Premium plus subscribers'.
Too bad. That's doesn't help but still, it's a great start. Maybe Declan will open the paper up - kudos if he does!
What's interesting about this - apart from the novel idea of spotting outbreaks around the physical world by scanning the information shadow they leave in the digital cyberworld - is that to work it depends critically on having free access to as much information and as many scientific and medical reports as possible.
Indeed, this seems a clear case where it could be claimed that not providing open access in relevant areas - and the range of subjects that are relevant is vast - is actually endangering the lives of millions of people.
Something for publishers and their lawyers to think about, perhaps.
posted by J David Galipeau at Sunday, March 26, 2006
Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents (PDF 1.2 MB)
1 Comments:
Thx for the comment - True on all point - Larry Brilliant is actually basing his future work on the Canadian version - GPHIN - but the point is - as you say - the access to future information.
My opinion is that the business models applied to this type of information will become very important (unless you have the support and, needs to be said, the money that Larry has).
My prediction is that these unique information models will not be free. IOs have got to increase there quality and reach in order to compete. Do they have the motivation?
In an environment where academic funding is being tightened, IP, and the ability to turn IP into $$s, has becomes very important.
I think that IP based on the 'uniqueness' of data models is starting to rear its head within patent offices around the world.
but that's a different post :-)
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