More fun with the flu
Scientists searching for hard data on how a pandemic might spread are looking to Where’s George, an internet site that tracks the movement of currency. EurekAlert! has the story:
Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.
“We were confident that we could learn a lot from the data collected at the www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking website, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations,” said Lars Hufnagel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of an article describing the research in the January 26 issue of the journal Nature.
This story has overwhelmed the servers at Where’s George, so it’s been a bit hard to test out. I loaded the one dollar I had in my wallet (pitiful) into the system, but so far I’m unable to see whether it took. Go try it for yourself.
For more fun with flu, see last year’s post The Perfect Circle of Spotlessness.
