Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Typhoid Mary Tracking

If the U.S. government, utilizing research being funded by the U.S. Navy, considers the spread of “revolutionary” ideas as infectious, then I want to be just like Typhoid Mary.

With funding from the Office of Naval Research, a team at Aptima, Inc. is developing software that’d do more than just scan Twitter for trending topics. Instead, it’d mine the web, including news stories, social networks and blogs, to extract topics and phrases that are gaining traction online. Then, the software would keep tabs on how the conversations proliferate, both geographically and over time.

The software would use epidemiological modeling to chart the discussions and their trajectory…

Applied to online discourse, epidemiological models would essentially treat uprisings like illnesses. They’d pull apart a web conversation (the author of the post, the site where it was published, the comments that ensued) and try to figure out which parts contributed most readily to the spread of a revolutionary message.

Cairo Contagion: Military Tracks Uprising’s ‘Infectious’ Ideas

Linked via Fred Lapides.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/25 at 10:43 AM
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