<div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div style>OK - Last article I'm forwarding today.</div><div><br></div>New Nature article today on how and why Google Flu -- a social media powered algorithm for estimating Flu trends- vastly overestimated the flu outbreak this year in the US.<div>
<br><div><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/when-google-got-flu-wrong-1.12413">http://www.nature.com/news/when-google-got-flu-wrong-1.12413</a><br></div></div><div><br></div><div style>Sources external to Google says that it was most likely due to paranoia concerning the flu sparked by widespread media coverage including New York declaring a health emergency early on. This caused people to search for the flu at large scale, even when they weren't sick themselves - foiling Google's algorithm.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>The perils of using a secondary indicator to power inference!</div><div style><br></div><div style>Have a good weekend,<br></div><div style>Max</div></div>