interesting....
so they found a less accurate way to work out if it's raining then looking out the bloody window. Rube Goldburg would be proud.
Maths boffins of the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Lab have found another great use for Twitter – to work out if it's raining. They can also use the social network to monitor the prevalence of flu, according to freshly published research. Using "state of the art" algorithms, Professor Nello Cristianini and …
From the sidelines I suspect it's good at indicating colds, but I suspect people with actual flu wouldn't be posting at all. So not that useful unless they are analysing people who do post and then suddenly don't but had previously indicated they felt a bit snuffly.
IT? because. (The reg needs a statistics section).
My company did a research piece on Twitter Mining during the Swine Flu epidemic. We were looking at tracking the spread across the world as well as people's sentiments towards various things like vaccination, media reporting of it, government response, etc.
We also applied the same techniques to the UK general election as well as the live debate between Brown, Clegg and Cameron.
Currently several pharma companies are using the service for research purposes.
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...then one is stupid enough not to know how to figure out if it is raining or not outside their window...or anyone elses...regardless of where on the planet they may be.
But then again...being a shut-in...as Twitter Twits seemingly are...they probably couldn't figure it out on their own anyway. So this just might help the poor slobs.