Swine Flu!

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

OMG!

Thanks to niman in Pittsburgh for this swine flu map. Check it out and imagine you are in a sci fi thriller.

If you like that sort of thing.

Great News About Oregon's Unemployment Rate

There is a silver lining in our economic cloud.

Yesterday's Oregonian reported an inverse relationship between employment and mortality. Professor Christopher Ruhm at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found that for each 1% increase in the unemployment rate, there is a 1/2% decrease in the mortality rate.

So, in just the last year alone, the 6.5% increase in our unemployment rate has saved lives right here in Oregon.

According to Ruhm's study, this increase should correlate to a 3.25% decrease in our death rate, which was around 775 people per 100,000 in 2006. 3.25% x 775 = 25.1875, reducing our mortality rate to around 750 people per 100,000. With a population of 3,747,455, this means 925 lives were saved!

Or, looking at it another way, each 1% increase in the unemployment rate saves 142 lives!

Small Town Eyes / Streetview Rejection / Beetle + Machine = ?

Pendleton, Oregon, a small town in Northeastern Oregon, is installing police-monitored surveillance cameras. The Oregonian's Richard Cockle puts it nicely when he writes, "But despite the specter of '1984'-style government monitoring, the system has stirred little debate among Pendleton's 17,000 residents."

The best part: "The first camera -- and the only one expected to have public Internet access -- will be installed in June at a new skate park. Residents, Graham said, will be able to make sure their kids are behaving."

Man, parents just don't understand.

Seriously though, using surveillance to check up on your kids is eerie -- baby monitors aside. I'm relieved I came of age during the pager era.

In other surveillance news, residents of Broughton, England chased away the Google Streetview car, fearing that would-be criminals would use the internets to case their luxurious homes. (Word to criminals: there are a lot of valuables in Broughton, England, according to many news stories which are much more prominent than Broughton's Streetview debut ever would have been.)

Early readers of this blog are aware of my love affair with Streetview.

And in a combo of two of my favorite topics -- cyborgs and surveillance: cyborg surveillance beetle. I am not kidding. I just read about it in Discover, one of my favorite mags. And here I link to the Science Channel's article about the topic. Check out this link for a photo. Serious kudos to Al Jazeera for reporting this story back in June 2008 -- and much more thoroughly than I've seen elsewhere.

These are the ultimate swarm bots.

It is incredible to consider a bio-mechanical creature that actually exists. I am a cyborg enthusiast, but... of course it would be the Pentagon, home of the predator drone, that gets there first.

See you at the singularity. (See also.)

"I Googled {insert concept here} and it had 5,783,928 hits."

How many times have you heard a speaker say that for emphasis? It is irritating and betrays a basic lack of understanding of how search works.

Duh, they should be using Google Trends -- an oldie (in internet terms), but a goodie, and always worth a mention.

There, I mentioned it.

Speaking of Google Trends, I have just been terribly ill with the flu. Excuses, so many, for not blogging. I am not entirely alone, although it appears the season peaked in March. Poor Montana though. Apparently the spring thaw is rough.

So why all this talk of trends?

I was noticing repeated reference to "reset" as a concept embracing hope that we can undo all the damage that has been done in recent times, relative to what the invoker of "reset" perceives said damage to be. This is in no small part due to the Obama administration's use of the term, including Hillary Clinton's recent hijinks with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

And then I was curious as to whether a new buzzword was growing. Certainly the term has currency right now. But will it stick? Is it picking up steam?

So, I thought, "I should search it in Google news." And ran into the "I Googled It..." problem, particularly since I am searching a common word.

I decided to do an advanced search on headlines only, to see if any interesting numbers popped out at me (very unscientifically, I might add).

Some sample headlines from the last month:

"Pressing the reset in the salmon debate"

"Editorial: Hitting the reset button"

"Chavez hopes to 'reset' US-Venezuela relations"

And some others. I also learned that "reset" often makes the headlines in reference to trial dates. All in all, I found 444 articles with "reset" in the headline in the past 30 days. And I realized I had fallen squarely into the "I Googled It" trap again. Only an in-depth textual analysis would do the job.

And then I ran into William Safire's article on this topic, and decided to give it up altogether.

Sorry, dear readers, still boggled by the flu, and even this cat's curiosity runs out from time to time.

The Map Sale is Back!

Portland State University's semi-annual map sale is back! I went last time, and found some really neat maps. They even had some 3D topo maps. Most, but not all of the maps were of the Pacific Northwest.

The sale is Wednesday, April 8th from 10 am - 3 pm on the 4th floor of Cramer Hall, 1721 SW Broadway Avenue. It benefits the Friends of Geography (warning -- site appears to be very outdated).

See ya there, map nerds.