Twitter allows millions of social media fans to comment in 140 characters or less on just about anything - from an actor's outlandish behaviour to an earthquake's tragic toll. But by sifting through this busy flood of banter, is it possible to also track important public health trends? Two Johns Hopkins University computer scientists would respond with a one-word tweet: "Yes!" Mark Dredze and Michael J. Paul fed two billion public tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 into computers, and then used software to filter out the 1.5 million messages that referred to health matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment