Very interesting attitude toward the use of personal information.
http://arxivblog.com/?p=1199
If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent
simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your
simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and
gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from
home to work and which people share homes.
But making this data realistic would be hard. After all, would anybody
willingly agree to have their real data entered into such a simulation?
Actually yes. Swedes. All nine million of them.
Yep, the personal details of the entire Swedish population have been
used to create what must be the world’s largest and most realistic
computer simulation of the way infectious diseases spread.
Lisa Brouwers at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control
and buddies have built a simulation called Microsim in which every
member of the Swedish population is represented with details including
their sex, age, family status, school, workplace and their geographic
location at these places to within 100 metres.
That makes for potentially fantastic simulations but it also raises
extraordinary questions over privacy. The data is only minimally
anonymized: each individual is given a random identifier but otherwise
their personal data is intact.
Given that the team is combining data from three different sources,
this doesn’t sound like nearly enough protection.
But Brouwers must know what she’s doing. Or at least be praying that
the rest of Sweden doesn’t find out what she’s done.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0902.0901: MicroSim: Modeling the Swedish Population
Jason Nolan, PhD
Assistant Professor
Ryerson University
Room KHS 350
350 Victoria Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 2K3
ph: +1-416-979-5000 x7030
fax: +1-416-979-5239
http://ryerson.ca/~jnolan
School of Early Childhood Education - http://www.ryerson.ca/ece/
MA program in Early Childhood Studies - http://tinyurl.com/6oarhn
Graduate program in Communications and Culture - http://comcult.ryerson.ca/
Learning Inquiry Journal - http://learning-inquiry.info
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