Thinking differently about mapping disease

Two of my favorite podcasts to inspire me to think differently about understanding our world are TED talks and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society Audio Fishbowl.

The two videos below are talking about similar issues from a different perspective.

Emily Oster is looking at using economic measures to rethink how we understand the spread of AIDS in Africa, including how people respond to epidemic issues.

Nathan Eagle is discussing a very similar issue, exploring different ways to understand epidemiological issues, specifically focusing on cell phone data (CDR) that is collected primarily in Africa.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheons/2009/11/eagle

What both these talks suggest to me is that the need to understand the vast amounts of data we collect is essential. Eagle points out that analyzing CDR begins to show how the self-reporting that we rely on others to supply for research is fragile and often skewed by our own biases and perspectives. The good news is that using these new ubiquitous tools to collect data and building new models to understand the information we are collecting can yield powerful results.In both talks Oster and Eagle are able to flip conventional thinking on its head. Rather than mapping superficial ties, we can begin to understand strength of these ties and, which can lead to modeling of important issues like the spread of H1N1, which could potentially predicted and lead to precision interventions that address a specific location, rather than taking a policy cure from one country and trying to map it onto another.