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    Quarantine: Use personal communication networks to set up a monitoring system

    Punctual information on new disease foci might help map the diffusion of ReDS and build prediction models

    Started by: Steamdave Raves:9 Badge Winner! Longbroading

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    Personal communication systems (cell-phones, netbooks etc) are sufficiently widespread to allow a punctual monitoring of the disease. A single man walking down the street with a cell phone, checking out houses and recording infected individuals, might help build a model of the disease spreading pattern, and at the same time allow faster deployment of health care and better prevention tactics. The system should be reasonably cheap to set up and might provide a huge almost-real-time database for medical and statistical researchers.

    We have already launched the Panda - Pandemic Surveillance System. Information available here: http://superstruct.wikia.com/wiki/Panda_-_Pandemic_Surveillance_System

    Your intentions are good, but I honestly feel that this won't work. Even ignoring the significant threat of hacking, either to add or remove infected areas or simply crash the entire system, people can and probably will make false reports about people they don't like. That'll tie up time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Unfortunately, I don't have a better idea.

    Then we work with a bad one until we come up with a better one. Nobody found mosaic particularly great, now when Netscape came out that was the fun part, it knocked off Mosaic, and then upped the ante. It brought the web to the masses in a user friendly way. Although, I have never been found of what I've read about Andreesens ego.

    Besides the beauty of this system is that it's self correcting. For every person that's malicious you're going to have contravening data that shows it. And quite frankly they don't have the choice of false or true reporting. The system has been turned on regardless of what people think about it. It's been pushed down to every account. It can run in an ad-hoc mode until the servers are brought back up. And using the pirate bay model, our servers are spread across the various continents along with some satellites we've shot up on old Delta-IV's. The Air Force cut me a deal. Plus, we flashed some new software into some other satellites (the NRO was pissed!). It kind of helps when you're organization is operating under congressional mandate and executive order.

    The master-slave replication and peering master to master replication in databases had been figured out and more or less solved by the end of 2010.

    We can peer databases, do self correcting among them and further kick the reports out to analysts in matters of disagreements among the servers.

    It's not AI, but is a very well designed forward chained expert system. All we're really talking about is supply chain management and applying it to pandemics.

    All of the technology was available in '08. The automated video analysis was parroted from VIRAT a DARPA project. The pressure sensors became standard starting with iPhone, Android later on, and got far cheaper when Dallas Semiconductor put them out. The RFID tags became more flexible and far smaller allowing for chain stores, clothing companies to not only identify products that were official and products that were black market knockoffs, but also made part of the military's command and control software Blue Force Tracker. The only thing that limited deployment of something like Panda was the dearth of people experienced in expert systems, the initial lack of touch screens with appropriate sensors, and scale of electronics.

    As soon as the complexity software surpassed the ability of hardware to handle it, we were in a rut.

    Congress early on enacted the clipper chip and later on passed a more powerful version of it.

    If you want to look at the history, and most of the inspiration behind PANDA. The links are below

    VIRAT

    https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=1033f2c5c507d57449a570538fbe21df&tab=core&_cview=1&cck=1&au=&ck=

    Ad-Hoc Networks

    http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/itmanet/itmanet.asp

    Identification

    http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?IA=US2000019652&DISPLAY=DESC

    Blue Force Tracker

    http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=35fd8857-c9fe-4036-8739-15f2f8ebd0f6

    Master-Master DB Replication

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-master_replication

    Most innovations don't come from a stunning insight. They usually come from crap we've already done before combined in a new manner.

    E-mail, superseded postal mail. It made it more efficient transmitting letters and words over a wire. Earlier than email was the telegraph.

    Visual analysis, utilized cameras strapped to planes, and then later on cameras strapped to satellites. Nothing revolutionary there.

    And finally reporting on pandemics by utilizing information from the field. Larry Brilliant and the folks stamping out smallpox used fliers and canvased the areas repeatedly. It took longer than PANDA. But same concept

    I agree with Nick Resonance. You've done a good job indicating that this CAN be done, but haven't made a convincing case that it SHOULD be done. The argument that the system is "self-correcting" controverts much historical precedent that giving the masses trusted access to be able to insert data into ANY system throws serious aspersions upon the reliability and veracity of the data...practically requiring centralized fact-checking and editorial power (case in point: the corporate co-option of Wikipedia, which Wales sold to Microsoft for an undisclosed sum in 2014). Without a concurrent, serious discussion about security and the reliability of data generation sources, this admittedly good idea could founder quite spectacularly.

    Open source monitoring could use off the shelf mapping statistical analysis software and mapping software, as well as online communication to perform analysis, and keep the network updated as to the spread and changes in the disease process.

    Our community has placed look outs in strategic places, most of which are ancient look out areas of Indian Tribes documented by archeologists at the Museum of Northern Arizona. A messenger system has been set in place with complex foreign language codes, and wilderness survival skills. Northern Arizona University has provided education for Flag Mountain community members in local Indian languages such as Navajo, Supai, Hopi, and Walapai.




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