Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [122]
p 93: The paper describing the use of Google search queries to track the flu is [71].
p 93: Influenza annual mortality rates are from the World Health Organization [244].
p 93: The Spanish flu mortality rate is from [219].
p 94: The Google Flu Trends website is http://www.google.org/flutrends.
p 94: The CDC/General Electric system for tracking influenza is described in [136].
p 94: The follow-up study showing that Google Flu Trends is better at tracking influenza-like illnesses than it is at tracking laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza is [163].
p 94: On the use of search queries to predict unemployment, see [6]. On the use of search queries to predict housing prices, see [245]. On the use of search queries to help improve predictions for how well songs will do on the charts, see [73]. For a broad range of applications, see [42]. A study using Twitter to predict movie box-office revenue is [7]. Finall see [11] for a thought-provoking discussion of Google as a “database of [human] intention.”
p 95: For Eric Schmidt on privacy, see [64].
p 96: The phrase “unknown knowns” was suggested in this context by Jen Dodd and Hassan Masum, inspired by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s famous use [188] of “unknown unknowns.”
p 97: The discovery of the Sloan Great Wall of galaxies is described in [77]. The Sloan Great Wall galaxies don’t appear to be gravitationally bound together, and so some astrophysicists don’t regard them as a single structure. However, much of the story told in this section carries over to several other large-scale features of the universe—my choice of the Sloan Great Wall was somewhat arbitrary.
p 100: The discovery of the many dwarf galaxies near to the Milky Way was described in multiple papers. For an overview, see http://www.sdss.org/signature.html.
p 100: The discovery of the orbiting black holes was described in [25]. In the text I state that Boroson and Lauer searched through galaxy images from the SDSS. To be a bit more precise, they searched through a selection of 17,500 quasars, a special type of galaxy known to contain supermassive black holes. For more on what quasars are and why they’re interesting, see the description on page 130. Note that there has been considerable follow-up discussion in the astronomy and astrophysics community of whether the discovery in [25] is, in fact, of a pair of orbiting black holes, or perhaps something else. This conversation is ongoing.
p 101: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey was described in [247]. The citation numbers for this paper are from the service Google Scholar. The numbers are conservative, since they do not include citations to subsequent data releases, and many other key papers from the SDSS.
p 102: The SDSS has codified many of their policies about collaboration and data sharing at http://www.sdss.org/collaboration/. It makes surprisingly stimulating reading.
p 102: The SDSS SkyServer is at http://skyserver.sdss.org.
p 104: On Watson, Crick and Franklin, see Watson’s memoir, The Double Helix [234].
p 105: The webpage for stage III of the SDSS is at http://www.sdss3.org.
p 105: My account of the Ocean Observatories Initiative is based on the project website, at http://www.oceanleadership.org/programs-and-partnerships/ocean-observing/ooi/, and [50].
p 106: Mapping the brain is far too large a subject for me to give a comprehensive list of references. An overview of work on the Allen Brain Atlas may be found in Jonah Lehrer’s excellent article [120]. Most of the facts I relate are from that article. The paper announcing the atlas of gene expression in the mouse brain is [121]. Overviews of some of the progress and challenges in mapping the human connectome may be found in [119] and [125].
p 108: Bioinformatics and cheminformatics are now well-established fields, with a significant literature, and I won’t attempt to single out any particular reference for special mention. Astroinformatics has emerged more recently. See especially [24] for a manifesto on the need for astroinformatics.
p 113: A report on the 2005 Playchess.com