Last fall, Google’s philanthropic division released Flu Trends, a tool that purportedly predicts regional influenza outbreaks 7-10 days faster than traditional methods. The bio-surveillance tool relies on the fact that people use Google to search flu-related terms well before calling their physicians.

Now, a study of similar methodologies appears to show that the Mountain View-based company’s omnipotence extends to the prediction of economic trends as well.

Hal Varian, an economics professor at UC Berkeley who moonlights as Google’s chief economist, and  Hyunyoung Choi, a Google employee tested the hypothesis that variations in search frequency for certain phrases improves the accuracy of econometric models used to forecast retail and home sales, among other things.

Such data are available to the public through Google Trends, which enables interested parties to access reports on search volumes for particular categories and terms. The reports are updated daily.

The scientists found that addition of such information improves the predictive value of the standard models used to forecast car and truck sales by 18%.

Similarly, search volume on terms like Hong Kong and other ports of call carried out in Australia, India, the UK and the US can foretell bumps in tourist volume to these locations.

The tool still needs refining, however. The scientists showed for example that searches for real estate agents are better predictors of future home sales than those for home financing.

People get attached to their Roombas.

They name their machines. They worry that repairs might change their Roomba’s personality. They paint them, dress them in costumes, even post videos of their Roomba in action.

Roboticists see opportunity in this behavior. If humans develop strong feelings about mindless floor cleaners, imagine how they might respond to “socially assistive” machines designed specifically to provide companionship and assistance to people; those with disabilities, for example.

Socially assistive robots, scientists hope, will one day assist stroke patients with rehab, stroll alongside dementia patients-perhaps helping them navigate hallways along the way, and help autistic kids improve interpersonal skills.

But they’ll reach their potential only if they can discern human emotion and intent, express something akin to feelings in response, and follow social conventions, according to Kerstin Dautenhahn, a professor at the School of Computer Science at the UK’s University of Hertfordshire.

“A socially ignorant robot always takes a direct path and interrupts at any point to do its task,” she explained to the Washington Post.

“But a socially (assistive) robot modifies its path to avoid getting too close to a human, waits until the right time to talk and fetches items without being asked.”

To accomplish this, new robots will use information obtained from sensors.

For example, motion detectors attached to the wrist allow robots to assess a human’s speed and direction. Heat sensors permit the robot to move toward or away from a warm body.

“People may be open to direct encouragement when they’re fresh and require more empathy when they’re tired,” notes Reid Simmons, a professor at Carnegie Mellon.

“So the robot may need to change its speech and expression, just as a therapist would.”

When Barack Obama’s economic Hail Mary cleared Congress, his e-team posted the legislation on whitehouse.gov with an open invitation to post comments. The bill was 1,071 pages long but responses were limited to 500 characters.

“Absurd,” cried Ellen Miller of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, who spoke for many.

A day later the e-team managed to bump the count to 5,000 while removing egg from its eye and chewing gum at the same time, but that was an inauspicious beginning for the geekocrats who had been canonized just months earlier for running the most tech savvy presidential campaign in history.

The Big O had hired Macon Phillips to be the White House director of new media, and immediately kinged him to special assistant with direct access to The Man and The Blackberry.

He envisioned whitehouse.gov to be his major communication platform, a digital Cape Canaveral from which he could launch gold nuggets that would rain down on supporters.

But the site, it turns out, doesn’t permit email blasts.

And the Presidential Records Act mandates that all White House written communications be preserved so Web pages on the site must be archived every time they’re modified, which gums up site refreshing.

“This is uncharted territory,” said Phillips, which we take to mean that no one tried to chart the territory before the Big O unpacked his gym bags on January 20.

But Phillips can point to progress. WhiteHouse.gov now has a blog, a YouTube channel, and a jobs link for example.

The first post on that blog announced that that all non-emergency legislation will be posted there for 5 days, giving the public a chance to review and comment before the president signed off.

That promise lasted until Congress passed the SCHIP extension and the Big O signed it 3 nanoseconds later.

Shortly after Russia’s brazen denial-of-service attack knocked Kyrgyzstan off the grid for a week, the impoverished nation’s president announced he was closing Manas Air Base, the US’ last remaining facility in Central Asia.

The Bear’s cyber-bullying had the Big O bumming since he planned to use the base as a staging ground for troops on their way to Afghanistan.

Still, that was small potatoes compared to the coordinated cyber-attacks on the Pentagon and other US agencies in 2007, which among other things infiltrated Robert Gates’ email.

The hack demonstrated for the once and future Defense Secretary that his country isn’t nearly as prepared to defend itself in a cyber war as it is to do so in a conventional military war.

Obama got the memo too. He just charged Melissa Hathaway to lead a 60-day review of America’s cyber security prowess, or lack thereof.

The more our government, financial systems and power grid rely on the Internet, the more exposed we become. Michael McConnell, who was National Intelligence Director under Bush Jr., told the Wall Street Journal that cyber security was “the soft underbelly of this country.”

Last year, Bush created the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative, a top-secret $6 billion program directed at shielding dot-gov and dot-mil Web sites with nuts and bolts security procedures ironically dubbed “Einstein.”

Cyber aggressors would likely cruise past such defenses without breaking a sweat, if they haven’t already.

The US government repels amateurish cyber attacks daily. Many are after weapon designs or classified communication.

Most appear to originate in China, though it’s not possible to know, the Internet being what it is.

There were 13,000 information security attacks in 2007 alone, according to the Wall Street Journal, and that’s not counting the ones we don’t know about.

 So far as the US public knows, no one’s launched a sophisticated, coordinated, sustained cyber-attack against the US since 2007.

Even if this has happened and we’ve defended ourselves fairly well, no one knows what will happen next time. (more…)

Last month Steve Jobs Who-is-Apple acknowledged that, 5 years after being treated for a rare neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas, he’s not altogether well.

Jobs emailed employees to say he’d be taking a 6-month leave from the company. His “health-related issues are more complex” than he’d known previously, and he’s cool with Tim Cook being “responsible for Apple’s day-to-day operations” while he’s gone.

Jobs Who-is-Apple also made it clear he’s coming back and he’s still CEO.

So now Tim Cook, Apple nation turns its lonely eyes to you.  Cook, Apple’s COO, has been running the show for years, but always with Jobs Who-is-Apple there to provide context not to mention the fairy dust.

Most people figured Cook would never cut it as Apple’s CEO, that he was an ops guy and not a visionary like Jobs Who-is-Apple.

But under these circumstances no one makes sense as a stand-in more than the guy who already oversees customer support, sales, the online store, the Macintosh division, and telecom relations not to mention operations.

But can he like, really do it all by himself?

“The company already has coalesced around (Cook),” a top Apple executive told Fortune, on condition of anonymity.

“Tim does almost nothing that would make you disrespect him, which you can’t always say about Steve,” he added.

It would have been the Tech story of the year but for now at least, a Twitter-Facebook hook-up is not going to happen.

Talks between the social network and the microblogging service began soon after Evan Williams became Twitter’s chief executive in mid-October, according to Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times. But they concluded abruptly after Williams rejected Facebook’s$500 million largely stock offer.

 “We explored it, as we should. We took it seriously,” Williams told the Times, “but it wasn’t the right time.”

It is the right time for Twitter to try making money, something it has not done yet despite its fantastic brand, 6 million registered users and $20 million in VC cash.

That’s not going to cut it during our economic crisis or as Williams put it, “I don’t want to have to raise money in 2009.”

Williams told the Times he wants to avoid an ad-based model and instead convince companies that use his site to interact with customers to pay for the privilege.  Dell, JetBlue, CNN, Whole Foods and others use Twitter this way.
 
Williams might have to buy a suit to pull this off since he candidly admits, “We have no business people in the company, so this isn’t an area we’re focused on.”

Yeesh!

Meanwhile, there’s competition from Yammer, a microblogging service for use by companies that started making money the day it went live, and old-school giants like Microsoft and Yahoo might enter the space.

But Williams remains undaunted. Twitter is after all just a 2 year-old company with 25 employees.  “Give us a minute,” he pleaded.

It was nice while it lasted, but the days when Web-based start-ups could focus on building traffic and cash in later on ad-based revenue models are going, going, gone.

Online display-ad spending will likely plummet in 2009, and probably stay low through at least part of 2010, and the line-up of affected companies looks like an Internet murderer’s row: Twitter, Facebook, AOL, CNET and Yahoo among others, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

In the Great Economic Crisis of 2008, Web companies need a balanced revenue model according to Roger Lee, a general partner from Battery Ventures.

Lee told the New York Times that most start-ups in his portfolio offer premium services, subscription products or e-commerce elements in addition to free services.

Pizaazz has covered several companies like this including comScore, LinkedIn, and Yammer.

Angie’s List does this as well. It provides reviews and ratings of local businesses for a monthly fee, as well as earning income from ads. World Golf Tour is yet another. The site lets people play famous golf courses for free on their computers, but charges tournament fees and has a virtual store that sells duds for avatars and tips from pros.

Or, as David Weiden said, “If a company approaches investors with a plan to lose money for three or four years while building an audience, it will encounter many closed doors.”

The partner at Khosla Ventures told the Times, “It’s gone from plausible to almost implausible.”

“What’s changed more than the ability to make money from ads is the ability to raise money at the same valuation it had six months ago (using an ad-based revenue model),” he added.

It’s a shame that blood pressure recordings from the doctor’s office aren’t great predictors of future cardiovascular events due to white-coat hypertension, but it is what it is.

The long-recognized phenomenon is characterized by office-based BP readings that are higher and more labile than those taken during the course of normal everyday life.

Thankfully, scientists have shown that ambulatory blood pressure recording devices provide useful predictive information, particularly in those having severe hypertension, a cardiac history, multiple cardiovascular risk factors, pregnancy and elderly folks.

Now Gil Salles and co-investigators at University Hospital Clementino Fraga Filho in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil have shown that ambulatory blood pressure recordings can predict CV risk in another subset of patients, the ones with resistant hypertension.

Sales’ was a prospective study of 556 patients with resistant hypertension, defined as persistently elevated blood pressure despite treatment with 3 anti-hypertensive agents.

After median follow-up of 4.8 years, the scientists found that 109 patients (19.6%) either died or incurred a cardiovascular event.

After controlling for age, gender, prior cardiac events and other CV risk factors, Salas’ group confirmed that office-derived blood pressure recordings were not predictive of future events, but higher mean ambulatory BPs did predict these events.

Ambulatory systolic and diastolic blood pressure recordings were both effective predictors, and nighttime recordings were superior to those obtained during the day.

Russia’s cyber attacks on Georgia and Estonia didn’t do it. A US citizen’s big hack into the Pentagon’s computer system didn’t do it. Even a special Congressional commission’s warnings about China’s advanced cyber warfare capabilities didn’t do it.

But Agent.btz did. When the embarrassingly simple, 3 year-old worm infected the bejeesus out of the whole US Army necessitating a costly pan-continental thumb-drive scrubbing, the US government finally got the message.

And now, maybe, it will get serious about beefing up the nation’s cyber security systems. 

The likely starting point will be National Security Presidential Directive 54 a program that has languished since the day President Bush signed it into law.

Directive 54 set aside $15 billion to develop a national cyber security program that would protect the federal government’s computers as well as critical energy, electric and water systems.

The main reason Directive 54 has gone nowhere is the lack leadership on the issue, according to a special commission set up by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

So the commission plans to recommend appointment of a cyber czar, a person that would report directly to the President and have at his or her disposal all the proper diplomatic, military and intelligence tools to confront cyber threats.

The recommendation is likely to trigger the same furious debate around privacy that surfaced during Bush’s domestic wiretapping caper, so the Big O, who long ago recognized the cyber problem and promised during the campaign to appoint a “national cyber adviser,” better save some chips.

Hopefully, the Big O prevails because according to the commission, “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration. The battle in cyberspace…is a battle we are losing.”

If small gangs of cybercriminals can outwit computer makers and antivirus vendors while raking in $100 billion per year in credit card theft and bank fraud, what’s to stop well-funded governments from conducting more sophisticated attacks like shutting down power plants or disrupting Internet traffic?

Not much, it turns out.

Russia proved that last summer. While its army was slicing and dicing Georgia, the Bear launched a distributed-denial-of-service attack on Georgian government Web sites that knocked out email service and public information access for days.

A year earlier, Russia launched a similar attack on Estonia disrupting among other things phone access to emergency services.

OK maybe these countries don’t have the latest, greatest security programs, but now the US Army has been hit. A piece of malware called Agent.btz has infected tens of thousands of thumb drives and memory cards throughout the Army.

Agent.btz is a worm that infects computers after the portable memory devices are inserted into them. Infected computers subsequently hooked up to the Internet automatically download programs enabling distant operators to access the hard drive.

It’s not clear who perpetrated the worm or why they did it but Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff thought it was important enough to brief President Bush on the matter last week.

And Agent.btz is not overly sophisticated. In fact it’s a variant of malware that’s been around for 3 years.

By contrast, Congress was warned last month by a special commission that “since China’s current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the US may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts.”

Meanwhile simple though Agent.btz may be, it costs a fortune to deal with. One commercial bank that got hit by the worm decided the best approach was to block its computers’ USB ports with glue.

The Army plans a different approach. It’s going to scrub every memory card in its 6-continent system. Tennnn-HUT!