Sick and not sick

   One of my daily chores is scanning the newspaper's wire service feeds for stories written by other publications that are on topic for my section of the newspaper and not so badly written, so lazy, so gullible or sloppily researched that ... wait. I should start over.

   One of my daily tasks is scanning the wire for potential filler stories that I think our readers would enjoy reading. Reading the wire takes time away from looking for real news in my immediate vicinity, but my section often needs a few fillers. And we pay substantial, big, some might say huge fees to the wire services for the privilege of picking up these articles for use in our pages. 

   Today the wire included an intriguing piece about a website called sickweather.com. The reporter explained that this website purports to be able to track the incidence of contagious diseases based upon comments made in social media including Twitter and Facebook.

   Furthermore, the reporter stated, "Now, Sickweather is introducing a new smartphone app in six to eight weeks that will alert users every time they are in the vicinity of a sick person." It would be called "geosensing" them.

   My first thought: Wow, ambitious. 

   Second thought: Wait. Would I want to know that info?

   Third thought: How exactly are they snooping through my Facebook and Twitter comments?

   But it's the fourth thought that counts, and here was mine: How well does his site work now?

   So I clicked over to sickweather. I called up its map of Arkansas and began trying to figure out how it represents the diseases it says it tracks.

   The default setting appears to be "flu," and the site showed an orange line, which I took to be representations of flulike complaints in social media near Fort Smith. It's not flu season, so just a little bit of orange seemed plausible.

   But I live in Little Rock. There was no flu orange in Little Rock, even when I set the zoom as close as it would go.

   Again, not flu season. So I looked up some other diseases. For instance, the toggle list offered something called "man flu." Was any of that showing up as orange in my area? No.

   How about nasal congestion? No. None, not even in the vicinity of Arkansas Children's Hospital.

My nose was really congested last week. And a bunch of people I know complain about their noses on a daily basis. So now I was a little skeptical.

   But before I allowed myself to decide that this website was overselling its abilities, I looked up one more ailment, the sort of thing my Facebook friends who have children would most assuredly post and Tweet about: pink eye. I looked for pink eye in the vicinity of Arkansas Children's Hospital, surely a hotbed.

   Nothing.

   Given this experiment and its results, I am suspending for now any further thoughts I might be tempted to think about the idea of being able to "geosense" sick people using an app on my cellphone.