Two scientists are using the NYT, Wikipedia and more to predict the future
Software v. humans:
For example, they examined the way that news about natural disasters like storms and droughts could be used to predict cholera outbreaks in Angola. Following those weather events, “alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,” they write.
Horvitz and Radinsky acknowledge that epidemiologists look at some of the same relationships, but “such studies are typically few in number, employ heuristic assessments, and are frequently retrospective analyses, rather than aimed at generating predictions for guiding near-term action.”