>It's one thousand times better to fail when trying to predict the flu epidemics than successfully using technology to bomb weddings. That's a pointless and ir

>It's one thousand times better to fail when trying to predict the flu epidemics than successfully using technology to bomb weddings. That's a pointless and irrelevant comparison. There's a cost to false positives, e.g. creating more vaccinations than necessary; fortunately I don't think the CDC or any other government organizations made any policy decisions based on Google Flu. As a person who works with a lot of data, I think applications like Google Flu have a lot of potential to do a lot of good. But it sounds like Google wasn't properly rigorous in their experiments if Google Flu is such a failure.