PageRank Useful In Stopping The Spread Of Infections?

from the it's-useful-everywhere-but-search dept

Wed, Jan 9th 2008 8:41am — Mike Masnick

There have been a number of stories recently about how Google's famed "PageRank" system is in less and less use at the company these days. Still, that doesn't mean the concept isn't being used elsewhere. Last year we wrote about how some researchers were using it to better understand how brains work in a way that could be useful for artificial intelligence work. And, now, there's a report saying that researchers are using the concept of PageRank to try to stem staph infections at hospitals. Google's founders have been known to dabble in a variety of other interests beyond search -- perhaps they should be leading the charge to apply PageRank to other arenas.

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Filed Under: pagerank, staph infections

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Josh, 9 Jan 2008 @ 8:54am

Great stuff
As a member of the mathematical biology community, I would definitely say this is an example of how an idea translates well across disciplines and applications. Let's hope we can see more of this kind of thing.
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Petréa Mitchell, 9 Jan 2008 @ 10:08am

Not really
Reading the article, it seems clear to me that PageRank is the specialized case of a general concept that existed well before Google, and which is also being applied to infectious networks here.
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M. Thompson, 9 Jan 2008 @ 10:10am

Another good reason why...
Yet another example of how -if- Google had patented this idea we would have missed out on the ability for the biologists/scientists to use this idea for even better applications. Glad it was created by Google and not some scumbag corporation that would patent the idea and then sue everyone who looks at it only then to allow people to ue it for $1 billion a pop so they can suck the blood out of every stone around them.

Someone staple this information to the foreheads of all the patent trolls out there and see if we can get a convert amongst those scumbags about WHY we don't need restrictive patents on EVERYTHING on the planet.
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