January 30, 2012
Wednesday
Coachella, page 6
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2013
WWW.DAILYAZTEC.COM
VOLUME 99, ISSUE 62
Library receives out-of-this-world collection
campus
Arturo Garcia Staff Writer
The San Diego State Love Library received a science fiction collection valued at $2.25 million. SDSU announced on Monday that Escondido real-estate agent Edward Marsh has been collecting books since the age of 9, donated works of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs and other golden-age authors to the school. SDSU Dean of Library and Information Access Gale Etschmaier said the collection includes firstedition items, memorabilia and artwork. SDSU’s full science fiction collection is currently comprised of nearly 5,000 titles. The Department of Special Collections and University Archives put together an exhibition on the second floor of Love Library’s dome. The department’s librarian Anna Culbertson SAID, the displayed works were divided into several themes, including golden-age authors, fantasy and dystopia, space opera, and women and LBGTQ representation and authors. “I hope all students enjoy the exhibit,” Special Collections student assistant Mario Delgadillo said. “We have worked really hard on it.”
I still think a number of people know them as “They had that song from the Target commercials.” Fair Trade University, page 6
It’s going to bring so much recognition to SDSU denise thompson
Nursing junior monica linzmeier , assistant photo editor
Different science fiction titles are on display on the second floor of Love Library. An Escondido real-estate agent donated a $2.25 million valued science fiction collection.
Marsh told the U-T San Diego he wished for his golden-age collection to be preserved because kids today have no idea it even existed. “They’ve never seen a pulp magazine with these lurid covers,” Marsh said. “And all the movies they see come from stories written by the golden-age guys.”
Culbertson said the golden age of science fiction carried themes of “hard” science fiction, with a big focus on things that had scientific and technical plausibility such as space travel and rockets. Culbertson described these themes masculine and said later in post-modern science fiction, the stories involved
social and political themes. Ninety-five percent of the collection is from the 20th century. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was chosen as the start of the displayed timeline. Culbertson said lectures by former SDSU affiliates will accompany the exhibition later in the semester.
Experts using Twitter to follow the flu
national
Hannah Beausang Senior Staff Writer
In this hard-hitting flu season, experts are turning to Twitter and crowdsourcing to track the virus. This flu season, more than 2,000 people have been hospitalized and there have been more than 18 deaths from symptoms associated with the flu. Brigham Young University conducted a study in which 24 million tweets were collected from 10 million random Twitter users. The researchers looked for recurring terms such as “flu,” “coughing” and “fever.” Location data was collected for roughly 15 percent of the tweets, allowing researchers to get an idea about the distribution and prevalence of the virus. Further location information was gathered from user-generated profiles, which proved to be accurate 88 percent of the time. Using the collective data, researchers were able to collect incidences of the flu at the state level. This tool allows health professionals to track the virus with more immediacy than the information provided by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which can take approximately two weeks to process. New language-processing technologies are being developed to weed out “chatter” about the flu, eliminating noise from people expressing concern about the flu
and honing in on people reporting actual flu-like symptoms. Because social media is becoming a prominent part of people’s daily lives, this type of research has potential to thrive in the future. A 2012 Pew Research Center study indicated 69 percent of online adults use social networking sites and 16 percent of online adults use Twitter. San Diego State School of Journalism & Media Studies assistant professor Rebecca Nee conducted a study through the Social Science Research Laboratory last fall that reported 30 percent of SDSU students use Twitter and 90 percent use Facebook. Because the technology-reliant younger generation tends to dominate the cyber world of social media, the online chatter is booming. “College-age students are coming down with the flu and they may be more likely to be public about that,” Nee said. “They might be reporting it more to social media than to their health professionals.” SDSU geography professor MingHsiang Tsou, has been working closely with Anna Nagel, a public health graduate student since 2010 to use social media and online search engines, such as Yahoo and Bing for tracking. The team has been tracking the flu via Twitter in 31 cities. Tsou says San Diego is one of the most highly correlated cities for accuracy of flu-related tweets matching CDC data.
Twitter users from around the world are posting when they have the flu and experts are tracking the trends.
The team is creating “word clouds” to aggregate weekly tweets to track the frequency of vocabulary to monitor the top keywords. The word clouds help detect the sentiment of the tweet and analyze the content to cut down on error. “We want to create a linkage between cyberspace and real space,” Tsou said. “We think all the activity, chatting and buzz will reflect some level of truth in the real world.” In the future, the team hopes to develop methods of linguistic analysis to examine writing styles in order to categorize tweets by age group. It will also be able to differentiate gender by user names and profile information to better understand data. “This is much more efficient
monica linzmeier , assistant photo editor
than conducting a survey asking how you are feeling about the flu,” Tsou said. Twitter has been successful in monitoring disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and tracking major events, such as the recent elections. Although Twitter is a large source of data collection for this type of tracking, researchers also look at Internet search engine data. To help monitor the flu, Google has created Google Flu Trends, a global flu-tracking system. HealthMap, another flu tracker from Boston Children’s Hospital, looks at online news about the flu to track outbreaks and Flu Near You, is an online project that collects weekly reports of illnesses.
Hackers using e-cards to steal computer access national
Stephanie Saccente Senior Staff Writer
Computer hackers seek to gain personal data from other people without their authorization. As technology continues to advance, hackers have devised a new way to obtain access to private information through the use of a computer webcam. These particular Internet predators start by sending the user an email containing content such as a link to a YouTube video or a notification saying the user has received an e-card. Once the user clicks on the link in the email, the hacker gains full access to not only the information on the user’s computer, but also the webcam, allowing the hacker to watch his or her every move. Graphic casey carter Computer Science design junior senior Marcus Papazian-Cowan, was shocked to hear such a virus existed. While he doesn’t believe his computer has been hacked before, he advises others to take caution with the websites they visit and the emails they open. “If someone else had an insight to my life through my webcam, I would be really mad and wouldn’t feel secure using my computer, especially if I had to use my credit card to make a purchase,” Papazian-Cowan said. “I definitely advise ev-
Secure websites have a little lock picture on the side...
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