“There’s an enormous richness of information by looking in the water that’s indicative of what’s going in a city in a real-time fashion,” says Prof. Eric Alm in an interview with Wudan Yan of The Daily Beast of his idea to examine public health by tracking the transmission of pathogens in sewers.
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr profiles the work of Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at the MIT Media Lab, Pentland’s new book, “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lesson From a New Science,” argues that data collected about everyday human interaction can be used to accelerate the pace of innovation.