Team:Minnesota/Web Scrape

Team:Minnesota/Project/Insulin - 2015.igem.org

 

Team:Minnesota/Project/Insulin

From 2015.igem.org

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Biotechnology and the Web


        The advent of the internet has conceived a common grounds for the public to rapidly generate and spread their ideas. Although this has undoubtedly shaped and improved our lives, patterns of misinformation spread in these channels have presented serious obstacles to the advancement to biotechnology in societal applications. To address this, we have taken prelimary steps into developing a module power by Google that has the ability to probe the web on both content and temporal ranges to give research a reference for public outlook.

The Rising Coalition

        The past few years has brought biotechnology to the forefront of science discussion in the public. Vaccination and genetically modified organisms are the greatest examples of this debate and how the public can follow emotional driven arguments above scientific reason. How can we study these behaviors?

        "Web scraping" is a term used in computer science to describe the process of extracting data and information from websites in a highly automated manner. With the effectively endless supplies of opinions, data, and articles on the web, we can clean up text from these websites and computationally sweep them for both objective and emotional content.



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