Google doodles aren’t just naff – they’re trying to rebrand the past | Phil Hoad. This probably marks me down for instant refusal when Google upgrades us all to cyborgs, but Google doodles really rub me up the wrong way. The company started taking doodles seriously enough to design them in-house 15 years ago today, when intern Dennis Hwang – who later became “chief doodler” – whipped one up for Bastille day 2000. I wish he hadn’t. It’s not just that the doodle, the corporate-branding equivalent of dress-down Friday, has that naff novelty air about it: all those cute animated Thanksgiving turkeys, faux silent films and puzzle-piece Nietzsches. Or even that, presumably driven in part by Google employees’ hobby horses (“How about Giambattista Tiepolo’s 318th birthday?”) Oh look: those ubiquitous six letters tossed around Saul Bass’s iconic Anatomy of a Murder cut-up, twisted into Watson and Crick’s double-helix, brass-embossed like Galileo’s telescope.
But aren’t Google doodles educational, too, I hear you say. In-Depth: Under Armour’s fitness app acquisition spree. By Jonah Comstock When Under Armour bought MapMyFitness for $150 million in November 2013, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank specifically told the Wall Street Journal it was not the start of an acquisition spree. This week, Under Armour changed that tune when it spent an additional $560 million to buy MyFitnessPal and Endomondo, giving the company a major foothold in food, nutrition, and fitness tracking as well as in the European fitness app market. While one acquisition is always big news, a company spending that sort of money to snap up three of the biggest names in fitness tracking apps is more than that: it’s a serious market consolidation that will change the nascent fitness tracking market.
Why did Under Armour buy MyFitnessPal and Endomondo? Plank explained the reasoning behind this week’s acquisition at length in a recent call with investors. “At the end of the day, the math is pretty simple,” he said, according to a transcript in Seeking Alpha. Why did MyFitnessPal and Endomondo sell? ‘Public should be consulted on NHS medical data-sharing scheme’ | Society. Plans to combine NHS patient records into a national database must be reconsidered by the government to ensure that people understand their privacy cannot be guaranteed, leading experts say. The government’s care.data scheme involves the creation of a database that holds anonymised patient records and information on hospital admissions. It was due to start last year, but was postponed for six months amid concerns over consent and privacy. The plan was launched as an opt-out scheme that assumed people were happy to have their records used for medical research and by life science companies unless they specifically opted out.
However, the NHS has disregarded tens of thousands of requests by patients to opt out of the health service’s system of sharing medical records. Officials admitted last month that not sharing the data would affect the treatment patients received, such as cancer screening services. “We now generate more health and biological data than ever before,” said Prof Richards.
Better medicine, brought to you by big data. Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level. Here are some of the interesting use cases we’ve written about over the past year or so, and a few others I’ve just come across recently. If you have a cool one — or a suggestion for a new use of big data within the healthcare space — share it in the comments: Genomics. This is the epitomic case for big data and health care. Genome sequencing is getting cheaper by the day and produces mountains of data. Companies such as DNAnexus, Bina Technologies, Appistry and NextBio want to make analyzing that data to discover cures for diseases faster, easier and cheaper than ever using lots cutting-edge algorithms and lots of cloud computing cores.
BI for doctors. Watson. Rita Allen Foundation. July 25, 2013 A few years ago, the City of Boston decided to tackle an age-old municipal problem in a new way. Using the motion-sensing capabilities of smart phones, volunteers who download Boston’s Street Bump app automatically send to the city information about the condition of the streets they’re driving on. When their cars hit a pothole—or a pothole-to-be—their phone sends the shock to a data hub, which combines the information from many other phones to pinpoint problem areas on the streets to be repaired.
In the early days of the program, Street Bump found something fascinating: there were more potholes reported in wealthy areas of the city than in poor ones. Jake Porway of DataKind told this story at The City Resilient, a recent gathering of people from diverse fields working to develop communities more resilient to catastrophic change. “Why?” This is a cautionary story, but not an alarming one. Earlier in the day at The City Resilient, Dr. What’s to be done? And the result? 'The Cloud' and Other Dangerous Metaphors. Contemporary ideas about data and privacy are tied up inextricably with language choices. The collection of personal data is now ubiquitous, and people are starting to pay attention. But data-collection policies have been built primarily on what we technically can do, rather than what we should do. The gulf between can and should has led to controversies about the sharing of student data and debate about a massive emotional contagion experiment conducted on the News Feeds of close to 700,000 users on Facebook.
Researchers of all stripes are scrambling to find a clear way forward in uncharted ethical territory. Underlying the discussion has been a tangle of big, thorny questions: What policies should govern the use of online data collection, use, and manipulation by companies? Do massive online platforms like Google and Facebook, who now hold unprecedented quantities of sensitive behavioral data about people and groups, have the right to research and experiment on their users? Understanding Calico: Larry Page, Google Ventures, and the quest for immortality. Yesterday, Google CEO Larry Page announced what is perhaps his company’s most audacious project: a life science startup called Calico that will pursue solutions for aging and its associated diseases.
As Time Magazine put it, Calico hopes to cure death. In many ways, this new venture seemed to come out of left field. But Page actually has a long history with the search for immortality. Page has long been a fan of Ray Kurzweil, the legendary inventor and author who popularized the concept of the Singularity, a theoretical tipping point where technology becomes so advanced it begins to radically alter the fabric of our existence.
In the documentary Transcendent Man, Kurzweil openly talks about his ambition to achieve eternal life, even speculating that it might be possible to bring his dead father back from the grave in the process. In 2008 Google became one of the corporate backers of the Singularity University, of which Kurzweil is a co-founder. Study finds most patients want the option to withhold data from their doctors. Dr. William Tierney HIPAA is designed to give patients control of their own medical data — who can see it, who can access it, and who can use it, especially with regards to third parties. But when it comes to physicians themselves, the status quo is patients being expected to fully disclose, so doctors have all the information they might need to treat them.
A new study is challenging that paradigm. The study comes out of The Regenstrief Institute, Indiana University School of Medicine and Eskenazi Health, published as a five-part special supplement to the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and it shows that patients for the most part want controls of their data. Using Eskenazi Health’s in-house electronic record system, researchers gave 105 patients the option to block sensitive information, including information on sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse or mental health, from their care providers.
Exploratory workshop: What Is Data-Intensive Science? (December 2014) 17–19 December 2014, Jury's Inn Hotel Exeter This workshop is the first event in the project ERC project [DATA_SCIENCE], organised by Sabina Leonelli from the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and funded through a European Research Council Starting Grant. It brings together the key participants in the project, aiming to start long-term discussions around what constitutes data-intensive science, to compare the ways in which different scholars and fields conceptualise and enact data practices, and to agree on the set-up, methods and themes to be pursued by the project team and collaborators over the next three years. Speakers will be presenting the specific sciences that they are researching, the methods that they use and the themes that they are interested in exploring. The workshop is meant to provide an informal occasion for discussion, and will therefore not showcase full papers except for the keynote lecture provided by Professor Luciano Floridi.
Invited Participants. K/V5: Dark Data — Absence and Intervention. Concept note for the fifth workshop The fifth meeting of the Knowledge / Value series will be held at the University of Exeter (UK), on 15–16 December 2014, and will explore the intersections between knowledge, value and dark data. Current discourse around data, and particularly scientific data and ‘big data’, are infused with the importance of the available, the pre-existing, the present. Data are givens, things that are and thus can be used as evidence; they are also tangible goods, the result of investments and labour, which need to be spread and used to improve human life and understanding. As one delves into actual ongoing attempts to handle, visualise, disseminate and interpret data, however, one realises that absence is at least as conspicuous as presence, and that it comes in different forms.
Within this conference, we wish to focus on the absences of data. We also hope to explore the various resonances acquired by the notion of dark data in contemporary public discourse. 23andMe Is Terrifying, But Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks. SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. If there’s a gene for hubris, the 23andMe crew has certainly got it. Last Friday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the genetic-testing company immediately to stop selling its flagship product, its $99 “Personal Genome Service” kit. In response, the company cooed that its “relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us” and continued hawking its wares as if nothing had happened.
Although the agency is right to sound a warning about 23andMe, it’s doing so for the wrong reasons. Since late 2007, 23andMe has been known for offering cut-rate genetic testing. Spit in a vial, send it in, and the company will look at thousands of regions in your DNA that are known to vary from human to human—and which are responsible for some of our traits. At first, 23andMe seemed to angle its kit as a fun way to learn a little genetics using yourself as a test subject. Sound paranoid? You Are What You Like. Two-thirds of Americans willing to share health data with researchers. Graphic from NPR According to a new survey from Truven Health Analytics and NPR, 68 percent of American consumers are willing to share health information with researchers, but this group of people is more likely to be wealthy, well-educated, and young. Truven surveyed 3,000 Americans via landlines, mobile phones, and the web, with the group filtered by generation, education level and income level.
They asked questions about physician connectedness and data privacy. The survey found that overall, only 74 percent of respondents said their physician had an electronic health record. However, that figure includes 19 percent of respondents who said they don’t have a physician at all — only 6 percent reported having a physician with no EHR. Other questions in the survey centered on privacy and data sharing. Nonetheless, most survey participants were willing to share information anonymously with researchers. View From Nowhere. Franz Kline, Suspended, 1953 On the cultural ideology of Big Data. “What science becomes in any historical era depends on what we make of it” —Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991) Modernity has long been obsessed with, perhaps even defined by, its epistemic insecurity, its grasping toward big truths that ultimately disappoint as our world grows only less knowable. New knowledge and new ways of understanding simultaneously produce new forms of nonknowledge, new uncertainties and mysteries.
The scientific method, based in deduction and falsifiability, is better at proliferating questions than it is at answering them. For instance, Einstein’s theories about the curvature of space and motion at the quantum level provide new knowledge and generates new unknowns that previously could not be pondered. As the name suggests, Big Data is about size. Positivism’s intensity has waxed and waned over time, but it never entirely dies out, because its rewards are too seductive. 7AAICC39 The Social Life of Big Data. 7AAICC39 The Social Life of Big Data Taught by Dr Mark Coté This module will provide students with the opportunity to explore an array of theories, concepts and practices in big data with a specific focus on its ‘social life’; that is, the data that we collectively generate through our myriad mediated cultural practices.
It will introduce students to the unprecedented quantification of the self and environment, the platforms—like the smartphone—through which that transpires, and the computational environment and algorithmic practices through which it circulates and its processed. This will enable students to better analyse the cultural, economic and political dimensions of big social data which are transforming power and knowledge in our contemporary era. Draft outline Week 1: What is Big Data? Key reading Beer, David, and Burrows, Roger. (2013) “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” One essay of 4000 words (100%) Now Google Wants Your Genome, Too. Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us. The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google, like one late last month about a far-fetched plan to battle cancer with nanoparticles (see “Can Google Use Nanoparticles to Search for Cancer?”).
Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Google began work on Google Genomics 18 months ago, meeting with scientists and building an interface, or API, that lets them move DNA data into its server farms and do experiments there using the same database technology that indexes the Web and tracks billions of Internet users. Some scientists scoff that genome data remains too complex for Google to help with. The explosion of data is happening as labs adopt new, even faster equipment for decoding DNA. Google Genomics storing genomes in the cloud for longterm big data play.
Halamka: Time is right for patient-generated data, care traffic controllers needed. The death of privacy | World news | The Observer. Apple bans developers from selling HealthKit data to ad platforms. How activity trackers remove our rights to our most intimate data | Technology. RWJF awards Calit2 project $1.9M to explore health data sharing. In-Depth: Consumer health and data privacy issues beyond HIPAA. Computers, Privacy & Data Protection • International Conference. Can you still be a stranger when everyone is wearing Google Glass? Stop The Cyborgs | Only the unmeasured is free. Dating sites. Why I want a microchip implant. In-Depth: Digital health APIs every health startup should know. Survey: Despite risks, patients want to share data.
What Big Data Will Never Explain. Big Data's New Buzzword: Datafication. Wearable tech: why Intel thinks we should own our data | Technology. Joerg Blumtritt. Sell your data to save the economy and your future. How 'big data' is changing lives. The Rise of Big Data.