June 2009
6 posts
Server Fault →
interesting sys admin site, lots of questions and answers … will need to explore some more
who owns health data
This is an interesting post by Tim O’Reilly pointing out one of the disconnects with data in the health care system: who actually owns the data? The patient? Most health care systems would probably argue against that, but as we want to move to a system of personalized medicine it will be difficult to argue that the patient should not own their own data and be able to decide which providers...
odesi
I need to check this out some more when I have time, it looks interesting … it is supposed to be a web based data discovery tool developed in Ontario, shades of old consulting projects (accessing databases fro Canadian Opinion Research Archives, Stats Can, etc)
ODESI - Home
An interesting summary of real world experience with the amazon cloud computing environment … interesting take away that the cloud is more expensive than actual servers, but I wonder if that is before or after infrastructure costs are factored in - or just what the math is behind that statement
Real-world cloud computing
this could be useful
javascript toolkit for visualizations
JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
This is an excellent article from the New Yorker on the reason why health care is so expensive in the US. It takes a good look at why one of the poorer counties in the country has an average medicare expenditure that double the national average and 25% more than the income per capita in the county. And it is not because they have better equipment (they don’t), or newer hospitals (they...
May 2009
6 posts
Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer...
Interesting technology for monitoring cancer treatment: “The devices, which could be implanted at the time of biopsy, could also be tailored to monitor chemotherapy agents, allowing doctors to determine whether cancer drugs are reaching the tumors.”
It gets more interesting as you imagine some of the other types of similar applications that might be possible.
Implantable Device...
luxury vs. premium
Interesting post by Seth Godin about the importance of the distinction of luxury vs premium as it relates to apple and microsoft.
Seth’s Blog: Luxury vs. premium
open database alliance
should be good for mysql, for more info links, etc follow the link
The Open Database Alliance
infochimps
Infochimps.org
Something about the name infochimps that attracts me to the site and makes me want to spend some time digging around to see what they have come up with.
What it is, is a rather large collection of free datasets and is well worth checking out for some useful and not so useful datasets.
I found it by tripping over pitching stats for Josh Beckett at dataspora.org
cognitive surplus
“cognitive surplus” is a great expression; I came across it again today while looking at a site with the sub title of “solve puzzles for science”. Trying to harness some of that excess brain power for good.
Back to the idea, or the talk, about cognitive surplus … it is an interesting and thought provoking talk that places blame for the industrial revolution on gin...
How Google and Facebook are using R : Data...
This is an interesting blog post/report summarizing a panel discussion for an R users group in the bay area where a couple of people from Google and Facebook discuss how they use R. The panel was called “The R and Science of Predictive Analytics”
One of the interesting points for me is that google uses R for modelling but not productions. For production they implement in python or...
April 2009
13 posts
google flu trends in mexico
I have posted the link to google flu trends in the past showing flu activity geographically based on from where people are searching for flu symptoms. Google now has a version for Mexico with a couple of important differences: the data has not been validated against confirmed cases and does not include data for all states (for example where is Nayarit).
Google Flu Trends | Mexico
To read more...
Us and Them (Sun & Oracle) →
interesting take on the oracle - sun merger from an insider at sun. he has created a comparison table of business and products and is asking for people’s help in filling it in. should be interesting to see how much it changes in the next few days and weeks.
“Are we there yet? … not quite.”
– New England Journal of Medicine (via bloomberg news) on the idea of personal gene testing
Spokane to detonate squirrels tearing up parks →
caddyshack?
Eureka! Science News →
a science news aggregator
comparing the travel aggregators
The idea behind an aggregator is simple in that it provides information from multiple sources to the end user through a single interface as if all of the data came from the same source. Perhaps the best examples, or at least most easily understood, are the search engines people use to compare airline fares.
This link goes to a good review (survey) of the different travel aggregators that are out...
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the guardian's world last week
The cloud below represents the raw word count from the guardian’s world section. Still mostly unfintltered, but I find it interesting how often Obama is mentioned vs. say Brown or Sarkozy.
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“Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly”
– Dalai Lama
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visualization 101 (actually 171)
This is a link to Harvard’s computer science data visiualization course with lots of good resources.
The first link goes to the 2008 version of the course, along with the course work and completed assignments. The second link goes to the current version of the course (which I have not looked at yet as it is being blocked by Baylor’s web filters) … so the link/info might get...
marketing personal genomics
A really interesting disucssion about how 23andMe is marketing personal genomics to pregnant women; in effect creating a community of mommy bloggers.
What is in it for the bloggers? Well the social network, where they can use tools to track their pregnancy, and discuss everything from morning sickness to the gene of the week.
What is in for 23andMe? The customers, the publicity, and the army of...
March 2009
30 posts
1 tag
the guardian's world last week
The cloud below represents the world as the guardian saw it last week. The size of the words in the image represent the number of articles in the guardian’s world section in which they appeared.
Looking at the image it is apparent that some extra filtering techniques should be applied.
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some interesting mashups/mining to predict...
Crawling the Web to Foretell Ecosystem Collapse | Wired.com
The article has links to a bunch of examples of how you can mine data from different sources to predict different things or take an interesting look back on a recent event.
Some examples include:
google flu trends
health map
uk snow storm twitter map
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just walk a couple hundred meters ...
I have been told more than once that if I want to escape the summer crowds at any national park in the US that all I really need to do is walk a little more than a couple of hundred meters from the parking lot. The reason, as it has been explained to me, is that most americans tend not stray that far.
This link goes to a post that effectively asks that if your, and in this case it is the...
“There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”
– Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
That quote comes immediately after this paragraph.
“And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril,...
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“Now, you have to understand, to this person a dataset of 1000 whole genomes is...”
– Will Wolfram make bioinformatics obsolete?
Interesting thought, I do not agree with it in that if they learn to program properly they should be able to adapt to the new realities of data processing and mining. Ture, the programs may be obsolete, but the skills should not be.
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“A new map of knowledge has been assembled by scientists … based on...”
– Visual Science - Map of Knowledge
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An interesting paper taking a different look at the relationships between published papers. They have analyzed actual click stream data to see which references were actually followed as opposed to which ones might be there just for show (or politics).
PLoS ONE: Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science
“In short, the computer depersonalizes medicine. It ignores nuances that we do...”
– The Computer Will See You Now - NYTimes.com
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An opinion piece from the NY Times last week gives an interesting take on electronic medical records, and reminds us of some of the challenges that must be solved in their implementation. In the letters following on the piece there is even more skeptism.
It should be interesting to see what the tipping point turns out to be when we find EMRs that live up to the promise with integration into all...
busy weekend
The dash [sic] down greenville for St Paddy’s Day on Saturday followed by the Rock To Victory half marathon in Dallas on Sunday.
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open science closed source
Open Science, Closed Source
A very interesting take and analysis of the announement of some new word plugins from Microsoft to aid with citations and generating pubmed compliant xml.
Here is the link to the original aritcle at O’Reilly
Microsoft and Science Commons Team Up To Add Semantic Content to Online Science
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“Building and making sense of massive databases is the core competency of the...”
– Magoulas and Lorica, O’Reilly Radar Release 2.0.11 Feb. 2009, page 5
design the classroom of the future
2009 Open Architecture Challenge
This might be an interesting one to keep an eye on; open sourcing classroom design and architecture … might make for a good example of distributed collaboration in the future
how to give a better presentation
Dear Speakers
Advice on how to give a better presentation from a man who photographs conferences and has thus had to sit through his fair share of talks (good and bad), and apparently does not need your help to make you look silly in the photos and/or videos.
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high scalability
Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
lots of useful posts, links, and aritcles about building large sites that scale