Posts tagged data
Mining FDA Data Reveals a Multitude of Side Effects from Drug Interactions
With Big Data techniques, the world is your lab:
The work, published today in Science Translational Medicine1, provides a way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of ‘adverse events’ reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year. “It’s a step in the direction of a complete catalogue of drug–drug interactions,” says the study’s lead author, Russ Altman, a bioengineer at Stanford University in California.
Although clinical trials are often designed to assess the safety of a drug in addition to how well it works, the size of the trials needed to detect the full range of drug interactions would surpass even the large, late-stage clinical trials sometimes required for drug approval. Furthermore, clinical trials are often done in controlled settings, using carefully defined criteria to determine which patients are eligible for enrolment — including other conditions they might have and which medicines they can take alongside the trial drug.
For practical studies, being able to take lab-calibre measurements in the real world trumps a lab any day. (Via Nature)
Ben Goldacre reminds us that the primary goal of data visualization is to effectively communicate a message. Being a pretty poster is a nice-to-have.
The Problem isn't Browser Exploits, it's that Users Have No Idea What's Happening With Their Data
- Microsoft: Hey Google, you're breaking our browser's privacy settings and getting more data because of it. Cut it out.
- Google: A bunch of academics say your privacy settings were already broken. (Plus, Facebook's doing it too).
- Facebook: Oh hi Microsoft, your browser is old so we thought nobody would notice.
- Internet Explorer Users: What the hell is going on?
What “Big Data” can Learn from Dubai’s Skyscrapers & Sewage System
Suddenly, we love data. It’s the hero in our TV shows, saves our baseball teams, generates our art, and is the topic of the moment at Davos. Our obsession borders on religion: we believe data is infallible, containing a single, emergent truth (the Guardian’s Datablog’s subtitle is “Facts are Sacred”). If our businesses or institutions are failing we say they need more data.
But when we embrace “Big Data” we neglect the operations and environments we hope the data will improve. Which is unfortunate because data’s value is determined by how well we capitalize on the intelligence it produces. If a film studio identifies a new trend they’re limited by how long a film takes to produce. If a retail outlet discovers that peanut butter buyers can also be sold bananas, they’re limited by how quickly employees can rearrange shelves.
Adding more data to the mix doesn’t help if infrastructures aren’t upgraded. If we ignore the systems we aim to improve, the data we crave is worth only a fraction of its potential value.
For those of us investing in or producing data, the bottleneck is our users, culture, and infrastructure. We’d be wise to learn from examples in other fields and scenarios. Take Dubai, for instance, where skyscrapers sprung up while sewage systems stagnated.
No One Wants their Name on a Sewer
Dubai’s record-setting skyline emerged over the last decades, fueled by rising fuel prices. Wikipedia lists 195 skyscrapers built or under construction in the once quiet city, whose population has more than quintupled in the last 30 years.
But all is not rosy: while the skyline was funded the sewage system was ignored. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal wrote, “By one estimate, some $300 billion in new projects are going up in Dubai in the next 10 years… But Dubai’s single, 30-year-old sewage-treatment plant isn’t keeping up. Sewage output here is rising by 25% a year.” The 160-floor Burj Khalifa alone was designed to house 25,000 people, nearly a 10th of Dubai’s total population when their sewage treatment plant was built.
“ (One interesting side note: The cameras on drone aircraft in Afghanistan take such precise pictures that not all the data can quickly travel over the local Internet connections to analysts in the United States. The usual method is to store everything in a local cargo container full of receiving gear, computers and storage, then airlift it home when it’s full, swapping out another container to absorb more info from the drones.)”
NYTimes.com on the shipping container as a medium, which the military is hot-swapping in and out of Afghanistan.
(via new-aesthetic)
(via new-aesthetic)
Businessweek shows the potential danger in data. “All you need are two graphs and a leading question.”
I’d argue word clouds are just as bad as these parodies. They suggest correlation by pretending word frequency is more important than sentence structure and, you know, actual language.
“ General managers submit weekly reports, measuring factors like traffic and customer satisfaction. Every quarter, teams assess their priorities under an Intel-pioneered system called “objectives and key results.” And Mr. Pincus, a professed data obsessive, devours all the reports, using multiple spreadsheets, to carefully track the progress of Zynga’s games and its roughly 3,000 employees.”
NYTimes.com on Zynga.
Ignore the rest of this article for a moment and just focus on Zynga’s data obsession, an obsession shared by many other start ups and one being adopted by established companies.
Here’s the rub: anything Excel can’t measure, Pincus can’t see.
Eric Fischer is mapping language communities on Twitter using Chrome’s language detector. (Via Eric Fischer)
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages follows a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
(Via NYTimes.com)
