My Digital FootPrint

The Inflamed Mind Edward Bullmore Follow Edward on TWITTER In The Inflamed Mind, Cambridge psychiatrist, Professor Edward Bullmore presents a new discovery which overturns centuries of medical, psychological and philosophical understanding: the mind and body are linked far more closely than we ever knew - obvious! Central to this thinking is doing away with old notions of dualism, such as mind and body, inherited from Descartes. For years it has been accepted by the medical profession that mind and body were separated by a `blood-brain barrier', which prevented all cellular interaction. It was not considered professionally respectable to investigate connections between the brain, the realm of neuroscience, and the immune system, the province of immunology, because it was well known that the brain and the immune system had nothing to do with each other. Now it is clear that that is not the whole story. Bullmore's research reveals that the existence of the blood-brain ba...

This is also published on LinkedIn and Medium as well  Data is Data.  It is not Oil or Gold or Labour or anything else! Words, in general, are a creative symbolic linguistic invention through which people invoke concepts and meanings that are flexible enough to enable we Homo sapiens to shortcut detailed explanations.  A dog = mammal, furry, four legs, barks, teeth etc. However, words; because they are a shortcut, often lack context and relationship that add “meaning”. Words are “data” which requires the addition of meaning derived from context to “inform” the listener - to become “inform-ation.”   Love, for example, can mean, or be interpreted to mean, many propositions depending on context and relationship. The 2019 update to the New Oxford Dictionary brings in the words   agender and intersexual to help define better and enable more nuanced conversations about  sexuality and gender identity, as society has words without the specific context...

The video is not new and neither is the thinking. The Verge did a write up on this and an update - worth reading.  The general response was always about the creepy line - however now seeing clearly that the issue is about where the data is.  What I mean by this is that the data is in Google Silo and Google's view is not to find the data from other sources - but to find a way to get the data itself, making a bigger silo. My problem with this is that this very model of one big silo is the one model that will get broken first. As trust is the issue in the big silo model, why does trust become the game changer.... that idea is explored  here 

We humans set a premium on our own free will and independence ... and yet there's a shadowy influence we might not be considering. As science writer Ed Yong explains in this fascinating, hilarious and disturbing talk, parasites have perfected the art of manipulation to an incredible degree. So are they influencing us? It's more than likely. Love the challenge and what data might tell us that we don't want to know. 

Alexander Duisberg Partner @ Bird Bird, talks to the legal aspects of exploiting big data and lists his top tips for private and   public sector. He talks to : data ownership as a concept [ personally I am not sure anyone can own data, however there are rights and responsibilities] and no jurisdiction has a fully developed concept of data ownership to date. privacy aspect of data  understanding what data you own and how it affects your customers’ privacy. licensing implications when buying or selling data and the issues of making data anonymous. 

                                               

Source : Andrew McAfee’s Blog Source2 : Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach They analysed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insigh...

Source : http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140122165800-37102839-lies-data-tell-us Great article from Steven Thomson He sets out questions to ask next time you're about to make a big decision based on a particular set of data: Are you measuring the right thing? In almost any data-gathering situation, there are far more types of information that could be gathered than you can possibly tackle. Compare the contradictory claims that U.S. wireless phone providers make for their network coverage. No one's lying--they're all just picking different aspects of coverage to measure. Are you measuring it accurately? There are far more ways to screw up a measurement than there are to get it right. Ever compare election results to what the polls had said right up to the end? And political pollsters are the rocket scientists of data gathering--it's downhill from there. Are you interpreting the data wisely? Unless someone is inside trading, all inve...

Source :  https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-formation-of-love/10152064609253859 This is the Facebook view of the world of relationships which start with a period of courtship on Facebook ( e.g messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other's timelines.) = snooping.  The graph shows the average number of timeline posts exchanged between two people who are about to become a couple. We studied the group of people who changed their status from "Single" to "In a relationship" and also stated an anniversary date as the start of their relationship. During the 100 days before the relationship starts, we observe a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple. When the relationship starts ("day 0"), posts begin to decrease. We observe a peak of 1.67 posts per day 12 days before the relationship begins, and a lowest point of 1.53 posts per day 85 days int...