Big Data Processing Is Relative to Paradigm of Today
September 7, 2016
The size and volume that characterizes an information set as big data — and the tools used to process — is relative to the current era. A story from NPR reminds us of this as they ask, Can Web Search Predict Cancer? Promise And Worry Of Big Data And Health. In 1600’s England, a statistician essentially founded demography by compiling details of death records into tables. Today, trends from big data are drawn through a combination of assistance from computer technology and people’s analytical skills. Microsoft scientists conducted a study showing that Bing search queries may hold clues to a future diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
The Microsoft scientists themselves acknowledge this [lack of comprehensive knowledge and predictive abilities] in the study. “Clinical trials are necessary to understand whether our learned model has practical utility, including in combination with other screening methods,” they write. Therein lies the crux of this big data future: It’s a logical progression for the modern hyper-connected world, but one that will continue to require the solid grounding of a traditional health professional, to steer data toward usefulness, to avoid unwarranted anxiety or even unnecessary testing, and to zero in on actual causes, not just correlations within particular health trends.”
As the producers of data points in many social-related data sets, and as the original analyzers of big data, it makes sense that people remain a key part of big data analytics. While this may be especially pertinent in matters related to health, it may be more intuitively understood in this sector in contrast to others. Whether health or another sector, can the human variable ever be taken out of the data equation? Perhaps such a world will give rise to whatever is beyond the current buzz around the phrase big data.
Megan Feil, September 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
IBM Continued to Brag About Watson, with Decreasing Transparency
February 29, 2016
A totally objective article sponsored by IBM on Your Story is titled How Cognitive Systems Like IBM Watson Are Changing the Way We Solve Problems. The article basically functions to promote all of the cognitive computing capabilities that most of us are already keenly aware that Watson possesses, and to raise awareness for the Hackathon event taking place in Bengaluru, India. The “article” endorses the event,
“Participants will have an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate, co-create and exchange ideas with one another and the world’s most forward-thinking cognitive experts. This half-day event will focus on sharing real-world applications of cognitive technologies, and allow attendees access to the next wave of innovations and applications through an interactive experience. The program will also include panel discussions and fireside chats between senior IBM executives and businesses that are already working with Watson.”
Since 2015, the “Watson for Oncology” program has involved Manipal Hospitals in Bengaluru, India. The program is the result of a partnership between IBM and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Watson has now consumed almost 15 million pages of medical content from textbooks and journals in the hopes of providing rapid-fire support to hospital staffers when it comes to patient records and diagnosis. Perhaps if IBM put all of their efforts into Watson’s projects instead of creating inane web content to promote him as some sort of missionary, he could have already cured cancer. Or not.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Overhyped Science Stuff
December 30, 2015
After Christmas, comes New Year’s Eve and news outlets take the time to reflect on the changes in the past year. Usually they focus on celebrities who died, headlining news stories, technology advancements, and new scientific discoveries. One of the geeky news outlets on the Internet is Gizmodo and they took their shot at highlighting things that happened in 2015, but rather than focusing on new advances they check off “The Most Overhyped Scientific Discoveries In 2015.”
There was extreme hype about an alien megastructure in outer space that Neil deGrasse Tyson had to address and tell folks they were overreacting. Bacon and other processed meats were labeled as carcinogens and caused cancer! The media, of course, took the bacon link and ran with it causing extreme panic, but in the long run everything causes cancer from cellphones to sugar.
Global warming is a hot topic that always draws arguments and it appears to be getting worse the more humans release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Humans are always ready for a quick solution and a little ice age would rescue Earth. It would be brought on by diminishing solar activity, but it turns out carbon dioxide pollution does more damage than solar viability can fix. Another story involved the nearly indestructible tardigrades and the possibility of horizontal gene transfer, but a dispute between two rival labs about research on tardigrades ruined further research to understanding the unique creature.
The biggest overblown scientific discovery, in our opinion, is NASA’s warp drive. Humans are desperate for breakthroughs in space travel, so we can blast off to Titan’s beaches for a day and then come home within our normal Earth time. NASA experimented with an EM Drive:
“Apparently, the engineers working on the EM Drive decided to address some of the skeptic’s concerns head-on this year, by re-running their experiments in a closed vacuum to ensure the thrust they were measuring wasn’t caused by environmental noise. And it so happens, new EM Drive tests in noise-free conditions failed to falsify the original results. That is, the researchers had apparently produced a minuscule amount of thrust without any propellant.
Once again, media reports made it sound like NASA was on the brink of unveiling an intergalactic transport system.”
NASA might be working on warp drive prototype, but the science is based on short-term experiments, none of it has been peer reviewed, and NASA has not claimed that the engine even works.
The media takes the idea snippets and transforms them into overblown news pieces that are based more on junk science than real scientific investigation.
Whitney Grace, December 30, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
