First Blog

Big Data and Medicine Even now servers and their machine learning algorithms are digesting as much medical data they can find.   They have now learned to diagnose medical problems at a truly professional level.   One problem confronting the medical community now is whether to accept such diagnoses as the diagnosis.   This is not a little problem. It is a problem with repercussions across all of medicine , from the school to the courtroom.   Let’s look at a few elementary considerations. Tools will be put in the hands of the medical practitioner and physician's assistant. The patient may not even qualify to see a doctor until after this “procedure.” The doctor contradicting the diagnosis is put at legal risk.   Medical research and new procedures will be undermined. On the other hand, if the doctor goes with machine learning, he/she has a legal defense built in.  The medical schools will teach doctors to rely on the software.   This could undermine their diag

Rules for Modern Living with Big Data We, the citizens of our community, have a new presence, almost a consciousness living in parallel with us.   Something of a semi-consciousness, not contained in a single vessel, it make observations, accomplishes tasks, it makes predictions, and it evolves prescriptions. An essential aspect is in the algorithms that massage, manipulate, and matriculate data to actionable spheres of information. The algorithms, while not individually conscious do extract and store information about us in large volumes.   It does not hesitate to sift and sort information at the behest of an external agent.     Not unlike you, who also stores great volumes of information, they do nothing with it until a task is set - perhaps by a human operative.   With you, it’s all in a single container.   But with the machine, certain tasks operating like “interrupts” can be continuously active.   You also have certain tasks continuously active, e.g. danger, food .

The promises of big data are convincing. O rganizations from across every major industry are using data mining techniques and data bases as competitive differentiators to: Detect fraud and cyber-security issues Manage and eliminate risk Anticipate resource demands Increase response rates for marketing campaigns Discern voter preferences for election campaigns Solve today’s toughest big data challenges Believing these sound wonderful, the concerned citizen needs to explore applications that have a downside and must be addressed very soon.  We are not about nefarious designs but rather a creeping invasion into human life. On mental health and beyond .   Through big data, we will soon witness the development of personal counselor programs.   Already such programs have existed for a half-century.   The first example, consider ELIZA , a computer program operated by processing users' responses to scripts , the most famous of which was DOCTOR .   It was written