linkstream2 microblog

Interesting alternatives to Grammarly…
https://thewritelife.com/automatic-editing-tools/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/magazine/the-mystery-of-the-wasting-house-cats.html

Swipe right on the new Tinder for preprints app, Papr by @JTLeek &co
http://www.ScienceMag.org/news/2017/06/great-paper-swipe-right-new-tinder-preprints-app Gathering #statistics on the subconscious swipe

QT:{{”
““We don’t believe that the data we are collecting is any kind of realistic peer review, but it does tell us something about the types of papers people find interesting and what leads them to be
suspicious,” Leek says. “Ultimately we hope to correlate this data with information about where the papers are published, retractions, and other more in-depth measurements of paper quality and interest.”

But don’t take Papr too seriously, because its developers don’t. “This app is provided solely for entertainment of the scientific community and may be taken down at any time with no notice because Jeff gets tired of it,” the Papr website says.”
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Design for data sharing
http://www.Nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n4/full/nbt.3516.html Issues in distributing mPower mobile dataset – no DAC, allowing donors to change preferences

QT:{{”
“This March, Sage Bionetworks (Seattle) began sharing curated data collected from >9,000 participants of mPower, a smartphone-enabled health research study for Parkinson’s disease. The mPower study is notable as one of the first observational assessments of human health to rapidly achieve scale as a result of its design and execution purely through a smartphone interface. To support this unique study design, we developed a novel electronic informed consent process that includes participant-determined data-sharing preferences. It is through these preferences that the new data—including self-reported outcomes and quantitative sensor data—are shared broadly for secondary analysis. Our hope is that by sharing these data immediately, prior even to our own complete analysis, we will shorten the time to harnessing any utility that this study’s data may hold to improve the condition of patients who suffer from this disease.

Turbulent times for data sharing

Our release of mPower comes at a turbulent time in data sharing. The power of data for secondary research is top of mind for many these days. Vice President Joe Biden, in heading President Barack Obama’s ambitious cancer ‘moonshot’, describes data sharing as second only to funding to the success of the effort. However, this powerful support for data sharing stands in opposition to the opinions of many within the research establishment. To wit, the august New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)’s recent editorial suggesting that those who wish to reuse clinical trial data without the direct participation and approval of the original study team are “research parasites”. In the wake of colliding perspectives on data sharing, we must not lose sight of the scientific and societal ends served by such efforts.” “}}

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/19/apple-just-created-and-killed-a-generation-of-ar-businesses/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tctwreshare&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=twitter

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3130168/data-center-cloud/yahoo-mail-suspends-automatic-mail-forwarding-as-privacy-controversies-swirl.html

QT:{{”
“For people, a drug that’s safe for use during pregnancy may help. A probiotic, many of which have anti-inflammatory properties, may also be of benefit. Not coincidentally, asthma researchers are arriving at similar conclusions; prevention of the lung disease will begin with the pregnant woman. Dr. Parker has more radical ideas: pre-emptive restoration of “domesticated” parasites in everybody — worms developed solely for the purpose of correcting the wayward, postmodern immune system.

Practically speaking, this seems beyond improbable. And yet, a trial is under way at the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine testing a medicalized parasite called Trichuris suis in autistic adults.

First used medically to treat inflammatory bowel disease, the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.

And really, if you spend enough time wading through the science, Dr. Parker’s idea — an ecosystem restoration project, essentially — not only fails to seem outrageous, but also seems inevitable.”
“}}

fellowships, grants, space
QT:{{”
“DOMINICI: Because of the new advances in technology, almost every field right now has data, and more data than ever. Clearly, there’s the explosion of genetics and genomics data in the life sciences, in molecular data, as well as astronomy and economics. Even in the humanities, you can scan documents and turn it into data that you can analyze.
…
PARKES: To add some numbers to this, IBM has estimated that we’re generating more than one quintillion bytes of data a day. (A quintillion is a 10 to the 18th.)
…
DOMINICI: One of the reasons we are so excited that Harvard is launching the Data Science Initiative is because of all the advances our faculty have made in recent years. We can now describe the entire genome, define the exposome (the environmental analogue to the genome), characterize social interactions and mood via cellphone data, and can digitize historical data relevant for the humanities. ….

DOMINICI: We have launched the Harvard Data Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, which is among the largest programs of its kind, and we want to recruit talented individuals in a highly interdisciplinary ways. We’re looking for people who can lead their own research but will want to work collaboratively with other people around the University. In fact, we’ve asked them to identify faculty they’d be excited to work with. In addition to passsion for computer science and statistics, we are are looking for talented individuals who want to advance knowledge in astronomy, psychology, business, health, and are excited to work with us to builld data science at Harvard. We have a committee that will be making decisions about this very soon.

We have also launched a competitive research fund that will catalyze small research projects around the University. Through our friends in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Medical School, we’ve identified some spaces in the near term where people can get together. …

PARKES: We are launching the initiative because we want to get to a point where we have a Harvard Data Science Institute. The aspiration is that the Data Science Institute will have some physical space associated with it,
…
Then the third one I wanted to mention is privacy.
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http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/03/co-directors-of-newly-launched-harvard-data-science-initiative-discuss-new-era/

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/science/louis-pasteur-chirality-chemistry.html

QT:{{”

“This shift has been having profound impacts on mental-health research in the United States, but the magnitude of the transformation is only now coming to light. An analysis by Nature suggests that the number of clinical trials funded by the NIMH dropped by 45% between 2009 and 2015 (see ‘’). This coincides with the agency’s launch, in 2011, of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) — a framework for research on the mechanisms of mental illness. The NIMH’s roll-out of RDoC included asking researchers to focus more on the biological bases of behaviour — such as brain circuitry and genetics — than on the broader symptoms that clinicians typically use to define and classify mental illness.

The NIMH’s embrace of fundamental research has infuriated many clinical researchers, who see it as an attempt to invalidate their methods — and say that there is scant evidence to support the idea that using RDoC will lead to greater insight or better treatments for mental illness.”
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US mental-health agency’s push for basic research has slashed support for clinical trials
http://www.nature.com/news/us-mental-health-agency-s-push-for-basic-research-has-slashed-support-for-clinical-trials-1.22145