A Haystack Full of Needles: Cutting Through the Clutter of the Online World to Find a Place, Partner or President (TED Books) by Jim Hornthal
Published in October of 2012. 61 pages, $2.99.
Orbitz and Expedia may have killed the travel agency business, but my family desperately needs a skilled trip advisor to plan our next vacation. (The number of travel agents has dropped from over 110,000 in 2001 to about 77,000 today).
iTunesU (and Napster) destroyed Tower Records, but I have no idea how to get a better playlist for my morning run.
Amazon and Netflix put Borders and Blockbuster out of business (Blockbuster is limping along out of bankruptcy), but it is doubtful that our new way of finding books and movies is resulting in us reading and watching better books and movies. (Although Long Tail enthusiasts may disagree).
Jim Hornthal thinks that we are about to enter the second wave of consumer Internet platforms. The new platforms will be based less on community content (Facebook), or cloud applications (Gmail) - but on personalization via algorithms and massive data analysis.
His canonical example is Pandora's Music Genome Project. Pandora breaks each song in its database into 450 discrete musical characteristics. The system then learns your musical tastes by how you rate different songs, and by building on ratings from all Pandora listeners (over 51 million), the site can predict which music (from a catalogue of almost 1 million songs) that you are likely to enjoy...
2. http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/coursesmart-analytics-bad-idea [snippet]
I am a little late to this story, but apparently digital textbook provider CourseSmart will be introducing a new tool that, in the words of my parent publication, "could make identifying unprepared students even easier, and, the creators hope, improve outcomes and retention."
The idea is that CourseSmart Analytics can quantify student interactions with the text. The software "tracks students’ engagement with their e-textbooks and provides and allows professors and colleges to evaluate the usefulness of learning materials and to track student work."
The theory, as I understand it, is that this additional data will help universities “prove” their students are learning, presumably by showing how much and in what ways they interact with their reading.
... will not be using this tool because I have a better way of measuring their engagement. I call it “their grade.”
3. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/19/165498842/matching-dna-with-medical-records-to-crack-disease-and-aging [snippet]The idea is that CourseSmart Analytics can quantify student interactions with the text. The software "tracks students’ engagement with their e-textbooks and provides and allows professors and colleges to evaluate the usefulness of learning materials and to track student work."
The theory, as I understand it, is that this additional data will help universities “prove” their students are learning, presumably by showing how much and in what ways they interact with their reading.
... will not be using this tool because I have a better way of measuring their engagement. I call it “their grade.”
Researchers weren't sure how they were going to extract genetic information from the saliva until a company called Affymetrix came along with a new system that could process lots of samples really quickly.
The National Institutes of Health provided grant funding of nearly $25 million, which allowed Affymetrix and the Kaiser team to process the saliva samples in just 15 months.
Then came another daunting task: matching each participant's genetic information with detailed health information in Kaiser's electronic records, which go back to 1995. The records include diagnoses, procedures, prescriptions and results of medical tests. For people who sent in saliva, Kaiser also has information on smoking and drinking habits, body mass measurements, and even geographic information that could be used to estimate exposure to certain chemicals in the air or water...
