ISEPP took the risk of inviting an industrialist versus an academician to address the Portland lay public, an audience reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Vienna by some accounts. Speakers like to unveil stuff in Portland, as do movie people. Several in our circle had known David Cox from their shared high school (same school as Tara's, and formerly a business school before joining the public fleet, accepting that charter).
Pfizer, and one extrapolates to other pharmaceutical companies, is seeing vast wastelands of useless patents in fields were the name of the game is to learn science, meaning one needs a culture of openness and open data (a true society). You can try to play lip service to those ideals, and get away with it for awhile, but then the physics of the inevitable kicks in and you realize you're stalled and/or slipping backwards, forgetting your science, your know-how. That sense of an impending dark age provokes an avoidance reflex.
Fortunately, we're surrounded by evidence of great civilizations, including some very recent ones, such as the Apollo Project, which put humans on the moon. More to come (in the pipeline and/or incubator right now).
The giant project to decipher the genome has yielded big data for sure, but the statistical correlations with diseases are relatively slight, giving subtle clues as to mechanisms. What you need to find are concentrations of shared diseases and find correlations there.
The individuals should be enrolled as responsible medical team members, to an MD level in specialty i.e. with respect to their own condition (MDs licensed to practice on people besides themselves are not permitted such narrow self-centeredness).
Dick Cox encouraged us to begin the ascent to a more enlightened society, not out of some altruistic do gooder sense so much as a need to get on with the business of learning science and really finding drugs that work. We just don't have that many yet and the side effects are killing us. Drug company people take drugs too, have an investment in being smart about self-administration. Some top researchers have first hand experience with the diseases they treat.
DNA research has opened plenty of doors, but to walk into this new world of medical science we have to be free and open with medical records in a way that doesn't miscast either government, industry or insurance as ipso facto "the bad guy" i.e. there are legitimate get-the-job done configurations that aren't interested in wasting anyone's time on scandalously poor ethics or impossibly wasteful and/or ineffective treatments.
There's too much ignorance about the body and how it works, about nature, to squander precious lives on soap operatics and melodrama. Dialing back to preventative therapies is still the best approach, but that means seeing the tendencies, knowing the signs. When you're preventing, you're preventing against, which means the diseases have shown themselves. This is more of an Asian attitude perhaps, in that you're not looking for "cures" so much as negotiated settlements, tolerable equilibria, steady states.
Happiness, including on into old age, is legit to pursue, and not just because the US Constitution says so.
At the dinner afterward, I asked if I were one of the bad guys per his model, in that I was in the business, at least until recently, of purging case records of identifiable traits, i.e. I was into anonymizing and pseudonymizing major data sets. Yes, I was a bad guy. He used the word "encrypt" but I don't see myself doing that so much as rendering petabytes of case data innocuous as a public good, e.g. not subject to blackmailing purposes or leading to divorce action because of revealed details in peoples private lives.
However, we've detoured into a technical footnote as the allegiance between medical sciences and free open source computing has only just begun, yet has been one of those exponentially more relevant curves. Many people have no problem being up front with their identity when presenting with various diseases and will not mind having their DNA fingerprint a part of the public record.
Those less interested in helping science in that way will not be coerced into doing so as protecting record privacy and security also relate to integrity i.e. if the data gathering models are not themselves clear and public, then the outcomes data will not be trusted -- could be just someone's faked / randomized noise, for sale at high prices.
The ability to authenticate to trusted sources needs to be part of the model as well. But then banking is not a complete stranger to these issues. Bank your genome. Consider it yours (whom else would it belong to -- nature herself maybe as you're her baby) and perhaps some of your income might come under a kind of "thanks for the memories" in the chart of accounts (i.e. thanks for the samples, the records). Pay people for being who they are, what a concept. That's usually more applied to horses these days.
I'm expecting some of the upcoming conference events on my calendar to give me more of a sense of Big Data and medicine. I'd say Pfizer is definitely not alone in thinking Portland has a role to play in designing the data collection centers and sharing the data. The local buzz matches the global in this case. Something like Google Earth but for the body, built with filters so you might see different demographic cross-sections... such public goods with pro versions might be one outcome of the upcoming data crunching and visualizing era.
People with exotic diseases have much to teach us and should not have to worry where their next meal is coming from as medical science works with its students -- as long as they don't mind cafeteria food (we hope there's a Food Not Bombs like end of the spectrum, fresh and vegan, with some of the healthier patients doing their own prep and serving). The Global U will have better and more humane infrastructure as we shluff off the old snake skin. To be continued.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Wanderers 2012.2.14
Lynne Taylor is here talking about her paintings, water colors.
The Internet domain name stuff from a previous meeting is still on the board. Linus Pauling House.
It's "two dog night" (Nirel has one in a bag, helping with her daughter's move), and Blueberry (a veteran attender).
Shomar is missed. I was thinking about David earlier, thinking we should have dinner.
The first painting represents the new hadron collider at CERN and the particles they seek.
The second has lots of nanotubes and DNA and stuff.
We have two bottles of double dog dare (cheap wine on the table).
Lynne's paintings have frequently featured as covers of ISEPP programs, handed out at the concert hall (usually the Schnitzer downtown).
We have some visitors tonight, first timers.
Tomorrow I'm giving a talk on the Bucky stuff at Quakers, having dropped the ball earlier.
One of our guests had been on Ken Kesey's bus that day. She was later a college English teacher, wrote poetry.
Her cousin, also present, was a career fireman with Portland's fire department.
Craigmore Creations has move out, taking the fancier table and chairs. We're using the standard institutional folding tables with an assortment of chairs, some stackable.
We talked about Henk Pander and his show.
David called last night. We talked about Nick Espinoza whom he knows, an inventor of "glitter bombing" -- a Blue House topic conversation sometimes. Speaking of acting up activists, I hear Tre might be campaigning for Mayor.
I was writing about democracy again today, on the Wittgenstein list, mentioning DemocracyLab.
We spent most of the evening going around the table. I brought one of the Pinot Noirs, and some cheese and crackers. I drank some coffee. Looked at pix of the newer stealth boats (still pretty secret).
The Internet domain name stuff from a previous meeting is still on the board. Linus Pauling House.
It's "two dog night" (Nirel has one in a bag, helping with her daughter's move), and Blueberry (a veteran attender).
Shomar is missed. I was thinking about David earlier, thinking we should have dinner.
The first painting represents the new hadron collider at CERN and the particles they seek.
The second has lots of nanotubes and DNA and stuff.
We have two bottles of double dog dare (cheap wine on the table).
Lynne's paintings have frequently featured as covers of ISEPP programs, handed out at the concert hall (usually the Schnitzer downtown).
We have some visitors tonight, first timers.
Tomorrow I'm giving a talk on the Bucky stuff at Quakers, having dropped the ball earlier.
One of our guests had been on Ken Kesey's bus that day. She was later a college English teacher, wrote poetry.
Her cousin, also present, was a career fireman with Portland's fire department.
Craigmore Creations has move out, taking the fancier table and chairs. We're using the standard institutional folding tables with an assortment of chairs, some stackable.
We talked about Henk Pander and his show.
David called last night. We talked about Nick Espinoza whom he knows, an inventor of "glitter bombing" -- a Blue House topic conversation sometimes. Speaking of acting up activists, I hear Tre might be campaigning for Mayor.
I was writing about democracy again today, on the Wittgenstein list, mentioning DemocracyLab.
We spent most of the evening going around the table. I brought one of the Pinot Noirs, and some cheese and crackers. I drank some coffee. Looked at pix of the newer stealth boats (still pretty secret).
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Yes Men Fix the World (movie review)
I recommend seeing both if you can deal with either. These films are great satire, but then the clowns are really high on that wire, which had better stay taut.
There's a Sesame Street air about the whole thing, a kind of lecturing to moral imbeciles. How does one get across a sense of top management?
Copy TV. Those newscasters are so good at pontificating -- there's a reason the preacher is in the pulpit.
The Halliburton disaster suits are especially rolling-in-this-aisles funny.
We watched it at Blue House, LW & M snuggled on the couch, me slogging through a standard workflow on the Air, chuckling along the way.
Dow tried to take 'em out, with the "cruel hoax" line (against the people of Bhopal -- I'd thought of that too), delivered perfectly.
That could have sunk 'em, and their only recourse was to head to Bhopal and hang out, actually get the reaction. Yes, some had wept for joy, but then understood the heroics, like the heroics behind that Other Tomorrow New York Times edition.
Shades of Sasha Cohen (another brave heart).
The guys express their fear levels in several ways, including during the opening credits. The fear of losing one's head, to the guillotine, for using it, is not empty paranoia when you really are about to address a few million people as the faux representative of an evil empire.
But then the real representatives have their fears too, in looking so greedy-inept with their lame form of faux capitalism (which is about using other peoples' heads, mostly -- Milton Friedman's especially if you can afford the look).
I understand the nightmare these guys live in. They win their battle over and over, keep making their point. But what really changes? The goal isn't winning then? It comes as a revelation. Conditioned reflexes don't change that fast and the three laws of robotics get broken left and right (positronic might have been better dontcha know (yes, an Asimov allusion)).
There's a Doppler Effect at work. Every event is also a potential time bomb, MIRVed to hit (have some impact) in multiple elsewheres in a chain reaction, leading to tipping points and avalanches. They teach about these patterns in Systems, at Wanderers, common as rain.
There's a Sesame Street air about the whole thing, a kind of lecturing to moral imbeciles. How does one get across a sense of top management?
Copy TV. Those newscasters are so good at pontificating -- there's a reason the preacher is in the pulpit.
The Halliburton disaster suits are especially rolling-in-this-aisles funny.
We watched it at Blue House, LW & M snuggled on the couch, me slogging through a standard workflow on the Air, chuckling along the way.
Dow tried to take 'em out, with the "cruel hoax" line (against the people of Bhopal -- I'd thought of that too), delivered perfectly.
That could have sunk 'em, and their only recourse was to head to Bhopal and hang out, actually get the reaction. Yes, some had wept for joy, but then understood the heroics, like the heroics behind that Other Tomorrow New York Times edition.
Shades of Sasha Cohen (another brave heart).
The guys express their fear levels in several ways, including during the opening credits. The fear of losing one's head, to the guillotine, for using it, is not empty paranoia when you really are about to address a few million people as the faux representative of an evil empire.
But then the real representatives have their fears too, in looking so greedy-inept with their lame form of faux capitalism (which is about using other peoples' heads, mostly -- Milton Friedman's especially if you can afford the look).
I understand the nightmare these guys live in. They win their battle over and over, keep making their point. But what really changes? The goal isn't winning then? It comes as a revelation. Conditioned reflexes don't change that fast and the three laws of robotics get broken left and right (positronic might have been better dontcha know (yes, an Asimov allusion)).
There's a Doppler Effect at work. Every event is also a potential time bomb, MIRVed to hit (have some impact) in multiple elsewheres in a chain reaction, leading to tipping points and avalanches. They teach about these patterns in Systems, at Wanderers, common as rain.
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