Jul 24, 2013, 8:00 AM, Posted by
Lori Melichar
We at Pioneer are fortunate to work with grantees who consistently challenge our thinking and open us up to new ways of looking at the world. Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH is no exception. We recently watched a talk of his on Edge.org titled A New Kind of Social Science for the 21st Century (which we highly recommend), and found ourselves brimming with questions. His answers were as provocative as the talk itself, so we thought we'd share them. Read the Q&A.
Jul 5, 2013, 8:00 AM, Posted by
Pioneer Blog Team
In case you missed it, the New York Times recently devoted a section to the business and culture of big data. “Virtually every field, from science to sports to public health, is being transformed by data-driven discovery and decision-making,” observed writer Steve Lohr. The coverage included several insights into the intersections of data and health. We were especially interested to read about data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher’s new role at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (he used to run the data-mining team at Facebook), where he’s “exploring genetic and other medical data in search of breakthroughs in disease modeling and treatment.” Also of interest: how CVS is using data to “stage-manage paths to the prescription counter” (apparently, those with chronic health problems are their best customers), and this chart of devices that track health data.
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Jul 3, 2013, 11:15 AM, Posted by
Steve Downs
On my way out to visit the Calit2 team that is running the Health Data Exploration project (sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio), I read Alissa Quart's excellent piece in Newsweek about the Quantified Self (QS) movement and health. The article covers many of the possible benefits as well as the downsides of self-tracking.
As Quart acknowledges, she also focuses quite a bit on the edge cases, the extreme QSers, painting a picture that can seem a little ridiculous. It’s inevitable; whenever a new technology emerges, a subset of early adopters takes it to the extreme, making the technology and its applications easy for us to mock (see "glasshole").
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Jun 10, 2013, 8:00 AM, Posted by
Steve Downs, Lori Melichar
As we set forth on the Health Data Exploration project, we're being guided by a wonderful set of advisors. Here's a quick video post from one of them, Larry Smarr, the director of Calit2. Larry's a pioneer who's exploring the frontiers of quantified self, as you can see from the extraordinary talk he gave at TEDMED earlier this year.
Jun 7, 2013, 3:29 PM, Posted by
Paul Tarini
From: Paul Tarini
To: Christine Nieves, Beth Toner and Thomas Goetz
Date: June 7, 2013
Thomas, I agree with your description that Health Datapalooza is the place to be. For me, this year's conference was a great experience and offered a really rich environment for networking. At RWJF's booth and throughout the conference, I had conversation after conversation with a range of people who are interested in liberating data and using liberated data. I talked with researchers, entrepreneurs, health care providers, people from state and federal government, and representatives from large corporations. It was really quite impressive.
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