Category: SciFoo

Health Hackers

From Saturday’s WSJ, this essay on health hacking: at its most glorified, rolling your own molecular biology. I first heard about this back in 2008 at Scifoo. It’s certainly taken off. The problem of course is that it’s not science without sufficient statistical power. Although, it certainly wouldn’t require any statistics to detect an unlucky SNP.

Scifoo rap up

This was without a doubt one of the very best meetings I have ever attended. From the “flying car” (known as the Transition) to the Tesla roadster, to meeting one Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, to some of the very best neuroscience on the brain-machine interface–I learned an awful lot. 

We had a good session on the Decade of the Mind project—I remain cautiously optimistic.

Now for the awful red-eye back to Washington and…..a regular work day tomorrow. I wish I could just teleport like they do in Second Life.
Jim

Arrival at Scifoo

So here I am at the Wild Palms Hotel lobby in Sunnyvale getting ready for the fun to start at Scifoo camp. I got up at 4:30AM this morning to catch a Jet Blue flight at Logan. And all went well for once except for losing a pair of glasses–I’m on the reserve pair.

Thinking about Science 2.0, I keep returning to the notion of provenance of the data–especially for images and movies. It’s a major issue. As important I think as metadata.

Jim

More from the Cape


A wonderful dinner last night with a former student, now a valued member of my editorial board, and her husband.  This evening sitting out under a cool, cloudy sky in Falmouth working on a new paper about the trajectory of cortical development in post-natal humans (from zero till six years old).

I’m thinking about ideas for Nature’s Scifoo Camp at Google later this week. It’s a lot of fun.
Jim