Breathing apparatus (Taken with instagram)
“”The drive for less expense may have already spawned some consequences — a proliferation of secondary journals, a reduction in stringent quality control at various levels in order to preserve margins in the face of inelastic pricing, experimentation with models that draw money from other parts of the academic or research budgets and thereby potentially affect the amount and longevity of ongoing research grants, or a flood of barely interesting papers that leads to more churn and undertow in the scientific record and slows the journey from bench to bedside…
In our culture at large, we are currently letting a fringe political group undercut major portions of our civilization — education, roads, vaccines, public safety — to save a few bucks in the short-term. These people will vanish like smoke when it’s time to account for the costs their savings incurred, from unproductive workers, to banged up cars, to sick kids, to homes lost.
Astute commentary in the Scholarly Kitchen on how the drive to save pennies can cost us pounds more down the road.
Thank you for not mentioning @DrOz. (New Yorker)
Glove One is a wearable mobile communication device. It presents a futile and fragile technology with which to augment ourselves. A cell phone which, in order to use, one must sacrifice their hand. It is both the literalization of Sherry Turkle’s notion of technology as a “phantom limb”, in how we augment ourselves through an ambivalent reliance on it, as well as a celebration of the freedom we seek in our devices…
Glove One is not an exercise in innovation, but rather this project asks the question “What are we willing to sacrifice in order to participate in technology and social media?”
Alpha Block (Taken with instagram)
“ We’ve all seen our friends post about being sick on Facebook, but this new feature paves the way for the provision of structured health data that is linked to a wealth of other identifying information… Facebook’s new Health and Wellness section has implications not just for organ donor registration, but for personal health information management, public health, and disclosure – raising questions about what can or will be done with our health data once we’ve trusted it to Facebook.”
At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5” technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. If I can survive the separation, I’m going to do this for a year. Yeah, I’m serious. I’m not leaving The Verge, and I’m not becoming a hermit, I just won’t use the internet in my personal or work life, and won’t ask anyone to use it for me.
Starting tonight, @futurepaul is leaving the internet for a year. After watching this video I’m surprised how much that idea scares me. Good luck, Paul.
“ When small start-ups I’ve spoken with do make money, they often find it difficult to recruit additional investment because most venture capitalists — and often the entrepreneurs they finance — are not interested in building viable long-term businesses. Rather, they’re interested in pumping up enough hype and valuation to find a quick exit through an acquisition at an eye-popping premium.”
Nick Bilton in the New York Times. This is one of my central concerns around startup culture in health care
[via Daring Fireball]
Patterned by Nature - Sculptural Transparent Display
The artwork, a collaboration between Plebian Design, Hypersonic Engineering & Design, and Sosolimited, celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.
Oh, how I want to see this. (via @blprnt)
