Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Life on Film

Memoto CEO Martin Kallstrom with the Memoto camera. Photo by Johan Lange
Memoto CEO Martin Kallstrom with the Memoto camera. Photo by Johan Lange

Do you ever get to the end of a whirlwind trip and wish you could actually remember what you did? I’m guessing many of you who attended ScienceOnline2013 have forgotten as much awesome as you remember about the conference. What if there was a way to record your days for nostalgia’s sake or to monitor your lifestyle? You are in luck! This week at South-by-Southwest (SXSW) a Swedish start-up is pitching their tiny wearable camera called Memoto.

Memoto takes two geotagged photos each minute from its position on your collar, on a belt loop, wherever you decide to clip the tiny weather-proof camera. The camera’s battery can last several days and it recharges when you plug the camera into your computer to download all of the pictures taken since the last sync. Now you can record all the moments of the day that you might not think to whip out your smartphone to record. The camera isn’t automatically linked to social media platforms yet, but that functionality is on the horizon.

I think this particular functionality could really test the limits of personal privacy.  I personally don’t want two photos per minute of me posted to facebook while I have a conversation with someone. It can also be a huge infringement on patient privacy should someone wear this camera into a hospital and end up imaging someone’s private health information and potentially posting it to the web or even storing it on a server somewhere. Are medical practices even aware that this sort of thing exists?

Another issue linked with the type of data volume (120 photos per hour!) this camera would generate is storage. Memoto offers a remote server storage program for all of your images but it isn’t clear how secure your data will be. Memoto has several blog posts about data security but no firm policy in place yet. Would you be willing to risk having the images of your life exposed to anyone with the gumption to hack into those servers?

The idea of self-tracking is really intriguing but,I think I might be depressed to know how many photos a day are of my computer screen.

Witten’s Rules of Astonishment

Recently, Mike and I have found ourselves discussing several research studies with supposedly “surprising” results. While the work involved appears solid and the details of the phenomena were certainly amazing, we struggled to understand why the general phenomenon was “surprising”. Amazing, yes. Unexpected, no.  After years of such discussions, Mike has asked me to write down Witten’s Rules of Astonishment*. Continue reading “Witten’s Rules of Astonishment”

Cultural relevance

In a post for Convergent Ed, John Romano makes a compelling case for being “with it” as an educator and communicator. He admits to watching TMZ – every night! Why? Because analogies and metaphors are only effective tools if the reference imagery is relevant to your audience.

On the front lines of education, there is no room for intellectual vanity.

Cutting the second slide & Dollo’s “Law”

A recent study on house dust mites has shown that the mighty mites have evolved “in reverse” from an obligate parasite into a free living organism. That is pretty cool. Yet, I find myself in the position once again of questioning the way the research is presented without questioning the quality of the research itself.

For permanent parasites and other symbionts, the most intriguing question is whether these organisms can return to a free-living lifestyle and, thus, escape an evolutionary “dead end.” This question is directly related to Dollo’s law, which stipulates that a complex trait (such as being free living vs. parasitic) cannot re-evolve again in the same form. Here, we present conclusive evidence that house dust mites, a group of medically important free-living organisms, evolved from permanent parasites of warm-blooded vertebrates. – Klimov & O’Connor 2013

The researchers present their result as a refutation of Dollo’s Law, which postulates that evolution is irreversible: Continue reading “Cutting the second slide & Dollo’s “Law””

Recruiting under false pretenses?

In conjunction with the Uncommon Alliance: Women in STEM conference in Washington, DC (8-9 March 2013), there was a social media push (#DCSTEM) in conjunction with International Women’s Day to get professionals in the sciences to provide 140 characters of encouraging young women to go into STEM fields. I encourage, in my own way, but I can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that I’m being a bit disingenuous when I do so. Continue reading “Recruiting under false pretenses?”