Public policy
Discussion of public policy around technological issues, especially but not only surveillance and privacy.
A few notes from XLDB 4
As much as I believe in the XLDB conferences, I only found time to go to (a big) part of one day of XLDB 4 myself. In general: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Health care, Michael Stonebraker, MySQL, Open source, Parallelization, Petabyte-scale data management, Scientific research, Surveillance and privacy | 2 Comments |
Notes and links October 10 2010
More quick-hit notes, links, and so on: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Health care, Surveillance and privacy, XtremeData | Leave a Comment |
A rant about medical records
It is very difficult to convey utterly tedious frustration without — well, without thoroughly boring one’s audience. And hence I will not try to explain the full awfulness of modern medical records and information compartmentalization. But I was personally present 5 times in one recent week while Linda gave detailed information about her contact information, medical history, etc. — and all 5 times it was to the same hospital.
In our case, that just costs time. But the information flow in my father’s case upsets me more. Read more
| Categories: Health care, Surveillance and privacy | 2 Comments |
Reconciling medical privacy and elder care
In a previous post, I outlined how Friendship Village of Dublin has mishandled my father’s medical information, to the detriment of his medical care. Expanding on that story, here are some other complications or screw-ups in the same series of medical events. In these other cases, the blame clearly falls more on the information-flow system itself, rather than on some particular medical care provider such as Friendship Village of Dublin, Riverside Methodist Hospital, or the paramedics who transported my father from one to the other.
| Categories: Health care, Surveillance and privacy | 3 Comments |
Big Data is Watching You!
There’s a boom in large-scale analytics. The subjects of this analysis may be categorized as:
- People
- Financial trades
- Electronic networks
- Everything else
The most varied, interesting, and valuable of those four categories is the first one.
The essential questions of Fair Data Use
Today is Independence Day in the United States, which seems like a great time to return to the subject of liberty, privacy, and fair data use. I continue to believe:
- New technologies for information creation, gathering, and analysis offer dire new possibilities for abuse.
- Our law- and policy-makers need to create effective new safeguards in response.
- That’s not going to happen unless we in the technology community help them.
In this matter – as in many others – I think getting the questions right is at least as important and difficult as then choosing the answers. What’s more, I think that the questions naturally fall into the domain of the technologists – we know better what is possible, what will be possible in the future, and which distinctions lead to true differences. The answers, on the other hand, lie more properly in the domain of those whose expertise is the crafting of actual laws.
For my first draft of suggested Fair Data Use Questions, I am dividing things into three categories:
- The questions themselves.
- Different kinds of data (for which the questions may have different answers).
- Other qualifiers that could change the answers to the questions.
Suggested additions and other comments will be gratefully received. I intend for this to be a community effort. Read more
| Categories: Surveillance and privacy | 15 Comments |
Objectivity Infinite Graph
I chatted Wednesday night with Darren Wood, the Australia-based lead developer of Objectivity’s Infinite Graph database product. Background includes:
- Objectivity is a profitable, decades-old object-oriented DBMS vendor with about 50 employees.
- Like some other object-oriented DBMS of its generation, Objectivity is as much a toolkit for building DBMS as it is a real finished DBMS product. Objectivity sales are typically for custom deals, where Objectivity helps with the programming.
- The way Objectivity works is basically:
- You manage objects in memory, in the format of your choice.
- Objectivity bangs them to disk, across a network.
- Objectivity manages the (distributed) pointers to the objects.
- You can, if you choose, hard code exactly which objects are banged to which node.
- Objectivity’s DML for reading data is very different from Objectivity’s DML for writing data. (I think the latter is more like the program code itself, while the former is more like regular DML.)
- The point of Objectivity is not so much to have fast I/O. Rather, it is to minimize the CPU cost of getting the data that comes across the wire into useful form.
- Darren got the idea of putting a generic graph DBMS front-end on Objectivity while doing a relationship analytics project for an Australian intelligence agency.
- Darren redoubled his efforts to sell the project internally at Objectivity after reading what I wrote about relationship analytics back in 2006 or so.
- There is now a 5 or so person team developing Infinite Graph.
- Infinite Graph is just now going out to beta test.
Infinite Graph is an API or language binding on top of Objectivity that:
- Hides a lot of Objectivity’s complexity.
- Is suitable for graph/relationship analytics.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Object, Objectivity and Infinite Graph, RDF and graphs, Surveillance and privacy | 10 Comments |
The most important part of the “social graph” is neither social nor a graph
“Social graph” is a highly misleading term, and so is “social network analysis.” By this I mean:
There’s something akin to “social graphs” and “social network analysis” that is more or less worthy of all the current hype – but graphs and network analysis are only a minor part of the whole story.
In particular, the most important parts of the Facebook “social graph” are neither social nor a graph. Rather, what’s really important is an aggregate Profile of Revealed Preferences, of which person-to-person connections or other things best modeled by a graph play only a small part.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Facebook, Games and virtual worlds, RDF and graphs, Surveillance and privacy, Web analytics | 13 Comments |
8 not very technical problems with analytic technology
In a couple of talks, including last Thursday’s, I’ve rattled off a list of eight serious problems with analytic technology, all of them human or organizational much more than purely technical. At best, these problems stand in the way of analytic success, and at least one is a lot worse than that.
The bulleted list in my notes is:
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Individual-human
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Expense of expertise
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Limited numeracy
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Organizational
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Limited budgets
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Legacy systems
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General inertia
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Political
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Obsolete systems
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Clueless lawmakers
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Obsolete legal framework
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I shall explain. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Surveillance and privacy | Leave a Comment |
Big Brother watching our parents?
Life as an elderly person can have Kafkaesque aspects. For example, whether you are allowed to continue to live independently in your own apartment can depend upon whether you are trusted to follow orders for your own good in areas such as:
- Taking medication
- Walking with proper care
- Keeping your feet elevated to let various medical conditions heal
Similarly, it can depend upon whether you are deemed likely, for whatever reason, to fall.
Note: All these examples are taken directly from my family’s very recent experience, although at the immediate time we have bigger problems than that.
This raises the subject of how the elderly can be provided with precious additional months or years of independent living. when constantly attentive in-home nursing assistance isn’t affordable. Well, it won’t be long before technology can monitor all of those subjects and more, via a variety of video, audio, tactile, or motion-detecting sensors. In other words, an utter Big Brother set-up is what may allow the elderly some continued freedom.
Putting it that way illustrates that there are huge reasons to invent and commercialize this kind of technology. But clearly, once invented and deployed, that technology would be horrifically easy to abuse. That’s just one more reason we really, really need to get our collective liberty and privacy act together.
Related links
- A 2003 post speculating about multiple uses to which home monitoring technology could be put.
- A couple of academic papers about home/health monitoring kinds of technology
| Categories: Surveillance and privacy | 2 Comments |