Empiricist League #16 meeting at Union Hall on The Hidden DNA of NYC

OK this looks like it will be really really interesting.  Laurie Garrett sent me a link to this announcment about a meeting of the Empiricist League in New York: What are the 15,000 microscopic lifeforms that live on the subway? How disgusting are the contaminants in the Gowanus Canal? Can we use technology to stop …

The long road from Data to Wisdom, and from DNA to Pathogen

I. Introduction There is an oft-cited hierarchy for data, wherein ideally it should flow: Data –>Information –>Knowledge –>Wisdom (DIKW).  Just because you have data, it takes some processing to get quality information, and even good information is not necessarily knowledge, and knowledge often requires context or application to become wisdom. For example, you could have …

Pathomap: a big task regarding small things: a microbial map of New York City

Just found out about this really cool project: Pathomap | Mapping New York’s Unseen Residents. From the project page “Pathomap is a research project by Weill Cornell Medical College to study the microbiotic population and genetic dynamics in urban areas in order to detect and respond to escalated microbial dangers.” Basically, Chris Mason, along with collaborators, …