#cancer

Turbulence – artwork based on algorithms and hand-drawn systems to create computational and natural system visualisations.
Artist: Owen Schuh via DataIsNature

The other day I overheard a student next to me on a flight say, “I can remember the words to almost every song I’ve ever heard more than once or twice – if only the legal cases I need to learn were set to music, I could remember them all.”

Optimistic, I know, but maybe not so far off.

Appeal to the brain’s pleasure center and learning becomes as easy as humming a well-known tune.

Along the same lines, researchers have been turning to crowdsourced data processing to work through big data conundrums. Offer a means of pleasurable participation for data entry, such as a game platform, and citizen scientist gamers will come.

Cancer Research UK worked together with game developers to create a smartphone game that would help them outsource a large backlog of genetic micro-array data garnered from thousands of breast cancer patients over the years. The result was Play to Cure: Genes in Space, which is basically a space shooter game in which the player finds the best path through an obstacle course, shooting asteroids and mapping successful escape routes.

A sample of genetic micro-array data. The analysis involves identifying the areas where the dots are at their most dense.
Source: Gamasutra

The possible paths, however, are actually maps of genetic micro-arrays, and the players game solutions are uploaded to the Cancer Research UK database for processing. After one month of use, gamers worked through data that it would have taken researchers six months to process without assistance.

The game version of the original data, with possible paths marked through the denser areas. Source: Gamasutra

The Genes in Space game version of the original data, with possible paths marked through the denser areas.
Source: Gamasutra

Another game, Geo-Wiki, deals with processing data on cropland cover and land use. From the Geo-Wiki site: “Volunteers review hotspot maps of global land cover disagreement and determine, based on what they actually see in Google Earth and their local knowledge, if the land cover maps are correct or incorrect. Their input is recorded in a database, along with uploaded photos, to be used in the future for the creation of a new and improved global land cover map.”

The ‘game’ is a quick image/response competition. The platform can be expanded to include further agricultural and land-use data from users, which is then reflected in other projects that support better environmental monitoring.

The power of crowdsourcing is phenomenal, and I think we are just at the beginning of putting these tools to use outside of purely commercial marketing strategies. Having tried out both games, and having tried out the Geo-Wiki game, I think what’s still missing is that the games have to work on their own, as stand-alone games, for them to be truly addictive – and useful on a larger scale.

It’s been fifty years since a watershed report was released in the United States, the 1964 U.S. Surgeon General’s report on the effect of tobacco and smoking on health.

A recent study estimated that as a result of this 1964 report, 50 million lives were saved worldwide that would have otherwise been lost to tobacco-related disease. The number of adults who smoke has been reduced by half – from 40% to 20% – between the 1960s and now.

With the publication of the report, the U.S. and other countries began to implement a broad variety of measures to counter widespread addiction to cigarettes.

What was the reaction of the powerful tobacco industry?

Protecting the nest egg
Photo: Brian Klaus

From before the report was published, and well into the 1990s, the industry countered with independent research that questioned the direct links drawn between using tobacco products and various diseases; new markets with fewer impending regulations were opened; new restrictions were met with litigation and arguments about consumer rights and choices; new forms of cigarettes were presented as less harmful.

Books and studies have dissected the tactics used by a large-scale, highly profitable and powerful industry to save itself. One very thorough book, The Cigarette Papers, quotes press statements released by the Tobacco Industry Research Committee over the course of decades. A sampling:

The tobacco industry recognizes that it has a special responsibility to help find the true facts about tobacco and health. Since 1954, it has been supporting a program of independent research through the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC)…

The TIRC emphasizes that many clinical and experimental factors still need to be identified, investigated, and evaluated regarding the origin of lung cancer and other diseases. Actually, the number of suspects under study in lung cancer has broadened and now includes viruses, previous lung ailments, air pollutants, heredity, stress and strain, and other factors.

While these [TIRC-funded] research studies have increased our factual knowledge, they have at the same time continued to make clear and to emphasize the great and critical gaps in that knowledge.

We accept an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.

As the book’s authors state, the goal here wasn’t to discover facts, it was to perpetuate controversy about the adverse effects of tobacco, and in the interim, continue to remain an economic force.

And in all fairness, the industry can’t be blamed for trying to protect its interests, nor can those supporters who saw the tobacco industry in terms of employment, industry and taxes.

The fact remains that smoking is harmful for anyone except the tobacco industry itself.

None of this, really, is news except for the part about how many lives were saved due to the Surgeon General’s report and its aftermath.

What I wondered, while I was reading all this and revisiting the ads proclaiming a ‘safer cigarette’ was this:

There have been countless reports on the effects of fossil-fuel consumption on health, the environment, and the climate. The oil industry has reacted in much the same way as the tobacco industry – to the point that numerous financial companies draw parallels between the plight of the two industries for investment purposes.

When it comes to damaging products and industries, it might take time, but regulation, awareness campaigns and alternatives work.

So, when will we have our watershed moment when the majority of us learn to kick the habit?

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Never cry over spilt milk. It could've been champagne. Or whisky.

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