Tag Archives: research

Related News: Surprise! With $60 Million Genentech Deal, 23andMe Has A Business Plan

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. Forbes published an article titled Surprise! With $60 Million Genentech Deal, 23andMe Has A Business Plan.

People who have bought 23andMe kits and agreed to donate their data to research (that’s about 600,000 of the company’s 800,000 customers) automatically consent for 23andMe to sequence their genomes. 23andMe says that it is also able to share anonymous and pooled data about their self-reported health traits without asking. But Genentech wants even more: it wants to look at health and genetic data on an anonymous but individual basis. For that reason, the company will have to ask customers if they want to enter the study.

One big question behind 23andMe’s business model has always been whether customers will be happy or upset when they find out that they realize they have paid to be used in for-profit research projects. “I’m sure some people will feel great, no problem, and some will feel cheated,” says Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “And the reactions will form a bell curve.”

Source: Forbes

Related News: DARPA funded studies to see how you use social networks

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. Engadget published an article titled DARPA funded studies to see how you use social networks.

DARPA’s been spending its money on many, many things other than robots and exoskeletons — including several experiments that seek to determine how we use social media. Apparently, Pentagon’s most adventurous division has quite a number of studies under its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program since it was announced in 2011. And thanks to The Guardian (which spotted the details SMISC quietly posted on its website), we now know the projects the agency’s been working on… and they involve not only Facebook, but also Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Kickstarter and even Digg. According to the researchers involved, they used only data available to the public, and it doesn’t look like they violated any law. But just like Facebook’s mood experiment, some of these studies might make people a tad uncomfortable.

Source: Engadget

Related News: On Facebook, a growing teenage wasteland

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. CNN published an article titled On Facebook, a growing teenage wasteland.

Nicole Uvieghara is only 18, but that’s old enough to remember the good old days on Facebook.

“I used to log in to Facebook every day,” said Uvieghara, a Murrieta, California, native and freshman at Arizona State University. “Now, I go, like, once a week. On my news feed, I rarely see posts from my friends and I have not posted things on my wall in the past year.”

Her experience isn’t unusual. Teens are cooling on Facebook, a trend suggested by recent research and acknowledged, this week by Facebook itself. The shift was confirmed time and time again in e-mail and phone interviews with dozens of teens and their parents in CNN’s reporting of this story.

Source: CNN

Related News: Pew survey: 21 percent of US cellphone owners get online mostly through their phones

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. Engadget published an article titled Pew survey: 21 percent of US cellphone owners get online mostly through their phones.

There have been signs that Americans are leaning more and more on the smartphone as a primary internet device, and nowhere is that clearer than the latest edition of Pew’s Cell Internet Use survey. The research group found that 21 percent of American cellphone owners now get online chiefly through their handset, up from 17 percent last year.

Source: Engadget

Related News: Jurors jailed for contempt of court over internet use

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. BBC published an article titled Jurors jailed for contempt of court over internet use.

Two jurors have each been jailed for two months for contempt of court after one posted a comment on Facebook and the other researched a case online.

Kasim Davey, 21, of London, wrote a strongly-worded Facebook message during the trial of a man for sex offences.

The High Court ruled he and Joseph Beard, 29, who was a juror on a separate fraud trial, “interfered with the administration of justice”.

Source: BBC