Psychological Issues of direct to Consumer Whole Genome Sequencing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/06/2012 - 21:37Last month, I wrote a blog post about personal Genomics. It is a topic I've been getting more and more interested in. The other day, a friend tweeted about a discussion on LinkedIn, Would you have your genome sequenced?.
84% of the respondents said they would. The subsequent discussion hit a lot of issues, including how testing relates to various U.S. Federal acts like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).
One person posted a link to a blog post, Whole Genome Sequencing and Calculating Risk Tolerance. The blog post pointed to an article, Harvard Mapping My DNA Turns Scary as Threatening Gene Emerges. It was an article I concurrently found links to from a different discussion.
The author, through genetic testing, discovered he had a variant called JAK2, associated with rare, cancer-like, blood diseases. It is a great article and well worth the read. As the author explored the ramifications of finding out about genetic propensities to rare diseases, he noted
a 1999 study in the American Journal of Human Genetics found that about 1 percent of 4,527 people who were told they had the gene that causes Huntington’s disease, a progressive nervous system disorder, attempted or committed suicide, or were hospitalized for psychiatric reasons
Does knowing about certain risks, link that of Huntington's disease increase other risks, like that of attempting suicide? How should we, and particularly, how should genetic counsellors, deal with these shifting risks? Should genetic counsellors get get some training in psychology, or work with psychologists?
I'm not sure, but even after reading all of this, if there was affordable direct to consumer Whole Genome Sequencing available, I'd still go for it. But then again, I like to explore new technologies and innovations, partly in hope that my explorations might help others.
This is Bayt
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/05/2012 - 21:20Last week was long and hard, and the time driving to and from work provided brief moments of respite. Sometimes, I would leave the radio off and enjoy the silence, other than the rattles of the aging car. Other times, I'd turn on the radio for a little distraction.
Friday morning, I turned on the radio fairly early during my commute. NPR was playing the story, Anthony Shadid, Finding Peace In A 'House Of Stone'. What particularly jumped out at me was the end of the story where they talked about Bayt, the Arabic word for house, family and home.
This is bayt. This is what we imagine.
It made me think, what is 'bayt' for me. At one point, it was the house that this blog is named after, but that was years ago and lots of water over the water fall behind that house. We ended up in a small rental house in Woodbridge. I did some consulting jobs, and ended up working for a Federally Qualified Health Center. Was 'bayt' somehow tied up in work? We drifted between a few different churches, and have now settled into a new church. Was 'bayt' somehow tied up were I worshiped? And what about this blog, itself? Is writing part of 'bayt'?
Then, on Saturday, the article came out about the radio show that Fiona does with me every Sunday evening. Sunday, we did the radio show, and this morning, we skyped into a local television station where Fiona was interviewed about her show. Perhaps this is part of 'bayt'.
As I think of this, I think of Scarlett O'Hara talking about going back to Tara and talking about never going hungry again. My mind then wanders to Lenten disciplines, but nothing clear comes to mind.
So what is 'bayt'? What is home? Is it true that you can't go home again? Does it have something to do with being cast out of Eden, with the wandering of Cain?
"And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden"
Towards a Hermeneutics of Online Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/04/2012 - 21:08This afternoon, I returned to INTRODUCTION TO THEORY OF LITERATURE. I've been moving very slowly through it and am only on the third lecture. This lecture is about hermeneutics. Other than briefly reading a little Heidegger and Gadamer, and watching part of the lecture, my knowledge of hermeneutics limited, so, if I go astray, I apologize, and if you're looking for an introduction to hermeneutics, I'd suggest you look elsewhere.
Put simply, hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of written texts. Texts have always been interpreted, in one way or another. Yet for that study was not rigorously or systematically pursued, until it really mattered what the interpretation said. So, hermeneutics became important in religion during the Protestant reformation. Perhaps it has always been important for law, and as it gained importance in other areas, the hermeneutics of literature became important.
So, does a hermeneutics of online social media make sense? At first blush, perhaps not. Does your interpretation of my latest tweet really make a difference? Yet if you look a little more deeply, it may make quite a bit of difference. Social media is being brought into the courtrooms, particularly in family law cases. The interpretation of these social media messages may be very important. Likewise, as news and politics is increasingly being distributed via social media, the interpretation of those messages may be especially important.
Yet on my initial search, I'm not finding much of anyone writing about hermeneutics of online social media. Perhaps the closest I've found is Dr. Krista Francis-Poscente's blog, Blogging about Blogging. I've skimmed a few of the posts and it looks like a blog well worth reading.
As I think about it, there are interesting questions about the readers interpretation and relationship to the author, the individual social media entries, the overall collection of social media entries on a particular social media network, as well as all of the social media entries across the universe of social media networks that the author is on. How do we understand these different relationship as we think about a hermeneutics of online social media? What is out there already that I might be missing?
Exploring Images from Flickr through Empire Avenue to Instagram, Streamzoo and Gimp
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 03/03/2012 - 12:39People have often told me, I need more images on my blog. Images get people to stop and look, and, if you're lucky, read a little bit. Yet, mostly, I haven't gotten around to it. You see, I love words. I love text. Putting words together has always been easy.
I typically tell people I'm not really a visual sort of person. Yet that's not exactly right. I was in the photography club in junior high school. I had an early fifties vintage Exacta SLR. I would roll my own canisters of black and white film, shoot roll after roll, and then spend hours in the darkroom developing the film and making prints.
I learned some of the tricks back then of over exposing, under exposing, burning in clouds, and so on, but while ability to craft words made it over to the Internet, my photography never has. Now, recently developments online are causing me to consider ramping up my digital image making.
One thing that has gotten me thinking about this is Pinterest. People 'pin' articles on their boards at Pintrest, and this seems to be very image driven. Perhaps, if I want to keep building audience here, I need to have more images with my stories to encourage more pinning.
Then, there is a discussion going on over at Empire Avenue. People have found that being active in photo sharing sites can really boost your performance on Empire Avenue. A key focus has been on InstraGram. The problem with InstaGram is that it is limited to iPhone users. So, some people have become more active on Flickr.
One person who has some very interesting images on Flickr is Liz Strauss. I commented that it looked like one of her photographs had been put through and Edward Hopper filter and another through a Soviet Realism filter. It made me think about different filters for different famous painting styles. Can I create a Chiaroscuro filter? How about a Pointillism filter? Perhaps something emulating Picasso's blue period? Maybe I could even create some sort of palimpsest.
InstaGram, Hipstamatic, and the Flickr app for Android have some sort of filters like that, and another site I recently discovered thanks to a friend on Empire Avenue, StreamZoo, has a bunch of interesting filters. Unfortunately, StreamZoo does not seem to have an easy way of posting to Flickr. I couldn't even find a way to do it with IFTTT. So, I'm mostly cross posting my StreamZoo pictures to .
Beyond this, sites like InstaGram have their set of filters you can apply. With something like StreamZoo, you can really do an awful lot, but what if I want to create my own filters?
I've always been an open source sort of guy, so I started looking around for articles that talk about how to do some of this via Gimp. A good starting point is Create Instagram Style Photo Effects with GIMP or Photoshop.
I read through that and started experimenting. It took me a little while to get comfortable with layers, and color curves, but slowly it started to take shape. There is a lot more that can be explored, as well as how to relate this to semiotics. So, who else is doing interesting thing with modifying images? Got any suggestions?
#ff @djgoddessa @src_changeagent @cthealth @zoe201015 @nerdenterprises @candacemountain @freedomwalker77
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/02/2012 - 20:40This week, I'm using FollowFridayHelper again to come up with my list of people I'm following that are particularly interesting. I am using the order as it was presented by FollowFridayHelper, so It will hop around a little bit.
Starting the list is @djgoddessa. I connected with her via Triberr. A lot of her tweets are Retweets or conversations with others. On Triberr, her posts point to her Tumblr blog which is mostly of content that she grabbed via Scoop.it. She has a great eye for interesting stories, which I like to reshare.
Next is @src_changeagent. I got to know her through the #hcsmct tweetchat and breakfasts. She is well worth the follow, lots of interesting tweets about health, disparities, social justice, and how it all fits together.
Another person from the #hcsmct tweet chat is @cthealth. Well, actually, that is an organizational account that different people tweet on, but everyone I've met from @cthealth is great.
@zoe201015 is another connection from Triberr. She describes herself as 'just another outspoken queer & trans USAF veteran trying to make it another year'. She posts a lot of interesting articles that I often retweet.
I'm pretty sure that I first connected with @nerdenterprises on Empire Avenue, although we are connected on Triberr as well. He posts an interesting mix of articles, from 'How To Record an Owner Financed Sale Of An Asset in QuickBooks' to 'How To Use Pinterest For Your Business'. Yeah, I haven't worked in Quickbooks in years, and some of the posts are a bit nerdy, but hey, that why he's @nerdenterprises.
@candacemountain is another connection in both Empire Avenue and Triberr. She describes herself as 'Author, writer, blogger, science enthusiast, geek, humorist, reader, reviewer, and many other things. I also like Jello!'. From the description you can probably see why I recommend her. She's a fairly prolific tweeter with a wide variety of tweets.
Closing out the list, is @freedomwalker77 Besides being connected on Twitter, we're connected on Empire Avenue, Facebook, and probably some other venues as well. She is also a prolific tweeter and has a strong presence on the other social networks.
So, that's my Follow Friday list for this week.
