#lak12 Week 5

I'm catching up on the readings of week 5 and started of with the big Aspen report.

Nice and down to earth.... in some cases correlations can be useful, but be careful: correlations are not causal relations and they have limited value as predictors. If you want more, you still need to develop theories and test them purposefully. Yep.

In many cases you need to think carefully about what data you need, instead of just collecting everything just because you can... because otherwise you create more confusion and distractions.

I hadn't thought so much about the value of visualization of data (but good to be remembered that visualization techniques contain embedded judgements).

The privacy issues confuse me.... on the one hand I do feel powerless, because I don't know which data about me are collected by whom... and I dread the consequences for the less fortunate people: if you are illegal, you can already not go to a hospital any longer, but in future the police will track you down because of your mobile phone or your Facebook account?

On the other hand, I tend to think this is nothing new. Didn't we hate it when big companies were buying sets of addresses to send (paper) advertisements? well, nowadays I have the right to tell them to stop... And don't we already know much more about our risks to get diseases than 50 years ago? And we still have a reasonable insurance system (at least here in the Netherlands). So, we can expect new legislation to develop. Maybe along the lines of the 'information audit' proposed by Stefaan Verhulst.