The Best Australian Science Writing 2013

by Jane McCredie

  Consumer targeting is undoubtedly where much of the potential treasure lies, as Price explains: ‘Consider the difference it would make to a company if marketers could quickly and easily see that certain products or services are generating “buzz” at a given time and location, or even identify a reason why a product is not selling and respond to this by targeting supplementary promotions to the relevant geography,’ he says, pointing to the McKinsey report figure of a 60 per cent potential increase in profit margins for retailers through big data applications.

  There are, as always, a few points of caution. ‘Big data washing’, for example, refers to the fact that ‘everybody and their brother is coming out saying “this is our big data tool” – frankly, some of it is more marketing than reality,’ warns Kelly.

  Having mountains of information doesn’t necessarily equate to mountains of value. ‘A lot of what big data is all about is wading through the crap, for lack of a better term. Maybe you can figure out if somebody’s likely to purchase a particular type of gum if the weather’s a certain way, but does it really matter? That’s not exactly a high-margin business or a significant social insight. That’s the challenge – to find the interesting bits that are just buried under petabytes of data,’ says Kelly. He hastens to add that he thinks some of the hype is justified.

  ‘There is definitely a lot more chatter going on than there is large-scale deployment, but I’m not sure I’d call that hype, I’d call that early talk – because this technology really does have huge potential to impact all industries.’

  A few obstacles still lie between the talk and the actual dollars. The biggest by far is a shortage of talent. ‘Although we have these big data technologies now, we simply don’t have enough qualified people to use them. A lot of this stuff was created by highly skilled engineers at web companies like Google or Yahoo! – things like MapReduce and Hadoop – because they were the first to really need to deal with massive data sets and there were simply no tools available for them to use,’ says Kelly.

  ‘So what they came up with was not necessarily user-friendly, it was designed for their core business. The people we need to help commercialise this stuff – we call them “data scientists” but it requires a whole mix of skills around maths, statistics, programming, business, social sciences – there just aren’t enough people who meet that criteria now to make big data analysis possible in too many organisations.’

  The McKinsey report quantified this workforce shortfall for the USA alone at ‘140 000 to 190 000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions’. Those findings are mirrored in the explosion of datarelated job advertisements since 2010.

  ‘You go to data conferences and just about every presentation ends with “oh and by the way – we’re hiring”,’ says Goldbloom, who in 2011 secured US $11 million in funding to further grow Kaggle, a competitive crowd-sourcing platform, which is credited with ‘making data science a sport’.

  Goldbloom, a former Australian Treasury economist, founded the company in 2010 after recognising just how big the demand for big data analysts was becoming. ‘I was interning at The Economist in London, writing a piece about big data and predictive modelling, and got to speak to a whole lot of CIO-level people and ask them how high on their list of priorities this stuff was. I discovered that they were all wanting to do it but having trouble putting anything into action – they didn’t have access to the people who could.’

  He came up with a model that allows companies and organisations to post their data and particular problems online; there, over 45 000 data scientists from all over the world compete to find the best solution. A leader board is updated in real time until the competition closes and the winner claims their prize money from the host. Bounty can range from a few thousand dollars to US $3 million.

  Participants who consistently perform well in public competitions may then be invited – and paid – to compete in private contests.

  ‘It’s a meritocracy, like golf or tennis,’ says Goldbloom, who hopes Kaggle will play a central role in the future of the industry. ‘We’d like to see the world’s best data scientists making their living this way.’

  In the meantime, more big data wranglers have to be trained. Goldbloom sits on the advisory board for a data science course being created at New York’s Columbia University, one of many educational institutions preparing to offer qualifications specifically designed for this new discipline.

  ‘Universities are starting to come around to the fact that this is an area in great demand around industry, but it will probably take a long time before these courses become ubiquitous and a long time before students are graduating from these courses, so it’s a long game. The parallel one might draw is engineering, which wasn’t initially a uni degree but now very much is – I think we’ll see the same phenomenon with data science.’

  The issue of privacy – we know you’ve been wondering – is ever present in conversations about big data. While not all information ripe for big data analysis is derived from the personal lives of human beings (think NASA’s climate sensors, or motorvehicle-performance data), much of the most profitable information is.

  A memorable story from 2012 gives an example of just how powerful – and disturbing – big data insights based on personal information can be. An in-house statistician at Target (in the US) analysed the purchasing behaviour of women on the department store’s baby-shower registry to come up with a ‘pregnancy prediction’ model which could then be applied to all shoppers on its customer database. When a teenage girl in Minneapolis began stocking up on signal items like unscented lotion, vitamins and cotton wool, it prompted Target to send her coupons for baby clothes and maternity wear – a move her father considered grossly inappropriate until he learned she was, in fact, expecting.

  ‘For a lot of people, that crosses a line,’ says Chris Yiu, the economist heading the Digital Government Unit at UK think tank Policy Exchange in London. Yiu recently authored a report highlighting the potential for between £16 billion and £33 billion of public-sector efficiency savings through big data analytics, and says the issue of privacy is one of the biggest obstacles.

  ‘With all of this very rich data you have tremendous potential to save money, but also to infringe privacy and civil liberties. You need a way to hold the government to a very high standard of ethical behaviour,’ Yiu says. His report recommends governments adopt a Code for Responsible Analytics requiring adherence to the highest ethical and privacy standards, and also suggests test-driving big data initiatives before rolling them out to the real world.

  ‘We should sandbox and test with synthetic data before releasing this stuff into the wild, because there’s so much potential for it to go wildly wrong,’ says Yiu. ‘Do it “in a lab” first and see how it goes, then have a debate about the public policy benefits versus how far you had to go with personal data, and ask “does it overstep the mark?” If it does, kill it in the lab.’

  Kelly takes a similar ethical position: ‘I’d argue the principle that should always be kept in mind is that just because you can do something with big data, doesn’t mean you should.’

  Whether the private sector will display the same level of concern remains to be seen, and will depend largely on what we – consumers – are prepared to provide in return for free services.

  ‘What people will start to understand is that when you log on to Facebook, you’re essentially giving away your data. People might find it creepy that an organisation mines social data to make better decisions, but ultimately you’ve made that decision to give it away,’ says Kelly.

  The potential consequences of that behaviour was on the agenda at DEF CON – the 20th annual, and controversial, computer hacker convention held in Las Vegas in 2012 – when the Online Privacy Foundation presented the results of its Kagglehosted competition titled ‘Psychopathy Prediction Based on Twitter Usage’.

>   The organisation provided an anonymised dataset of around 3000 Twitter users who had completed a psychological survey which calculated their ‘psychopathy score’. Competitors were then invited to analyse 337 variables derived from the users’ Twitter activity to come up with a model that could identify those with high levels of psychopathy based on their online behaviour.

  ‘They did find there is a correlation – if you swear in your tweets or reply with a swear word, the more you do that the higher the psychopathy score. And if you reply with a conjunction – with a “but” for instance – that increases the probability you’re a psychopath. The correlation wasn’t crazily strong, but there was one,’ says Goldbloom.

  The real point of the exercise was to raise awareness about social-media use. ‘For instance, given this algorithm, an employer might run your tweets through to get a sense of your employability based on your Twitter profile.’

  Price reminds us that mining online chatter could also have positive outcomes.

  ‘Imagine a scenario where health practitioners can use realtime, big data analytics to understand where the flu virus is spreading, and at what pace, so they can tailor their response and ensure that sufficient vaccine stocks get to the right places,’ he says.

  ‘The modern world has been built squarely on the foundations of data. Almost every aspect of our lives has been impacted by the ability of organisations to marshal, interrogate and analyse data. Our cars have been made more efficient by it, our medicines more effective, road safety improved and crimes solved faster.’

  It’s a point almost everyone you speak to from the big data world makes. ‘We’re just doing what human beings have always done’ – finding patterns and relationships to help us make betterinformed decisions. Whether those insights are used for good or ill, profit or power, still comes down to the people using them. The difference today is merely one of scale.

  Business drive

  Prospecting

  With body in mind (after Vesalius)

  Ian Gibbins

  1. Preparator

  Surrounded by rows of knuckles

  boiled and bleached free of their marrow

  I focus through my lenses

  to place facet on articulated facet

  and with a skeleton of surprise, I reconstruct

  this intimation of a beating heart.

  In preparation for display

  my texts and numbered charts are closed

  the cabinet door locked shut;

  under the magnifying beams of spotlights,

  I polish my glass eyes

  and stitch my skin tight around me.

  2. Students

  Once the paperwork is done

  the rest is just formality

  an irredeemable end

  to caged silences of a lifetime

  precisely at the tip of a scalpel

  this he, this she

  when cool with missing breath

  we look on and look away.

  3. Donors

  No-one is likely to argue

  that, any time soon,

  we will be moving far from here.

  Not because our bones

  have become soft and yellow,

  carefully exposed

  below these anonymous cotton sheets.

  Nor because our nerves,

  now slack, without tension or tone,

  no longer sing like piano strings.

  Nor even because our

  rich red blood and

  dark shining muscles

  have ceased to pump, to pulse.

  As you can see, we are done with action:

  all we have left is intent and desire;

  all we wish is for

  you to feel our warmth.

  Death

  Teachers

  How a donor is done

  Kellee Slater

  It was usually late at night when we slipped into the donor hospital as discreetly as we could. We came and went via back entrances and dark alleyways just in case the family of a donor might catch us leaving with a cooler filled with organs from their relative. It was important too not to discuss a donor whilst we were taking a taxi to and from the airport in small towns because there was a fair chance that the driver might know the donor, their family or the details of the death.

  Organ donation is a much misunderstood procedure. People have told me that they think we do a ‘slash and grab’ to retrieve organs and that we ‘hack’ people open to plunder them of their bits and pieces. This isn’t helped of course by the wildly untrue tales of hapless tourists waking up in ice-filled baths in South American hotel rooms to find they are missing their kidneys. The reality of donor surgery could not be more different. Removing organs for transplant is a careful operation, performed in an operating theatre with an anaesthetist, surgeon, assistants and an army of nurses. It takes hours of hard slog and if it wasn’t for the dead body on the operating table at the end, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that we were performing any other routine surgery. The utmost reverence is paid to the deceased and even the most minor details are thoughtfully considered. Our aim is to leave the donor looking like we have not been there. I wait patiently in the tea room at the end of the case while the nurses wash the body and comb the hair. The long incision I have made is covered with a neat dressing. We cover the body completely with a clean white sheet and when we have gone, the family is able to come in and say their final goodbyes.

  Despite all the respect that is paid, I still find donation a really gruesome task. I have done it hundreds of times and I think I will always feel this way. The donor team always uses the local anaesthetist and nursing staff, so, in addition to your own emotions, you also have to deal with the reactions of the locals who are usually seeing this side of donation for the first time. At the smaller hospitals, many of the staff will have been involved in the patient’s care and may have formed a connection to them. It is impossible to prepare someone for the sight of a human heart removed from the chest when moments before it was still beating. Then at the end, before the wound is closed, there is the shocking appearance of a hollowed-out body devoid of its organs, when only a short time before they seemed to be a living breathing person. It can be so traumatic that I have seen theatre staff burst into tears during the procedure. I too still find it very sobering and try not to look back at the body once I have left the table. If you take the time to notice, often everyone in the theatre goes about cleaning up the room with their backs turned to the donor, trying not to think about the sad scene.

  Anaesthetists can also have a really hard time because donors are the only cases where they are not there to perform their usual task of keeping the patient asleep, alive and pain-free. In donation surgery their job changes and they are there to make sure the lungs are receiving oxygen and to keep the blood pumping around the body using powerful stimulant drugs. During routine surgery, the anaesthetist is the first person to see the patient and the last one to bid them farewell when they deliver them to recovery. For donors, however, there is no recovery and the moment the heart and lungs are removed, the anaesthetist’s job is finished. The regular beat of the heart monitor that sets the tempo of the operating theatre abruptly ceases as the heart is stopped from beating by the preservation liquid running through it. There is silence in the room and instead of an operating theatre the atmosphere is more like that of a mortuary. It is completely unnatural for an anaesthetist to leave the theatre without their patient and I can tell that some have a hard time deviating from the routine. Many times they will stand firm at the head of the bed, looking a little unsure what to do next, mesmerised by the stunning sight of the organs being lifted out one by one. We thank them for being there and gently tell them they can go home if they wish.

  One chap, obviously feeling odd that he had not run through his usual post-surgery checklist, asked me, ‘What was your estimated blood loss?’

  I looked up quizzically, not sure that I had heard him
correctly, and finally replied, ‘All of it, actually’.

  He flushed with embarrassment when he realised what he’d asked. Another thing that anaesthetists do is give medication to paralyse the donor to stop them from moving. Yes, despite being dead, donors frequently move. It can really freak everyone out, me included. Donors have primitive spinal reflexes that cause them to twitch, move their hands and have erections. I just about passed out the day the anaesthetist omitted the paralysis medication and a donor’s hand twitched violently, slapping me hard on the backside.

  There are usually two pairs of surgeons operating during donation surgery, one team for the heart and lungs and the other to take the liver, kidneys and pancreas. Other groups from the eye and bone bank come for the corneas and bones after the deceased has been taken to the morgue. When the donor is brought into the operating room, all activity stops while we check that the paperwork is all done and, most importantly, that the donor’s identity is correct. I don’t think that there has ever been a case of mistaken identity and it is my mission to ensure that there never will be. That would be difficult to live with.

  The donor is positioned on the table in a rather unseemly pose, with their arms taped high above the head. This gives us lots of room to work. It can get pretty tight for space with the heart and liver teams working alongside each other and sometimes a sleep-deprived unfriendly rivalry results in toes being stepped on and elbows to the ribs. The body is opened via a long cut from the neck to the pubic bone and a noisy power saw is used to slice the breast bone up the centre. A metal frame is inserted into the gap and the chest is slowly cranked open. The heart is then fully on display, beating steadily in its sac. This is a show-stopping sight and, exposed like this, the heart makes a soft slapping sound as it pounds away. At the same time, one of the chest surgeons passes a telescope through the nose and into the lungs to ensure the windpipe is clear and that the lungs are healthy. They are looking for cancer and infections that might render the lungs unsuitable to use. From time to time they even find some surprising things down there. One donor I went to met his end by crashing his Harley Davidson into a tree whilst riding to the Sturgis Motor Cycle Rally in Wyoming. Down his windpipe we found the piece of gum that he had been chewing at the moment of impact. He had inhaled it and it was wedged hard and fast. It was probably what killed him. Life can hinge on the smallest things.