Blog

Crowdsourcing a clinical trial

Ars Technica has an article today about a crowdsourced clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of using lithium for treating ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).  Over 3500 patients participated in tracking their disease symptoms online and 150 of them were treated with the drug.  The results showed no significant impact of the drug on ALS symptoms.  The company that ran the study, PatientsLikeMe, was founded by three MIT engineers, and they published an article describing the trial in Nature Biotechnology.

From the press release:

“This is the first time a social network has been used to evaluate a treatment in a patient population in real time,” says ALS pioneer and PatientsLikeMe Co-Founder Jamie Heywood. “While not a replacement for the gold standard double blind clinical trial, our platform can provide supplementary data to support effective decision-making in medicine and discovery. Patients win when reliable data is made available, sooner.”

in Crowdsourcing / Networks  by pj 0 comments

Did You Know?

Thanks to Brian Uzzi for sending me a copy of this thought provoking video, Did You Know?  Interestingly, the success of the Did You Know? video itself is a product of the rapidly expanding global communication that the video describes.  According to the creator’s history of the presentation, the video was originally a PowerPoint deck made for a high school faculty meeting in 2006.  Soon thereafter the video “went viral” and by June 2007 had been viewed by over 5 million people online.  The most recent version (4.0) has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube.

 

Some of the interesting stats from the video:

  • There are over a trillion web pages and 65,000 iPhone apps.
  • The average American teen sends 2,272 text messages a month.
  • Dell claims to have earned $3 million from Twitter posts since 2007.
  • In February 2008, Barack Obama raised $55 million dollars without attending a single campaign fundraiser.

 

Sources for the stats are available here.

in Uncategorized  by pj 0 comments

New York Times BITS Blog: Facebook Is Latest Rival to Groupon and LivingSocial

Facebook hopes to leverage its more than 600 million members and “ability to tap directly into the communications and activities of networks of friends” to cut into the business of successful coupon websites like Groupon and Living Social.
Read more here.

in Social Media  by pj 0 comments