Everyday Data

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Wisconsin Public Radio

Prx, Philosophy, Knowledge, Wpr, Ttbook, Wisconsin, Society & Culture

4.7 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2016

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

So much of our daily lives gets turned into data -- our online shopping purchases, phone calls, family photos. We're all surrounded by data, and learning how to harness it could be more transformative than we realize. This week, a look at the new data specialists using their knowledge of numbers to change everything, from music to baseball to health. Can Tracking Your Period Change Women's Health?; Runs, Hits, and Algorithms: How Data is Changing Baseball; By Transforming Data into Music, New York's Income Inequality Gets Amplified; A Novelist Assesses the Beauty of Computer Code; The Box of a Trillion Souls: Stephen Wolfram on the Distant Future; Their Lovely Bones: The Decorated Skeletons of Europe.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI.
0:06.0	I'm Anne Strange Champs.
0:07.0	You know those handy little data collection devices we can't live without?
0:11.0	We call them cell phones, but let's be honest,
0:14.0	the phone is probably their least interesting feature.
0:17.0	What we're really drawn to is the data. That little device you keep in your pocket,
0:23.6	it can solve problems in milliseconds, but it used to take mainframes days to compute.
0:29.6	It can find nearby restaurants you might like. Tell you the weather a week from now.
0:34.6	Remind you that it's your anniversary. Oh, and it also knows when you're getting your period.
0:39.3	I had been trying to be on the pill in my early 20s
0:42.3	and it didn't work that well for me.
0:44.3	I had a ton of side effects.
0:46.3	So after many years of being in relationship,
0:48.3	I started wondering why there were no good methods for me
0:51.3	to manage my family planning or my reproductive health.
0:55.0	And so I started looking around and I was really shocked to see that there were no great new
1:00.0	innovations. Everything was about putting hormones into the body. So I thought, well, you know,
1:05.0	if only I could know exactly where in my cycle I was, I wouldn't need to worry about condoms every single time,
1:12.2	and I wouldn't have to take the pill. And that was really the first inspiration, this kind of
1:15.8	inside of like, wow, I just need to know really, really accurately where I am in my cycle.
1:20.6	Like a lot of great innovators, Edatine wanted something that didn't exist, and so she built it.
1:26.2	It's a period tracking app called Clue, and the more
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wisconsin Public Radio, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Wisconsin Public Radio and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.