Hello and welcome to Slate Money, our weekly podcast, guiding you through the important business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon, a fusion in New York. And this week we have a kind of monetizing others theme to the podcast. We'll start with healthcare and the possibility that

big data might be able to predict and prevent illness. What's the privacy price we'd pay for that?

And would it be worth it? Then we'll turn to Manhattan Apartments and ask whether they've

become a tool for money laundering,

and how General Motors is making cash payments to those killed and injured by its defective ignition systems.

And last but not least, we'll wrap up with our lightning round of the numbers that caught our attention this week.

Let me introduce our regular guest, Kathy O'Neill,

the head of the lead program for data journalism at Columbia University. What's your number this

week, Kathy? Hi, Felix. My number is hopefully the smallest number in absolute value that we're

going to have on this podcast ever. It's 0.001. 100th. Tantalizing. Wow. That's a small

number. Jordan, I'm assuming your number is bigger than 10 to the minus three. It's a little bit bigger.

But it's still modest. It's a modest one. It's 869.

Okay.

And my number is 11.

So I'm sliding in there in the middle.

We will come back to those numbers later.

But first, topic number one, big data, healthcare.

Kathy, tell us what's going on.

Well, this week we heard a lot about people that are getting calls from their doctors or their insurers

talking to them about, you know, don't forget to exercise, don't smoke too much, things

like that.

...