1st UK Maker Faire, Newcastle, March 2009, makers wanted!

The first Euro Maker Faire in Brussels was an evening event but now with the first UK Maker Faire makers have a chance to hang around for 2 days and develop or deepen their DIY skills similar to the original US events (we enjoyed Austin Maker Faire in 2007). Let me know if you’re interested.

from my mailbox:

We are shortly to publicly announce the first UK Maker Faire but thought you would appreciate advanced notification.
The Make team forwarded me your names and email addresses as they believe you might be interested in the Newcastle upon Tyne Maker Fair on March 14th-15th 2009.

The first UK Maker Fair will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March as part
of Newcastle ScienceFest – a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and
innovation.

This two-day, family-friendly event celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset and features interactive exhibits organized by individual enthusiasts, hobbyist groups and clubs as well as student groups. It’s for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things. Maker Faire is an opportunity to share what you do with others.

The Decision Tree: Thomas Goetz’s upcoming book on predictive/personalized medicine

In the past months Thomas Goetz begun writing a book on the radical changes already ongoing but mostly upcoming in healthcare due to affordable new technologies and quantitative approaches in personalized genomics and medicine.

The book is to be called The Decision Tree (explanation below) accompanied by a new website. Thomas is the perfect man for this job, he is the deputy editor of Wired magazine (=he is well informed and connected), a good journalist who took his job (writing on science, health and medicine) so seriously that he went back to school to get a degree in Public Health. Back in the days his very early coverage on 23andMe (actually published before the official launch of the service) was actually the only serious insight on 23andMe.

With this book Thomas will have a chance to become the Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell of personalized medicine and public health.

“The premise is that we are at a new phase of health and medical care, where more decisions are being made by individuals on their own behalf, rather than by physicians, and that, furthermore, these decisions are being informed by new tools based on statistics, data, and predictions. This is a good thing – it will let us, the general public, live better, happier, and even longer lives. But it will require us to be stewards of our health in ways we may not be prepared for. We will act on the basis of risk factors and predictive scores, rather than on conventional wisdom and doctors recommendations. We will act in collaboration with others, drawing on collective experience with health and disease, rather than in the isolation and ignorance that can come with “privacy” concerns. And we will act early, well before symptoms appear, opting to tap the science of genomics and proteomics in order to mitigate our risks down the road.

Together, these tools will create a new opportunity and a new responsibility for people to act – to make health decisions well before they become patients. This can be characterized as a decision tree, a series of informed choices we will make to minimize uncertainty and optimize our outcomes. Indeed, we will use decision trees to navigate most of our health decisions, sometimes in overt ways – new decision support tools will both inform us and guide us, and they’ll be steeped in statistics, prediction, and the power of collective experience.”

Nature Insight: The complex trait of quantitative genetics

Nature’s newest issue has a Quantitative genetics supplement with 3 free access pieces included out which I find this review the most interesting: Reverse engineering the genotype–phenotype map with natural genetic variation by Matthew V. Rockman. There’s a lot information to digest and many patterns to understand in this background field in order to approach the future of (personal) genetics/genomics.

How to predict the future via Twitter: Kids’n'Kits or 23andMe’s Holiday Family Pack!

After the first Twitter prediction here is my second one back from September, realized today:

and here we go….Happy Holidays Grandma you’got a 2fold risk for psoriasis but don’t worry too much about the Alcohol Flush Reaction and your caffeine consumption!

Actually I tried to convince