We Need More Science

How Graph Databases Can Reinvent Recruiting

lumaxart/Flickr

They say it’s not what you know but who you know. However, the missing implication of that is the importance of who they know. The ways that we are all connected are broadly interesting in a “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” way. However, for recruitment sites trying to find and access important, talented people, it’s much more valuable than that. Endless internet searches and manually trawling through CVs is the common process for many recruiters today — but this is time consuming and quite restrictive in what information it can deliver. Also, once the data is gathered it can be difficult to sit back and actually make sense of it. So, how can the recruitment industry move on from this?

Traditionally, the ways that such data is stored has not been easy to access or analyse. Relational databases, often formatted in tables, could provide plenty of information about individual records in a basic siloed form, but simply weren’t designed to show relationships and patterns between those records. You could unearth some of these connections at a very high level, but the results were extremely slow and lacked real definition. It’s like the difference between understanding two people that live in one house and knowing if they are married, siblings, flatmates or tenants.

Today, far too much time and effort is consumed in the slow process of working with the old style of databases or manual methods like trawling the internet. This works, of course — but it gives you little or no advantage over your competition. And the market for great talent is nothing if not competitive.

For example, tools like LinkedIn are built on a different kind of database in the background that fundamentally tracks relationships. This is the same as Facebook, Twitter — any social network, which revolves around how people know each other. The reasons these companies run on this kind of technology are clear. For a start, it’s much faster and more efficient. You can achieve the same kinds of effects in these ‘graph’ databases with 10 to 100 times less code. But perhaps more importantly, you can also perform different kinds of tasks that just aren’t possible on older tech.

If recruitment sites collect existing data sets from the likes of LinkedIn, other job sites and personal records/CVs to create their own, more comprehensive graph database, they could start to immediately understand and classify candidates based on their relationships with others, their background, specific skills and even their hobbies and interests to see if they have cultural fit. This would not be identified by reading it on profiles, but by asking the right questions with specific search criteria and key words. For example, ‘has Joan Phillips ever worked for Sony or known anyone that has?’ These systems can pick out the important connections for us in a matter of seconds.

When it comes to looking at interests and hobbies, recruitment sites can use this information to proactively approach individuals for roles that may be of interest to them. Graph databases can help source individuals who aren’t necessarily looking to move but have a clear link of interests with another dimension of the role or the company itself. For example, it might be clear from the interest data that the candidate is a football fan — the perfect match for a role at the FA. These sorts of advantages are, at best, laborious and, at worst, impossible to generate manually.

The important detail here is that it makes us more effective at identifying people who genuinely should be the best match for a position. This industry is much maligned for contacting people out of the blue for roles they aren’t interested in — but that’s because the best examples of execution are so effective and such a great match that they remain undercover. Graph databases help create more of these instances.

This doesn’t mean there’s no human component. It just means you’re able to use the power of machines to quickly and at scale, crunch the numbers, answer your queries and give you superhuman ability. The machine does what it’s good at and the recruiter is able to concentrate on what they are good at.

Equally, these tools should increase the opportunity for candidates to understand the possibilities that lie before them. If you can describe to them the caliber of employees who have worked at your company (or your client’s) — even the kinds of things those people have gone on to achieve after leaving, you can add to your arguments with clear, persuasive data. Again, this comes directly from better tracking of relationships in the data.

For a long time, this industry has been built around the power of informal, real world networks and word of mouth recommendations. There’s no longer any reason that the tools we use to pursue those same goals are designed around the same philosophy. Armed with graph databases, recruitment sites will be able to quickly identify the best candidates for their roles and in turn, candidates are much more likely to be happy with their new jobs that have been matched so well.

Emil Eifrem is founder of the Neo4j open source graph database project.

How Graph Databases Can Reinvent Recruiting

lumaxart/Flickr

Emil Eifrem is founder of the Neo4j open source graph database project.

Why Google’s Cancer-Detecting Pill Is More Than Just Hype

A device worn on the outside of the body can detect the nanoparticles and provide useful information to physicians.

Google is hoping to build nanoparticles that can detect cancers inside your body—and notify a wearable computer on your wrist. Google

Before Google started work on a pill that aims to detect cancers and other diseases by sending magnetic nanoparticles into your bloodstream, it talked to Sam Gambhir.

Gambhir is a professor of radiology, bioengineering, and materials science at Stanford University and the director of the university’s Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection—a researcher at the forefront of a movement that seeks to identify cancers far sooner than we do today. Googlers Andrew Conrad and Vik Bajaj approached him about a year and a half ago, not long after the company hired Conrad to oversee a new health sciences effort inside Google X, its “moonshot” research lab.

Basically, Gambhir says, they wanted recommendations on what moonshots they should try for. And as Google built up its health operations, he continued to consult with the company and the health sciences lab it now runs in Silicon Valley.

One of the projects Google eventually settled on was what Conrad calls the “Nanoparticle Platform,” an effort to build a cancer-detecting pill, publicly revealed last week. The idea is that this pill will contain magnetic nanoparticles that can latch onto certain cancer-related molecules in the bloodstream—and that a wearable device could then use magnetic properties to recognize when this happens. As Gambhir points out, this is just one of many efforts to detect cancer in vivo—i.e. within the body, without drawing blood. But he’ll also tell you that Google brings something new to such a project.

Part of it, he explains, is that Google has built an unusually talented team that spans multiple disciplines, including physics, chemistry, and biology. “They have brought on a lot of very smart people that are thinking about these problems in very unique ways, ” Gambhir says, pointing out the company has hired some researchers from his lab. Certainly, some academic centers have built their own multi-discipline teams, but on top of this, Google provides a new kind of corporate leverage. It aims to push this sort of thing into the market at speed.

“Academic institutions aren’t as good at making an actual product. Research has to leave the academic world and move into the industrial world, and most industrial world applications are focused on therapeutics rather than diagnostics—and certainly not diagnostics based on wearable sensors,” Gambhir says.

Conrad and his team have taken much the same approach in building a contact lens that can detect blood sugar levels through the tears in your eyes. The lens would let diabetics track their blood sugar without ever having to draw their own blood, and through various third parties, Google is now working to turn the thing into a product. The lens was originally developed at Microsoft, but it’s Google that’s trying to commercialize the thing.

All that said, it will likely be years before a Google cancer-detecting pill reaches the market—if it reaches the market at all. Google has yet to test its nanoparticles on humans—at this point, it’s sending prototypes into artificial human limbs—and according to Muneesh Tewari, who heads a research lab working on early detection of cancer at the University of Michigan, reaching the market will require not only additional research but some rather significant regulatory wrangling. “The concept is very exciting and has merit—to do more proactive and continuous monitoring in the blood,” he says. “The question is how feasible is this and over what time frame. It’s still quite early days.”

First, he says, Google must demonstrate that its particles can indeed attach to markers in the bloodstream that are highly specific for cancer—and that a wearable device can read information from these particles well enough to make an accurate diagnosis. And then it must win approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Google has said that its particles are similar to those used with MRIs and other clinical procedures, but according to Tewari, the regulatory safety bar may be higher because its pill is intended to be used by healthy individuals

Colin Connolly—a senior scientist with Quantum Diamond Technologies, a company that specializes in biological sensors built with magnetic nanoparticles—says much the same. “It remains to be validated that this would be a safe way to go. With anything that’s inside a person—as opposed to a blood draw—the challenge is greater.”

Indeed, it is. But that’s largely the point. The Google X lab was built for challenges like this. Says MIT’s Robert Langer, another academic who has consulted with the company on its nanoparticles project: “A lot of companies are doing one step in a project like this. They’re doing four steps.”

How cells defend themselves against antibiotics, cytostatic agents

"On the one hand, ABC transporters causes diseases such as cystic fibrosis, while on the other hand they are responsible for the immune system recognising infected cells or cancer cells," explains Professor Robert Tampé from the Institute for Biochemistry at the Goethe University. The considerable medical, industrial and economic significance of ABC transporters is also based on the fact that they cause bacteria and other pathogens to become resistant to antibiotics. Likewise, they can help cancer cells to defend themselves against cytostatic agents and thus determine whether chemotherapy will succeed.

For the first time, the group led by Robert Tampé, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco, succeeded in determining the structure of an asymmetrical ABC transporter complex with the aid of a high-resolution cryo-electron microscope. "Over a period of five years, we have successfully implemented a number of innovative, methodological developments. These have enabled us to gain insights that previously were unimaginable," says Tampé.

The researchers report in the current issue of the scientific journal, Nature that they have succeeded in investigating a single frozen ABC transport complex at a subnanometer resolution that has never before been achieved. For this purpose, they used a newly developed single electron camera, new imaging processes and specific antibody fragments in order to determine the structure and conformation of the dynamic transport machine.

"The combination of physical, biotechnological, biochemical and structural biological methods has led to a quantum leap in the elucidation of the structure of macromolecular complexes," says Tampé. The method facilitates the targeted development of a trend-setting therapeutic approach.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Goethe University Frankfurt . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Climate, emerging diseases: Dangerous connections found

Climate change may affect human health directly or indirectly. In addition to increased threats of storms, flooding, droughts, and heat waves, other health risks are being identified. In particular, new diseases are appearing, caused by infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, parasites) heretofore unknown or that are changing, especially under the effect of changes in the climate (change of host, vector, pathogenicity, or strain). These are so-called "emerging" or "re-emerging" infectious diseases, such as leishmaniasis, West Nile fever, etc. According to the WHO, these diseases are causing one third of deaths around the world, and developing countries are on the front line.

A difficult relationship to establish

Several parameters may be behind this increased spread of pathogens and their hosts (vectors, reservoirs, etc.). Climate change modifies temperature and humidity conditions in natural environments, and therefore alters the transmission dynamics for the infectious agents. It also affects the range, abundance, behaviour, biological cycles, and life history traits of the microbes or related host species, changing balances between pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs. However, these effects remain poorly explained, in particular because they require an understanding of the long-term spatial or temporal changes to the phenomena. Therefore, it is difficult to establish a direct link between climate change and the overall evolution of infectious pathologies.

Decreased rainfall rhymes with epidemic

Providing some clarification on this question for the first time, a study by IRD researchers and their partners has shown the relationship over a 40-year period between climate change and epidemics of a disease emerging in Latin America: Buruli ulcer. Rising surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean tend to increase the frequency of El Niño events, which especially affect Central and South America approximately every five to seven years, causing waves of droughts. The research team compared changes in rainfall in the region with changes in the number of cases of Buruli ulcer recorded in French Guyana since 1969 and observed the statistical correlations.

In fact, the decrease in rainfall and runoff led to an increase in areas of residual stagnant water, where the bacteria responsible, Mycobacterium ulcerans, proliferates. The greater access to swampy habitats that results from this facilitates frequentation by humans (fishing, hunting, etc.) and thus intensifies human exposure to the microorganism living in this type of aquatic environment. This result, published in Emerging Microbes and Infections -- Nature, was made possible through long-term time series data.

In light of the rainfall conditions in recent years, the researchers fear a potential new outbreak of Buruli ulcer in the region. Beyond an improvement in forecasting the risk of an epidemic, this study highlights the need to consider a set of parameters and their interactions. Contrary to the accepted idea, less rainfall does not mean a certain decrease in the prevalence of infectious diseases, as shown by this example. Similarly, the expected warming of the atmosphere could provide temperature conditions unsuitable to the development cycle of some pathogenic agents, such as for malaria in Africa.

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The above story is based on materials provided by Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Why Google’s Cancer-Detecting Pill Is More Than Just Hype

Google is hoping to build nanoparticles that can detect cancers inside your body—and notify a wearable computer on your wrist. Google

Before Google started work on a pill that aims to detect cancers and other diseases by sending magnetic nanoparticles into your bloodstream, it talked to Sam Gambhir.

I Support Taylor Swift—Spotify Is Killing Music

Courtesy Aloe Blacc

I am many things: a singer, a musician, a businessman, and a philanthropist. But above all, I am a songwriter

At our core, songwriters are creators. We challenge ourselves and others to reflect on the world around us. And the work we produce has power—power to capture people’s emotions and imaginations like few other art forms, power to transcend traditional barriers of age, language and culture, and power to transform a conversation and generate positive social change.

But does our work as songwriters have value? Coming from someone who has spent his life working hard to master his craft in order to touch the lives of others, that may seem like an absurd question. But in today’s rapidly changing music marketplace, the answer is increasingly unclear. Just this week, Taylor Swift removed her music from Spotify—not because she doesn’t want you to stream her songs, but because she wants to be compensated fairly for her work. She wants to Spotify to treat her work as though it has value. This problem ought to cause anyone who cares about the future of music—professionals and fans alike—to stand up and take note. Let me explain why.

Aloe Blacc

Aloe Blacc is a singer, songwriter, and artivist best known for the hit singles “I Need a Dollar” and “I’m the Man.” He sings on and co-wrote the No. 1 hit “Wake Me Up!” by Avicii.

First, unlike most people in creative industries, songwriters seem to have less control over our work than ever before. Knock off a handbag design from a high-end fashion house or use a sports team’s logo in your new t-shirt line, and expect a lawsuit in short order. And good luck copying a big tech company’s patented innovation. You need express permission from the original creators to use or copy their work before you resell it. That’s how they protect the value of their work.

But the world doesn’t work that way for songwriters. By law, we have to let any business use our songs that asks, so long as they agree to pay a rate that, more often than not, was not set in a free market. We don’t have a choice. As such, we have no power to protect the value of the music we create.

The abhorrently low rates songwriters are paid by streaming services –enabled by dreadfully outdated federal regulations—are yet another indication our work is being devalued in today’s marketplace.

Consider the fact that it takes roughly one million spins on Pandora for a songwriter to earn just $90. Avicii’s release “Wake Me Up!” that I co-wrote and sing, for example, was the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13thmost played song on Pandora since its release in 2013, with more than 168 million streams in the US. And yet, that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties – which were then split among three songwriters and our publishers. In return for co-writing a major hit song, I’ve earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service.

If that’s what’s now considered a streaming “success story,” is it any wonder that so many songwriters are now struggling to make ends meet?

In return for co-writing a major hit song, I’ve earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service.

The reality is that people are consuming music in a completely different way today. Purchasing and downloading songs have given way to streaming, and as a result, the revenue streams that songwriters relied upon for years to make a living are now drying up.

But the irony of the situation is that our music is actually being enjoyed by more people in more places and played across more platforms (largely now digital) than ever before. Our work clearly does have value, of course, or else it would not be in such high demand. So why aren’t songwriters compensated more fairly in the marketplace?

I firmly believe there must be a way for innovative new music services to succeed in the marketplace without undervaluing the contribution of songwriters. And, thankfully, I am not alone in that view.

Through performing rights societies, this summer songwriters successfully convinced the US Department of Justice to open a formal review of the ASCAP and BMI consent decrees that govern how the vast majority of American songwriters are compensated for our work. The world has changed dramatically since this regulatory framework was first established in 1941, but the consent decrees haven’t been updated since 2001—before the iPod even hit stores.

Updating the nation’s antiquated music licensing system will better serve the needs of not only music creators, like me, but businesses that use our music, consumers and the global marketplace for music. But the digital music services that see a financial advantage in maintaining the status quo are fighting hard to obstruct any meaningful reform.

I, for one, can no longer stand on the sidelines and watch as the vast majority of songwriters are left out in the cold, while streaming company executives build their fortunes in stock options and bonuses on the back of our hard work. Songwriting is truly a labor of love, one that often does not result in wealth. But I know the work we create has real value. And I believe policymakers will one day recognize that a system that allows digital streaming services to enjoy enormous profits while music creators struggle is imbalanced and broken.

Until that day comes, I will do my part to try to convince people that the music they love won’t exist without us, and that we, as songwriters, cannot continue to exist like this. And you can do your part to protect the music you love by buying albums and urging streaming services to uphold the value of songwriting. After all, if songwriters cannot afford to make music, who will?