I really dislike it how 'big data' is increasingly mentioned left and right these days, even when the application context doesn't call for it. Perhaphs the reporter should've sticked with the safe option of what the app creator(s) used instead, 'data science' or data analysis.
Interesting how thorough the app is. I suppose that'll set it apart from the simpler ovulation trackers.
What a huge mine of private data, however!
Can you imagine how it would feel to have someone else find a record of your sexual activity, including positions and count of female orgasms?
My ex-girlfriend was kicked out of her church and disowned by her parents because she admitted to being sexually active. She was a senior in high school. She had to finish the school year living out of her car and relying on friends' charity.
Privacy is a protection against (often irrational) people who are out to hurt you.
There might be reason for people to care about the general fact of "did they have sex?"--but this can be inferred/derived from other sources, e.g. purchasing habits.
How people are having sex, on the other hand, is pretty irrelevant to everyone except those people, isn't it?
The attorney-general of Virginia is seeking to preserve a law that would ban sodomy, which in Virginia includes oral sex. Yes, there are some people who think that how you have sex is very much their business, notwithstanding the fact that they talk out the other side of their mouth about their disdain for big government (I refer here to his arguments against Obamacare).
I think they are on to something - this part for me stood out (quote from Max Levchin)
"Anything that can be measured, you record—and
it’s applied to things like managing your weight,
or deciding how likely you are to dope in the Tour
de France. But with infertility? You get a Xerox
from the 1960s.”
Most up-to-date fertility clinics use ultrasound and hormonal tracking to check the cycle; temperature & mucus are unreliable.
And, even if someone's ovulating or not-ovulating... it's often moot when it comes to whether to opt for fertility treatment. It's much more about time spent trying already, and finances.
I lived until recently in a very active community of both cyclists and family-aged couples (Marin, CA, Fairfax to be specific), and heard numerous stories at the local pub about many cyclist men having this very issue. Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but enough to make me find an alternate form of exercise if/when I am trying to have a child.
It's interesting how many commenters thought (from the headline) this was Elon Musk, despite the fact that Paypal had 5 founders and Musk has his hands pretty busy right now.
On a related note, has there ever been anything unsuccessful from the Paypal Mafia?
How is a phone supposed to passively collect information about sexual positions?
"By asking about sexual positions and female orgasms, for example, the app is collecting data on oft-cited but little-researched possible factors in successful conception. The founders say that physicians have already signed on to use this data in studies. And eventually, Levchin said, they hope to make the data collection totally passive (by using a combination of phone sensors and specialized hardware) so that you don’t even have to take the trouble of entering any numbers yourself."
Simple, just prop up your phone and video yourselves having sex. Like a Kinect, it can detect the position of your bodies. And it can analyze the audio to determine if the female orgasmed.
And then the video will be automatically uploaded to the NSA.
It would take some guesswork. But there are fairly characteristic rhythmic motions in sex that you can look for. The various angles and rhythm is correlated with the sexual position. Comparing hand-entered data with actual data would let you discover these correlations.
(More creepy would be listening to the microphone and guessing from that...)
It doesn't bring the $1m kick-off grant for the fertility fund, but another new app in that space is http://www.helloclue.com/
It focuses more on tracking the monthly cycle and how it affects you personally, instead of pregnancy/ fertility and crowdsourced data on conception. Clue was actually started by a female founder - seems that could be helpful in this instance.
an idea about Elon Musk announcing a plan to fund 100 women/year to have his children through sperm banks, in 10 generations (1 generation/year), with fully paid support and tutoring for life for the kids, and regularly schedule reunions of generations / the whole group.
It was at attempt to re-introduce cloning style massively parallel reproduction to the human species.
That was what I thought this story would be about.
Seriously though, don't you think Snowden could get a few hundred extremely smart, civil libertarian women to agree to bear his children?
Before we start indulging in fantasies of tech folks begatting like in the Bible and creating a master IT race, could we care about the kids that people already created first?
The kids on the planet already have plenty of potential, we really don't need to keep pumping them out.
