Week 1: Goggins *expletive* for Motivation | Workplace Satire | CatCon Global | 9 Reasons to Care About Synthetic Healthcare Data
“What if I told you the importance of finding your purpose was overblown?”
“…What if it doesn’t matter what the fuck you do with your time here? And life doesn’t give a flying fuck if you want to be happy - what then? All I know is this: ‘I am David fucking Goggins. I exist. Therefore I complete what I start. I take pride in my effort and my performance in all phases of life, just because I am here. If I’m lost, I will find myself. As long as I am on planet Earth, I will not half-ass it.”
If you haven’t heard of David Goggins (and “Goggins” the tough mother alter-ego for this hardened and widely respected Army Seal and ultra-athlete), you don’t want to know him. Why not? Because he will bring you out of the most impressive depths of self-wallowing and excuse-making. He will make you want it again. He will cajole, inspire, shock, and determine you to get what you came here for. And for this, he is my “emergency break glass” figurehead of motivational support. I can climb out and move up when it’s least expected - with just a little injection of Goggins.
Workplace Satire and Other Funny Stuff
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of people-first culture. I may be too results-oriented.”
Emily Menez is funny. It’s that rare kind, too. The PG-rated and nuanced word-smithing kind of funny you don’t quite laugh out loud at, but instead just serves to validate how much you find the world so ridiculous that it’s comical. She just presented at Medium Day and she is from Kansas, and that’s cool. Her quote above is from a recent Medium Member only post called Famous American Quotes Rephrased by Middle Management.
The spotlight quote here is timely: As Oppenheimer recalled in a 1965 NBC News documentary called The Decision to Drop the Bomb, he thought of Hindu scripture while watching the first-ever atomic bomb explode during the Trinity Test: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Apparently results-oriented culture is out, and people are in.
Watch out, Trekkies. CatCon is coming for you.
CatCon. It’s a global conference series (held in Seattle for Sea-Meow this past weekend) for cats and those who love them. The cats, of course, didn’t want to be bothered to attend, but their humans did everything possible to represent their feline features.
If you just can’t get enough of cats gone wild, you’re in luck. Will Braden is promoting Cat Video Fest, playing at a theatre near you! Watch the trailer, grab your popcorn and catnip, and enjoy uninterrupted cat fancy for hours. You can also swipe to this Netflix documentary, Inside the Mind of a Cat, where I learned how cats always seem to land on their feet.
What I learned from reading about CatCon is my slice of the world is so miniscule. And so is yours. I could do without cats, but there are people who see “cat-lover” as very much a part of their identities and certainly a passion. Thank you to Janna for introducing me to this swath of society and to be impressed by what looks to be a super well-organized event series.
CatCon. It’s a global conference series (held in Seattle for Sea-Meow this past weekend) for cats and those who love them. The cats, of course, didn’t want to be bothered to attend, but their humans did everything possible to represent their feline features.
Synthetic Healthcare Data: 9 Reasons to Care
Why might you care about synthetic healthcare data? Let us count the ways:
Privacy Protection: Synthetic data allows researchers, developers, and organizations to work with realistic data without compromising patient privacy.
Compliance with Regulations: Synthetic data can help organizations remain compliant with HIPAA regulations while still conducting research, analysis, and development.
Data Security: Synthetic data eliminates the risk of exposing actual patient information to breaches and unauthorized access.
Access to Diverse Data: High-quality healthcare data can be scarce, limiting the effectiveness of research and development efforts. Synthetic data can be generated to represent various demographic groups, medical conditions, and scenarios, providing a more diverse dataset for analysis and testing.
Algorithm Training: Many healthcare applications, such as machine learning algorithms and AI models, require large amounts of data for training. Synthetic data can supplement real data, enabling better model performance and generalization without compromising patient confidentiality.
Scenario Testing and Training: Synthetic data allows for controlled testing under various scenarios without putting real patients at risk.
Innovation and Development: Researchers and developers can use synthetic data to prototype and test new healthcare technologies, applications, and solutions. This accelerates the innovation process and reduces the reliance on real patient data for early-stage development.
Data Sharing and Collaboration: Collaborative research and knowledge sharing across institutions and organizations can be challenging due to privacy concerns. Synthetic data provides a way for researchers to collaborate and exchange insights without compromising patient privacy.
Bias and Fairness Analysis: Synthetic data can be designed to simulate biases and fairness issues that might exist in real healthcare data. This enables researchers to test algorithms and models for potential biases and develop strategies to mitigate them.
Humana synthetic data contains 1,500,000 member records. The sample datasets are limited to 100 synthetically-derived individual records.