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You may have heard the advice for pregnant women to avoid eating soft cheeses. This is because soft cheeses can sometimes carry the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria, which can cause a mild infection. In some cases, the infection can be serious, even fatal, for the unborn child. However, the infection is very rare, affecting only around 65 people out of 23.5 million in Australia in 2014. That's 0.0003% of the population. Of these, only around 10% are pregnant women. Of these, only 20% of infections prove fatal to the foetus. We're getting down to some very small numbers here. If we talked about every risk factor in our lives the way health authorities talk about soft cheeses, we'd likely don a helmet and kneepads every morning after we get out of bed. And we'd certainly never drive a car. The upshot of this example is to emphasise that our intuitions about risk are often out of step with the actualities. So journalists need to take great care when reporting risk so as not to exacerbate our intuitive deficits as a species.

For decades, researchers and physicians tended to think about pregnancies as either planned or unplanned. But new data reveals that for a significant group of women, their feelings don't neatly fit into one category or another. As many as one-fifth of women who become pregnant aren't sure whether they want a baby. This fact may reshape how doctors and policymakers think about family planning. For women who are unsure, it doesn't seem enough for physicians to counsel them on pregnancy prevention or prenatal care. "In the past we thought of it as binary, you want to be pregnant or not, so you need contraception or a prenatal vitamin," said Maria Isabel Rodriguez, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Oregon Health and Science University whose research focuses on family planning and contraceptive policy. "But it's more of a continuum." The new data comes from a recent change in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's big survey of new mothers, now allowing them to answer a question about their pregnancy desires by saying "I wasn't sure." It shows that some women want to avoid making a decision about becoming pregnant, or have strong but mixed feelings about it.

Once your business has started collecting and combining all kinds of data, the next elusive step is to extract value from it. Your data may hold tremendous amounts of potential value, but not an ounce of value can be created unless insights are uncovered and translated into actions or business outcomes. During a 2009 interview, Google's Chief Economist Dr. Hal R.Varian stated, "The ability to take data-to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it-that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades." Fast forward to 2016 and many businesses would agree with Varian's astute assessment.

Scientists have typically justified excluding female animals from experiments - even when studying conditions that are more likely to affect women - on the basis that fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable. However, according to Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, in Boston, it is entirely unjustified by scientific evidence, which shows that, if anything, the hormones and behaviour of male rodents are less stable than those of females. Shansky is calling for stricter requirements to include animals of both sexes in research, saying the failure to do so has led to the development of drugs that work less well in women.

Medicine's decades-long march toward patient autonomy means patients are often now asked to make the hard decisions - to weigh trade-offs, to grapple with how their values suggest one path over another. This is particularly true when medical science doesn't offer a clear answer: Doctors encourage patients to decide where evidence is weak, while making strong recommendations when evidence is robust. But should we be doing the opposite?People in general are not great at evaluating risk. They worry more about shark attacks than car crashes.

The benefits and harms of medical marijuana can be debated, but more states are legalizing pot, even for recreational use. A new evaluation of marijuana's risks is overdue. Last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering released a comprehensive report on cannabis use. At almost 400 pages long, it reviewed both potential benefits and harms. Let's focus on the harms.

Last week, the American Cancer Society published new guidelines that call for colorectal cancer screening to begin at age 45 - five years earlier than the group had previously recommended. But some experts are saying not so fast. The new recommendation was made in reaction to increasing rates of colorectal cancer among people younger than 50. But while the rise in cancers among this younger age group is troubling, this new recommendation was made before we know what's behind the new trend. And it's not clear that screening can help.It makes intuitive sense to respond to increasing rates of colon cancer among young people by lowering the screening age, said Michael Hochman, director of the the Gehr Family Center for Health Systems Science at the Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. "But if I had a quarter for every time in medicine that we were tricked by an idea with intuitive appeal, I'd be a rich man," Hochman said.

But because a machine learning model learns the boundaries of its world from its input data, just three people informed how any model using that dataset would interpret if 'childbirth' was emotional. This led to a perspective that has informed all of my work since: a dataset is a worldview. It encompasses the worldview of the people who scrape and collect the data, whether they're researchers, artists, or companies. It encompasses the worldview of the labelers, whether they labeled the data manually, unknowingly, or through a third party service like Mechanical Turk, which comes with its own demographic biases. It encompasses the worldview of the inherent taxonomies created by the organizers, which in many cases are corporations whose motives are directly incompatible with a high quality of life.

A new paper published in PLOS One by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich Ecker tests the power of inoculation; not against disease, but against the sort of misinformation that created the conditions leading to Minnesota measles outbreak. Inoculation theory suggests that exposing people to the tricks used to spread misinformation can equip them with the tools to recognize and reject such bogus claims.

Podcast from UTS Think:Digital Futures (that I briefly appear on). Sometimes we get caught up thinking data and science are the be all and end all - it can give us a lot of answers sure, but the devil is in the detail. How are we interpreting data wrong? And why do we have trouble communicating it? Presenters/Producers: Cheyne Anderson & Ellen Leabeater Speakers: Jon Wardle - Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney Simon Knight - Lecturer, Connected Intelligence Centre, UTS Mark Moritz - Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University Think: Digital Futures is supported by 2SER and the University of Technology Sydney. http://2ser.com/shows/think-digital-futures/

What do you take from this hypothetical headline: "Reading the Research Digest blog is associated with higher intelligence"? How about this one: "Reading this blog might increase your intelligence"? According to science writing guides like HealthNewsReview.org, taking the first correlational finding from a peer-reviewed article and reporting it for the public using the second wording, implying causation, is a sin of exaggeration, making a relationship appear more causal than the evidence suggests.

Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) Media Watch is based on the same premise as the ABC show Media Watch. It aims to highlight poor examples of journalism regarding AOD-related issues in the hope that we can assist journalists to report more objectively using science and evidence rather than perpetuating myths, opinions and moral panic. Research has found moral panics in the media can actually be detrimental. Moral panics in the media can actually be detrimental by counter-intuitively leading to increased drug use since it increases the perception that more people are using the drug than actually are. It has also been found to found that moral panics reduce the degree to which some people believe that the drug being reported on is harmful. It also reduces the credibility of AOD information in the media.

Dismissing people's worries as baseless, whether that's about the safety of mobile phones or fluoridated drinking water, is one of the least effective ways of communicating public health risks. Yet it is common for people to "reassure" like this, both at home and in professional roles as experts, officials or corporate managers. 1. Hose down your own outrage first 2. Respect people's fears 3. Build trust 4. Don't panic about panic 5. Your actions communicate more than your words 6. Play the long game

In August 2016, the Australian government released an "anonymised" data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people. Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals' privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries.

Most people pass through some type of public space in their daily routine - sidewalks, roads, train stations. Thousands walk through Bryant Park every day. But we generally think that a detailed log of our location, and a list of the people we're with, is private. Facial recognition, applied to the web of cameras that already exists in most cities, is a threat to that privacy. To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers' websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon's commercial facial recognition service.

Last month, CNBC reported on a page in Google's account settings titled "Purchases" - a month-by-month list of items you've bought across online services like Amazon and other apps that are collected via Google services like Gmail. Purchases is a jarring example of how leaky our data really is and how large companies can aggregate that information unbeknown to the consumer. I, for one, was unaware that almost every concert ticket, Domino's pizza and Amazon purchase (including a 2014 accidental purchase of the film "Tango & Cash") was being logged by Google. Equally troubling: The purchases can't easily be deleted from the page without also deleting the receipt emails from your Gmail account.

Interesting article discussing how ai is being used in medical diagnoses

Cool study showing the potential of data analyses to give us new kinds of insights! What does instagram tell us about peoples' nutrition decisions? Food deserts, or places where people have limited access to fresh food, are usually measured by the distance people have to travel to get to a large grocery store. What's harder to measure is what the residents of these areas are actually eating day to day. To do so, researchers typically have to rely on surveys, ...In a recent study, De Choudhury and her colleagues propose another method: mining Instagram. All those artfully arranged plates, all that latte art, just waiting for someone to analyze it!

The eBook contains 16 short stories about brilliant Australian research data projects that have led to real-life impacts for Australia and beyond. It is intentionally very punchy and image-led. The stories were collected during ANDS' #dataimpact campaign which ran through 2016.

A series of short articles, with videos and browser addons "investigating algorithmic injustice and the formulas that influence our lives."