Hacking the social life of Big Data

This paper builds on the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing

The art and science of winning: professional cricket coaching as transdisciplinary practice

This context statement examines the thirty-year evolution of my coaching and leadership in professional sport through my work in the public domain. It focuses on how to optimally coach and manage teams to win across multiple formats in professional cricket. Examining and reflecting on the process of how this took place: the campaigns, the engagement with the team and performer, with the ultimate goal of optimizing (designing) team performance to win leagues and championships. To do this, I began by utilising my training in education. I designed a coaching and performance programme, which I divided into a time phased performance curriculum. Over time I began to see the holistic nature of performance and I evolved this thinking into a coaching system bringing together the mental, technical, physical and strategic aspects of performance, into the overarching design of 'winning' performance for individuals and teams. The system was centred both on the individual performer and the team, coaching them to set clear, precise performance goals, with the aim that they would go on to proactively take responsibility for their own learning process. The coaching and performance system evolved through research and constant testing with different teams and players. A ‘thought architecture’ (a term I coined) emerged, which is a design process to attain a goal or objective. The ‘thought architecture’ evolved into a specific coaching approach focused on performance design to create the neural circuitry of optimal performance. The goal was for the learning process to become unconscious thinking and action, both individually and collectively within the team. This submission examines and summarises the stages of learning, the role of mentors, the championships won and lost, the evolution of the transdisciplinary coaching model and the optimal performance system. This text analyses the professional context in which this work took place with reference to the theoretical frameworks that informed this study. I conclude by looking at both the applications of optimal performance in other professional fields and the implications of this practice

Genetic analysis reveals the complex structure of HIV-1 transmission within defined risk groups

We explored the epidemic history of HIV-1 subtype B in the United Kingdom using statistical methods that infer the population history of pathogens from sampled gene sequence data. Phylogenetic analysis of HIV-1 pol gene sequences from Britain showed at least six large transmission chains, indicating a genetically variable, but epidemiologically homogeneous, epidemic among men having sex with men. Through coalescent-based analysis we showed that these chains arose through separate introductions of subtype B strains into the United Kingdom in the early-to-mid 1980s. After an initial period of exponential growth, the rate of spread generally slowed in the early 1990s, which is more likely to correlate with behaviour change than with reduced infectiousness resulting from highly active antiretroviral therapy. Our results provide new insights into the complexity of HIV-1 epidemics that must be considered when developing HIV monitoring and prevention initiatives

Mining Mobile Youth Cultures

In this short paper we discuss our work on coresearch devices with a young coder community, which help investigate big social data collected by mobile phones. The development was accompanied by focus groups and interviews on privacy attitudes, and aims to explore how youth cultures are tracked in mobile phone data

Black Loyalists and “The Book of Negroes”

Histor