Data Science Consulting and Machine Learning

Take a look at the latest obesity data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and you can see that the country’s obesity epidemic is far from over.

Even in Colorado, the state with the lowest rate, 21.3 percent of its population is obese. Arkansas tops the list with 35.9 percent.

“It is the largest epidemic of a chronic disease that we’ve ever seen in human history,” says Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of the department of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Click on the CDC’s obesity prevalence maps and you’ll see something even more startling — the disparity among different ethnic groups. It’s not new that the obesity epidemic is hitting African-Americans the hardest, followed by Hispanics, but the maps highlight this worrying trend.

For African-Americans for example, there are 33 states with an obesity rate of at least 35 percent, whereas for white Americans only 1 state reports that rate. Nine states estimate the Hispanic obesity rate at 35 percent or higher.

“It is not about one group doing something wrong,” says Lloyd-Jones, who was not involved in creating the CDC maps. “It is about the environment that we have built that sets people up to fail.”

Obesity Maps Put Racial Differences On Stark Display

How DNA could store all the world’s data

It was Wednesday 16 February 2011, and Goldman was at a hotel in Hamburg, Germany, talking with some of his fellow bioinformaticists about how they could afford to store the reams of genome sequences and other data the world was throwing at them. He remembers the scientists getting so frustrated by the expense and limitations of conventional computing technology that they started kidding about sci-fi alternatives. “We thought, ‘What’s to stop us using DNA to store information?'”