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Mobile phone game 'could find cancer cures'

 

Cancer Research UK hopes the game will be fun while at the same time using the brain power of players to analyse vast amounts of data

A smart phone game which results in players analysing real cancer data is being developed with the aim of discovering new treatments.

Cancer Research UK has hired Dundee-based Guerilla Tea to build "GeneGame".

The charity has already enlisted the help of the public to classify variations in vast amounts of gene data using its site Cell Slider.

It said in three months "citizen scientists" had analysed data that would have taken scientists 18 months.

The charity said advances in technology had helped scientists to identify new causes and drivers of cancer.

However, it said colossal amounts of data needed to be analysed by the human eye rather than machines - and this could take years.

Now it hopes to create a game which will will be fun to play while at the same time classifies data from research archives, which can then be fed back to Cancer Research UK scientists.

 

This will help them "drastically speed up" research into the genetic causes of cancer, and in turn develop potential new cures.

GeneGame is to be launched in the UK later this year.

Amy Carton, citizen science lead for Cancer Research UK, said: "We're right at the start of a world-first initiative that will result in a game that we hope hundreds of thousands of people across the globe will want to play over and over again and, at the same time, generate robust scientific data analysis.

"Combining complicated cancer research data and gaming technology in this way has never been done before and it's certainly no mean feat but we're working with the best scientific and technology brains in the business.

"We're ready for the challenge and believe the results will have global impact and speed up research."
'Braver and bigger'
Guerilla Tea's Mark Hastings said: "We've always believed games technology as the potential to provide huge benefits to other sectors and this project will be a wonderful example of that."

Cancer Research UK's first initiative, Cell SliderTM, launched in October 2012 and allows the public to classify archived breast cancer samples.

Dr Joanna Reynolds, director of science information, Cancer Research UK, said "Over 200,000 people have already visited our CellSlider site, from over 100 countries, making more than 1.6 million classifications.

"With GeneGame we are being bolder, braver and bigger and we hope that by the end of the year we'll have a game that not only is fun to play but will play a crucial role in developing new cancer cures sooner - ultimately saving lives."

ONE THING SUCCESFUL PEOPLE NEVER DO

Success comes in all shapes and colours. You can be successful in your job and career but you can equally be successful in your marriage, at sports or a hobby. Whatever success you are after there is one thing all radically successful people have in common: Their ferocious drive and hunger for success makes them never give up.
Successful people (or the people talking or writing about them) often paint a picture of the perfect ascent to success. In fact, some of the most successful people in business, entertainment and sport have failed. Many have failed numerous times but they have never given up. Successful people are able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on trying.
I have collected some examples that should be an inspiration to anyone who aspires to be successful. They show that if you want to succeed you should expect failure along the way. I actually believe that failure can spur you on and make you try even harder. You could argue that every experience of failure increases the hunger for success. The truly successful won't be beaten, they take responsibility for failure, learn from it and start all over from a stronger position.
Let's look at some examples, including some of my fellow LinkedIn influencers:
Henry Ford - the pioneer of modern business entrepreneurs and the founder of the Ford Motor Company failed a number of times on his route to success. His first venture to build a motor car got dissolved a year and a half after it was started because the stockholders lost confidence in Henry Ford. Ford was able to gather enough capital to start again but a year later pressure from the financiers forced him out of the company again. Despite the fact that the entire motor industry had lost faith in him he managed to find another investor to start the Ford Motor Company - and the rest is history.
Walt Disney - one of the greatest business leaders who created the global Disney empire of film studios, theme parks and consumer products didn't start off successful. Before the great success came a number of failures. Believe it or not, Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was not creative enough! In 1922 he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram. The Kansas based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films. In 1923, the business went bankrupt. Walt didn't give up, he packed up, went to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company.
Richard Branson - He is undoubtedly a successful entrepreneur with many successful ventures to his name including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Music and Virgin Active. However, when he was 16 he dropped out of school to start a student magazine that didn't do as well as he hoped. He then set up a mail-order record business which did so well that he opened his own record shop called Virgin. Along the way to success came many other failed ventures including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vie, Virgin cards, etc.
Oprah Winfrey - who ranks No 1 in the Forbes celebrity list and is recognised as the queen of entertainment based on an amazing career as iconic talk show host, media proprietor, actress and producer. In her earlier career she had numerous set-backs, which included getting fired from her job as a reporter because she was 'unfit for television', getting fired as co-anchor for the 6 O'clock weekday news on WJZ-TV and being demoted to morning TV.
J.K. Rowling - who wrote the Harry Potter books selling over 400 million copies and making it one of the most successful and lucrative book and film series ever. However, like so many writers she received endless rejections from publishers. Many rejected her manuscript outright for reasons like 'it was far too long for a children's book' or because 'children books never make any money'. J.K. Rowling's story is even more inspiring because when she started she was a divorced single mum on welfare.
Bill Gates -co-founder and chairman of Microsoft dropped out of Harvard and set up a business called Traf-O-Data. The partnership between him, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert was based on a good idea (to read data from roadway traffic counters and create automated reports on traffic flows) but a flawed business model that left the company with few customers. The company ran up losses between 1974 and 1980 before it was closed. However, Bill Gates and Paul Allen took what they learned and avoided those mistakes whey they created the Microsoft empire.
History is littered with many more similar examples:

• Milton Hershey failed in his first two attempts to set up a confectionary business.
• H.J. Heinz set up a company that produced horseradish, which went bankrupt shortly after.
• Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, the company he founded. Only to return a few years later to turn it into one of the most successful companies ever.

So, the one thing successful people never do is: Give up! I hope that this is inspiration and motivation for everyone who aspires to be successful in whatever way they chose

WHAT ARE YOU WORTH?

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford they developed technology that was designed to search Stanford University’s Web pages, which immediately became popular among the students and faculty. This was 1996, and everyone thought that Yahoo! was the dominant search engine, and there could never be another one.

Larry and Sergey did not think their technological innovation was the basis for the company they wanted to start, so they put it on the market—at a price of approximately $1 million.

Fortunately for the rest of us, there were no takers. Had they found a buyer, Google probably never would have been born. It is an excellent example of how overpricing can have salutary effects.

Unfortunately, most professionals underprice their intellectual capital. They justify this with a variety of excuses:

• We do not have enough quality customers.
• Customers view what we do as a commodity.
• Customers do not understand the value we provide.
• Our people do not understand their worth.
• When customers engage in hardball negotiation tactics, we capitulate.
• Our profession has too much capacity, which drives prices down.

Most of these are nothing but excuses to explain away a lack of purpose, strategy, marketing effectiveness, and poor customer selection. But I believe there is a deeper reason, which I truly did not understand until I began teaching value pricing to my colleagues.

Many participants of my courses have commented that they would “feel guilty” about charging a substantial multiple of their hourly rate. The epiphany for me was that this was not a strategic, or even a pricing competency issue, but rather a low self-esteem issue.

Low self-esteem (or self-respect) does go right to the heart of why professionals question the value of the service they provide. Do you truly believe the benchmark of your value is the hours you spend? What about the years of experience that stand behind that $1 million marketing idea that took 15-minutes to create? Is the value really one-quarter your hourly rate?

You Are Your First Sale

The lesson is vital, and it is this: Before you can charge a premium price, you first have to believe, internally, that you are worth it. If you do not think you are worth multiples of your hourly rate, your customers never will believe it either.

Have you ever dealt with a professional, such as a doctor or a consultant, who came highly recommended? When you learned of the price, did you try to negotiate it downward?

Most highly recommended professionals will not budge on their pricing, because they know they deserve it and are worth it. They are secure and confident in their worth, and they price above the market as a result. Obviously, not everyone can do this. But the ones who do all possess a common characteristic: high self-esteem.

Psychologist Nathaniel Branden has done extensive work on self-esteem. His treatise on the subject is The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, wherein he defines it as:

1. Confidence in our ability to think, confidence in our ability to cope with the basic challenges of life; and

2. Confidence in our right to be successful and happy, the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants, achieve our values, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts."

In his book Self-Esteem at Work, Branden discusses the critical role self-esteem has in the success of enterprise:

A simple example is the fact that analyses of business failure tell us that a common cause is executives’ fear of making decisions. What is fear of making decisions but lack of confidence in one’s mind and judgment? In other words, a problem of self-esteem."

Branden says “Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.” That is profound. Professionals are deeply concerned, and rightfully so, with their reputations: They care what their customers think of them, of their firm, of their integrity. But what about their reputation with themselves? Most professionals were never taught even to ask the question. According to Branden:

If low self-esteem correlates with resistance to change and clinging to the known and familiar then never in the history of the world has low self-esteem been as economically disadvantageous as it is today. If high self-esteem correlates with comfort in managing change and in letting go of yesterday’s attachments, then high self-esteem confers a competitive edge."

Yet how can people feel good about themselves, their work, and their service to the customer and the greater community if they believe they are commodities, whose value is measured by a discredited labor theory of value?

There is no Standard Price for Intellectual Capital

In today’s world, intellectual capital is the chief source of all wealth. Shelly Lazarus, former chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, explained what advertising agencies are really selling:

Advertising is an idea business: That’s all we are. And ideas don’t come from the air, they come from human beings.”

According to the New York Times, Merv Griffin (and his estate) has made between to $70-80 million in royalties from the “Jeopardy!” theme song, which he wrote in less than one minute.

In 1935, Edgar Kaufman, the German-American businessman and philanthropist who owned Kaufmann’s
department store, asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a small summer home for him near Mill Run (75 miles southeast of Pittsburgh).

Wright surveyed the site but procrastinated on the design. When Kaufman telephoned him one day saying he was nearby and would like to stop by to see the design, Wright replied, “Come on Edgar, we’re ready.”

Two of Wright’s draftsmen who heard the call could not believe it, since no one had drawn a single line. Draftsmen Edgar Tafel explains what happened next in his book about Wright:

Wright hung up the phone, walked to the drafting room and started to draw, talking in a calm voice. ‘They will have tea on the balcony…they’ll cross the bridge to walk into the woods,’ Wright said. Pencils were used up as fast as we could sharpen them. He erased, overdrew, modified, flipping sheets back and forth. Then he titled it across the bottom: Fallingwater.

"Two hours later, when Kaufmann arrived, Wright greeted him and showed him the front elevation. ‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ Wright said.

"They went to lunch, and we drew up the other two elevations. When they came back, Wright showed Kaufmann the added elevations."

This is why intellectual capital, expertise, wisdom, judgment, ability to synthesize information, along with all the other characteristics of knowledge work, cannot be denominated in hours, efforts and costs to produce.

Napoleon Hill wrote in Think and Grow Rich:

There is no standard price on ideas. The creator of ideas makes his own price, and, if he is smart, gets it."

Do not feel guilty or ashamed of your success, and do not let low self-esteem interfere with being paid what your worth.