I thought the TEDTalk this weekend was great, but not so much because of the theme of the talk itself. Don’t get me wrong. Full credit goes to Max Little for discovering a quick, cheap test for Parkinsons. This, if it pans out, will help millions of people and, by extension, their families and friends.
Max Little Saves The World
It’s really an amazingly simple thing, as so many great inventions and developments are. He realized that, before losing bodily control entirely, the voices of the disease’s victims get shakier. So, he developed a voice analysis program that measures that and now he’s pretty sure they can spot Parkinson’s in its early stages 99% of the time – over the phone. Or soon, just with a computer program that you can run by yourself at home.
It’s not a cure, but it might help a lot.
One doctor who wrote on the subject pointed out that, while it is pretty nifty, the truly amazing thing about it is it shows that advances in medicine are no longer just coming from medical doctors, or research scientists with a medical specialty. Little is a mathematician.
That’s true. Mathematicians, biologists, botanists, chemists, opticians, astronomers, paleontologists, computer geeks, engineers and many others, every day, examine the state of accumulated knowledge in their own field and try to push it a step forward, a step outward. Sometimes it’s breakthrough by sudden inspiration like this, sometimes it’s years of painstaking experimentation but in every case, once it’s accomplished, people in every other field start looking to see how they can apply it, the gears start to mesh and the whole machine moves forward.
It wasn’t in the video, but in the last 3 paragraphs of the accompanying article, Little wrote about how this technology could be used in the search for extrasolar planets. Which moves up the date when we actually make contact with intelligent extraterrestrial species. At which point the steady stream of new technology that keeps coming out will become a raging torrent.
www.gurukalehuru.com 