[amazon_link id=”0525951601″ target=”_blank” ]
[/amazon_link]Being sick, on the other hand, is. That’s where I was on Tuesday. Yesterday as being sick yielded to convalescing, I picked up Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’ s book [amazon_link id=”0525951601″ target=”_blank” ]Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do[/amazon_link]. In his chapter “Feeling Sick Is Not A Priority”, he highlights the drop in ER visits on the weekend of Harry Potter releases and, in Boston, when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. He concludes, “Harry Potter and the Red Sox suggest that our well-being is more linked to our priorities than we are willing to acknowledge.”
The book also yielded up this gem, “And today that data is pervasive: Our time-resolved communications and whereabouts are already available to our mobile-phone carriers; our spending and travel habits are no secret to our banks; our social links and personal interests are documented by our e-mail providers; surveillance cameras regularly tape our behaviors and companions. Despite the ubiquity of these records, we continue to maintain both an illusion and an expectation of privacy. We hide behind practical obscurity, a belief that the many bits of information collected about us are so scattered in disparate proprietary databases that the impediments to accessing and linking them to one another are insurmountable.”