It’s a line we’ve heard over and over in movies and books. We’ve used it, or some variation of it, ourselves. That’s because there are many aspects of life that we simply have to take with a certain degree of trust. We trust that our brakes will work, we trust that our kids aren’t sneaking out of the house at night, that our doctor isn’t a quack. In short, even in the small, mundane aspects of our lives, we rely on others to be honest with us. One could even say that trust is the most valuable thing in society.

But wait! Don’t we always go on about how ‘data is the new gold’? Yes, and that’s true. Data is the most valuable commodity. Trust, however, is not merely a commodity, a resource that can be bought and sold. Trust makes it possible to buy and sell in the first place. In order for data to be a valuable commodity in the first place, we have to be able to trust it. 

This is even more apparent in the more macro aspects of life. We trust our parents to tell us the truth about life. We would like to trust our political, business, and religious leaders to tell us the truth. We expect those delivering the news to tell us honestly what is going on in the world. Yet, we can all point to many examples of these very authority figures lying to us, sometimes very obviously. 

The constant lying that we have learned to take for granted has generated a true crisis of trust, which itself has led to fresh and strange realignments. Many people go through life now not having any idea of what to believe and who to trust. Others reject one set of lies but reflexively believe whatever someone else tells them, quickly becoming unable to even hear others. This is how we have gotten to a world where a disturbing number of people believe the moon landing was faked and others even argue that the world is flat. It’s easy to dismiss such people as fools, yet, it isn’t entirely their fault. They’ve grown up in an environment where you can never trust the official story, where critical thinking is confused with rejecting what your parents or some other authority figure told you. In a world of lies, they think the only truth is the one thing you aren’t allowed to believe. 

Not only is this sad, but it is also utterly unsustainable. Without trust, society simply can’t continue. While we at TARTLE can’t solve all of modern society’s trust issues, we can help in our little corner. We can point out when companies are not acting truthfully with regard to how they acquire their data. We can be an example that doesn’t put profits before people. We can be transparent about how we operate, allowing people to see how their data plays a role in our business and how we make a buck not from people giving us their data but others buying it data. 

TARTLE can help by providing truthful data directly from the source, from you the individual. Data that is untainted by any bias, free of the assumptions that are built into any algorithm. By doing this, by helping people to get the source, to get the truth behind the data, maybe we can help rebuild some tiny sense that trust is possible. By being transparent, we can show that it is possible to operate a global company without lying, or being secretive. By setting an example and spreading the word with your help, maybe we can help put just a little trust back into our troubled world.

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Trust is hard to come by these days. People have learned to distrust every once trusted authority figure. It’s gotten so bad, some people don’t even believe the world is a sphere. Jason and Alex discuss this crisis of trust and how the TARTLE philosophy is built around a foundation of transparency and truthfulness. www.tartle.co

Time for TARTLE to deliver another good news shoutout. With so much bad news flying around on a constant basis, it’s good to take a moment every now and then to stop and appreciate the good that some people are trying to do. 

Today’s shoutout goes to Siobhan Brady, a geneticist currently at the University of California. She began her research career investigating types of grasses that can actually absorb toxic heavy metals from the ground. Imagine being able to remove toxic metals and chemicals from the ground with something as simple as grass? If one could isolate the genes responsible, it would be a fairly simple matter to breed new species of grass that would be specialized to absorb even more. The grass could then be harvested and the concentrated chemicals within would be contained. This would make it possible to clean up industrial accidents, old manufacturing sites built before there were any kind of regulations, or even just the generic soil contamination that is found even in non-industrial areas like Alaska thanks to contaminants getting into the upper atmosphere and landing all over the world, reclaiming it all for nature, for housing or farmland.

Even with a greater focus on environmentally friendly energy, such an advance would be important. Solar panels and batteries like those used in electric cars cause a large amount of heavy metal pollution. While that fact shows there are trade-offs and downsides to almost anything, metal absorbing grass would go a long way to mitigate that particular downside. Unfortunately, Brady was never able to isolate the particular genes needed to bring that goal to fruition. 

Never one to stay down long, Siobhan did manage to learn how genes affect root propagation in these grasses, she also took her knowledge and growing expertise to Duke, continuing her efforts in root development. When that project eventually ran out of funding, the scientist adapted once again, this time applying herself to studying tomato and sorghum plants. The result is a paper awaiting publication that could pave the way to breeding plants that are better able to deal with harsh environments. That in itself could prove to be very useful as the environment continues to change, affecting where we can grow sufficient crops to feed the global population. If we can learn to grow them in cooler or warmer temperatures than is currently possible, that could greatly improve the overall food supply. 

Academic and research setbacks are not the only troubles that Brady has experienced. In 2016 Siobhan was in Ethiopia for her research when anti-government protests broke out. Their car got caught in a riot and a rock struck and killed a colleague riding with her. While many would have given in either to anger or to despair and given up, Brady took a different route. With her colleague Sharon’s husband she started a fund dedicated to the educating and training of Ethiopian scientists, with a particular focus on training women. 

Perhaps this, more than anything is what sets Siobhan Brady apart. When faced with death, hate, and adversity of many kinds, her response is never to give up. She adapts, she finds a new way to pursue the good, to help others. She gives of herself to help understand and improve our environment while improving educational opportunities for others, two of the TARTLE Big Seven. In short, this young scientist represents the best that humanity has to offer, seeking to elevate others. TARTLE recognizes this and so elevates her in the hopes that others will follow her excellent example and give back to the world for the good of us all.

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Bad news is everywhere. You can’t log onto the internet without being bombarded with news of bad people doing bad things. Yet, there is plenty of good out there if you know where to look. Today, TARTLE looks to Siobhan Brady, a scientist who has worked to overcome setbacks that would keep a lesser person down. She has risen above to help us understand our environment and educate future scientists. www.tartle.co

They say it’s a small world and getting smaller. In many ways that’s true. Thanks to the many advances in transportation and communication over the last hundred years, it’s easy to think sometimes that the world is more like a big town. Especially with the rise of social media over the last ten years, we can actually have regular conversations with people thousands of miles away. Even though TARTLE is a small company, we have team members all around the world. So yes, it’s very easy to think of the world as small and getting smaller. Yet, it’s still very physically big. When something happens on the other side of the Atlantic or even on the other side of the country, it’s very easy to think of it as not really affecting us, certainly not how it might be affecting our health. 

Yet, this where we have to realize that while the world may be big enough that things don’t directly affect us, it is still small enough that we are indirectly affected by a lot of things. There are plenty of examples. 

Turn the clock all the way back to 9/11/01 when terrorists flew a pair of passenger liners into the World Trade Center in New York. For weeks after, flights were grounded. That led to a measurable increase in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, sunlight that normally is blocked by contrails. 

More recently are all the wildfires in the western United States in the summer of 2020. Dry weather and poor forest management caused what in the US was a worse than average wildfire season. The immediate effects were of course loss of millions of acres of forest, loss of homes for many and loss of life. So much burned that it also had a significant effect on the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. So much particulate went into the upper atmosphere that it affected the colors during sunrise and sunset at least as far away as Michigan. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the sheer amount of smoke and other particles in the air is going to have an effect on people’s respiratory health. In fact, it’s actually possible that the wildfires and the subsequent respiratory effects helped fuel the summer COVID spike that was seen in the United States.

Or recall the big storm that went through the plain states last fall, destroying millions of acres of crops. Fallout from that affects food prices which in turn affects people’s ability to get quality food, which in turn affects long-term health. 

One doesn’t even need to invoke climate change to make this point. If a water treatment plant is poorly maintained or its capacity is overwhelmed due to excess water usage or too many chemicals getting flushed down the drain it can cause a failure that leads to significant river contamination, which has a downstream effect on fish and other things, such as treatment plants that take water out of the river for nearby towns. 

A single cigarette tossed out the window or poorly managed campfire can turn into something that affects people thousands of miles away. One mistake in quarantine procedures can lead to an invasive species such as Asian Carp taking over whole river systems, causing significant effects on the overall food supply. 

How to track all of this and its long-term effects on the globe? We need data, and as always, the closer we can get to the source of that data the better. This is exactly why TARTLE is set up the way it is. We provide buyers the ability to connect not just with random information, but with individuals who generate data every day and who can generate more if need be. Want to know how food prices are affected by a big storm? Go ask people how prices are going up in their area. How is health getting affected? Go directly to the hospitals and clinics around the country and find out how many are admitted to the ER and for what. Or ask people if they are getting new prescriptions, or if exercising outside is more difficult since the wildfires started. Data like this is exactly what is necessary to determine the effects of our behaviors on the world and what things we can change to make a difference.

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

We often hear that the world is small. Yet, we often act like something that happens a thousand miles away couldn’t possibly affect us, or what we do couldn’t affect things for others. Alex and Jason discuss many examples of how we are more connected than might seem obvious and the effects that have on climate and health. www.tartle.co

Airplanes are cool. They look cool, especially the older WWII era planes with their big curves, artwork and the way they always look like they just came back from a fight. And of course, they fulfill man’s long-time dream of being able to fly without having to worry so much about falling to the sea like Icarus.

What would make them even cooler? Blockchain. Now, you might be asking how exactly that works. Isn’t blockchain only for cryptocurrency? Nope, blockchain is potentially far more versatile than that with applicability for all sorts of industries. So, what’s the application here?

One of the things blockchain technology is known for is its ability to securely track information, allowing users not only to transfer information but to verify its authenticity. This is already beginning to happen with check-in procedures. Airlines are faced with an incredibly daunting task; they need to keep their customers’ personal data private while also running background checks to ensure they don’t pose a terrorist threat. Blockchain allows the airlines to take that dilemma by the horns and encode fliers’ personal data in such a way that the airline can access it without its being able to be accessed by an outside source or falsified. With blockchain, it should even be possible to tie that information to a code on your passport that lets the TSA person scan it in order to verify you are who you say, while also running a security check to make sure you have stayed out of trouble since the last time you flew. 

Baggage tracking could also be helped. Yes, the airlines already track baggage and generally do an adequate job at it. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Tagging your favorite piece of Samsonite with a blockchain code allows it to be kept track of at least as well any current system. However, that data can still be lost or faked unless it’s part of the blockchain. In this system, a number of nodes all around the world actually record all the encoded information and verify themselves against the other nodes. With copies all around the world, this system would be very difficult to break into and alter any of its data. 

That same feature, having the data in multiple locations is a big deal for all sorts of aviation data. Even something as simple as location data can benefit from being recorded in multiple nodes. Rather than having it all in one or two servers that can lose data when they crash, they can be in hundreds or thousands of nodes. Even if half of them crash, the other half is still there with a nice clean copy of their data. All of this makes it easier to avoid a situation like the lost Malaysian flight MH370. When that flight went missing, kicking off a massive search and months of news coverage part of the problem was that investigators couldn’t locate the flight data. 

This directly relates to all sorts of other data, even data stored in the much-vaunted black boxes. While they might be incredibly tough and can practically survive having a nuke dropped on them it doesn’t matter if the one you need is at the bottom of the ocean. Imagine instead that information is also getting streamed to a secure blockchain network, so if a plane goes down you don’t have to spend resources hunting down that box, you already have all the data. 

Naturally, we at TARTLE are big fans of these kinds of moves. Anything that helps make data more secure and more available is right in line with our mission to use data to build a better world. 

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

The aviation industry is awesome. From cargo planes that help get your Amazon package across the country in two days, to fighter planes that can maneuver in ways that make your head spin to the humble passenger liner, the aviation industry performs veritable miracles by the minute. But as with all human endeavors, there is always room for improvement. To help manage their data, from tickets to black boxes, the aviation world is looking to blockchain. www.tartle.co

COVID came out of nowhere and upset the balance of pretty much everything. Back in February of 2019 things were proceeding normally, more or less. Then, countries around the world started locking down, one after the other. All of a sudden, people went from normal lives to in many cases not being allowed to leave their homes except to buy groceries once a week. While it never got that extreme in the United States, many businesses were curtailed, especially restaurants, theaters, and any other place where people would gather. That in turn had a significant effect on their suppliers. The net result has been a major shift in the global economy, the full effects of which likely won’t become fully apparent for years. 

It’s no surprise that many businesses haven’t survived the turmoil. Tens of thousands have shut their doors for good. What is surprising is the number of businesses that have survived so far and those that have managed to thrive despite the unique circumstances that have been thrown at them. Those are businesses run by people who either already understood the importance of data or quickly learned to appreciate it. They were able to use technology and data to adapt to radically different circumstances. 

Whether it be the restaurant that offered curbside pickup or outdoor seating, or the art instructor that added participation through Zoom as an option they’ve managed to turn those adverse circumstances into an opportunity. 

Bigger businesses have naturally gotten involved as well. So much so that the executive position of Chief Data Officer (CDO) is becoming increasingly common. These executives have a difficult job not just in terms of organizing the acquisition and analysis of data but also in justifying the return on investment (ROI) that comes from all of that data. That last bit can of course be the most difficult because the benefits of all of that data are sometimes hard to quantify. Indeed, if not managed properly, there won’t actually be any benefits. How to navigate that particular minefield? The CDO of course needs to be able to show how the reach of their efforts is often greater than what is obvious. One successful interaction can lead to many more and it is the job of the CDO to make sure that the extended reach can be shown, to acquire that data and process it into a format that the other executives can readily grasp. 

This is where issues often arise. Responding to the pressure that comes with that position can lead CDOs or whoever is in charge of the data to be tempted to get as much as they can, however, they can. That can lead to all kinds of ethical issues in acquiring that data. We’ve seen a number of examples of that in this space over the last few months and there are many others. People are often tricked into giving up their data unwittingly or in other cases it’s just taken outright with no chance whatsoever for the individual to provide consent. It’s a kind of digital theft and it is a major problem for people’s rights around the world. 

What should they do then? One option that we would obviously like to propose is that they sign up on TARTLE as a buyer. That way these businesses, large or small can connect directly with individuals who are using or might use their products and services. Then the CDO can be sure that they are getting their information with the consent of people which in turn ensures that it is more accurate than anything else that could be gathered through any other method.  TARTLE also allows buyers access to something that no algorithm can possibly touch, the why. Why do people do the things they do? Why does one marketing campaign work while another doesn’t? Yes, we know companies learn these things through focus groups. But how much time does that take? Wouldn’t you rather get your information faster, almost in real time? I know I would. That’s what TARTLE offers, accurate, near real-time data that is gathered with the full consent of the individual. That’s a much better world, one that is responsive and honest.

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Sometimes, people need a little something to shake them out of their routine. Unfortunately, that is usually something negative such as a war, a depression, or in the current case, a pandemic. On the other hand, people usually prove to be able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances and advances in technology and data management have played a major role in helping manage the COVID situation. www.tartle.co