By pooling data about so many people, they hope to detect the relationships among patterns of neural connections, healthy brain behavior and neural disorders.

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Pooling data on 78, 000 women in six different practices, Dr. Weigert found that about half of the women, or 8, 651 patients, with dense breast tissue went on to have ultrasounds which found 28 cancers that weren't visible on mammograms.

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The new trend goes far beyond the pooling of data.

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The EU watchdogs also objected to Google's current pooling of our data in a single personalized record.

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Sometimes researchers try to understand what is going on by pooling all this data, but that opens the door to mathematical gymnastics.

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Stephen Friend, the president of Sage Bionetworks and the former head of cancer research at Merck, has suggested pooling patient reported data about drugs in a similar manner.

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One EU complaint about current Google practice, you'll remember, was about the absence of an opt out button to enable users to say no to Google's pooling of their data.

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Data-pooling is not a new idea.

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Netatmo allows users to contribute to its Urban Weather Program, creating a wider network for weather data monitoring and pooling to help meteorologists, environmental activists, scientists and people living in urban environments gain a better understanding of the city climate landscape.

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They're collecting, pooling and analyzing huge quantities of data, looking for minor incidents that don't result in crashes or near misses, but potentially could.

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