Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

showing posts for 'instead'

What would my peers say?

blog post image "We're all used to giving our opinion with a Likert-type scale - choices from strongly disagree to strongly agree - but what if we were instead asked to predict what the overall score would be from our peers? Would using a prediction method be better than an opinion method?" From my LinkedIn article.
Source: linkedin.com

Microsoft Cloud AI Accelerates Search for New Battery Materials

Extremetech report that "Microsoft and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used AI to narrow a list of 32 million candidate materials down to 18 in hours instead of years."
Source: extremetech.com

Workplace well-being initiatives don't boost employee mental health

"The mental health of people who undertake mindfulness or meditation courses offered by their employer is generally no better than those who are not offered such programmes." "Instead of offering these initiatives, Fleming suggests that employers focus on bettering the work environment. For example,...
Source: newscientist.com

Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning.

One of the challenges with deep learning (neural networks) is that although they find patterns the reasoning disappears into an endless detail of numbers. In this paper the researchers built an 'explainable' AI to discover antibiotics instead of such a 'black box'. "The discovery of novel structural...
Source: nature.com

Opinion: OpenAI's drama marks a new and scary era in artificial intelligence

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, professors at MIT, lend their insight to the recent drama at OpenAI. "Sam Altman’s dismissal and rapid reinstatement as CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, confirms that the future of AI is firmly in the hands of people focused on speed and profits, at the expense...
Source: latimes.com

Fatalism - the stalemate of us vs. COVID-19

Stephen Casper - medical historian at Clarkson University - offers a worrying prediction for COVID for the end of 2022. The analogy for COVID-19 won't be influenza but 'tuberculosis before the discovery of antibiotics'. A new hospital specialty might even exist - looking after COVID patients - and they...
Source: twitter.com

Clinically contextualised ECG interpretation: the impact of prior clinical exposure and case vignettes on ECG diagnostic

Does teaching ECGs with a clinical vignette improve training? Not greatly ... but having seen a condition previously (and presumably the ECG that went with it) is probably best. The researchers concluded that "ECG training should therefore not rely on experiential learning alone, but instead be supplemented...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?

"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com

Winds of change: how Enel and Iberdrola powered up for the energy transition

Europe's biggest utilities Enel and Iberdrola saw the clean energy transition coming decades ago when others baulked at the high cost of producing energy from the sun and wind and instead stuck with coal and oil.
Source: reuters.com

UK PM pledges 3 billion pounds for England's bus network

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will invest 3 billion pounds ($4.17 billion) in England's bus network, aiming to provide more frequent, cheaper services to encourage people to catch the bus instead of using the car.
Source: reuters.com

Dreadful user experience can be expensive.

"Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design: Citibank was trying to make $7.8M in interest payments. It sent $900M instead." The screenshot is from court records where the judge ruled against Citibank who had wanted to get their money back. The lesson is to always include...
Source: arstechnica.com

Word of the day: deprecated

Geek talk. The tech behind this blog which takes any link that I find interesting and, instead of curating it for LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook, curates it here on something I have control over broke. I accidentally upgraded the server to PHP8 and an old function in PHP each() no longer worked. Took...

A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases - PubMed: Skin conditions affect 1.9 billion people.

A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases - PubMed: Skin conditions affect 1.9 billion people. Because of a shortage of dermatologists, most cases are seen instead by general practitioners with lower diagnostic accuracy. We present a deep learning system (DLS) to provide a differential...
Source: nih.gov

Solving Rubik

Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand: We've trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. Instead of thinking too much about the complex algorithms to solve the task they instead focus on creating complex worlds where the machine can learn. This of course...
Source: openai.com

Show evidence that apps for COVID-19 contact-tracing are secure and effective

"Show evidence that apps for COVID-19 contact-tracing are secure and effective: Governments see coronavirus apps as key to releasing lockdowns. In exchange for people’s health data, they must promise to work together to develop the highest standards of safety and efficacy. Governments see coronavirus...
Source: nature.com

It's too late to ban face recognition - here's what we need instead

It's too late to ban face recognition - here's what we need instead: Plans to ban face recognition in public places would only halt a tiny fraction of its use. Instead we need to regulate the technology [as with the provisions in GDPR] - and fast. "Calls for an outright ban on face recognition technology...
Source: newscientist.com

Are there automation-resistant intelligences? The question we all want to ask is 'will my job be taken over by a robot?'

Are there automation-resistant intelligences? The question we all want to ask is 'will my job be taken over by a robot?' "Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations,...
Source: ox.ac.uk

How do you define a scenario? Researchers in Futures & Foresight Science suggest an approach based on published literature.

How do you define a scenario? Researchers in Futures & Foresight Science suggest an approach based on published literature. The approach suggests a series of questions (see diagram) to challenge a particular phenomenon to check if it is a scenario that can be used in future planning - or if it is...
Source: wiley.com

Instead of building (only) strong relationships we should aim for many acquaintances. There is resilience for organisations

Instead of building (only) strong relationships we should aim for many acquaintances. There is resilience for organisations and communities in these weak ties. Granovetter’s theory of the strength of weak ties.
Source: analytictech.com

What If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef?: What can an individual do about climate change? One dietary change could go

What If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef?: What can an individual do about climate change? One dietary change could go a long way.
Source: theatlantic.com