Psychology of panic buying
I've been fascinated by the psychology of panic buying and it is clearly an area for future research. It has an enormous impact on delivery infrastructure and I wonder if anyone has been tracking the data of the causes and the impact in the current fuel 'crisis'. A systematic review from last year identified...
Source: nih.gov
New WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines aim to save millions of lives from air pollution
"Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, alongside climate change. New guidelines provide clear evidence of the damage air pollution inflicts on human health, at even lower concentrations than previously understood." "Global assessments of ambient air pollution alone...
Source: who.int
New WHO toolkit promotes inclusion of people with dementia in society
“Towards a dementia-inclusive society: WHO toolkit for dementia-friendly initiatives”, launched today, is WHO’s latest response for establishing and scaling-up dementia-friendly initiatives globally. The toolkit helps countries raise public awareness and understanding of dementia to support people...
Source: who.int
What happened when a 'wildly irrational' algorithm made crucial healthcare decisions
Advocates say having computer programs decide how much help vulnerable people can get is often arbitrary - and in some cases downright cruel
Source: theguardian.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
Taking an invention from idea to the marketplace
Lockdown spurred many people to invent new products, but how did they get to market?
Source: bbc.com
World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'
"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com
Build for a crisis: Ideas for the future of local news
Enjoyed this story of the ingenuity of local newspapers when struck with the crisis of extreme weather. What does it say for our other complex technology and business layers? When crisis strikes perhaps that's when you find the lowest common tech that works and exactly what purpose you are using it for....
Source: niemanlab.org
The US is about to have a vaccine surplus
Covid-19 vaccines are still hard to come by in many places, but supply in the US will soon outpace demand.
Source: technologyreview.com
Implementing Medical Chatbots: An Application on Hidradenitis Suppurativa - PubMed Dermatology (Basel, Switzerland).
A medical chatbot has to be customised to the specific subject whilst general principles have to be considered. High-quality information has to be available in just a few clicks. People concerned about HS are looking for a diagnosis online and often have not seen a doctor previously. Guidance toward...
Source: nih.gov
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...
Contactless Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub
“People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is to record their daily exercise, measure their heart rate, or increasingly, to understand their sleep patterns. Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact...
Source: googleblog.com
Vaccination isn’t the quick coronavirus solution many of us hoped for
Varying national approaches to dealing with the coronavirus and variance in how people respond to vaccines put new hurdles on the path to beating covid-19
Source: newscientist.com
Cornwall: Home care issues for people in rural areas
More than 80 people in Cornwall currently have no council-funded care despite being eligible.
Source: bbc.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
Gloves that give people with tremor a helping hand | Reuters Video
One of the word's largest electronics manufacturers has invested in a UK start-up making gloves with built-in spinning gyroscopes that help people overcome the sometimes debilitating tremors that can stop them doing some simple tasks.
Source: reut.rs
Study shows conversations rarely end when people want them to end
"A team of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the University of Virginia has found that conversations between people usually do not end when either partner in the conversation wants them to end. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National...
Source: phys.org
Data-driven humanitarianism
An article from MIT Technology Review showing how the World Food
Programme uses geospatial data that is developed and made 'open' to all
by people within the areas being served. "It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but its people are among the most vulnerable. Afghanistan’s snowy...
Source: technologyreview.com
UK rollout data on AstraZeneca shot should guide other countries: vaccine chief
Natural experiments can be a really useful source of data. "Data from Britain's vaccine rollout on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 shot in older people should help other countries reassess their use of it, the head of the university's vaccine research group said on Tuesday."
Source: reuters.com
The Technology Behind Cinematic Photos
There has been some work by teams at Google looking at analysing images to extract their 3D features. They launched a new feature called 'cinematic photos' and this blog posted by Per Karlsson and Lucy Yu, Software Engineers, of Google Research tries to explain how it works. "Looking at photos from...
Source: googleblog.com
RSS feed