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5 expert tips for behavior change in 2024 - Stanford Report

Looking to eat better? Exercise more? Get unstuck in life or career? Stanford scholars offer research-backed advice for making moves in the new year.
Source: stanford.edu

What (else) happened? A key question for learning programmes.

blog post image Good paper from 2013 on the need to go beyond just asking 'did our programme work?' "It is clear that programme evaluations using traditional ‘outcomes-based’ models are inadequate for the health professions context. Consequently, the scholarship in health professions education has begun to incorporate...
Source: wiley.com

How the Post Office's Horizon system failed: a technical breakdown

"From bugs to unqualified staff, the Post Office's point-of-sale system was inadequate on many levels." The code was poor from the start and the small team of developers were not up to the job. However, the problems were apparent in 1999 before it was launched. Includes a discussion of the Dalmellington...
Source: theguardian.com

Yaws could soon be eradicated — 70 years behind schedule Jones, Sam. Nature 2024.

Researchers are cautiously optimistic that the neglected tropical disease could be gone by 2030, but new barriers — including antibiotic resistance and primate reservoirs — might stand in the way. Researchers are cautiously optimistic that the neglected tropical disease could be gone by 2030, but...
Source: nature.com

Assessing learners - a mindset for the era of generative AI.

ChatGPT assignments to use in your classroom today. "Teachers and faculty everywhere first need to adopt a mindset that acknowledges the availability of AI and the likelihood that students will use it. As a result, we need to adjust our expectations of students. With online tests, maybe we should stop...
Source: ucf.edu

The Vulnerable World Hypothesis

blog post image "This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the ‘semi-anarchic default condition’. Several counterfactual historical and...
Source: doi.org

Is Vaccination Approaching a Dangerous Tipping Point? Peter Marks. Robert Califf. JAMA.

This Viewpoint discusses declining vaccination rates in the US, specifically against COVID-19, and the ways in which clinicians and the Food and Drug Administration can counter the current large volume of vaccine misinformation.
Source: jamanetwork.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

Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastoralist populations

"The last 10,000 years have seen some of the most extreme global changes in lifestyle, with the emergence of farming in some regions and pastoralism in others. While 5,000 years ago farmer ancestry predominated across Europe, a relatively diverged genetic ancestry arrived with the steppe migrations around...
Source: nature.com

Mozilla launches a new startup focused on 'trustworthy' AI | TechCrunch

Mozilla, the nonprofit behind software like Firefox, has launched a new startup, Mozilla.ai, focused on developing trustworthy AI systems.
Source: techcrunch.com

How machine learning might unlock earthquake prediction

Researchers are applying artificial intelligence and other techniques in the quest to forecast quakes in time to help people find safety.
Source: technologyreview.com

A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.

New AI-generated digital replicas of real experts expose an unnerving policy gray zone. Washington wants to fix it, but it’s not clear how.
Source: politico.com

Isomorphic Labs kicks off 2024 with two pharmaceutical collaborations - Isomorphic Labs

Isomorphic Labs kicks off 2024 with two pharmaceutical collaborations
Source: isomorphiclabs.com

Changes in Hospital Adverse Events and Patient Outcomes Associated With Private Equity Acquisition.

"Private equity acquisition of hospitals, on average, was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events despite a likely lower-risk pool of admitted Medicare beneficiaries, suggesting poorer quality of inpatient care."
Source: jamanetwork.com

Apple’s iPhone Design Chief Enlisted by Jony Ive, Sam Altman to Work on AI Devices

Legendary designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are enlisting an Apple Inc. veteran to work on a new artificial intelligence hardware project, aiming to create devices with the latest capabilities.
Source: bloomberg.com

Why Are Alaska's Rivers Turning Orange?

Streams in Alaska are turning orange with iron and sulfuric acid. Scientists are trying to figure out why
Source: scientificamerican.com

Monkeys in Thailand took up stone tools when covid-19 stopped tourism

Long-tailed macaques on the island of Koh Ped appear to have learned a new way to forage when the pandemic put a stop to feeding by tourists
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

Citations show gender bias — and the reasons are surprising

Homophily is the tendency for people to stick with similar people. Could this partly explain some of the gender bias in citations? "Women still tend to build more on women’s work, and men still tend to build on men’s work more." "Gender bias in paper citations is less common among younger scientists,...
Source: nature.com

2023: A year of groundbreaking advances in AI and computing

"This has been a year of incredible progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its practical applications." A review of 2023 posted by Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind & Google Research, Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind, and James Manyika, SVP, Google Research,...
Source: research.google