Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

showing posts for 'pa'

Early warnings and emerging accountability: Total's responses to global warming, 1971-2021 Global Environmental Change.

Building upon recent work on other major fossil fuel companies, we report new archival research and primary source interviews describing how Total responded to evolving climate science and policy in the last 50 years. We show that Total personnel received warnings of the potential for catastrophic global...
Source: sciencedirect.com

Rocking down to Electric Avenue? Good luck charging your car

European and U.S. cities planning to phase out combustion engines over the next 15 years first need to plug a charging gap for millions of residents who park their cars on the street.
Source: reuters.com

Overturning 'conventional wisdom' with 'natural experiments'

Via Reuters ... "Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the 2021 Nobel economics prize on Monday for pioneering "natural experiments" to show real-world economic impacts in areas from minimum wage increases in the U.S. fast-food sector to migration from Castro-era Cuba." "One experiment...
Source: reuters.com

The AI Hierarchy of Needs | Hacker Noon

Sometimes you come across something that someone has written which makes what was a whole complicated mess in your head very simple indeed. Monica Rogati has done that with AI using an analogy of Maslow's (in)famous hierarchy of needs. For AI it translates to something like collecting, storing, preparing,...
Source: hackernoon.com

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

Rediscovering Cryptpad

Cryptpad is for working collaboratively on documents such as Rich Text, Spread Sheets, Presentations, Whiteboards, and Project Boards. The server has no access to any of your data and the encryption is based on zero knowledge. You don't even need to give an email address to register - you pick a username...
Source: cryptpad.fr

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

Britain tells its food industry to prepare for CO2 price shock

"Britain warned its food producers on Wednesday to prepare for a 400% rise in carbon dioxide prices after extending emergency state support to avert a shortage of poultry and meat triggered by soaring costs of wholesale natural gas." State support has been given to a key producer for a period of 3 weeks.
Source: reuters.com

The Impact of Mask Distribution and Promotion on Mask Uptake and COVID-19 in Bangladesh

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that face masks can protect against COVID-19. There is, however, limited rigorous evidence on the extent to which mask-wearing is effective in reducing COVID-19 in a real-life situation with imperfect and inconsistent mask use. In Bangladesh, researchers...
Source: poverty-action.org

Development and validation of teacher and student questionnaires measuring inhibitors of curriculum viability - BMC Medical

Background Curriculum viability is determined by the degree to which quality standards have or have not been met, and by the inhibitors that affect attainment of those standards. The literature reports many ways to evaluate whether a curriculum reaches its quality standards, but less attention is paid...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Will MIT Scientists' Powerful Magnet Lead Us to Nuclear Fusion Energy? - Slashdot

"A start-up founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it is nearing a technological milestone that could take the world a step closer to fusion energy, which has eluded scientists for decades," reports the New York Times: Researchers at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fus...
Source: slashdot.org

OpenAI's Codex Translates Everyday Language Into Computer Code

The company believes its Codex machine learning algorithm is the next step in programming—a sidekick for coders to speed up the work and ease the drudgery.
Source: singularityhub.com

U.S. employers get religion with vaccine mandates

As coronavirus infections rise again, U.S. companies mandating vaccinations are confronting an uncomfortable question rarely asked by an employer - what is an employee's religious belief?
Source: reuters.com

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

Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free to all

New policy brings UKRI-funded research in line with European open-access push
Source: sciencemag.org

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

Investors overseeing $14 trln call for vote on company climate plans

Investors managing $14 trillion in assets on Friday said they wanted all companies to set a climate transition plan and allow them to vote on it, ahead of next year's season for annual general meetings.
Source: reuters.com

Stonehenge tunnel campaigners win court battle

A judicial review into road works near the world heritage site finds for the campaigners.
Source: bbc.com

Gout and 'Podagra' in medieval Cambridge, England - PubMed International journal of paleopathology.

"The high prevalence rate of gout in the friary is at least partly explained by the consumption of alcohol and purine-rich diets by the friars and the wealthy townsfolk. Medieval medical texts from Cambridge show that gout (known as podagra) was sometimes treated with medications made from the root of...
Source: nih.gov

The pandemic slashed the West Coast’s emissions. Wildfires already reversed it.

Major fires and resulting emissions are set to continually increase across the world’s forested regions, fueling more warming and more fires to come.
Source: technologyreview.com