Thinking Allowed

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showing posts for 'end'

Medical Education predictions for 2025

blog post image Some predictions for educational technology in healthcare in 2025. Mixed Reality (MR) The hardware for mixed / augmented / virtual reality is becoming more accessible and with it the opportunity for applications. There are many examples of educational technology businesses in this space - Osso...

The risks of automation of education

blog post image Unintended consequences such controlling the norms of behaviour and framing knowledge can be brought with automation ... and the problem is not a new one. "Although intended as an act of freedom, the self-instruction provided by an Automatic Teacher also habituated learners to the authoritative norms...

Markov blankets: can they help explain learning from a systems perspective?

blog post image Every now and then you find something, described a long time ago (in this case 1988), that could have helped you if only you'd known about it. In supporting pharma companies I have used several approaches to explaining why learning is complex, non-linear, and how we should look at it from a systems perspective....

My favourite tech hacks ... a thread

blog post image I started a thread on Bluesky of my favourite tech hacks earlier in the year and just added a couple more. Will keep a parallel list running here. Invidious (YouTube alternative front end - Not working so well Dec 2024) Pixabay (photos with appropriate Copyright) Etherpad (collaborate on a document...
Source: bsky.app

65 Reasons To Celebrate The 6502

blog post image "The legendary chip from 1975 that helped start the home computer revolution." I can remember sharing the manual for the 6502 with my school friend, Chris. He had a BBC micro computer and I had a Commodore Vic 20. To do the machine code I remember you had to: compile into 6502 instructions what you...
Source: substack.com

AI Watermarking Won't Curb Disinformation

blog post image "Generative AI allows people to produce piles upon piles of images and words very quickly. It would be nice if there were some way to reliably distinguish AI-generated content from human-generated content. It would help people avoid endlessly arguing with bots online, or believing what a fake image purports...
Source: eff.org

Predicting students’ academic progress and related attributes in first-year medical students: an analysis with artificial

"Background Dropout and poor academic performance are persistent problems in medical schools in emerging economies. Identifying at-risk students early and knowing the factors that contribute to their success would be useful for designing educational interventions. Educational Data Mining (EDM) methods...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Scientists identify first known prehistoric person with Turner syndrome

Studying skeletons could provide further insight into the past's gender variability.
Source: arstechnica.com

AI beats real doctors on 149 remote OSCE-style tests

blog post image "We tested performance in consultations with simulated patients (played by trained actors), compared to those performed by 20 real PCPs using the randomized approach described above. AMIE and PCPs were assessed from the perspectives of both specialist attending physicians and our simulated patients in...
Source: research.google

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

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

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

Machines may be better at assisting, not replacing us.

Journalist Kawandeep Virdee sees if he can be replaced by AI by writing some predictions for 2024. "I gave ChatGPT the last 13 years of Nieman Lab predictions ... [and asked it what I'd write about in 2024]" [ChatGPT suggested] Navigating the infodemic: Strategies for media in the era of misinformation...
Source: niemanlab.org

Ice Halos over Bavaria

"For suspended water to freeze into an ice fog requires quite cold temperatures, and indeed the air temperature on this day was measured at well below zero. The ice fog reflected light from the Sun setting behind St. Coleman Church."
Source: nasa.gov

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

Meta Trained Its New AI Image Generator on a Billion Of Your Facebook, Instagram Posts

Your cat photos, your friends’ selfies, and my desert landscapes are now a part of Imagine, whether we like it or not.
Source: extremetech.com

A systematic review of insight and reflection in post graduate medical education

Great literature synthesis on reflection. "We present a novel description of a hierarchy from discrete episodes of reflection, to cyclic processes that involve reflection, through to a state in which the practitioner is reflective. There is no unified understanding of how an individual ascends this...
Source: wiley.com

Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

"The general case for extending moral consideration to AI systems is that they might be conscious or sentient or agential or otherwise significant. And if they might have those features, then we should extend them at least some moral consideration in the spirit of caution and humility."
Source: 80000hours.org

AI information retrieval: A search engine researcher explains the promise and peril of letting ChatGPT and its cousins search

A new generation of artificial intelligence-based information access systems, which includes Microsoft’s Bing/ChatGPT, Google/Bard and Meta/LLaMA, is upending the traditional search engine mode of search input and output. These systems are able to take full sentences and even paragraphs as input and...
Source: ampproject.org