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
Adaptive testing reduces collusion in online tests
“Rensselaer-developed method proven effective in reducing collusion among students”
“When a distanced online test is performed, students receive the same questions, but at varying times depending on their skill level. For instance, students of highest mastery levels receive each question after...
Source: rpi.edu
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...
Israel Reveals Newly Discovered Fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls
The finds, ranging from just a few millimeters to a thumbnail in size, are the first to be unearthed in archaeological excavations in the Judean Desert in about 60 years.
Source: nytimes.com
Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race
"COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn’t come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have...
Source: 80000hours.org
This Soft Robot Stingray Just Explored the Deepest Point in the Ocean
The bot could be a game-changer in how we explore the deep sea, especially its bizarre marine life. It can handle living specimens without damaging them.
Source: singularityhub.com
PAIRED: A New Multi-agent Approach for Adversarial Environment Generation
This Google AI blog describes a method for machine learning using paired agents. The gap between the one that did the best and the one that did the worst is regret. That feeling of 'could have done' better is what pushes the 'unsupervised environment design' algorithm towards a better solution. "The...
Source: googleblog.com
COVID-19 has transformed education – here are the 5 innovations we should keep
"Five changes made to higher education during COVID-19 will be beneficial afterwards, according to an expert, including more creative assessment methods." Whilst this is written from the perspective of university education this authentic, rich, and active learning approach can and should be applied to...
Source: weforum.org
Why Are COVID-19 Case Numbers Dropping?
"We don’t know. That part is easy. Also easy is that case numbers really are falling — it’s not just reduced testing — and it’s happening pretty much everywhere. Urban areas and rural. Red states and blue. Places with broad vaccine rollouts and those with hardly any. North and South America,...
Source: jwatch.org
Eeek! or E484K mutation and the coronavirus pandemic
Rupert Beale · Eeek! · LRB 19 February 2021: "Uncontrolled spread – as we knew it would – led to an even greater wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths than last spring. Children were sent to school for one day before the necessary ‘lockdown’ was reimposed. The impulse to keep schools...
Source: lrb.co.uk
Using the right tools for the job
Since this blog has been up I've fiddled with some text analysis stuff by analysing the text and making recommendations for similar blog entries. Did it all in PHP and MySQL just to understand how the algorithms work. Eventually it started to take about 5 hours to: tokenise and stemming the textcalculate...
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
Australian news app beats Facebook in App Store
"Take that Facebook. A homegrown app from Australia Broadcasting Company (ABC) topped iOS download charts in Australia, outpacing Facebook. That's important for one big reason: Facebook just banned news from appearing on Australian newsfeeds in response to a law that would require the social giant...
Source: mashable.com
Mars rover landing
NASA releases “exhilarating” image of Mars rover just above the planet
Source: arstechnica.com
'I just need food in my belly and a bed to lie on': Big Issue sellers see sales plummet as shoppers stay away from town
'I just need food in my belly and a bed to lie on': Big Issue sellers see sales plummet as shoppers stay away from town and city centres.
Source: bbc.co.uk
Ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons
Ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons: There are less harmful ways to stop a lot of crime from happening in the first place. Listen to Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research...
Source: 80000hours.org
Google Has Announced a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree: Google's new certificate program takes only six months to complete,
Google Has Announced a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree: Google's new certificate program takes only six months to complete, and will be a fraction of the cost of college.
Source: inc.com
What makes fake news feel true when it isn
What makes fake news feel true when it isn’t? For one thing, hearing it over and over again: "The more often participants had heard a statement, the more likely they were to attribute it to Consumer Reports rather than the National Enquirer." Key features of effective fake news - should you want to...
Source: niemanlab.org
Letter to Cardiff University School of Medicine urging a review of 2020 student admissions
Just sent this to the undergraduate admissions team and the head of school at my old college. "To the admissions team Cardiff University School of Medicine. I write as an ex student of Cardiff School of Medicine having graduated in 1990. If you haven't already could I urge you to review all...
Establishing a taxonomy of potential hazards associated with communicating medical science in the age of disinformation
“In a globalised information age, medical science can appear disconnected and aloof from those it serves to help. Educational and professional bodies (including universities and medical centres) have a unique societal role to inform their peers and public on evidence-based medicine, and a responsibility...
Source: bmj.com
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