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
Moving fast and breaking us all: Big Tech’s unaccountable algorithms
Much of the technology driving revenues for the world’s most powerful digital platforms is accountable to no one—not even the companies themselves.
Source: rankingdigitalrights.org
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
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
Preventing critical failure
Can routinely collected data be repurposed to predict avoidable patient harm? A quantitative descriptive study Objectives To determine whether sharing of routinely collected health service performance data could have predicted a critical safety failure at an Australian maternity service. Design Observational...
Source: bmj.com
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological visual cortex systems, are a powerful category of artificial neural networks that can extract the hierarchical features of raw data to provide greatly reduced parametric complexity...
Source: nature.com
How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping: For Nicholas DeVito, Georgia Richards and Peter Inglesby, custom webscrapers
How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping: For Nicholas DeVito, Georgia Richards and Peter Inglesby, custom webscrapers have driven their research — and their collaborations. For Nicholas DeVito, Georgia Richards and Peter Inglesby, custom webscrapers have driven their research — and...
Source: nature.com
Covid-19: The global crisis — in data: Charts and maps show paradoxes of a pandemic that has claimed a million lives
Covid-19: The global crisis — in data: Charts and maps show paradoxes of a pandemic that has claimed a million lives
Source: ig.ft.com
Sports During COVID-19 - When What Doesn't Matter Actually Matters a Lot
Sports During COVID-19 - When What Doesn't Matter Actually Matters a Lot - HIV and ID Observations:
"A few weeks ago, I got a text from a long-time ID colleague here in Boston: Hey Paul want ur opinion … this is for an interview with MLB radio, and no one knows less about baseball than I do, but...
Source: jwatch.org
Augmented reality could be the geology classroom
Augmented reality could be the geology classroom’s killer app
"Geology is a very spatial science and can require a lot of 3-D visualization. Simple physical models (not to mention rocks) have long been used to aid teaching about things like faults or crystalline mineral structure. But these things...
Source: arstechnica.com
Facial Masking for Covid-19
"Facial Masking for Covid-19 — Potential for “Variolation” as We Await a Vaccine | NEJM: Facial Masking for Covid-19 Increasing the proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections that are asymptomatic with the simple public health measure of universal masking might reduce the severity of disease and ensure...
Source: nejm.org
Publishers are getting a (brief) reprieve from Apple’s coming ad-pocalypse: Apple now won't kneecap the ad tech industry
Publishers are getting a (brief) reprieve from Apple’s coming ad-pocalypse: Apple now won't kneecap the ad tech industry — for all the good and bad that implies — until early 2021. Publishers should use the extra time to get their data houses in order.
Source: niemanlab.org
A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 — and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged "According to the team’s analysis,
A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 — and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged "According to the team’s analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body’s mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively...
Source: medium.com
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
5 simple questions to ask clinical AI vendors before you buy
Blog: 5 simple questions to ask clinical AI vendors before you buy — Hardian Health: Learn the five key questions you need to ask AI vendors, giving you the low-down on common marketing misunderstandings, statistical obfuscation, and creative stretching of medical device regulation.
Source: hardianhealth.com
Harvard professor says surveillance capitalism is undermining democracy: In her new book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,”
Harvard professor says surveillance capitalism is undermining democracy: In her new book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” HBS Professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff outlines her belief that surveillance capitalism is undermining personal autonomy and eroding democracy — and the ways she says society...
Source: harvard.edu
Diagnostic Tests for Syphilis Continue to Perplex Even the Experts
Diagnostic Tests for Syphilis Continue to Perplex Even the Experts: An Unanswerable Question in Infectious Diseases - HIV and ID Observations: Here’s a tricky clinical scenario: An elderly person with cognitive decline or some other non-specific neurologic symptom sees a clinician. Clinician sends...
Source: jwatch.org
Preparing Future Psychiatrists in the Era of Apps and Chatbots
Therapy and E-therapy—Preparing Future Psychiatrists in the Era of Apps and Chatbots David Gratzer. David Goldbloom. Academic Psychiatry.
Source: springer.com
Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a
Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down: A new project aims to make LibGen, which hosts 33 terabytes of scientific papers and books, much more stable. "It’s hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The latest studies and current research...
Source: vice.com
City fund managers call for rethink of capitalism
"Two of the world’s biggest fund management bosses have called for a rethink of capitalism and its obsession with constant economic growth, in a plaintive appeal for business and governments to deal more decisively with the challenges of climate change.
Anne Richards, chief executive of Fidelity...
Source: www.ft.com
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