Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

Coding excursions

blog post image Anonymity with encryption At Outcomes Engine we are working on techniques to gather data from learners, analyse the data, and share the data whilst maintaining anonymity. I was involved in some work in my previous company (pharmaceutical) with the security of personal data - in our case it was data...

The Biggest Discoveries in Computer Science in 2023

"Artificial intelligence learned how to generate text and art better than ever before, while computer scientists developed algorithms that solved long-standing problems." Links to further papers and discussion on topics including: Tackling "P versus NP" Emergent behaviours in large language models...
Source: quantamagazine.org

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

These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI

Generative AI took the world by storm in 2023. Its future—and ours—will be shaped by what we do next. TL;DR 1. Will we ever mitigate the bias problem? (Probably) 2. How will AI change the way we apply copyright? (A lot) 3. How will it change our jobs? (Maybe not as much as feared but things will...
Source: technologyreview.com

Development and validation of Simulation Scenario Quality Instrument (SSQI)

A validated scale for measuring quality of simulation scenarios in medical education. "Background Due to the unmet need for valid instruments that evaluate critical components of simulation scenarios, this research aimed to develop and validate an instrument that measures the quality of healthcare...
Source: biomedcentral.com

High Pay Centre analysis of FTSE 350 pay ratios • High Pay Centre

Pay inequalities at UK's largest companies remain constant, despite ‘cost of living’ crisis. "The companies with lowest-paid UK employees (based on pay at the 25th percentile) were retailer JD Sports, where the lower quartile threshold was £11,240, pub chain Mitchells & Butlers (£15,161) and...
Source: highpaycentre.org

The rise of the AI class

"In an industry shedding publishers and jobs and routinely challenged to do more with less, we’re foolish not to at least try on the generative AI suit."
Source: niemanlab.org

Introducing Gemini: our largest and most capable AI model

Gemini is our most capable and general model, built to be multimodal and optimized for three different sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano.
Source: blog.google

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

AI can tell which chateau Bordeaux wines come from with 100% accuracy

A machine-learning algorithm was able to tell which estate 80 Bordeaux red wines came from with 100 per cent accuracy by assessing their chemical signatures
Source: newscientist.com

Cornwall: Nearly £5m awarded to tackle health inequalities

The aim of the work is to enable "more research on issues that affect people in Cornwall".
Source: bbc.com

The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment

Money always helps, but for the very poor, one lump sum can last a long time.
Source: vox.com

Artificial intelligence for healthcare and medical education: a systematic review

"After searching and reading a large amount of literature, we were surprised to find that most of the literature related to “AI+medical/medical education” was of low quality... This suggests us to conduct new research or improve the quality of research related to AI and medical/medical education....
Source: nih.gov

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

Randomised trial of general practitioner online education for prescribing and test ordering Andrew Bonney. Conrad Kobel.

Potentially inappropriate medicine prescriptions and low-value diagnostic testing pose risks to patient safety and increases in health system costs. The aim of the Clinical and Healthcare Improvement through My Health Record usage and Education in General Practice study was to evaluate a scalable online...
Source: nih.gov

Embracing Authenticity: Why Non-Algorithmic Social Media Platforms Are More Social Than Instagram, Tumblr, or Threads

The fallacy shared both by social media services and educational services is one of trying to engineer the perfect mix of content for their clients. What we find, I think, in both education and online media is that authentic content - that is, content based in a person's actual life and relations with...
Source: downes.ca

New protocluster of massive quiescent galaxies discovered

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new protocluster of massive quiescent galaxies at a redshift of approximately 4.0. This is the first detection of a protocluster of this type at such a high redshift. The finding was detailed in a paper published Nov. 20 on the pre-print...
Source: phys.org

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

Search algorithm reveals nearly 200 new kinds of CRISPR systems Allessandra DiCorato | Broad Institute.

A new search algorithm has identified 188 kinds of new CRISPR systems in bacterial genomes. The systems have a range of functions and could enable gene editing, diagnostics, and more.
Source: mit.edu

The legal framework for AI is being built in real time, and a ruling in the Sarah Silverman case should give publishers

That an AI model was trained on copyrighted material does not make all of the model's outputs a copyright violation.
Source: niemanlab.org