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
Guest Post - Beyond Generative AI: The Indispensable Role of BERT in Scholarly Publishing - The Scholarly Kitchen
ChatGPT has popularized generative AI, but interpretive AI has quietly remained in the shadows. Interpretive AI offers profound insights into content and audience engagement, a critical tool for publishers aiming to harness the full potential of AI.
Source: sspnet.org
This AI Trained on the Life Events of Every Person in Denmark. It Can Now Predict Their Future.
Artificial intelligence is very good at finding patterns. Given enough data it will start making telling you what's going to happen. "The AI can make highly accurate predictions about people’s lives, including how likely they are to die in a given time window and their personality traits." ... ...
Source: singularityhub.com
NFTs died a slow, painful death in 2023 as most are now worthless
A reminder that early adoption of technology is not without risk. "Non-fungible tokens promised to revolutionise the concept of ownership using the blockchain technology behind bitcoin, but the market seems to have all but collapsed."
Source: newscientist.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
AI cuts treatment time for cancer radiotherapy
The technology will be offered at cost price to all NHS trusts in England, following successful pilot studies.
Source: bbc.com
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
Gender differences in individual variation in academic grades fail to fit expected patterns for STEM - Nature Communications
Fewer women than men pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), despite girls outperforming boys at school in the relevant subjects. According to the ‘variability hypothesis’, this over-representation of males is driven by gender differences in variance; greater male...
Source: nature.com
Saints, Kings & Mermaids - Discovering Breage's Medieval Wall Paintings - The Cornish Bird
Discover some of the finest medieval walling paintings in Cornwall and their meaning in the St Breaca church in Breage.
Source: cornishbirdblog.com
Extending the lifecycle of clothes during Covid-19
Good example of analysing behaviour by barriers and enablers. “Two studies carried out with the Centre for Behaviour Change examined factors affecting the purchase, repair, repurpose and disposal of clothes by people in the UK before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Source: ucl.ac.uk
Thich Nhat Hanh, poetic peace activist and master of mindfulness, dies at 95
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist who in the 1960s came to prominence as an opponent of the Vietnam War, died on Saturday aged 95 surrounded by his followers in the temple where his spiritual journey began. "Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less...
Source: reuters.com
Fatalism - the stalemate of us vs. COVID-19
Stephen Casper - medical historian at Clarkson University - offers a worrying prediction for COVID for the end of 2022. The analogy for COVID-19 won't be influenza but 'tuberculosis before the discovery of antibiotics'. A new hospital specialty might even exist - looking after COVID patients - and they...
Source: twitter.com
Omicron-variant border bans ignore the evidence, say scientists Mallapaty, Smriti. Nature 2021.
Researchers say travel restrictions in response to the newly detected coronavirus variant come too late and could even slow studies of Omicron. Researchers say travel restrictions in response to the newly detected coronavirus variant come too late and could even slow studies of Omicron.
Source: nature.com
Factors affecting the uptake of new medicines: a systematic literature review - BMC Health Services Research Lublóy, Ágnes.
"This systematic literature review has provided insights into the factors that affect new drug uptake—primarily, doctors’ scientific orientation, prescribing habits, exposure to pharmaceutical marketing, and interpersonal communication." "Background The successful diffusion of new drugs is crucial...
Source: biomedcentral.com
The unhealthy industry playbook
What Public Health Practitioners Need to Know About Unhealthy IndustryTactics. Attack legitimate science. e.g. Accuse science of deception, calling it “junk science” or “bad science,” claiming science is manipulated to fulfill a political agenda. Attack and intimidate the scientists. e.g. Create...
Source: aphapublications.org
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
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
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
Using Markov chain model to evaluate medical students’ trajectory on progress tests and predict USMLE step 1 scores---a
Background Medical students must meet curricular expectations and pass national licensing examinations to become physicians. However, no previous studies explicitly modeled stages of medical students acquiring basic science knowledge. In this study, we employed an innovative statistical model to characterize...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Effectiveness of a serious game addressing guideline adherence: cohort study with 1.5-year follow-up Tobias Raupach. Insa
Background Patients presenting with acute shortness of breath and chest pain should be managed according to guideline recommendations. Serious games can be used to train clinical reasoning. However, only few studies have used outcomes beyond student satisfaction, and most of the published evidence is...
Source: biomedcentral.com
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