Thinking Allowed

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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

Integrating basic sciences into clerkship rotation utilizing Kern’s six-step model of instructional design: lessons learned

Worked example of curriculum design using Kern's six-step approach. "Background It is generally agreed that basic and clinical sciences should be integrated throughout the undergraduate medical education, however, there is still need for continued formal integration of basic sciences into clinical...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Apple knew AirDrop users could be identified and tracked as early as 2019, researchers say | CNN Business

Security researchers warned Apple as early as 2019 about vulnerabilities in its AirDrop wireless sharing function that Chinese authorities claim they recently used to track down users of the feature, the researchers told CNN, in a case that experts say has sweeping implications for global privacy.
Source: cnn.com

The Vulnerable World Hypothesis

blog post image "This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the ‘semi-anarchic default condition’. Several counterfactual historical and...
Source: doi.org

A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.

New AI-generated digital replicas of real experts expose an unnerving policy gray zone. Washington wants to fix it, but it’s not clear how.
Source: politico.com

gathio - events without the big tech

An easier, quicker, and much less privacy-invading way to make and share events
Source: gath.io

Newspocalypse now

"We will learn that the less something looks like what we have now, the better chance it has of being the thing on the other side of death."
Source: niemanlab.org

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

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

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

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

QR codes to become less convenient?

A sticker with a fraudulent QR code pasted over a legitimate one can lead the unwary to websites that can capture your personal data. Thornaby: Woman targeted in £13k train station QR code scam. Rail firm TransPennine Express has since removed QR codes from all of its station car parks. Is the root...
Source: bbc.com

AI Can Now Write Your Lesson Plans

Meet your new AI teaching assistant - ChatGPT.
Source: barefootteflteacher.com

Spem in alium nunquam habui (Hope in any other, never did I have)

This piece of music is probably like nothing you have ever heard. Maybe because it is nearly 500 years old it feels like it is from another world. Maybe because it is written for eight choirs with five voices each the forty parts it's so complex you'd be pressed even to hum some of the tune afterwards....
Source: wikipedia.org

FDA approves most expensive drug ever, a $3.5 million-per-dose gene therapy for hemophilia B

The single-dose medicine "represents important progress" as the first-ever gene therapy for the rare disorder, the FDA said. ”The Food and Drug Administration cleared Hemgenix, an IV treatment for adults with hemophilia B, the less common form of the genetic disorder which primarily affects men.”
Source: cbsnews.com

Global Lessons from Exposing War Abuses in Yemen

Open source tools like the Yemeni Archive allow investigative journalists to track Saudi airstrikes in order to interrogate what is happening on the ground in Yemen.
Source: gijn.org

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

Psychology of panic buying

I've been fascinated by the psychology of panic buying and it is clearly an area for future research. It has an enormous impact on delivery infrastructure and I wonder if anyone has been tracking the data of the causes and the impact in the current fuel 'crisis'. A systematic review from last year identified...
Source: nih.gov