Ten Ways COVID-19 Will Change Your Next Air Trip
You’ll still get there but it definitely won’t be half the funOn board, the plane will be cleaner but also leaner. Expect to wear a mask and snack before you go.
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Making Sense of the Numbers Behind COVID-19
Media and politicians put statistics before us to sway our opinions. But what do they really mean?Numbers can frighten or enlighten. The secret is making them explain themselves. Here’s a quick primer.
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Five Surprising Changes To Watch for from COVID-19
Expect to hear much more about robots that can stand in for humans, as a way of enabling social distanceThere are the Spanish police drones flying around, enforcing lockdown orders. And Singapore’s robotic police dogs, enforcing social distance. Will they go away?
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Elon Musk’s Myths About the Mind
According to Musk, everything in the brain is an electrical signal. That’s pretty naiveNeuroscientists used to think that each neuron was as complex as a switch. But newer research shows that each neuron is more similar to a microprocessor. Musk’s 3,000 Neuralink electrodes controlled by a single processor does not remotely match your brain’s 80 billion processors, all linked together.
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Thinking Outside the Box Is Not a Disease
Enforced orthodoxy, often described euphemistically as “scientific consensus,” is an impediment to scienceAt the Skeptical Inquirer, we read about the“Nobel Disease,” whereby Nobel Prize-winning scientists ditch critical thinking and embrace unorthodox views. In reality, unorthodoxy helped them win the Prize.
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Vitamin D and COVID-19: Is It Data or Noise?
Because random clusters occur naturally in large numbers, only randomized, controlled trials can tell usRandom data shows geographic clusters. Thus some locations will inevitably have higher COVID-19 rates than others. As my example shows, associating these clusters with personal characteristics after the fact is not convincing scientific evidence. That’s where randomized, controlled trials are needed.
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Data Mining: A Plague, Not a Cure
It is tempting to believe that patterns are unusual and their discovery meaningful; in large data sets, patterns are inevitable and generally meaninglessFindings patterns in data is easy. Finding meaningful patterns that have a logical basis and can be used to make accurate predictions is elusive. We can see this from 18th-century attempts to cure scurvy through 21st century claims about the stock market or history.
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Will Ideas or Algorithms Rule Science Tomorrow?
David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute offers an unsettling vision of future science as produced by machines that no one really understandsThe basic problem is that accepting on faith what we can’t ever hope to understand is not a traditional stance of science. Thus it’s a good question whether science could survive such a transition and still be recognizable to scientists. But does turning things over to incomprehensible algorithms, as Krakauer proposes, really work anyway? Current results from a variety of areas give pause for thought.
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Top Consumer Trends COVID-19 Will Change Long Term
Data from 40 countries suggests that, post-COVID, people will continue to stick close to homeAccording to analysts, robotic devices are becoming more popular for a reason few would have guessed earlier; they reduce the need for physical human contact. Recycling, however, has taken a hit and weaning consumers from disposables post-COVID may prove a challenge. Huge firms are riding the storm, however, and Gen Z is spending the lockdown improving its career chances. Meanwhile, consumers surveyed around the globe say they plan to travel less.
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Is Contact Tracing a Simple Answer to COVID Lockdowns?
An engineering professor at the University of Austin asks us to look at the costs and benefitsThe conventional science fiction fear of a superintelligent AI taking over the planet and ridding it of pesky humans distracts our attention from a much more realistic threat: Artificial intelligence (AI) makes both government and corporate surveillance much easier, cheaper, and more useful—whether it is in average citizens’ interests or not. If we are lucky, this will be the decade when we address the implications of that fact.
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Can AI Save Us from COVID-19? An Expert Is Skeptical
To use AI more successfully next time, we need a clear understanding of its limitations as well as its capabilitiesExperts list various problems, including the fact that AI is vulnerable to failure due to unforeseen problems, including problems with data (too sparse, too noisy, too many outliers, etc.). It also doesn’t learn as well from experience as humans do.
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Through AI, a Paralyzed Man Has Regained the Sense of Touch
In 2016, through advanced technology, he regained the ability to move individual fingersAccording to researchers, Ian Burkhart, whose hands and legs were paralyzed in a diving accident in 2010, has regained the sense of touch,, through a brain implant, as opposed to simply the ability to move a hand: The breakthrough came from analysis of years of data collected from NeuroLifeTM program study participant Ian Burkhart, who suffered a spinal cord injury in 2010 when diving into the ocean, and now lives with paralysis in his hands and legs. “When the chip was placed on the surface of Ian’s motor cortex in 2014, it was not known that the signals related to object touch could be observed because of the paralysis,” said lead author and Battelle Principal Research Scientist Patrick Ganzer. “Furthermore, Read More ›
Coronavirus: Is Data Mining Failing Its First Really Big Test?
Computers scanning thousands of paper don’t seem to be providing answers for COVID-19If Alphabet’s Deep Mind or Microsoft had successfully data mined the 29,000 papers and found useful coronavirus information, that would be pretty impressive. But they appear to be giving others a chance to try instead, raising issues once again about the value of data mining in medicine.
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Why Does COVID-19 Target the Northern Hemisphere?
A graph of death rates by latitude is revealingFirst of all, COVID-19 clearly does not attack the globe uniformly by latitude. The second standout feature is that it targets the northern hemisphere. How can a disease’s spread be affected by hemisphere, let alone latitude? Let’s look a little deeper for some clues.
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COVID-19: When 900 Bytes Shut Down the World
A great physicist warned us, information precedes matter and energy: Bit before itThe COVID-19 virus contains about as much information as a sticker in WhatsApp. Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón explore a dreadful truth: “Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world.”
COVID-19: Getting to the Bottom of What Happened in China
China knowingly violated the terms of a World Health Organization (WHO) disclosure agreementIt is widely recognized that medical professionals and journalists in China are being silenced if they publish any information about COVID-19 that contradicts the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s official narrative. But now mainland Chinese scientists must ensure that their research publications also toe the CCP party line. If we sift carefully, however, we can uncover real information.
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Can People in Comas Have Abstract Thoughts?
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses how we might test for that abilityIn the recent podcast, “Michael Egnor on Whether People in Comas Can Think,” Robert J. Marks raised an interesting point with Egnor: Can people in comas think abstractly or do they form thoughts only at a much more basic level, given how physically distressed they are? The answer might surprise you.
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Can Loved Ones in a Coma Hear Us?
Modern brain imaging studies show that very often they can. And, with help from new technology, they can answer us tooPioneering research using brain imaging (fMRI) over the last fifteen years has shown that, even in deep coma, people can hear, understand, and respond. It’s no longer just anecdotes from caregivers. The controversial Terri Schiavo case might be decided very differently today.
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Why Depend on Only One Source for Modeling AI in Healthcare?
We may be missing many of the ways AI can help usAs we struggle with the COVID-19 crisis, many are beginning to ask hard questions about how our system works, its strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. One vulnerability might be too heavy reliance on a single source for data modeling and predictions. Considering all the uses to which AI may be put in health care, getting our guidance exclusively from the Institute for Health and Metric Evaluation for modeling is reckless.
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Is AI really better than physicians at diagnosis?
The British Medical Journal found a serious problem with the studiesOf 83 studies of the performance of the Deep Learning algorithm on diagnostic images, only two had been randomized, as is recommended, to prevent bias in interpretation.
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