Research: Kids’ Phones Steal Sleep
How important might 21 minutes less sleep a night be to a child?If sleep is lost, what will make up for it?
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Scientific American: No Consensus on Smartphones’ Effect on Teen Brains
Others continue to wonder why teens seem comparatively fragileThe editor’s view is that “change is unceasing, and different does not necessarily mean worse – despite the fears of the “cluck-cluckers.” We recommend several other sources for alternative context and background.
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Can AI Make Unique Trail-Blazing Science Discoveries?
It would save us a lot of time but, as Eric Holloway warns, some things can’t be automated, by their very nature“What is needed is the happy medium of a model that is complex enough to learn, but simple enough to not memorize. There is no way to automate finding the happy medium. It requires human intelligence.”
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Betraying Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Espousing Abortion
Bonhoeffer opposed abortion but the president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute argues for itI treat very premature babies—they can feel excruciating pain, and colleagues who do fetal surgery always ensure that the fetus, as well as the mother, has sufficient anesthesia during the operation.
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Can health tracking apps make us sicker?
Yes, if information overload leads to more anxietyIn the Information Age, we face a problem our ancestors did not face: far too much information. Our challenge is learning how to know when we have all the information we need to calmly make decisions we can live with.
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Non-Invasive Healing for the Wounded Brain
One method does not involve invasive surgery but rather stimulating the tongueJonathan Sackier emphasizes that, when dealing with sufferers from severe or chronic brain injury, medicine must not raise false hopes: “So we have a profound obligation to be honest, open, transparent, and to do darn good science!” But he is optimistic.
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How the Injured Brain Heals Itself: Our Amazing Neuroplasticity
Jonathan Sackier is a pioneer in non-invasive techniques for speeding the healing of traumatic brain injuriesPeople who have come back from catastrophic injuries like Bill Zoller’s intrigue neuroscientists because they offer a glimpse into the neuroplasticity that enables the brain to restore lost functions, which we can learn to augment.
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Why AI Won’t Replace Your Doctor
Most analysts think that AI can improve medical care but cannot replace human judgement in painful situationsIt’s not so much that electronic systems make errors as that they make errors that health care staff can’t anticipate and correct for—errors that occur in complex machinery, not errors made by experienced professionals.
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Does “Alien Hand Syndrome” Show That We Don’t Really Have Free Will?
One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it?Alien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.
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Tech Fail: Man Told He’s Dying via Video Link
The family, who thought that the robotic video cart was just “making a routine visit,” was outragedThe response statement from Kaiser Permanente, acknowledging failure, recognizes the problem, but only in part
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The Junk Science of the Abortion Lobby
Fetuses not only experience pain but experience it more intensely than do adultsMuch of pro-abortion advocacy is science denial—the deliberate misrepresentation of science to advance an ideological agenda. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University, wrote a misleading essay on that theme in the New York Times, “Science won’t end this debate” (January 22, 2019).
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AI: Think About Ethics Before Trouble Arises
A machine learning specialist reflects on Micah 6:8 as a guide to developing ethics for the rapidly growing professionTo love mercy sometimes means to give up efficiency. It could mean losing a few points of model accuracy by refusing to take into account features that invade privacy or are proxies for race, leading to discriminatory model behavior. But that’s OK. The merciful are willing to give up some of their rights and advantages so they can help others.
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Yes, the Placebo Effect Is Real, Not a Trick
But the fact that the mind acts on the body troubles materialists. Such facts, they say, require revisionThe fact that you may start to get better if you believe you are receiving treatment is one of the best-attested facts in medicine. Despite that, far from being accepted, this “placebo effect” is seen in many quarters as, at best, a “pesky thing” and at worst, a “trick,” if not a “fraud.” Perhaps that is due to a drive to reduce medical science to the purely physical.
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Researchers find loneliness is hard on the brain
What we think about our lives really does affect our health.What’s less often recognized is that loneliness could cause be a cause of brain damage as well, at least if we go by rodent studies.
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The $60 Billion-Dollar Medical Data Market is Coming Under Scrutiny
As a patient, you do not own the data and are not as anonymous as you thinkData management companies can come to know a great deal about you; they just don’t know your name—unless, of course, there is a breach of some kind. Time Magazine reported in 2017 that “Researchers have already re-identified people from anonymized profiles from hospital exit records, lists of Netflix customers, AOL online searchers, even GPS data of New York City taxi rides.” One would expect detailed medical data to be even more revelatory.
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Boy loses large hunk of brain
And is “doing just fine”When pundits talk glibly of creating artificial minds or claim that consciousness is an illusion, it might help to remember that few predicted cases like this could exist and few thought that high tech diagnostics would lead to their discovery.
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Better medicine through machine learning?
Data can be a dump or a gold mineThe biggest problem today isn’t the sheer mass of data so much as the difficulty of determining what it is worth. The answer lies, unfortunately, in the undone studies and the unreported events. Machine learning will be a much greater help when those problems are addressed.
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