To get a better handle on what sort of libertarianism was at play at Liberty Forum, I asked attendees what their ideal society would look like. The answer, for the most part, was that it would be completely different from the world we know. Drugs and prostitution would be legal. Education and medical care would be market commodities or gifts. In the absence of government support, individuals would be forced to help each other. Without liability protection or the ability to lobby for favours from the state, corporations as we know them would disappear in favour of smaller, more dynamic companies. The vision is so distant and theoretical that even Déjacque-style anarchists and Cato-esque reformers can work side by side in the same movement.
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New plastic biomaterials could lead to tougher, more versatile medical implants - 0 views
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A type of nylon, the material's shape memory properties enable it to be stretched and molded but able to reform into its original shape when heated. This makes it useful for medical devices such as bone replacements, where minimally invasive surgery techniques require additional flexibility in implant materials.
Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views
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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Hospital Price Transparency Could Change The Face Of Medical Debt Collections, If Advoc... - 0 views
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The problem for consumers up to now has been that the negotiated prices were unknown, or impractical to raise in court due to evidentiary rules. The general rule is that witnesses must testify to facts within their personal knowledge. Notably, if a consumer contests a medical debt collection lawsuit, someone from the hospital must testify that the price charged is reasonable and customary-an assertion that, with regard to chargemasters, involves shading the truth and is vulnerable to cross-examination.
Is Transgenderism Social, Medical or Legal? - 0 views
Adapting Boston Medical Center to COVID-19 | McKinsey - 0 views
Big data + private health insurance = game over / Boing Boing - 0 views
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"The existence of more personal health data and better algorithms for sorting it suggest that private medical insurance is just incompatible with 21st century technology."
Severe undercounting of COVID-19 cases in U.S., other countries estimated via model - 0 views
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A new machine-learning framework uses reported test results and death rates to calculate estimates of the actual number of current COVID-19 infections within all 50 U.S. states and 50 countries. Jungsik Noh and Gaudenz Danuser of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 8,
Alignment with Market Forces: The "Re-Whithering" of Infectious Diseases | Open Forum I... - 0 views
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Given constant emergence of new infectious threats, Infectious Diseases (ID) should be one of the most attractive medical specialties to students and trainees. Yet, ID Fellowship programs continue to not fill in the match, and ID remains among the lowest paid specialties. Nearly 35 years after Dr. Petersdorf first asked the question, we find ourselves once again wondering, "Whither Infectious Diseases?" To answer this question, and align with predominant US market forces, ID experts should push for: 1) restrictions regarding utilization of ID diagnostics and antimicrobial agents; 2) pay-for-performance measures regarding antimicrobial prescribing rates; and 3) healthcare reform as called for by the American College of Physicians to move away from fee-for-service medicine. Einstein said, "Continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity." We must move towards alignment with market forces, to benefit our patients, society, and our colleagues.
Proteins Unfolded - 0 views
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has solved one of biology's grand challenges: predicting how proteins curl up from a linear chain of amino acids into 3D shapes that allow them to carry out life's tasks. Today, leading structural biologists and organizers of a biennial protein folding competition announced the achievement by researchers at DeepMind, a U.K.-based AI company. They say the DeepMind method will have far-reaching effects, among them dramatically speeding the creation of new medications.
Preserving a Sense of Wonder in DNA - Issue 92: Frontiers - Nautilus - 0 views
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ot long ago, Joe Davis, the "artist-scientist" in George Church's genetics lab at Harvard Medical School, was in Brittany, France. The region is known for thousand-year-old salterns that produce fleur de sel, or flower of salt-salt that forms as seawater evaporates. Davis was there sampling these brightly colored ponds with a microscope, and found in the shallow waters an abundance of diverse halophiles, organisms that can grow in and tolerate saline conditions. "I wondered what happens to these organisms," he said. "The salt is evaporating, the water's gone. The organisms aren't just going to disappear. Where are they?"
Bill would classify homelessness as medical condition - 0 views
Why America is the World's Most Uniquely Cruel Society - 0 views
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Any theory of being American must explain one salient and striking fact: cruelty. America is the most cruel nation among its peers — even among most poor countries today. It is something like a new Rome. It has little, if any, functioning healthcare, education, transport, media, no safety nets, no stability, security. The middle class is collapsing, and life expectancy is falling. Young people die for a lack of insulin they cannot crowdfund. Elderly middle-class people live and die in their cars. Kids massacre each other in schools — when they’re not self-medicating the pain of it all away. The combination of these pathologies happens nowhere else — not a single place — in the world. Not even Pakistan, Costa Rica, or Rwanda. Hence, the world is aghast daily at the depths of American cruelty — yet somehow, they seem bottomless.(Of course I don’t mean that all Americans are cruel. I just mean that in the same way we say countries have attitude, dispositions, that there’s such a thing as a French or German national attitude or disposition, so, too there is an American one. Nor do I mean America is “the most cruel society in the world”. Can we really ever judge that? But it is uniquely cruel — a kind of special example — in weird, needless, and singular ways.)Let me throw that into relief. Scandinavians are the happiest, longest-lived, and most prosperous people in the world because they do not punish one another constantly — but lift one another up. But Americans do not believe this reality. The underlying sentiment that unites America’s manifold problems is a myth of cruelty.
Will AI replace Humans? - FutureSin - Medium - 0 views
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According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, some jobs will be wiped out, others will be in high demand, but all in all, around 5 million jobs will be lost. The real question is then, how many jobs will be made redundant in the 2020s? Many futurists including Google’s Chief Futurist believe this will necessitate a universal human stipend that could become globally ubiquitous as early as the 2030s.
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AI will optimize many of our systems, but also create new jobs. We don’t know the rate at which it will do this. Research firm Gartner further confirms the hypothesis of AI creating more jobs than it replaces, by predicting that in 2020, AI will create 2.3 million new jobs while eliminating 1.8 million traditional jobs.
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In an era where it’s being shown we can’t even regulate algorithms, how will we be able to regulate AI and robots that will progressively have a better capacity to self-learn, self-engineer, self-code and self-replicate? This first wave of robots are simply robots capable of performing repetitive tasks, but as human beings become less intelligent trapped in digital immersion, the rate at which robots learn how to learn will exponentially increase.How do humans stay relevant when Big Data enables AI to comb through contextual data as would a supercomputer? Data will no longer be the purvey of human beings, neither medical diagnosis and many other things. To say that AI “augments” human in this respect, is extremely naive and hopelessly optimistic. In many respects, AI completely replaces the need for human beings. This is what I term the automation economy.
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