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johnsonma23

BBC News - Ebola tests in Edinburgh for patient who recently returned from west Africa - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...d-edinburgh-east-fife-30842916

science research social media edinburgh africa ebola

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Ebola tests in Edinburgh for patient who recently returned from west Africa
  • A woman who recently returned from west Africa is being tested for Ebola at a hospital in Edinburgh.
  • However, there has been no confirmation that she is suffering from the
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  • "We have robust systems in place to manage patients with suspected infectious diseases and follow agreed and tested national guidelines."
  • "As a precautionary measure, and in line with agreed procedures, the patient will be screened for possible infections and will be kept in isolation.
  • deadly virus.
  • The suspected Ebola case in Edinburgh comes around 24 hours after Northampton General Hospital said it was treating a possible case.
  • that the female patient, who has a history of travel to west Africa, tested negative for the virus.
  • "Scotland has a robust health protection surveillance system which monitors global disease outbreaks and ensures that we are fully prepared to respond to such situation
  • ondon's Royal Free Hospital and was in a critical condition although she has since improved.
  • The virus has killed more than 8,400 people, almost all in West Africa, since it broke out a year ago.
lenaurick

IQ can predict your risk of death, and 8 other smart facts about intelligence - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...iq-test-intelligence

intelligence science research psychology brain science education

shared by lenaurick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • But according to Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher at the University of Edinburgh, there's a massive amount of data showing that it's one of the best predictors of someone's longevity, health, and prosperity
  • In a new book, Intelligence: All that Matters, Ritchie persuasively argues that IQ doesn't necessarily set the limit for what we can do, but it does give us a starting point
  • Most people you meet are probably average, and a few are extraordinarily smart. Just 2.2 percent have an IQ of 130 or greate
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  • "The classic finding — I would say it is the most replicated finding in psychology — is that people who are good at one type of mental task tend to be good at them all,"
  • G-factor is real in the sense it can predict outcomes in our lives — how much money you'll make, how productive of a worker you might be, and, most chillingly, how likely you are to die an earlier death.
  • According to the research, people with high IQs tend to be healthier and live longer than the rest of us
  • One is the fact that people with higher IQs tend to make more money than people with lower scores. Money is helpful in maintaining weight, nutrition, and accessing good health care.
  • It could also be that people with higher IQs are smart enough to avoid accidents and mishaps. There's actually some evidence to support this: Higher-IQ people are less likely to die in traffic accidents.
  • Many of these correlations are less than .5, which means there's plenty of room for individual differences. So, yes, very smart people who are awful at their jobs exist. You're just less likely to come across them.
  • The correlation between IQ and happiness is usually positive, but also usually smaller than one might expect (and sometimes not statistically significant)," Ritchie says.
  • IQ often beats personality when it comes to predicting life outcomes: Personality traits, a recent study found, can explain about 4 percent of the variance in test scores for students under age 16. IQ can explain 25 percent, or an even higher proportion, depending on the study.
  • Even though intelligence generally declines with age, those who had high IQs as children were most likely to retain their smarts as very old people.
  • "If we know the genes related to intelligence — and we know these genes are related to cognitive decline as well — then we can start to a predict who is going to have the worst cognitive decline, and devote health care medical resources to them," he says.
  • Studies comparing identical and fraternal twins find about half of IQ can be explained by genetics.
  • genetics seems to become more predictive of IQ with age.
  • The idea is as we age, we grow more in control of our environments. Those environments we create can then "amplify" the potential of our genes.
  • About half the variability in IQ is attributed to the environment. Access to nutrition, education, and health care appear to play a big role.
  • People’s lives are really messy, and the environments they are in are messy. There’s a possibility that a lot of the environmental effect on a person’s intelligence is random."
  • Hurray! Mean IQ scores appear to be increasing between 2 and 3 points per decade.
  • This phenomenon is know as the Flynn effect, and it is likely the result of increasing quality of childhood nutrition, health care, and education.
qkirkpatrick

BBC News - Study investigates how brain deteriorates with age - 0 views

www.bbc.com/health-30826552

brain psychology brain science

shared by qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • People in their 70s are helping scientists in Edinburgh investigate the effects of ageing on the brain.
  • Part of the study sees volunteers re-take tests that they first carried out when they were young children, to see how their mental abilities have changed.
  • qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15
     
    Study shows how Brain deteriorates with age
kushnerha

BBC - Future - What Sherlock Holmes taught us about the mind - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...holmes-tells-us-about-the-mind

bbc sherlock holmes perception deduction reasoning logic

shared by kushnerha on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The century-old detective stories are being studied by today’s neurologists – but why? As it turns out, not even modern technology can replace their lessons in rational thinking.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician himself, and there is evidence that he modelled the character of Holmes on one of the leading doctors of the day, Joseph Bell of the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. “I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell treated disease,”
  • Conan Doyle may have also drawn some inspiration from other doctors, such as William Gowers, who wrote the Bible of Neurology
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  • Gowers often taught his students to begin their diagnosis from the moment a patient walked through the door
  • “Did you notice him as he came into the room? If you did not then you should have done so. One of the habits to be acquired and never omitted is to observe a patient as he enters the room; to note his aspect and his gait. If you did so, you would have seen that he seemed lame, and you may have been struck by that which must strike you now – an unusual tint of his face.”
  • the importance of the seemingly inconsequential that seems to inspire both men. “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important,” Conan Doyle wrote
  • Both Gowers and Holmes also warned against letting your preconceptions fog your judgement. For both men, cool, unprejudiced observation was the order of the day. It is for this reason that Holmes chastises Watson in The Scandal of Bohemia: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
  • Gowers: “The method you should adopt is this: Whenever you find yourself in the presence of a case that is not familiar to you in all its detail forget for a time all your types and all your names. Deal with the case as one that has never been seen before, and work it out as a new problem sui generis, to be investigated as such.”
  • both men “reasoned backwards”, for instance, dissecting all the possible paths that may have led to a particular disease (in Gowers’ case) or murder (in Holmes’)
  • Holmes’ most famous aphorism: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
  • the most important lesson to be learned, from both Gowers and Holmes, is the value of recognising your errors. “Gentlemen – It is always pleasant to be right, but it is generally a much more useful thing to be wrong,” wrote Gowers
  • This humility is key in beating the ‘curse of expertise’ that afflicts so many talented and intelligent people.
  • University College London has documented many instances in which apparent experts in both medicine and forensic science have allowed their own biases to cloud their judgements – sometimes even in life or death situations.
  • Even the most advanced technology can never replace the powers of simple observation and rational deduction.
Javier E

Is Coffee Good for You? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coffee-benefits.html

coffee diet health nutrition science

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • experts say some of the strongest protective effects may be with Type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and liver conditions such as cirrhosis, liver cancer and chronic liver disease. For example, having about five cups of coffee a day, instead of none, is correlated with a 30 percent decreased risk of Type 2 diabetes, according to a meta-analysis of 30 studies.
  • “We don’t know for sure if coffee is the cause of the health benefits,” said Jonathan Fallowfield, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of the British Medical Journal review. “These findings could be due to other factors or behaviors present in coffee drinkers.”
  • A study in JAMA Internal Medicine examined the coffee habits of nearly 500,000 people in the U.K. and found that it didn’t matter if they drank one cup or chain-drank eight — regular or decaf — or whether they were fast metabolizers of coffee or slow. They were linked to a lower risk of death from all causes, except with instant coffee, the evidence was weaker.
runlai_jiang

What Is Synesthesia? Definition and Types - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/a-definition-and-types-4153376

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The term "synesthesia" comes from the Greek words syn, which means "together", and aisthesis, which means "sensation." Synesthesia is a perception in which stimulating one sensory or cognitive pathway  causes experiences in another sense or cognitive pathway. In other words, a sense or concept is connected to a different sense or concept, such as hearing a color or tasting a word. The connection between pathways is involuntary and consistent over time, rather than conscious or arbitrary.
  • Types of SynesthesiaThere are many different types of synesthesia, but they may be categorized as falling into one of two groups: associative synesthesia and projective synesthesia. An associate feels a connection between a stimulus and a sense, w
  • There are at least 80 known types of synesthesia, but some are more common than others: Chromesthesia: In this common form of synesthesia, sounds and colors are associated with each other. For example, the musical note "D" may correspond to seeing the color green.Grapheme-color synesthesia: This is a common form of synesthesia characterized by seeing graphemes (letter or numerals) shaded with a color. Synesthetes don't associate the same colors for a grapheme as each other, although the letter "A" does appear to be red to many individuals. Persons who experience grapheme-color synesthesia sometimes report seeing impossible colors when red and green or blue and yellow graphemes appear next to each other in a word or number. Number form: A number form is a mental shape or map of numbers resulting from seeing or thinking about numbers.Lexical-gustatory synesthesia: This a rare type of synesthesia in which hearing a word results in tasting a flavor. For example, a person's name might taste like chocolate.Mirror-touch synesthesia: While rare, mirror-touch synesthesia is noteworthy because it can be disruptive to a synesthete's life. In this form of synesthesia, an individual feels the same sensation in response to a stimulus as another person. For example, seeing a person being tapped on the shoulder would cause the synesthete to feel a tap on
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  • How Synesthesia WorksScientists have yet to make a definitive determination of the mechanism of synesthesia. It may be due to increased cross-talk between specialized regions of the brain. Another possible mechanism is that inhibition in a neural pathway is reduced in synesthetes, allowing multi-sensory processing of stimuli. Some researchers believe synesthesia is based on the way the brain extracts and assigns the meaning of a stimulus (ideasthesia).
  • Who Has Synesthesia?Julia Simner, a psychologist studying synesthesia at of the University of Edinburgh, estimates at least 4% of the population has synesthesia and that over 1% of people have grapheme-color synesthesia (colored numbers and letters). More women have synesthesia than men. Some research suggests the incidenc
  • Can You Develop Synesthesia?There are documented cases of non-synesthetes developing synesthesia. Specifically, head trauma, stroke, brain tumors, and temporal lobe epilepsy may produce synesthesia. Temporary synesthesia may result from exposure to the psychedelic drugs mescaline or LSD, from sensory deprivation, or from meditation.
anniina03

People with at least two Northern Isles grandparents needed for genetics study - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-east-orkney-shetland-51135287

science research

shared by anniina03 on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • People with at least two grandparents who were born in Orkney or Shetland are being sought for a genetics study aimed at improving health.The research aims to better understand the causes of conditions such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer, and in turn find treatments.Those taking part in the University of Edinburgh study-led Viking II project will complete an online questionnaire about their health and lifestyle.
  • The team believes the "unique genetic identity" of those with Northern Isles ancestry offers a "rare opportunity" to give a detailed picture on how genes are implicated in health
  • It is believed this information could be useful in terms of their future healthcare, including taking preventive actions to reduce the impact of health conditions.The study is being backed by the Medical Research Council.
Javier E

'The Godfather of AI' Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bot-engineer-quits-hinton.html

danger AI pioneer industry warning technology research

shared by Javier E on 01 May 23 - No Cached
  • he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
  • Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
  • “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,”
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  • Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.
  • But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.
  • “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
  • After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.
  • Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.
  • Dr. Hinton, often called “the Godfather of A.I.,” did not sign either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticize Google or other companies until he had quit his job
  • Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.
  • Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”
  • Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.
  • In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.
  • In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.
  • Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others.
  • “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”
  • As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
  • Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.
  • His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
  • He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”
  • Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their ow
  • And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
  • “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
  • Many other experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical. But Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.
  • But that may be impossible, he said. Unlike with nuclear weapons, he said, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret. The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said.
  • Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
  • He does not say that anymore.
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