Unsurprising. There's a poor economic argument for funding healthcare in the UK, other than it being used as a political football to win votes. The result is decades of underfunding and then massive tranches of funding to make headlines which has to be spent immediately and therefore gets squandered on "transformation initiatives" without a focus on health outcomes.
The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.
Came here to say this. Both Seveneves and Fall have long unending psuedo-epilogues which add little to the main story, but also don't really wrap anything up satisfactorily either.
My issue with Seveneves is the first part (two parts I guess) was a pretty first-rate thriller then hard to believe transition to equally unlikely and not very interesting IMO outcomes which, as you say, weren't really wrapped up either.
I think the disconnect here is that I get the impression he wrote the entire first part just to justify writing his "SF with multiple humanoid species that all have 'hats' but there's a good reason for it" story which forms the second part. (Part of the problem being that... there's really not a good reason for it - Stephenson's grasp of biology is much worse than his grasp of computing technology.)
Oh I pretty much agree. There's a good argument that the whole first part of the book was to get him to a point where he could write the story he wanted to write. But, if so, there were probably better ways of getting to that point.
And, even if you accept how they got there, the last part of the book just wasn't very compelling for me.
I kind of liked how openly seveneves seemed to be about building some fantasy world for stories (or perhaps even for some video game or p&p rpg, with a number of clearly cut out character classes?), then getting gloriously sidetracked in the background explanation story and finally accepting that the world just built isn't remotely as interesting as that background explanation story. It's as if at some point half way through he realized just how much he was being "typical Neil Stephenson" and decided to go with it, to ten-up himself.
That last part almost seems like a form of trolling, the smallest viable story to claim "I had you on a sidetrack all the time and you did not even notice"
The app actually looks decent, so it's a shame you spammed this without disclosing you founded the company or providing any additional context. Behavior like this makes me suspicious of things like your app store reviews.
It's fine to share something you founded, just be upfront about it and don't spam. It would have been easy to just post "We're working on something similar over at Pepper! <link> Our approach is .... Would love to hear what people think."
Just finding this now after noticing the traffic spike (thanks!). Yes we are playing with doing this, however to be honest it's a very challenging task. You can extract the 'key information' from a paper, but abstractly summarising concepts is a bit more challenging. Probably the way forward will be a tool-assisted approach to aid humans to write better.
Really disappointing to see a whole host of inaccuracies in this article, even beyond the artistic license you'd expect for the New Yorker. My own area of knowledge is in neuroscience so I'd focus on this.
For instance, while its somewhat correct that nerve signals are binary, insofar as they are all-or-nothing, and yet activity is highly analogue, with specific groups of neurons firing together in pre-programmed bursts & rhythms. This has been one of the challenges in producing BCIs
The analog nature of neural processing is frustratingly nonanalogous to digital computing. I’d really like to see more oscillatory computing systems built, like the von Neumann harmonic injector or the parametron. Using oscillators like central pattern generators is more common in robotics but there are much more powerful oscillatory computers that have simply never been built. That’s frustrating only because I think we’d learn a lot more about the way oscillations are used for computation in the brain.
I'm curious why you think it is non-analogous to digital computing? I published a manuscript which diagrams the necessity for the applications of electrical engineering scientific theory to electromagnetic brain reflexes which ought to be equivalent to electronic feedback control orders which become digital, i.e. operations which are principally numerically caused.
If you're curious to read the proposition of cellular life evolving electronics please see it posted in the /r/dsp:
Yes, please see Chapter 5 "Human Homeostasis" on page 56. It is principled on the belief that biological tissue is piezoelectrical and forms electrical motion which is patterned - please see Chapter 1 section VII "Piezoelectricity in Biological Physical Matter" page 47:
There is a preponderance of available evidence on the piezoelectric properties of biological matter. According to Chen-Glasser et al, Eiichi Fukada demonstrated piezoelectric effects in major human physiological tissue, such as in bone and muscle.[55][56] Fukada’s biological examination demonstrates the intrinsic nature of piezoelectric effects in the building blocks of cellular life: proteins. Proteins, when considered to be digital control outputs of cellular replication stability, are genome expressions of amino acids –with at least 15 demonstrating piezoelectric properties. It is the reorientation and change in dipole moments in biological macromolecules under stress that causes piezoelectricity, hypothetically as an effect of the dipolebmoments causingbelectromagnetic resonances to naturally occur.[57]
I can see the use of this for neurological disease, but far and away the most common reason for a stairlift is frailty (or sarcopenia, to be more precise) along with other musculoskeletal conditions like osteoarthritis. Generally in sarcopenia you lose much more quadriceps strength, such that you find it difficult to stand up out of a chair, which is precisely the motion of how this is propelled. I'd therefore find this difficult to justify.
Secondly, stairlifts work because they are retrofitted into people's homes. This would require quite considerable changes to fit, and possibly loss of an upstairs room to make it work.
Sure, but its the corner of two rooms on two floors. Depending on what your house looks like, that's quite an undertaking to fit, it's destructive to the house, and doesn't replace your need for stairs.
Everyone in the comments discussing the UX of scrolling in this setting- this is exactly how you look through a CT scan! And in the different planes, as in this page. Sure a slider is useful, but I think this is really authentic.
Hey HN, I've been sharing some of the articles about this website that I've set up for a little while, and been developing it based on your feedback.
The aim is to simplify/explain/debullshit papers about AI in healthcare so that patients and doctors can better understand, use and trust them.
I think it's now at the point of being feature-complete, and we've got about 75 papers summarised on there now, but would love any thoughts on this.
That's fair- I've edited the title to make it more specific. I've not come across Bayesian but I'm going to add their research on the site to summarise down the line.
One of the problems with closed models is that any model can be found to train on the 'wrong' data point. So e.g. a chest x ray reader determines that images taken with the machine in ICU indicate sicker patients than elsewhere- that's not useful. If you can't inspect the model to check that, they might claim superior performance, but then the model doesn't work as well as advertised when it's tried out. Other biases might occur as well- for instance you can imagine a 'Greyball for healthcare' with the wrong incentives which recommends a certain drug/therapy more often than it should.
One of my more radical opinions in this area is the idea that it should be illegal to sell a closed and proprietary ML model for areas of public safety, specifically in hospitals and in courts/jails. The public’s interest in transparency in such matters trumps the company’s copyrights. Trained experts get a chance to inspect every drug and every medical device that’s used; why shouldn’t they get to see how a ML model used in a hospital was trained?
Completely agree. I've not seen it tested legally, but the EU now has a 'right to explanation' where automated decisions are made about people. This would prohibit closed ML from most arenas.
I don't see why the training data would need to be provided. The model would, and that's derived from the training data, but the training data itself shouldn't need to be provided. It is hard to explain a model with any degree of complexity with or without training data, so it might not be easy, but that's just the nature of complex models.
Yes this is why I'm not sure how it's been tested. In the scientific literature in many cases the data is anonymised and made available publicly or to those interested, but you can't always anonymise the data adequately, so an audit process might be necessary
The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.