Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for April 25, 2020
A Steem essay argues for glasses to prevent inadvertent eye touching; IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; The COVID-19 pandemic may be ushering a new era of AI supported medicine; Rules of thumb for evaluating statistical models at a time when statistical models matter; and a description of four substantial astronomical discoveries that were made by the ancient Greeks
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First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, SteemSTEM.
- Steem @bettervision: Why Wearing Your Spectacles May Be Important Now More Than Ever - The most common mechanism for transmission of the SARS2 virus is when the subject uses their own hands to touch the eyes, mouth, nose, or ears. This is often an unconscious action that is triggered by feeling an itch. The author suggests that, by creating an obstacle between the finger and the eye, the habit of wearing glasses may discourage the wearer from accidentally touching their eyes when an itch is experienced. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @bettervision.)
- Video Friday: Waymo Unveils 5th-Gen Self-Driving Car - IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos this week include: A 5th generation self-driving car from Waymo; A robotic vacuum as a COVID companion; A musical composition and performance by Shimon the robot; A prototype device, a a metal-air scavenger, from the University of Pennsylvania that harvests energy from metal surfaces in order to provide power to portable electronics; and more...
Here is Menoy (Mental and Emotional Nurturing of Youth), a robot that's designed to develop healthy social habits in children with autism:
- Doctors are using AI to triage covid-19 patients. The tools may be here to stay - Subtitle: Faced with staff shortages and overwhelming patient loads, a growing number of hospitals are turning to automated tools to help them manage the pandemic. - Last year, Rizwan Malik" devised a trial to validate an AI system from Mumbai based Qure.ai for checking check X-rays against his own analyses. If the trial was successful, Malik planned to use it as a time-savings aid to check the work that his trainees were doing. Then, the SARS2 pandemic hit, and one of its most pervasive and dangerous symptoms happens to be viral pneumonia. As a result, Qure.ai retooled their product and Malik redesigned his trial so that the AI could perform initial diagnoses, instead of checking human analyses. Because of the urgency of the pandemic, the normal months-long approval process was fast-tracked, and the trial is now in progress. This technology is far from unique. The article notes that AI has always shown promise for medical uses, but concerns surrounding privacy and other issues have slowed its adoption. Now, the article summarizes the new state of affairs, saying,
The pandemic, in other words, has turned into a gateway for AI adoption in health care—bringing both opportunity and risk. On the one hand, it is pushing doctors and hospitals to fast-track promising new technologies. On the other, this accelerated process could allow unvetted tools to bypass regulatory processes, putting patients in harm’s way.
-h/t Communications of the ACM: Artificial Intelligence - Rules of Thumb for Evaluating Statistical Models - This is important because, "Citizens (whose opinions influence policymakers) and policymakers must be able to evaluate models intelligently. The coronavirus has made this a matter of life and death.
1. Keep an open mind in response to claims that " coronavirus deaths correlates with X".
2. Get the most data possible to the pubic as fast as possible. 4+ months in, and we still don't have solid answers to basic questions.
3. Researchers should work to provide falsifiable models, and to falsify them.
4. Be aware that no model provides perfect knowledge.
5. Incorporate intelligent policy responses into policy models. Don't defer blindly to the claims of epidemiologists.
6. Resist groupthink - Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece - The planets orbit the sun; An accurate calculation of the size of the moon; An accurate calculation of the circumference of the Earth; and The first astronomical calculator.
Here is a video that shows a fragment of the caluclator:
-h/t RealClear Science
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