health department

All over China, people are furiously tapping on their smartphones to improve their score on an app - Study the Great Nation - a new app devoted to promoting President Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party — a kind of high-tech equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book. Many spend several hours daily on the app, checking news about Mr. Xi and brushing up on socialist theories. Schools are shaming students with low app scores. Private companies, hoping to curry favor with party officials, are ranking employees based on their use of the app. Many employers now require workers to submit daily screenshots documenting how many points they have earned. The state-run news media teems with glowing reviews of the app, including stories about diligent hospital workers and kindergarten teachers who open Study the Great Nation as soon as they awaken, even before they drink water or go to the bathroom. Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/world/asia/china-xi-jinping-study-the-great-natio...

Google developed an AI model that was trained on 306 of Bach's harmonizations. This allows users to compose their own two-measure melody in the style of Bach. See for yourself here: https://g.co/doodle/7pftun References: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6834369/First-artificial-intelligence-Google-Doodle-features-Bach.html

From WSJ: Don’t Believe the Algorithm: Blind faith in machines (and machine learning) has left us vulnerable to biased and incoherent AI. The solution? A healthy dose of skepticism and human oversight. The mathematican who wrote the WSJ artucle had the following suggestion: "USE ‘MAGIC’ TO SPOT BOGUS ALGORITHMS -- Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, replace buzzwords like “machine learning,” “artificial intelligence” and “neural network” with the word “magic.” Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If not, I’d be worried that something smells like bull—. Because I’m afraid—long into the foreseeable future—we’re not going to “solve world hunger with magic” or “use magic to write the perfect screenplay” any more than we are with AI." References: Don’t Believe the Algorithm , WSJ.

From the NEJM: What if health care were designed so that in-person visits were the second, third, or even last option for meeting routine patient needs, rather than the first? At Kaiser Permanente, 52% of 100 million patient encounters each year are now “virtual visits”. It spends 25% of its annual $3.8 billion budget on information technology. "Payment models are an obvious barrier to deemphasizing in-person visits, but every provider’s business success depends on market share. The best way to win market share is to design and deliver better care, then modify the payment system to support it. Moreover, payment systems are already evolving to support nonvisit care. For example, use of bundled payment programs and accountable care organizations — which reward nontraditional care delivery models that reduce spending and meet patients’ needs — is growing." Patients are increasingly asking, “Isn’t there a way to do this without my having to drive to your office?” References: In-P...

Google Glass 1.0 (the first version available to consumers) was a failure in terms of social acceptance and commercial appeal. Yes, there are more than 70 articles in PubMed about Google Glass as of December 2015 but the device never got traction and most of publicity around it was decidedly negative. The second version aims to change that. Here is more information about Google Glass 2.0 from the WSJ: Here is something not to try: Texting while driving using Google Glass™: Promising but not distraction-free. He J, Choi W, McCarley JS, Chaparro BS, Wang C. Accid Anal Prev. 2015 Aug;81:218-29. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.2015.03.033. Epub 2015 May 26. And of course, there is this: Google Glass liability risks. Frankel J. Bull Am Coll Surg. 2015 Feb;100(2):39. No abstract available. There are potential benefits, of course: Do you see what I see? Insights from using google glass for disaster telemedicine triage. Cicero MX, Walsh B, Solad Y, Whitfill T, Paesano G, Kim K, Baum CR, Cone DC. Prehosp D...

The company DreamLab says will allow users to "donate" their smartphone's processing power while their owners are sleeping: "Cancer affects so many of the people we love. But what if you could help by speeding up cancer research, simply by going to bed. Researchers are hindered by limited access to supercomputers. So that’s where you and the DreamLab app come in. It’s a free to purchase app* that uses the processing power of your idle phone to solve a piece of the cancer research puzzle. If just 1,000 people used the app, cancer puzzles would be solved 30 times faster." http://www.vodafone.com.au/aboutvodafone/vodafoneaustraliafoundation/dreamlab "When a phone is plugged in and fully charged, it is sent a tiny genetic sequencing task by Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research to solve. When it is completed, the data is sent back to the Garvan Institute, which can use it as part of their research. Users can select what project they want to cont...