Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Over the past few generations, however, the culture and ethos of the American business elite has changed. A once cohesive establishment has broken down, making collective action rarer and much harder to achieve. Competition among companies has become increasingly cutthroat. Chief executives are often more concerned with their share price than their company's long-term health, much less any genteel sense of obligation to a vague greater good. The civic organizations that once bonded corporate leaders to one another have been hollowed out or disappeared altogether.
Diagnosing patients when there aren't effective treatments to give them can make their symptoms worse, argues neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan.
In her new book,The Age of Diagnosis,
she backs this assertion
with some sobering facts. For instance, between 1998 and 2018,
autism diagnoses jumped by 787 percent in the UK alone;
Lyme disease has an estimated 85 percent overdiagnosis rate,
including in countries where it's impossible to contract the disease;
and there's still little evidence that many cancer screening programs
actually reduce cancer-related death rates.
...
The reason it's not working is because when you get to the very mild
end of a spectrum of behavioral or learning problems, you have a balancing
act between the benefit of being diagnosed along with the help you can get,
and the drawbacks of being diagnosed, which is telling a child that they've
got an abnormal brain. What does that do to a child's belief in themselves?
How does it stigmatize them? How does it affect their identity formation?
We thought it would be helpful to tell children this, but the statistics
and the outcome is suggesting it isn't helpful.
Steven Levitt podcast interview with the author.
Eric Topol: The data on high protein diets, bars, supplements, and powders will surprise you
Simply put, there are no data to support more than 1.6 g/kg/day of
protein intake. Some of these studies were in older adults with
mixed data (Nunes study no benefit for older group; ten Haaff no
benefit age 50+ over resistance training; Liao benefit in older
men on top of resistance training). Likewise, the data are mixed
for overweight and obese participants. The findings across all
the studies, most of which are quite small in sample size, show
marked inter-individual variability. The design and the analysis
of the trials are compromised by lack of controlling for calories
in the diet, physical activity, and many other confounding factors,
along with flaws of interpretation.
...
This leucine discovery is important because leucine is one of the
3 branched chain essential amino acids that is widely used as a
supplement by people training and athletes and one with putative
anti-aging properties. Which is remarkable since potently activating
mTOR is just the opposite of rapamycin (that blocks mTOR), a drug
that many longevity influencers take! Remember that leucine is one
of the 3 essential branched chain amino acids which are unique since
they are primarily metabolized by muscle, not liver. So leucine
may be considered pro-inflammatory and a bad actor even though it
is also tied to building muscle mass.
Scientists are using digital technology to revolutionise animal communication and move towards an "animal internet", using new products such as phones for dogs and touchscreens for parrots.
Experiments by Glasgow university have enabled several species, from parrots and monkeys to cats and dogs, to enjoy long-distance video and audio calls. They have also developed technology for monkeys and lemurs in zoos to trigger soothing sounds, smells or video images on demand.
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, who heads the university's Animal-Computer Interaction Group, started by developing a DogPhone that enables animals to contact their owners when they are left alone.
Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks.
The difference between human and synthetic content is becoming increasingly indistinguishable, and platforms seem unable, or uninterested, in trying to police it.
The rise of AI's "thinking" machines is not the problem. The decline of thinking people is. Derek Thompson
Leveraging a combination of neurophysiological methods, we show that regardless of which side of the political aisle an individual is on, those with more extreme views show heightened neural activity to\ politically charged content in brain regions implicated in affective processing-including the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and posterior superior temporal sulcus.
The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping
Mercor is partnering witha lead AI Lab to contract seasoned poets for a creative initiative aimed at enhancing AI's understanding of poetic structure, literary nuance, and emotional expression.
10+ years of experience writing and publishing poetry.
Strong portfilio with notable literary journal publications,
anthologies, or awards.