Disinformation

 A while back I wrote a piece asking What is AI? But the core problem is that junk in then junk out. See Google's latest piece of junk, Gemini. But as I noted, if the AI system can go out on its own a scour up information and then develop an unbiased rating metric, a real step up, independent of its creators, then perhaps we obtain a reliable AI system. Otherwise we have a next step disinformation system! Never trust humans, especially big ego Silicon Valley types. They believe that they know more than the rest of humanity but in my experience they are just pampered creatures oftentimes not worth the name human.

Thus my recommendation is stay away from this AI systems which are merely mouths for the Silicon Valley elite.

Everyone Gets a Prize

 Back in the early 60s at MIT undergraduates often had little time for social events and to my best recall the only "prize" one gets is at graduation and a diploma. Now I note that MIT News almost daily has students getting some prize or other. They note:

Elected by the Burchard Committee from a large pool of impressive applicants, all students chosen for the program have demonstrated excellence and engagement in the humanistic fields, but can major in science, design, and engineering fields as well as the humanities, arts, and social sciences. In the course of this calendar year, the Burchard Scholars will attend seminar dinners with members of the SHASS faculty, during which they will have the chance to engage with the faculty and one another. The program is designed to both broaden horizons for promising students and provide scholars the chance to engage in friendly but challenging discussions in which to hone skills for expressing, critiquing, and debating ideas with peers and mentors.

"Prizes" like this seem to be a common occurrence. There seems to be a common thread here of engaging with faculty and one another. Back in the Middle Ages of this process one got to engage via class performance and one on one contact. No "organized" prize awards. It seems that there is some need to have awards en masse. It is becoming like Hollywood, awards every week or so, making everyone "happy". How about just a little work, less awards.

Star Wars?

 

For those of us who remember the Star Wars program in the 80s, this was a plan to place satellites capable of neutralizing missiles and enemy satellites before they came down on the US. Its very announcement was an element leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now forty years later Russia is again trying to launch satellites armed with nuclear weapons. 

I remember in the 70s when I was seconded to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, ACDA, we met with the Soviets in Kirkland AFB to discuss technical issues of the treaty. My job was communications with seismic monitors. My Russian was limited but after a few vodkas and walking about I spoke with the Soviet representatives, likely KGB and others, and we both understood what a 50 MT weapon could do, not to mention hundreds. There would be nothing left except the proverbial cockroaches.

So have the Russians forgotten and has the Defense Department been spending too much time on tactical issues and none on strategic. To paraphrase a movie character, Forest Gump, "stupid is as stupid does".

What Gender Bias?

Nature has a piece alleging gender bias, namely institutions show via text and image a bias towards men, especially white men. They note:

Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images, which are proliferating online. Images from platforms such as Google and Wikipedia are downloaded by millions every day, and millions more are interacting through social media, such as Instagram and TikTok, that primarily consist of exchanging visual content. In parallel, news agencies and digital advertisers are increasingly capturing attention online through the use of images, which people process more quickly, implicitly and memorably than text. Here we show that the rise of images online significantly exacerbates gender bias, both in its statistical prevalence and its psychological impact. We examine the gender associations of 3,495 social categories (such as ‘nurse’ or ‘banker’) in more than one million images from Google, Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and in billions of words from these platforms. We find that gender bias is consistently more prevalent in images than text for both female- and male-typed categories. We also show that the documented underrepresentation of women online is substantially worse in images than in text, public opinion and US census data. Finally, we conducted a nationally representative, preregistered experiment that shows that googling for images rather than textual descriptions of occupations amplifies gender bias in participants’ beliefs. Addressing the societal effect of this large-scale shift towards visual communication will be essential for developing a fair and inclusive future for the internet.

Now if one then looks at MIT News it is near impossible to find this effect.  The Institute management is all female, mixed race. 

Harvard is somewhat akin but frankly much less so. It will be interesting in the long run to see how this plays out. The MIT course noted above is described as:

The course, known as CLICK for short, stands for "Connecting as is, Listening first, Investigating without Judgment, Communicating kindness, and Keeping in touch." CLICK was taught for the first time at MIT in winter 2023 and focuses on emotional intelligence and social connections. During the 50-minute sessions, students work in small groups and learn valuable tips to help them navigate life — especially being on campus for the first time. Students also learn how to decompress with yoga. CLICK also helps students examine the places they go during the week and the people they interact with, then provides “recipes” for easy conversation starters along with a blend of open-ended reflections on how to show up authentically and with compassion. Conversely, they offer advice on backing out of an unwanted conversation graciously.

Yes, this is a real MIT course and it is being promoted on the MIT News site. My, have things changed!

Employment 20 Years

 Back in 2005 I started to examine certain employment numbers to try to understand the changing economy. I thought  it would be worth a review. So here goes:

First s core business vs Government. Core saw a large drop in the Plague period but has recovered. Government not so much but continues to grow.

The following is core by sector. Transportation has grown as has non durable.

The following are per PoP numbers by sector. Ed and Health are dramatically increasing. This is workers not just dollars. Surprisingly Government has dropped.

The following is a graph of percent total by year by segment. Note that health and professional have grown but many old core have dropped.Especially manufacturing.

AI and Health Care

 Kaiser Health News reports on the move by the Senate to regulate AI in Health Care.

The Senate Finance Committee contemplated the future yesterday: artificial intelligence and its potential applications to health care. And it turns out the future looks an awful lot like the past and present: Democrats want regulations. And the industry wants money. He expressed outrage at the results of 2019 research led by Ziad Obermeyer, a University of California at Berkeley associate professor, who found that one commercial algorithm recommended less health care for Black patients based on historical cost data. “How does such a flawed system make its way into general use?” Wyden said. “Nobody’s watching. No guardrails. No guardrails to protect the patients from flawed algorithms and AI systems.”  It’s unclear whether this algorithm is still being marketed, Obermeyer testified later. The hearing marked Congress’s latest attempt to wrap its head around the newest AI systems, which can mimic some forms of human reasoning to make predictions and calculations, or generate text and images that look deceptively human-created. Wyden touted his “Algorithmic Accountability Act,” a bill intended to force companies to assess their own products and require the Federal Trade Commission to collect and report data on AI systems. But Republicans indicated that they don’t want to move quickly on the emerging technology. 

 The problem is, as we have noted, there is no agreed to definition of "AI". As as usual Congress is not the least bit concerned about regulating something they are totally ignorant of. After-all let the Chevron precedent allow the bureaucrats take of as they so choose. How can one regulate something that is undefined? Each purported AI technique is vastly different starting with the training sets.

What is Science?

 In a recent article in the journal Science, the authors promote the idea that science as we know it is too limited and it must include the ideas of indigenous people as a key part. They note:

Conflict has grown around Indigenous knowledge in education policy. There has been growing acceptance of the value of Indigenous knowledge for promoting ecological resilience, transformational approaches in stewardship, and cultural renewal within global fora such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, despite increasing acceptance at a strategic high level in science-informed policy, there is often a lack of wider acceptance, application, and policy protections of Indigenous knowledge transmission in more local settings, including opposition by some scientists. We argue that Indigenous knowledge can complement and enhance science teachings, benefitting students and society in a time of considerable global challenges. We do not argue that Indigenous knowledge should usurp the role of, or be called, science. But to step from “not science” to “therefore not as (or at all) valuable and worthy of learning” is a non sequitur, based on personal values and not a scientifically defensible position.

 

They continue:

 

 Similarly, we argue that teaching Indigenous knowledge alongside science should not seek to usurp science (in the way that, for example, creationism seeks to undermine evolutionary theory because they are incompatible with one another), but rather it “provokes science, and can act as a mirror for science to see itself more clearly, reflected in a philosophically different form of knowledge”  A parallel understanding of science and Indigenous knowledge systems would be complementary, emphasizing their similarities and cultural differences; the separation versus connection of empirical and philosophical subjects would be one example of those differences. Another example specific to Aotearoa–New Zealand would be that Te Ao Māori (Māori worldview) uses an intergenerational lens inclusive of the observer that gives cultural integrity to questions and generated outcomes, whereas the scientific method strives to be disconnected from that which it observes.

 

 This article makes no sense. Western science has evolved as a fact based construct, that uses a set of physical and mental tools which are subject to verification. The "constructs" the authors propose are cultural and cultural without verification. I admit that many medications are based upon time honored constructs from botanical areas but they have evolved with a firmer bases of their functions leading to improved medications. Such is not the case here. Their dismissal of creationism as non indigenous seems a bit far fetched. If a society accepts certain rituals such as healing by some stones then why not creationism. I am a firm Darwinian, one has to be when one hybridizes plants, but at the same time I am a firm believer in the basis of Western Science. Apparently these folks want us to accept any far fetched idea except those they do not agree with. It seems to be consistent with may of our current society.

And Who Paid for This?

 NEJM presents an interesting case. It is also in a NEJM video. It is about leptospirosis, a bacterial infection having crossed the Rio Grande. They note:

When the patient was discharged 6 weeks after his initial presentation, the urine volumes were normal and the creatinine level remained elevated at 2.3 mg per deciliter (203.3 μmol per liter). One month later, in clinic, he appeared healthy. He had mild normocytic anemia but the results of other laboratory studies were normal, including the rest of the complete blood count and tests of kidney and liver function.

Yes, the patient was hospitalized for six weeks, 42 days. Now typical hospital costs are well above $25,000 per day at MGH so we are looking at a $1 million plus bill. 

My question: who pays for this? Just a thought.

Vulnerable Cables

 

The BBC notes:

Yemen's legitimate, UN-recognised government in Aden has warned that the Houthis, who seized much of Yemen in 2014, are now threatening to sabotage the crucial undersea communication cables, including internet lines, which run under the Red Sea - connecting Asia to Europe.The warning came after a channel linked to the Houthis on the Telegram messaging app posted a map showing undersea cable routes in the Red Sea.Could the Houthis sabotage these lines? They almost certainly would if they could.The group has reportedly claimed that they have easily accessed maps showing the confluence of undersea communications cables running past their coastline, as they pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait which, at its narrowest, is just 20 miles (32km) wide.

 (See Maps)

Yes, this is a real problem. However, Russia has facilities across the Arctic that connect St Petersburg to Nahodka. That being the case the West would be at the mercy of Russia for Eastbound traffic. Pacific Westbound would still function but India would be in trouble. Again see above Maps reference.

 

By the way, all it requires is a fishing trawler, an anchor, a map and GPS. Cheap and it is game over!

An Interesting Observation

 In Nature there is an interesting note regarding how to deal with cancers. Simply stated:

1. We know that cancers are driven by genetic pathways that have become aberrant

2. We know that cancers can be attacked by the immune system with the help of certain targeted therapies using antibodies such as those attacking PD-1, CTLA4, HER2 etc

3. We know that these above two factors are often organ independent

4. Thus instead of dealing with organ specific cancer treatment we should be focusing on genetic specific cancer treatment.

This means that a priori we should sequence the cancer cells independent of organ and start from there. We have spent centuries dealing with organ first and it is about time to deal with genes first. I have posted a recent Note regarding cancer vaccines. After reading the Nature piece I noted that my suggestions and observations in the Note follow just such a shift in paradigm.

As Nature notes:

This attachment to classifying cancer — and addressing it — on the basis of the organ in which it originated is stalling progress in multiple ways. First, it runs counter to the scientific understanding now emerging. The past two decades of cancer research, which have been dominated by efforts to characterize tumours at the cellular and molecular level, have shown that some of the molecular events driving their evolution are shared across different ‘types’ of cancer. Mutations in the tumour suppressor gene TP53, for example, are a feature of most types of cancer, as defined by the organ in which the cancer originated. What’s more, most cancer types can be subdivided into different molecular subgroups. Some lung cancers have mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene, some have mutations in the MET gene, others have translocations involving the ALK gene, and so on. Second — as already described — classifying cancer according to the organ in which it originated is making it harder for patients to obtain the drugs that could help them. In fact, when it comes to regulators approving the use of treatments, molecular-based classifications are likely to become ever more important as more drugs are developed using advanced biotechnologies.

I strongly believe that this trend, an actual paradigm shift, focuses on the problem not the organ. Thus metastasis no longer would exist since it is nothing more than an extension of the aberrant gene expressions..Focusing on the aberrant genes we then focus on the whole body and not an organ at a time. This is the expression of what is today's reality.

Thus instead of an Oncology book contents being:

1. Nervous System

2. Respiratory

3. Head and Neck

4. Genitourinary

5. Digestive

etc where the subsets are often the gene targets. Instead it would be:

1. PD-1, PDL-1

2. mTOR

3. JAK

4. HER2

5. etc

Then the subsets of each would then be the organ.  

This flips the view 90 degrees if you will, and it demands genetic profiling initially on all suspected lesions from the initial target lesion. It would turn Oncology on its head. Possibly make it a great deal more effective. Surgery would most likely not be affected but treatment would be.

PsyOps?

 

I returned to MIT in the Spring of 2005 to assist several PdD students and a PostDoc. I was on campus about 2 days a week and we conducted research, field trips, and some entrepreneurial investigations. I remained there until 2012 when some VP of Administration who I never knew took a disliking to me for reasons unknown. But that is another story. But weekly I would have dinners with my students and a colleague who would add some insight from their successful careers. One was Ed Habib, a phenomenal engineer and visionary, having been in WW II Navy and having been the architect and implementer of many key NASA satellites.

 

 A second one of our "guests" was Dr David Margulies, a physician and entrepreneur, showing my students that research and professional excellence can excel in the commercial world as well. These dinners were a means to expand their worlds, rather than just the ofttimes closed MIT environment. Namely, human contact and communications was critical.

Then in 2005, some of my students had discovered Facebook from Harvard. It was just then migrating to MIT. They insisted I join in. So I did. The BBC now recounts the 20th anniversary of Facebook, and it is worth the read. They note:

Other social networks, such as MySpace, existed before Facebook - but Mark Zuckerberg's site instantly took off when it launched in 2004, proving just how rapidly an online site of this kind could take hold.In less than a year it had one million users, and within four years it had overtaken MySpace - fuelled by innovations such as the ability to "tag" people in photos.Taking a digital camera on a night out, then tagging your friends in dozens of pictures was a staple of teenage life in the late noughties. The constantly changing activity feed was also a big draw for early users.By 2012, Facebook had surpassed one billion users a month and, aside from a brief blip at the end of 2021 - when daily active users dropped for the first time - the platform has continued to grow.By expanding into less connected countries and offering free internet, the company has maintained and increased the number of Facebook users. At the end of 2023, Facebook reported it had 2.11 billion daily users.Admittedly, Facebook is less popular than it used to be with young people. Nonetheless, it remains the most popular social network in the world, and has ushered in a new era of social activity online. 

Now after just a few weeks of use of Facebook, I realized that Facebook was a fantastic psychological profiling system. Back in the 60s we always were trying to profile Soviet targets. It was generally done at a distance. Now with Facebook, one could get a fantastic psy-profile.

 Yet after a few weeks it became clear that not only did they get a profile they could use that to influence the user. Perfect PsyOps!  I told my students but to no avail, it had become an addiction. Now with an abundance of these tools, foreign adversaries view their own platforms can influence the mentally vulnerable, also known as most under 35! 

Free Speech is a cornerstone of our Democracy, but PsyOps controlled by an adversary is not.

A National Health System

 The UK has the NHS. In dealing with cancers, time is of the essence in many types. But as Cancer Research UK notes:

Cancer services across the UK are struggling to meet demand for cancer diagnosis and treatment, resulting in patients experiencing some of the worst waits on record.  With more people being referred for suspected cancer than ever before, and the number of new cancer cases per year in the UK rising, it is essential that services have the necessary investment in diagnostic equipment and the NHS workforce. In England, currently only around 54% of cancers with a known stage are diagnosed early (stages 1 and 2), and we are not on track to meet NHS England’s ambition for 75% of cancers to be diagnosed early by 2028. Screening can help prevent cancers developing as well as detect cancers at an early stage, and it is estimated that in the UK over 5,000 lives are saved by the cancer screening programmes each year.  However, screening participation varies across population groups, and in recent years there has been an overall decline in the uptake of breast and cervical screening.  We need to take action to tackle barriers to participation and to ensure everyone eligible who wants to take up the offer of cancer screening can do so. 

Namely in Northern Ireland, the occupied territory, only 40% get to see a cancer specialist in 60 days. In the US, a woman with breast cancer will get next day service. That is the difference between life and a horrible death.