Dr. Jo Boaler of Stanford is in the news again. She had claimed that "lower achieving and lower income" student achieved better when exposed to a "reform-oriented teaching approach". Her paper was apparently the basis of removing algebra from California's math curriculum. But she never revealed the schools that were the basis of her research. Until now. The identities of the schools that she says benefited from the specialized education led to an investigation into the schools' performance. Turns out they didn't do any better than other schools, and refutes Boaler's claims.
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Just out: German study shows that the mRNA COVID-19 vaxxes (both Comirnaty (BNT162b2, Pfizer/BioNTech) and Spikevax (mRNA-1273, Moderna)) led to "intracellular aggregation of encoded spike monomers and their subunits". "The various spike protein derivatives impaired not only cell proliferation, but also induced a pro-inflammatory response and oxidative stress". These were felt to be contributory to the vaccine's acute reactions and long-term side-effects. This is a potentially devastating paper. The mRNA vax should be taken off the market.
And it's starting. Enraged over COVID-19 vax side-effects, a gunman opens fire on the CDC. Yeah, people aren't going to just take it any longer. Their worst fears are coming true.
Gary Marcus is very underwhelmed with GPT-5. Marcus is a known wet-towel thrower, so this is not surprising. I've played around with GPT-5, and frankly haven't noticed a big difference just with casual use.
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The Unmarker app removes watermarks that other apps put on. Back to the drawing board guys. You're going to have to find some other way of digitally watermarking images to protect against theft.
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ODOT is not going to clean up graffiti, since the budget was cut. Illegal alien non-citizens will continue to get state funding, but services that citizens pay taxes for are going to be cut. That's essentially what's happening.
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Intel's CEO has been clashing with its board. This is not what you want to hear. Interesting that WSJ had an article on this, and the link I saved is broken. In it, there were these tidbits:
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Tan and some Intel directors have disagreed in his first months in the role about questions as central as whether the company should stay in the manufacturing business or exit it entirely,
Intel board chairman Frank Yeary disagreed about whether Intel should remain in the business of making chips for itself and its clients or exit manufacturing, the people said.
Yeary also explored brokering a sale of the business to Taiwan’s TSMC, the people said, but that effort went nowhere.
Even Intel's board is dysfunctional.
Intel had also been exploring a potential acquisition of an AI business, the people said. Proponents of the deal, including Tan, saw it as an opportunity for the company to catch up to rivals such as Nvidia and AMD, which are much further ahead in AI. But the board took its time deliberating the potential deal, and another publicly traded technology company appears poised to buy the target instead, the people said.
What a dysfunctional company.
Meditation posture makes a difference. When I try to meditate lying down, it helps me go to sleep.
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Someone posted the system prompt for GPT-5. Or so its supposed to me. The bio tool is interesting.
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Why are so many women leaving the workforce? You know where they really need to quit? Government positions. Oregon is bad, but Seattle is worse. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the source of all the bad policy. I can't forget this:
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JAMA just put out this article: Colorectal Cancer Incidence in US Adults After Recommendations for Earlier Screening.
Take a look at the incidence graph for the 45 to 49 age group:
Colonoscopy guidelines were revised in 2021, although the American Cancer Society updated their guidelines in 2018. Could earlier screening explain all the increase? I don't think so. If screening were the explanation, you would see a step increase in the incidence curve, as you detected more early-stage disease. But the sharp and steady increase suggests something else is going on. I don't think that people suddenly flocked to their gastroenterologist's office for a procedure. It's not something you are eager to have done. Also, many offices were closed due to government policies. Sure gotta wonder if the mRNA vax had something to do with the incidence.
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Our eyes have not been lying to us. Personality traits are truly different from what they used to be ten years ago. Those less than age 40 are more neurotic, less conscientious, less agreeable, and less extroverted. The changes have not been in a good way.
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After about 50 years, Alaska Airlines is going to replace the Eskimo face logo. It's going to be replaced by a stylized aurora. The face in the logo is Oliver Amouak.
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Wow, supposedly the reason why RFK Jr pulled funding for mRNA vaccines was that for COVID, meta-analysis data showed that getting the vax was worse than getting the disease. This is just a X posting, and I'd like to see the meta-analysis data.
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Japan will require that Apple allow non-webkit browsers. This is a big deal, and finally the market may be open to better browsers than Safari. So far, all other browsers are inferior due to features that Apple apparently kept for themselves. This is like forcing Apple to go with USB-C connectors instead of just Lightning connectors.
Meanwhile, Apple is losing members of its AI team to rival companies. Tim Cook had better provide some vision for where the company is going, or frustrated researchers will look elsewhere to other companies that know what they are going to do.
The may soon be an eyedrop that helps correct presbyopia. It's called VIZZ, and it's a once-daily drop that lasts about 10 hours. Saves you from having to wear reading glasses.
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Low-dose lithium supposedly relived Alzheimer's symptoms in mice. Cognitive decline was reversed. Amyloid plaques apparently sequester lithium, depriving the rest of the brain. I didn't know that lithium was an essential element in the brain.
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Remember the guy who lost ten years of data on his AWS account? He got his account back. Because he posted it on his blog and someone in Amazon noticed and decided to help him. After reading about his experience, I would stay the hell away from AWS for my cloud services. The company got too big too fast. Lucky for him, but others might not have a blog that others read.
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Anthropic thinks they know how to prevent AI from turning evil. Interesting, it seems that Anthropic is the only company that is pursuing things like this, or at least talks about it. Everyone else just focus on releasing newer models, and release benchmark numbers, and that's it.
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Scientists have finally detected anti-neutrinos in their CONUS+ detector. I remember when it used to take large underground chambers filled with liquid and lined with detectors to detect neutrinos. Now it can be done with a detector "the size of a lunchbox".
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Providence lays off 128 workers, and warns more layoffs will come. Soon they'll have a shrinking pool of rich nurses. And consolidation. And now the ONA is saying that having less nurses won't be safe. Can't have it both ways, union leaders.
And Legacy Health nurse practitioners are going to unionize. What a headache it must be to be a hospital administrator in Portland.
It's about time. HHS will cut Medicare and Medicaid funding to hospitals that provide transgender surgery for children. I guess Hollywood actresses will have to take their kids to another country for genital mutilation surgery. OHSU doesn't do children so they won't be affected. Seattle Childrens already agreed to stop doing it.
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OPB has an article on the history of the Gateway district in Portland. It's sad to see that those early grandiose dreams got destroyed by City of Portland policies. Now that area is crime central, and looks so run down.
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Apple is finally changing the hard drive icon after 20 years. Now it will look like an SSD drive, which some people won't recognize. So much for skeuomorphism.
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It's kind of on brand that Gen X is overlooked. Another article describing how GenX is being overlooked. They were the generation that said "whatever" with the eye-roll. Now, it appears people are saying that about them.
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The rollback on renewable energy is going to be hard on Oregon's economy, since Oregon went heavily in that direction. But renewable energy never made sense, and only made people feel good. The blight on the landscape was terrible. And no one talked about how much carbon was consumed in producing solar panels and windmill blades and wind turbines. If carbon is the concern, we should focus on making emissions cleaner. Oh, we did. And carbon emissions in the United States went down. We're not the problem, are we?
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Someone posted Lewis Thomas' thoughts on hearing Mahler's Ninth Symphony as he got older. How the evocations of death became harder to listen to. For me, it's the ending of Mahler's Tragic Symphony (the 6th). When the threat of doom seems to fade away, into the calming trombones, which are not quite sweet and reassuring, but they seem to signal that the danger has passed. You begin to relax, and then just when you think all is OK, the Hammer of Doom strikes again. Somehow, I can't forget that.
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I missed this back in March, but gepotidacin, a triazaacenaphthylene, was approved for uncomplicated UTI in women. It's a topo IV inhibitor and DNA gyrase inhibitor, which is interesting. Here's a nice review. Seems to be similar to ciprofloxacin in it's dosing and side-effect profile.
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Even Disney was thinking about using AI-actors instead of real ones. But they chickened out at the last minute.
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The cancer centers, QIMR Berghofer Institute and even the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Australia suspected they had a fake cancer researcher, but did nothing to stop him because he was raking in a lot of money. PNAS just put out a report stating that scientific research fraud is escalating.
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Semaglutide can reverse aging by about 3 years. The test was done on subjects with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, so one has to be careful. But it probably pertains to others as well. So it's like metformin.
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Of course. The UK is going to go after VPN users. Good luck with that. And how will they defeat those who use Tor? Dissidents have been eluding authorities for years.
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the subsidized group worked somewhat less, devoted a bit more time to leisure activities, and spent more money on health care without seeing significantly improved health outcomes.
It just gives people more unearned leisure time and spending money.
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Joining the open source world. OpenAI released two open-source models, gpt-oss-20b and -120b. Fun!
And speaking of which, one of the few things Tina Kotek did right: get some of Jensen Huang's money to introduce AI into schools. Don't screw it up, Tina, and mandate DEI programs that exclude Asians. But why did it have to be built in Corvallis? Not the right place. Shoulda built it in Hillsboro.
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Why are physicians getting paid less while more is demanded of them? Blame it on Baumol's Cost Disease. Doctors have little control over their destiny these days.
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Cool. AI can pick out a subtle brain tumor in an MRI scan. It can also spot a hiker's helmet in mountainous terrain.
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WTF??? In Oregon, Medicaid won't cover tummy-tuck sugery, unless it's for trangenders. What does transgender have to do with the need to have this done? Unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a joint federal-state run insurance plan. So idiotic restrictions like this get put into place. And since the Medicaid money isn't coming in, Oregon is spending $1.9 million to get as many as they can onto private insurance.
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Trump's tax bill will cut Oregon's revenue by $1 billion in the next two years. Oregon calculates your taxable income based on what the federal taxable income is, so having a lower federal taxable income hurts Oregon revenue. Can you guess what will happen next?
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Southern Oregon University is in dire financial straits. Reminds me of Marylhurst University. I think we are going to see a general decline in the university business model. There were way too many of these, and all they seem to do in entrap people into debt situations. And things are going to get tough for folks that still have student loans that they "forgot" to pay off during the Biden administration.
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7 dire economic warnings facing Oregon. In 2004, the region was so hot. Still coming off the dotcom boom, Portland was a popular destination for smart people, who made people think the city could be another Seattle or an outpost of Bay Area glory. Now, it's a dumpster, full of homeless and druggies, run by a city government that is clueless, but doesn't realize it. They went easy on crime, encouraged mind-destroying drugs, shackled the police, let protestors ruin the city, and taxed everyone to their limit. There's increasingly less of the city to enjoy, despite the high taxes. The mayor wants to uglify the city with shelters popping up everywhere. Nobody is stopping him. And Portland shit isn't staying in Portland, unfortunately. Beaverton and Gresham are experiencing it as well.
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Here's some of the bills passed in Salem recently. The one that caught my eye was SB 426, which
I wonder if you could demand a clause be inserted protecting you from this sort of thing....hold(s) homeowners financially liable if they are cheated by a contractor who doesn’t properly pay his workers. That means when you pay a contractor $200,000 to build a house, if the contractor doesn’t pay his workers and leaves town, the property owner is responsible, in part, for paying the entire $200,000 again.
Anthropic's CEO is upset about the way Mark Zuckerberg is changing corporate culture, making certain AI engineers and researchers super wealthy while others can only watch. He's pleased that Zuck was unable to poach any of Anthropic's engineers, but expectations are changed. People will demand more.
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Academia unmasked. Even in academics, there is bias and corruption. And it is not the place to be if you are prone to mental illness and have a weak mental constitution.
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Boy I missed this when it came out last year: Noncanonical inheritance of phenotypic information by protein amyloids. Such a nondescript title of a major discovery. Here is a more approachable summary of what this paper means. Certain amyloid proteins can effectively pass on traits to offspring in a manner that does not require DNA or RNA. Just protein. People continue to discover new stuff.
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Physicians are removing themselves from Medicare. I'm glad they're doing this. There also needs to be an alternative to Obamacare, too, but there's nothing yet out there except concierge medicine.
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Coursera is no longer going to let you access their courses without paying for it. One used to be able to access the course material for free, and just not get a certificate for it, but now you can't even do that.
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This is why I don't trust cloud storage for mission-critical stuff. I use pCloud for convenience, but I'd never put my life's work on the cloud. Or irreplaceable items. All this guy can do is issue negative publicity for how ill he was treated.
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Tim Cook talks to Apple employees. About AI woes. Not sure what the plans are, and it seems like most of the talk was just "we did it before, we'll do it again". Hope so.
But maybe he's not the only one out of ideas. Maybe Zuck is out of ideas, too. He's been poaching various people from different companies, probably hoping that a good idea will come up. Could be. Maybe.
And Anthropic revoked OpenAI's access to Claude. Probably a safe move, but it proves Andrew Ng's thoughts that closed silos will hamper American AI research, and allow China to dominate. We didn't fight amongst ourselves in AI's early days. Everyone shared their work. But now, there's money to be made.
Yikes. ChatGPT users sharing private and sensitive information unintentionally sent their chat sessions to the Internet to be indexed by Google. Use Big tech at your risk. They don't care about your privacy. I feel sorry for the people affected, but sheesh. C'mon people.
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This is wild. It might be possible to detect when videos are manipulated or AI fakes. It uses encrypted lighting as a watermark. Watch the video in the link – the video makes it all clear.
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Edge case. Britain's most tattooed man can't use age verification apps because his tattoos make it look like he's wearing a mask. Live on the edge, fail on the edge. Use a VPN, guy. At least you don't live in Russia. Yet.
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Intel worker went nuts and threatened others. This is really sad, and I wouldn't be surprised if others experience the same thing. Intel's failure isn't Oregon's fault, but losing your job in Oregon is especially painful. Here's an editorial detailing Oregon's doom loop.
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Pearl District folks are not happy with the new homeless shelter being built in their midst. The funniest part was this statement:
Sure, Keith. Less crime near a homeless shelter. Let's put one near your home. So tone deaf.Portland Mayor Keith Wilson looks at this situation very differently. “In the shelters that we’ve opened, we’ve seen a reduction in crime, we’ve seen an increase in business.
The UK's General Medical Council is blocking doctors from speaking freely about COVID-19. This was also a dangerous phenomenon in the U.S. Doctors have lost a lot of clout in the past two decades, and I fear that this will affect quality of care, as doctors prefer to stick with safe narratives when recommending treatment, instead of going with what their training tells them. It's unclear how AI will affect this.
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Et tu, Nordstrom?. The CEO of Nordstrom hints that he might pull out of downtown Portland, as it's harder to function there. When, oh when, will the City get the hint?
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Andrew Yang and Yann Le Cun think that China will surpass the U.S. in AI tech leadership. Because China is open source and the U.S. is closed source. Being closed-source hasn't stopped the pharmaceutical industry, though. I think the root of the issue lies elsewhere.
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Why is South Korean and Japanese sunscreen better than U.S. sunscreen? You can still get South Korean sunscreen on Amazon, but the brands I used to buy are no longer listed.
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Encore anxiety. Something else to be anxious about. As if you didn't have enough already.
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Facebook offered a VPN, called Onavo. But it wasn't meant to protect your privacy. It was a surveillance tool, allowing Facebook to see what competing apps you were using. Why do people trust Zuckerberg and Meta apps?
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