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The most vaccine-hesitant group of all? PhDs

  • August 12, 2021August 12, 2021
  • by Andy
A new study found that the most educated are the least likely to get jabbed

The percentage of each education group that is somewhat vaccine hesitant. Source: Carnegie Mellon University

There has been much debate over how to get the unvaccinated to get their jabs — shame them, bribe them persuade them, or treat them as victims of mis- and disinformation campaigns — but who, exactly, are these people?

Most of the coverage would have you believe that the surge in cases is primarily down to less educated, ‘brainwashed’ Trump supporters who don’t want to take the vaccine. This may be partially true: the areas in which the delta variant is surging coincide with the sections of red America in which vaccination rates are lowest.

But according to a new paper by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, this does not paint the full picture. The researchers analysed more than 5 million survey responses by a range of different demographic details, and classed those people who would “probably” or “definitely” not choose to get vaccinated as “vaccine hesitant.”

Hmmmm.

[Read more…]

The Automation of Healthcare

  • January 3, 2020
  • by Andy

Below are a couple of competing views on the coming automation of healthcare. Healthcare is ripe for it as its a non-scalable industry. Highly educated service providers are paid for their time including doing menial and repetitive tasks that could be automated. This is why your doctor charges so much (amongst other inefficiencies).

The other factor here is that, in the US at least, you own your medical data. Few people feel like they own it but legally you do. Its just locked away with your doctors, labs and other health providers. All of the big tech companies, as well as several healthcare tech providers, are working on actually providing access and portability to this data.

Once that is available, I have a view that there’s a big opportunity for healthcare providers to offer APIs into them with that standardized data. You want a 2nd opinion, submit your data to another doctor. You want to see if a pharmaceutical or supplement helps with your condition, submit your data. Behind those APIs will need to be reasonably sophisticated AIs that can assess and respond to the patterns seen in your data. Doctors provide not only the input to the AI but the specialization needed on top for unique cases and follow-up. This makes healthcare a lot more scalable.

In his upcoming book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, which will hit bookshelves in late January 2020, Diamandis makes the case for why he believes big tech companies are going to be running healthcare by 2030. In December, he came to Fast Company’s offices to make the case for why Big Tech is the doctor of the future.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90440921/amazon-and-apple-will-be-our-doctors-in-the-future-says-tech-guru-peter-diamandis

Hamish Fraser first encountered Babylon Health in 2017 when he and a colleague helped test the accuracy of several artificial intelligence-powered symptom checkers, meant to offer medical advice for anyone with a smartphone, for Wired U.K. Among the competitors, Babylon’s symptom checker performed worst in identifying common illnesses, including asthma and shingles. Fraser, then a health informatics expert at the University of Leeds in England, figured that the company would need to vastly improve to stick around.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90440922/should-you-get-medical-advice-from-a-bot-doctors-arent-so-sure

Tesla Model 3 owner unlocks car with her arm…

  • August 18, 2019August 18, 2019
  • by Andy

Talk about brand lock in.

There many ways to unlock a Tesla Model 3 — keycard, key fob, Tesla app — and one owner found a new one with a biohack: implanting a RFID chip into her arm to unlock her Model 3 with it.


A biohacker going by “Amie DD” on Hackaday released a video (embedded below) about how she extracted the RFID chip out of her Model 3 keycard and created an implant that she injected into her arm.

https://electrek.co/2019/08/10/tesla-model-3-unlock-arm-implanting-rfid-chip/

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