244 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2019
    1. For people who suffer from it, mouth sounds are common triggers. "Chewing is almost universal. Gum chewing is almost universal. They also don't like the sound of throat clearing. Coughing, sniffing, nose blowing — a number of things," says Jaelline Jaffe, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles who specializes in misophonia and works with Rapp.
    1. The MS-ISAC has recently observed an increase in malware that is most often disseminated through malvertising. Malvertising, or malicious advertising, is the use of online, malicious advertisements to spread malware and compromise systems. Generally this occurs through the injection of unwanted or malicious code into ads. Malicious actors then pay legitimate online advertising networks to display the infected ads on various websites, exposing every user visiting these sites to the potential risk of infection. Generally, the legitimate advertising networks and websites are not aware they are serving malicious content.
    1. Nightlights.Our second measure of real activity following demonetization is the changein nightlight intensity. Nightlight intensity refers to low-light imaging data collected bysatellite and filtered to measure the quantity of artificial (i.e. human-generated) light in anarea. Such data have been used to augment official measures of output and output growthand to generate estimates for areas or periods where official data are unavailable
    1. Having a mutant LHCGR gene leads to what doctors now call familial male-limited precocious puberty, an extremely rare disease that affects only men because you have to have testicles, which is why it’s also called testotoxicosis. The condition tricks the testicles into thinking the body is ready to go through puberty — so wham, the floodgates open and the body is saturated with testosterone. The result is premature everything: bone growth, muscle development, body hair, the full menu of dramatic physical changes that accompany puberty. Only instead of being 13, you’re 2.

      hw-familial_male-limited_precocious_puberty

    1. Commitment contracts, whereby people deposit money that they receive back only if they succeed, have substantial conceptual appeal as a method of changing health behaviour. Scott Halpern, David Asch, and Kevin Volpp examine the evidence behind them and find many unanswered questions Much illness stems from poor health behaviours. But changing behaviours is difficult, particularly when immediate desires must be sacrificed to achieve future benefits,1 as when people try to quit smoking, eat less, or exercise more. To overcome these challenges, corporate ventures such as www.stickk.com and www.healthywage.com are banking, quite literally, on commitment contracts, offering the millions of people who struggle to lose weight or take their medicines more regularly the opportunity to deposit money that they will receive back only if they succeed. Grounded in behavioural economic theory,2 commitment contracts bring a risk of loss into the present, where the temptations also lie, and augment motivation to succeed. They potentially offer an efficient mechanism of behaviour change because people generally are more motivated to avoid losses than they are to achieve similarly sized gains.3
    1. So we coined a scientific term for it, ‘kama muta’, borrowed from the ancient Sanskrit where it meant ‘moved by love’, written in the beautiful Devanāgarī script as काममूत.
  2. Nov 2019
    1. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word—a technique called “circumlocution”—­which can yield mangled syntax.
    1. Google announced Wednesday it will start offering checking accounts through a partnership with Citigroup. Google is far from the only tech company to move into the financial space. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Molly Wood of “Marketplace Tech” about Google’s announcement and the future of “neobanking,” all-digital services accessed by mobile devices.
    2. he tech industry is coming for traditional banking. Digital payment apps are changing how we move money around. A wave of so-called neobanks — all-digital services that let people do everything on a smartphone without any branches — is cropping up in the United States.
  3. Sep 2019
  4. Aug 2019
    1. Ordeals are burdens placed on individuals that yield no direct benefits to others. They represent a dead-weight loss. Ordeals – the most common being waiting time – play a prominent role in health care. Their goal is to direct scarce resources to recipients receiving greater value from them, hence presumed to be more willing to bear an ordeal’s burden. Ordeals are intended to prevent wasteful expenditures given that health care is heavily subsidized, yet avoid other forms of rationing, such as quotas or pricing. This analysis diagnoses the economic underpinnings of ordeals. Subsidies to nursing home versus home care illustrate.
    1. In an effort to reduce prescription drug abuse, especially of opioids, while not obstructing clinically appropriate treatments, states are increasingly pursuing legislation known as “pill mill” laws, aimed at restricting the clinical operations of health care clinics that account for disproportionately high volumes of opioid and other controlled substance prescribing.
    1. "weathering" to describe the overt and structural racism that wears down African-American women, creating chronic stress linked to poor health outcomes for pregnant moms and babies at birth.
    1. “Scrollytelling” is an online storytelling technique in which more and more content is revealed as the user scrolls down the page.
  5. Jul 2019
    1. That’s because, usually without their knowledge, their partners have installed stalkerware on their devices—apps that let someone spy on your smartphone activity. Sometimes these apps require access to the person’s device, but some of them just require you to send someone an innocuous-seeming download. As soon as your victim has clicked through, you’re in. You now have access to everything.
    1. Astronomers think that exomoons — moons orbiting planets that orbit stars other than the sun  — should be common, but efforts to find them have turned up empty so far
    2. Meet ploonets: planets of moonish origin.In other star systems, some moons could escape their planets and start orbiting their stars instead, new simulations suggest. Scientists have dubbed such liberated worlds “ploonets,” and say that current telescopes may be able to find the wayward objects.
  6. Jun 2019
  7. May 2019
    1. Circlusion means pushing something – a ring or a tube – onto something else – a nipple or a shaft.
    1. “Microchimerism” is the scientific term for the cross colonization that takes place in pregnancy, whereupon the pieces of DNA left behind by the fetus float around the adult’s body for the rest of their life.
  8. Mar 2019
    1. Frontotemporal degeneration is a group of disorders that also have a distinctive appearance, says Dr. Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which organized the dementia summit. "Those folks can oftentimes be seen as peculiar but not demented," Koroshetz says. "But they can be severely impaired." For example, people with frontotemporal dementia may begin to behave inappropriately or make poor decisions or become insensitive to others.
    2. isophonia is characterized by intense emotion like rage or fear in response to highly specific sounds, particularly ordinary sounds that other people make. The cause is unknown.
    1. Monitoring Antibiotic Use to Reduce Antibiotic Resistance

      This reminds me of a Forbes article I read recently by Bruce Lee (who is a really super guy, by the way): https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2018/09/22/fda-here-is-the-2019-strategic-approach-to-combat-antimicrobial-resistance/#1e92fd203210

      Two of the AMR strategies that the FDA announced for 2019 were to enhance surveillance methods and support antibiotic stewardship. So these seem to recurring themes, yet, at least following Scott Gottlieb's statements, we don't seem to be making any major progress. Kind of feels like shouting into the void.

  9. Feb 2019
    1. In 2016, the top seven advanced to the grand championship finale, where they’d need to enter a full cyber-reasoning system—one that would not merely notice a problem but could also infer its nature.
  10. Jan 2019
    1. With two minibuses containing seven separate bills under its belt and a third covering two more on deck, the Senate is already poised to do better at passing its version of component appropriations bills before September 30 than it has in recent years.
    2. This week, the Senate passed a four-bill spending package addressing funding for the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development as well as a number of other government agencies. In the coming weeks, the chamber may bring up a combined spending bill for the Departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. These bills follow one passed by the Senate earlier in the summer to fund military construction, energy, and water projects as well as the VA and Congress’s own operations. Dubbed the “minibus” strategy, this choice to combine separate spending bills into a few, larger packages has been at the center of Congress’s efforts to keep the government funded this year.
    1. Recently, toys have become more interactive than ever before. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) makes toys smarter and more communicative: they can now interact with children by "listening" to them and respond accordingly. While there is little doubt that these toys can be highly entertaining for children and even possess social and educational benefits, the Internet of Toys (IoToys) raises many concerns.
    1. As it turns out, ‘wishful recyclers’ like myself can actually cause more harm than good when it comes to recycling. ‘Wishful recycling’, or tossing items in the recycling bin that you hope are recyclable or think should be, could be contaminating inbound streams of recyclable materials and causing tons (literally, tons) of recycled items to be sent to landfills instead of being recycled.
    1. “By definition, deepfake is a cybersecurity threat because what deepfake represents is a spoof or fake publication of a video or audio recording typically associated to a business leader or political leader, statements that the actual individual didn’t make,” explained Fox Rothschild partner Scott Vernick.
    2. Deepfakes use machine learning techniques, feeding a computer real data about images or audio, to create a believable video. In a widely publicized instance,  a video disseminated by the Trump administration of a journalist interacting with the president’s staff was found to be doctored intentionally, according to The Associated Press.
    1. It’s also common to see getters being used with Promises, since Promises are known to not be reusable computations, so that wrapping a Promise constructor in a getter (also known as “factory” or “thunk”) makes it reusable.
  11. Dec 2018
  12. Jan 2018
    1. Brief polemics such as Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” have been followed by more nuanced books, creating a rapidly growing literature that critiques work as an ideology – sometimes labelling it “workism” – and explores what could take its place.
  13. Oct 2017
    1. Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement. At the same time, it is an early example of science fiction.
    2. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (or simply, Frankenstein for short), is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley (1797-1851) that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a grotesque but sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment.
    1. A modern natural philosopher accompanying the Frankenstein family explains to Victor the workings of electricity, making the ideas of the alchemists seem outdated and worthless.
  14. Sep 2017