Category: Technology

Book review: The Checklist Manifesto

Medicine knows too much; even decades of medical training are insufficient for a doctor to know everything…. Patients are subjected to many interventions, most of which are complex and carry some risk; the average ICU patient requires roughly 178 daily care tasks (having worked as an ICU nurse myself, I believe it!), so even getting it perfect 99% of the time leaves an average of about two medical errors per day.

How do humans deal with this complexity? In other areas, especially the field of aviation, one solution is… checklists. And yet implementing these still has issues…

…Part of the change being introduced was a social one: nurses were responsible for documenting that the doctor had carried out each step, and had a new mandate – and backup from management and hospital administration – to chide doctors who forgot items.

Which, it turned out, made all the difference. In the first ten days of the experiment, the line infection rate went from 11% to zero.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dtmmP4YdJEfK9y4Rc/book-review-the-checklist-manifesto. About 1,500 words.

The cow that could feed the planet

Cultured meat — meat from real animals but grown in bioreactors — could (1) greatly reduce global warming and environmental issues, and (2) reduce animal cruelty. About 4,800 words:

https://time.com/6109450/sustainable-lab-grown-mosa-meat/

Eventually, says (Mark) Post, we would need only some 30,000 to 40,000 cows worldwide, instead of the 300 million we slaughter every year, without the environmental and moral consequences of large-scale intensive cattle farming.

…Mosa is in the process of applying for regulatory approval from the E.U. In the meantime, the company is already expanding into a new space with roughly 100,000 liters of bioreactor capacity, enough to produce several tons of meat every six to eight weeks.

The Facebook Papers

Just some of the revelations about how Facebook operates:

Facebook fails to moderate harmful content in developing countries

When a pair of Facebook researchers created a dummy account in 2019 to test how users in Kerala, India, experienced the social media site, they found a staggering amount of hate speech, misinformation and calls for violence on the platform. “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the researcher wrote.

Facebook AI struggles with non-English languages

A document showed that in 2020, the company did not have screening algorithms to find misinformation in Burmese, the language of Myanmar, or hate speech in the Ethiopian languages of Oromo or Amharic.

Facebook labeled election misinformation as “harmful, non-violating” content

“Harmful but non-violating”? Really?

Facebook was aware that maids were being sold on its platform

Apple threatened to remove Facebook and Instagram from its app store over the issue, but changed course after the social media giant removed 1,000 accounts linked to the sale of maids from its platform.

Facebook internally debated removing the Like button

When asked why Facebook hasn’t made Instagram safer for children, Haugen said during her testimony that the company knows “young users are the future of the platform and the earlier they get them the more likely they’ll get them hooked.”

https://time.com/6110234/facebook-papers-testimony-explained/

How to protect yourself from Google’s surveillance program

Why yes, everyone is spying on you. Or at least Google is:

It’s a scary thought: You and your friends are marching for gun control, climate action or social justice when a crime happens a mile or two away. Now you and the thousands of people who attended are suspects. And guess who turned you in: Google.

That’s because Google knows where you are right now, even if location tracking on your Google apps is turned off. And the company is handing over your location information to law enforcement agencies.

Google calls this program “Sensorvault” and its use by law enforcement for nearly 10 years was a well-kept secret until the New York Times recently exposed Google’s operation.

https://blog.credo.com/2019/10/how-to-protect-yourself-from-googles-sensorvault-surveillance-program/

Note. I have started using duckduckgo.com for most of my searches instead of Google, because they promise that they are protecting my privacy. Search results seem to be roughly as good as Google. You should be able to set this as your preferred search engine somewhere in “Preferences” for your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc).

How to turn off smart TV snooping features

A technology called automatic content recognition, or ACR, attempts to identify every show you play—including those you get via cable, over-the-air broadcasts, streaming services, and even DVDs and Blu-ray discs. The data is transmitted to the TV maker, one of its business partners, or both.

ACR helps the TV recommend other shows you might want to watch. But the data can also used for targeting ads to you and your family, and for other marketing purposes. You can’t easily review or delete this data later.

https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features/

Wind vs coal, 2019

A remarkable thing happened in the US in April. For the first time ever, renewable electricity generation beat out coal-fired electricity generation on a national level, according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA). While renewable energy—including hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass—constituted 23 percent of the nation’s power supply, coal-fired electricity only contributed 20 percent of our power supply.

There are seasonal reasons for this happening in April. Wind power generation tends to be higher in spring and fall, hydroelectric generation usually peaks as winter snow melts, and lengthening days mean more solar power can be fed to the grid.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/renewable-electricity-beat-out-coal-for-the-first-time-in-april/

Google vs privacy

Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.

This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.Our latest privacy experiment found Chrome ushered more than 11,000 tracker cookies into our browser — in a single week. Here’s why Firefox is better.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/21/google-chrome-has-become-surveillance-software-its-time-switch