How one city cut gun violence in half

Snippets from the article:

Omaha 360’s strategy is “collaboration, prevention, intervention, enforcement, reentry and support services,” said Willie Barney, CEO and founder of the Empowerment Network. Barney said the program began as a small initiative with seven people, some from the Empowerment Network and others working for the city.
…
Now, places like Boston; Chicago; Kansas City, Missouri; Little Rock, Arkansas; Minneapolis and Tulsa, Oklahoma, are having early conversations about what a similar program might look like in their cities, Barney said.

How it works

Omaha 360 is focused on addressing immediate threats of gun violence as well as the underlying issues that contribute to it….

Lack of employment was a top issue among young people that the group spoke with, Barney said, especially during the summer months.

“The country is not facing one gun violence problem,” Abt said. “It’s facing at least four” — everyday community violence, domestic and intimate partner violence, mass shootings and suicide.

The police department also teaches deescalation tactics, a common move among law enforcement across the nation to try and defuse potentially violent situations.

“A significant portion of our sworn law enforcement officers are crisis intervention team-trained,” Gray said.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/omaha-nebraska-cut-gun-violence-half-become-model/story?id=96799185. About 1,700 words.

From the internet (2015)

I save interesting sayings that I find on the internet. Here are some from 2015 but which still make me laugh… or learn:

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(Still Drinking, http://www.stilldrinking.org/god-s-not-dead-a-film-student-s-review):

“Don’t try to be clever. Just tell the truth.” I am absolutely behind this extremely reusable piece of advice that works in any context outside of politics, job interviews, and first dates.

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An article in Ars Technica:

New neural implant reads a person’s intentions to control robotic arm

“Erik Sorto, 34, has been paralysed from the neck down for the past 13 years. However, thanks to a ground-breaking clinical trial, he has been able to smoothly drink a bottle of beer using a robotic arm controlled with a brain implant.”

And one of the comments:

I admire this man’s priorities.

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A Grand Master was talking to another GM at the chess club.

“I played an anonymous opponent online last night. He was good, I think it was God.”
The other GM replied, “God? Really? You think God plays anonymous chess online?”
“Yes, He was really good.”
“Maybe it was Carlsen, he’s played anonymously before.”
“No, He wasn’t that good.”

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QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.

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Article title in The Register, 9/2015, which made me create an account there:

MAMMOTH MAMMOTH fossil find with BONUS BISON BONE BONANZA

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Karen Ravn (via Ad Astra):

Only as high as I reach can I grow,
only as far as I seek can I go.
Only as deep as I look can I see,
only as much as I dream can I be.

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Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes. – Patrick Hayden.

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I was not born with enough palms to place over my face.

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Not my circus, not my monkey.

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Perfectionism is a failure to optimize across a complex goal space.

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And when I had a boss who insisted on making everything far more complicated than it needed to be, I came up with this:

When all you have is a hammer with three heads, everything looks like three nails.

Good news: The world really is getting better (2022)

The Atlantic ran an article about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers Report. Some interesting bits:

Since 1990, poverty and hunger have declined dramatically while life spans have increased on every continent. According to the report, the share of global smokers has declined by about 20 percent; children are roughly 30 percent less likely to be malnourished or stunted; rates of tuberculosis have similarly declined by about one-third; maternal deaths per live births have declined by 40 percent; the prevalence of neglected tropical diseases such as dengue and leprosy has declined by roughly 70 percent; and the share of the global population with access to toilets and safe plumbing has increased by 100 percent….

These lifesaving programs cost a fraction of a rich nation’s GDP. From a utilitarian standpoint, they represent some of the greatest bargains on Earth….

In 1990, more than 8 percent of children died before their fifth birthday. But that figure fell to 3.6 percent in 2021….

Finally, for hundreds of years, economists and philosophers have worried that overpopulation would deplete the world’s resources and lead to mass starvation. But that hasn’t happened. Thanks to scientific breakthroughs such as the Green Revolution, the number of famine victims in the 2010s was lower than in any decade on record. In the 1870s—one of the most famous decades in the history of scientific and technological development—142 people per 100,000 died of famine globally. Today’s rate of famine deaths is about 99 percent lower than that of the late 1800s, despite the world’s population being roughly five times larger.

Article (about 1,070 words): https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/bill-melinda-gates-foundation-goalkeepers-report-poverty/671415/.

Download the 2022 report (52 page PDF): https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/downloads/2022-report/2022-goalkeepers-report_en.pdf.

Flu shots vs Alzheimer’s Disease

This is from 2020:

Flu (influenza) and pneumonia vaccinations are associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research reported at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference® (AAIC®) 2020…

Amran and team found having one flu vaccination was associated with a lower prevalence of Alzheimer’s (odds ratio 0.83, p<0.0001), and among vaccinated patients receiving the flu vaccine more frequently was associated with an even lower prevalence of Alzheimer’s (odds ratio 0.87, p=0.0342). Thus, people that consistently got their annual flu shot had a lower risk of Alzheimer’s. This translated to an almost 6% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease for patients between the ages of 75-84 for 16 years.

The researchers found the protective association between the flu vaccine and the risk of Alzheimer’s was strongest for those who received their first vaccine at a younger age — for example, the people who received their first documented flu shot at age 60 benefitted more than those who received their first flu shot at age 70.

From NPR (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/27/894731147/flu-shot-and-pneumonia-vaccine-might-reduce-alzheimers-risk-research-shows):

People who got at least one flu shot had a 17% reduction in risk, Amran says. And people who got regular vaccinations saw their risk drop another 13%….

Those who received a pneumonia vaccine before age 75 were at least 25% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

So these vaccines by themselves don’t make a huge difference (although as a free bonus, you’re protected against flu and pneumonia), but they help, and they give us more clues. Full story: https://aaic.alz.org/releases_2020/vaccines-dementia-risk.asp.

ChatGPT

You may have been reading about ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the new AI that can write comprehensible English prose… and more. First, from Time Magazine (link), a brief intro:

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot created by the San Francisco company OpenAI. Known as a generative AI, it responds to virtually any prompt you give it with startling speed and clarity. Whereas many chatbots only know how to respond to certain keywords or triggers, ChatGPT can respond to complex questions and spit out comprehensive, essay-length answers on virtually any topic.

ChatGPT is able to do this by running the Internet’s vast amounts of data through powerful neural networks: software loosely designed on neurons in the human brain. This technology has existed for several years. Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, recently argued that ChatGPT was “not particularly innovative” and relied largely on Google’s Transformer neural net technology unveiled in 2017.

I have not visited the chatbot myself (not quite feeling up to giving them my phone number), but here are some examples that I found in other’s articles:

Instruct ChatGPT to assume the role of a sarcastic comedian who only responds to all of your future prompts in a hilariously sarcastic manner, then try to give it a go:

“I tried to get insurance coverage for my left shoe, but the insurance company said no because it’s ‘not a valuable enough item.’ I mean, have you seen my left shoe? It’s a work of art. Plus, I’ve had it for over 10 years. That’s like a lifetime in shoe years. But apparently, the insurance company doesn’t appreciate fine footwear.”

Or this test:

Write me a funny essay about thinking:

“Thinking can be a real pain in the brain. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes it feels like it’s just not worth the effort. But let’s face it, what else are we going to do with our time? Watch reruns of “The Price is Right” for the millionth time? No thanks.”

Remember, the above snippets were written by a computer program.

Three points from my own personal thinking:

(1) Is this really artificial intelligence? From my understanding, it is not. ChatGPT puts related words together in sentences based on their frequency in existing sentences on the web. It’s generating sentences; there’s no intelligence there. Similarly, AlphaGo can play the game of go better than the best human players, and chess programs can beat humans, but that is their one trick. They cannot learn other functions. They are definitely not like human intelligence, or what AI researchers call AGI: artificial general intelligence.

(2) On the other hand, ChatGPT is probably going to be a very powerful tool. Producing an article based on other human articles is in one sense unnecessary, yet an awful lot of what you see on the web, on news sites, all around you is… re-written text from other people. Really, most news articles are repeating or rewording what a politician said, or what a corporate press release said, or what witnesses at a tragedy site said. Some business news sites are already apparently using many computer-generated articles, because a lot of them don’t need any original thinking. So if this capability becomes widely and inexpensively available… it will make up more and more of what we read. I have no doubt that this will have both advantages and disadvantages.

(3) Also remember, this is just a start. Future versions will be far more powerful. I’m sure people dismissed the first Wright Brothers airplane because it couldn’t go more than a mile and couldn’t carry 100 passengers. But a few decades later, airplanes were doing those things and much more. Computer software can move a lot faster than airplane engineering. One of the major complaints about the current version of ChatGPT is that it frequently comes up with “facts” that are simply wrong or even invented. What happens when that is reduced or fixed?

This has taken off all over the internet. Just some of the many stories:

Renewables cheaper than coal plants

This article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/30/new-york-might-take-second-swing-electrification/) covers several environmental issues, but the part that really caught my eye was:

99% of U.S. coal plants pricier to run than renewables, analysis finds

A coal plant in Delta, Utah, in June. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

Nearly all coal plants in the United States are more expensive to operate than renewable energy projects that could replace them, according to an analysis.

The report by Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy firm, looked at the cost of running the country’s remaining 210 coal plants in 2021. 

For 99 percent of the coal plants, it would be cheaper to build and operate a new wind or solar project, the analysis found. That marks a major increase from 2019, when the firm first conducted the analysis and found that 62 percent of existing coal capacity was uneconomic compared to new renewables.

Replacing the 210 coal plants with wind and solar would create cost savings large enough to finance the addition of nearly 150 gigawatts of battery storage, increasing the reliability of the new renewables, the analysis concluded.

The report’s authors acknowledged that many communities depend on coal plants for jobs and tax revenue. But they noted that clean energy projects would also create jobs and economic growth, and that the Inflation Reduction Act offers additional tax credits to developers of clean energy projects in communities historically reliant on fossil fuels.

New attack on cancer? (in mice)

Cancer cells delete the part of their own DNA that normally keeps them from reproducing out of control. Bad news (from the cancer’s viewpoint)? This deletion also removes some genes that any cell needs to survive. Good news (from the cancer’s viewpoint)? The cell has a backup version of the genes needed for survival.

So what happens if we turn off the backup genes? Normal cells don’t notice, their first set of genes is working just fine. But cancer cells are now screwed.

Again, this is in mice and may work differently in people. And it’s a very small study. But it might be very important…

Lots of articles on MTHFD2 inhibitors, but this one is clearer than most. 550 words: https://scitechdaily.com/cancer-weakness-discovered-new-method-pushes-cancer-cells-into-remission/.

The Russian Army

Russia has 146 million people and a GDP around $4 trillion. Ukraine has 43 million people and a GDP of $545 billion. (All numbers from the internet and approximate.)

So Russia has over three times the population and over seven times the GDP of Ukraine. Why haven’t they simply crushed Ukraine?

Lots of reasons. One major reason is the atrocious performance of the Russian armed forces. This article https://medium.com/@dylan.combellick/why-russia-cant-have-nco-s-9c20577111f4 discusses the makeup and training of their military. (About 2,400 words.)

Don’t the Russians train, too? Well, no. They don’t. Not at the NCO level, anyway. Nearly everything the average soldier learns in the Russian military is on-the-job training. Don’t get me wrong, this is the best kind of training for many circumstances, but ONLY when it is done upon a solid foundation — and that’s what Russia lacks…

Variety. Every officer and enlisted in the US military moves between jobs on a regular basis — typically every three years. For the most part they are still working within their broad specialty — a mechanic is a mechanic — but the exact vehicles they service, the environment they service them (storage depot, training base, operating base) change frequently. In the Russian military they often stay at the same job for their entire career. I know that in the New START missions there were Russian counterparts who had been doing the same job for thirty years…

Corruption. At no point can a large shipment of parts go missing for the NCO to sell on the black market — they will be discovered pretty soon. In the Russian system there is no check on this behavior. Once they’re in the job they can probably keep it forever if they want to. They can cut in superiors and inferiors into the corruption to look the other way. They are also more or less permanently and can coverup indefinitely…

Conscripts are treated like garbage. The Russian mentality is one of power and exploitation. If you are powerful it is your right to exploit those lower down the line, and it is in your interest to avoid exploitation from those above you. There is no concept of teamwork or working for a greater purpose — everyone is in it for themselves.

(For what it’s worth, Russia is the world’s ninth largest economy by GDP, hardly a superpower. California has around 39 million people and a GDP almost the size of Russia’s at $3.63 trillion.)