What Adam is Reading

Week of May 22, 2023

Thanks to a mobile app for plant photo-identification (and health analysis), we learned that our mountain laurel has leaf blotch. I was surprised by the feelings of failure and inadequacy. (Am I a lousy plant parent? Do other people's laurels get leaf blotch? What are the next steps? Why do I feel a tinge of shame?) Even the best tech using robust data and offering accurate analysis needs a proper context. And sometimes good people can have bad laurels.

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The N.Y. Times COVID Tracker paused new updates as of May 15, 2023. CDC data sets are in flux.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html

Wastewater monitoring indicates a considerable amount of coronavirus RNA is still detected (~ 4 times the concentration compared to last year). Please see the year-over-year view.

https://biobot.io/data/

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COVID articles

Dr. Jeremy Faust discusses the WHO's recommendations on monovalent vs. bivalent boosters against the XBB variants. The best part is the discussion about how choosing a vaccine's breadth of immune impact is a trade-off with the degree of protection.

https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/who-recommends-next-covid-booster

WHO Designates XBB.2.3 As A Variant Under Monitoring - which explains the vaccine discussion.

https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/who-designates-xbb-2-3-as-a-variant-under-monitoring-and-warns-about-increasing-covid-19-deaths-in-south-east-asia

Wired offered a thorough consumer-level roundup of "how to think about COVID in a post-public health emergency world" article.

https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-isnt-over-how-to-stay-safe/

Medical Trends and Technology

Dr. Eric Topol offered a fantastic blog post on a project to capture a broader understanding of human genetic variation - the human pangenome project. This study looked at 47 individuals (comprising 94 genomes) and found that ~0.4% variations in our DNA make each of us unique. Genetically speaking, humans are 99.6% the same. It is a long article but an excellent summation of meaningful work.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/pearls-from-the-pangenome

One other article I found fascinating: Personality changes following heart transplantation. This article reviews how heart transplant recipients report acquiring some personality characteristics of their donor, including:

Changes in preferences.
Alterations in emotions/temperament.
Modifications of identity.
Memories from the donor's life.

The authors go on to speculate about a mechanism, "The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to occur via the transfer of cellular memory, and four types of cellular memory are presented: (1) epigenetic memory, (2) DNA memory, (3) RNA memory, and (4) protein memory. Other possibilities, such as the transfer of memory via intracardiac neurological memory and energetic memory, are discussed as well." The article appears in the journal Medical Hypotheses, which is filled with speculative science articles. Nevertheless, and even without a clear scientific mechanism, the feelings noted by these transplant recipients are frequently reported.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987719307145?via%3Dihub

A follow-on: Ozempic appears to alter the dopamine reward system for more than eating. Ozempic users report "effortlessly quitting nail biting, compulsive shopping, drinking alcohol, and other behaviors." These are the kind of anecdotal observation that leads to more extensive studies.

https://twitter.com/sarahzhang/status/1659590361952538624?s=20

Infographics

It is time to revisit the odd infographic world of Alan's Factory Outlet. I am continually perplexed - why does this custom shed company have such a robust infographics designer? Whatever the reason (nepotism, hobby, or just fun), we all win. See "20 Common Alloys and what they are made of."

https://alansfactoryoutlet.com/20-common-metal-alloys-and-what-they-are-made-of/

Things I learned this week

Microsoft is using A.I. to develop an artificial nose. "The Artificial Nose "smells" by using a neural network to correlate the concentration of gases (C.O., NO2, etc.) in the air—data inputs received from the gas sensor— to certain categories of smell (coffee, whiskey, bread). A screen displays the smell category along with a visual cue indicating the A.I. model's degree of certainty in its correlation." I may soon have a COVID-sniffing IoT device since I can't have my COVID-sniffing dog. My son wants someone to develop an artificial tongue - imagine menu descriptions replaced by a matrix of scores that tells you how a food's "taste profile" overlaps with your preferences.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-lab-artificial-nose

Living with A.I.

Google released a text-to-music LLM - MusicLM. You type a prompt like "happy techno with spanish guitar and flute," and you get https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xpNM_0xcwQDFBhVT9NoZlJzNrXdVLG3u/view

Here is a Twitter thread about it.

https://twitter.com/heyBarsee/status/1658507153659797504

Play with it here:

https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/experiments/music-lm

A story of logical fallacies and failure to understand technology from Texas A&M. A professor copied student essays into ChatGPT and asked the software to detect if it had written the assignments. Since the A.I. engine doesn't work like this, ChatGPT flagged numerous papers as LLM-generated. The university withheld diplomas, students (and the internet) were outraged, and all involved learned painful lessons.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/professor-falsely-accused-class-using-195309754.html

OpenAI also launched the official ChatGPT iOS app, promising an Android app soon.

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-chatgpt-app-for-ios

A.I.-augmented Robots are coming (to, with, or for) you.

Tesla

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/16/23726139/tesla-robot-update-video-shareholder-meeting

Amazon's A.I. Robot Burnham:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/12/23721400/amazon-astro-smarter-home-robot-ai

Or, with Jizai Arms, you can make yourself into a cyborg with up to six (6!) arms:

https://gagadget.com/en/tehnologii/241205-jizai-arms-a-backpack-that-turns-humans-into-cyborgs-with-six-robotic-arms/

A.I. art of the week

MidJourney is making "Selfies From History" a thing