In her first six months, Donald Trump’s second agriculture secretary has altered the course of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She says prosperity is ‘just around the corner.’ But staffing cuts and restricted research could have long-lasting impacts.
Read more...Part the First: Pharmacopeia. Who doesn’t love a garden? It sometimes seems that all drugs come from plants, initially. My first biology teachers claimed they were taught that bacteria were plants back when life was either animal or plant. Garden of Healing is a bit long but very interesting. It is also a break from […]
Read more...The Neoliberal turn of late capitalism [1] rules our world. Quinn Slobodian has become the voice of our time in explaining how this has happened and why. In Globalists The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2020), he described, among other things, how the Liberals of Central Europe who became Neoliberals were most […]
Read more...Even where FEMA identifies a flood risk, the overreliance on historical data and political influence leads to maps that don’t fully represent true risk.
Read more...Part the First: Algorithmic Intelligence in Clinical Medicine. From the article This Ohio health system tested an AI tool to predict sepsis. Here’s how it went. As the subhead notes: Summa Health’s experience highlights the challenges of AI adoption, especially at community health systems: Across emergency departments around Akron, Ohio, physicians were getting overwhelmed. In […]
Read more...On this Independence Day in one country in North America a few notes on life outside current politics, scientific and otherwise. Part the First: The Archaeology of Food Is Fascinating. Having read about Roman eating habits over the years I have wondered about two things, fish sauce and the dormouse. Now we know which fish […]
Read more...Shortly after COVID-19 was recognized as a worldwide catastrophe, my much better half asked me how long I thought this would this last. Based on my then 45 years of biomedical research experience I replied, “Three years.” I was wrong. That was more than five years ago, when the refrigerated makeshift morgues were parked on […]
Read more...Part the First: Financing Professional Education in the United States. College costs too much in the United States. Professional School costs way to much. Up until the present – who knows what will happen next as the broad attacks on American universities continue – graduate education at the PhD level in traditional disciplines in the […]
Read more...On the mounting evidence that a ketogenic diet considerably can alleviate some debilitating mental health ailments, such as schizophrenia.
Read more...A warning to US readers on the further degradation in medical training and resulting crapification of care.
Read more...Part the First. How Did the United States Get This Healthcare System? I distinctly remember the first time this question occurred to me, because as the child of a union household a visit to the doctor or the Emergency Room (trees were made to fall out of) was never a problem. I was twenty years […]
Read more...On the fallen legitimacy of science in the US, and what might be done about that.
Read more...Universities are loath to take NIH funding due to “evil” grant terms that make ideological non-compliance subject to False Claims Act damages
Read more...More on RFK, Jr. making shit up but attempting to wrap it in the mantle of science.
Read more...A new paper confirms early doubts that LLMs could ever meet AI boosters’ claims that they were intelligent.
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