Tag: images

Nodosaur

A dinosaur fossil that was discovered in a bitumen pit in Alberta, Canada, in 2011 is the best-preserved specimen of a nodosaur ever discovered, and it is truly a spectacle to behold. The herbivore died 110 ma BP in a riverbed and was swept to sea where it was swiftly buried in the mud and sediment of the seabed. Resting on its back, the nodosaur’s soft tissues, armor plating and thorny ridges became mineralized, preserving its form in stone.

Mapping NYC Changes

Here’s where New York City’s getting whiter (in green on the map). The red areas are the 25 sub-boroughs with declining white populations—none of which were in the gentrifying neighborhoods identified by the Furman Center. The population of white residents increased in every gentrifying neighborhood from 2000 to 2015. 8 gentrifying neighborhoods logged the biggest increases, topped by Bedford-Stuyvesant, at 1235%.

Kevin & Friends

If you like your comedy black with a little dash of sweetener then you’ll probably love Nick Fisher’s beautifully dark and twisted comic strip Kevin & Friends.

Kevin is one of those wonderfully naive and earnest characters who can always see the bright side in everything—whether this is helping someone to commit suicide or just being positive about his own brutal murder. For Kevin, the glass is always half full—even if that glass is being repeatedly smashed into his face.

Robot delivery

Amazon, which currently charges a $99 annual fee for 2-day deliveries under its “Prime” service, will eventually offer 2-tier pricing for delivery services. One will be a “Gold Prime” membership costing $199 to $249 a year that covers next-day deliveries, the other a platinum membership for $399 a year that includes same-day deliveries.

2019-08-20: Starship Technologies

The company has made over 100K commercial deliveries. The total funding has reached $85M. Parcels, groceries and food are directly delivered from stores, at the time that the customer requests via a mobile app. Once ordered the robots’ entire journey and location can be monitored on a smartphone. Starship delivery bots use machine learning to detect objects and do not use expensive LIDAR. Starship robots mostly drive on sidewalks and cross streets when they need to. This poses a different set of challenges compared to self-driving cars. Traffic on car roads is more structured and predictable.

2021-01-27: 1m now:

Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the sidewalk. In addition to sidewalks, the robots are also doing 50K street crossings per day.

This might seem mundane, but both sidewalks and bike lanes are a huge opportunity. Even Amazon realized this, and is using both for last km delivery.

Automated diagnosis

“I think that if you work as a radiologist you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon. You’re already over the edge of the cliff, but you haven’t yet looked down. There’s no ground underneath.” Deep-learning systems for breast and heart imaging have already been developed commercially. “It’s just completely obvious that in 5 years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. It might be 10 years. I said this at a hospital. It did not go down too well.”

2022-10-05: The deep learning dividend for medicine

Today’s report on AI of retinal vessel images to help predict the risk of heart attack and stroke, from 65k UK Biobank participants, reinforces a growing body of evidence that deep neural networks can be trained to “interpret” medical images far beyond what was anticipated. Add that finding to last week’s multinational study of deep learning of retinal photos to detect Alzheimer’s disease with good accuracy. AI models have been shown to be quite useful for detecting eye diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy. But this is about the indirects, the not so obvious. That work has now extended to detection of kidney disease, control of blood glucose and blood pressure, hepatobiliary disease, a previous study on predicting heart attack, close correlation of the retinal vessels with the heart (coronary) artery calcium score


2023-07-31: Misdiagnosis is one of the biggest causes of death, yet doctors think they’re better than AI

~800k Americans are permanently disabled or die each year from diagnostic medical errors. “Our results demonstrate that, unless the documented mistakes can be corrected, the optimal solution involves assigning cases either to humans or to AI, but rarely to a human assisted by AI.”