Digital Exhaust #182

Breast milk soap and other fascinomas

Hope you’re having a great weekend. Here are some cool things I stumbled on this week.

Lady doctors

New ACGME data on women entering medicine and where. Not totally surprising. What is going on with ortho? This is 2023, for Pete’s sake. From the ACGME Data Resource Book.

I’m not dead yet

This is a tough one: A 66-year-old woman was taken to a funeral home, where workers discovered her chest moving, according to the New York Times. An Alzheimer’s care center in Iowa that declared her dead was fined $10,000.

Artificial intelligence is a mirror

Since ChatGPT dropped, people have been railing against what it generates — results that reflect social bias, inequity, insensitive views, etc.

We can believe in AI as a kind of objective body, but it isn’t. All technology is ultimately a reflection of ourselves. It is a human product. What we create is a reflection of ourselves and our values. If we were perfect we might expect it to be perfect. But we’re not.

I found this quote from Chris Anderson on Twitter this week:

AI is a mirror. It reflects back our own mental constructs, good or bad

If you want to see our end, there it is...

If you want to see bias, there it is..

If you want to see utopia, there it is. — Chris Anderson on Twitter

Wired founder Kevin Kelly, added: If you want to see yourself, there it is.

Beyond this idea of reflection is the idea of amplification. Technology can amplify the best and worst parts of who we are. Look no further than social media.

Small beans

It looks like there is a movement of nephrologists lobbying for a kidney emoji.

Your health data for sale. Again

Last week it was GoodRX. This week it’s Cedars Sinai. A class action lawsuit filed in California accuses the hospital of sharing patient data with Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

Should you take investing advice from Jim Cramer?

Good overview of surgical hospital at home from Brigham & Woman’s

Hospital-at Home is a care model of delivering hospital-level care in patients’ homes. It’s gaining real momentum. It’s has been shown to be safe and effective for medical patients, though the introduction of HH programs for surgical patients has been limited. This is a solid overview of the Brigham’s program in Nature NPJ Digital Medicine.

Related: This Nature article presents a framework to characterize cyber harms so that they can be prevented and mitigated.

Information overload as a timeless problem

Did you ever think that information overload was a 21st century thing? This Aeon essay sets the record straight detailing the anxiety that came with the printing press. In the context of a world without printed material, the explosion of books must have been pretty disarming.

+ And this is cool. Centuries-old books, manuscripts and printing plates often contain doodles. A new technology is bringing them to light.

Shift Happens: A book about keyboards

The history of keyboards – from early typewriters to modern mechanical marvels – told in two beautiful volumes.

Generative AI as the next consumer platform

From Andreessen, a nice breakdown by category of how AI will amplify existing consumer experiences. In addition to creating new categories of products, AI will supercharge existing ones, improving the consumer experience and making it easier to scale.

North Korean malware attacks on hospitals

A security alert from officials in the US and South Korea reveals how diabolical North Korea’s elite state-sponsored hackers can be. According to the US National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI, hackers used a host of malware and ransomware to attack South Korean and US hospitals and health care systems.

Breast milk soap

Even as a pediatrician I’m not sure I can get behind this idea of breast milk soap.

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