Digital Exhaust #195

Public health sausage, red teaming, and rebranding PAs

You’ve opened Digital Exhaust. Here are a few things I found this week.

Rebel Health

Digital Exhaust community member Susannah Fox is writing a book about peer-to-peer health care and the incredible work being done by patients, survivors, and caregivers. Its called Rebel Health and its coming out in February from MIT Press. There’s more information here and links to preorder.

Susannah is one of the OGs in this patient-driven space.

Medical students are skipping class

…and they watch videos at home on their own time. The pandemic accelerated this trend. These two medical students offer their insight on how this might work as an educational model.

I’ll add that the flipped classroom is not new. It’s been kicked around in medical education for about a decade without alot of serious traction.

Burned out of burnout

Digital Exhaust community member Dr. Jay Baruch had an excellent piece on burnout in Slate. A bit of hard reality, but very well done.

I often feel numbed by it all. I want to feel more, care more, and recognize myself again. I want to work with the uncertainty and understand that burnout can never be fully defined or mastered, only honored and engaged with.Follow the science or phone a friend?

Public health: Follow the science or phone-a-friend?

Joe Biden has nominated Dr. Mandy Cohen as the new director of the CDC.

As quoted in Stat News, Cohen offered her philosophy on public health leadership: “I would say stay true to the science, be a leader, stay the course of trying to understand the science and adjust to that.”

But in this clip from a Duke Seminar, Cohen shares how the sausage is really made.

I”m guessing 1) she didn’t know the cameras were running, and 2) she never thought she'd be a candidate for one of public health's top posts.

Either way, her pre-nomination candor is refreshing.

Word of the week: Red teaming

This is the practice of attempting to get AI to act in harmful or unintended ways in order to anticipate the harm the system could do.

In Wired, one of the red teamers for OpenAI's GPT-4 argues that further steps are needed.

NYT editor on Liz Holmes piece

Faced with a room full of hostile journalists angry their editor had humiliated them with a puff piece on Elizabeth Holmes, New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock "stood by her shoddy work, even swearing and bringing her dead mother into the conversation."

Modern healthcare's most notorious fraud is finally behind bars and she continues to feed the media. In Vanity Fair via Boing Boing.

Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI

Loved this in The Onion. Beyond the humor is a slim thread of truth that we are becoming worse at being human.

TiTok stores user data in China

Via Forbes: TikTok has stored the most sensitive financial data of its biggest stars — including those in its “Creator Fund” — on servers in China. Earlier this year, CEO Shou Chew told Congress “American data has always been stored in Virginia and Singapore.” It’s pretty simple: shut this down.

New Zealand weighs in

Remove your shoes. Take your keys out of your pocket. Step on the scale.

If you’re flying Air New Zealand be prepared to weigh in. Apparently it’s a ‘survey’ of some kind…but still.

Physician assistants want a rebrand

A longwinded editorial on why PAs don’t want to be PAs anymore. Its a small foreshadowing of this emerging professional subset. Names matter.

TVs impoverishment cycle

I’m moving to Austin next weekend and I’ll be cutting the cable cord. Im not alone, apparently. I found these stats on cable's pending collapse fascinating.

Drive with Roger Federer on Waze

This is fun. Roger Federer's latest achievement is becoming your Waze partner on the road and doing it in more languages than any other person has before. Team up with him with voice navigation in English, French or German.

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