#like no one has a massive physical mental financial leverage over the other
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I genuinely cannot comprehend guys who want a girl that’s barely legal because they are moldable and submissive like..
…those are on a list of the least attractive traits in a person to me.
Even scrubbing the ick off of it, like I’ve had guys say “but yeah ok you wouldn’t do it in person but say in your wildest fantasy if she was happy in that arrangement, you’d want it” and I’m like…no?!?
Even in the case of a completely consenting partner my own age asking me to treat her that way because she enjoyed it id have to say, I’m sorry I just don’t think I’m the right person for you and break it off.
#this isn’t like kink shaming like if a woman actually was into that I’m not JUDGING her for it#I’m just saying hey that’s a need you have that I can’t fulfill#because I would feel so revolted at myself bossing someone around that I’d always be miserable in the relationship#just incompatible#i literally can’t even approach understanding the thought process of these guys#because even in my WILDEST fantasies under ideal pristine morally absolved situations#I still hate the concept on a personal level#I would want to be a little afraid of my wife#be subtly aware that like yes this woman could end me#not in that abusive creepy way that one guy said a girl wants to feel like a man COULD kill her but chooses not to#but more in a level playing field sort of way#like no one has a massive physical mental financial leverage over the other#I’m not saying a woman HAS to be as physically strong as her husband for it to be equal#like dude maybe you can benchpress her and she can’t lift a 10lb dumbbell but buddy did you forget poison exists#and why would you want a life partner that’s not mentally challenging you and making you grow as a person#I need to be called out on my BS
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Opportunities in Covid times
When social distancing has forced people to remain inside the premises of their house, mobile applications have come to the rescue. Singapore top app developer are ensuring that the lockdown doesn't cut people off basic necessities like groceries. Actually, the lockdown has made it easier for them to shop and get everything delivered at the doorstep immediately. It's quite evident that this pandemic isn't something we'll be able to get freed of unexpectedly early. Life as we knew it no longer exists. Now, everything is going to be about social distancing. However, the good news is that mobile apps can still continue to engage, educate, encourage and entertain to help everyone cope with the pandemic.
While every business has wound up in a sorry situation due to unforeseen shutdowns, mobile apps have arrived as the knight in sparkling covering for people. What are the chances to have a successful work from home without Zoom, Skype, Slack, or such enterprise apps that have been making it easier for us to work serenely well despite being home? Practically none. Moreover, consider a day without binge-watching favorite shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Or on the other hand coming up short on supplies and not having grocery apps to the rescue? Frankly, it's hard to imagine and that is the power of mobile apps. It has made everyone's lives so a lot easier and hassle free that we can't imagine making due without them especially in the midst of the scenario of self-quarantine.
Top 6 Mobile App Development Industries Whose Growth Soared High During The COVID-19 Crisis
1. Grocery Apps
One could survive without anything other than grocery. Grocery apps top the rundown because during the pandemic-induced scenarios, people discover it quite reluctant to step out of the home and go grocery shopping, worried that they may accidentally come under contact with someone infected with virus, However, grocery apps are evolving to keep up the pace with onslaught of demand and to feed people in the safest manners. The most well known grocery apps like Walmart, Instacart, Shipt, Target, and H-E-B experienced an alarming measure of downloads in the midst of the worldwide crisis. Grocery apps have undergone a breathtaking metamorphosis from merely being a choice to becoming an absolute necessity during COVID-19.
2. Educational Apps
Education sector is no exception to what the entire economy is going through. While education institutes are closed, online education apps and e-learning have gained a huge momentum among faculties and students. Every institution has tapped digital platforms to arrange online classes for their students to make learning uninterrupted. E-learning platforms help teachers to teach their students remotely, and communicate with them over live video chats. Educational apps like edX, Alison, Harvard University mobile app etc., are helping students from all around the globe to get uninterrupted education. Institutes are conducting online lectures and webinars to help students hone their abilities with video apps, for example, Zoom, Skype, Google Duo, WhatsApp, and Facebook Video calls.
3. Healthcare Apps
In a sensitive time like this where everyone is worried about their health, healthcare apps have appeared as a blessing in everyone's life. As our physical movements have reduced radically, healthcare apps like medical care apps, fitness apps, mental health apps are helping people to keep their rational soundness unblemished by keeping us physically healthy. Online fitness programs guide people on benefits and types of exercises, how to meditate or do basic yoga to keep healthy while remaining inside, the importance of a balanced diet etc. On-demand doctor's apps provide brief consultation, guidance on medical sample tests, e-prescriptions, and with medicine delivery. People can consult first rate doctors over medical apps to examine their symptoms and diseases to get a better understanding of their health and withstand alarm situations.
4. Social Media Apps
Social media apps play a foremost role during social distancing by encouraging everyone to connect with one another and let everyone stay updated on what's humming on the planet. Social distancing has reportedly shot up the social media activities. Well known social media apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Tik Tok, and Tumblr have witnessed a steep hike in the active user base. Engagement on social media platforms has increased complex as everyone is chatting, sharing, and posting more than any time in recent memory. From celebrities to influencers, and entrepreneurs, everyone is contributing on social platforms to motivate, entertain, educate and gear up the people to withstand the pandemic by helping them tap into their creative self.
5. Entertainment Apps
Binge-commendable entertainment apps help people to cut boredom. In the scenery of pandemic, entertainment apps like Netflix, Amazon prime, HBO Now, YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, Snapchat, IMDb, Scrabble GO, etc., have noticed a stunning spike. Children are engrossed in gaming apps to engage themselves and have a little piece of fun under these basic circumstances. Grown-ups are engrossed in news apps to remain updated on what's going on nearby and over the world. News apps like CNN, BBC News, Google News, etc., have got more traction than any time in recent memory as people are worried and inquisitive about the latest happenings around the globe. They need to know what government and healthcare authorities are telling them to do and to learn more about precautionary measures just as to understand how the entire world is adapting to the crisis.
6. Digital Payments Apps
Digital payment, online payment, and e-wallet apps are flourishing in the season of COVID – 19. People who are reluctant to visit banks for financial transactions are resorting to digital payments apps for funds transfer. Along with banking apps, the usage of Google pay, Paypal, Venmo, Square Cash, Zelle, Alipay, etc., has increased complex to seamlessly make payments. FinTechs and mobile app development companies are additionally working towards powering mobile payments keeping security and robustness under consideration. With instant payments, real-time transactions, Digital payment apps and e-wallet apps have played a vital role in COVID – 19 pandemic.
Conclusion
COVID-19 disruption has unleashed the real potential of Singapore top app developer digitalization which is evident to everyone. After all, who wouldn't cherish DIY tips, a workout video, an educational webinar, instant messaging, virtual happy hours, ordering stuff and making payment with only a fingertip? Social media and entertainment apps have played a massive role in joining people by keeping them connected and upbeat while the virus was good to go to divide them. Businesses that have identified the torment purposes of people and leveraged digital platforms to cater the needs of people will come out even stronger once the pandemic gets over. The worldwide economy is ready to take off by embarking on a digital transformative journey triggered by the Coronavirus disruption.
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13 Side Hustles You Can Use to Fund a New Venture in 2019
A buzzword floating around for a while now has been “side hustle.” Many entrepreneurs are turning to side hustles as a way to increase income without signing onto massive commitments. This approach can potentially have more flexibility than part time work, allowing entrepreneurs to gain needed income or experience, without over-stressing their routines.
For entrepreneurs looking to fund an initial venture, side hustles may be the perfect solution. As there are a wide variety of side hustles out there, we asked entrepreneurs from YEC to share the kinds of side hustle they think are worth considering, along with how to get started. Here’s what they said:
1. Do Something Automatable
To fund my initial venture, I started selling cell phones on Amazon. I was able to do this because I could ship all of my inventory to Amazon and they would handle all the shipping and returns using their Fulfilled by Amazon service. The key is that your side hustle needs to be automatable. I found suppliers, placed orders and then shipped the inventory to Amazon and I’d call it a day.
– Bryan Kesler, CPA Exam Guide
2. Try Flipping as a Side Hustle
An entrepreneur I follow is a big proponent of flipping as a side hustle. This doesn’t mean houses, it means anything you have at home that you don’t need, what you’d find at a garage sale or anything you can make a profit on. Apps like Offer Up and others make it extremely easy to list things and sell things without having to tell everyone you know what you’re doing.
– Joel Mathew, Fortress Consulting
3. Do Something Related to Your Venture
You only have so many hours in the day and you want to be using as many as possible to move your life, goals and dreams forward — so don’t squander them working in a completely different direction from what you actually want! These days, you can side hustle in just about any field or industry, so pick one that is going to help get your venture off the ground and prepare you with useful skills.
– Justin Faerman, Conscious Lifestyle Magazine
4. Monetize Your Expertise
Monetizing expertise is the easiest way to build a profitable side-hustle — or even a primary hustle! Everyone is an expert at something, and expertise can be monetized. Figure out what you’re best at, then figure out who needs that skillset. Whether you consult, give speeches, create sponsored content on social media or share another way, there is an audience willing to pay for what you know.
– Brittany Hodak, The Superfan Company
5. Consider Which Category Works Best for You
Undertaking a side hustle can branch into two separate categories: financial reserves and learning opportunities. Paid contracting or freelancing gigs and training opportunities, combined with savings and a frugal lifestyle, help with self-funding a business. Learning opportunities are volunteering and participating in startup communities, building a network for scaling a business quickly. – Mario Peshev, DevriX
6. Rent a Room via Airbnb
Airbnb is a great side hustle for extra cash. Whether you have a room or two at your house you’d like to post on the site or invest in purchasing a house solely to rent out, you can make quite a bit of money. Type in your city or neighborhood in Airbnb and check out your competition. Which places have the most and best reviews? What can you do to differentiate?
– Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
7. Drive With Uber
Uber is a great side hustle. Anyone with a car can take advantage of. By providing just a few trips before or after your work day, you’ll have more extra cash in your bank account to put into your new business venture.
– John Turner, SeedProd LLC
8. Start an Affiliate Marketing Site
Starting a business requires a huge amount of energy and dedication. Chances are, you won’t have a lot of energy left over to do something you don’t enjoy. That’s why starting an affiliate marketing site can be such a good fit. Choose a topic you are passionate about that also has sizeable niche of consumers that are interested in it.
– Thomas Smale, FE International
9. Sell Things on Facebook Marketplace
Got some stuff lying around your house that you don’t want anymore? Put it up for sale on Facebook Marketplace. You could even go hunting for some great finds at charity shops or garage sales and resell them for a profit right from the comfort of your own home.
– Blair Williams, MemberPress
10. Do Anything That Gives You Free Time
One of my side hustles was working at the front desk of a hotel. I worked the slow shifts and used all my downtime to build my business on my computer. I understood every piece of spare time was valuable to me. Even mowing lawns as a teenager I would listen to Tony Robbins’ CDs. Stay away from anything too physically or mentally intensive so you have the energy to moonlight when you get home.
– Matt Wilson, Under30Experiences
11. Become an Amazon Prime Seller
It’s surprisingly easy to become an Amazon Prime seller. Considering that there are 100 million Prime members, with the right Prime product, you can make some decent cash. One trick is finding a product that is selling well and no one is selling it with a Prime tag. You will then differentiate by selling the same product with a faster delivery.
– Jared Atchison, WPForms
12. Start Freelancing
The ideal side hustle brings in money while providing the flexibility you need to grow your main venture. Freelancing fits the bill and you can leverage skills you already have, especially if you have technical expertise — developers are always in demand. However, make sure the side hustle is worth your time; focusing on growing your business might provide better returns in the long run.
– Vik Patel, Future Hosting
13. Do Something You Actually Enjoy Doing
A side hustle offers people the unique opportunity to do what they’ve always dreamed of. Many people, for example, turn to blogging because writing isn’t the most lucrative career path. Whatever you choose should be something you enjoy because it will ultimately be added work. Your side hustle should embrace the cliche of doing what you love so you never have to work a day in your life.
– Reuben Yonatan, GetVoIP
Take these Expert Tips and Start Implementing them Today
Now that you’ve had a chance to read through some expert tips on how to start making some extra money on the side, it’s time to implement these changes into your own business and daily efforts.
Also, if you enjoyed this expert round up, I highly recommend you check out another one on BloggingTips.com which asks 83 online marketing experts the question “How Do I Start a Successful Blog?“. If you don’t already have a website or blog of your own, follow my guide to get started with one today.
The post 13 Side Hustles You Can Use to Fund a New Venture in 2019 appeared first on Zac Johnson.
Read more: zacjohnson.com
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Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes”
“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.”
Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool.
[If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your first dip into his wisdom should be “A Doctor’s Touch,” his TED talk from 2011 with over 1.5 million views. You will thank me for pointing you to this pearl. You will want to know more. But before diving deeply, let’s return to the main vein of this post, Dr. T’s latest].
We want our physicians to know us, deeply indeed, through all of our “omes:” genome, proteome, metabolome, transcriptome, and so on, Dr. V observes. We want our physicians to give us time and attention, “to acknowledge the locus of disease on our body and not on a biopsy or an image or a report,” he continues.
Ultimately, we want our doctors to know, “what we live for and would die for,” Dr. V concludes his forward.
Thus begins the promise of Deep Medicine, and how AI can make healthcare human again, via Dr. Topol’s tagline to the title.
This book picks up where The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine leave off…on the future of medicine, versus what’s led up to where we are now. In the first chapter introducing the concept of “deep medicine,” Dr. Topol starts with the
He follows up the promise of AI in chapter two, discussing the deep economic mess American health care is in. This is familiar territory here in Health Populi where we cover every nook and cranny of dismal U.S. health economics, and hopeful green shoots for making health care more cost-effective, high quality, engaging and even enchanting-by-design. “Shallow Medicine” is the theme of this discussion, which includes the word cloud shown here describing Americans’ views on doctors in 2017, published in a JAMA Surgery article called, “Patient Perceptions About Their Physician in 2 Words: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
The U.S. spends too much money for too little ROI on that spending, from hospital care and dental services to prescription drugs and what ultimately illustrates wasted life and potential in American society: maternal, infant and child mortality, which is by far the worst outcome in a developed nation and as bad as some much poorer countries experience.
Shallow calls for Going Deep for medical diagnosis, Dr. Topol argues, talking about the opportunities afforded by looking at a cluster of symptoms, second (or more) opinions, crowdsourcing diagnoses, and leveraging citizen science: the role of engaged lay people who share the details of their illnesses and pay-it-forward through that sharing — for peer patients today, and future patients.
Dr. Topol then teaches us about the Skinny on Deep Learning, making sure we understand that getting labels and “ground truths” right is critical for building useful algorithms. But wait — what’s an algorithm, anyway? It’s more than “if this, then that,” Dr. T. warns. He quotes Massimo Mazzotti of UC Berkeley, who calls out that “algorithm” means a program running on a physical machine, as well as its effects on other systems. This is obviously important as doctors grow to count on AI in medicine with a systems perspective on human health.
Furthermore, Dr. T. refers us to Yuval Noah Harari whose book Homo Deus is groundbreaking (and a must-read for Health Populi readers, too). “‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world. If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions….99 percent of our decisions…are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires,” Harari wrote in his book. He’s very concerned about faith in algorithms’ power, Dr. T observes, noting Harari says that faith is “dataism.”
With this caveat in mind, Dr. T explains that algorithms lie on a continuum from human guided to entirely machine guided. These latter algorithms are the deep learning ones, deep neural networks (DNNs). Four converging forces underlie DNNs:
Big Data sets
Dedicated graphic processing units (GPUs) which are the founding for speedy computations
Cloud computing and the ability to store massive amounts of data, and
Open-source algorithms.
DNNs have already been adopted in gaming, images (useful for image recognition for biometrics, for example), voice/speech/translation, and autonomous cars. Ironically, Dr T points out that “neural networks” really aren’t all that “neural.” Brains really don’t work like machines.
Deep learning AI complements human learning, Dr. T asserts. There’s bias in algorithms, and bias in human thinking, too, explored in the chapter “Deep Liabilities.” We know bias is, “baked into the system,” Dr. T admits, because patients in clinical trials are rarely generalizable to the overall population. The inequities have medical implications, Harari wrote in Homo Deus: “twentieth century medicine aimed to heal the sick, but twenty-first century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.” There’s an AI-fueled gap between have’s and have not’s, with AI biases often adversely impacting the most vulnerable people in society.
With this further caveat in mind, recognizing that U.S. public policy in current form protects neither the vulnerable nor the hackable, Dr. T talks about the promise of AI to enhance doctors’ ability to diagnose conditions “with patterns” and without patterns, along with detecting and supporting patients’ mental health. AI also supports health system management (like preventing readmissions or predicting staff requirements over a time period), discovering cures, informing nutrition based on N’s of 1’s, and providing care to people who may live in rural or under-served areas.
The promise is to drive Deep Empathy, the last chapter hopefully concludes. An introductory quote from Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) suggests where this section will go: “By these means we may hope to achieve not indeed a brave new world, no sort of perfectionist Utopia, but the more modest, and much more desirable objective — a genuinely human society.” Ideally, AI can give the clinician and the patient the gift of time, replacing the “scut work” and wasted work-flow with time to be human. Beyond time, people on both sides of the diagnosis and treatment process desire empathy. No machine will alleviate “suffering,” Dr T writes: this requires human-to-human bonding, time and trust.
The last page of the book takes on the book’s title, “Deep Medicine.” “We’re still in the earliest days of AI in medicine….long on computer algorithmic validation…but very short on real-world, clinical proof of effectiveness,” Dr T realizes. The triad of deep phenotyping, understanding a person’s many layered-data, deep learning, and deep empathy, could remedy the economic unsustainability in healthcare, he hypothesizes. That comes second to what’s even more important, bringing the book’s optimistic tagline full circle: “Presence. Empathy. Trust. Caring. Being Human.”
AI can help us restore the humanity between physicians and patients. At the end, Dr T says we must embrace the opportunity to do so.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: In an essay last week in Brookings, Bob Kocher and Zeke Emanuel ask the question, “Will Robots Replace Doctors?” Kocher, a long-time venture capitalist who has funded many a health care innovator via the VC firm Venrock, and Dr. Emanuel, who heads the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania along with being a venture partner at Oak HC/FT, speak to the public policy, economic, clinical and all-to-human challenge of AI bias. “Before we entrust our care to AI systems and ‘doctor robots,’ we must first commit to identifying bias in datasets and fixing them as much as possible. Furthermore, AI systems need to be evaluated not just on the accuracy of their recommendations, but also on whether they perpetuate or mitigate disparities in care and outcomes,” Kocher and Emanuel assert.
Addressing biased data sets and algorithms must be part of a new deal on health citizenship for Americans, who must also be in control of their personal health data and have a right to quality health care without regard to what state they live in, or whether they’re urban or rural communities. Bias delivered via AI is still bias, and would reinforce and exacerbate the health disparities that have marred American health care for decades and continue to do so.
My family and I are proponents of the Slow Food Movement. Founded in Italy, Slow Food is based on the idea that eating locally sourced food, cooked at home, by hand, shared and savored with other people bolsters health on all levels – physical, emotional, financial. That Eric Topol devoted an entire chapter to “Deep Diet” is further evidence that the good doctor gets more than digital health innovations: he also embraces the importance of food-as-medicine and nutrition as a social determinant of health, also one of grand disparities underlying health inequity in the U.S.
One of our family mantras (in addition to Slow Food and the importance and gift of shared family mealtime) we ingrained in our daughter was to “go slow to go fast.” Festina lente, an Italian grandmother might quote Emperor Augustus or the Medici clan: “make haste, slowly.”
With AI married to medicine, we can “go fast to go slow,” to the benefit of both patient and provider.
The post Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.
Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com
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Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes”
“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.”
Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool.
[If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your first dip into his wisdom should be “A Doctor’s Touch,” his TED talk from 2011 with over 1.5 million views. You will thank me for pointing you to this pearl. You will want to know more. But before diving deeply, let’s return to the main vein of this post, Dr. T’s latest].
We want our physicians to know us, deeply indeed, through all of our “omes:” genome, proteome, metabolome, transcriptome, and so on, Dr. V observes. We want our physicians to give us time and attention, “to acknowledge the locus of disease on our body and not on a biopsy or an image or a report,” he continues.
Ultimately, we want our doctors to know, “what we live for and would die for,” Dr. V concludes his forward.
Thus begins the promise of Deep Medicine, and how AI can make healthcare human again, via Dr. Topol’s tagline to the title.
This book picks up where The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine leave off…on the future of medicine, versus what’s led up to where we are now. In the first chapter introducing the concept of “deep medicine,” Dr. Topol starts with the
He follows up the promise of AI in chapter two, discussing the deep economic mess American health care is in. This is familiar territory here in Health Populi where we cover every nook and cranny of dismal U.S. health economics, and hopeful green shoots for making health care more cost-effective, high quality, engaging and even enchanting-by-design. “Shallow Medicine” is the theme of this discussion, which includes the word cloud shown here describing Americans’ views on doctors in 2017, published in a JAMA Surgery article called, “Patient Perceptions About Their Physician in 2 Words: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
The U.S. spends too much money for too little ROI on that spending, from hospital care and dental services to prescription drugs and what ultimately illustrates wasted life and potential in American society: maternal, infant and child mortality, which is by far the worst outcome in a developed nation and as bad as some much poorer countries experience.
Shallow calls for Going Deep for medical diagnosis, Dr. Topol argues, talking about the opportunities afforded by looking at a cluster of symptoms, second (or more) opinions, crowdsourcing diagnoses, and leveraging citizen science: the role of engaged lay people who share the details of their illnesses and pay-it-forward through that sharing — for peer patients today, and future patients.
Dr. Topol then teaches us about the Skinny on Deep Learning, making sure we understand that getting labels and “ground truths” right is critical for building useful algorithms. But wait — what’s an algorithm, anyway? It’s more than “if this, then that,” Dr. T. warns. He quotes Massimo Mazzotti of UC Berkeley, who calls out that “algorithm” means a program running on a physical machine, as well as its effects on other systems. This is obviously important as doctors grow to count on AI in medicine with a systems perspective on human health.
Furthermore, Dr. T. refers us to Yuval Noah Harari whose book Homo Deus is groundbreaking (and a must-read for Health Populi readers, too). “‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world. If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions….99 percent of our decisions…are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires,” Harari wrote in his book. He’s very concerned about faith in algorithms’ power, Dr. T observes, noting Harari says that faith is “dataism.”
With this caveat in mind, Dr. T explains that algorithms lie on a continuum from human guided to entirely machine guided. These latter algorithms are the deep learning ones, deep neural networks (DNNs). Four converging forces underlie DNNs:
Big Data sets
Dedicated graphic processing units (GPUs) which are the founding for speedy computations
Cloud computing and the ability to store massive amounts of data, and
Open-source algorithms.
DNNs have already been adopted in gaming, images (useful for image recognition for biometrics, for example), voice/speech/translation, and autonomous cars. Ironically, Dr T points out that “neural networks” really aren’t all that “neural.” Brains really don’t work like machines.
Deep learning AI complements human learning, Dr. T asserts. There’s bias in algorithms, and bias in human thinking, too, explored in the chapter “Deep Liabilities.” We know bias is, “baked into the system,” Dr. T admits, because patients in clinical trials are rarely generalizable to the overall population. The inequities have medical implications, Harari wrote in Homo Deus: “twentieth century medicine aimed to heal the sick, but twenty-first century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.” There’s an AI-fueled gap between have’s and have not’s, with AI biases often adversely impacting the most vulnerable people in society.
With this further caveat in mind, recognizing that U.S. public policy in current form protects neither the vulnerable nor the hackable, Dr. T talks about the promise of AI to enhance doctors’ ability to diagnose conditions “with patterns” and without patterns, along with detecting and supporting patients’ mental health. AI also supports health system management (like preventing readmissions or predicting staff requirements over a time period), discovering cures, informing nutrition based on N’s of 1’s, and providing care to people who may live in rural or under-served areas.
The promise is to drive Deep Empathy, the last chapter hopefully concludes. An introductory quote from Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) suggests where this section will go: “By these means we may hope to achieve not indeed a brave new world, no sort of perfectionist Utopia, but the more modest, and much more desirable objective — a genuinely human society.” Ideally, AI can give the clinician and the patient the gift of time, replacing the “scut work” and wasted work-flow with time to be human. Beyond time, people on both sides of the diagnosis and treatment process desire empathy. No machine will alleviate “suffering,” Dr T writes: this requires human-to-human bonding, time and trust.
The last page of the book takes on the book’s title, “Deep Medicine.” “We’re still in the earliest days of AI in medicine….long on computer algorithmic validation…but very short on real-world, clinical proof of effectiveness,” Dr T realizes. The triad of deep phenotyping, understanding a person’s many layered-data, deep learning, and deep empathy, could remedy the economic unsustainability in healthcare, he hypothesizes. That comes second to what’s even more important, bringing the book’s optimistic tagline full circle: “Presence. Empathy. Trust. Caring. Being Human.”
AI can help us restore the humanity between physicians and patients. At the end, Dr T says we must embrace the opportunity to do so.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: In an essay last week in Brookings, Bob Kocher and Zeke Emanuel ask the question, “Will Robots Replace Doctors?” Kocher, a long-time venture capitalist who has funded many a health care innovator via the VC firm Venrock, and Dr. Emanuel, who heads the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania along with being a venture partner at Oak HC/FT, speak to the public policy, economic, clinical and all-to-human challenge of AI bias. “Before we entrust our care to AI systems and ‘doctor robots,’ we must first commit to identifying bias in datasets and fixing them as much as possible. Furthermore, AI systems need to be evaluated not just on the accuracy of their recommendations, but also on whether they perpetuate or mitigate disparities in care and outcomes,” Kocher and Emanuel assert.
Addressing biased data sets and algorithms must be part of a new deal on health citizenship for Americans, who must also be in control of their personal health data and have a right to quality health care without regard to what state they live in, or whether they’re urban or rural communities. Bias delivered via AI is still bias, and would reinforce and exacerbate the health disparities that have marred American health care for decades and continue to do so.
My family and I are proponents of the Slow Food Movement. Founded in Italy, Slow Food is based on the idea that eating locally sourced food, cooked at home, by hand, shared and savored with other people bolsters health on all levels – physical, emotional, financial. That Eric Topol devoted an entire chapter to “Deep Diet” is further evidence that the good doctor gets more than digital health innovations: he also embraces the importance of food-as-medicine and nutrition as a social determinant of health, also one of grand disparities underlying health inequity in the U.S.
One of our family mantras (in addition to Slow Food and the importance and gift of shared family mealtime) we ingrained in our daughter was to “go slow to go fast.” Festina lente, an Italian grandmother might quote Emperor Augustus or the Medici clan: “make haste, slowly.”
With AI married to medicine, we can “go fast to go slow,” to the benefit of both patient and provider.
The post Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.
Article source:Health Populi
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Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes”
“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.”
Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool.
[If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your first dip into his wisdom should be “A Doctor’s Touch,” his TED talk from 2011 with over 1.5 million views. You will thank me for pointing you to this pearl. You will want to know more. But before diving deeply, let’s return to the main vein of this post, Dr. T’s latest].
We want our physicians to know us, deeply indeed, through all of our “omes:” genome, proteome, metabolome, transcriptome, and so on, Dr. V observes. We want our physicians to give us time and attention, “to acknowledge the locus of disease on our body and not on a biopsy or an image or a report,” he continues.
Ultimately, we want our doctors to know, “what we live for and would die for,” Dr. V concludes his forward.
Thus begins the promise of Deep Medicine, and how AI can make healthcare human again, via Dr. Topol’s tagline to the title.
This book picks up where The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine leave off…on the future of medicine, versus what’s led up to where we are now. In the first chapter introducing the concept of “deep medicine,” Dr. Topol starts with the
He follows up the promise of AI in chapter two, discussing the deep economic mess American health care is in. This is familiar territory here in Health Populi where we cover every nook and cranny of dismal U.S. health economics, and hopeful green shoots for making health care more cost-effective, high quality, engaging and even enchanting-by-design. “Shallow Medicine” is the theme of this discussion, which includes the word cloud shown here describing Americans’ views on doctors in 2017, published in a JAMA Surgery article called, “Patient Perceptions About Their Physician in 2 Words: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
The U.S. spends too much money for too little ROI on that spending, from hospital care and dental services to prescription drugs and what ultimately illustrates wasted life and potential in American society: maternal, infant and child mortality, which is by far the worst outcome in a developed nation and as bad as some much poorer countries experience.
Shallow calls for Going Deep for medical diagnosis, Dr. Topol argues, talking about the opportunities afforded by looking at a cluster of symptoms, second (or more) opinions, crowdsourcing diagnoses, and leveraging citizen science: the role of engaged lay people who share the details of their illnesses and pay-it-forward through that sharing — for peer patients today, and future patients.
Dr. Topol then teaches us about the Skinny on Deep Learning, making sure we understand that getting labels and “ground truths” right is critical for building useful algorithms. But wait — what’s an algorithm, anyway? It’s more than “if this, then that,” Dr. T. warns. He quotes Massimo Mazzotti of UC Berkeley, who calls out that “algorithm” means a program running on a physical machine, as well as its effects on other systems. This is obviously important as doctors grow to count on AI in medicine with a systems perspective on human health.
Furthermore, Dr. T. refers us to Yuval Noah Harari whose book Homo Deus is groundbreaking (and a must-read for Health Populi readers, too). “‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world. If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions….99 percent of our decisions…are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires,” Harari wrote in his book. He’s very concerned about faith in algorithms’ power, Dr. T observes, noting Harari says that faith is “dataism.”
With this caveat in mind, Dr. T explains that algorithms lie on a continuum from human guided to entirely machine guided. These latter algorithms are the deep learning ones, deep neural networks (DNNs). Four converging forces underlie DNNs:
Big Data sets
Dedicated graphic processing units (GPUs) which are the founding for speedy computations
Cloud computing and the ability to store massive amounts of data, and
Open-source algorithms.
DNNs have already been adopted in gaming, images (useful for image recognition for biometrics, for example), voice/speech/translation, and autonomous cars. Ironically, Dr T points out that “neural networks” really aren’t all that “neural.” Brains really don’t work like machines.
Deep learning AI complements human learning, Dr. T asserts. There’s bias in algorithms, and bias in human thinking, too, explored in the chapter “Deep Liabilities.” We know bias is, “baked into the system,” Dr. T admits, because patients in clinical trials are rarely generalizable to the overall population. The inequities have medical implications, Harari wrote in Homo Deus: “twentieth century medicine aimed to heal the sick, but twenty-first century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.” There’s an AI-fueled gap between have’s and have not’s, with AI biases often adversely impacting the most vulnerable people in society.
With this further caveat in mind, recognizing that U.S. public policy in current form protects neither the vulnerable nor the hackable, Dr. T talks about the promise of AI to enhance doctors’ ability to diagnose conditions “with patterns” and without patterns, along with detecting and supporting patients’ mental health. AI also supports health system management (like preventing readmissions or predicting staff requirements over a time period), discovering cures, informing nutrition based on N’s of 1’s, and providing care to people who may live in rural or under-served areas.
The promise is to drive Deep Empathy, the last chapter hopefully concludes. An introductory quote from Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) suggests where this section will go: “By these means we may hope to achieve not indeed a brave new world, no sort of perfectionist Utopia, but the more modest, and much more desirable objective — a genuinely human society.” Ideally, AI can give the clinician and the patient the gift of time, replacing the “scut work” and wasted work-flow with time to be human. Beyond time, people on both sides of the diagnosis and treatment process desire empathy. No machine will alleviate “suffering,” Dr T writes: this requires human-to-human bonding, time and trust.
The last page of the book takes on the book’s title, “Deep Medicine.” “We’re still in the earliest days of AI in medicine….long on computer algorithmic validation…but very short on real-world, clinical proof of effectiveness,” Dr T realizes. The triad of deep phenotyping, understanding a person’s many layered-data, deep learning, and deep empathy, could remedy the economic unsustainability in healthcare, he hypothesizes. That comes second to what’s even more important, bringing the book’s optimistic tagline full circle: “Presence. Empathy. Trust. Caring. Being Human.”
AI can help us restore the humanity between physicians and patients. At the end, Dr T says we must embrace the opportunity to do so.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: In an essay last week in Brookings, Bob Kocher and Zeke Emanuel ask the question, “Will Robots Replace Doctors?” Kocher, a long-time venture capitalist who has funded many a health care innovator via the VC firm Venrock, and Dr. Emanuel, who heads the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania along with being a venture partner at Oak HC/FT, speak to the public policy, economic, clinical and all-to-human challenge of AI bias. “Before we entrust our care to AI systems and ‘doctor robots,’ we must first commit to identifying bias in datasets and fixing them as much as possible. Furthermore, AI systems need to be evaluated not just on the accuracy of their recommendations, but also on whether they perpetuate or mitigate disparities in care and outcomes,” Kocher and Emanuel assert.
Addressing biased data sets and algorithms must be part of a new deal on health citizenship for Americans, who must also be in control of their personal health data and have a right to quality health care without regard to what state they live in, or whether they’re urban or rural communities. Bias delivered via AI is still bias, and would reinforce and exacerbate the health disparities that have marred American health care for decades and continue to do so.
My family and I are proponents of the Slow Food Movement. Founded in Italy, Slow Food is based on the idea that eating locally sourced food, cooked at home, by hand, shared and savored with other people bolsters health on all levels – physical, emotional, financial. That Eric Topol devoted an entire chapter to “Deep Diet” is further evidence that the good doctor gets more than digital health innovations: he also embraces the importance of food-as-medicine and nutrition as a social determinant of health, also one of grand disparities underlying health inequity in the U.S.
One of our family mantras (in addition to Slow Food and the importance and gift of shared family mealtime) we ingrained in our daughter was to “go slow to go fast.” Festina lente, an Italian grandmother might quote Emperor Augustus or the Medici clan: “make haste, slowly.”
With AI married to medicine, we can “go fast to go slow,” to the benefit of both patient and provider.
The post Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.
Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” posted first on https://carilloncitydental.blogspot.com
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How to Take Your Brand Direct to Consumer
Thinking of dipping your toes into the direct to consumer waters?
You’re not alone.
Merchants who sell everything from razors to pet food to mattresses to meal kits have seen the writing on the retail wall.
In fact, according to IAB’s popular new study, The Rise of the 21st Century Brand Economy, the future of retail growth comes from direct consumer relationships.
The challenge is, large corporations don’t know what to do.
If your brand wants to win the direct to consumer game, you can’t just efficiently fill orders, you need to expertly fulfill the modern expectations of customers who place those orders.
Today we’ll explore five essential elements your brand needs to know for going direct to consumer.
Why brands are going direct to consumer.
Which customer expectations are changing.
How to design and optimize your website and its marketing.
How to integrate other business operations accordingly.
What to measure for success.
The water is cold and the waves are choppy.
But we’re here to help you navigate your course along the direct to consumer journey.
What Does Going Direct to Consumer Mean?
Direct to consumer means you are selling your product directly to your end customers without third-party retailers, wholesalers, or other middlemen.
Why Brands are Going to Direct to Consumer
The writing is on the wall.
Ecommerce has changed and it’s continuing to change.
The model of the multichannel retailer is failing, and it’s falling apart because the margins are small.
Foot traffic has continued to diminish in the traditional sense.
Customers are buying more and more things online and are buying fewer goods from traditional physical retailers.
This trend hurts legacy brands whose primary channel of selling products has been through stores like Bloomingdales and Macy’s, stores that have been struggling and even closing many locations lately.
It shrinks the overall business, both for the brand and the wholesaler.
The scary part for legacy brands is, now they have to compete against all of these hip upstart brands that are digitally native.
You’ve seen the ads and read the articles about retail darlings like Harry’s, Casper, Blue Apron, Bonobos, Barkbox, and Warby Parker.
Customers have come to expect, and demand, buying directly from a brand, no matter what they sell.
Your Next Step: Answera These Questions for Your Brand
Which digital native brands are disrupting your legacy business?
What might you learn from them?
That’s the attraction for legacy brands going direct to consumer: taking back control over how their brand merchandises and messages its products.
Especially if their products have a unique selling proposition.
They don’t want to rely solely on the stores to put the products out in the right places for the right people, or for the local sales reps to be educated about it.
The other upside is, brands who go direct to consumer take ownership over their most important assets: Their customers.
Currently, someone might be a customer of Macy’s, but not a customer of your brand.
Which means your brand isn’t able to communicate with those individuals, email them with relevant updates, or own that relationship at all.
Ultimately, the lack of control is a huge loss for any organization.
Owning the customer relationship is what allows you to have much more leverage to increase customer lifetime value.
Your Next Step: Answer These Questions for Your Brand
To what degree do you own your customer relationship?
Does it give you the leverage to increase customer lifetime value?
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Which Customer Expectations are Changing?
Discount Electronics, a twenty-year veteran of the industry, was intentional about evolving their business to match their customers’ changing needs.
By updating their ecommerce platform to an on-demand, same day computer configuration, they began offering same day shipping.
Not to mention, made their web experience mobile friendly, secured PCI compliance, and integrated with Amazon Pay and ultimately deepened their direct to consumer relationships.
As a result, they increased revenue by 150% and average order value by 58%!
Lesson learned: if you have historically been a wholesale brand, you need to think long and hard about why a customer is going to change their behavior and buy something directly from your ecommerce website.
Is it the price?
Possibly, but price is a really dangerous game to play, as you might upset your historical business if you start pricing more cheaply.
Yes, you need to at least be aware of price, because if someone searches for your product and the first thing that comes up under your website is Bloomingdale’s selling that product for twenty percent less, it’s going to be really hard to convert.
Here’s the big question: What entices customers to buy from websites versus traditional retailers?
For starters, customers connect to more products, whereas some retailers won’t always have every item in stock.
Next, direct to consumer takes advantage of impulse buys.
Stores can leverage that better online because now a shopper has the chance to connect with the brand whenever they want, throughout their day, on their terms.
And brands can proactively connect with them through email, push notifications, and so on.
Also think about direct to consumer in terms of opportunity costs.
From a financial perspective, now the store can hold less inventory. You can cut costs and keep the same margin.
And from a time perspective, direct to consumer saves the customer the hassle of physically going to a brick and mortar location.
Common Customer Buying Motivators:
Exceptional service.
Engaging marketing campaigns.
Exclusive SKUs.
Narrative-driven copy.Unique or useful packaging.
Email marketing with deals and promos.
Liberal return policy to compensate for the inability to see products at the point of sale.
How to Design and Optimize Your Store and Its Marketing
Your company needs to launch an online store that is cost effective but still serves the direct to consumer needs.
Here are several strategies for doing so.
The first key to get right is modeling your site in a way that makes searching, finding, and buying a product easy and quick.
Make their site visit memorable enough to encourage repeat visits. But don’t do so at the expense of usability.
You need to put a shopper a situation where they’re used to the experience.
They’re getting the information that they need to get, and it’s happening in a way that they’re satisfied enough to make this purchase online.
The experience needs to bridge the little mental gap of not having the product in the customer’s hands where they can touch, feel, and try on your product.
Anytime you’re getting too experimental on that front, you’re getting far, far away from that journey.
Andie Swim is a great example of matching site design with expectation.
This women’s swimwear brand made serious waves in their first season online.
Not only by making high-quality products, but also by closing the “try before you buy” gap.
Thanks to the partner integration with Rebilla, customers can now place a 3-4 week hold on credit cards while they try on the swimsuit and send it back.
Less friction led to 1000 orders in the first three months and a 200% increase in conversion rate.
Another lesson learned: Make sure each of the products on your site has a gallery of at least four or more images.
Remember, ecommerce is a puzzle.
The gap you’re trying to bridge is the fact that the product is not in their hands like the traditional shopping experience.
Ultimately, everything you’re doing is bridging that gap so that the product seems like it’s here.
Users might be sold visually and informationally before they get to the product page, but you have to bring the sale home with compelling and comprehensive visuals.
Don’t waste valuable real estate of your website with too many brand images, taglines, and other company assets.
Make the shopping images the heroes of the page.
How to Integrate Other Business Operations Accordingly
Clearly, going direct to consumer will affect multiple operational issues at your company.
Here are several elements to think about.
From an operational side
Legacy retail brands in the past would not have really needed to have much of a technical team.
They would do some quick web dev, but these days they will need much more customer facing customer support.
And it’s going to expand past what they previously had. Plus, now you have to handle shipping and logistics.
It’s one thing to send massive orders to your warehouses for the suppliers.
It’s another thing to set up an efficient system to go directly to consumers.
For this, you can partner, or you can build out the distinct network yourself.
From performance marketing side
Brands must also now shift the basics of how they think about channel roles.
For example, what’s your customer acquisition strategy? What’s your customer lifetime value model? And, how will you answer these questions if you lack enough historical customer data as a baseline?
The answers to these new questions might mean relying on others to establish baselines to forecast and plan budgets accordingly.
From a branding side
Legacy retailers have to think more critically about the way they tell stories around their products.
They should be crafting and contributing to their brand narrative every two weeks.
The ideal place to begin this story is by looking at what your differentiator is.
To pinpoint it, here’s one question we challenge our retail clients to ask:
Who is the kind of person that, if they had this product, and you took it away from them, would feel some sort of pain?
You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone whose life would be improved by your product.
Whether it’s a new product line, a big sale, or some other kind of promotion, direct to consumer brands should be constantly phasing their launches so they’ve always got something new to talk about.
From a service side
You have to think about customer loyalty.
Wholesalers who go direct to consumer used to have to rely on the retailers to foster loyalty.
But now they have to do that work themselves.
As such, design and expand your email marketing program with loyalty in mind.
A big portion of your email marketing program should be on creating more loyal customers out of people who are currently on your lists and increasing the value of those people.
That means putting triggers on all kinds of automated email flows that are designed to get people to purchase, purchase again, share your brand, and coordinate with your other channels.
What to Measure for Direct to Consumer Success
Last, but not least, our favorite topic: Leveling up your measuring game.
In the past several years, enterprise and legacy retailers have been making decisions based on quantifying the wrong metrics.
For example, many companies aren’t tracking online to offline for Facebook ads.
That is a huge missed opportunity to clarify attribution.
But the problem is, marketing executives have been sold on the value of soft KPIs like brand lift and how many people are using hashtags, but not revenue.
Those metrics certainly have their place and should not to be ignored, but it’s not where you should focus your time if you really want to make a significant direct to consumer play.
That’s why many legacy retailers are getting their clocks cleaned by direct to consumer companies.
Those scrappy startups have to be lean or they lose. The stakes are higher for them and there’s less margin of error.
In fact, depending on the size of the legacy enterprise, there would have to be a real cultural shift around data strategy.
Now, even if your company doesn’t have that level of resources, the basic philosophy and practice around measuring still applies.
Don’t have old legacy KPIs driving your direct to consumer brand.
It’s simply a different set of skills and different things you should measure.
The truth is, most legacy brands are used to looking at metrics like impressions and reach and frequency.
These are noisy numbers, and they easily pull marketing executives in their direction.
But measuring engagement doesn’t necessarily always translate to dollars and cents.
Brands must get used to the fact that the ecommerce KPIs that should focus on include:
Purchases.
Repeat purchases.
Average order value.
Lifetime value of revenue.
Then, build your funnel around those metrics.
It’s a whole new kind of mindset that certain companies may not have a history of embracing.
Okay, one final issue around measurement.
As a performance marketing agency, we’ve found that it’s easier to track marketing effectiveness and treat it as a profit center.
Our clients know exactly what percentage of their spend goes to which channel, and how effective each of these respective channels is.
Whereas, if a customer bought something through a wholesaler, there would be no way to know why or how.
Did they click on a Facebook ad? Were they remarketed via Google Search? What kind of conversion rate did we get?
There’s no way to tell.
And remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t optimize it.
Executive Summary
Whew! Told you that direct to consumer ocean was cold.
But you’re not alone, and it’s not too late.
There has never been a better time to evolve your customer relationship into a more direct one.
If you focus on finding the right vendors, technologies, and partners to help you implement these marketing strategies and tactics, your retail ship will set sail into profitable waters.
Want more insights like this?
We’re on a mission to provide businesses like yours marketing and sales tips, tricks and industry leading knowledge to build the next house-hold name brand. Don’t miss a post. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
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WordPress REST API Bug Could Be Used in Stored XSS Attacks
New Post has been published on https://universeinform.com/2017/03/29/wordpress-rest-api-bug-could-be-used-in-stored-xss-attacks/
WordPress REST API Bug Could Be Used in Stored XSS Attacks
The recently patched WordPress Rest API Endpoint vulnerability is the present that continues on giving.
Already liable for greater than a million website defacements and attempts to monetize some of those assaults, the flaw additionally opens the door to a separate assault.
Researchers at Sucuri who found the authentic worm on Monday disclosed details of how it is able to be leveraged to pull off a saved move-website scripting attack.
The saved XSS bug changed into patched last week in the WordPress core whilst the model 4.7.three protection replace was launched. Marc Montpas, a researcher at Sucuri, stated that an attacker who defaced an internet site using an take advantage of for the Rest API Endpoint vulnerability can also have saved malicious JavaScript on the website that could be prompted later.
“Blended with the recent content injection vulnerability we found
It’s feasible for a far off attacker to deface a random post at the web page and save malicious Javascript code in it,” Montpas wrote in the disclosure published the day past. “This code might be executed while a traffic views the put up and when anybody edits the put up from the WordPress dashboard. As an end result, an administrator attempts to restoration the defaced publish, the would unknowingly cause the malicious script, that can then be used to place a backdoor on the website and create new admin users.”
The difficulty changed into not patched till the four.7.3 release because it can’t be exploited without the unique content injection bug in the Relaxation API being the gift and without the attacker possessing contributor privileges on WordPress.
Montpas defined that during research at the Rest API vulnerability
He located how the embed shortcode function in WordPress ought to triumph over some hurdles installed location via the wp_kses() function, which limits the HTML tags a person ought to insert right into a publish. Specifically, Montpas said the youtube_embed_url feature turned into particularly useful in putting in a scenario wherein an attacker ought to drop a saved XSS attack that might execute later.
When an administrator visits the affected submit, the XSS payload will execute and might pressure his browser to perform administrative movements on his behalf, like storing backdoors on the web page and growing new administrator accounts,” Montpas told Threatpost closing week.
Why Choose WordPress CMS For Your Next Business Website?
It is vital to have an effective and characteristic-rich website for the commercial enterprise. Now not having the identical may be unfavorable to the fitness of your commercial enterprise in a time where the business global is popping aggressive by the day. You need to simplest agree with a platform that is established and popular at the same time as only this could guarantee a useful and excessive-appearing internet site to your business. At gift, there are masses of structures to be had in the market and you need to pick out the one that comes preloaded with business-pleasant functions. You need to select a platform that brings flexibility and freedom to run the business without any hiccups.
Maintaining all this in thoughts, you should trust WordPress CMS because it’s unfastened and open supply
Because of this, it is able to be used, edited and redistributed without spending any cash. Further, this platform brings you the privilege of making any internet site to fulfill your necessities easily. So, this content control system can be depended on to get both commerce, membership, weblog publishing website and so forth. easily. With an entire host of plugins and subject matters to pick out from, you may beautify the capability of the internet site and meet your desires in a trouble-loose manner. Furthermore, It is a Seo-pleasant platform this means that your merchandising costs will be stored a super deal.
Further, websites developed using WordPress deliver rapid loading velocity and follow an awesome coding popular.
These websites include XML sitemap and make navigation a breeze for visitors. They make photograph optimization a simple assignment and in addition, they assist social media integration. Most of these features within the website help them get better ranks in search engines like google and yahoo. Moreover, anyone can do customize both hues, layout or features of a subject matter made the use of WordPress. Being an open source platform, this platform enjoys the assist of a massive network of developers and active customers who assist in troubleshooting issues of virtually any variety.
Moreover, safety is the front in which WordPress scores the most and this makes it the maximum favored alternative for enterprise websites. It follows a high-security widespread and everyday updates maintain it far from any hacking-related malaise or danger. More so, Preserving your commercial enterprise internet site relaxed won’t need an expert as you could do it yourself, and this is every other key component of WordPress. What is More, it gives an effective aid to multimedia and agencies finds genuinely no problem with the insertion in their pictures, audios or films. Not all content material control structures provide this sort of multimedia aid and that’s why Now not all are as popular as WordPress.wordpress seo plugin reviews
FASB Updates Recognition of Breakage for Prepaid Stored-Value Cards
One of the five issues taken into consideration at the March 19, 2015 assembly of the Rising troubles Project Pressure, (“The Undertaking Force”) became the difficulty of whether liabilities springing up from the sale of pay as you go stored value playing cards below three birthday party arrangements need to be classified as economic or non-financial liabilities.
Customers can also purchase a pay as you go saved cost cards (present cards) beneath a birthday celebration association, immediately from providers who stand equipped to offer items and offerings to the client upon redemption of the card. Rather, Clients might also purchase present playing cards beneath a three celebration arrangement from an intermediary consisting of a monetary institution or a pay as you go community company.
Typically, present cards do now not expire, aren’t and redeemable for cash and may or may not be subject escheatment legal guidelines. Often times, gift playing cards cross unredeemed in entirety or in part. Those unredeemed balances are typically called “breakage.”
Whilst present playing cards as sold below a birthday celebration arrangement
The seller acknowledges deferred sales (a non-economic liability) at that time of sale, with revenue being identified When present playing cards are redeemed. Similarly, the seller may also recognize revenue for the breakage it expects to be entitled to preserve. The recognition of breakage, as presently practiced is constant with the brand new revenue popularity trendy, ASC606 – sales from Contracts with Customers, which will become effective from the calendar year 2017.
Whilst gift cards are bought by means of an intermediary,
The middleman acknowledges a liability for the obligation to provide the customer with the ability to redeem the gift card in alternate for items and services to be supplied via 0.33 party vendors. Upon redemption of the cards, the middleman relieves the liability and remits the budget to the seller and acknowledges sales for any transaction fees and commissions earned.
whether the middleman is entitled to breakage revenue or now not depends on whether or not the responsibility to stand ready to provide charge to 0.33 party companies is a monetary or non-financial legal responsibility. If the obligation is a non-monetary obligation, the intermediary may additionally understand sales for the breakage it expects to be entitled to preserve.
To the contrary, if the responsibility is considered a monetary legal responsibility should be derecognized upon redemption pursuant to ASC 405-20- Extinguishments of Liabilities. However, if Purchasers by no means redeem gift playing cards that haven’t any expiration dates and are not the problem to escheatment legal guidelines, the liability remains in perpetuity except the cardboard is destroyed or there may be no longer a duty to the consumer.
What Causes Panic Attacks? How Exhaustion Causes Panic Attacks
Human beings frequently ask themselves, “What causes panic attacks?” They normally blame situations that they’re in or different forces which are out of their control. What they do now not realize is that panic issues are regularly because of exhaustion either physical, emotional or mental.
While you are constantly tired and run down your body is in a regular nervous kingdom. You could never truly loosen up or relax due to the reality which you are in no way truly rested. While this takes place… This frightened energy subsequently manifests itself as panic and anxiety.
Being apprehensive and jittery clearly, confuses your frame and thoughts.
Ultimately those feelings become increasingly more mentioned… Then they grow to be what reasons panic assaults. Whilst those feelings building up to the factor in which they become bodily signs and symptoms they motive the character experiencing them plenty of confusion and fear.
When someone starts of evolved to show up actual signs and symptoms their minds begin racing
You begin to get involved together with your signs and symptoms and you can not stop considering them. All of this issue reasons you to show up other signs and symptoms… And those subsequently purpose more. This is how the cycle of anxiety starts off evolved.
While your body reaches a breaking factor… It causes you to have a panic assault to stop the cycle of tension. Your exhaustion is what causes panic assaults… And your frame does all it can do to stop the emotions of anxiety and fear.
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Entrepreneur: Latest Articles http://j.mp/2n8oaLY
Every entrepreneur dreams of being rich. They dream of having the power to pull fiscal strings, able to command a vast fortune and make money while they sleep, all while enjoying a life replete with leisure and pleasure. Yet, in a world where the have-nots far outweigh the haves, where just over 1,800 individuals across the entire planet can call themselves billionaires -- a mere blip on the percentage scale of the world's population -- not only are most not rich, they're also heavily indebted.
The truth? While some might seek the answers or secrets to getting rich in life, others are simply struggling to keep their heads above water. Most are suffocating in a sea of debt, unable to extricate themselves from the shackles of an abhorrent situation inherently created by the consumptionism and consumerism that grips much of the world's population. We are, in effect, products of our own society.
Related: 3 Tips to Better Handle Your Business Finances
Still, how is it that some people have all the answers? How do the rich keeping getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer? Is the game actually rigged against us? Are we, in fact, doomed to live ordinary lives, merely controlled by our hedonistic desires and pleasures, forced to succumb to our animalistic urges, never able to actually get ahead in life, let alone get rich? Or, is there some solution? A way out, if you will?
Clearly, these are questions posed by the masses. Nearly everyone wants to get rich in life. But not everyone can pull it off. What separates those who seem to have all the answers from those that are constantly jumping from one ship to the next, never able to truly find their gravy train? Well, the answers are far simpler than most would imagine.
What are the secrets to getting rich in life?
The secrets to getting really rich in life aren't secrets. They're actually well-known. Yet, as well-known as they are, they most certainly aren't abided by. Much of the world's denizens and a large part of every country's population actually live in stark contrast to these so-called secrets to getting rich.
However, if you're at all serious about the longevity of your wealth, then you'll heed the advice that's been passed down through the ages. While it's been largely ignored by most, it's been harnassed by some of the world's richest and wealthiest individuals throughout time.
Related: 5 Small Financial Mistakes That Can Lead to a Major Cash Crisis
1. Live below your means.
The first so-called secret to getting rich is to live below your means. Translation? Don't spend more money than you make. Period. However, not many people follow this advice. Many are focused on spending as much as possible. Whether it's to revel in the perception of being more well-off than they actually are, or some other purpose, this is the truth across much of the developed world.
In fact, 55 percent of Americans have stated that they either break even or spend more than they make every single month, according to a survey from The Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded its findings based on responses from 7,000 U.S. households.
2. Save 20 percent of your income.
That same survey from The Pew Charitable Trusts found that one-third of Americans have absolutely no savings at all. Yet, in order to get rich, you need to save at least 20 percent of your income off the top. Everyone has heard this before, but how many people actually follow this advice?
The term "pay yourself first" holds major weight here. While some don't find the importance in this, others realize that this not only provides a rainy-day fund in case of emergencies, but also moment-of-the-opportunity cash. When the right opportunity comes by, you need cash to seize it. If you don't have the cash, you just missed the proverbial boat.
In another survey, it was determined that nearly half of all Americans have no retirement savings. And that nearly 70 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts, and are one small emergency away from a complete and total monetary collapse.
3. Meticulously track expenses.
The next step to getting rich? Meticulously track every red cent that you spend. Not just the big expenses. Every single expense that you have should be tracked with a fine tooth comb. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship."
As easy as it might seem to ignore the little stuff, so to speak, the more you sweat the details, the better off you'll be. Cancel that gym membership you haven't used in six months. Eliminate that costly cable television plan. Stop buying expensive lattes and eating out when you know you can't afford to do it.
Download an app or purchase a small notebook and track every expense no matter how small or how big. Chart and plot those expenses over time using widely available software. See where your money is going. How much of that could you put towards savings every month that's otherwise being spent unwisely?
Related: John Travolta: 'I Know Where Every Cent I've Ever Spent Has Gone'
4. Eliminate bad debt.
Don't get me wrong, not all debt is bad. Some debt is good debt to have. Other debt, such as revolving credit card debt and high interest rate loans, is bad debt. You have to eliminate your bad debt. This is especially the case if all you're doing is paying the monthly payments.
You can't get rich in life when you spend a large majority of your income paying interest payments on money that you've already spent. Take the highest interest rate card or loan and double the minimum payments until it's paid off. Then, move to the next one. Then the next. Until it's all gone.
When you're debt-free from the bad debt (not the good debt like mortgages for investment properties and loans to grow you business, for example), take that money and put it towards your savings. The trick is not to go spending cash and splurging on a vacation or a new car once you're debt-free. Stay focused.
5. Own the roof over your head.
For most people, their home is their biggest investment. However, a large majority of the world rents its homes. While renting on a temporary basis isn't terrible, you should most certainly own the roof over your head if you're serious about your finances. It won't make you rich overnight, but by renting, you're paying someone else's mortgage. In effect, you're making someone else rich.
No matter what it takes, even if you have to downgrade your living situation, you should do what it takes to purchase a home. Sit down with a mortgage broker and assess your situation. Set some goals and create a plan of action.
Even if you don't have enough money saved for a down payment right now, figure out what it's going to take to buy your home. We're not talking about your dream home here. However, over time, the money spent on your mortgage is far better invested than money spent paying rent.
Related: Here's Why It Pays to Track Every Tiny Business Expense
6. Decimate your bad habits.
Bad habits hold us back from achieving many kinds of goals. They stop us from losing weight, making more money, saving, investing and everything in between. The only way you can actually get ahead in life is to decimate those bad habits. You need to quit the bad habits before they lead you down a deathly spiral.
It's hard to achieve something that takes so much of your energy, such as getting rich, without eliminating your bad habits first. I'm not just talking about poor financial habits; I'm also talking about any other habit that eats away at you, physically, emotionally or mentally.
Obviously, success in anything isn't just about eliminating the bad habits that hold us back; it's also about ensuring that we employ some of the best habits in life and the best habits in business to virtually guarantee our future outcomes and make progress on autopilot.
7. Set daily goals.
Getting rich is a monumental goal. However, you can't simply say that you want to be rich. First of all, you need an exact number and you need to have a specific date you'll achieve that by. That's the bigger picture. Beyond that bigger picture, you need to set goals on a daily basis.
Daily goal setting provides milestones on your way to your bigger goals. Break the big goal down to achievable daily goals that won't seem so overwhelming. For example, if you want a $10 million dollar net worth in the next five or 10 years, figure out what it's going to take on a daily basis to move closer to that goal.
Obviously, you'll have a hard time saving towards that massive goal of getting rich when you start out near ground zero or worse. However, compound interest is very powerful, and even if you don't save your way there, you can leverage the cash that you do make and tuck away to engage in smart investments that will produce high returns.
8. Manage your time effectively.
We all have the same amount of time in this world. You don't have more than the next person and that person doesn't have more time than another. No matter if they're a powerful politician, a business magnate or a famous athlete, they don't have more time than you do. Time is life's greatest equalizer.
However, what does matter is how effectively the time we do have is used. Those precious moments of every single day can easily be squandered. There's absolutely no way to get rich by wasting time on trivial pursuits. Manage your time by instituting a smart and effective time management system to stay on track towards your goals.
Related: 10 Money Habits That Will Help You Get Serious About Prosperity
9. Add massive amounts of value.
No matter what strategy you implement to make money (online or offline), without adding massive amounts of value, and doing it consistently over time, there's almost no chance that you'll get rich. Those that have added the most value to this world have amassed the greatest fortunes.
The simple truth is that, one of the most fundamental principles of success states that you need to do the most amount of work for the least initial return. If you look for shortcuts and hacks for getting rich quickly or without great amounts of effort, you'll most surely fail.
The problem? There are so many unscrupulous marketers who prey on individuals that are looking for that quick fix. Well, it doesn't exist. If you want to get rich, you need to add massive amounts of value, and you need to do it constantly without fail over time.
10. Build multiple streams of passive income.
Anyone who's serious about getting rich needs to build multiple streams of passive income. Passive income is incredibly important when it comes to amassing wealth. Simply put, you to need to generate your income on autopilot if you want to create a considerable net worth.
There are a number of passive income generating ideas that you could implement. Some of the most popular involve real estate and dividend income for those that can afford the often high-cost barrier of entry into those fields. Others opt for generating passive income by starting a blog, creating digital products such as ebooks or courses, and even creating online tutorials, just to name a few examples.
Whatever you decide to do, by focusing on passive income, you'll do the work once and get paid repeatedly. Alternatively, active income requires the consistent investment of your time to earn money. As soon as you stop working, you stop earning. There's no way to scale your wealth or income by solely engaging in active income. Focus on passive income and watch your wealth explode over time.
11. Invest in what you know.
If you're serious about getting rich, you have to invest in what you know. For example, if you're in the pharmaceuticals business, don't try to invest in an agriculture business. Get the point? Invest in what you know. If you know pharmaceuticals, get involved in biotech.
The better you know an industry or niche, the more likely you'll be able to spot ideas that could possibly create massive amounts of income for you in the future. No one else is going to do this for you. And when you do invest in something that you know, be sure to track it vehemently.
It's okay to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, as long as you watch them like a hawk. As soon as you get distracted or lose interest, that's when things go downhill. Pay acute attention if you're serious about compounding your wealth.
12. Mind your own business.
While you can get rich by working as an employee, it's far more difficult. Instead, you should start your own business and mind that business. Put all your heart and soul into the business and keep working at it even if you fail. And if you do fail at it, even if that happens repeatedly, learn from those failures and grow.
Henry Ford learned a lot through failure but didn't give up. Even though he went bankrupt once and was forced out of his second business, he didn't throw in the towel. He minded his own business. Every successful entrepreneur has failed. But the reason why they succeeded on such a massive scale was because they didn't give up.
R.L. Adams
Robert Adams is a writer, blogger, serial entrepreneur, software engineer, and best-selling author of dozens of technology, SEO, online marketing and self-development books, audiobooks and courses.
Read more
http://j.mp/2n8krOi via Entrepreneur: Latest Articles URL : http://j.mp/1PSmwRr
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Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes”
“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.”
Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool.
[If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your first dip into his wisdom should be “A Doctor’s Touch,” his TED talk from 2011 with over 1.5 million views. You will thank me for pointing you to this pearl. You will want to know more. But before diving deeply, let’s return to the main vein of this post, Dr. T’s latest].
We want our physicians to know us, deeply indeed, through all of our “omes:” genome, proteome, metabolome, transcriptome, and so on, Dr. V observes. We want our physicians to give us time and attention, “to acknowledge the locus of disease on our body and not on a biopsy or an image or a report,” he continues.
Ultimately, we want our doctors to know, “what we live for and would die for,” Dr. V concludes his forward.
Thus begins the promise of Deep Medicine, and how AI can make healthcare human again, via Dr. Topol’s tagline to the title.
This book picks up where The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine leave off…on the future of medicine, versus what’s led up to where we are now. In the first chapter introducing the concept of “deep medicine,” Dr. Topol starts with the
He follows up the promise of AI in chapter two, discussing the deep economic mess American health care is in. This is familiar territory here in Health Populi where we cover every nook and cranny of dismal U.S. health economics, and hopeful green shoots for making health care more cost-effective, high quality, engaging and even enchanting-by-design. “Shallow Medicine” is the theme of this discussion, which includes the word cloud shown here describing Americans’ views on doctors in 2017, published in a JAMA Surgery article called, “Patient Perceptions About Their Physician in 2 Words: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
The U.S. spends too much money for too little ROI on that spending, from hospital care and dental services to prescription drugs and what ultimately illustrates wasted life and potential in American society: maternal, infant and child mortality, which is by far the worst outcome in a developed nation and as bad as some much poorer countries experience.
Shallow calls for Going Deep for medical diagnosis, Dr. Topol argues, talking about the opportunities afforded by looking at a cluster of symptoms, second (or more) opinions, crowdsourcing diagnoses, and leveraging citizen science: the role of engaged lay people who share the details of their illnesses and pay-it-forward through that sharing — for peer patients today, and future patients.
Dr. Topol then teaches us about the Skinny on Deep Learning, making sure we understand that getting labels and “ground truths” right is critical for building useful algorithms. But wait — what’s an algorithm, anyway? It’s more than “if this, then that,” Dr. T. warns. He quotes Massimo Mazzotti of UC Berkeley, who calls out that “algorithm” means a program running on a physical machine, as well as its effects on other systems. This is obviously important as doctors grow to count on AI in medicine with a systems perspective on human health.
Furthermore, Dr. T. refers us to Yuval Noah Harari whose book Homo Deus is groundbreaking (and a must-read for Health Populi readers, too). “‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world. If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions….99 percent of our decisions…are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires,” Harari wrote in his book. He’s very concerned about faith in algorithms’ power, Dr. T observes, noting Harari says that faith is “dataism.”
With this caveat in mind, Dr. T explains that algorithms lie on a continuum from human guided to entirely machine guided. These latter algorithms are the deep learning ones, deep neural networks (DNNs). Four converging forces underlie DNNs:
Big Data sets
Dedicated graphic processing units (GPUs) which are the founding for speedy computations
Cloud computing and the ability to store massive amounts of data, and
Open-source algorithms.
DNNs have already been adopted in gaming, images (useful for image recognition for biometrics, for example), voice/speech/translation, and autonomous cars. Ironically, Dr T points out that “neural networks” really aren’t all that “neural.” Brains really don’t work like machines.
Deep learning AI complements human learning, Dr. T asserts. There’s bias in algorithms, and bias in human thinking, too, explored in the chapter “Deep Liabilities.” We know bias is, “baked into the system,” Dr. T admits, because patients in clinical trials are rarely generalizable to the overall population. The inequities have medical implications, Harari wrote in Homo Deus: “twentieth century medicine aimed to heal the sick, but twenty-first century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.” There’s an AI-fueled gap between have’s and have not’s, with AI biases often adversely impacting the most vulnerable people in society.
With this further caveat in mind, recognizing that U.S. public policy in current form protects neither the vulnerable nor the hackable, Dr. T talks about the promise of AI to enhance doctors’ ability to diagnose conditions “with patterns” and without patterns, along with detecting and supporting patients’ mental health. AI also supports health system management (like preventing readmissions or predicting staff requirements over a time period), discovering cures, informing nutrition based on N’s of 1’s, and providing care to people who may live in rural or under-served areas.
The promise is to drive Deep Empathy, the last chapter hopefully concludes. An introductory quote from Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) suggests where this section will go: “By these means we may hope to achieve not indeed a brave new world, no sort of perfectionist Utopia, but the more modest, and much more desirable objective — a genuinely human society.” Ideally, AI can give the clinician and the patient the gift of time, replacing the “scut work” and wasted work-flow with time to be human. Beyond time, people on both sides of the diagnosis and treatment process desire empathy. No machine will alleviate “suffering,” Dr T writes: this requires human-to-human bonding, time and trust.
The last page of the book takes on the book’s title, “Deep Medicine.” “We’re still in the earliest days of AI in medicine….long on computer algorithmic validation…but very short on real-world, clinical proof of effectiveness,” Dr T realizes. The triad of deep phenotyping, understanding a person’s many layered-data, deep learning, and deep empathy, could remedy the economic unsustainability in healthcare, he hypothesizes. That comes second to what’s even more important, bringing the book’s optimistic tagline full circle: “Presence. Empathy. Trust. Caring. Being Human.”
AI can help us restore the humanity between physicians and patients. At the end, Dr T says we must embrace the opportunity to do so.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: In an essay last week in Brookings, Bob Kocher and Zeke Emanuel ask the question, “Will Robots Replace Doctors?” Kocher, a long-time venture capitalist who has funded many a health care innovator via the VC firm Venrock, and Dr. Emanuel, who heads the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania along with being a venture partner at Oak HC/FT, speak to the public policy, economic, clinical and all-to-human challenge of AI bias. “Before we entrust our care to AI systems and ‘doctor robots,’ we must first commit to identifying bias in datasets and fixing them as much as possible. Furthermore, AI systems need to be evaluated not just on the accuracy of their recommendations, but also on whether they perpetuate or mitigate disparities in care and outcomes,” Kocher and Emanuel assert.
Addressing biased data sets and algorithms must be part of a new deal on health citizenship for Americans, who must also be in control of their personal health data and have a right to quality health care without regard to what state they live in, or whether they’re urban or rural communities. Bias delivered via AI is still bias, and would reinforce and exacerbate the health disparities that have marred American health care for decades and continue to do so.
My family and I are proponents of the Slow Food Movement. Founded in Italy, Slow Food is based on the idea that eating locally sourced food, cooked at home, by hand, shared and savored with other people bolsters health on all levels – physical, emotional, financial. That Eric Topol devoted an entire chapter to “Deep Diet” is further evidence that the good doctor gets more than digital health innovations: he also embraces the importance of food-as-medicine and nutrition as a social determinant of health, also one of grand disparities underlying health inequity in the U.S.
One of our family mantras (in addition to Slow Food and the importance and gift of shared family mealtime) we ingrained in our daughter was to “go slow to go fast.” Festina lente, an Italian grandmother might quote Emperor Augustus or the Medici clan: “make haste, slowly.”
With AI married to medicine, we can “go fast to go slow,” to the benefit of both patient and provider.
The post Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.
Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com
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Text
Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes”
“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.”
Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool.
[If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your first dip into his wisdom should be “A Doctor’s Touch,” his TED talk from 2011 with over 1.5 million views. You will thank me for pointing you to this pearl. You will want to know more. But before diving deeply, let’s return to the main vein of this post, Dr. T’s latest].
We want our physicians to know us, deeply indeed, through all of our “omes:” genome, proteome, metabolome, transcriptome, and so on, Dr. V observes. We want our physicians to give us time and attention, “to acknowledge the locus of disease on our body and not on a biopsy or an image or a report,” he continues.
Ultimately, we want our doctors to know, “what we live for and would die for,” Dr. V concludes his forward.
Thus begins the promise of Deep Medicine, and how AI can make healthcare human again, via Dr. Topol’s tagline to the title.
This book picks up where The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine leave off…on the future of medicine, versus what’s led up to where we are now. In the first chapter introducing the concept of “deep medicine,” Dr. Topol starts with the
He follows up the promise of AI in chapter two, discussing the deep economic mess American health care is in. This is familiar territory here in Health Populi where we cover every nook and cranny of dismal U.S. health economics, and hopeful green shoots for making health care more cost-effective, high quality, engaging and even enchanting-by-design. “Shallow Medicine” is the theme of this discussion, which includes the word cloud shown here describing Americans’ views on doctors in 2017, published in a JAMA Surgery article called, “Patient Perceptions About Their Physician in 2 Words: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
The U.S. spends too much money for too little ROI on that spending, from hospital care and dental services to prescription drugs and what ultimately illustrates wasted life and potential in American society: maternal, infant and child mortality, which is by far the worst outcome in a developed nation and as bad as some much poorer countries experience.
Shallow calls for Going Deep for medical diagnosis, Dr. Topol argues, talking about the opportunities afforded by looking at a cluster of symptoms, second (or more) opinions, crowdsourcing diagnoses, and leveraging citizen science: the role of engaged lay people who share the details of their illnesses and pay-it-forward through that sharing — for peer patients today, and future patients.
Dr. Topol then teaches us about the Skinny on Deep Learning, making sure we understand that getting labels and “ground truths” right is critical for building useful algorithms. But wait — what’s an algorithm, anyway? It’s more than “if this, then that,” Dr. T. warns. He quotes Massimo Mazzotti of UC Berkeley, who calls out that “algorithm” means a program running on a physical machine, as well as its effects on other systems. This is obviously important as doctors grow to count on AI in medicine with a systems perspective on human health.
Furthermore, Dr. T. refers us to Yuval Noah Harari whose book Homo Deus is groundbreaking (and a must-read for Health Populi readers, too). “‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world. If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions….99 percent of our decisions…are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires,” Harari wrote in his book. He’s very concerned about faith in algorithms’ power, Dr. T observes, noting Harari says that faith is “dataism.”
With this caveat in mind, Dr. T explains that algorithms lie on a continuum from human guided to entirely machine guided. These latter algorithms are the deep learning ones, deep neural networks (DNNs). Four converging forces underlie DNNs:
Big Data sets
Dedicated graphic processing units (GPUs) which are the founding for speedy computations
Cloud computing and the ability to store massive amounts of data, and
Open-source algorithms.
DNNs have already been adopted in gaming, images (useful for image recognition for biometrics, for example), voice/speech/translation, and autonomous cars. Ironically, Dr T points out that “neural networks” really aren’t all that “neural.” Brains really don’t work like machines.
Deep learning AI complements human learning, Dr. T asserts. There’s bias in algorithms, and bias in human thinking, too, explored in the chapter “Deep Liabilities.” We know bias is, “baked into the system,” Dr. T admits, because patients in clinical trials are rarely generalizable to the overall population. The inequities have medical implications, Harari wrote in Homo Deus: “twentieth century medicine aimed to heal the sick, but twenty-first century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.” There’s an AI-fueled gap between have’s and have not’s, with AI biases often adversely impacting the most vulnerable people in society.
With this further caveat in mind, recognizing that U.S. public policy in current form protects neither the vulnerable nor the hackable, Dr. T talks about the promise of AI to enhance doctors’ ability to diagnose conditions “with patterns” and without patterns, along with detecting and supporting patients’ mental health. AI also supports health system management (like preventing readmissions or predicting staff requirements over a time period), discovering cures, informing nutrition based on N’s of 1’s, and providing care to people who may live in rural or under-served areas.
The promise is to drive Deep Empathy, the last chapter hopefully concludes. An introductory quote from Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) suggests where this section will go: “By these means we may hope to achieve not indeed a brave new world, no sort of perfectionist Utopia, but the more modest, and much more desirable objective — a genuinely human society.” Ideally, AI can give the clinician and the patient the gift of time, replacing the “scut work” and wasted work-flow with time to be human. Beyond time, people on both sides of the diagnosis and treatment process desire empathy. No machine will alleviate “suffering,” Dr T writes: this requires human-to-human bonding, time and trust.
The last page of the book takes on the book’s title, “Deep Medicine.” “We’re still in the earliest days of AI in medicine….long on computer algorithmic validation…but very short on real-world, clinical proof of effectiveness,” Dr T realizes. The triad of deep phenotyping, understanding a person’s many layered-data, deep learning, and deep empathy, could remedy the economic unsustainability in healthcare, he hypothesizes. That comes second to what’s even more important, bringing the book’s optimistic tagline full circle: “Presence. Empathy. Trust. Caring. Being Human.”
AI can help us restore the humanity between physicians and patients. At the end, Dr T says we must embrace the opportunity to do so.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: In an essay last week in Brookings, Bob Kocher and Zeke Emanuel ask the question, “Will Robots Replace Doctors?” Kocher, a long-time venture capitalist who has funded many a health care innovator via the VC firm Venrock, and Dr. Emanuel, who heads the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania along with being a venture partner at Oak HC/FT, speak to the public policy, economic, clinical and all-to-human challenge of AI bias. “Before we entrust our care to AI systems and ‘doctor robots,’ we must first commit to identifying bias in datasets and fixing them as much as possible. Furthermore, AI systems need to be evaluated not just on the accuracy of their recommendations, but also on whether they perpetuate or mitigate disparities in care and outcomes,” Kocher and Emanuel assert.
Addressing biased data sets and algorithms must be part of a new deal on health citizenship for Americans, who must also be in control of their personal health data and have a right to quality health care without regard to what state they live in, or whether they’re urban or rural communities. Bias delivered via AI is still bias, and would reinforce and exacerbate the health disparities that have marred American health care for decades and continue to do so.
My family and I are proponents of the Slow Food Movement. Founded in Italy, Slow Food is based on the idea that eating locally sourced food, cooked at home, by hand, shared and savored with other people bolsters health on all levels – physical, emotional, financial. That Eric Topol devoted an entire chapter to “Deep Diet” is further evidence that the good doctor gets more than digital health innovations: he also embraces the importance of food-as-medicine and nutrition as a social determinant of health, also one of grand disparities underlying health inequity in the U.S.
One of our family mantras (in addition to Slow Food and the importance and gift of shared family mealtime) we ingrained in our daughter was to “go slow to go fast.” Festina lente, an Italian grandmother might quote Emperor Augustus or the Medici clan: “make haste, slowly.”
With AI married to medicine, we can “go fast to go slow,” to the benefit of both patient and provider.
The post Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.
Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes” posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com
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