Tag: technology

Healthcare professionals app Doximity promises crackdown after doctors are accused of sharing “misinformation”

Doctors who take to social media to discuss their opposition to various COVID measures are facing calls for censorship from media outlets.

CNBC says it discovered plenty of vaccine skeptic statements on Doximity, a doctor-to-doctor networking site. While the reports shared on the app are from well-known news organizations and scientific journals, the comments, CNBC says, appear to be full of “misinformation” about vaccination safety, mask use, and natural immunity, among other things.

Dr Paul Malarik, a retired psychiatrist, spends up to 50 hours a month in pop-up clinics near his home in San Luis Obispo, California, helping to deliver COVID-19 vaccines. According to him, when he logs onto Doximity and sees vaccine skeptic remarks, he’s particularly disturbed.

Doximity is only open to healthcare professionals in the United States, and members must be verified before they can join. No one may post anonymously on the site.

It has long been branded as “LinkedIn for doctors,” had its stock market debut in June and quickly rose to a market valuation of $10 billion. According to the company’s IPO prospectus, it has 1.8 million members, including 80% of doctors. They utilize the site to remain in touch with one another, discuss research, keep up with industry news, and securely interact with patients.

Doximity likewise doesn’t let users publish their articles or stories; instead, it curates content from medical and scientific journals as well as mainstream news. Each user receives a personalized feed of aggregated material depending on their choices, such as their field of medical practice.

Members of Doximity may comment on articles, which is where the alleged “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” appear to thrive, according to CNBC.

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Scanning your iPhone for Pegasus, NSO Group’s malware

In collaboration with more than a dozen other news organizations The Guardian recently published an exposé about Pegasus, a toolkit for infecting mobile phones that is sold to governments around the world by NSO Group. It’s used to target political leaders and their families, human rights activists, political dissidents, journalists, and so on, and surreptitiously download their messages/photos/location data, record their microphone, and otherwise spy on them. As part of the investigation, Amnesty International wrote a blog post with their forensic analysis of several compromised phones, as well as an open source tool, Mobile Verification Toolkit, for scanning your mobile device for these indicators. MVT supports both iOS and Android, and in this blog post we’ll install and run the scanner against my iOS device.

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The Pentagon Is Experimenting With Using Artificial Intelligence To “See Days In Advance”

U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) recently conducted a series of tests known as the Global Information Dominance Experiments, or GIDE, which combined global sensor networks, artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and cloud computing resources in an attempt to “achieve information dominance” and “decision-making superiority.” According to NORTHCOM leadership, the AI and machine learning tools tested in the experiments could someday offer the Pentagon a robust “ability to see days in advance,” meaning it could predict the future with some reliability based on evaluating patterns, anomalies, and trends in massive data sets. While the concept sounds like something out of Minority Report, the commander of NORTHCOM says this capability is already enabled by tools readily available to the Pentagon. 

General Glen VanHerck, Commander of NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told reporters at the Pentagon this week that this was the third test of GIDE, conducted in conjunction with all 11 combatant commands “collaborating in the same information space using the same exact capabilities.” The experiment largely centered around contested logistics and information advantage, two cornerstones of the new warfighting paradigm recently proposed by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A full transcript of VanHerck’s press briefing is available online. 

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Militaries Plunder Science Fiction for Technology Ideas, But Turn a Blind Eye to the Genre’s Social Commentary

Military planning is a complicated endeavour, calling upon experts in logistics and infrastructure to predict resource availability and technological advancements. Long-range military planning, deciding what to invest in now to prepare armed forces for the world in thirty years’ time, is even more difficult.

One of the most interesting tools for thinking about future defence technology isn’t big data forecasting and the use of synthetic training environments, but narrative and imagination. And we get this from science fiction.

That might sound fanciful, but many militaries are already engaging with the genre. The US military and the French army use science fiction writers to generate future threat scenarios. The Australian Defence College advocates for the reading of science fiction and, in Germany, Project Cassandra uses novels to predict the world’s next conflict. The Sigma Forum, a science fiction think tank, has been offering forecasting services to US officials for years.

But while science fiction provides military planners with a tantalising glimpse of future weaponry, from exoskeletons to mind-machine interfaces, the genre is always about more than flashy new gadgets. It’s about anticipating the unforeseen ways in which these technologies could affect humans and society – and this extra context is often overlooked by the officials deciding which technologies to invest in for future conflicts.

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Physicists Have Developed a New Way to Levitate Objects Using Sound Only

A newly developed method of levitating and manipulating tiny objects using sound waves could represent a major step forward for the technology.

Engineers in Japan have figured out how to pick up objects from reflective surfaces using acoustic levitation. Although they can’t yet do so reliably, the advance could help unlock the full potential of the manipulation of physical objects using nothing but sound.

Biomedical engineering, nanotechnology and the development of pharmaceuticals are some of the fields in which manipulating objects without touching them is potentially really useful. We can already do this with a technology called optical tweezers, which use lasers to generate sufficient radiation pressure to levitate and move extremely small particles.

Acoustic tweezers – where pressure generated with sound waves can be used to move particles – have the potential to be an even more powerful tool. They could be used to manipulate a wider range of materials, and at larger sizes – up to the millimeter scale.

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Dubai makes its own RAIN to tackle 122F heat: Drones blast clouds with electrical charge to produce downpours

The United Arab Emirates is creating its own rain using drones that fly into clouds and unleash electrical charges to beat the sweltering 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) heat. 

The rain is formed using drone technology that gives clouds an electric shock to ‘cajole them’ into clumping together and producing precipitation. 

The UAE is one of the most arid countries on Earth, and it hopes the technique could help to increase its meagre annual rainfall. 

And it is working. Video footage released by the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology shows monsoon-like downpours across the country which create a sheet of rain on the highways. 

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World-first CRISPR-edited sugarcane helps reduce environmental impact

Sugarcane is an important food crop, but it’s large environmental impact means there’s plenty of room for improvement. Unfortunately it’s tricky and time-consuming to breed new varieties, but now researchers have used CRISPR gene-editing to do so quickly and more easily.

Sugarcane is a key source of sugar, obviously, but that’s not its only product – the oil in the leaves and stems is often used to make bioethanol for greener fuels and plastics. But these don’t come cheap – sugarcane takes up a large percentage of farmland in many countries, which fuels deforestation. It also takes a huge amount of water to grow, and creates plenty of waste and pollution during processing.

Some of these problems can be addressed with new varieties of the plant, but sugarcane is frustratingly difficult to crossbreed due to its complex genome. It requires a lot of back-and-forth to filter out desirable traits from unwanted ones, so new versions can take years to develop.

That’s where CRISPR comes in. This powerful gene-editing tool allows scientists to switch off genes or cut them out and replace them with more useful ones. It could be useful in treating a range of diseases, but also for improving crops – and now researchers have used CRISPR to develop a couple of new varieties of sugarcane.

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The Evil Twins Of Transhumanism And Technocracy

Technocracy is to the transformation of society as Transhumanism is to the transformation of the human condition of people who would live in that society.

Both are underpinned by a religious belief known as Scientism that says that science is a god and that scientists, engineers and technologists are the priesthood that translates findings into practice.

It is a fatal error to equate Scientism with science. True science explores the natural world using the time-tested scientific method of repeated experimentation and validation. By comparison, Scientism is a speculative, metaphysical worldview about the nature and reality of the universe and man’s relation to it.

Scientism refutes traditional religious views, morals and philosophy and instead looks to science as the source for personal and societal moral value.

The relationship between Technocracy and Transhumanism can be seen as early as 1933 when Harold Loeb wrote Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like:

“Technocracy envisages another form of domestication, a form in which man may become more than man… Technocracy is designed to develop the so-called higher faculties in every man and not to make each man resigned to the lot into which he may be born… Through breeding with specific individuals for specific purposes… A technocracy, then, should in time produce a race of men superior in quality to any now known on earth…”

Thus, Loeb saw Technocracy (the society) as producing a superior quality of man by applying advanced technology to the human condition.

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4 Ethics-Breaking Biological Experiments Touted by Chinese Scientists as ‘World Firsts’

Throughout the world, scientific research and experiments involving ethical issues must first pass the scrutiny of ethics committees. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has conducted many experiments in the field of biomedical and genetic engineering that break human ethical boundaries.

China began implementing the Ethical Review of Biomedical Research Involving Humans on Dec. 1, 2016. However, 122 Chinese scientists who co-signed an open letter in 2018 to oppose gene-edited babies criticized China’s biomedical ethics review as a “sham.”

In the United States, as ethical and moral regulations on animal research have become stricter, budgets and funding have tended to decrease in recent years, making China the most attractive place for such experiments. For example, in 2014, the U.S. government imposed a funding pause of gain of function research involving influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronaviruses, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses. In 2019, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would stop conducting or funding studies on mammals by 2035.

In 2011, the CCP made it a national development goal to create primate disease models through cloning and other biotechnologies. According to the 2020 China Biomedical Industry Development Report published by Chinese Venture, “the overall biopharmaceutical market in China increased from $28.7 billion to $49.6 billion from 2016 to 2019, at a CAGR (Compound annual growth rate) of 20 percent. It is expected to reach $130.2 billion in 2025.”

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