Computer says ON

Last December, before Elon Musk started wielding his billion dollar chainsaw, an article in Futurism...              

<parenthesis subject="The link not followed">
( I had, incidentally, published a link to it in an article in The Byte quoted in this:

AI models routinely hallucinate and make up facts. They have no understanding of language, but instead use statistical predictions to generate cogent-sounding text based on the human writing they've ingested 

But I'd made the mistake of leaving a link in that I hadn't followed. Usually I remove any links that I've not followed; it seems to me to be a requirement of responsible blogsmansanship – making sure my blog doesn't lead people astray.) 
</parenthesis>

... pointed out that information seen through the distorting mirror of Elon Musk's imagination (EMformation?) might not be entirely reliable: 

The astonishingly gullible billionaire ...

<parenthesis type="silly quip">
(a sequel to The Very Hungry Caterpillar?) 
</parenthesis>

...has a well-documented tendency to spread misinformation, an embarrassing and often dangerous quality that's undermined his standing in the world of science and technology.

In fact, even his own AI company's chatbot Grok — which Musk himself has branded as a brash truth-teller — has a pretty good grasp on the situation.

"Yes, there is substantial evidence and analysis suggesting that Elon Musk has spread misinformation on various topics, including elections, to a very large audience through his social media platform, X," Grok responded when asked if "Elon Musk spread misinformation to billions of people."

Source

 The article goes on:

Grok pointed to the wealth of misinformation Musk has shared in recent years, especially when it comes to the most recent presidential election.

"Musk's posts related to elections, which have contained misleading or false claims, have amassed billions of views," Grok wrote. "Musk has shared manipulated videos and debunked claims about voting processes, including allegations about non-citizen voting, which are common themes in misinformation narratives."

Case in point, less than a day after Musk cosigned a meme that called people who "still believe everything shown in [sic] news" dumb, he shared a video that purportedly showed "armed communist Maduro gangs... storming polling stations in Punta Cardón," Venezuela.

As many users quickly pointed out, the video actually showed thieves attempting to steal air conditioners.

This reminded me...

<parenthesis>
Not sure why. Perhaps it was that the bad uses of AI brought to mind the possible good ones. That's me – always looking on the bright side.
</parenthesis>

... of a recent addition to the The Rest Is Politics: Leading series. To quote that website's description:

How many people are going to die as a result of American support for USAID programs being removed? What are the limits of thinking of AI as the silver bullet for healthcare? How do we bring the doubling of the human lifespan to everyone alive without bankrupting our societies? 

Atul Gawande, late of USAID, and soon to be reinstated as a Professor at Harvard...

<trump-warning>
(that is, if the His Royal Mendaciousness doesn't have it closed down for the bare-faced effrontery of having been founded before the USA was [and shame on all the other institutions and people [particularly politicians] kowtowing to the infantile/amoral vandal...

<tangent>
[Meanwhile, in Ukraine, where traditional diplomats want 'a just peace' he wants 'just peace' so that he can get on with general exploitation]
</tangent>

...]). As Anthony Scaramucci says in another Goalhanger podcast, we can look forward to "a Golden Age of Corruption'.
 </trump-warning>

... is well worth a listen He talks with wit and wisdom (and, appropriately enough for a surgeon, incision) about not only Trump and his lying hench-nerd (to call Musk a henchman would be an insult to henchmen), but about the uses of AI in medicine. At one point he says that in the average clinic every hour of contact with patients requires two hours' work on documentation. 

Which adds weight to a Medscape survey on the use of AI in medicine, published last September, here

   

Of all the areas considered by respondents (745 UK based doctors), 'Administration and recordkeeping' us seen by doctors as potentially the most promising area  for using AI.

But this doesn't mean much; they might be wrong in that belief; and UK-based doctors may not be the best judges of this anyway; I don't know. Besides, AI may just be the deus ex machina that – in this pipe dream – gets rid of all the pen-pushing.

 Towards the end of the survey report we get to the main event:

That last comment is really GOSH-worthy. And don't you agree that the penultimate word is doing a lot of heavy-lifting?

But, although I can't say I'm  impressed by the survey, the message seems to be that AI can have a big influence on medicine as long as expectations are kept in check. The tech-bros waving their iPhones at Atul Gawande and saying 'This is gonna replace you' are wrong. As he says 'How is it going to deliver [a] baby?'

There's good news: 

 

<tangent>
Oh dear. That "61% vs 47%" is a symptom of the confusion and haste that characterizes this report. They should've used AI – and if they did they should have done a decent job of post-editing.
<tangent>

 Enough. But before I go I must mention the next WCS concert, at All Saints in ... oo-er. less than a month.

b

For The Record

Earlier this week I received the latest copy ('latest' being the 2023-24 edition, celebrating 40 years of 'women at Corpus') of my college's annual  magazine, The Record. I did a quick sum and realized that this meant '40 years of women resident at Corpus'.  

<autobiographical-note>

The reason for my temporary confusion was that when I first dined in Corpus, having arrived in late September 1971 (just before my first term – the Oral exam for foreign languages being held before we'd been exposed to anything like tuition) women were admitted to dine at High Table. (This barefaced assault on the patriarchy was greeted by what Nigel Starmer-Smith might have called 'some ill-mannered hissing'). To mark the occasion there were four courses, and as this was my first experience of Formal Hall, my expectations of my second Hall were rudely dashed.  

I wrote about this (with a paranoid self-justificatory note about the timing of Cambridge terms) here.
</autobiographical-note>

Having skimmed through The Record I was about to put it out of my mind ...

<tangent>
(the role of recycling in this process is a matter for ongoing debate with MrsK)
</tangent>

...when I took a last look at the Old Members section, which passes on bits of information about alumni/-ae, listed by year of matriculation and found that I had nearly missed this:

Excerpt from 'Old Members' section of The Record

The text was vaguely familiar, but in this wordy (linkless) form almost entirely useless. Guiltily I remembered a note I had written two or three years ago, with links to posts with 'Corpus-related content'. I had looked in the 2022-23 edition to see whether my attempt at publicity had borne fruit, and then forgotten it.

But in a blog with well over 500 entries, posted over a dozen years, it would be ridiculous to draw from that entry in The Record the conclusion that the content was always related to Corpus. My subjects are many and various, often relating to language and music. I append an example  by way of a PS (or makeweight) that can safely be ignored by the non Corpuscular.

Anyway I hope Blogger's servers can handle the surge in traffic now that I've included these links:

• Chris Andrew's book (not books)
• Augustine Gospels
• Singing in Chapel
• Marlowe portrait
• Chronopage also here and here
• Wilkins (New Court architect)
• DNA Origami/Rutherford

b

PS

On BBC Radio 4 the other  day...

<correction>
This was in fact more than a year ago. I just left it unfinished and unpublished.
</correction>

 ...in a programme I didn't have time to digest, but will revisit..

<parenthesis>
(I did, but found I had no more to add)
</parenthesis>

...a Spanish-speaking vulcanologist...

 <parenthesis>
(I think they used the Globish volcanologist, but I'm a fan of Latinate derivations...

<glossary>
[volcanoes got their name from Vulcan, and those ignorant Romans didn't know squat about seismology and stuff ]
</glossary>

...at the possible expense of international understanding.)
 </parenthesis>

... talking about an eruption he had seen. And he said 'I couldn't stop to watch [the eruption]'.

His English was good enough for him to use "couldn't", but not good enough to stretch to 'couldn't stop watching' (let alone the idiomatic 'couldn't take my eyes off it').

This reminded me of a picture shared in an ESOL teachers' group on Facebook...

<autobiographical-note>
My biography in The Record doesn't mention the fact that, after the skinflints at HP laid me off a few months short of my 20th year (when they'd have had to fork out for an award), I became a language tacher.
</autobiographical-note>

...discussed here

<pre_script>

[This] recalled for me a diagram (I won't say picture) that I used to use to show the difference between "stop + infinitive' (the right-thinking word in the ESOL world is "to-infinitive")... and "stop + gerund*"):

</pre_script>

Exofarts?

Good old Cambridge. Researchers there have really got their finger on the pulse. Theyve been looking at hycean planets ...

<glossary>

HYCEAN is a porte-manteau of hydrogen and ocean. Wikipedia calls them
"a hypothetical type of planet that features a liquid water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere", but the 'hypothetical' is based on a 2023 paper. I admit I haven't been keeping up with the literature....: 

</glossary>

...::

Astronomers have detected the most promising signs yet of a possible biosignature outside the solar system, although they remain cautious.

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, have detected the chemical fingerprints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b, which orbits its star in the habitable zone.

On Earth, DMS and DMDS are only produced by life, primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton. While an unknown chemical process may be the source of these molecules in K2-18b’s atmosphere, the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.

Original paper 

The article goes on:

The observations have reached the ‘three-sigma’ level of statistical significance – meaning there is a 0.3% probability that they occurred by chance. To reach the accepted classification for scientific discovery, the observations would have to cross the five-sigma threshold, meaning there would be below a 0.00006% probability they occurred by chance.

Well I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and turn a blind eye to that < .001% chance that they've got it wrong. But K2-18b is 124 light years away. In other words, a few years after my great grandfather Donald celebrated the birth of his son Archibald, the light that we see today from K2 (which I thought was a mountain anyway) had just set off.

Given that K2-18b is an exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than the sun) and the chemicals mentioned ("dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS)") are on Earth produced only by life, the exact provenance of these exofarts doesn't really bother me anyway.

And finally

I've noticed of late that something's been happening to "it's your fault", especially during the 21st century. I suppose it's down to the growing unfashionability of the idea of "fault": all this judgmental stuff isn't really politically correct. 

This Ngram from Google Books shows that in the year 2000 "it's your fault" was more than 12 times more common than "it's on you" and "it's down to you" combined, but by 2021 it was less than 7 times more common than combined sightings of the millennial arrivistes – still a good deal more common, but not nearly as much. 

That's all she wrote.

b