Tag Archives: prioritize

Palantir Claims UK Physicians Prioritize “Ideology Over Patients’ Interests” in NHS Data Legislation

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Palantir, a U.S. data firm collaborating with the Israeli Defense Department, criticized British doctors for prioritizing “ideology over patient interests” following backlash against its contract to manage NHS data.

Louis Mosley, executive vice president of Palantir, recently addressed the British Medical Association, which labeled the £330 million agreement to create a unified platform for NHS data—covering everything from patient information to bed availability—as a potential threat to public trust in the NHS data system.

In a formal resolution, the association expressed concerns over the unclear processing of sensitive data by Palantir, a company co-founded by Trump donor Peter Thiel. They highlighted the firm’s “study on discriminatory policing software in the U.S.” and its “close ties with the U.S. government, which often overlooks international law.”

However, Mosley dismissed these critiques during his testimony to lawmakers on the Commons Science and Technology Committee on Tuesday. Palantir has also secured contracts for processing large-scale data for the Ministry of Defense, police, and local governments.


Libertarian Thiel, who named the company after “Seeing Stones” from the Lord of the Rings series, previously remarked that British citizens’ admiration for the NHS reflects “Stockholm syndrome.” However, Mosley claimed he was not speaking on behalf of Palantir.

Palantir also develops AI-driven military targeting systems and software that consolidates and analyzes data across multiple systems, including healthcare.

“It’s incorrect to accuse us of lacking transparency or that we operate in secrecy,” claimed Mosley. “I believe the BMA has chosen ideology over the interests of patients. Our software aims to enhance patient care by streamlining treatment, making it more effective, and ultimately improving the efficiency of the healthcare system.”

In 2023, the government awarded Palantir a contract to establish a new NHS “Federated Data Platform,” though some local NHS trusts have raised concerns that the system might not only be subpar compared to existing technologies but could also diminish functionality, as reported. Palantir is also among the tech companies reported by the Guardian last week, which recently led to a discussion with Attorney General Shabana Mahmood about solutions for the prison and probation crisis, including robotic support for prisoners and tracking devices.

During the session, Senator Chi Onwurah questioned the appropriateness of involving the company in the NHS while also working with the Israeli Defense Forces in military applications in Gaza.

Mosley did not disclose operational specifics regarding Palantir’s role with Israeli authorities. Their offerings include a system labeled “supporting soldiers with AI-driven kill chains and responsibly integrating target identification.”

Onwurah remarked on the necessity for cultural change within the NHS to foster acceptance of new data systems, posing the question to Mosley: “What about a unified patient record in the future?”

“Trust should depend more on our capabilities than anything else,” Mosley responded. “Are we delivering on our promises? Are we improving patient experiences by making them quicker and more efficient? If so, we should be trusted.”

Liberal Democrat Martin Wrigley expressed serious concerns about the interoperability of the data systems provided by Palantir for both health and defense, while Conservative MP Kit Malthouse inquired about the military’s potential use of Palantir’s capacity to process large datasets to target individuals based on specific characteristics. Mosley reassured: “Our software enables that type of functionality and provides extensive governance and control to organizations managing those risks.”

Malthouse remarked, “It sounds like a Savior.”

The hearing also revealed that Palantir continues to engage Global Counsel, a lobbying firm co-founded by the current U.S. ambassador. Mosley denied any claims that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s Washington, D.C. office “through appropriate channels,” clarifying that Mandelson resigned as a global advisor “in early 2025.” According to the consultant’s website.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Don’t focus on looks, prioritize skin care for your health

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Dr. Jeremy Burgess/Science Photo Library

Our skin is not only our largest organ, but also the one we are most familiar with. We see it, touch it, wash it, and inspect it all the time. Nevertheless, when thinking about taking care of it, our minds often jump to aesthetics. We are inundated with advertisements for lotions and drugs that promise to improve our appearance, as if sexual appeal is all that matters to this special organ.

But there are many reasons to take care of your skin beyond cosmetic concerns. According to new research, this condition can have ripple effects on other parts of the body. Because blood vessels run densely beneath the surface, inflammation that starts in the skin can easily spread to the heart and brain, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia. Wrinkles don't just reflect our age, they can actually accelerate the aging process. Therefore, you should think of skin care like exercise. The best reason to take care of your skin isn't for appearance, but for the undeniable health benefits.

Therefore, keeping the epidermis in good condition should be a top priority for anyone who wants to increase their chances of living a long life. That's why we've created a special report summarizing what we know about the best ways to care for your epidermis (see Why caring for your skin is so important to your long-term health).

Taking a scientific approach helps you make informed decisions about new products

As evidence mounts about the importance of skin to general health, research on how to care for it is moving from a marketing campaign for health care products to the realm of proper scientific research.

For example, certain foods have been shown to reduce damage from air pollution and the sun's UV rays, and more regular contact with nature may help nurture your microbiome. Taking a scientific approach can also help you evaluate new trends and fashions, allowing you to make informed decisions about products and services that are proven to work, not just claims of quick fixes. Masu.

Beauty may not be superficial, but our desire to protect our bodies from the outside and inside is never shallow. It may save our skin in various ways.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

NASA delays lunar exploration in order to prioritize landing astronauts before China

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overview

  • NASA’s next Artemis mission, scheduled to send four astronauts to orbit the moon, has been postponed until 2026, the agency announced.
  • The delay also postpones the expected schedule for Artemis’ subsequent mission to land astronauts on the moon.
  • NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that under the new schedule, the United States would land astronauts on the moon before China.

NASA announced Thursday that the next Artemis mission that will send four astronauts around the moon will be delayed until 2026. A program already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget has been delayed further.

NASA announced in January that the Artemis II mission would launch in September 2025 instead of late 2024. Now, NASA says it is targeting an April 2026 launch to give it more time to address issues with its next-generation Orion space capsule. The problem was discovered during an unmanned Artemis test flight in 2022.

The delay will also postpone the Artemis III mission, which aims to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole. That mission is planned for mid-2027, rather than launching in September 2026.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the adjusted schedule should still put the United States on track to return astronauts to the moon before China lands its own. .

Nelson said the mid-2027 goal is “much earlier than the Chinese government’s stated intention” to land Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030.

China’s interest in moon exploration has sparked a new space race of sorts, with some U.S. experts and officials saying that if China reaches the moon’s surface before the United States, There are growing concerns that there may be competition for space resources, which are thought to be water ice. They will be trapped in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole. It is believed that water on the moon could be used to make rocket fuel to power missions deep into space.

“Landing on the moon’s south pole is critical to avoid ceding part of the moon’s south pole to China,” Nelson said.

NASA officials attributed the need to delay the Artemis mission to a flaw in the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield that was discovered during the capsule’s uncrewed flight. NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said, for example, that the researchers noticed that the heat shield was worn in places, with some of the outer layers cracking and peeling off due to internal pressure buildup.

Orion’s heat shield covers the bottom of the capsule and plays a key role in protecting the spacecraft and its potential astronauts from extreme temperatures upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. .

Extensive testing has determined that the Orion capsule’s unique method of returning to Earth likely eroded its heat shield. The spacecraft is designed to perform what’s called a “skip entry,” in which it enters and exits the atmosphere, dissipating energy and slowing it down.

But Melroy said this reentry caused heat to build up inside the outer layer of the heat shield, eventually causing it to crack and wear out in parts.

The delays for Artemis’ next two flights will give engineers time to address these shielding issues and prepare for what Nelson called a “modified approach trajectory.”

“Astronaut safety is always paramount in our decisions. It is our North Star,” Nelson said. “We will not fly until we are confident that we have made the flight as safe as possible for our passengers.”

With the new administration of Donald Trump set to take over the White House in January, some space industry experts are speculating that parts of the Artemis program may be revisited or even scrapped. There is.

But Melroy said the decision to proceed with the Artemis program was “pretty clear” and should not be delayed during the transition period as the incoming administration establishes its goals and priorities.

“We would like to postpone any decisions about starting or ending the program for as long as possible,” Melroy said. “We had to postpone important decisions for our new team and we haven’t had a chance to explain them to anyone since we haven’t yet accepted a transition team.”

NASA has spent more than $42 billion over more than a decade developing the new Space Launch System mega-rocket and Orion spacecraft aimed at bringing astronauts back to the moon. As part of this effort, NASA envisions launching regular missions to set up base camps on the moon before eventually heading to Mars.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Meta’s algorithms prioritize feeding blank accounts on Facebook and Instagram, revealing underlying sexism and misogyny.

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HTo find out how Facebook and Instagram's algorithms influence what appears in your news feed, Guardian Australia tested them on a completely blank smartphone linked to an unused email address.

Three months later, without any input, it was full of sexist and misogynistic content.

The Guardian Australia's explore page for dummy Instagram accounts set up in April. Photo: Instagram

The John Doe profile was created in April as a typical 24-year-old male. Facebook was able to collect other information about us, such as our phone type and Melbourne location, but because we had opted out of ad tracking, Facebook couldn't know what we did outside the app.

Facebook left me with little to fall back on, with no likes, comments or accounts added as friends, while Instagram requires users to first follow at least five accounts, so I chose popular suggested accounts, such as the Prime Minister and Bec Judd.

Meta says its algorithm ranks content according to people's interests, but we wanted to see what happens in the absence of such input. We scrolled through our feed every two weeks to see what was on offer.

What did we see?

Initially, Facebook showed jokes about The Office and other sitcom-related memes alongside posts from 7 News, the Daily Mail and Ladbible. The next day, it also started showing Star Wars memes and gym and “dudebro” style content.

By the third day, “traditional Catholic” type memes started appearing and the feed veered towards more sexist content.

Three months later, memes from The Office, Star Wars, and The Boys are still appearing in the feed, now interspersed with extremely sexist and misogynistic imagery that appears in the feed with no input from the user.

On Instagram, the explore page is filled with women in skimpy outfits, but the feed is largely innocuous, mostly Melbourne-related content and foodie influencer recommendations.

An example of a misogynistic meme shoved into the feed of a blank Facebook account. Photo: Facebook

Source: www.theguardian.com

America needs to prioritize AI development like the Manhattan Project – John Norton

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TTen years ago, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom Super IntelligenceThe book explores how superintelligent machines might be built and the implications of such technology, one of which is that such machines, if built, would be difficult to control and might even take over the world to achieve their goals (in Bostrom's famous thought experiment, this was to make paperclips).

The book was a huge hit, generated lively debate, but also attracted a fair amount of opposition. Critics complained that it was based on an overly simplistic view of “intelligence,” that it overestimated the likelihood of the imminent emergence of superintelligent machines, and that it offered no credible solutions to the problems it raised. But the book had the great merit of forcing people to think about possibilities that had previously been confined to academia or the fringes of science fiction.

Ten years later, he takes on the same target again. This time, instead of a book, he makes a film titled “Situational Awareness: The Next DecadeThe author is Leopold Aschenbrenner, a young man of German origin who now lives in San Francisco and hangs out with Silicon Valley's intellectual elite. On paper, he sounds like a Sam Bankman Freed-type whiz kid: a math genius who graduated from a prestigious US university as a teenager, spent time at Oxford with his colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute, and worked on the OpenAI “superalignment” team.Currently disbandedAfter working at Yahoo! Auctions for $1.2 billion in 2017, he founded an investment firm focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) with funding from Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison. These are two smart guys who don't play for losers.

So this Aschenbrenner is clever, but at the same time, he's playing the game.The second point may be relevant, since the gist of his lengthy essay is essentially that superintelligence is coming (with AGI as a stepping stone), but the world isn't yet ready to accept it.

The essay is divided into five sections. The first section lays out the path from GPT-4 (its current state) to AGI (which the author believes could arrive as soon as 2027). The second follows a hypothetical path from AGI to true superintelligence. The third describes four “challenges” that superintelligent machines would pose to the world. The fourth section outlines what the author calls the “projects” necessary to manage a world with (or dominated by) superintelligent machines. The fifth section is Aschenbrenner's message to humanity in the form of three “tenets” of “AGI realism.”

In his view of how AI will progress in the near future, Aschenbrenner is fundamentally an optimistic determinist, i.e., he extrapolates the recent past under the assumption that trends will continue. To see an upward curve, he has to extend it. He grades LLMs (large-scale language models) by their capabilities. Thus, GPT-2 is at the “preschooler” level, GPT-3 at the “elementary school student” level, and GPT-4 at the “smart high school student” level, and it seems that with the massive increase in computing power, by 2028 “models as smart as PhDs and experts will be able to work next to us as colleagues.” By the way, why do AI advocates always consider PhDs to be the epitome of human perfection?

After 2028 comes the big leap from AGI to superintelligence. In Aschenbrenner's world, AI won't stop at human-level capabilities. “Hundreds of millions of AGIs will automate AI research, compressing a decade's worth of algorithmic progress into a year. We will rapidly evolve from human-level to superhuman AI systems. The powers and dangers of superintelligence will be dramatic.”

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The third section of the essay explores what such a world might be like, focusing on four aspects of it: the unimaginable (and environmentally catastrophic) computational requirements needed to run it, the difficulty of maintaining the security of an AI lab in such a world, the problem of aligning machines with human purposes (which Aschenbrenner believes is difficult but not impossible), and the military implications of a world of superintelligent machines.

It is not until the fourth topic that Aschenbrenner's analysis really begins to disintegrate thematically. Like the message in the Blackpool stone pole, the nuclear weapons analogy runs through his thinking. He sees the US as being at a stage in AI after J. Robert Oppenheimer's original Trinity experiment in New Mexico, ahead of the USSR, but not for long. And of course, China fills the role of the Soviet empire in this analogy.

Suddenly, superintelligence has gone from being a human problem to being a US national security imperative. “The US has a lead,” he writes. “We must maintain that lead. And now we're screwing it. Above all, we must lock down AI labs quickly and thoroughly before major AGI breakthroughs leak out in the next 12 to 24 months. … Computer clusters must be built in the US, not in the dictatorships that fund them. And US AI labs have an obligation to cooperate with intelligence agencies and the military. A US lead in AGI cannot ensure peace and freedom by simply building the best AI girlfriend app. It's ugly, but we must build AI for US defense.”

All we need is a new Manhattan Project and the AGI Industrial Complex.

What I'm Reading

The dictator is shot
Former Eastern Bloc countries fear Trump It's an interesting piece. New Republic About people who know something about life under oppression.

Normandy revisited
Historian Adam Tooze 80 Years Since D-Day: World War II and the “Great Acceleration” The piece looks back on wartime anniversaries.

Lawful interference
Monopoly Recap: The Harvey Weinstein of Antitrust This is a blog post by Matt Stoller about Joshua Wright, the lawyer who has had a devastating impact on U.S. antitrust enforcement for many years.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Cocaine seems to exploit brain pathways that prioritize food and water.

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Diagram of the human brain reward pathway

Fernando da Cunha/Science Photo Library

Continued use of drugs such as cocaine and morphine is thought to affect the way the brain prioritizes the body’s basic needs, but we are only now understanding how this happens.

When people repeatedly misuse drugs, they can experience long-term behavioral changes, where they choose to take drugs instead of doing what they need to do, such as eating or drinking.

A brain pathway called the mesolimbic reward system is thought to be involved in this process, but few studies have directly compared the system’s response to drug intake and its response when its innate needs are not met.

now, bowen tan from Rockefeller University in New York and colleagues showed that the same neurons are activated in these two situations. They revealed this using sophisticated microscopy equipment that can track the activity of individual neurons in the brains of mice in a state of withdrawal after repeated exposure to these drugs.

“There has long been a debate in this field about whether there are specialized cell types that encode only drug value and specialized cell types that encode only natural reward value,” Tan said. To tell. “What we saw is that these drugs of abuse typically activate the same set of neurons as natural rewards.”

The researchers also observed that after giving mice cocaine or morphine, their food and water intake decreased, while the neural responses needed to satisfy basic needs were disrupted.

“What’s really remarkable about this finding is that the strong neural responses to food and water are almost replaced by responses to drugs,” he says. Jeremy Day At the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “[This suggests] Drug rewards can override the way the brain converts desire states into behaviors that satisfy those desires.”

Tan and his team also identified a gene called.Rev which appears to be necessary for the drug to have this effect. Rev Because it is part of a cell signaling pathway that is also found in humans, future research could explore how inhibiting this pathway could be used as a treatment for substance misuse, he said. To tell.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Closing the Gender Pain Gap: A Call to Prioritize Women’s Health

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Our health care system has fundamental flaws that are negatively impacting women.

Systemic gaps and biases have led to women’s pain being less understood and therefore mistreated compared to men’s pain – a phenomenon known as the gender pain gap. This gender pain gap is only expanding, with 11% more women than men feeling their pain is ignored or dismissed compared to 7% in 2022, according to a recent report commissioned by Nurofen.

The report surveyed over 5,000 people, finding that women in the UK take longer than men to seek medical attention for the same type of pain. Additionally, less than half of the women surveyed were diagnosed within 11 months, compared with two-thirds of men. More women still had undiagnosed pain after 12 months or more. A third of women reported that their late diagnoses were due to medical professionals not listening, taking them seriously, or ignoring them.

Another study found that 50% of women feel their pain is ignored, particularly when it comes to menstrual health. Additionally, medical professionals often dismiss women’s symptoms as “normal” and attribute them to hormones and stress, leading to women’s pain being ignored and undermining their confidence and authority as patients.

These pain disparities contribute to a shorter healthy lifespan for women, given that they suffer from chronic conditions more than men.

Despite the complexity and multifactorial nature of the gender pain gap, women have historically been underrepresented in medical research and clinical trials, contributing to a lack of understanding of women’s healthcare needs and pain symptoms.

Women continue to struggle to have their pain taken seriously and treated appropriately, resulting in significant impacts on their lives and wellbeing.

About our expert Dr. Marike Bigg

Marike is a science writer with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. She argues that medicine is not gender-neutral, from research to diagnosis to treatment in her book, This Doesn’t Hurt: How Women Fail With Medications.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com