Ulysse Sabbagh

How apps are changing how surgeons operate and communicate with their patients

How apps are changing how surgeons operate and communicate with their patients

betakit.com/2012/11/2…

In the past, surgeons have turned to pen and paper when sketching out a surgical procedure for a patient. To enhance surgeon-patient communication, Visible Health has created DrawMD, a series of free iPad apps that allow surgeons to more effectively explain surgical processes to their patients. These apps offer digital anatomical images, which doctors can sketch, stamp or type on to explain the procedure in a way that the patient will easily understand. Following the appointment, the surgeon can send a copy of the illustration to the patient and keep one for their own records. DrawMD is available for a growing number of medical specialties including urology, cardiology and pediatrics.

A good round-up of existing apps for surgeons and an interesting insight on how the iPad is entering the medical part of the professional world. 

Deep learning basically tries to make machine recognise patterns following the way our brains does. Google’s Street View makes use of deep learning to make its machines “view” addresses. Apple’s Siri uses it too.  

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain. “There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Maybe the world of automated robots doing human activities is not so far away now. 

Deep learning basically tries to make machine recognise patterns following the way our brains does. Google’s Street View makes use of deep learning to make its machines “view” addresses. Apple’s Siri uses it too.  

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain. “There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Maybe the world of automated robots doing human activities is not so far away now. 

10 business leadership lessons Julius Caesar could have taught us

10 business leadership lessons Julius Caesar could have taught us

thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2012/11/1…

Funny article, one cool bit:

7. “It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.”

The competition is the hungry kid with an idea, ambition and nothing to lose. Thirty years ago, they were Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Five years ago, they were Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Who’s next? Who will crush Big Advertising? Big Web? Big Print? Big Software? Big Consulting? Big Energy?

If you’re the industry leader, don’t look to your biggest competitors. Instead, look to the kids with the brains, the vision and the huevos to redefine your category and make you obsolete. Likewise, if you’re one of those kids, don’t let the big dogs intimidate you. If you have a better idea, fight for it. Make it happen. Don’t settle for what’s comfortable. Fight. The old guy playing golf with his CEO buddies every other day, he’s given up.

In the long run, my money is always on the hungry young wolf, not the fat one taking a nap in the sun.

In the long run, the media bias against incremental progress may be more damaging than any bias the media display toward the political left or right. The media are heavily biased toward extreme events, and they are slightly biased toward negative events — though in their defense, that bias may just be a reflection of the human brain’s propensity to focus more on negative information than positive, a trait extensively documented by neuroscience and psychology studies.

Steven Johnson on the value of incremental progress. Johnson’s latest book, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age, is an absolute must-read.

As Sir Francis Bacon put it in his essays centuries ago,“It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself; which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, by degrees scarce to be perceived.”

Fascinating.

(via explore-blog)

In the long run, the media bias against incremental progress may be more damaging than any bias the media display toward the political left or right. The media are heavily biased toward extreme events, and they are slightly biased toward negative events — though in their defense, that bias may just be a reflection of the human brain’s propensity to focus more on negative information than positive, a trait extensively documented by neuroscience and psychology studies.

There is 15-year old guy in Sierra Leone, called Kelvin Doe who scours the trash bins for spare parts which he used to build a radio station or batteries to power people’s houses. With literally no resources or someone to teach him. 

There is 15-year old guy in Sierra Leone, called Kelvin Doe who scours the trash bins for spare parts which he used to build a radio station or batteries to power people’s houses. With literally no resources or someone to teach him. 

Wishful thinking, if you were to ask The Economist’s “Babbage”. He links the briefings editor’s blog, Mainly Martian:

…thousands of tonnes of organic material arrive at the surface of Mars every year. Once it gets there, it either has to be got rid of or it accumulates. Recent work has also shown that most of the Martian meteorites studied have been found to contain organics that were aparently created on Mars through means that have no link to biology (Science paper here). So not only should people presume there are at least some organics on Mars—people have actually found and studied organics from Mars.

Let’s keep on searching then. 

Wishful thinking, if you were to ask The Economist’s “Babbage”. He links the briefings editor’s blog, Mainly Martian:

…thousands of tonnes of organic material arrive at the surface of Mars every year. Once it gets there, it either has to be got rid of or it accumulates. Recent work has also shown that most of the Martian meteorites studied have been found to contain organics that were aparently created on Mars through means that have no link to biology (Science paper here). So not only should people presume there are at least some organics on Mars—people have actually found and studied organics from Mars.

Let’s keep on searching then. 

Now that is cool. ScriptKit is an iPad app that lets you program by dragging and dropping snippets of code. 

ScriptKit is a touchable programming environment for building simple mobile prototypes on iPad using native iOS UI components and social media APIs, available via an intuitive drag and drop interface.

Excellent collection over at Brain Pickings. Maria Popova compiled the daily routines of famous writers including Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac and Simone de Beauvoir. 

Here is how Ernest Hemingway organised his day:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Excellent collection over at Brain Pickings. Maria Popova compiled the daily routines of famous writers including Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac and Simone de Beauvoir. 

Here is how Ernest Hemingway organised his day:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Because that’s the way everyone expects pop and rock musicians to sound. British pop singers have been imitating American pronunciations since Cliff Richard, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones began recording in the 1960s.* These musicians were largely influenced by the African-American Vernacular English of black American blues and rock and roll singers like Chuck Berry, but their faux-American dialects usually comprised aspects of several American dialects. Imitating an American accent involved both the adoption of American vowel sounds and rhoticity: the pronunciation of r’s wherever they appear in a word. (Nonrhoticity, by contrast, is the habit of dropping r’s at the end of a syllable, as most dialects of England do.) Sometimes Brits attempting to sing in an American style went overboard with the r’s, as did Paul McCartney in his cover of “Till There Was You,” pronouncing saw more like sawr.

The rest of the article focuses on linguist Peter Trudgill who tracked rhoticity in British music and discovered that the Beatles’ pronunciation of r’s decreased over the 1960s decade. 

Because that’s the way everyone expects pop and rock musicians to sound. British pop singers have been imitating American pronunciations since Cliff Richard, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones began recording in the 1960s.* These musicians were largely influenced by the African-American Vernacular English of black American blues and rock and roll singers like Chuck Berry, but their faux-American dialects usually comprised aspects of several American dialects. Imitating an American accent involved both the adoption of American vowel sounds and rhoticity: the pronunciation of r’s wherever they appear in a word. (Nonrhoticity, by contrast, is the habit of dropping r’s at the end of a syllable, as most dialects of England do.) Sometimes Brits attempting to sing in an American style went overboard with the r’s, as did Paul McCartney in his cover of “Till There Was You,” pronouncing saw more like sawr.

The rest of the article focuses on linguist Peter Trudgill who tracked rhoticity in British music and discovered that the Beatles’ pronunciation of r’s decreased over the 1960s decade. 

The feature is a big deal for Facebook since photos are a core driver of return visits and time on site. Most people take way more photos with their phones than they upload to Facebook and the social network wants to close the gap. Instead of having to manually choose photos and wait for them to upload, Photo Sync makes this all very low friction, which could drastically boost the number of photos people publish.

You could upload all your photos to Facebook and restrict their visibility to only you. Thus, when you’d want to put a photo on Facebook, it’ll already be there. This is big for them; perhaps they should expect that Apple will block this.