Prometheus

Don't know. You've read through their accompanying paper? Under their FAQs is a contact form - i'd ask them directly.

From their website:

CDR and dementia diagnosis can be found with other demographic data in “ADRC Clinical Data”.

Or you take the opportunity to try some unsupervised learning.

On 1/3/2021 at 12:46 AM, Sensei said:

AI means Artificial Intelligence, which should mean "teacher gives it data samples, and let it learn from them". The more data are given, the more knowledge gained.

Isn't that more a definition of machine learning, which is itself a subset of AI?

Even if they prove correlated, with millions (billions?) of astronomical bodies now being tracked our sun is bound to be in sync with some of them for some of the time by some metric. 

5 minutes ago, swansont said:

It is also, as far as I can tell, not spatially-resolved process

Does spatially-resolved have a specific technical meaning in this context? Spatial information is acquired by taking a spectrum from a defined location then shifting the stage slightly and taking a spectrum from an adjacent location and so on, then computationally stitching them all together.

46 minutes ago, studiot said:

Imaging to me refers to creating some sort of pictures of the spatial disposition of the objects being imaged.

Raman spectroscopy is conducted on the randomly scattered light at near right angles to the beam and looses all of this spatial information.

Hyperspectral imaging using Raman microspectroscopy is a thing, the putative benefit being that images of various biochemicals can be acquired without the need for individual staining, as is currently done via immunohistochemistry. It's quite a specialised setup though.

I gather the OP speculates such techniques can be modified to allow brain imaging? If only. I've seen some transcutaneous experiments, mostly for blood glucose monitoring which isn't concerned with spatial information. Going through skin is one thing, i've never come across any set-ups even trying to penetrate bone.

I don't know physics, but one problem that straight away suggests itself is that if you are using longer wavelengths to achieve penetrance, then you are limiting the usefulness of any spatial information (as there is a dependence on wavelength and spatial resolution).

6 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Let's examine this point.  There are many gradations of how the entity could assert itself (covertly, overtly, benevolently, malevolently, and on and on).  For the sake of simplicity let's assume it is benevolent and benign (just here to help).  Even in that case I could see a lot of destabilization occurring: people quitting their jobs, people ceasing to believe in the political system or recognizing only the A.I. as the sovereign leader, economies grinding to a halt, etc.

This collapses down to a value alignment problem. As a super-intelligence it should be able to predict people quitting their jobs etc. Whether it knows this is not what we really want depends on its goals. Is it simply maximising dopamine - then it could invent a way to directly stimulate dopamine receptors. Is it trying to cater to every physical whim - then we could end up with enforced hedonism. Is it trying to to optimise for some vague concept such as 'wellness' - this might sound ideal as wellness could include just enough resistance for us to overcome to make human life fulfilling, but can we define such vague goals? There are attempts to have AI agents that extract their goals from the environment instead of having them explicitly stated, which may provide one avenue to this end.

You mean SN8? I'm not an engineer but my understanding is that it hit the ground too hard as they couldn't get enough propellant to the engines. It crumpled where it was most structurally weak. I think they regarded it a resounding success. SN9 might give it another go this week or next.

6 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

1.  What would humanity's collective reaction be to such an ultra-intelligent entity?  Mass panic?  Quiet acceptance?  Religious fervor?  Combative aggression?

Yes.

6 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

2.  How would the appearance of such an entity affect the social order (for example:  governments, religious organizations, economies).  To what extent would the collective awareness that something has far greater power than human beings destabilize human social systems?  What would be the reasons for this destabilization?

Again, it depends on the culture. I can imagine something even as simple as ubiquitous automated driving would be well received and readily adopted in somewhere like Singapore, but rejected in many places in the US. Scale that up.

7 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

The idea that "humans are in control" is a primary stabilizing force of human social systems.

I'm not sure that is true: most religions are predicated on the observation that on some level humans are not in control. Whether that manifests as a god/s being in control, or natural forces  (to which humans are bound) is irrelevant - the idea exists in many systems of thought. Perhaps you mean human agency? I don't see that humans would necessarily give up this agency in light of a super-computer. Computers already play chess much better than all humans, but AFAIK that hasn't affected the numbers playing chess in the slightest.

7 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

3.  Is there any scenario or potential chain of events where human society would not be greatly destabilized by the emergence of something this powerful?  

Nick Bostrom gives an account of this in his book Superintelligence in which he outlines several paths superintelligence could emerge and speculates that the most destabilising ones are one that emerges alone (i.e. the Chinese of Americans get the first, and so only superintelligence, as it can destroy all other attempts) and/or one that emerges so quickly that societies cannot react, either internally (emotional) or externally (putting in place laws) - we already see how slowly governments are responding to social media.

The other scenario he warned of was an arms race to super intelligence in which AI safety (value uploading, goal misalignment, orthogonality thesis etc...) are ignored just to beat the competitors - which, i believe, is why open AI was founded. 

I find anaconda useful for managing environments. I also had problems installing tensorflow, then a bunch of computer scientists said google didn't support it that much and that Pytorch was the way to go anyway.

What's the purpose of the project? Are you focused more on learning how programming a chatbot works, or do you just want a working product (or something else)?

4 hours ago, PoetheProgrammer said:

It’s just GPT has 3 billion parameters

The full model has 175 billion parameters. Crazy stuff. I heard rumour that GPT 4 will have 20 trillion parameters. How much do you think just making bigger models and feeding them more data will improve outcomes? 

The Markov model linked isn't trying to extract intent, i think it's predicting the next word in a sequence given an input word, based on a state space that contains emission probabilities for word pairs. It then uses that output as the input to predict the next word until a termination is paired with an input word.

Intent is how humans parse such information, there's no reason an algorithm needs to parse words in the same way (and still give intelligible results). 

If you want state of the art natural language processing check out GPT-3. It's a neural network based on an autoregressive model (so that it can take into account a number of previous words rather than just one), but i believe it still just predicts the next word sequentially.

11 hours ago, Trurl said:

Well I cannot describe a Utopian society. What I am trying to describe the best possible Earth. Mainly peaceful, less crime, freedom of thought, and no suffering ring. Obviously I have no idea how it works. But can you achieve it without religion? Can science alone do it? And how would you use science to accomplish this?

It may be possible that science, through technology, can provide a post-scarcity society, where all our physical needs are sated. Arguably some people already occupy that bubble. Whether that counts as a utopia or would be sufficient to create the conditions of a utopia is another question. I'm reminded of the rat utopia experiments in which rats were provided every physical need and didn't do so well. I suspect humans would fare little better.

Or as William Blake put it:

Man was made for joy and woe
Then when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul to bind.

A major consideration would be whether your data comes from a truly random sample - given the nature of what you describe, probably not. This will limit your options, but there are plenty of observational study designs you could utilise depending upon the exact nature of the study and what question you want to answer.

5 hours ago, molbol2000 said:

This therapy does not improve the absorption of sugar...

That's exactly what insulin does - without insulin cells cannot absorb glucose through facilitated diffusion thus blood glucose levels accumulate. Giving insulin treats this. Unless by treat you mean only therapies which would restore function to the pancreatic beta cells which fail to produce insulin in type 1 diabetes.  This is not currently possible. Perhaps there is a language barrier here.

Two cases is not enough to draw the conclusion that 'medicine treats symptoms rather than disease'. It's true that there are cases for which medicine can only treat symptoms - these usually reduce to not understanding a disease sufficiently. But there are plenty of cases where the cause of the disease is directly addressed - antibiotics, for instance. Even your own example of diabetes is not representative - all type 1 and many type 2 diabetics take insulin , which is not treating a symptom. 

I didn't understand the points about hypertension, melanin or skull shape.

On 10/10/2020 at 11:15 AM, jimmydasaint said:

I remember our Primary School teacher telling us that we needed basic English and Maths so that we could get jobs in factories.  My response was to do anything to prove her wrong.  Most of my colleagues accepted her view without comment.  I feel terrible when teachers say this stuff to people.  As a teacher (now out of retirement) in my whole teaching career of 22 years, I have never told a child they could not do something. I have always stressed that they could do anything that they set their mind towards. I apologise on behalf of teachers. 

Appreciated, though there are still a few teachers i would slap if ever i met them again. I think the thing that pissed me off the most though was that my GCSE science teacher had never even heard of the big bang, and laughed at me when i asked what exotic particles are.

3 hours ago, zapatos said:

You seem to be putting the blame on the victim. 

I think that's an unfair representation of what MigL said, at least i didn't read it that way. 

Lack of motivation =/= laziness. You could be an extremely hardworking and unhappy warehouse worker, but never even think you could improve your lot through education. It's just not a thought for many socio-economically disadvantaged people.

If your dreams provide the ceiling of what you can achieve in life, then poor people in rich countries are conditioned to dream no higher than the dog's bed. It's as much a barrier to education as is anything else, but perhaps the most important because it's the only one you can directly tear down with your own mind.

That's not mutually exclusive with making changes to education system, but while we're waiting for that to happen, as Billy Bragg says: the system might fail you, but don't fail yourself. 

20 hours ago, MigL said:

The head monk with tears in his eyes replies, “The word is CELEBRATE!"

I think this joke perfectly captures the essence of the topic.

In this joke the monks were just following teachings blindly. Apparently they never questioned or explored their celebicacy. But i understand (some?) monks are encouraged to explore the experience of celibacy. It's not just an arbitrary rule, but a tool used to explore a headspace few humans choose to navigate. There's an inquisitiveness to it. In this case the transcription error wouldn't matter to their practice because they are focused on the experience.

The mindset of the former monks might not be conducive to science, but the latter monks would have an easier time of it.

Now it might be that certain religious institutions encourage one way of thinking over the other, but religions are not homogenous and each should be taken on their own merits.

I remember a conversation with a Pakistani friend at school where he said he was going to try to become a doctor and that i should do the same. I just laughed at him - i've no idea where i picked it up, no one had ever explicitly said i couldn't, but even the idea of being a doctor was already beyond me. I was, however, explicitly told by my teachers that i couldn't be a pilot or a scientist.

5 hours ago, Charles 3781 said:

I know this another thread derailment.  Please delete it, if you think it advisable.

I don't think it's an unreasonable question, after all astronauts spend some of their training under water to better approximate zero-g conditions. Unfortunately are probably not a good model organism in this context:

Quote

While fish and amphibians were useful animal models to study developmental and neuronal processes, they were less useful to investigate microgravity effects on the skeletal, muscular and cardiovascular systems. These species are adapted to decreased weight effects during normal life conditions because buoyancy in their aquatic environment counteracts gravity-induced weight-loading on muscles and bones. 

Have you looked at Partial Least Squares? It deals nicely with highly correlated variables by projecting them unto a subspace before fitting the model.

4 hours ago, studiot said:

I didn't say that peace has nothing to do with the EU, I said I (and many others) consider it the principal reason.

Yes a much smaller EU maintained a peace, now there are borders and restrictions between various countries of the enlarged organisation and internal pressures are building up.

Again I did not suggest any war would happen tomorrow or that it would be an external one.

You have a point about Iraq, but it could also be looked at another way: we were silly enough to allow ourselves to be dragged into that one. Should the EU as a whole go to war, we could not opt out.

You are worried perhaps by countries like Hungary? Being in the EU makes military intervention less likely surely? It means economic and political measures can be much more effective, due to integration. 

Also, why do you think the UK would be dragged into a war. If we objected to a military intervention (even though historically it seems EU countries are the more reluctant) , it's likely that other EU nations would also object, and we could pursue other avenues. I know the UK were quite passive in the EU, always complaining rather than offering solutions, but we could easily have had as much influence as Germany. 

Presumably you would also like to leave NATO for the same reasons? And that Scotland, Wales, NI should leave the UK for the same reason (England must have dragged them into many wars down the ages).

Dietetic studies are notoriously difficult to run. They recruit often just dozens of patients, trying to track 100s of variables and several outcomes. And for any prolonged period of time, which dietary changes often need to manifest clinically relevant outcomes, you lose patients to follow-up, or they start eating stuff they agreed not to introducing noise to the dataset etc...

The answer to most of your questions is practical considerations. Another is there are bigger fish to fry: hard to justify the additional resources when we still haven't even got a vaccine to market.

On 9/25/2020 at 8:44 PM, studiot said:

That has been promoted as a benefit, yes.
But I think the real reason there has not yet been another war was fear of the Soviets.
In infant school, the other side of my back garden fence was an RAF station. They flew Hunters and then Lightnings. Very frightening things to  5 year old, as they skimmied over the hedge.
Later mine was the first year at grammar school that did not have to do compulsory military preparation training  -- Yippee.
I grew up in a generation that fully expected to have to go to war again and a nuclear one to boot.
Ironically this was prevented by MAD.

Do you really still want to go to war again ?

I'm sure the Soviet threat played a part, but it seems a stretch to say peace in Europe has nothing to do with the EU and its antecedents. Do you have a specific reason for believing this? Has the EU dragged us into any wars - ever? Do you have a specific reason to believe that the EU is about to engage in a war? The US seems more likely to drag us into wars than the EU, as was the case in Iraq.

No, i don't want to go to war, hence i'll be voting to rejoin the EU when the chance comes back round in 20 years or so.