Once an immunologist who went to interesting places to do interesting things. Now an author who writes about people who went to interesting places to do interesting things. https://www.variolator.com/
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I suppose I should be happy that the emergency test actually worked this time but why did it need to come in the voice of Elon Musk's robot girlfriend? And can anyone tell me whether the Welsh it lapsed into was as bad as I think it was? pretty sure that's not how to pronounce 'Cymraeg'!
“The only broadcast media at the time that was willing to talk about and get me on and report on it as a news story was GB News”. That makes perfect sense – but not in the way he seems to think.
"I would like to see the data. Not enough to bother looking at the data which is available online but I would like to see it and until I do, I'm going to proudly announce how little I know as if ignorance is a virtue." It's like watching the Muppets' Government by Fever Dream.
By 'not showing', does he mean sneakily hiding them among lots of scary words and numbers that he might need to read instead of serving them up on Fox News between KFC ads? It's so frustrating that this sort of performative stupidity plays so well.
I'd also like to know how, if mercury compounds cause autism, there were so few autism diagnoses back when they were sold over the counter to treat teething pain. But I probably shouldn't expect consistency from a man who can't be trusted with a dead whale or his children's babysitter.
As recommended by the JCVI nearly two years ago and as the USA has been doing for about 30 years. Better late than never. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Saw a copy of this in St Panras Station WH Smiths yesterday. A spectral chap called Richard kept tapping the subtitle and saying, "You mean the LATEST rise and fall of the House of York". Then he demanded a horse.
He'll probably be happy to let Mullis have PCR. HIV and climate change deniers are very much in favour with him and his friends. It really was a tragedy that Henry Erlich and Randall Saiki didn't get any credit for PCR.
If it smells like a quack, it quacks like a quack and it ducks like a quack when challenged, it's probably working for RFK Jr. It's frustrating becauseimportant questions around autism going unanswered while these quacks pretend vaccines have anything to do with it. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
That was Watson's version. Wasn't true. It was shared with her full knowledge and comments and her paper was published back to back with Watson's and Crick's: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Watson thought it made him look good to pretend he stole it when he wrote his memoir. He's a wally.
I wonder what it's going to be. I'm on tenterhooks. Seriously, though, the only question is whether he's going to wait for a scandal that needs a distraction before he drops his AI generated report wailing about vaccines. If only he'd stuck to chainsaws and beached whales.
The day the Beeb broke Betteridge's law of headlines. Is a spade a spade? Is the pope a catholic? Is this a picture of a man who can't be trusted with a dead dolphin, his babysitter or decisions that will affect millions of people? Same answer. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
That's a question that needs to be asked for every vaccine individually but with that caveat, immunocompromise is not usually a counter-indication for either mRNA or inactivated vaccines. Inactivation actually works well for some vaccines, eg polio. Not so well for influenza or COVID-19
Many thanks. I hope you enjoy it.
I dread to think what he thinks 'safer, broader vaccine platforms' means.
Looks like the 'new tech' is inactivated influenza, which they've shown protects animals and is reasonably safe in people. That was really, really exciting when Frank Macfarlane Burnet did it in the 1930s. Not seeing why it's exciting enough to dicth 90 years of subsequent progress.
Interesting to get a view of his home and family life. There's so much information about his work on vaccines but far less about Hilleman outside Merck.
We think so but none of us chalks are very good at recognising changelings. We'll have to trust that it is.
Humans on helplines have been making unfulfillable promises for years while robots lie that our call is important to them. Now the lying robots use the empty human promises as training data. The long promised tech utopia has arrived. Where's my flying car?
In fairness, Jenner did bring in the first vaccine. Using cowpox to induce immunity to smallpox was fundamentally different to deliberately infecting children with smallpox. Though it was Pasteur who really established vaccination as we understand it today.
Glad you're enjoying it. That 1721 smallpox outbreak in Boston was a key moment in the history of immunisation. Pity Onesimus wasn't around to see it. I'll leave the military historians to debate whether there would be a USA without the immunisation that Onesimus introduced!
They give themselves away by using the American term DEI rather than EDI, which we use in Britain. I don't know who is doing their thinking for them but they're not doing it for themselves.
Looks like our few months of respite from covid waves is about to end. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Thanks to @chrischirp.bsky.social for keeping track of the little so-and-so. christinapagel.substack.com/p/latest-cov...
Tickets prepped for tomorrow's trip to speak at Pint of Science in Colchester. I'll be talking cheerful subjects like smallpox, rabies and mRNA vaccines right in the footsteps of Boudicca. pintofscience.co.uk/event/the-in...
Thanks, that's very kind of you. I hope it turns out to be what you're looking for.
Thanks for flagging that. It's woth watching just to see how fast Malhotra reverses direction when @krishgm.bsky.social starts talking about how he might address real problems with child health. Actually help children? No, no, we're not in that game, old boy.
Having read Darryl's Science Tales, 'Wakefield's Mental Health Museum' cost me a double take. It's oddly appropriate.
A couple of days before I talk about how chickens in Paris and self-inoculation with cholera led us to modern vaccination. Livestream link below.
Nearly 80 since the precursor to the measles vaccine was isolated from an infirmary full of semi-conscious children in Boston and a crazy old man thinks the sick kids were the best part of the story. Some days I really miss the enlightenment.
Any time. I'll look forward to it.
Please don't blame me for the poetry. It's Edwin Kilbourne's, not mine.
Here's me pontificating about the 1918 pandemic, the vaccines made by a brilliant virologist (and terrible poet) and other matters influenzal . Many thanks to @rmatheists.bsky.social for hosting it.
True, that was shorthand but teaching doesn't mean promotion. My undergrad classes on venomous snakes didn't include teaching me to get bitten. Besides, there's more to AI than LLMs. Search engines and grammar checkers use 'AI' in the current sense and students need to learn how to use those.
Even if your magic wand can make LLMs go away, none of that will fix the information environment. Misinformation and disinformation were rife before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. My point is that HE needs to teach students to evaluate information and that now includes evaluating LLMs.
I'd be interested to know how you'd go about doing that. But even if it's possible, it's only a partial solution. The information enviornment has always been a mix of information, misinformation and disinformation. Learning to navigate it is an essential life skill, let alone HE skill.
That's a good one. I'll look into that.
That would be true if the goals of HE ended at the classroom doors. One of HE's goals is to teach students how to access and use information. When the most widely used tool for accessing information starts spoonfeeding mariachi bands to its users, they will need to be addressed in HE.
That's a good one too. Though it can be difficult to keep up to date with these things. They change so often that you could give an example of something it got wrong yesterday only to find it describes it perfectly today, undermining the whole point.
You're going to have to help me here. Based on my question, and your comments which it was in response to, how have you derived the idea that I am using Google AI summaries as teaching material?
If you Google 'gasoline' - or anything else - what do you see above the search results?
Exactly. Taught. Not assumed to know not to do it already. Teaching the difference between citing a source and plaigiarising it is essential in all HE disciplines.
That makes sense. I do try to encourage students to critically appraise all sources, including LLMs. With mixed results.
I agree AI shouldn't be used for writing but I think the problem for HE is more complex than that. We need to incorporate discussion of LLMs because they're now part of the world we're educating students to operate in. As for how we should be teaching LLMs, I only wish I knew.
Nice to see some good news on here! Really surprised to see lives saved from tetanus coming it at twice lives saved from whooping cough. Then again, tetanus always was an under-rated problem.
I'll be spending the evening talking in Reading. Typing that makes me expect someone to say 'shhh' but I shall persevere with the story of how Pearl Kendrick and a Great Depression-hit city invented a whooping cough vaccine we still use today. www.meetup.com/chalk-scribb...
Thank you for that! Hope the book doesn't disappoint.
How does a LLM know the difference between an overlooked gem of knowledge and Stoner Joe's last LSD-induced epiphany? How useful is a combination of the latter with properly evidenced knowledge?
Getting into practice to talk about whooping cough vaccines in Lincoln on Tuesday. Always nice to discuss the reason why millions of children haven't died. lincolnartscentre.co.uk/event/cafe-s...
This sums up how I feel about... well, everything at the moment. All in 10 minutes. Thank you @writereralk.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
I am now wondering whether every online customer service desk is using this chatbot or whether they provided the training data for it.
Heading to Yorkshire to talk influenza with Beverley Cafe Sci tomorrow. If someone could distract the train gremlins, it would be much appreciated. cafescientifique.org/uk/beverley
Many thanks for hosting. The ATOM crowd always come up with the most interesting questions.
Looking forward to heading back to Abingdon next week. Hope the ATOM crowd isn't too tired of my talks by now!
It Can't Happen Here is the story of a semi-coherent but charismatic man who rises to the presidency by claiming to be a friend of the common man and gets elected by people who don't realise they're voting for a fascist takeover. Published in 1935 and could be about 2025.
How Vaccines Work is finally available in the USA and Canada. So far, paperback and kindle editions only. Audio version to come. It's the sort of book that RFK Jr really doesn't want you to read. www.amazon.com/dp/B0DS19PXHF
Finished last year by making fun of Del Bigtree with @thinkthisthrough.bsky.social and @alhill.bsky.social. What else can you do with his fantasy that Bill Gates is going to tell him he's a genius for not being vaccinated except point and laugh? www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mv9...
How one popular movement gave us the whooping cough vaccine and another one scared us away from it and gave us our whooping cough back. I’ll try to make sense of it at the Barbican Library 12:30 Tue 8th Oct. Free tickets: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/whooping-c...
How did a slave, a witchfinder, an aeronautical pioneer, a tanner's son and countless scientists save our lives? Answers between the covers: www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/david...