All posts tagged: risk

New groundbreaking AI helps identify patients at risk for suicide

New groundbreaking AI helps identify patients at risk for suicide

Published by skeptic

Suicide remains a major public health crisis, claiming the lives of approximately 14.2 per 100,000 Americans annually. Despite its prevalence, many individuals who die by suicide have interacted with healthcare providers in the year leading up to their death, often for reasons unrelated to mental health. This underscores a critical gap in routine risk identification and the need for innovative solutions to enhance suicide prevention efforts. A recent study conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center offers promising insights into how artificial intelligence (AI) can bridge this gap. Published in the journal, JAMA Network Open, the research focused on the Vanderbilt Suicide Attempt and Ideation Likelihood model (VSAIL), an AI system designed to analyze routine data from electronic health records (EHRs) to calculate a patient’s 30-day risk of suicide. By leveraging AI-driven clinical decision support (CDS) systems, the study aimed to improve suicide risk assessments during regular healthcare visits, particularly in neurology clinics. The study was a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 7,732 patient visits over six months across three neurology clinics at Vanderbilt. …

Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires

Published by José

“This is fire sea­son in Los Ange­les,” Joan Did­ion once wrote, relat­ing how every year “the San­ta Ana winds start blow­ing down through the pass­es, and the rel­a­tive humid­i­ty drops to fig­ures like sev­en or six or three per cent, and the bougainvil­lea starts rat­tling in the dri­ve­way, and peo­ple start watch­ing the hori­zon for smoke and tun­ing in to anoth­er of those extreme local pos­si­bil­i­ties — in this instance, that of immi­nent dev­as­ta­tion.” The New York­er pub­lished this piece in 1989, when Los Ange­les’ fire sea­son was “a par­tic­u­lar­ly ear­ly and bad one,” but it’s one of many writ­ings on the same phe­nom­e­non now cir­cu­lat­ing again, with the high­ly destruc­tive Pal­isades Fire still burn­ing away. Back in 1989, long­time Ange­lenos would have cit­ed the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid exam­ple of what mis­for­tune the San­ta Ana winds could bring. Wide­ly rec­og­nized as a byword for afflu­ence (not unlike the now vir­tu­al­ly oblit­er­at­ed Pacif­ic Pal­isades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Den­nis Hop­per, Burt Lan­cast­er, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa …

Life in the subnivium, beneath the snow, is at risk of melting away

Life in the subnivium, beneath the snow, is at risk of melting away

Published by skeptic

A soft, thick coat of snow makes a lot of the world seem to slow down or even stop — at least temporarily. The fluffy piles absorb sound and make the world quiet and still. But deep underneath, in pockets between the snow and the ground, life goes on. This is the subnivium — a tiny ecosystem all its own. Here under the white stuff, roots, small mammals, microbes, insects and even birds thrive. They use the subnivium to make the most of the winter months — hunting, breeding, breaking down leaves and more. All those cold-weather activities help determine which plants and animals (including insects) thrive during the snow-free seasons. But this seasonal ecosystem is in danger. Climate change is making winters warmer. Much of the precipitation that used to fall as snow now pours out of the sky as rain. Snow covers less ground and for less time. No snow means no subnivium. And as this snowy ecosystem shrinks, a host of organisms might pay the price. Their loss could change the way …

Bench customers are now being forced to hand over their data or risk losing it, they say

Bench customers are now being forced to hand over their data or risk losing it, they say

Published by skeptic

After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire-sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t easily just take their financial data and leave.  And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch. To recap: When Bench, a startup based in Canada that raised $113 million from investors like Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify, shuttered, it left thousands of businesses without access to their accounting and tax documents. Days later, Bench announced it would be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal. San Francisco-based HR tech company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax.  On the surface, Employer.com appears to be a relatively new company: Its CEO, Jesse Tinsley, announced his acquisition of the domain name in November for about $450,000. Tinsley is behind a host of HR, onboarding, and recruiting-related businesses, including Recruiter.com and BountyJobs. However, digging deeper, TechCrunch learned that Employer.com is a dba for Recruiting.com Ventures. Tinsley acquired …

Scientists debate fleeing America because of Trump — or risk their research being censored

Scientists debate fleeing America because of Trump — or risk their research being censored

Published by Sam

It was not easy for Dr. Kevin Trenberth to leave the United States. An esteemed climate scientist who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, Trenberth spent more than four decades of his life in America, first teaching at the University of Illinois before joining the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he eventually became a distinguished scholar. Yet by September 2019, the New Zealand native decided to return home because he’d had enough of America under President Donald Trump. Trenberth has long been a fierce critic of Trump, but now things were impacting him personally. “I cannot go to NSF [the National Science Foundation] for research funds because NCAR is base funded that way,” Trenberth wrote in a note to himself at the time. “Nor has it been fruitful to garner funds internally, and the external grants, especially with NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] dried up after 2012 when NOAA put forward a proposal for a climate service but thoroughly messed it up, and Lamar Smith [R-Texas, then-chair of the Science …

As Birth Rates Plummet, Women’s Autonomy Will Be Even More at Risk

As Birth Rates Plummet, Women’s Autonomy Will Be Even More at Risk

Published by skeptic

History tells us that all freedoms are conditional. In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion, as part of a socialist commitment to women’s health and well-being. Sixteen years later, that decision was reversed once Stalin was in power and realized that birth rates were falling. The pressure on all nations to keep up their population levels has never gone away. But in 2025, that demographic crunch is going to get even crunchier—and the casualty will be gender rights. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the rate at which babies are being born has been plummeting for 15 years. In Japan, Poland, and Canada, the fertility rate is already down to 1.3. In China and Italy, it is 1.2. South Korea has the lowest in the world, at 0.72. Research published by The Lancet medical journal predicts that by 2100, almost every country on the planet won’t be producing enough children to sustain its population size. A good deal of this is because women have …

Moderate drinking linked to lower risk of death, but there’s a major catch

Moderate drinking linked to lower risk of death, but there’s a major catch

Published by Sam

A major report released this week found that compared with abstaining from alcohol, moderate drinking was linked to a lower risk of death from any cause and a lower risk of death from heart disease, but it was also linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. Far from settling the debate over whether drinking in moderation is healthy or dangerous, the report’s conclusions further muddied the issue.  The report, released Tuesday, was commissioned by Congress and carried out by a committee from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. An update to federal dietary guidelines next year could include new recommendations about how much alcohol people should drink. The current guidelines recommend people limit alcoholic beverages and say that if they choose to drink, they should do so in moderation, defined as two drinks a day for men and one drink for women.  But over the last few years, mounting evidence has questioned the health benefits of drinking. In 2022, the World Health Organization concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe. A …

Religious service attendance linked to lower dementia risk in Black older adults

Religious service attendance linked to lower dementia risk in Black older adults

Published by José

An analysis of data from the Health and Retirement Study focusing on Black participants found that older adults with higher participation in religious or spiritual activities were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias. Those who never attended religious services had 2.37 times higher odds of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or related dementias than those who attended such services more than once a week. The research was published in the American Journal of Human Biology. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and the most common cause of dementia. It is characterized by memory loss, cognitive decline, and adverse behavioral changes. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the accumulation of abnormal protein deposits in the brain, including beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles. These accumulations disrupt neuronal function and connectivity, ultimately leading to cell death. Symptoms typically begin with short-term memory loss and gradually worsen to include difficulties with reasoning, language, and performing daily tasks. However, Alzheimer’s is not the only type of dementia. Other conditions can produce cognitive decline similar to Alzheimer’s disease but …

Historians Debate Ukraine War As WWIII Risk Mounts: Niall Ferguson Vs Scott Horton

Historians Debate Ukraine War As WWIII Risk Mounts: Niall Ferguson Vs Scott Horton

Published by skeptic

Watch the debate replay below (or on YouTube) https://t.co/Rq7jRVhabg — zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 27, 2024 * * * Despite Trump’s promises to bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine by negotiating with Russia, the war has escalated to a dangerous inflection point with long-range U.S., British, and French missiles being deployed deep in Russian territory and talks of deploying NATO troops in Ukraine. That… and anonymous officials in the New York Times saying what is impossible to believe: “Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications,” the newspaper wrote. Amid the chaos, ZeroHedge will be hosting preeminent historians Sir Niall Ferguson and Scott Horton to debate the history of the conflict and U.S. policy in the region. They will be joined by the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson (if you’ve seen a Thomas Sowell interview, it was probably …

Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode,’ bad hires, and why avoiding risk is deadly

Entrepreneur Marc Lore on ‘founder mode,’ bad hires, and why avoiding risk is deadly

Published by skeptic

Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars, collectively. Now he plans to take his food delivery and take-out business Wonder public in a couple of years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation. We talked with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate aim of making meal planning effortless, but we also touched on Lore’s management philosophies. Below is some of what he had to say on the latter front, edited lightly for length and clarity. Lore on so-called founder mode, wherein founders and CEOs actively work with not only their direct reports but with “skip level” employees, too, in order to ensure that small challenges do not become big ones (Brian Chesky operates this way, as does Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman, among many others): Yeah, the founder mode thing didn’t really resonate with me, because I operate differently. I really focus on this idea of vision, capital, and people. We have a meeting every week with the leadership team, and we …