inkbluesky

Can computers make life-or-death medical decision?

But how well can surrogates accurately predict the wishes of patients? Researchers have previously addressed this question by asking people how they would want to be treated in various hypothetical medical scenarios and, in a separate room, asking surrogates to guess what those responses had been. A review of 16 studies found that surrogates got it right only 68% of the time.

In our daily conversations with friends and family the topic of what to do should you become incapacitated to the point where you can’t make your own medical decisions doesn’t come up that often. Kind of a conversation killer in a way, but still the fact that 68 percent of those closest to you don’t know or perhaps don’t want to acknowledge what your wishes might be in that situation is a little depressing. If a computer can do better then what the heck.

contemplating the view 

And six years later the experts on all things national security get a bright idea, Famed trackers to join Osama hunt 

AN elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders.

The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.

[  ] Some military experts want the Shadow Wolves to help to track down bin Laden. Despite a $US25 million bounty on his head and the use of billions of dollars worth of sophisticated equipment, US forces have so far failed to fulfill President George W. Bush’s promise to capture bin Laden “dead or alive”.

In our daily lives if we have a moment or two when we might have a problem thinking of things to be thankful for just be thankful that Bush wasn’t President in 1939 or we’d all be marching lock step in jack boots and German would be the national language.

No slight against the modern German nation intended.