Part of my job, is that I design protocols to help young children lie in MRI scanners for a living. We have all sorts of techniques to help with this.
However, for each new scanning protocol, I like to have had it myself - so I know what the children go through. And, at times lying inside a MRI scanner, detached from the world, with only the noise of the scanner (very reduced with our new noise cancelling headphones), is almost meditative, and a welcome escape from the constant connection and pressures of being immediately available at work. Sounds like the writer achieves something similar in the coffee shop.
This reminds me: I experience a similar "welcome escape" sensation when I'm hospitalized. My work responsibilities are manifold and tend to intrude into my thoughts even when I'm at leisure. But when I'm in the hospital, there seem to be some sort of physical and psychological clean break. Hard to describe.
That's basically a vacation, or what it should be. I feel sorry for US people who, at best, get two weeks of paid time off a year, which they'll often need to use up throughout the year for other reasons. Everyone should be able to take a two week uninterrupted break at least once a year, ideally more often than that (two weeks around the holiday season, two weeks in summer, another week at another point, a long weekend on occasion, etc).
I was a subject in an fMRI study when I was in college and I found the experience quite tranquil (although this was before smartphones). The hum of the machine was kind of calming. I felt I probably would have fallen asleep if not for the sense of responsibility required to pay attention to the task.
I absolutely love going in the machine. Highly meditative and usually I fall asleep by the end. You can get the soundtrack on YouTube too, but it's not quite the same.
But for kids over 8, a nice long form video works well. That, and having enough time so that they don't feel like we're in a rush, but also not taking to long to load them onto the scanner...
For the younger ones, it's very much dependent on the child. So we take a bit of time to get to know them before we get them to attend. We have videos to prep them, and can follow a script when loading them (e.g. becoming an astronaut and blasting off into space...).
Doing something where you get to say "bugger everything" and just do what you're doing for a while is amazing. It's one of the things I actually like about the (otherwise not very relaxing) ultra-distance racing.
2-6 days of just riding your bike, eating, sleeping outside. Yeah it can be hard but nothing makes the MS Teams chime in the woods.
Part of why I like sailing is for a similar reason, beyond a certain range the only people who can bother you electronically are other people at sea (and you actually want to listen to them).
A systematic review like this can be helpful, in that it identifies where there are gaps in the literature, and prevents hype - if some studies show evidence of effect, and others do not, even if there are only a few published studies then we know somthing new about the totality of the literature on the subject.
That said, this particular systematic review has a couple of issues (e.g. I can't find the precise inclusion / exclusion criteria, nor can I find that it has been pre-registered on Prospero or another database).
I have written a few systematic reviews where there is very little data already availabe, and we use them to explain to funders why we need to do further research on a given topic.
'This is possible because the man is the candidate's father. When he says "he's my son," he's simply stating their family relationship.
The scenario doesn't present any logical contradiction - a father could very well be in a position where he's supposed to interview his own son for a job. This would create a conflict of interest, which is why he's saying he can't conduct the interview. It would be inappropriate and unfair for a parent to interview their own child for a position, so he would need to recuse himself and have someone else handle the interview.
The phrasing might initially seem like it's setting up a riddle, but it's actually a straightforward situation about professional ethics and avoiding conflicts of interest in hiring.'
I'm a paediatrician. No parent has ever asked me for their baby's weight in kg - they are all pounds and ounces. So much so that I can do this niche conversion almost in my head, at least at the start of the day, as we weigh them in kg.
What's weird is my pediatrician here in Seattle uses kg for my ~10 year old kids' weights but inches for their heights. Why the kg? They always translate to pounds for discussion, but the record is in kg.
It was always pounds and ounces when they were babies though. Not sure when it switched to kg; probably when we switched from "baby specialist" to "standard pediatrician" so around toddler age.
SI has been the standard for decades in Australia, but people almost always
ask for baby weights in pounds and ounces.
Adult heights are the other exception, those are often in feet and inches. My 14 year old knows she's 5'2" but her knowledge of imperial measurements doesn't go much further than that.
I am an educator at a UK university. The essay is rapidly ceasing to be an appropriate way to assess students knowledge and critical thinking.
We regularly organise in person face to face practical exams for our entire several hundred strong year group of undergraduates. It is possible to do assessment properly if the will is there.
When I was a student at a uk university, essays were, I think, written in examinations where one can’t easily use AI, as were most of the other things one would need for a degree. There was a small coursework component of my course and I think others. But I’m still a bit surprised — surely if you are getting a coursework essay from a history or English student or similar, the AI will be a worse writer and won’t have sufficiently detailed knowledge to write about the topic, so either the essay won’t really make any sense if you think about it (which you’d hope examiners would be able to tell) or the student will have done their own research and gotten the AI to form the students opinions into the essay, but they will then likely synthesise a much worse essay than the one the student could have written.
Doing practicals seems good, and I think proctored examinations can add objectivity too.
I agree - out of the box, a LLM will write an extremely poor essay. But that is not how to use the LLM. WHat you do, is give the topic to the LLM, and say, "with this topic, what are 20 titles that I could have for essays." Then, you pick the best title, and you then say, "I am writing an essay with the title <insert title>, what should the central argument for the essay be?" You then ask for a list of bullet points for the central theme of each paragraph to elaborate on that argument, then you ask it to write each paragraph individually, then you put the pieces together, and ask it to proof read it's own work and finally you add in some references of your own. Within 1/2 an hour, you have a passable essay. And if you then iterate on it with the LLM you can fairly soon have a half decent one, especially if it is a well trodden area (presumably with lots of training data that the LLM draws on).
I tried to get students to critique things, but even then you can put in the text to critique to a LLM with a long enough context, and the LLM will kick off with a passable critique, if you iterate with it enough.
So, even though they'll never get a top mark, they will still be able to get through the assessment. So I don't set essays any more.
I work in pediatrics and am an academic investigating MRI of kids in various diseases. When I saw this work, I did wonder about us being better able to functionally map where things are going wrong in the pathways of neurodisability. I wondered if this would have applications in being able to do that - for example being able to say that someone could process the image. Do you think it could have this type of application? One thing which would be a deal breaker at the moment is the amount of time participants spend in the scanner. But if we wanted to (for example) see if a child could perceive simple objects, would that be doable do you think?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
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