stuartbman

The difficulty with the generation study is that there is no way to selectively opt in/out; your child is sequenced and then the data is retained until you opt out (at which point it is still retained as part of historical releases). It isnt ringfenced for medical research and can be accessed by pharmaceutical companies. It isnt even kept by the NHS but rather by a private arms-length body of the government which could be privatised under a change of leadership. We've seen failures with UK Biobank data security, why would this be any different?

Unsurprising. There's a poor economic argument for funding healthcare in the UK, other than it being used as a political football to win votes. The result is decades of underfunding and then massive tranches of funding to make headlines which has to be spent immediately and therefore gets squandered on "transformation initiatives" without a focus on health outcomes.

The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.

Came here to say this. Both Seveneves and Fall have long unending psuedo-epilogues which add little to the main story, but also don't really wrap anything up satisfactorily either.

Just finding this now after noticing the traffic spike (thanks!). Yes we are playing with doing this, however to be honest it's a very challenging task. You can extract the 'key information' from a paper, but abstractly summarising concepts is a bit more challenging. Probably the way forward will be a tool-assisted approach to aid humans to write better.

Really disappointing to see a whole host of inaccuracies in this article, even beyond the artistic license you'd expect for the New Yorker. My own area of knowledge is in neuroscience so I'd focus on this.

For instance, while its somewhat correct that nerve signals are binary, insofar as they are all-or-nothing, and yet activity is highly analogue, with specific groups of neurons firing together in pre-programmed bursts & rhythms. This has been one of the challenges in producing BCIs

Sure, but its the corner of two rooms on two floors. Depending on what your house looks like, that's quite an undertaking to fit, it's destructive to the house, and doesn't replace your need for stairs.

I can see the use of this for neurological disease, but far and away the most common reason for a stairlift is frailty (or sarcopenia, to be more precise) along with other musculoskeletal conditions like osteoarthritis. Generally in sarcopenia you lose much more quadriceps strength, such that you find it difficult to stand up out of a chair, which is precisely the motion of how this is propelled. I'd therefore find this difficult to justify.

Secondly, stairlifts work because they are retrofitted into people's homes. This would require quite considerable changes to fit, and possibly loss of an upstairs room to make it work.

Everyone in the comments discussing the UX of scrolling in this setting- this is exactly how you look through a CT scan! And in the different planes, as in this page. Sure a slider is useful, but I think this is really authentic.