Rod McCullom reports on the intersections of science, technology, biomedicine and society for Undark, MIT Technology Review, Scientific American, Nature, , The Atlantic, among other publications.
Has the BLM Movement Influenced Police Use of Lethal Force?
Researchers seeking to answer this question face a key challenge: incomplete government data on police use of force.
How wearable AI could help you recover from covid
Chicago-based pilot program is testing a body sensor that monitors covid patients remotely.
How Often Do Police Use Tasers on Teens? Experts Want More Data.
https://undark.org/2021/05/05/convictions-data-taser-use-teens/
Is mass incarceration driving racial disparities in the pandemic?
One study in June linked 16 percent of Covid-19 cases in Chicago and across Illinois to Cook County Jail.
Is Mass Incarceration Driving Racial Disparities in the Pandemic?
One study in June linked 16 percent of Covid-19 cases in Chicago and across Illinois to Cook County Jail.
Artificial Intelligence, Health Disparities, and Covid-19
Artificial intelligence has transformed health care, using large datasets to improve diagnostics and treatment. But some AI-powered medical tools replicate racial bias — raising questions about whether these new technologies contributed to Covid-19’s disproportionate toll on Black Americans.
How Bullying May Shape Adolescent Brains
In recent years, a steadily increasing volume of data has demonstrated that peer victimization — the clinical term for bullying — impacts hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, with the effects sometimes lasting years and, possibly, decades. The problem is even recognized as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And yet, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how the behavior may physically shape the developing br...
How Bullying May Shape Adolescent Brains
In recent years, a steadily increasing volume of data has demonstrated that peer victimization — the clinical term for bullying — impacts hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, with the effects sometimes lasting years and, possibly, decades. The problem is even recognized as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And yet, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how the behavior may physically shape the developing br...
AI Tool Could Help Diagnose Alzheimer's
An estimated 5.7 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s disease—the most common type of dementia—and that number is expected to more than double by 2050. Early diagnosis is crucial for patients to benefit from the few therapies available. But no single assay or scan can deliver a conclusive diagnosis while a person is alive; instead doctors have to conduct numerous clinical and neuropsychological tests. So there is growing interest in developing artificial intelligence to identify Alzhei...
Training Artificial Intelligence to Predict Alzheimer’s Disease
While more data is needed, researchers hope that these kinds of algorithms will eventually make their way to the clinic, providing speedier diagnoses — and better care — for the millions of people who live with this progressive and irreversible degenerative disease.
Google Searches Could Predict Heroin Overdoses
About 115 people nationwide die every day from opioid overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A lack of timely, granular data exacerbates the crisis; one study showed opioid deaths were undercounted by as many as 70,000 between 1999 and 2015, making it difficult for governments to respond. But now Internet searches have emerged as a data source to predict overdose clusters in cities or even specific neighborhoods—information that could aid local interventi...
A murdered teen, two million tweets and an experiment to fight gun violence
In the middle of the day on 11 April 2014, a hooded gunman ambushed Gakirah Barnes on the streets of Chicago’s South Side. A volley of bullets struck her in the chest, jaw and neck. The 17-year-old died in a hospital bed two hours later.
To many, her death was just another grim statistic from a city that has been struggling with gun violence. Last year, around 3,500 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois, of which 246 were aged 16 or younger; 38 of those children never celebrated another birth...
Teaching Machines to Recognize (and Filter) Humanity’s Dark Side
Tech and social media giants, along with video streaming services everywhere, are scrambling to develop and deploy automated content moderation systems capable of flagging, reviewing, and removing offensive posts with more speed and precision — and they are leaning on machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, or AI, to do it.
How Indirect Violence Gets Under a Child’s Skin — and Into the Brain
Eight years ago, New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey published a paper whose conclusions shook the worlds of criminology and adolescent psychology. Researchers had long known that children exposed to violence and crime had poorer measures of memory, attention, planning, and focus — the cognitive processes collectively known as executive function — than peers whose lives were violence-free. But what Sharkey found, using data on 6,000 Chicago homicides from 1994 to 2002, was that a ...
Your Fingerprints Can Show If You've Done Drugs
The technology has titillated law-enforcement and corrections officials, and it may have useful applications for professionals working in drug treatment, elder-care centers, and other inpatient and outpatient facilities. However, the emergence of technologies like these has some observers feeling a bit uncomfortable about how, where, and to whom they are likely to be applied. More pointedly, the ability to glean detailed information about a person from a mere fingerprint—Do they smoke cigarettes? Use marijuana? Enjoy fatty foods? Drink alcohol?—raises a number of knotty questions.