Links from May 2025: copyright; Mrs Dalloway; coffee extraction; cold mice
Pets and disasters, predicting healthcare needs, origins of copyright; Mrs Dalloway; coffee extraction; cold mice
Disaster Preparedness for Pets
CattleDog Publishing
Suggests keeping a waterproof bag containing: up-to-date set of pet’s medical records and medications, meds for two weeks, microchip info, food and water bowls (“collapsible bowls do not take up much space”), food for 3-4 days plus anything you need to open the food, harnesses, leashes. “Never leave pets behind during a disaster.” I’d add that if you have a Houndini maybe a few ready-made print outs of “dog lost” posters.
Foresight AI – Groundbreaking AI trained on de-identified patient data predicts healthcare needs
Science Media Centre
I’ve not seen what Foresight AI is and does. It’s a language model of some kind, trained on 57 million NHS records, and something to do with COVID. The expert reaction doesn’t add much: “Foresight does not just predict who might get sick, but reveals where care is delayed, inconsistent, or missing entirely”. Good to see this is happening inside the secure data environment, despite my trigger reaction to run to medConfidential.
Memories of a cold place trigger bodily responses to warm up [...in mice]
Nature
They “repeatedly exposed mice to a cold environment (4 °C), creating an association between the particular environment (a context) and cold exposure […] conditioned mice that were later returned to the same context, but at room temperature (21 °C), showed elevated metabolic rate and body temperature”.
Introducing HealthBench
Open AI
A test set of health conversations for evaluation. “HealthBench is a rubric evaluation, where each model response is graded against a set of physician-written rubric criteria specific to that conversation. Each criterion outlines what an ideal response should include or avoid, e.g., a specific fact to include or unnecessarily technical jargon to avoid.”
Mrs Dalloway at 100: Virginia Woolf’s timeless novel is a work of pandemic fiction
The Conversation
It’s been a few years since I last read Mrs Dalloway. The article is a lovely reminder of it, and the context of when it was written.
Coffee Extraction and How to Taste It
Barista Hustle
If there’s a sour taste, the coffee is under-extracted. Which I think means you need a finer grind or to let it bloop for longer.
Copyright
In Our Time, BBC Sounds
Frustratingly brief on AI, but strong on the history of copyright. Looks from just before the Act for the Encouragement of Learning (1710) and discusses the tension between copyright as a property right for an author (based on labour or personality, etc.) versus the public utility for learning and creativity.
From 38:35 in:
Should training an AI system on copyright protected material be regarded as an infringement of the copyright in that material? And at one level to train an AI system you have to make some temporary reproductions of the work. But you’re doing it in a different way, probably, then most reproductions, because the reproductions are not really for the expressive form of the work. They being made so that the AI system can analyse the work and generate connections between different aspects of the work.