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If latest technologies are affecting your flight experience, listed here are tried-and-tested strategies to take care of it

enzo2go — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 05:33:01 +0000

Ten years ago I wrote a book called “The end of airports“that digital technologies and business air travel were on a collision course. At the start of the summer, my opinion was confirmed.

In July, a cybersecurity software outage brought airports all over the world to a standstill. It took airlines weeks to return to normal operations. Delta was particularly hit hardwith some 7,000 flights cancelled and delays well into August.

As an air travel expert who considers flights from a humanities and cultural studies perspectiveI believe that the brand new technologies being integrated into air travel management are a double-edged sword. While they improve safety and efficiency, they can even disrupt all the system more fragile and vulnerable.

The dark side of digital technology

Truth be told, aviation will depend on technology. Without it, humanity would never have taken to the skies. But latest technologies can create latest problems at the same time as they solve old ones. The latest digital technology inevitably offers imperfect ways of managing an unlimited, complex network of places, machines and folks.

And as computer systems turn into more finely tuned and integrated, they can even result in catastrophic failures, precisely due to the interconnected nature of technology. And we don't even need to talk in regards to the weather.

Last summer Software error event It won't be the last time an unexpected variable brings air travel to a halt. Fortunately, travelers don't must rely solely on airport technology systems or our own smart devices for a smooth journey. Here are six analog strategies travelers can use to take care of air travel debacles:

Old-school flight suggestions

Pack correctly to be prepared for possible delays. Make sure you’ve gotten all the things you would like in your carry-on luggage for an unplanned overnight stay in a hotel or, worse, on the ground of an airport. Take Transportation Security Administration-approved toiletries and enough clothes to survive a stopover in an unexpected place. And wear comfortable shoes.
Be kind to airline and airport staff who haven’t any control over delays or cancellations. Remember that if there's a software glitch or a freak storm grounds flights, no airline worker can robotically fix the issue. But in the event you're kind and patient, an airline worker might just offer you a hotel room or give you a more generous rebooking arrangement. Besides, it's the human thing to do.
Buy your tickets directly from the airlines. It's not price saving $20 or $50 on a third-party ticket deal. With delays and cancellations, the airline can be less concerned with helping you if you’ve gotten such a ticket. Buying tickets directly from the airline can get you back within the air faster.
Have a plan B. In case your connecting flight gets canceled mid-trip, have you ever contacted anyone you recognize in town? Or have you ever searched for hotels which can be easily accessible from the airport? What would it not take to get a snug place to remain for an evening? A bit research can go a good distance in the event you find yourself stranded.
Bring healthy snacks and other supplies. It is smart to pack vitamins, zinc, hydration packs, a reusable water bottle, medications, hand sanitizer, or anything that can boost your health during a visit. If you're stuck for just a few hours or overnight, planning ahead for just a few self-care items can aid you avoid contagious diseases and general fatigue.
Have fun on the airport. It is an enchanting place where so many individuals come together. If you stuck on the airport If you're there for several hours, use the time to find interesting things within the airport halls. You might discover art exhibits, an ideal bookstore, a yoga room, or a movie show. It could be tempting to only stand around within the gate area and laze around. But it's more fun to maneuver across the airport and explore what's there.

image credit : theconversation.com

At the Department of Veterans Affairs' $43 million simulation hospital, where doctors test latest technologies

enzo2go — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 12:48:14 +0000

In an enormous $43 million Department of Veterans Affairs facility equipped with operating rooms, intensive care units and an outpatient clinic, there aren’t any patients. At least, no real ones.

Located just minutes from Orlando International Airport in Florida, the 55,000-square-foot constructing known as the National Center for Simulation Validation, Evaluation and Testing, or SimVET. It serves as a central location where teams of VA health care employees come to practice procedures and test latest technologies without putting patients at unnecessary risk.

For example, if a team of doctors wants to regulate their response to opioid overdoses or test a brand new artificial intelligence tool, they will repeatedly simulate the method at SimVET. VA officials told CNBC that by working in a controlled environment, health care employees can iron out kinks and make sure that latest ideas are feasible and protected to implement.

SimVET, which opened in 2016, is an example of how simulation in healthcare increasingly normal and have turn out to be increasingly sophisticated in recent times. As health systems look to guage the a whole lot of latest AI tools which have recently hit the market, organizations like SimVET can assist cut through the noise.

The Veterans Health Administration cares for 9 million veterans at 172 medical centers across the United States. Each medical center has a simulation program, and a few have their very own on-site unit.

The SimVET facility in Orlando is “by far” the biggest simulation center throughout the VA and in addition certainly one of the biggest within the country, said Dr. Scott Wiltz, medical director of the VA’s Simulation Learning, Evaluation, Assessment and Research Network (SimLEARN).

Simulating high-risk scenarios is standard practice within the military and in industries resembling aviation, where pilots can spend hours practicing in flight simulators.

In healthcare, hospitals and medical schools have long relied on skilled actors to coach doctors, and virtual reality headsets have gotten increasingly popular for surgical practice. But SimVET takes things a step further.

The goal is often to be “as close as possible to [to] the very best possible level of realism,” Wiltz said in an interview with CNBC.

“The operating rooms are an excellent example,” Wiltz said. “We have two fully staffed operating rooms, all of the equipment you’ll normally use: lights, booms, real anesthesia machines. We actually have a mannequin that reacts realistically to anesthesia.”

CNBC visited SimVET in March and the dolls are a permanent fixture at the facility. They have a range of skin tones, hairstyles and facial features and some are programmed to talk, move and develop complications. One “older” doll at the facility has wrinkles and more pronounced veins and another can “give birth” to a “baby” doll.

Wiltz said the numbers should represent the VA's veterans and the country's overall population. There are “well over” two dozen mannequins at the facility, he said.

Aside from its unusual patients, SimVET features many familiar-looking healthcare scenes. Neon lights line a long hallway filled with exam rooms, and operating rooms filled with machines look like they've been taken straight out of a nearby hospital.

To an unsuspecting visitor, the facility looks like a real medical center, with the building's many classrooms and teaching rooms being the only small hint of this.

“The number of spaces now we have and the realism that comes with it really makes you are feeling like you could possibly actually take care of patients on this constructing,” Wiltz said. “And that's what we do, except our patients are puppets and actors.”

A place where you can surely fail

Wiltz said SimVET employs about 60 full-time staff and typically tackles several pilots and projects at once. National program offices and front-line staff at the VA come to SimVET with ideas for simulations, and sometimes facility staff come up with the idea themselves, he said.

SimVET can offer its services with funding directly through the VA, and so Wiltz says it often makes more sense for these groups to turn to SimVET rather than trying to pay someone outside of the government.

Amanda Borchers, patient safety manager at the Lexington VA Medical Center in Kentucky, was part of a surgical emergency team that visited SimVET in May of last year. She said they wanted to improve their response to unexpected complications that can arise during surgery, so they approached SimVET with ideas in the winter of 2023.

Borchers said some of the more vulnerable veterans in her group have respiratory, cardiac and circulatory problems that can cause sudden problems during procedures. Her team wanted to develop a new protocol to be better prepared for some of those challenges, such as how to quickly draw blood and get it to an operating room.

SimVET leadership helped Borchers and her four other teammates write several simulations before arriving on site and put them in touch with a number of subject matter experts from across the country.

The team spent a busy week at SimVET's facility: their first day started promptly at 7am at a drawing board, and then they spent hours going through various procedures and discussing issues with the experts and SimVET staff.

“You can fail, but you fail safely, and then you definitely use that to vary something. And then you definitely do it again. And then you definitely do it again,” Borchers said in an interview with CNBC. “The transformation and what we were capable of do in an unexpected emergency was amazing.”

Borchers said she has participated in simulations before, but has never experienced anything quite like SimVET. She said the facility replicates the environment she works in every day, allowing her to practice “each detail” of her routine work.

“It's the exact same,” she said. “You could actually do an operation there immediately.”

At the end of the week, Borchers and her team left SimVET with the framework for a brand-new medical code, which represents a facility-wide response to a specific type of emergency. For example, TV shows and movies often talk about “Code Blue,” in which medical personnel immediately intervene when a patient goes into cardiac or respiratory arrest.

Borchers said the new code the team developed will be announced over the loudspeakers as “Code SET,” which stands for “Surgical Emergency Team.” She said it is intended to alert a special team to provide support if unexpected complications arise during or immediately after surgery.

SimVET gave Borchers and her teammates their first practice and the confidence they needed in their idea, but they still needed to get the rest of the Lexington VA Medical Center on board. They introduced the code to their leadership and began to determine exactly which people and resources would respond to it.

Borchers said the medical center has begun running its own simulations and developing the code within small parts of the hospital in the fall. In the spring, they expanded their testing and began running facility-wide simulations with the code.

The medical center is currently upgrading its paging system, and Borchers said the facility will simulate the code again once the new system is installed. If all goes according to plan, the SET code will be in use with real patients in the next two to three months.

Borchers said their ultimate goal is to deploy the SET code in VA medical centers across the country, and staff from states such as Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas have already participated in simulated training.

Wiltz said the code is on track to become a national program at the VA.

“Fortunately, this is just not because of an opposed event, but moderately to people saying, 'You know what, we're doing things pretty much, but we predict we will do even higher,'” Wiltz said.

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image credit : www.cnbc.com

Disability community has long struggled with “helpful” technologies – lessons for all in coping with AI

enzo2go — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 05:34:20 +0000

You could have heard that artificial intelligence will revolutionize all the pieces, save the world, and provides everyone superhuman powers. Or you will have heard that it can take your job, make you lazy and silly, and switch the world right into a cyberpunk dystopia.

Look at AI from a special perspective: as an assistive technology – something that helps you function.

In this context, it’s best to also consider a community of experts in giving and receiving help: the incapacity community. Many disabled people make extensive use of technology, each specialized assistive technologies akin to wheelchairs and general-use technologies akin to smart home devices.

Likewise, many disabled people receive skilled and occasional help from other people. And despite stereotypes on the contrary, many disabled people repeatedly help disabled and non-disabled people of their environment.

People with disabilities have extensive experience in receiving and giving social and technical assistance, making them a helpful source of insights into how people might interact with AI systems in the longer term. This potential is a very important driver for my work as a disabled person and Researchers in the sphere of AI and robotics.

Actively learning to live with help

Although virtually everyone values independence, nobody is totally independent. Each of us relies on others to grow our food, look after us once we are sick, give us advice and emotional support, and help us in hundreds of other interconnected ways. Disabled people have support needs that transcend the standard and are subsequently way more visible. Because of this, the disabled community has grappled with what it means to need assistance to live more clearly than most non-disabled people.

This perspective from the incapacity community may be invaluable in relation to developing latest technologies that may help each disabled and non-disabled people. You cannot replace faking a disability with Experience of really being disabledbut accessibility can profit everyone.

The curb effect – the best way through which technologies designed for disabled people help everyone – has grow to be a principle of fine design.

This is typically known as Curb effect the best way through which installing a ramp within the curb to make it easier for wheelchair users to cross the sidewalk also advantages individuals with strollers, trolleys and bicycles.

Partnership support

You've probably had the experience of somebody attempting to show you how to without listening to what you actually need. For example, a parent or friend might “help” you clean and as a substitute hide all the pieces you wish.

Disability advocates have long been fighting against this sort of well-intentioned but intrusive help – for instance by Spikes on wheelchair handles to forestall people from pushing someone in a wheelchair without being asked to accomplish that, or to advocate for services that Maintain control of the disabled person.

The disability community as a substitute offers a model of support as a community effort. Applying this model to AI may help be sure that latest AI tools support human autonomy slightly than taking it over.

A key goal of my lab's work is to develop AI-powered assistive robotics that treats the user as an equal partner. We have shown that this model just isn’t only helpful, but essential. For example, most individuals have difficulty moving a robot arm with a joystick: the joystick can only move front to back and side to side, however the arm can move in almost as many directions as a human arm.

The creator talks about her work on robots designed to assist people.

To help, the AI can predict what someone is planning on doing with the robot after which move the robot accordingly. Previous research assumed that folks would ignore this help, but we found that folks quickly found out that the system was doing something, actively worked to know what it was doing, and tried to work with the system to make them do what they wanted.

Most AI systems don’t make this easy, but my lab’s latest approaches to AI allow humans to influence robot behavior. We have shown that this leads to raised interactions in Tasks which can be creative, akin to paintingWe have also began to explore how people can use this control to resolve problems outside the areas for which the robots were developedFor example, people can use a robot trained to hold a cup of water to pour the water to water their plants.

Training AI for human variability

The disability-centered perspective also raises concerns in regards to the huge data sets that underpin AI. The essence of data-driven AI is to search for common patterns. In general, the higher something is represented in the information, the higher the model will perform.

If disability signifies that your body and mind don’t conform to normal, then disability signifies that you are usually not well represented in the information. Whether it’s AI systems designed to detect cheating on exams, as a substitute, the popularity of disabilities of scholars or robots that Do not consider wheelchair usersThe interaction of disabled individuals with AI shows how fragile these systems are.

One of my goals as an AI researcher is to make AI more responsive and adaptable to real-world human differences, especially for AI systems that learn directly from interactions with humans. We have developed frameworks for testing how robust these AI systems are to real human teaching and investigated how robots can learn higher from human teachers even when these teachers change over time.

By viewing AI as an assistive technology and learning from the incapacity community, we may help be sure that the AI systems of the longer term meet people’s needs – while keeping people on top of things.

image credit : theconversation.com