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Having trouble focusing? This service pairs you with a remote work buddy

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Sometimes we need another person—even a largely silent one—to help us reach our goals. Focusing on tasks intensely enough to make progress is hard enough during normal times. It’s been even tougher as our homes have become both a castle and a prison over the last year. Some of us thrive best in an environment with accountability or collegiality. In a workplace, we may have the thrum of people or the occasional stare of a boss. At home, not so much. A service called Focusmate addresses the challenges of working alone by pairing people to perform separate tasks at the same time in companionable silence during a video call, with each worker being aware that they’re in the virtual presence of someone else. In effect, it gives people who work from home some of the value of toiling among others, in on-demand form. Focusmate is modeled after body doubling , a form of personal task accountability that’s common in circles of people who have trouble focusing and may have a self-diagnosis or professional diagnosis of ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). A body double is another person who has a set of tasks to get done, and you agree to pair your unrelated tasks with each other for a short period of time to provide external reinforcement. Setting up body doubling without an in-person component or trusted friends or colleagues can be tricky. You need to find a partner, set the rules, and make sure you both have time at the right time. And if you know someone too well, you can easily slip into the procrastination mode that led you to seek help in the first place. Focusmate connects two people via video, but it’s about focused work in someone else’s presence, not chatting, [Image: Focusmate] “If I were to do this with one of my classmates or colleagues, we [would] certainly spend some larger percentage of our time in chat or discussion, and less-than-focused work,” says Lynn D. Warner, an ADHD/executive-function coach who recently finished her training and relied on Focusmate for studying. “Working with a stranger is much more productive for that reason.” (Warner, my spouse, first alerted me to Focusmate after finding it invaluable.) Focusmate’s matchmaking eliminates all the pain points and friction while still making a human and humane connection. The service answers the questions posed by its founder, Taylor Jacobson: “How can you combine just the ingredients of providing structure, providing accountability, providing human connection and camaraderie and team spirit?” The service sets ground rules to keep chat to a minimum and stresses safety and trust to minimize the possibility of abusive incidents. Users must register even to use the free tier, which allows you to book three 50-minute sessions each week. Those who pay $5 per month have unlimited access Read More …

How a largely untested AI algorithm crept into hundreds of hospitals

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L ast spring, physicians like us were confused. COVID-19 was just starting its deadly journey around the world, afflicting our patients with severe lung infections, strokes, skin rashes, debilitating fatigue, and numerous other acute and chronic symptoms . Armed with outdated clinical intuitions, we were left disoriented by a disease shrouded in ambiguity. In the midst of the uncertainty, Epic, a private electronic health record giant and a key purveyor of American health data, accelerated the deployment of a clinical prediction tool called the Deterioration Index . Built with a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning and in use at some hospitals prior to the pandemic, the index is designed to help physicians decide when to move a patient into or out of intensive care, and is influenced by factors like breathing rate and blood potassium level. Epic had been tinkering with the index for years but expanded its use during the pandemic. At hundreds of hospitals, including those in which we both work, a Deterioration Index score is prominently displayed on the chart of every patient admitted to the hospital. The Deterioration Index is poised to upend a key cultural practice in medicine: triage. Loosely speaking, triage is an act of determining how sick a patient is at any given moment to prioritize treatment and limited resources. In the past, physicians have performed this task by rapidly interpreting a patient’s vital signs, physical exam findings, test results, and other data points, using heuristics learned through years of on-the-job medical training. Ostensibly, the core assumption of the Deterioration Index is that traditional triage can be augmented, or perhaps replaced entirely, by machine learning and big data Read More …

As schools reopen, some are keeping all-virtual options

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Teaching to the middle has historically been the approach taken by many schools nationwide, where a one-size-fits-all model is the norm and students must figure out how to fit in or fail. When COVID-19 hit and schools quickly pivoted to distance learning, challenges and disparities—many already present but ignored—were revealed for teachers, parents, and students. Yet, as the pandemic raged on, some students actually thrived in this at-home learning environment. Who are these students, and why are they flourishing? What can we learn from them? One lesson is that many students experience stress due to daily instances of racism. This occurs especially when they do not feel a strong sense of belonging in their school setting, which  research  shows can lead to reduced academic confidence and performance. Taking classes online eased some of the pressure that students, including Black, immigrant and indigenous kids, felt to  assimilate in classrooms  and schools. Distance learning has also benefited students who may struggle with anxiety, are uncomfortable with social interactions, have learning differences, or are bullied in school. Presenting material in various formats remotely can allow more students to access information they need to fully participate in class, and the flexibility to learn on their own can give students with unique interests time to explore their passions in the arts, writing and other endeavors, while empowering them to choose how to best schedule their work. Two key principles of learning highlighted in  The End of Average by Todd Rose, former Harvard professor and cofounder of the  Populace think tank, are at the core of what’s happening. First, the concept of variability, which states that every learner varies across many dimensions—executive function, emotional regulation, primary language, and mental health among them. Nobody is average across every dimension, and these differences impact how we learn best. The Learner Variability Project  at Digital Promise has mapped these dimensions of variability so that educators, school system leaders and product developers can understand and design for them. The second principle is that context impacts learning—how a learner learns best can change based on what the subject is. For example, a child who practices hard to get better at soccer or music has a growth mindset, but that same child can have a fixed mindset when it comes to math, not believing there is any point to trying to improve through hard work. It’s the same child with the same abilities, but changing the context alters how that child thinks and learns. As students and teachers return to school buildings, they need not boomerang back to the traditional, one-size-fits-all environment, where everyone is expected to learn the same content, the same way, at the same time, in the same context. Instead, they should strive to better understand  the “why” behind a student’s behavior , and to design practice and contexts around each learner’s variability, whether in school or online Read More …

The U.S. is alarmingly close to an autonomous weapons arms race

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One of the Pentagon’s primary jobs is anticipating what the wars of the future will look like so that it can allocate the resources necessary to make sure the U.S. has the edge in those battles. When people in the defense industry talk about the tools of future war, they usually mention applications of AI, autonomous weaponry, and a very different role for warm-blooded human beings during battle. These technologies are in their early stages of maturity; defense forces don’t yet understand the best ways to deploy them in battle. Military leaders in other wealthy countries, including China and Russia , are also talking about such matters, though we don’t know where they’re placing their bets. For a number of reasons—some old, some new—the U.S. could easily get pulled into a race to develop and use autonomous weapons before it understands how to use them predictably, effectively, and ethically. Cold War 2.o We may enter a period of escalation that recalls the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. “There’s an AI arms race where I’m worried about your development of this technology and you’re worried about my development of this technology, and neither of us communicates that we’re aware of the limitations,” said Chris Meserole, director of research and policy for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Read More …

Google Ventures-backed Merlin Labs is building AI that can fly planes

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Merlin Labs, which develops autonomous systems that fly airplanes, has emerged from stealth with $25 million in funding from Google Ventures and others. The company says it wants to be the “the definitive autonomy platform for things that fly.” Merlin announced Wednesday it signed a deal to outfit 55 twin-turboprop King Air planes owned by Dynamic Aviation with AI flight systems. The startup also has a contract with the Air Force to develop autonomous transport planes. Boston-based Merlin Labs, which currently has roughly 50 employees (including full-time contractors), has a dedicated flight facility at the Mojave Air & Space Port where it’s been testing its AI platform. The system has already piloted hundreds of unmanned test flights from takeoff to touchdown, Merlin’s co-founder and CEO Matthew George tells me. [Photo: Merlin Labs] The first Dynamic Aviation King Air to be outfitted with a Merlin Labs AI system is now doing test flights in the Mojave. Eventually, the AI-enabled King Airs will do flights that are too “dull, dirty, or dangerous” for human pilots, George says. Currently, Dynamic Aviation uses humans for flying fire surveillance missions, transporting goods, and patrolling far out over the ocean, but it hopes Merlin’s AI will be able to ultimately take over the cockpit. Dynamic Aviation offers these flights as a service to customers that include federal defense and intelligence agencies, state and local governments, and private companies. Merlin’s AI will have to get clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) before Dynamic’s King Airs can go pilotless. George says his company has been working closely with the regulator to get its AI flight system certified as safe. But the FAA currently does not have a certification for autonomous systems that fly fixed-wing aircraft (the only aviation regulator in the world that does is in New Zealand). The agency is working on the requirements of the certification now, George says. Read More …