Artifical intelligence “is all around us,” says Harry Glorikian, author of “The Future You: How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Can Help You Get Healthier, Stress Less, and Live Longer” (Amazon).
Glorikian, who has been an advisor, investor, and partner in healthcare companies, details in his book how doctors are treating once-incurable diseases by rewriting DNA, how AI is helping them diagnose cancer more precisely, and how people (maybe you, too) used smartphones and smartwatches to reach health and fitness goals and sometimes survive a health emergency.
He notes scientists used AI to develop COVID vaccines at record speed and repurpose existing drugs to fight the virus—and how, he says, AI will help identify future outbreaks more rapidly.
There’s nothing about health and wellness that won’t be transformed by AI that’s either already here or coming. Self-driving cars. Smart personal assistants—think Siri, Cortana, or Google Now—or Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service that is available on literally hundreds of millions of devices. Voice-to-text. Manufacturing robots. Facial recognition software. Security surveillance. Automated financial investing and social media monitoring. Smart homes that control themselves when their owners are out of town. “The list is endless,” Glorkian avows.
Voters in the cities of DuPont and University Place, the Steilacoom and Orting school districts, and King County are being asked to approve separate funding measures in a special election that ends April 25.
DuPont is seeking a renewal of its six-year emergency medical services (EMS) levy. Its first year was 1999, and it has been renewed every six years since then. If passed again, it would continue to add 50 cents to the property taxes of landowners in the city.
University Place is proposing for a second time a levy to pay for police. Narrowly defeated last November, it would cost property taxpayers less than $20 a month.
The school measures are back on the ballot for a second time after being rejected in a special election in February, when their yes-vote totals fell short of the required 60 percent majority.
Steilacoom School District’s bond proposal totals $116 million that would be spent for a new elementary school, a high school sports stadium, and other upgrades.
Orting’s $150 million bond proposal would pay for construction for new or expanded elementary schools, among other plans.
King County is asking voters to let it collect $1.2 billion from property taxes over nine years to pay for behavioral health services. The proposal would fund the creation of five regional crisis care centers, residential treatment beds, growth of the behavioral health workforce pipeline, and immediate services while centers are being built. The cost for the owner of a median-valued home would be about $121 in 2024, the first year of the levy, officials said.
Once ballots are mailed to voters by the their county election departments, voters will have until April 25 to mail them back or deposit them in official dropboxes.
Whether you’re tackling a long trek or taking a leisurely stroll through a forest, it’s easier than you might think to get lost. So which states have the most people who are losing their way or are bad at self-navigating and need Google Maps the most often, and which month is the most likely for unlucky wanderers to get lost? It turns out that Washington is one of the 10 most map-needy.
USBettingReport.com, an online source of news and information tied to betting on U.S. sports, analyzed hundreds of Google searches for Google Maps over the last 12 months and discovered South Dakotans are the ones using the service the most. An estimated 75 out of every 100 residents of South Dakota searched for directions on average since February of last year – the highest figure across all states. The research also found that South Dakota residents were mostly like to get lost in April.
Vermont and Massachusetts rank far behind the leading state in second and third, with 25 out of 100 residents resorting to Google Maps for directions. Washington ranks sixth, right behind Oregon in fifth place. The rest of the top 10, in order, are Colorado, California, New Hampshire, Illinois, and Minnesota.
Appearing at the bottom of the ranking is Mississippi, with just an estimated 9 out of 100 people searching for Google Map directions.
The months with the highest number of residents becoming lost were revealed to be August and July.
Egg shortages in Washington are expected to continue
Grocery shoppers looking for eggs to buy sometimes find signs like this one at a Trader Joe’s store in Seattle’s University District. (Sophia Sun for Crosscut)
d. And according to one Seattle environmental microbiologist, the timeline for that is unknown.
Chicken eggs have almost always been an easily available and relatively inexpensive staple, but the shortage that began last year with the latest sweep of avian flu has made them increasingly expensive and difficult to find. According to the Consumer Price Index, nationwide egg prices have gone up 60 percent in one year.
As with other rising food costs, the high price of eggs results from shortages. Avian flu has been the major reason, because so many birds have been affected and killed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that over 58 million birds have been affected in 47 states. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reported 151 cases of avian flu in Washington in December 2022.
To control the potential spread of avian flu in Washington, the state Department of Agriculture has established policies for quarantine and the elimination of infected flocks. Farmers have been forced to destroy entire flocks of chickens if even a single bird tests positive.
“Many farmers spent years building up their flock,” said Kevin Scott-Vandenberge, the owner of Portage Bay Grange, a small chicken farm in Seattle. “Now bird flu has become their most sensitive topic. Once their chickens were infected with the virus brought by wild birds, they lost everything they had.”
According to Vanderberge, wild pigeons are one of the most persistent avian flu threats.
John Scott Meschke, an environmental microbiologist and associate chairman of the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, sees avian flu through an ecology lens.
“Climate change has altered the flight paths of many bird species,” Meschke said. “As a result, the species of birds that come to Seattle have become unpredictable, and these exotic birds bring more potential viruses with them.”
The National Audubon Society reported that over the past 40 years, more than 60 percent of North American bird species have shifted their ranges northward, by an average of 35 miles.
Seattle grocery stores have managed the current egg shortage through their long-term collaborations with food distributors that work with a wide range of suppliers and have the resources to quickly identify alternative supply sources when shortages occur.
“We haven’t predicted this crisis, but our routine of forecasting the egg demands and pre-ordering helps us maintain our supplies,” said Nihad Delic, a warehouse manager for District Market in Seattle. While stores like Fred Meyer and Whole Foods have limited egg purchases to one or two cartons per person, District Market’s egg display has never been empty and the price has not gone above $2.99 a dozen, according to Delic.
“As farmers kill birds carrying the virus and businesses raise the price of eggs, there is too much focus on how to minimize their harm from avian bird flu when the results have already been produced,” Meschke said. “People should put more attention on how to control avian bird flu.”
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture is monitoring avian flu, including developing guidelines for controlling outbreaks in commercial poultry operations, these efforts can’t control the illness in wild bird populations and among birds that don’t appear to be sick.
“There is still a long way to go to effectively control bird flu,” said Meschke. “More people should be involved in this project.”
Source: Crosscut.com, a non-profit Pacific Northwest news site and part of Cascade Public Media.
There’s nothing about health and wellness that won’t be transformed by AI that’s either already here or coming. Self-driving cars. Smart personal assistants—think Siri, Cortana, or Google Now—or Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service that is available on literally hundreds of millions of devices. Voice-to-text. Manufacturing robots. Facial recognition software. Security surveillance. Automated financial investing and social media monitoring. Smart homes that control themselves when their owners are out of town. “The list is endless,” Glorkian avows.
