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Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…
I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
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This is interesting, although I do wonder whether by the time the "cough" is detectable, a person has not already been infecting lots of others.
(Thanks to Robert Condlin for the pointer.)
Based on the abstract, they say there is a 94% specificity for detection of a covid cough, and 83% specificity for detection of an asymptomatic covid cough. I haven't read the article to see precisely how the latter figure managed to be lower. (Does it mean that 17% of people without covid were identified as having an "asymptomatic covid cough" while only 6% were identified as having a "covid cough", or does it mean that 17% of symptomatic people were identified as having an "asymptomatic covid cough"?)
That means that this mechanism would have quite a high false positive rate. I don't believe there are many settings outside of ships and meatpacking plants that have been confirmed to have more than 6% of the population actually infected at the same time, so a specificity of 94% suggests that in any use a majority of detected positives will be false positives.
But it still seems potentially more useful than fever checks, and perhaps more significantly might help us understand the different mechanisms that produce coughs. (I recall in March, when I started paying much more attention to coughs, I became convinced that I got better at identifying phenomenological differences between coughs produced by dry food particles, coughs produced by allergies, and coughs produced by the viral infections I had had in January or February – I'm definitely not *certain* I was reliable at telling the difference, but it does seem potentially useful for general public health if we can train people to recognize these differences in themselves.)
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