@manuelazucknick
Professor, Statistical learning in molecular medicine. Director Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology @ocbe.bsky.social, @uio.no & Oslo University Hospital. Posting in my own capacity. (Bio)statistics, climate breakdown, train journeys.
Jeg betrakter norske Sydenreisendes prislidelser på #dagsrevyen (flyreiser, drivstoff), mens jeg selv planlegger påskereise til Sicilia med bruk av interrail pass (15% avslag tilbud frem til og med 31. mars).
Ikke brenn opp kloden. Ta toget.
1) Queen! 2) The focus on code as a thing with a purpose that is reviewed and understood by people who assess it in a broader and often very nuanced context is vital here. We’ve all written basic coding bots for things that didn’t matter (and it didn’t need 1B parameters). Making them good is hard.
And life expectancy does not even reflect loss of health and of active, productive life years. This comparison is probably even more dramatic for healthy life years or QALYs. I have not yet met many healthy, fit 80-year-old U.S. Americans (but 80-year old Norwegians overtake me in the ski tracks 😅).
The time to register for this is now!
It's a great opportunity for biological / biomedical researchers who want to get better in analysing their own data.
Garbage in garbage out
U.S. News rankings the top 50 hospitals are driven overwhelmingly by reputation scores, which have almost no correlation with objective quality metrics. Newsweek’s global list weights "peer recommendations" at 55% and does not directly include outcome measures.
What's missing? The public. Decisions about whether AI can surveil American citizens or autonomously deploy lethal force are being settled in a contract dispute. No Congress. No democratic deliberation. No accountability. We've outsourced questions about the use of force to a corporate negotiation.
The proverbial Nazi bar on a crowded evening. Lots of random people milling about, waiting for tables or watching the goings on. The tables are occupied by men wearing Nazi armbands with the stylized X of X-Twitter replacing the swastika. They each have a beer in front of them. A woman at the bar is speaking to a man: "Wow! This place is busy. So everyone here is a Nazi?" She asks. He replies, "No. Us journalists come here to cover this important topic. The Nazis get the good seats... and service." A man nearby, overhearing the conversation, adds "And they get paid to be here."
Also, it should not *be* a radical thing to take a train from Berlin to Lisboa. It should be the normal thing to do. And the necessary thing, if we ever want to get to a carbon-neutral society.
"We regulate most of the products we buy, from automobiles to airplanes to appliances. Existing and emerging A.I. models entail far more risk and scope of potential harm than these products."
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/o...
Important take on Anthropic vs Pentagon: Military use of AI (any use of AI) should be governed by law & regulations, just like any other products. In the U.S. it is Congress who needs to come up with the appropriate legislation; this is not something that a company gets to decide or the government.
fell for it again award
Towns that question the value of an unsafe, costly, environmentally unsound, poorly governed monorail could be ‘left behind’, says Monorail Salesman
To be clear, no country should have its head in the sand about AI. But ‘embrace’ here, from OpenAI, means one thing - ‘uncritically adopt our tech, become permanently dependent on our power and infrastructure, and pay us handsomely for the privilege’
notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich
Tropical diseases spreading in Europe due to global warming.
www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
We used to say: “to get rich in a gold rush, sell shovels”, but I haven’t yet heard of a gold rush that took in all the worldwide production of shovels (and, actually, all the worldwide production of steel in order to make those shovels).
The left tried for decades to pass green energy subsidies, passed them, the subsidies worked, and now literally the entire planet's electricity grid is going to convert to solar+battery. It just doesn't feel like "tech" because it mostly produces kinda boring blue collar jobs instead of billionaires
In a world where the US is turning into an authoritarian banana republic, Russia has wrecked its economy trying and failing to conquer its neighbor, and China is turning into a hyper-nationalistic totalitarian nightmare, it is surprising so many people are thinking that Europe is the failing one.
Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns."
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
The Project 2025 author is using millions of dollars in USAID money for his own security detail.
It is estimated that 762,000 people have *already died* as a result of Elon Musk and Russell Vought’s obscene murder of USAID, including more than 500,000 children.
Vought is a mass murderer.
As a direct result of the obscene actions of Russell Vought and Elon Musk in destroying USAID, we can expect “at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trend continues.
About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.”
"Moderna's CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: 'You cannot make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market. Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.” 9:12 AM Feb 12, 2026 604.8K Views
In terms of what cures are being lost:
- Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis
- herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis
- shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease
Quite the chart
++ Major News ++
AABI is now ProbML: the Symposium on Probabilistic Machine Learning! Very excited about this!
ProbML will be co-located with ICML in Seoul!
Check out our new website: probml.cc!
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.
Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
👇👇👇👇
WHO removing Us Flag
Tenk at UiO for bare et par år siden flyttet hele mail-infrastrukturen sin til Microsoft. *UiO.* Som introduserte Internett i Norge.
No boycott but a systematic shift away from the unpredicable U.S. market. Is already happening. E.g. German exports to EU have increased and effectively cancelled the negative effects of lost business with U.S. after tariffs were introduced. Now Mercosur will increase trade EU - South America. Etc.
I always wondered, when I read Suetonius, how everyone could put up with Caligula for so long.
I think I understand better now. The institutional and social inertia is so strong, especially among elites with “something to lose”. No one wants to stick their heads up first, so they go into denial.