Live data from Hacker News

James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

jamesdysonaward.org

11–20 of 48 posts

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#11
post #6

So you send your urine test results to the "cloud". Now the Google engineers will know whether you are going to die even before your doctor does. That's just great.

Reading „cloud“ and „cancer test“ in the same article gives me the shivers. This is arguably one of the most sensitive pieces of information one can own about a person. The NN could just run in the app, recent phones are heavily optimized for this anyway.

Is it really that scary? In countries with sane laws and/or universal health care you can shout about your cancer diagnosis from the rooftops.

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#12
post #8

So you send your urine test results to the "cloud". Now the Google engineers will know whether you are going to die even before your doctor does. That's just great.

wow, there's no mentioning of Google in the article at all (ctrl-F showed no hit); Even then, "Google engineers" do NOT just get access to GCP client's data... it would be a immense breach of client trust for GCP and would be a code red for google immediately. Please refrain from making strenuous, baseless connections to arbitrary articles for your own privacy vendetta. It helps nobody.

I used Google as an example of what it normally means to send stuff to the cloud. Sorry If it bothered you. Insert X powerful monopoly private company instead.

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#13

With the usual caveat that a positive test to a rare condition is most likely a false positive.

At least in this case a false positive is unlikely to have any negative effects other than temporary anxiety while awaiting further screening, which is vastly more preferable to a false negative.

The use of COVID PCR tests for "mass testing" of asymptomatic individuals in the UK has resulted in the number of positive "cases" corelating more closely with the number of tests performed than with other measures[1], such as the number of people in hospital or dying with respiratory symptoms. This has been used to justify more extreme lockdown measures.

There have been estimates of the false positive rate[2] but it is likely to vary widely as the tests are administered by untrained personnel and not stored according to the manufacturer's recommendations. Those who test positive in the UK are not usually given confirmatory tests as they are immediately required to isolate, resulting in a large number of current "cases" which may be false positives[3].

[1]https://www.anhinternational.org/news/is-there-a-waning-pand...

[2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

[3]https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/pitfalls-of-repeat-testing-ill...

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#14

With the usual caveat that a positive test to a rare condition is most likely a false positive.

Probably, but it's one of those scenarios where the upside of early diagnosis outweighs the inconvenience of false positives, as long as the scores are way better than luck, or WebMD.

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#16
post #6

So you send your urine test results to the "cloud". Now the Google engineers will know whether you are going to die even before your doctor does. That's just great.

Reading „cloud“ and „cancer test“ in the same article gives me the shivers. This is arguably one of the most sensitive pieces of information one can own about a person. The NN could just run in the app, recent phones are heavily optimized for this anyway.

Do cloud tests really change much? How many people will start Googling information about a disease as soon as they have a positive diagnosis, giving Google the information without any cloud tests.

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#17

I feel like I keep seeing these as science fair wins and innovation award wins, but where are they in real life? Are they making it to (the biomedical equivalent of) prod?

In the US, the FDA usually has to approve medical devices like this. 23 and Me was paused while they talked to the FDA. The cloud connection of the award winner is of some concern. Should you include PII and a sample, US health insurers could use that against you in the future for pre-existing conditions. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/vitro-diagnostics/direct...

Isn't it insurance fraud to fail to report a pre-existing condition anyway? Are you suggesting that people engage in fraud?

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#18
This is really interesting, reading more deeply into it, it sounds like it's been known for a while that there are metabolites that can be used to detect cancer (and the reserach seems to indicate that's true for lots of different cancers), and it seems this person is gaining time to market by simply proving the test works through observation rather than understanding which metabolites are present for which reasons - which is a more traditional approach others are taking. I don't know why they're talking about pepole having their own machine or processing the results in the cloud though. It seems like the underlying test - a few sensors exposed to a urine sample is something you could provide in a thousand different ways (test via mail, routine tests during doctors check ups) without waving yours and going "WooooOOoOOoo Clloooudddd" - although maybe that's the sort of thing you need to do to impress Dyson.

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#19
The section about the sustainability winner completely ignores climate change. Mind boggling.

> The problem: Fossil fuels continue to account for over 81% of global energy product according to the International Energy Agency. It is estimated that, if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global supplies of gas and oil will deplete by 2060.

Re: James Dyson Award – International and Sustainability winners announced

#20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading „cloud“ and „cancer test“ in the same article gives me the shivers. This is arguably one of the most sensitive pieces of information one can own about a person. The NN could just run in the app, recent phones are heavily optimized for this anyway.

Do cloud tests really change much? How many people will start Googling information about a disease as soon as they have a positive diagnosis, giving Google the information without any cloud tests.

Your argument is that because things are already bad it doesn't hurt to make them worse?
Post reply on HN