Impact of a Large-Scale Handwashing Intervention on Reported Respiratory Illness: Findings from a Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial

This study presents the impact of a large-scale community-based handwashing intervention trial on respiratory illness. We found no impact of the handwashing intervention on overall or age-specific reported respiratory illnesses. However, people who had soap/soapy water plus water present at their handwashing station, irrespective of intervention allocation, had lower prevalence of respiratory illness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6402932/

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AI sceptic Emily Bender: ‘The emperor has no clothes’

Her thesis is that the whizzy chatbots and image-generation tools created by OpenAI and rivals Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, Google and Meta are little more than "stochastic parrots", a term that she coined in a 2021 paper. A stochastic parrot, she wrote, is a system "for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning". https://on.ft.com/465EHFT I saw this article when using the Financial Times app and thought you might be interested: Financial Times, AI sceptic Emily Bender: 'The emperor has no clothes' -- George Hammond -- Read the full article at:

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