Cognitive Bias in Forensic Pathology Decisions was published today by Journal of Forensic Sciences

Did you know that all the nuclear bombs we exploded in the '40s-50s-60s have permanently contaminated all the steel the world has produced since then? All steel in the world is divided into two categories: pre-1945 non-contaminated steel, and post-1945 contaminated steel.

How?

Nuclear bombs (including the tests) create a lot of radioisotopes that are not found in nature. For example Cobalt-60 (a radioactive version of Cobalt-59). And since the 1945 Trinity test, these have all dispersed in the atmosphere.

What does this have to do with steel?

The process of manufacturing steel uses atmospheric air (or atmospheric oxygen). Some of the radioisotopes like Cobalt-60 get pulled in too, and as a result, any steel produced after 1945 has embedded in it some of these radioisotopes, sitting there emitting gamma rays.

Why do we care about traces of radioisotopes in steel? When making Geiger counters, or medical devices to check for radioactive contamination, or astronomical instruments, the emissions from the contaminated steel would interfere with the measurements.

So we need pre-1945 steel

Pre-1945 non-contaminated steel is called "low background steel". And when we need it, where do we get it from?

We go, find pre-World-War-II sunken shipwrecks, and then salvage the steel (and lead) from those to build our instruments which need heavy radiation shielding.

Next up at #enigma2021, Sanghyun Hong will be speaking about "A SOUND MIND IN A VULNERABLE BODY: PRACTICAL HARDWARE ATTACKS ON DEEP LEARNING"

(Hint: speaker is on the

In recent years ML models have worked from research labs to production, which makes ML security important. Adversarial ML research studies how to mess with ML

For example by messing with the training data (c.f. Tay which became super-racist super-fast) or by foiling ML models by changing inputs in ways humans can't see.

Prior work considers ML models in a standalone, mathematical way
* looks at the robustness in an isolated manner
* doesn't look at the whole ecosystem and how the model is used -- ML models are running in real hardware with real software which has real vulns!

This talk focuses on hardware-level vulnerabilities. This is particularly interesting because these can break cryptographic guarantees (because those are outside of their threat models)
e.g. fault injection attacks, side-channel attacks

https://t.co/odzm9VTdwZ

Thread for today. /0

It is fashionable for people to create sympathy to the unseen / unknown organisms. The poor things that can't stand up and fight for their own existence.

It makes for a brilliant narrative. It melts your hearts. And you get to play saviour of the oppressed by outraging. /1

But, for most part, such things are also false.

Amazon are the lungs of the world. Never mind that most of the world's oxygen production happens in open oceans. But these are harmless ones. Of course, we all love to maintain forests.

However, some things are sheer scare mongering.

For instance - take this: coral reefs will be permanently gone if mean / median temperatures raise by 1°C ..

But, really - how? Then you get a lecture on how CO2 will affect calcification.

Dig a bit deeper from another angle+

+ and you find that the earth was much much warmer during the age of Dinosaurs. So much so, that we had cold blooded lizards growing to sizes of buildings. Surely, there must have been tons of CO2 then!

And the ocean temps were quite high too.

1/ #LBBB generates often a classical pattern on #EchoFirst. The pattern is very distinctive in Tissue Doppler of the septum.

The classical pattern arises from the time lapse of the activation and relaxation of the two walls, creating a pattern of interaction due to a sequence temporal imbalances of the tension between the two walls.

2/ As the septum is activated first, it contracts (shortening - septal flash) without activation of the lateral wall, which stretches. This generates slower pressure build up than a normal IVC, which then is prolonged.

3/ During ejection, the LV volume decreases, so both walls shorten. Tension, however, declines first in the septum, as this was activated first. This leads to a tension imbalance, so the lateral wall continues to shorten, the more relaxed septum stretches.

4/ The stretching of the septum builds up an elastic tension in the septum, which is released as recoil, when tension declines in the lateral wall, showing a post systolic shortening in the septum which is due to elasticity.