Shut this startup down!

The last thing in the world I would consider doing is renting my home out as an Airbnb, VRBO, or Home Away. Even if I had a spare place to spare for transient, paying guests, I wouldn't want to be a landlord.

I'm saying this even though I've always enjoyed my short term rentals, which go back to the pre-Airbnb days, when we were finding apartments in Paris and Rome through the classified ads in Harvard Magazine. It just wouldn't be for me.

I don't want anyone nosing around my stuff. Criticizing my taste. Thumbing through my books. Swiping that cute little lemon bowl that cost four bucks at Home Goods. Trying to pry their way into the locked owners closet in an unobvious way. (Of these things, I am guilty of nosing, criticizing, and thumbing, but never of swiping or prying.)

The most interesting things I've come across were in a short term rental on the East Side of NYC. The apartment was owned by an heir to the W.R. Grace fortune. The fortune had petered out over the generations, but this particular scion had inherited a very nice small Degas ballerina painting, which they didn't bother to lock away.

Weirdly, in the same apartment, I went to put my clothes away in the dresser in the bedroom, only to find that the drawers were stuffed with the owner's clothing, or, rather, his wife's. (There was no indication that the dresser was off limits. In every other place I've stayed, there have been drawers that are empty and available.) Anyway, the drawer I opened was stuffed - and I do mean stuffed - with every color imaginable of thongs. Ewwwww. Needless to say, my clothing stayed in my suitcase for the duration.

So while I stay in them on occasion, I don't like what these short term rentals have become. And that's a big business in which some owners have multiple places that they use for transients because they can make more money than they could renting to permanent residents. In many cities, they take scarce apartments off the market for "real people," making it harder for "real people" to live in their own cities. So, a pox on a lot of these short term rentals. I don't blame cities (like NYC) where Airbnb is heavily regulated, limiting the number of days a home may be rented, limiting occupancy, limiting the type of place you can rent (e.g., must be your primary resident - not a secondary home or vacation property).

Anyway, however he does it, Sean Donovan runs an Airbnb in San Francisco (a city that does have significant regulations on Airbnb rentals, even if it's the city where Airbnb was founded and is headquartered).

He thought he was renting to a group of colleagues who needed a place to stay while on business in SF. But things were a bit mysterious from the jump. Donovan's doorbell camera captured the renters moving in large black cases. Then the security system was turned off.

Two days later, Donovan stopped by the house to take out the trash. He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot.

When his guests checked out 11 days later, the house was a mess, Donovan claims. Glasses and dishes had been removed from kitchen cabinets and left elsewhere. The dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine were scratched. Dishwasher racks were bent and removed. Wooden furniture was scratched and stained. Bathroom tiles were chipped. A shoe rack and several pairs of shoes were missing from a locked bedroom closet.

"What the hell is going on here?” Donovan recalled thinking. (Source: SF Standard)

What the hell, indeed.  

After a bit of detective work, Donovan was pretty sure he had solved the mystery. The renters were, indeed, colleagues. But they worked for the Bot Company, a San Francisco robotics outfit headquartered, oddly enough, on the same street as Airbnb. 

The group had, Donovan alleges, taken the place "under false pretenses." They weren't using it as their bed and breakfast They were using it to "conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores." So Donovan's suing them for the relatively modest amount of $12,383.50, which he figures will cover the damages and lost income he would have received if the renters had been honest about wanting to use his place for commercial activity.

“The dishonesty is really what upsets me the most,” he said. “If they had come straight up, ‘Hey, we would like to rent your house for testing of our robot,’ then we could have come to an agreement. But it’s the lying and the misrepresentation that makes me feel violated.”

He's apparently not the only Airbnb host to be violated. 

...at least 12 other Airbnb hosts alleging they damaged the property and personal belongings, failed to clean up, exceeded the limit on the number of guests, or violated other house rules during their stays.

But, but, but, the Bot people are geniuses, above and beyond the rest of us.  

Our team comes from Tesla, Cruise, OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and many other great companies. (Source: bot.co)

They wouldn't even have had to mention that they come from Tesla and other genius hangouts. Just using the .co extension tells us that they're special. They're the cool kids. Using .com as your extension? How pedestrian. How boring. How yesterday. (Okay, they couldn't have used bot.com if they'd wanted to, as it's already taken by a Canadian board of trade.  Still...) 

And it goes without saying, they're a VC darling (and are currently valued at $2B).

We are backed by Greenoaks, NFDG, Spark, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and many others who share our belief that robots belong in our everyday lives.

And even if the investors really don't give a hoot if robots belong in our everyday lives, at least they're all hoping that bot.co is a unicorn that will make them all richy rich richer. (Who wants to be a millionaire billionaire trillionaire?)

But for now, the geniuses (or genius-adjacent workers) trashing these short terms rentals sure look to me like a bunch of entitled, ahole, feckless, slobs.

There is no danger, of course, of this startup getting shut down. But geez Louise, pick up after your robots, why don't you? Maybe you can find a better robot - or better yet - an actual human to take care of it for you.

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Image Source: Popular Mechanics

A note on Popular Mechanics. This magazine was founded and, until the early 1960s, was headquartered in Chicago. It's now located in NY. During the 1940s, my mother worked there as an admin/assistant editor.  In January 1945, she met my father - who was in the Navy, stationed in downtown Chicago and working out of Navy Pier - on a blind date and they hit it off. They were married in November of that year and moved to my father's home town, Worcester, Massachusetts. So she was something of an intra-country war bride. Anyway, I did get a kick out of finding an image on her magazine's website. 

The road to hell (and stupidity) is paved with AI

For years, I've been reading about how our abundance of technology is changing the way we think - and not in good ways. Cursive writing, using maps, reading books and pretty much any other form longer than the average tweet, making to-do lists on yellow pads. All of these skills aren't just lost arts. They're important, as they help us with cognitive development, memory retention, critical thinking, analytical ability...

And this was even before AI use cases started soaring. 

With AI making inroads, the law of unintended consequences is clearly being enforced. It's not just that folks relying on technology to do just about everything for them involved in thinking and doing won't develop key capabilities. It's that using AI will cause their existing skills to erode. 

In one study, doctors who'd gotten used to relying on AI to identify pre-cancerous growths during colonoscopies saw a decrease in their own ability to do so. 

This deskilling is worrisome to a lot of folks:

That possibility is a growing concern for medical specialists, computer scientists and other workers. Seventy per cent of nurses and 77% of physicians, for example, are worried about losing their skills because of over-reliance on AI systems, according to a survey of US health-care workers published earlier this month1.

Their fear might be justified. Evidence suggests that AI-driven ‘deskilling’ is starting to happen in medicine, computer science and other fields. Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the age of AI. (Source: Nature)

On the one hand, what of it? If from here on out there'll always be AI around to do the growth spotting, what difference does in make if a doctor's not as good? 

Good question, but I'd prefer my physicians to be able to, if not heal themselves, then heal me without all the heavy lifting being done by an AI. What if we're stranded on a desert island? Although on a desert island, I'm not likely to undergo a colonoscopy, I'd still want a doctor who knows how to do things the old-fashioned way. 

I have a friend who's a retired physician. She takes her blood pressure using her old hand-pump BP device, the one with the squeeze bulb. She trusts its reliability more than she trusts the swanky new digital machines.

Overall, the growing reliance on AI is not an unalloyed good for the wonderful world of health:

The study authors say that continuous exposure to such [AI] tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.

Less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance? That doesn't sound good.

Another example from my friend the doctor: She recently had a healthscare based on a misreading of a result. (Not sure if the situation involved human or machine error.) There was a slight problem, but not the major one initially reported, which had her writing her obituary in her head. Anyway, my friend's PCP was not particularly well-versed in what was happening to my friend and why. This is perfectly understandable, as the situation was a bit off the beaten path and no PCP can be expected to know everything.

The PCP went to the google and, we're guessing, AI'd her way into ordering a bunch of diagnostic tests for my friend, most of which my friend knew had nothing to do with the condition her condition was in. She played a bit of a waiting game, pushed back a bit, and ended up only with the tests she needed.

The situation is not, of course, perfectly analogous to the AI colonoscopy one, but it does demonstrate how a doctor might rely on what the technology is guiding them to do because it's quicker and easier than trying to figure out what actually makes sense in a given situation.

Then there's the impact of AI on coders.

By now, we're well aware of the looming coding takeover by AI. Folks used to look to computer science, to IT, to software development, for solid, lucrative careers. Now students are advised against studying much beyond how to work with AI.

Anthropic (an AI research company) recognizes the inherent problem at play:

AI creates a potential tension: as coding grows more automated and speeds up work, humans will still need the skills to catch errors, guide output, and ultimately provide oversight for AI deployed in high-stakes environments. (Source: Anthropic)

Anthropic decided to see how AI would help and/or hinder codes. So they set out to test the assumption about whether there were tradeoffs when it comes to using AI to assist - note, not replace - coders. 

Study participants were sorted into two groups, one using AI and the other "manually" coding, and were tested afterwards to see how rapidly they picked up a new coding skill 

The AI group was faster, but in the tests adminstered after the trial, they found:

...a significant differences in test scores the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group—or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades (Cohen's d=0.738, p=0.01). The largest gap in scores between the two groups was on debugging questions, suggesting that the ability to understand when code is incorrect and why it fails may be a particular area of concern if AI impedes coding development.

The good news, I guess, is that AI is not quite ready and able to replace all of us humans. The bad news is that while it's making its way to full readiness and human-ish capability, it's making us dumber.

Swell!

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Image Source: Parker's Ponderings

Hypochondriacs, assemble!

Just when I think I've said everything I have to say about the perils of AI, up pops another one. And this pop up is a doozy. A not surprising doozy, but a doozy nonetheless.

A couple of years back, Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at a Swedish university (and an "AI strategist") came to the realization that an awful lot of folks - including brainiacs who should know better, given how cavalierly so many of them are using AI - hadn't a clue how it works. (Bad enough that innocent bystanders, naive googlers, mere consumers of misinfo are blissfully ignorant.)

“It was interesting how few of them [her students], or how few even people within A.I., understand how large language models (LLMs) are built,” [she said]. (Source: The Smithsonian)

So she decided to teach her class how the AI systems that produce the info we get when we google are constructed. (Not all AI stems from LLMs, but when we amateurs are out there googling, the information/misinformation regurgitated to us on a platter of convenience and speed likely comes from an
LLM.) 

And what better way for a medical researcher to do so than to concoct a fake disease and see what AI could do with it.  

“...I really wanted to have a clear case that leaves breadcrumbs throughout the whole system to show both how data is processed, how data is churned out, and how the prediction model and training model works when it comes to distributing information,” adds Osmanovic Thunström.

The condition that she and her team came up with was bixonimania, a malady associated with computer screen use.  (And who among us hasn't searched a time or two to see if we could figure out how all our screen time was impacting us mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually?)

They unleashed bixonimania on a searching, unsuspecting world in early 2024.

They put out two blog posts on the website Medium and two research reports on a preprint server, where scientists post studies that have not been peer-reviewed... The papers’ lead author was named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic—which translates to “lying loser”—and one of the studies’ titles says something akin to “Hyperpigmentation: A Real B.S. Design.” (Both reports have since been taken down by the preprint server.)

In defense of AI - and this may be my one and only defense of AI - maybe it would have picked up on the fakery if the author's name was given as "Lying Loser" in English, rather than in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. Maybe.

Anyway, LLMs started to run with it. You searched on your symptoms and Microsoft Bing's Copilot would tell you that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition." Indeed!

Naturally, Chat GPT got in the act. And Google's Gemini attributed the condition to too much exposure to blue light. (By the way, those eyeglass lenses that are supposed to help prevent occurrences of bad things associated with blue light? They're apparently as dubious as bixonimania. As I found out when I ordered them - and paid a couple of hundred bucks extra - without checking with my eye doctor first.)

Worse yet, a number of scientists crazily/lazily went ahead and cited the BS apparently without having drilled down on the "research." Or even read it. (I'm guessing those gulled by the fakery were using Chat GPT to author their own work. Full circle!)

This despite the fact that Osmanovic Thunström's team threw in a bunch of Easter eggs that gave away the fakery - or should have. References to financial support from Lord of the Rings, and intellectual support from fellow scientists at the Starship Enterprise. 

At least one of the papers even explicitly stated, “This entire paper is made up,” reports Nature.

And that wasn't enough for the LLM to pick up on? Maybe the AI's eyesight was faltering due to bixonimania. Oh, wait...

“This is a master class on how mis- and disinformation operates,” says Alex Ruani, a misinformation researcher at University College London who wasn’t involved in the project, to Nature. “If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed.”

Doomed? Yikes! (And what a job title: misinformation researcher.  Bet that position didn't exist ten years ago. Maybe it's one of those swell jobs they keep telling us AI will create once it kills off all the current jobs.)

Meanwhile, I can think of one group of folks who might just delight in having a bunch of fake but harmless conditions out there. Hypochondriacs, assemble!

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Image source:  Amazon

Wii Bowling. (Wheeeeeee...)

I don't have a non-bucket list, but if I were to maintain one, two items that would safely be on it:

• I will never join a bowling league
• I will never live in Tulsa, Oklahoma

I also hope never to have to live in a senior living community - that's just no country for old introverts - but I don't really know what the future holds. So never say never on senior living. But I'm pretty confident saying never to bowling and Tulsa. 

Still, I was delighted to read a recent story in The New York Times on the U.V. Okies, a bowling team from University Village senior living who are the hottest bowlers in a senior league that bowls via Nintendo Wii Sports.

I must note that I am not against bowlng per se. Every time I've been bowling - which is maybe a few dozen times in my life - I've enjoyed it. Even that first time in eighth grade when I went candlepin bowling with the Junior Catholic Daughters of America (girls spinout of the Knights of Columbus) and managed to knock down 11 pins in total. Now candlepin is a lot harder than "big ball" bowling. Still, 11 is pretty embarrassing. 

I've managed to score over 100 - even well over 100 - in big ball bowling, but the only way I'll go bowling nowadays is using bumpers. 

Maybe I'd be better using Wii, but I doubt it. 

Tulsa is another story. If Oklahoma isn't exactly my cup on tea, state-wise, I would be fine visiting Tulsa to see the Black Wall Street History Center, which commemorates the 1921 race massacre, and to see the Woody Guthrie Center, which commemorates Woody Guthrie. (Fun fact: I'm friends with the former curator of the Woody Guthrie archives. She was an archivist for the collection when it was housed in NYC and was responsible for moving it to Tulsa.)

But there aren't many places in the United States where I can less imagine myself living than Oklahoma. (It might be tied for rock-bottom with Mississippi, but that's factoring out Texas and Florida.)

Yet I delighted in reading about my age peers having such a good time Wii bowling. 

The Okies are the league champeens, and have been so through six seasons. They rarely if ever lose. This season's record was 10-0.

Their team includes Phyllis the Killer Wimer, a.k.a., the GOAT, who is 95; Charlene "the Grasshopper" Giles; Marvelous Marcia Ness; Rollin' Ron Remaree; Ron Pogue; and Dandy Don Alcorn. They're all, like me, old geezers. But I would have guessed that just by looking at their decidedly old-fashioned names. Does anyone get named Charlene or Ron anymore? They're a couple of Maureen-ish names if ever. 

The league was founded 20 years ago, just about when the Wii first came out, and gives folks an opportunity to get together and have some fun while getting some exercise in as well. And compete for bragging rights - and 100 Grand candy bars. 

There are as many as 40 players at a time on the U.V. team, folks competing in-house to earn one of eight places for the week's league game. 

“There are some things I do where I feel ageless,” Ms. Giles, 75, said. She added: “It’s like I could just as well be 13 standing up there. It’s fun to have those things.”

Wii bowling helps them socialize and form friendships, navigate the aches and pains and grief and loss of aging, and encourages them to try new things. “This is the way older people survive,” Pat Winkle, known as “Nana Pat,” 87, said. (Source: NY Times)

Aches, pains, grief, loss. Yep/yelp!, they got aging right!

Players sport team shirts. They cheer on their teammates with pompoms. They decorate their bowling lanes (actually the facility's rec room) with posters. Smells Like Teen Spirit to me!

And if you're wondering whether the bowlers would be mssing the sounds of pins clattering when they go down, wonder no more. Wii comes with special effects: sounds of pins getting knocked down and visuals like "Strike" flashing on the screen when someone knocks down all ten pins. 

And if you're wondering whether real-life bowling alley skills automatically transfer to the virtual game, not really. 

When he first started playing, Mr. Alcorn had to unlearn the techniques and stances he knew from real-life bowling.

“That won’t work,” he said. “You’ve got to go up and out to get the strike.”

Hmmm. Maybe there'd be hope for me as a virtual bowler! 

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Image Source: Barstool Sports

Yet another thing that shouldn't be for profit

There are plenty of things that shouldn't be run on a for profit basis.

Prisons. Jails. Healthcare. Rehab. Armies. Student housing. And schools. Grammar schools. High schools. Colleges. And, yep, nursing schools. 

Across the boards, the need to maximize profits tends to lead to a lot of bad behaviors. Depending on the industry, this can mean pressure to grow in areas that shouldn't be expanding, but should be contracting. (Looking at you, prison industrial complex!) It can mean corner-cutting and shoddy service delivery to minimize expenses. (Dorms are supposed to be crappy, no? And that patient with bedsores can wait to get shifted in her bed. She's on her way out anyway.) 

For-profit schools for younger children often weed out the kids who are most likely to be poor learners in need of extra support and who would thus put some dents in a school's vaunted "outcomes" metrics.  

In higher education, profit maximization often means predatory marketing, pressure on the low-income students they recruit to take on more debt than they can afford, and folks ending up with a substandard, unrespected degree or credential. If they achieve that degree or credential at all. 

So like most of the insitutions of "higher education" that are run as money making schemes, for profit nursing schools are controversial. They tend to focus on non-traditional students who want their education to be fast and flexible. Who are easy to get sucked in.

Florida's Carleen Noreus was the president (owner operator) of two eponymous schools in Florida: Carleen Home Health School, Inc. in Plantation, and Carleen Home Health School II, Inc. in West Palm. (Really? She gave her schools her first name? That should have been BIG RED FLAG #1.) But teaching nursing was apparently way too much work for Carleen Noreus. Those who can, teach. Those who can't teach - or just don't want to - can just sell fake diplomas. Both of Carleen's schools have been shuttered, but while she was open for business:

Prosecutors said she conspired with others to sell fraudulent nursing diplomas and transcripts to people who hadn't completed the required coursework, enabling them to take national nursing board examinations.

Between April 2018 and October 2025, Noreus was responsible for providing 2,956 fraudulent nursing diplomas through the schools, prosecutors said.

Of those, around 2,274 passed nursing board examinations, allowing them to obtain nursing licenses and work as nurses in Florida and across the country, authorities said. (Source: NBC Miami)

The fake credentials she provided were for RN's, LPN's, and for BSN degrees. And goody good that the majority of those who short-cutted their way out of nursing school managed to pass their licensing exams. But baddy bad that they did so without completing important coursework AND without critical clinical experience. 

As a result of her "work," Noreus - who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering - is facing lengthy prison time once she's sentenced. Not clear what happens to the 2,274 certified nurses who passed their tests with flying colors. Presumably their licenses will be revoked and their careers will crash and burn.

Noreus was one of 13 defendants in this case, which was brought by the DOJ's South Florida District. It's certainly good to know that the DOJ is still capable of focusing on something other than selective persecutions prosecutions of those on Trump's enemies list. 

This prosecution is part of the second phase of Operation Nightingale (such a great name!) "a nationwide effort targeting fraudulent nursing diploma schemes operated by for-profit nursing schools in South Florida." (During Operation Nightingale's first phase, 30 miscreants were convicted.) Florida, huh? Why am I not surprised.

“Nursing licenses must be earned through education, training, and demonstrated competence, not purchased through fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “By selling thousands of fraudulent diplomas and transcripts, the defendant undermined the integrity of the nursing profession and our healthcare system. The Southern District of Florida remains committed to holding accountable those who profit by corrupting professional licensing processes and placing the public at risk.” (Source: US Department of Justice)

Nurses. RNs. LPNs. BSNs. PAs. NPs. 

I respect and admire nurses. Sure, they're not all Florence Nightingales. Not all Edith Clavells. (A WWI nurse-martyr.) They're not all the nurse Cherry Ames-es, the nurse Sue Bartons, of the insipid book series I consumed as a kid. Some nurses are no doubt Nurse Ratchets.

But to me, they've been the human and humane face of medicine. The ones who have more time and patience for their patients.  

I have had nothing but wonderful experiences with nurses, both personally and through second-hand observation. One of the most supportive professionals we encountered during my husband's long cancer fight was the NP who worked with Jim's oncologist. During one particularly gruesome period near Jim's end of life, I emailed Kelly at 5 a.m. on her day off, hoping that she'd get back to me the next day. She got back to me at 5:15 a.m.

My ortho is a PA. When needs be, he consults with the orthopedic surgeon he works with to review XRays and MRIs, and I have 100% trust in him. 

Sure, those 2,274 wannabe nurses passed their licensing exams. Who knows what prompted them to participate in this scam. They ran out of money. They flunked an exam and didn't want to take a course over. Who knows?

But I wouldn't want one of them showing up at my bedside, that's for sure.

I guess this is just what happens when you put the profit motive first. 

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Image Source: Daily Nurse

Good news for those who aren't a whiter shade of pale

A couple of weeks ago, I had what is likely my final visit with my dermatologist.

I was there for a periodic skin check, but the doctor found nothing to be worried about. On the one hand, I have very fair skin and skin cancer hits us pale faces more often than it does those with darker skin tones . On the other, although I did suffer a couple of hurty-hurt sunburns when I was a young fool, I've never been much of a sunworshipper. And there's no immediate family history of squamous cell carcinoma (vs. "good" skin cancer, which is basal cell) or melanoma. Plus I'm old. So unless I spot some worrying skin lesion, there's no need to come back. Ever. 

I do have vitiligo, an autoimmune condition that causes white patches to appear on my body. Mine are on my legs, arms, and armpits (of all things), but because I'm so light-skinned those white blotches just blend right in and aren't noticeable unless you're looking. And trust me, ain't nobody looking. Except Dr. Angel - my dermatologist's real name - and she has to look to find it.

Vitiligo can, of course, be awful, especially if it appears on your face. And especially if you have dark skin. For some vitiligo sufferers, it's obvious and disfiguring. 

Anyway, skin tone matters for a lot of reasons, and some of them - like the likelihood of cancer and the impact of vitiligo - are medical. And it's not just in medically obvious ways.  Skin tone is used to help "diagnose low blood oxygen, neonatal jaundice, and hospital-acquired pressure injuries [i.e., bedsores]." And most of the diagnostic tools that look at skin tone have been oriented towards white people. 

There was a standard for measuring skin tone, used from the mid-1970's on, that covered a six point spectrum. But four points on the scale were for those with light-colored skin, with two additional points for brown and Black skin. But those two points didn't incorporate the full spectrum of possibililties.

Enter the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale which was developed by Ellis Monk  - a Harvard sociology professor - in 2019. Some

of Monk's academic work had focused on colorism (prejudice, often intra-race, towards those with darker skin).  Encouraged by colleagues and his wife (because behind every great man...), Monk began working on a more expansive way of evaluating skin color.

The sociologist ended up developing a 10-tone, open-source scale aimed at improving inclusivity in skin tone classification across technological and clinical domains...Its original form, with colored spheres, reflected a much wider range of skin tones. But Monk settled on a 10-point scale for pragmatic reasons. “Ten points are pretty much the breaking point for having people be able to consistently use it as a subjective scale,” he said. (Source: Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences)

The MST is being used beyond medical applications, and is improving search engine, driverless car, and facial recognition technologies. Facial recognition tecnology in particular is notoriously less effective in differentiating one Black person from the next - which has resulted in many innocent people being accused of crimes they had nothing to do with. Etc. 

But the MST is now being adopted by the medical industry. And this cost-effective device is saving lives. 

Among the life-saving applications are pulse oximeters - you know, the little finger thingies we all bought for ourselves during COVID - which:

...measure blood oxygen by analyzing light as it passes through the skin via a small finger clamp. However, darker skin absorbs light differently than lighter skin. Because pulse oximeters originally used white skin as the standard, people with darker skin would get inaccurate readings. And because these inaccurate readings skewed higher, many people with dangerously low blood oxygen ended up with too-high readings, meaning they would appear to have normal blood oxygen.

Then there are bedsores.  

The[se] injuries are traditionally under-diagnosed in darker-skinned people, but a laminated badge displaying the MST scale, along with 15 minutes of training, is helping nurses recognize more incidents of HAPIs. A 2026 study finds the badge, which costs approximately $2, reducing these injuries by 94 percent at a 900-bed Level I trauma hospital in Los Angeles.

Because of his work, Monk has been "awarded the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. Monk was the first sociologist to win this $2.5 million grant." Unfortunately, the grant was canceled in 2025, presumably by DOGE know-nothings. Presumably because Monk's work is about color. And we can't have that. So what if a bunch of old Black folks get bedsores? Solving that problem is so patently unfair to whites. 

Despite termination of his NIH grant, Monk intends to continue this work, having seen applications for common medical tests such as EKGs and EEGs, which also take measurements through the skin.

“People have been operating blind to color,” he said. “You can’t do that, because the skin is your interface with the technological world.”

Good for Professor Ellis Monk. And good news for those among us who aren't, like me, a whiter shade of pale. 

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Image Source: Research Gate

For the record, although some days I feel as pallid as an A, I'm pretty sure I'm a B on the scale. 

Release the kratom? What's it worth to you?

Although I've been known to pop a mini-can of Diet Coke to jolt me out of my longing for an afternoon snooze, I've never imbibed an energy-boosting drink. No Jolt. No Red Bull. No Monster Energy. (Seriously, who needs the energy of a monster?)

Most energy drinks are, like my mini-can of Diet Coke, caffeinated. Just a lot more potently caffeinated than my mini DC.

But there's another category of energy boosters - often sold in gas stations to help drivers ward of falling asleep at the wheel -  that use kratom leaves, which are also supposed to be useful for painkilling.

Admittedly, there aren't many things beyond water you can put in your mouth without risk of something or other. And even bottled water is so unregulated that there could be something no good lurking in every gulp of H2O. But "kratom has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures and thousands of deaths." 

From 2020 through 2024, kratom was found in the system of more than 5,200 people who died of drug overdoses, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on death certificates and other official reports. Though often found in combination with other drugs, one study determined that those using kratom carried a sixfold increase in the risk of overdose death. (Source: NY Times)

Oh that...(Guess I won't be looking for kratom gummies to kill the pain in my paining knees.)

Despite linkages to things like death, there are many kratom proponents working to make sure that kratom-based supplements and drinks aren't regulated. One of these proponents is Markwayne Mullin, former senator R-Oklahoma and now Secretary of Homeland Security, who was a big booster of kratom boosting before being tapped to run DHS (and I'm guessing since as well). 

Was good ol' boy Markwayne doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Well, bless your heart for thinking the best, but Mullin was in fact an investor in Botanic Tonics, a kratom company, to the tune of as much as $1M. 

Last summer, while still a senator, Mullin:

...endorsed proposed federal restrictions on more powerful synthetic supplements that compete with kratom for shelf space. In explaining his position, Mr. Mullin pointed to a history of addiction in his family, though health experts say kratom products have also been shown to be addictive.

Oh that... 

Jerry Ross is Botanic Tonics founder, and he's been spearheading kratom-related lobbying efforts. Successes include getting the FDA to remove info on its kratom webpage regarding a case against Botanic, and then - what the hell - getting the DOJ to drop the case entirely. (I won't mention that Jerry Ross is an ex-con, because I really do believe in rehabilitation.)

All this successful "advice-giving" don't come cheap:

Mr. Kennedy, as health secretary, called the governor of Ohio to try to head off a state ban on kratom in the fall of 2025. Months later, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to a political committee associated with Mr. Kennedy.

Ross also donated over $400K to the RNC.

The lobbyists, of course, pooh-pooh the implication that they're up to anything untoward. 

The CEO of a rival kratom company has said that "'It’s not pay to play. It’s pay to have conversations. It’s pay to have a chance at the table...I mean, that is the world that we live in.'” 

He's right, of course, but what a hell world. And also upside down world, as the Trump admin promotes risky, unproven products as a means to Make America Healthy Again. (As in healthy back when kids were crippled and killed by polio? MAHA? HAHA!) What, us science?

Speaking of pooh-poohing, it will come as no surprise that the White House (via spokesman Kush Desai) is claiming that it would never be influenced by lobbyists with checkbooks. 

“The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health care policymaking is gold standard science,” he said in a statement. The administration, he added, was working “to get this critical matter correct and ensure the health and safety of Americans.”

I'm going to take their word for it here. It's not like they'd ever sell a pardon or make coin trading on insider info or award an inflated no-bid contract to someone willing to shovel some cash their way. (Only kidding.)

Not that corruption will automatically disappear when these guys are all good and gone, but, man, they are so openly and blatantly coin-operated it ain't even funny.

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Image Source: ClipartMax