INVESTIGATING POSSIBILITIES AND PROBABILITIES OF BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS (BMI): BEYOND BIOLOGY AND INFORMATION

My work focuses on how medicalized minds and bodies are refashioned through the concepts and technologies of Biomedical Informatics (BMI). I attempt to make visible objects of informatics that mark the human as a digital machine operating among and within computerized agencies, artificial intelligence, and what has been termed Big Data correlation. Specifically, the anthropological puzzle that I investigate focuses on the BMI imagination and its implicit and implemented effects upon doctors as operators, patients as sites, and informaticians as technicians of “new” medicine in a world of expanding computerized data that shifts and refashions the human care encounter. I argue that the contemporary of BMI has a far wider organizing effect upon healthcare and medicalized bodies than previous aspirations based on computer technology as mere tools in medicine. Through a rapid development and deployment of intelligent databases and computerized networks, BMI is currently restructuring modes of clinical care. As a set of scientific practices, it is reconstituting earlier medical informatics of the 1970s, 1980’s, 1990’s and pushing these modes of care in different directions. Such restructurings come in contact with non-human operations of medico-scientific systems of knowledge and through programmable expressions that impinge upon doctors’ deliberations through everyday encounters with patients. I approach these puzzles and clinical experiences through the figure of an informatics body that frames emergent arrangements of computerized algorithms, organization, disease, genomics, and therapeutic order. As an informatics body, the human falls under questions embedded in this deeper convergence of medical digitalization. Complex computerizations and algorithmic forms that are designed to bring clinical improvement are giving rise to unanticipated effects that are refashioning the body of the patient and the mind of the physician in ways that have been under-examined. In futures of biomedicine that I investigate, an informatics-based medicine, the figure of the human in the continuum of care is constantly being reengineered and redeployed. Throughout my investigation I ask What acts, human and non-human, possess the possibility of therapeutic improvement and can bring other things to life that do not originate in current therapeutic order? I suggest that systems of machine agency that are targeting and monitoring for disease and health are reconstituting who and what has access to care, as well as access to decision agency among intelligent and computerized care data

CONCEPTUAL DESIGN REPORT

Brookhaven National Laboratory has prepared a conceptual design for a world class user facility for scientific research using synchrotron radiation. This facility, called the ''National Synchrotron Light Source II'' (NSLS-II), will provide ultra high brightness and flux and exceptional beam stability. It will also provide advanced insertion devices, optics, detectors, and robotics, and a suite of scientific instruments designed to maximize the scientific output of the facility. Together these will enable the study of material properties and functions with a spatial resolution of {approx}1 nm, an energy resolution of {approx}0.1 meV, and the ultra high sensitivity required to perform spectroscopy on a single atom. The overall objective of the NSLS-II project is to deliver a research facility to advance fundamental science and have the capability to characterize and understand physical properties at the nanoscale, the processes by which nanomaterials can be manipulated and assembled into more complex hierarchical structures, and the new phenomena resulting from such assemblages. It will also be a user facility made available to researchers engaged in a broad spectrum of disciplines from universities, industries, and other laboratories

Brain Computations and Connectivity [2nd edition]

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Brain Computations and Connectivity is about how the brain works. In order to understand this, it is essential to know what is computed by different brain systems; and how the computations are performed. The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current biologically plausible computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes. Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions. This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed, and updates by much new evidence including the connectivity of the human brain the earlier book: Rolls (2021) Brain Computations: What and How, Oxford University Press. Brain Computations and Connectivity will be of interest to all scientists interested in brain function and how the brain works, whether they are from neuroscience, or from medical sciences including neurology and psychiatry, or from the area of computational science including machine learning and artificial intelligence, or from areas such as theoretical physics

Evaluation of the ingestive behaviour of the dairy cow under two systems of rotation with slope

The ingestive behaviour of grazing animals is modulated by the vegetation characteristics, topography and the type of stocking method. This research was carried out in 2019, at the Rumipamba CADER-UCE. It aimed to evaluate the impact of two contrasting stocking methods of dairy cows grazing a pasture with an average of slope >8.5%. Four dairy cows were set to graze a 0.4 ha paddock for 5 days for continuous stocking methods, while for the electric fence methods the dairy cows were restricted to 0.2 ha and the fence was moved uphill every 3 hours, repeating this process four times a day. Cow were equipped with activity sensors for 12 h per day. The whole procedure was repeated 2 times after realizing an equalization cuts and both paddocks, a rest time of 30 days and a random reassignment of paddocks to one of the treatments. The cows showed a difference in terms of the percentage of grazing P=0.0072, being higher with the electric fence (55% of the measurement time). From rising-plate-meter estimates of available biomass along the grazing periods, we calculated despite similar forage allowances (electric fence = 48.06 kg DM/cow/d and continuous = 48.21 DM/cow/d) a higher forage intake was obtained in the electric fence treatment (17.5 kg DM/cow/d) compared the continuous stocking (15.7 kg DM/cow/d) (P=0.006). In terms of milk production animals grazing under the differences electrical fence stocking method tended (P=0.0985) to produce more milk (17.39 kg/d) than those grazing in the continuous system (15.16 kg/d) due to the influence of the slope (P=0.05), while for milk quality the protein content was higher for the electric fence (33.7 g/l) than the continuous method (30.5 g/l) (P=0.039). None of the other milk properties differed between methods (P>0.05)