From the toxicity section (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borax#Toxicity) it seems like the concern is most about ingesting borax in large quantities or breathing in the dust. And also being cautious on potential health affects:
Since people are already exposed to boric acid naturally through their diets and water, Health Canada advised that exposure from other sources should be reduced as much as possible, especially for children and pregnant women. The concern is not with any one product, but rather multiple exposures from a variety of sources.
"Although it does not appear to be carcinogenic, studies in dogs have reported testicular atrophy after exposure to 32 mg/kg bw/day for 90 days. This level is far lower than the LD50."
The base toxic dosage (on the order of multiple grams per kilogram bodyweight) is the reason it's typically labeled as very safe.
The labels and general knowledge passed from trainer to trainee insist on the reprotoxicity of the flux, which as you point appears to be at exposure levels far below toxic levels. I wonder if the safe label of boric acid for feet is made looking only at the general toxicity of the product, leaving aside potential reproductive issues that might arise with repeated use of small quantities?
The article seems to be talking about two potentially unrelated effects - up-regulation of gluconeogenesis in the liver and BCAT1. The gluconeogenesis makes sense in the presence of glucose-hungry cells, the body would start making its own to stabilize blood sugar. I wonder what the signal mechanism is for the BCAT1 up-regulation?
Not related to cancer, but the general consensus in the medical community seems to be that keto is NOT a healthy diet. Though it can help with weight loss it contributes to poor heart health and just generally mucks up your cardiovascular system (that’s my medical term, not a doctor’s). I gained a few pounds during Covid and my GPs first, unprompted, advice was to avoid keto at all costs. Additional anecdote: my uncle recently lost a good amount of weight on a keto diet (5’8”, was 220 now about 168) and he promptly had a heart-attack. Doctors said he had “diabetic arteries” and that the keto diet was at least a contributing factor.
I think getting any clear results in nutrition is essentially impossible because you can't conduct the studies necessary to get rid of all the confounding factors. Consequently it's probably a bad idea to follow an extreme diet. Of course that doesn't mean that keto (or other dietary interventions) can't be beneficial for certain illnesses like cancer. I'd be interested to hear about studies.
The diets in the "Blue Zones" feature those as staples as well. I somehow don't think that they're terribly unhealthy. Grains have been staples for millennia by now.
Thanks, it's funny how you can hear just about everything about diets. I just saw a video about a doctors review of someone doing one meal a day / keto saying their internals were in better shape than most young adults.
It's true that tapping in alternative energy path is risky, that's why I ask for others informations before jumping into a sharkpool.
Intermittent fasting seems to have a net positive effect, and the Mediterranean diet seems anti cancer - you live longer. A search will turn up multiple scholarly references.
I sometimes feel like only eating when very hungry might be the only reason I'm still around. I was no rock star, but had many of the same habits.
I have a gut feeling that eating less food might be better than any other healthy living tips.
(To those fasting. I have know two people, one a Chiropractor, who went on strict fasts. Both ended up in the hospital over their appendix bursting. I will always remember what my grandfather told me. Everything in moderation.)
Caloric restriction is one of the most reliable ways to increase the possibility of extending life. Fasting is also known to be beneficial. IIRC, you don't need very long fasts to get the full benefits.
Is there a text transcript feature for users who may want to search through the communications? I'm curious how well those speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.
It's a hard problem. I'm prototyping this here [1]. Any user can tweak or vote on transcriptions, so my goal is to use the user annotations to help train models and make it better.
I was wondering if you could estimate what it would cost to have always on recording of all these radio conversations, cost of running this speech2text ML and cost of labeling this data.
I think having these rough estimates will make donations easier for people.
I've got a year+ of the Ohio MARCS-IP site in Hamilton County Ohio recorded. Let me know if you need some data -- I'd be more than happy to get you the dump.
(trunk-recorder + rdio scanner).
The UI is:
https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz for the live stuff, but, let me know if you're interested in the data -- my email is in my profile
Great question! Unfortunately the long term costs aren't clear yet, right now I'm using google speech as a bootstrapping technique, but that is prohibitively expensive to run long term.
I think once my models are viable enough to do this at scale, the cost will be basically the cost of running a dedicated server per N streams. So $100-300/mo per N streams? Where N could roughly be at least 100 concurrent streams per server. I will know this better in "stage 2" where I'm attempting to scale this up. It's also a fairly distributed problem so I can look into doing it folding@home style, or even have the stream's originator running transcription in some cases to keep costs down.
I suppose maybe you can try running it through Otter[1]. We’ve used it with varying degrees of success when interviewing customers, and it’s also what powers Zoom’s transcript feature which is what we use these days.
It’s hit and miss, in my opinion. It’ll give you a good enough base to refine the transcript from, but I’ve yet to come across a transcript that doesn’t need editing. (Which is annoying, since Zoom doesn’t give you that option.) I’d say it’s more valuable having the tool than not, but don’t expect miracles.
(I’m not affiliated with Otter or Zoom in any way.)
Hi, this is a difficult problem but I've been working hard on it for a couple of days with some help. I have a pipeline and website that automatically transcribes scanner feeds that is working pretty well, and the website allows users to correct and vote on transcriptions.
My goal is to train my own models on the corrected transcriptions (I work in the speech recognition space) so I can transcribe many live feeds inexpensively.
I will respond with a link here (hopefully very soon today) once I've fixed a couple of remaining UX bugs.
I work in the speech recognition space and train my own models already. The existing open-source models aren't very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of my models to this task once I have some data from the site.
As you’re well aware but HN folks may not be, it’s not just that it’s noisy, it’s heavily coded, contextually bankrupt speech between multiple parties that spend all day in contact with each other. Dispatchers in particular seem to have superhuman ability to extract information from completely unintelligible garbage.
This is a very accurate description of the problem space. Every municipality has their own jargon, vernacular, and ways to communicate brevity which is key in public safety communications. The communications are often digitized over vocoders that are less than optimal, and then you have the process of recovering voice from noisy communcations channels.
Indeed. The only reason I know is that I tried a few years back and realized that I was asking the computer to do something that I couldn't even do. Anyone that doubts it, just listen to the NYPD feed and try to transcribe for just a minute or two.
(edit: also, thank you for keeping this service up and running for so long, have been a regular user since the early RR days. Would love to have a comment/live chat option if your backlog is getting bare :))
Thanks! I did a lot of tests and no existing ASR I found could do it to 100%, so I'm using the best ASR I could find and hoping users will help with transcriptions if they want to see it succeed and scale.
Oh man, compiz-fusion is what got me interested in Linux. I remember seeing videos circa 2007-8 of people's desktops with all sorts of crazy stuff. Cube desktops, wobbly windows, fire trails, etc. I spent forever figuring out how to dual boot Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows and learned a ton so I could setup these effects. Fast forward 12 years and now I only use Linux on servers without a desktop interface at all.
While this stuff may seem silly and pointless, you'll never know who it'll inspire to dive in to a whole new world. I'm glad it's being maintained still
It’s silly but loads of fun. My first Linux was also Ubuntu c. 2007-2008 and I got a kick out of using a cube desktop that neither Windows nor Mac had.
Their VP is also an epidemiologist by training, a public health researcher, and was the health minister during the SARS epidemic [0] so definitely seems like the right person in the right job at the right time.
In grapes, our lead consortium prevented botrytis, a key fungal pathogen, to a level statistically indistinguishable from chemical pesticides. Biological don't typically do that well.
We anticipate benefits that we have yet to prove: higher efficacy, lower risk that the target will evolve resistance, and better persistence in the soil.
