Impact of various media on health

A middle road for AI adoption is taking shape, routing around the debate between those who fear humanity could lose control of AI and those who favor a full-speed-ahead plan to seize the technology's benefits.

A study of more than 2 million people’s internet use found no “smoking gun” for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.

A Senate panel announced Monday it subpoenaed the CEOs of Elon Musk’s X, Discord and Snap to testify at a hearing on children’s online safety next month after “repeated refusals” by the tech companies to cooperate with its investigation into the matter. The move marks a major escalation by lawmakers probing how social media platforms may harm children’s mental health, an area of broad bipartisan interest on Capitol Hill. The committee announced that it also expects Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to appear voluntarily.

This paper seeks to address a gap in mobile communication scholarship by contributing insights from a qualitative study of library patrons who checked out mobile hotspots from the Boston Public Library in Massachusetts. The findings show that although mobile hotspots provided many benefits for public library patrons in general, these devices facilitated mobile communication with a different sense of urgency for six people experiencing homelessness who also happened to be in romantic relationships.

Preventing and mitigating any adverse health effects from use of online platforms on minors, while preserving benefits such platforms have on minors’ health and well-being, are critical priorities of the Biden-Harris Administration.

Fallout continues from the Wall Street Journal’s investigative journalism exposé that showed telecommunications companies in the US have left behind a massive network of copper cables covered in toxic lead. AT&T CEO John Stankey said “there is no public health crisis” to worry about, citing the release of lead test results by AT&T, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the state of New York.

Large language model (LLM)–-based artificial intelligence chatbots direct the power of large training data sets toward successive, related tasks as opposed to single-ask tasks, for which artificial intelligence already achieves impressive performance. The capacity of LLMs to assist in the full scope of iterative clinical reasoning via successive prompting, in effect acting as artificial physicians, has not yet been evaluated. The objective of the study was to evaluate ChatGPT’s capacity for ongoing clinical decision support via its performance on standardized clinical vignettes.

The Good Things Foundation is the UK’s largest digital inclusion charity, seeking to help a million people to get across a tech divide that has deepened during the cost of living crisis.

For decades, AT&T, Verizon, and other firms dating back to the old Bell System have known that the lead in their networks was a possible health risk to their workers and had the potential to leach into the nearby environment. They knew their employees working with lead regularly had high amounts of the metal in their blood, studies from the 1970s and ’80s show.