If the future is better than the past, it will be because of people like this.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“It is an honor and a great responsibility to be part of the network that gathers the best of the best of women (and some great men) from across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and now Latin America, who have the same issue to fight, who face radicalization and foster sustainable peace. I found a diversity of expertise. We have the common goal, and I am learning from them and they are learning from me. It was a blessing to have women from different ages, backgrounds and religions come together. I want to have that wisdom to represent my community.”
It’s not every day you meet a high school student who’s been building functional robots since age 10. Then again, Mihir Garimella is definitely not your average teenager.
Nice work. “When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn’t attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school’s bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time.
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Of 415 million diabetics worldwide, one-third will develop retinopathy. Fifty percent will be undiagnosed. Of patients with severe forms, half will go blind in five years. Most will be poor.
“The lack of diagnosis is the biggest challenge,” Kopparapu says. “In India, there are programs that send doctors into villages and slums, but there are a lot of patients and only so many ophthalmologists.” What if there were a cheap, easy way for local clinicians to find new cases and refer them to a hospital?
That was the genesis of Eyeagnosis, a smartphone app plus 3D-printed lens that seeks to change the diagnostic procedure from a 2-hour exam requiring a multi-thousand-dollar retinal imager to a quick photo snap with a phone.
Kopparapu and her team—including her 15-year-old brother, Neeyanth, and her high school classmate Justin Zhang—trained an artificial intelligence system to recognize signs of diabetic retinopathy in photos of eyes and offer a preliminary diagnosis. She presented the system at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference, in New York City, last month.
“The device is ideal for making screening much more efficient and available to a broader population,” says J. Fielding Hejtmancik, an expert in visual diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other research groups, including Google and Peek Vision, have recently announced similar systems, but Hejtmancik is impressed with the students’ ingenuity. “These kids have put things together in a very nice way that’s a bit cheaper and simpler than most [systems designed by researchers]—who, by the way, all have advanced degrees!”
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Hejtmancik, the NIH expert, notes that there’s a long road to clinical adoption. “What she’s going to need is a lot of clinical data showing that [Eyeagnosis] is reliable under a variety of situations: in eye hospitals, in the countryside, in clinics out in the boonies of India,” he says.
Still, Hejtmancik thinks the system has real commercial potential. The only problem, he says, is that it’s so cheap that big companies might not see the potential for a profit margin. But that affordability “is exactly what you want in medical care, in my opinion,” he says.”
So many ordinary people became heroes in the dark days before and during WW II.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
“They did it because it was the right thing to do, nothing more, nothing less.”
Even so, it was incredible brave. While they weren’t smuggling people out of the Germany, they were helping folks escape by smuggling their material wealth, against Nazi law. And doing it completely under the noses of the Nazi boarder guards.
Jews leaving Germany in the 1930s weren’t allowed to take their possessions, and would have had to surrender them at the boarder. But, many countries accepting refugees, like the UK, required each person to have a means of supporting themselves — money and a job. It was a terrible catch-22 for many.
By helping to smuggle their money and furs and jewels, they helped the escapees meet both of those requirements.
There are so many stories of heroism from WW II. Terrible times produce great as well as terrible people, I suppose.
Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society
Sigrid Schultz – the dragon from Chicago
How have I never heard of Sigrid Schultz before? Here was a trailblazing reporter who rose to the position of chief correspondent for Central Europe, making her America’s first woman bureau chief at a foreign desk, and who refused to be silenced by the Nazis at the most dangerous time. I cannot believe that I hadn’t heard of this amazing woman until earlier this week!
She stayed in Germany throughout the 1930s and the lead-up to WW2, filing reports about concentration camps, government assaults on churches and other institutions, telling the truth about increasing persecution of Germany’s Jews, warning about dangerous alliances with other countries, and otherwise trying to convince the world of the atrocities she was witnessing, all while facing both the dangers of being a reporter on the ground and dealing with an uninterested public back home.
I think it’s natural to wonder what we’d do in these kinds of terrible challenges. I sincerely hope I would find the strength to be as fearless as Sigrid Schultz. What a truly remarkable, inspirational woman!
