Or how not to make a (potential) problem bigger than it is.

As I write this (Feb. 28), the spread of Covid-19 within the US is still very limited in terms of numbers of confirmed cases. That said, it is already creating a large body of communications lessons to be learned that will remain relevant a month from now.

What are the questions we should ask before diving in?

To deliberately misquote and mangle Shakespeare once again, I come to praise AI, not to bury it, but does the potential evil it may do live after and the good oft interred in the dataset?

I apologize, but … discussion of the benefits of AI in all manner of applications has been the flavor of the month for much of the last two years, and there seems no end in sight! It has been one of the drivers of processor manufacture and use in recent times. However, two recent articles from BBC News seemed to highlight some pros and cons regarding use of AI for x-ray inspection and test.

The first¹ describes how AI has been trained to best radiologists examining for potential issues in mammograms, based on a dataset of 29,000 images. The second² is more nuanced and suggests that after our recent “AI Summer” of heralded successes on what could be considered low-hanging fruit, we might now be entering an AI Autumn or even an AI Winter. In the future, it suggests, successes with more complex problems may be increasingly difficult to achieve, and attempts are made only due to the hype of the technology rather than the realities of the results.

Finding our next customer, one trinket at a time.

Green is sexy. One ignores the wave – in politics, marketing, journalism, social media, commerce – at one’s peril. In 2019, The Economist published an entire edition raising the alarm about climate change and its implications. Three years ago, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical letter (Laudato Si) about the environment, emphasizing care for our neglected “common home.” Self-righteous millennials and impressionable younger people march, advocating immediate, drastic control of greenhouse gases and other toxic emissions. A Swedish teenager cuts school and uses her sudden free time to excoriate industrialized nations and big corporations at the UN General Assembly for favoring economic growth over ecological sustainability and contaminating the world, shaming magistrates and captains of industry alike for their perceived callous indifference to the effects of rising temperatures. It is a good time to be a scold.

To be green is to hate waste. Waste is anathema. Angels recycle. Daily. So say those who are woke.

Additive processes are an effective tool toward the single-iteration design goal.