Highly recommend the book, "An American Sickness," for reading about tactics like the one described in the article that Big Pharma and other players (e.g. insurers) in the healthcare ecosystem use to extract money out of said ecosystem.
A big theme in the class was the importance of understanding the real experiences of potential beneficiaries. The specific team in the picture wanted to understand what it was like to be in SEAL training since their project specifically dealt with that problem area.
I'd like to politely disagree. I took the Hacking for Defense class at my school and had a completely different experience from the one you worry about. I think the most important misunderstanding to clear up is that the hacking in the class is not about hacking in the NSA/cybersecurity sense but rather the process of building something. Just like at a hackathon, students aren't all trying to hack the school's wifi etc., this class is about using a different approach to tackling military problems.
I've attached a link to our class website which contains a superset of the problems that my classmates and I tackled throughout the quarter. Hopefully you'll find it informative.
Those are my classmates! I took the Hacking for Defense class with them this past Spring at Stanford. I found that fundamentally the class trains students to apply the iterative, quick-moving, need-based approach to product development often found in startups to military problems that have traditionally had lots of bureaucratic overhead. We were exposed to a ton of different people through our interviews and were constantly asked to create and improve our minimum viable product as we learned more about our problem space. Overall, I would highly recommend the class.
Many of the Bay Area public high schools are very good. Schools like Monta Vista, Lynbrook, Gunn, and Palo Alto high school are top in the state if not the nation.
Looking past all the numbers and the correlation/causation concern, I think the most important takeaway is that "of building a "cognitive reserve", which means strengthening the brain's networks so it can continue to function in later life despite damage."
All the factors listed have something to do with staying mentally engaged and constant learning and I think that's the overarching message we should be taking away.
I think this is a great point. Video games get a bad rep because they're a distraction for kids (which is mostly fair), but I think that it's a really good alternative to simply watching TV among the older population in terms of reducing dementia risk because it requires constant mental engagement and also some degree of learning to progress.
Thanks for the info. Since you seem to have some knowledge on the topic, do you happen to know how they determined that Plenty produced "crops at yields 530 times greater than that of a typical field"? It seems like there should be a more nuanced discussion around that number judging by the healthy skepticism in the comments. Any thoughts appreciated!