Day: August 1, 2023

CDC detects coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis and herpes at unlicensed California lab

~ [BLT]FQX

好吓人。

230727 fresno warehouse laboratory court file ac 609p 7b6990

Local and federal authorities spent months investigating a warehouse in Fresno County, California, that they suspect was home to an illegal, unlicensed laboratory full of lab mice, medical waste and hazardous materials.

The Fresno County Public Health Department has been “evaluating and assessing the activities of an unlicensed laboratory” in Reedley, the health department’s assistant director, Joe Prado, said in a statement Thursday. All of the biological agents were destroyed by July 7 following a legal abatement process by the agency.

“The evaluation required coordination and collaboration with multiple federal and state agencies to determine and classify biological and chemical contents onsite, in addition to assessing jurisdictional authority under this unique situation,” Prado said.

According to court documents, city officials inspected the location at 850 I St. on March 3 for building violations and found various chemicals being stored. On March 16, an inspection by county public health officials allegedly turned up medical devices thought to have been developed on-site, such as Covid and pregnancy tests.

“Certain rooms of the warehouse were found to contain several vessels of liquid and various apparatus,” court documents said. “Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.”

Hundreds of mice at the warehouse were kept in inhumane conditions, court documents said. The city took possession of the animals in April, euthanizing 773 of them; more than 175 were found dead.

Source: CDC detects coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis and herpes at unlicensed California lab

GPT-3 aces tests of reasoning by analogy

~ [BLT]FQX

更可能是大语言模型训练时已经见过这些题目，很可惜论文并没有对此进行分析。

The UCLA team, Taylor Webb, Keith Holyoak, and Hongjing Lu, relied on a large collection of ways that past research has tested humans’ ability to reason via analogy. The classic form of this is the completion of a comparison—think “cold is to ice as hot is to ____”—where you have to select the best completion from a set of options.

Related tests involve figuring out the rules behind transformations of a series of letters. So, for example, if the series a b c d is transformed to a b c e, then the rule is to replace the last letter of the series with its alphabetical successor. The participant’s understanding of the rule is tested by asking them to use the rule to transform a different set of letters. Similar tests with numbers can involve complex rules, such as “only even numbers in order, but can be ascending or descending.”

On all of these tests, GPT-3 consistently outperformed undergrads, although the margins varied depending on the specific test involved. The researchers also found that the software could develop rules based on a series of numbers, and then apply them to a different domain, such as descriptions of temperatures like “warm” and “chilly.” They conclude that “these results suggest that GPT-3 has developed an abstract notion of successorship that can be flexibly generalized between different domains.”

Source: GPT-3 aces tests of reasoning by analogy | Ars Technica