“A brief history of medicine: from mystery to mechanism”
This is a journey exploring the evolution of medicine, from the ancient era to modern times. It is more than just a list of medical achievements. Tectonic shifts in how we thought about the human body and disease mirrored changes to the cultural zeitgeist of the times – from affliction as a consequence of moral failure to disease as a disturbance in the internal homeostasis of the human body.
Jay is a father of two, a husband to one, and an emergency physician to any. When he’s not in the ER pulling bags of Meth out of a patient’s butt, you can find him in a coffee shop. His drug is caffeine and a well crafted story. He mainly writes for his daughters, but sadly, they are the least interested. He hopes that one day they will be, but until then his wife suffers his stories gladly.
Learn about new technologies impacting people with disabilities, both good and bad, including innovations on the horizon and around the corner presenting promise and risk. We’ll explore how bias in AI can discriminate against marginalized groups and why. AI is trained on history and the internet – both terrible sources of equality and truth; so if we don’t fix this now, the future will be written by racists.
Christopher Land is a UX designer, accessibility consultant (note: not an AI engineer) and co-organizer of the San Diego Accessibility & Inclusive Design group [ a11ySD ]. Chris has experience in training, coding, design, UX and enterprise systems. He sees digital accessibility as crucial in providing people with disabilities an unprecedented level of independence. Chris is simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the speed and power of today’s new technologies. https://a11ysd.com/ https://www.meetup.com/a11ysd/events/306271144/
Madeline Meade
“APEocalypse Now?”
We all know and love Planet of the Apes, but how scared should we really be of a chimpanzee-initiated apocalypse? Together, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie from the perspective of a cognitive scientist.
We’ll examine what the movie got right and what it got wrong about how great apes think & act, draw parallels with the real history of the field of comparative cognition, and ponder the cognitive changes that the movie’s miracle drug might need to induce in a chimpanzee’s mind to make a real-life Caesar.
Madeline is a second year PhD student in the Cognitive Science Department at UC San Diego, where she is a member of the Comparative Cognition Lab. Madeline studies nonhuman primate cognition, ranging from social intelligence to logical reasoning, as an approach to understanding the evolution of human intelligence. She received her B.S. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Yale University, and managed Yale’s Comparative Cognition Lab after graduating. If she’s not hiking around an island full of free-ranging monkeys, she’s probably hiking around San Diego with her friends.
