We now get to a new problem, multiplying many small probabilities together can be numerically unstable. To overcome this

What’s worse is that the rapid normalization of people willing to pair their medical data, health monitoring, and disease management to the internet in some ways perpetuates itself. Connected medical devices like pacemakers, ICDs, and continuous glucose monitors for diabetes management, as well as commercial wellness products like fitness wearables, create a flywheel effect that amplifies further use on both sides. Before medical and health IoT devices took off, people generally went to the doctor when they felt unwell. Now people are also going to the doctor when they feel fine but a machine is telling them something is wrong. Diagnostic cardiac tools, for example, like the Apple Watch’s arrhythmia detection, have the potential to drive more people into the health care system and could end up helping to increase the population of cardiac device users.,A quick look at the head of our dataframe shows some pretty impressive results. The second tweet is assigned a positive sentiment, but with a low level of confidence (0.51) — as a human, I’m also not sure whether this is a positive or negative tweet either.,Things turned out to be not so simple with the web browser. First, the Chromium browser comes preinstalled with Raspbian, and Chromium is not the same as Chrome. I don’t know if they really have the same core, but some news sites wouldn’t play the video, and Amazon Prime refused to work at all, giving a message about an incompatible browser. The main page opens normally.,I have had my ICD for nearly four years now. In that time, it has never once shocked me. I should feel relieved that the device has not yet gone off, but instead, the longer it sits inside my body without having saved my life, the more I think about the device’s ability to end it. Much of my experience of the health care system has been one of escalating calamity: The solution to one problem invariably causes an even bigger one. Even my very first pacemaker seems linked inextricably to the fact that I later became eligible for an ICD: About 10 months into living with it, I developed an arrhythmia that my doctors later determined was somehow caused by interference from the pacemaker itself. The heart surgeries I’ve had over the years have contributed to a layer of scar tissue on my heart that predisposed me—and likely contributed to—the incident that led to the ICD. When it comes to the security of the ICD itself, it’s less an absolute question of whether the costs outweigh the benefits and more a philosophical one. Not only do I feel less safe, but I am now also acutely aware of the ways in which I might have been destined to end up at this point, tracing the steps that led me here back through the maze of treatment.,There’s already some evidence that connected cardiac devices are being overprescribed, perhaps due to the positive bias the devices can engender in doctors and manufacturers. A 2011 study in JAMA found that in a population of more than 100,000 ICD patients, more than one-fifth received an ICD without meeting the standard clinical guidelines for implantation. Many of them had never experienced any kind of ventricular arrhythmia.,Of course, motivations for using the Raspberry Pi can vary. You may need an inexpensive Linux desktop for learning. You may not have the money for a full-fledged PC. I have long wanted a 100% silent and low-power computer to use as a media center and “typewriter.” Using the power-consuming 500W Core I7 desktop PC just to type this text seems a bit redundant for me, at least in terms of reducing the energy footprint. (I don’t care about the electricity bill; I care about the environment.) I tried using Samsung DeX as a desktop, and the experience was generally very positive — for typing and watching videos on the big screen, my Samsung Galaxy S10 is powerful enough. But the Android software that can work in desktop mode is limited, and not every website displays correctly using Android in desktop mode with a mouse. And DeX is still Android, with many limitations of the smartphone-based operating system. Linux is another matter — complete freedom in terms of SSH access, installing any libraries, components, a fully functional terminal, USB, GPIO, and hardware support. Sounds promising. Let’s see how it works.,This year, my doctor mentioned that their office hadn’t received a transmission from my ICD in a while. When I got home, I reluctantly pulled the monitor out from my closet and plugged it in by my dresser. I began the process of pairing the monitor with the device in my chest, but the monitor was having trouble connecting to my Wi-Fi. I tried it a second time, and then a third: A startup sequence ended in a flashing red light. I stopped trying to pair the devices. I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if, even momentarily, I’d regained control over myself, and put the monitor back into the closet.,The disadvantage that causes inconvenience is the lack of a power button and sleep mode for the Raspberry Pi. If the system is turned off, you can turn it back on only by reconnecting the power plug. There is no way to activate the sleep mode, and there is no power management system on the board at all, although it is possible to buy a USB cable with a switch — simple enough, but it works.,According to the description, everything looks fine. But the very first launch showed that the system works slowly. The solution is simple: The processor frequency needs to be increased. By default, the OS works in a low-power mode — the Raspberry Pi comes with no heatsink at all, and at high computing power mode, the CPU will simply overheat. Solution: Edit the config.txt file with the sudo nano/boot/config.txt command and uncomment two lines:,The case works well in terms of heat dissipation. Even with a high load, there was no overheating or system freezing. The case temperature did not exceed 50 degrees Celsius, even during stress tests.,This year, my doctor mentioned that their office hadn’t received a transmission from my ICD in a while. When I got home, I reluctantly pulled the monitor out from my closet and plugged it in by my dresser. I began the process of pairing the monitor with the device in my chest, but the monitor was having trouble connecting to my Wi-Fi. I tried it a second time, and then a third: A startup sequence ended in a flashing red light. I stopped trying to pair the devices. I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling as if, even momentarily, I’d regained control over myself, and put the monitor back into the closet.,The timeworn credo of medicine is “first, do no harm.” It’s hardly a fast rule anymore, but the principle comes into sharp relief when discussing the danger posed by medical devices. Doctors and manufacturers often take a statistical approach when discussing the cost-benefit relationship of these devices: Real harm is minuscule, comparatively. ICDs save lives all the time, so that justifies their use. But this gets the principle completely backwards. The question is not supposed to be will this patient get sicker if you don’t intervene, but rather, will someone get sicker if you do?,A version of Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi was recently released, and we will also test that. But first, let’s start with the standard Raspbian, which has been familiar to DIY enthusiasts for many years.,Attempts to replace the User-Agent did not lead to anything; the error was issued elsewhere. I found that it’s caused by the lack of DRM support, and I tried several manuals on how to install the Widevine Content Decryption Module DRM library by extracting it from the Chrome OS image. Several of the published scripts did not work; finally, I found a working tutorial on this site. This support for the DRM is unofficial, and if the version of the library or browser is changed, you will probably need to run the script manually again. But at least it works.,Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4, a lot more people have been trying to use this microcomputer as their desktop PC. More recently, the Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer has been released, the name of which directly indicates its “main” purpose. I have long been interested in the possibility of using a portable and silent PC for simple tasks like creating this text, where the full-size desktop is redundant and the tablet is inconvenient. Finally, I bought a top-of-the-line Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory. It’s time to see how it works.