Hodges' Model: Welcome to the QUAD: diseases

Hodges' model is a conceptual framework to support reflection and critical thinking. Situated, the model can help integrate all disciplines (academic and professional). Amid news items, are posts that illustrate the scope and application of the model. A bibliography and A4 template are provided in the sidebar. Welcome to the QUAD ...

Showing posts with label diseases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diseases. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 09, 2025

Hollowed out - aka 'No science here' ... 'Limited vision' ...

Individual
|
      INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               
HUMANISTIC  --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      
 SOCIOLOGY  :    POLITICAL 
|
Group






Policy. Public Protection. Vigilance. Monitoring:
Public (mental) health
is being (has been) hollowed out?
Discuss.


Image: https://sotamedialab.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/adjusting-perspective/

Monday, September 01, 2025

BCS - AI Health 2025 - Artificial Intelligence SG (reminder)

Date and time: Friday 7 November, 9:30am - 4:30pm

Location: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, Ground Floor, 25 Copthall Avenue, London, EC2R 7BP

Price: 42 - 108 GBP

Synopsis

BCS-SGAI, the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT's Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence, was founded in June 1980. Its mission is: "To foster achievement, capability and awareness in both business and research in Artificial Intelligence, and to promote the interests of the related community". It is one of Europe's longest-established groups working to support the community of artificial intelligence developers and users and is the organiser of one of the longest-running annual series of AI conferences in Europe: the AI-20xx series.

In England, 189 out of 208 (91%) hospital trusts are using electronic health records (EHRs) bringing opportunities and challenges and for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the morning, there will be a session about EHRs with speakers from UK (animal health records), France (European Health Data Space infrastructure for the use and exchange of EHRs), and Spain (personal health records). Before lunch break, there will be a brief 101 hands-on tutorial about Neuro-Symbolic AI with short exercises. In the afternoon, there will be a session about clinical decision, exemplifying the use of AI-based healthcare technologies. Come along if you are interested in AI and its potential in healthcare.
  • A comparison between open-source biomedical LLMs and general-domain LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT-4)
  • How to lower the technical skills overhead (understanding of AI and programming code) needed to use open-source LLMs for content generation and content analysis of text, images and audio
  • Exploring the plausible benefits of neuro-symbolic AI, combining neural AI (to process and extract patterns for health issues from unstructured data) with symbolic AI (explicit representations of background knowledge)
There will be Certificates of Attendance for those who register and attend the event.

We hope that you will come and join us, and that you enjoy this new offering from the BCS SGAI.

Speakers

Programme

More details and registration ...

(I look forward to attending.)

My source: BCS SGAI mail list.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

"Isomorphism of structures": intra- interDomain & model as theory?

"Another illuminating example of the advantages of a posthuman scientific position is the One Health Initiative. The movement is inspired by Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), who coined the term zoonosis, arguing that there should be no dividing lines between animal and human medicine. This position has been gathering momentum in the last fifteen years. The One Health Initiative is a rather daring interdisciplinary alliance that unites physicians, osteopaths, veterinarians, dentists, nurses, and other scientific-health and environmentally related disciplines, on the basis of a simple hypothesis, which is the isomorphism of structures between humans and animals in immunology, bacteriology, and vaccine developments. This means that humans are both exposed and vulnerable to new diseases, like bird flu and other epidemics, which they share with animal species." p.16.

 
Rosi Braidotti. (2015). Yes, There Is No Crisis. Working Towards the Posthumanities. DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 2(1–2), 9–20. https://doi.org/10.11116/jdivegendstud.2.1-2.0009

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I have felt for many years that there is an implicit 'theory' in Hodges' model.

"Lastly, model is defined by May Brodbeck as "an isomorphic representation of objects that leads to an unmistakable identification of the expression of the object with the physical object." p.235.

"Though, Models like theories, are systems of generalizations based on empirical findings yet there are differences between them. A theory basically involves a set of statements, called either laws or propositions which are related to each other and which express relationships between variables under varying states of the system. It has to be kept in mind that although some tentative or untested theories are called models, a model and a theory are only roughly identical, because a model has a more static connotation. Unlike concepts, models are not arbitrary, and can be confirmed or disconfirmed. They differ in the degree of isomorphism they have with the modelled phenomena. In social science, a model is not a concrete of "real" structure. For that would be complete and idiosyncratic, from which it would be difficult to develop generalizations. An important distincton between theory and model is that while the model has primarily predictive power, a theory has both predictive and explanatory power. However, this is not true in all cases. Apart from making predictions, models can also direct us towards new materials and ground which are not yet covered thereby helping us to discover more relationships, thus serving few heuristic functions." p.237.

PATNAIK, L. K. (1989). MODEL BUILDING IN POLITICAL SCIENCE. The Indian Journal of Political Science, 50(2), 234–250. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41855908

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I will add other useful references from here:

"Furthermore, in philosophy of science, a pragmatic view on modelling has emerged over the last decade, in which the relation between a model and its target, traditionally expressed as representation in the form of formal, structuralist or syntactic morphism (such as isomorphism), is being replaced by emphasizing a pragmatic relationship, often simply described as a situation where somebody creates a model of something with some purpose (Gelfert 2016, 113)." pp.344-45.

Ciula, A., Eide, Ø., Marras, C., & Sahle, P. (2018). Models and Modelling between Digital and Humanities. Remarks from a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 43(4), 343–361. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26544261

Plus for completeness:
Gelfert, Axel. 2016. How to do science with models: a philosophical primer. Cham: Springer. 

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In the conclusion: "Despite the growing body of research pertaining to a nascent theory of emergence, its central themes are based on a limited theory–model–phenomena conception that does not adequately support those conceptual abstractions. Take, for instance, the direct transfer of microscopic concepts to macroscopic levels of analysis. Strengthening the conceptual link beyond metaphorical device is essential to a robust process of theory building and holds numerous applications, such as underpinning further social science research and theory-building pursuits. Without an effective isomorphism of theory and structures to real-world behaviour, it is an arguable conclusion that a theory of emergence for human organisation does not currently exist. Such is the importance of ontological adequacy and the interchange between conceptual models. It facilitates the practice of interdisciplinary science that characterises much of complexity research." p.319.

Yezdani, O., Sanzogni, L., & Poropat, A. (2015). Theory of emergence: introducing a model-centred approach to applied social science research. Prometheus, 33(3), 305–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2016.1144669

My emphasis.