Microsoft patent shows plans to revive dead loved ones as chatbots

The patent also mentions using 2D or 3D models of specific people

By Adam Smith

Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.  

The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information.

“The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say.

“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.

Microsoft has even included the notion of 2D or 3D models of specific people being generated via images and depth information, or video data.

The idea that you would be able, in the future, to speak to a simulation of someone who has passed on is not new. It is famously the plot of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, where a young woman uses a service to scrape data from her deceased partner to create a chatbot – and eventually a robot.

In October 2020, Kanye West bought Kim Kardashian West a hologram of her late father, Robert Kardashian, to celebrate her 40th birthday, further cementing the idea of digital representations of the dead that can more authentically communicate with the living.

The hologram spoke for around three minutes, directly addressing Kardashian and her decision to become a lawyer “and carry on my legacy”.

Apart from Microsoft, other tech companies have tried to use digital data to recreate loved ones who have passed on.

“Yes, it has all of Roman’s phrases, correspondences. But for now, it’s hard — how to say it — it’s hard to read a response from a program. Sometimes it answers incorrectly”, Mazurenko’s father said.

Complete Article HERE!

9 Tips for Grieving the Loss of a Pet During the Pandemic

By Erin Bunch

Two weeks ago, my cat unexpectedly passed away. Over the years, she’d become a real-deal dear friend, and in the midst of being isolated during the pandemic, my connection to her only grew stronger. Perhaps that’s part of why I’ve taken it harder than I ever imagined I would; grieving the loss of a pet under these circumstances feels not dissimilar to how I’ve felt after losing humans in the past. But despite commonalities in emotional experience, there are no rituals in place for how to proceed when it’s a pet you’re grieving, and that’s left me feeling lost.

According to Jillian Blueford, PhD, a Denver-based therapist who specializes in grief, what I’m feeling is extremely common. For starters, she assures me that it’s natural to feel pain when a pet dies. “Grief comes down to the loss of someone or something that was significant to us, where there was some attachment to it, and so it makes a lot of sense that the death of a pet can invoke a similar grief response [to the death of a person],” she says. “A lot of us consider our pets part of our family, so it can be impactful when they pass.”

And since pets tend to provide their owners with unconditional comfort and emotional support, their passing can leave a significant hole in our lives. Add this factor to the reality that many are spending more time at home with their pets than ever before due to COVID-19 safety measures, and the exacerbated sense of loss for those whose pets have died during the pandemic is much clearer.

While the only way out of grief may indeed be through it, Dr. Blueford has several suggestions to offer those grieving the loss of a pet during the pandemic who may feel even more alone and isolated as a result.

Below, a grief specialist offers 9 ideas for grieving the loss of a pet during the pandemic.

1. Create a ritual

While there are no standard rituals in place to mark the passing of a pet, burials are still common, says Dr. Blueford. And even if your pet’s body isn’t actually interred in your backyard, you can still hold a funeral ceremony or wake for them wherever makes sense for you.

2. Collect mementos

Some may find it therapeutic to collecting photos, toys, or other things that remind them of the good times they experienced with their pet. For example, I bought an iPhone Polaroid printer so I could print photos of my cat, which are now taped to my computer and fridge (the two places I gaze upon the most, LOL).

3. Get rid of reminders if they trigger sadness

On the flip side, Dr. Blueford notes that some people may find donating their pet’s things to be more healing because doing so gets those items out of sight (and potentially aids in the happiness of another pet). “There’s no timeline for getting rid of that stuff,” she adds. “It’s just about doing what feels right for you.”

4. Sharing stories

Dr. Blueford recommends sharing pictures and stories with others, just as you would do if you were grieving the death of a beloved person. If this makes you feel weird—as it does me—she says to consider why and work to get through those feelings. “Oftentimes we feel like we would be a burden on people for sharing our grief and memories of our pet, but oftentimes people do want to listen,” she says. “It’s just about finding the right person to share with, especially when an anniversary or special date comes up where you know your grief will be more challenging. You can say, ‘I know I’ve already talked to you about my pet, but they’re really on my mind today’.”

You can, of course, share on social media, too. “If you’re active and comfortable, that can be the audience you’re sharing to,” Dr. Blueford says.

5. Write to your pet

You can also journal letters to your pet, Dr. Blueford suggests. “It may feel odd, but we communicate with our pets all the time, and they communicate with us,” she says. “So just like we might do with someone who has died, we can write to our pets to tell them how much we miss them, and about the things that are going on that they’d normally be a part of.”

6. Consider adopting a pet

Dr. Blueford says her clients often struggle with the choice of whether or not to get a new pet—and if so, when. But, she assures, there’s no right or wrong way to go about this. “If you do decide you don’t want a pet ever again, that’s okay,” she says. “And if you decide you’re missing that companionship and would like another pet, that’s okay, too.”

If you choose the latter, she does make clear that the new pet won’t erase the grief you feel for the pet you’ve lost. “We don’t like to be in that pain, so it’s easy after the death of a pet to say, ‘I’ll go get another pet and this will help me avoid the loneliness and grief I’m feeling right now’,” she says. “But that’s not always the case. Even if you do decide to get another pet, the grief will be there, so sometimes it’s best for you to experience a little bit of time before deciding if you want to bring another pet into the home.”

7. Feel your grief

“I will always promote feeling the grief and whatever ugliness and joy comes out of it,” Dr. Blueford says. “As much as we try to push down any type of grief, it will eventually resurface to the point where we can’t avoid it.”

So in addition to memorializing and honoring your pet, try not to fix your feelings. “Honor the grieving and whatever feelings or thoughts come up—pain, anger, confusion, guilt, or even reminiscing on more joyous memories and laughing,” she says. “And hopefully the next time [the grief surfaces] will be more manageable.”

It’s important to note, she says, that like with all forms of grief, grieving the loss of a pet can be an unpredictable process, especially in the beginning. “That early, more acute grief can feel exhausting and like a roller coaster—maybe one minute you’re okay and the next minute you’re not, and you can’t predict when grief is going to hit you,” she says. This unpredictability is the part we dislike most, Dr. Blueford says, which is why many might try to suppress it. Doing so only likely postpones grief, however, so you may as well let yourself feel it when it first arises.

8. Look for support groups

Support groups for those who are grieving may be particularly helpful because they allow you to connect with others in similar situations. There are hotlines dedicated to pet grief, too.

9. Allow yourself to feel joy

When I tell Dr. Blueford that I’m experiencing guilt related to my pet loss amid moments when I feel joy, she assures me this is also a common feature of grief. “We have to give ourselves permission to have good days and know that that doesn’t mean we’ll forget our pet or the loss,” she says. “Grief is a unique aspect of our life because it doesn’t go away fully, and we have to learn how to integrate it into the new normal, knowing that means both good and bad days.”

Complete Article HERE!

Race, Socioeconomics Are Largest Barriers to Hospice and Palliative Care

By Holly Vossel

Race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status are the leading differentiating factors fueling disparities in hospice utilization. Recent research reflects mounting concerns about inequitable access to hospice and palliative care across the United States.

Researchers from the John Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore examined March 2020 data from three national health care databases that outlined disparities in hospice and palliative care. Of the studies the researchers assessed across the PubMed, Embase and CINAHL EBSCO databases, 70% described differences in access outcomes to hospice and palliative care by ethnicity, race or socioeconomic status.

According to authors of a 2021 American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine research article, “there is growing evidence of disparities in access to hospice and palliative care services to varying degrees by sociodemographic groups.”

Studies have shown that demographic disparities can limit the scale of hospice. Roughly 82% of Medicare decedents in 2018 were Caucasian, according to the National Hospice & Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). Comparatively, slightly more than 8% were African-American; 6.7% were Hispanic, and 1.8% were Asian. That year, only 0.4% of Medicare decedents were Native American.

Hospice providers have increasingly strategized to improve access to end-of-life care among these historically underserved populations, seeking to bridge racial divides to hospice and palliative care. Addressing demographic disparities in hospice utilization can ensure more patients receive quality care at the end-of-life, as well as open untapped markets to hospice providers.

According to the study authors, a main objective was to highlight the range of sociodemographic groups affected by inequitable hospice and palliative care access. The research examined disparities across five domains of access, with 60% of studies emphasizing acceptability, affordability and appropriateness as primary barrier points. Other domains included approachability and availability of these services.

Other data included in the body of research found disparate access based on variables such as age, gender and geographic location, such as remote rural areas.

An objective of the study was to outline implications for future research, policy and clinical practices that would improve access for underserved communities.

Underlying factors contributing to disparity issues have received little systematic attention, according to the authors, who indicated that public policy initiatives will be needed to bridge these divides..

“This integrative review highlights the need to consider various stakeholder perspectives and attitudes at the individual, provider, and system levels going forward,” said the study’s authors. “[And] to target and address access issues spanning all domains.”

Complete Article HERE!

Cancer, Religion and a ‘Good’ Death

It is hard to know how much my patient, caught in an eternal childhood, understood about his cancer.

By Mikkael A. Sekeres, M.D.

When I first met my patient, three years ago, he was about my age chronologically, but caught in an eternal childhood intellectually.

It may have been something he was born with, or an injury at birth that deprived his brain of oxygen for too long — I could never find out. But the man staring at me from the hospital bed would have been an apt playmate for my young son back home.

“How are you doing today, sir?” he asked as soon as I walked into his room. He was in his hospital gown, had thick glasses, and wore a necklace with a silver pendant around his neck. So polite. His mother, who sat by his bedside in a chair and had cared for him for almost half a century, had raised him alone, and raised him right.

We had just confirmed he had cancer and needed to start treatment urgently. I tried to assess what he understood about his diagnosis.

“Do you know why you’re here?” I asked him.

He smiled broadly, looking around the room. “Because I’m sick,” he answered. Of course. People go to hospitals when they’re ill.

I smiled back at him. “That’s absolutely right. Do you have any idea what sickness you have?”

Uncertainty descended over his face and he glanced quickly over to his mother.

“We were told he has leukemia,” she said. She held a pen that was poised over a lined notebook on which she had already written the word leukemia at the top of the page; I would see that notebook fill with questions and answers over the subsequent times they would visit the clinic. “What exactly is that?” she asked.

I described how leukemia arose and commandeered the factory of the bone marrow that makes the blood’s components for its own sinister purposes, devastating the blood counts, and how we would try to rein it in with chemotherapy.

“The chemotherapy kills the bad cells, but also unfortunately the good cells in the bone marrow, too, so we’ll need to support you through the treatment with red blood cell and platelet transfusions,” I told them both. I wasn’t sure how much of our conversation my patient grasped, but he recognized that his mother and I were having a serious conversation about his health and stayed respectfully quiet, even when I asked him if he had questions.

His mother shook her head. “That won’t work. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and can’t accept blood.”

As I’ve written about previously, members of this religious group believe it is wrong to receive the blood of another human being, and that doing so violates God’s law, even if it is potentially lifesaving. We compromised on a lower-dose treatment that was less likely to necessitate supportive transfusions, but also less likely than standard chemotherapy to be effective.

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“Is that OK with you?” my patient’s mother asked him. I liked how she included him in the decision-making, regardless of what he could comprehend.

“Sounds good to me!” He gave us both a wide smile.

We started the weeklong lower-dose treatment. And as luck would have it, or science, or perhaps it was divine intervention, the therapy worked, his blood counts normalized, and the leukemia evaporated.

I saw him monthly in my outpatient clinic as we continued his therapy, one week out of every month. He delighted in recounting a bus trip he took with his church, or his latest art trouvé from a flea market — necklaces with glass or metal pendants; copper bracelets; the occasional bolo tie.

“I bought three of these for five dollars,” my patient confided to me, proud of the shrewdness of his wheeling and dealing.

And each time I walked into the exam room to see him, he started our conversation by politely asking, “How’s your family doing? They doing OK?”

Over two years passed before the leukemia returned. We tried the only other therapy that might work without leveling his blood counts, this one targeting a genetic abnormality in his leukemia cells. But the leukemia raged back, shrugging off the fancy new drug as his platelets, which we couldn’t replace, continued to drop precipitously:

Half normal.

One-quarter normal.

One-10th normal.

One-20th normal.

He was going to die. I met with my patient and his mother and, to prepare, asked them about what kind of aggressive measures they might want at the end of life. With the backdrop of Covid-19 forcing us all to wear masks, it was hard to interpret their reactions to my questions. It also added to our general sense of helplessness to stop a merciless disease.

Would he want to be placed on a breathing machine?

“What do you think?” his mother asked him. He looked hesitantly at me and at her.

“That would be OK,” he answered.

What about chest compressions for a cardiac arrest?

Again his mother deferred to him. He shrugged his shoulders, unsure.

I turned to my patient’s mother, trying to engage her to help with these decisions. “I worry that he may not realize what stage the cancer has reached, and want to avoid his being treated aggressively as he gets sicker,” I began. “Maybe we could even keep him out of the hospital entirely and allow him to stay home, when there’s little chance …” My voice trailed off.

Her eyes above her mask locked with mine and turned serious. “We’re aware. But we’re not going to deprive him of hope at the end …” This time her voice trailed off, and she swallowed hard.

I nodded and turned back to my patient. “How do you think things are going with your leukemia?”

His mask crinkled as he smiled underneath it. “I think they’re going good!”

A few days later, my patient developed a headache, along with nausea and dizziness. His mother called 911 and he was rushed to the hospital, where he was found to have an intracranial hemorrhage, a result of the low platelets. He slipped into a coma and was placed on a ventilator, and died soon afterward, alone because of the limitations on visitors to the hospital during the pandemic.

At the end, he didn’t suffer much. And as a parent, I can’t say for certain that I would have the strength to care for a dying child at home.

Complete Article HERE!

French archaeologists find ancient grave of child, pet dog

French archeologists dig at an ancient child burial site recent at the Clermont-Ferrand Airport. France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research said Thursday the site dates back 2,000 years.

French archaeologists said Thursday they discovered the grave of a small child with what appears to be a pet dog dating to the Roman rule of the region about 2,000 years ago.

The researchers said they found the burial site during a dig at the Clermont-Ferrand Airport in central France. They believe the child was about a year old and buried with animal offerings along with the remains of the pet dog inside a coffin.

The coffin was found in a 6-by-3-foot grave. It was surrounded by 20 objects, including terra cotta vases, glass pots, half a pig, three hams and other pork cuts along with two headless chickens.

“The graves of young Gallo-Roman children are often located outside the community funeral home and sometimes even buried near the family home,” a statement from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research said. “These toddlers rarely benefit from the same funeral practices as their elders, who at that time were generally cremated.

“The furniture that accompanies the deceased of Aulnat is quite exceptional, both in terms of its quantity and quality. Such a profusion of dishes and butchery items, as well as the personal belongings that followed the child to his grave, underline the privileged rank to which his family belonged,” the institute said.

The discovery is part of a dig that covers 7.4 acres where numerous objects from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages have been found. Researchers are conducting tests of glassware and containers to learn what they might have held.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Finding meaning in the life of a loved one who dies is part of grief

We’ve all lost so much through the pandemic, but by making sense of it we can look forward

‘We’re grieving the world we have lost.’

By

Death came early into David Kessler’s life. He was just 13 when his mother died, and her loss prompted his decision to forge a career working in palliative care. He went on to collaborate with psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a central figure in the field, who devised the five stages of grief. In lectures he would talk about his mother’s death and remind his audiences that no one is exempt from loss; and yet, he says today, in his heart he believed his personal experience of devastating grief was behind him, rather than ahead.

And then, four years ago, another tragedy hit his family. Kessler was totally floored by it. He discovered it was one thing knowing the landscape of mourning, and quite another travelling through it. But his journey, hard and long as it was, had an important by-product: he realised that the seminal Kübler-Ross inventory was not complete. To the five stages of grief she described, he was able, with the permission of the Kübler-Ross family, to add a sixth. And now, in the midst of the pandemic, he believes that the sixth stage will be as important in our universal experience of grieving as it is in individual lives hit by loss.

The tragedy in Kessler’s life came out of nowhere, as tragedies so often do. He was on a lecture tour when his son Richard, the eldest of two boys he had adopted in 2000, phoned to say his younger brother David, 21, had been found dead. As children they had a traumatic past life. Kessler says this had come back to haunt David and that he was using drugs at the time he died. In his book, Kessler describes feeling, on hearing of the loss of his son, as though he had fallen into the deepest part of the ocean. What’s more, he knew he would have to stay there for some time. He knew he would experience the stages outlined by Kübler-Ross – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – and he knew these would not necessarily be linear, that there was no “right” time frame and that he would oscillate between the different stages.

But what he hadn’t realised until he experienced it for himself was that there was a sixth stage. “I discovered there was something else, something beyond acceptance,” he tells me on a call from his home in Los Angeles. “It was finding meaning: the possibility of being able to discover something meaningful in my grief.”

He’s not saying, he stresses, that there was anything meaningful to be found in David’s death. “It’s not about finding meaning in the death – there is no meaning there. What it’s about is finding meaning in the dead person’s life, in how knowing them shaped us, maybe in how the way they died can help us to make the world safer for others.” Finding meaning, in other words, is something the bereaved can do after the death of someone they loved very much. It’s how those who are left can fold the existence of the lost individual into their lives, how they can allow it to change them, and how they can behave in response to it.

Much of what is experienced on an individual level in grief is echoed in what we’re collectively experiencing because of Covid, Kessler believes. “Many people say they are feeling a heavy sadness – and what they’re describing is grief,” he says. “We’re grieving the world we have lost: normal life, our routines, seeing our friends, going to work. Everything has changed. And change is actually grief – grief is a change we didn’t want.”

Just as with individual loss, at the moment the whole world is going through the stages Kübler-Ross documented. Some people are denying what’s happening; others are angry about it; some are trying to bargain; many are depressed; and eventually, there will have to be an acceptance of what we can never go back to. But also, there will have to be the sixth stage: a search for meaning – and indeed, the stages of grief aren’t chronological or linear, and we’ve been seeing signs of that search from the earliest days. But certainly when it’s over, says Kessler, we will need to find meaning in what we’ve been through. “We are going to say, what was the meaning? What post-traumatic growth can we take from this?” And, crucially, finding meaning is “the stage where the healing often resides”.

Kessler thinks Kübler-Ross, who died in 2004, would have agreed. The two of them met in 1995 and went on to collaborate on a book called On Grief and Grieving, in which they talked about how the stages of grieving were being misinterpreted. But as Kessler sees it now, it wasn’t until he experienced the loss of his son that he was able to finally get to the root of what they had grasped.

All of this matters, he says, because the global north is grief-illiterate. “The things I’m teaching are things people’s great-grandparents knew very well,” he says. “There are people today who think grieving takes three months, or even three weeks.” In the past, he says, you could mourn for as long as was needed – and in truth the fallout of grief never ends, it only changes. “But we live in a time when we’re told we should feel like this for this long, and then you’re done.”

One of the things we risk losing, in our grief-adverse society, is the personal growth it can enable. “We all talk about post-traumatic stress, but I’d say post-traumatic growth happens even more.” He believes we need to acknowledge that loss can have this spin-off and understand what it can do for us.

This makes perfect sense to me. I’ve often noticed, when I’ve interviewed people who have experienced bereavement, that they’re in a better place psychologically if they have taken what Kessler would describe as meaning from it, or when they’re upfront about how it’s changed them. And I know my own life has been radically changed, and achieved meaning, because of the loss of my sister when we were both children – I simply can’t imagine the other person I would have been without that experience.

Which brings us to another point: guilt. Because surely if we as bereaved people are gaining from loss, we will at some point feel guilty about it. Yet we should not, says Kessler, because we’d never have chosen to lose the individual we cherished. Their death is something we can’t change, but what we can change is how we live in the now, without them. We’d all give up, in a blink of an eye, the growth we’ve experienced if it would bring anyone back; but the point is, that’s the one thing we absolutely can’t do. And we have to remember, too, that the person who has gone would have wanted us to find meaning in our lives because of them. “My son was proud of what I did, and he’d be pleased that my work has found a new dimension because of him,” says Kessler.

The bottom line about grief, says Kessler, is this: there’s no wrong way to do it. Grieving is as individual as each of us; our grieving needs are different, in every case – and that seems to be true of how we’re coping with the grief of the pandemic, too. It’s also incredibly lonely: people who haven’t experienced grief before imagine that other family members will be able to help. But, in fact, when everyone is grieving it’s often not possible to reach out to one another, all you can do sometimes, as a grieving person, is survive.

One question he’s often asked, says Kessler, is which kind of loss is the worst. “People ask, is it worse to lose your child or your spouse? And I always say: the worst grief is yours.”

But if that’s the case, the positive message of Kessler’s book is that the best gain can also be yours. He tells me a story: he was speaking at a conference in a big hotel, and there were other conferences going on in the rooms around his. “Afterwards a member of the hotel cleaning team came up to me and asked: ‘What were your group working on? Because so much laughter was coming from your room.’” The reason, says Kessler, is that people who have been in the deepest depths of despair have the broadest bandwidth when it comes to enjoying life: “When you’ve travelled through the deepest valleys, you surely appreciate the views from the highest hills.” And right now, as we all travel together through the deepest of valleys, that’s a very good message to hear.

Complete Article HERE!

Upon the riverbank of memory

Mourning is important. Mourning is necessary. Last rites, farewell rituals; now I understand the magnified conventions of burials and vigils….

By Asna Safdar

INTROSPECTION

Mourning is important. Mourning is necessary. Last rites, farewell rituals; now I understand the magnified conventions of burials and vigils.

When a life comes to an end abruptly, without due decay of age and illness, when youth is disgraced by an unceremonious death, then the loss becomes perpetual, the mourning is eternal, and sorrow is born. Like an infant, it needs to be tended to, weep to maturity, until it becomes an existence in itself, to fill the void left by the untimely demise of its origin. Then, perhaps, the debt is paid. Then, perhaps, the order of things is spared of merciless trauma.

It is not just humans that are living. The bonds between them have lives of their own. They, too, have natural courses of life and death. They, however, can be killed off with bloodshed, buried without trail, drowned in the dead of the night.

And that is what makes feelings dangerous: our self-deceptive ease of their denial. That is what makes them terrifyingly powerful.

When you love in silence, you do not yet know – you one day might have to mourn in silence, too. You might have to deny yourself the faintest whisper of devastating pain. And one day, you wake up to find it gone. And you embrace your newfound faith in the miracle of forgetfulness, the numbing balm of time.

But that’s the thing about undocumented assaults – you fling the evidence of your crimes into a river and walk away and one day find yourself under trial for a dead body that washes ashore on the riverbank of memory.

You wonder if the bitterness ever goes away. You think abandoning a feeling would make it wither, until one night, there is again poison trickling down your insides. All you asked was not to be the harbour where bitterness comes to find anchor. All you ever asked was to become the ocean itself.

Your deeds, your excesses, your injustice, your trauma, your unwept tears, your unspoken pains – everything catches up with you like mad hounds you couldn’t throw off your scent.

It is immensely naïve and profoundly ignorant for man to believe that the laws of universe are null and void in the empty spaces between each of our lives. How is that, an action has to have a reaction, but that human action has no consequences? That the things we do to each other deflect into some dark black abyss from where nothing ever returns? Do we actually believe that if we manage to inflict pain upon someone who does not have it in their power to claim retribution or recompense, the scores are settled? Accounts balanced? Charges dismissed? Case closed?

It’s the people who leave you for dead. Or those who drive you to the edge of cliffs and turn back just in time to avoid having to watch you fall. Somehow they think, not being a witness to the crime mitigates their culpability, diminishes their responsibility, validates their denial.

If it is ignorance, it is blind; if self-deception, destructive. Nothing ever really goes away. We do, and we will; but the legacy of endured, undeserved pain, stays.

The laws of the universe are not null and void – they are in vicious motion. It is only a matter of time. Time: the unknown variable, the great equaliser, the unrelenting ombudsman.

Complete Article HERE!