This War of Mine to be added to school reading list in Poland
This War of Mine, which was first released in 2014, drew on the experiences of the Bosnian people during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. It won widespread acclaim for its realistic portrayal of the human cost of war, and had sold more than 4.5 million units in April 2019. The game will be included in the Polish reading list for the 2020/21 academic year, but will only be available to students aged 18 and above due to its age rating in the country. It will be recommended for those studying sociology, ethics, philosophy, and history, and will be available to students of those subjects for free.
(tags: war history bosnia sarajevo games gaming poland school)
Category: Uncategorized
_Opportunistic Paper about COVID-19 using my Favorite Theoretical Approach_
lol science: Mason Porter on Twitter: “I am here to help.”
_Opportunistic Paper about COVID-19 using my Favorite Theoretical Approach_ Abstract: COVID-19 is a disease that is killing a lot of people. It really sucks. To help save the world (or at least add to my publication list), I examine the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission using my favorite theoretical approach, whether or not there is any justification or relevance for it. I do some curve fitting with previous data, and my theory seems to match the data pretty well (at least for some parameter values). I also find some evidence for universality, which may be interesting from the perspective of fundamental theory. A more practical application of my work is its influence on the signal-to-noise ratio of COVID-19 papers on preprint servers. I am here to help.
(tags: funny papers preprints science physicists pet-theory latex argh)
“Internet folklorist” tracks down the origins of a “heart shaped honeycomb” meme
A South African beekeeper called Brian Fanner created it by routing a heart-shaped pattern into the lid of a hive:
‘The things that come up are really funny from how bees have “artistic sensibilities” to bees creating that shape “to increase airflow”. I’ve seen companies using it in their websites and so many claiming it came out of their hive somewhere in the world. I used this board, routed in the slots… a rush job I’ll admit… waxed in some foundation strips into the slots and screwed inside a deep langstroth hive lid and stuck it on the hive. The bees made do best they could… The lines are slots into which a foundation wax with the comb pattern on it can be placed…secured with melted beeswax. Normally…a sheet…to guide the bees as to where to build. So they just come across this weird pattern of foundation strip and start building onto it. After that they just fill it out best they can. It’s a simple manipulation. The bees are Capensis. The honey was most likely early season succulent type plant called a ‘vygie’. I called the image ‘a sweet heart’ dedicated to my wife…per the very first post of it on my Facebook page in 2013.’
(tags: beekeeping hives honey honeycomb history folklore facebook social-media brian-fanner bees)
A Shared File System for Your Lambda Functions
AWS Lambda can now attach an EFS NFS filesystem. This is pretty cool tbh
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I love this:
Umarell (Italian pronunciation: [uma?r?l?]; modern revisitation of the Bolognese dialect word umarèl [uma?r??l]) is a term popular in Bologna referring specifically to men of retirement age who pass the time watching construction sites, especially roadworks – stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice.[1]
(via Mltshp)(tags: via:mltshp umarell building construction building-sites work spectators old funny words italian bologna)
The hidden patterns behind the Covid-19 map of Dublin
Excellent article analyzing COVID-19 patterns here:
The four new classes defined by Robert Reich might also apply to Ireland. The results of the analysis of Dublin infection cases from the HSE map which show the so-called Remotes are definitely present in the Irish society as the economic wealth is clearly related to chances of being infected. Recently published information shows that 1030 of Covid-19 deaths had happened inside of the nursing homes and other facilities caring for older. This represents 63% of total deaths from Covid-19 in Ireland and suggests that the so-called Forgotten class has suffered the most from the mismanaged public health policy which disregarded their specific life situation. The exact structure and divisions between the new classes of the Irish society in the new Covid-19 world can only be known with the extensive research and dissemination of data related to Covid-19 infections and deaths. It is crucial to abandon the current practices of omitting the data. We must apply the principles developed by John Snow in the 19th century which aim to collect and disseminate as much data as possible. This is the only way we will be able to develop the public health policy which will defeat the virus without scarifying the wellbeing of those who lack the privilege of having high economic and social status.
Interpreting Covid-19 Test Results: A Bayesian Approach
This is very clever — it hadn’t occurred to me at all, but of course it makes sense. tl;dr: prevalence, the prevailing rate of infection in the community, is a key factor in Covid-19 testing.
a brief tutorial on Covid-19 testing, with an emphasis on a Bayesian approach. After presenting the basics, we’ll walk through four confusing Covid-19 testing scenarios, just to give you a feel for the kinds of pickles we often find ourselves in.
(tags: prevalence covid-19 bayes bayesian statistics testing)
How We Solved the Worst Minigame in Zelda’s History
a lovely bit of RNG hacking in this YouTube speedrun vid
The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee
Kim Stanley Robinson on a Jobs Guarantee:
It would mean that governments would set a higher minimum wage than ever before, and if that minimum were a true living wage, private enterprise would have to match it to attract workers. And then, suddenly, everyone would be both employed and making a decent living. Private enterprises would therefore have more prosperous customers, and all would then rise in a virtuous cycle. Given the immense stresses that climate change is sure to bring, finding useful work for people would not be a problem. There will be a lot to do. Recall that 5% unemployment is often said to be the “natural” level, such that markets get nervous when the jobless rate goes lower than that. Unemployment at 5% is said to create “wage pressure,” which it definitely does, because millions of people are thereby living in fear and will take any job they can get, even ones that don’t pay enough for a secure life. The phrase “wage pressure” is yet another indication of how markets exert power to keep power. In this context, a Job Guarantee would erase wage pressure (meaning fear and misery), and the less fearful and more productive populace that resulted might thrive in a feeling of security.
(tags: jobs work unemployment economics economy qe future ksr scifi climate-change)
Heat map of confirmed COVID-19 cases by county in Ireland
‘Heat map of confirmed cases by county in Ireland, ordered by when each county peaked.’ — this is nice dataviz. I like the way the outbreaks after the main peak are clearly visible
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‘EC2 Spot Instances comparison. Find the cheapest Region, availability zone, interruption rate or compare the specs’
(tags: spot-instances ec2 aws spots ops)
No, coronavirus apps don’t need 60% adoption to be effective | MIT Technology Review
But even though the researchers know that lower levels of adoption will be useful, they aren’t entirely sure what different ranges will actually mean. Still, every successful notification means a life potentially saved. Fraser says his team had assumed that lower levels of usage might have very small benefits—but that, in fact, simulations show the upsides are significantly higher than they thought. “The expectation going in was that app usage wouldn’t be very effective at low levels,” he says. “If you have 10% of people using the app, then the chance of contact between two people being detected is 10% of 10%, which is 1%—a tiny fraction. What we found in the simulation was that that actually isn’t the case. We’ve been working to understand why we actually see benefits of usage accruing.”
(tags: contact-tracing apps exposure-notification covid-19 papers)
Refilling a Soda Stream canister from a 5L CO2 tank
turns out it’s relatively simple to refill the small “60L” CO2 tanks used by Soda Stream, Drinkmate and other clones, from a commercial food-grade CO2 tank. decent writeup (with Dublin stockist info) here
(tags: co2 carbon-dioxide gas refills sodastream drinkmate)
The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
The Immuni exposure notification app, based on the Google/Apple protocol, is now OSS and up on Github. Sounds like HN are generally positive about its implementation
(tags: immuni italy covid-19 exposure-notification contact-tracing apps android ios)
We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy
Annike Linde, [Anders] Tegnell’s predecessor as chief epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, said last week that she had initially backed the country’s strategy, but had begun to reassess her view as the virus swept through the elderly population. “There was no strategy at all for the elderly, I now understand,” Linde told the Swedish state broadcaster. “I do not understand how they can stand and say the level of preparedness was good, when in fact it was lousy.”
(tags: sweden covid-19 lockdowns anders-tegnell pandemics herd-immunity)
Japan’s approach to combat COVID-19 [pdf]
Very interesting and detailed presentation, particularly the info about how they perform retrospective contact tracing to narrow down the sources of community transmission and monitor other contacts, who may be asymptomatic but still infectious.
(tags: covid-19 japan pandemics contact-tracing clusters infection)
We’re All Living In The Cool Zone Now – VICE
The Cool Zone is usually defined by people on Twitter as a period in history that’s super cool to read about, but much less cool to live through. This definition is usually attributed to Matt Christman from the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Looking back on what parts of history I like to read about, it makes sense. Reading about the long, protracted war in Vietnam is fascinating, for instance, but I do not wish to live through any part of the Vietnam War. Nor do I wish to live in Vichy France, or be part of the original Black Panthers movement, or to wage a revolution against the King of France, or be tossed in jail for a lunch counter sit-in like my father was in Selma. I counted myself lucky to be able to read about resistance leaders who took stands without being forced to make such a stand myself. Except, well, now I am, as I march in the streets with thousands of others all across New York City and the country.
(tags: cool-zone history change twitter chapo-trap-house)
OPINION: Coronavirus Response Is Haunted By Colonialism
There was public knowledge of a viral respiratory epidemic threat from China in January, yet serious nationwide public health responses in the U.S. and U.K. did not start until March 2020. Even once it became clear that wealthy countries were at risk, there was a widespread reluctance to learn from China and from other Asian countries. The American reaction focused instead on blaming China – consider President Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus.” China was further criticized for using draconian measures when millions of people in Wuhan were put under lockdown – even though the countries of the West that denigrated such tactics might today be better off if they had acted similarly. Indeed, recent data suggests that the majority of cases in the United States came from New York City. Restricting travel out of the city, as was done in Wuhan, might have meant far fewer cases in the U.S.
(tags: colonialism diseases covid-19 history neocolonialism china usa uk asia)
CA Root expired on 30 May 2020 | Hacker News
A root CA cert from Certigo expired over the weekend and lots and lots of shit broke. SSL PKI is awful.
(tags: ca certificates ssl tls pki pain oncall fail ops security)
Will there be a second Covid wave?
in science, you hold all your variables constant except one: keep the lid on your styrofoam cup and your china cup. That’s true, and if we were doing pure science — if we only cared about finding out what lockdown measures worked and which didn’t — then it would be simple: introduce measures one at a time, wait and see, do it slowly. But we’re not doing pure science. We’re also trying to make a country that works for its citizens, in conditions that change daily. “We’re trying to build a plane as we fly it,” my US epidemiologist told me. The most important thing, according to Javid, will be “nimbleness; being able to change policy in the light of new evidence”. If it turns out opening schools was wrong, then close them again. And we in the media need to be wary of shouting about mistakes and U-turns and instead say: when the facts change, you change your mind.
(tags: science epidemiology covid-19 second-wave lockdown medicine u-turns)
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‘any orthogonal maze, with vertical walls protruding equal heights from a rectangular floor, can be folded efficiently from a rectangle of paper just a small factor larger than the floor. The design algorithm has been implemented as a freely available web application you can design a maze or generate one randomly, and the application produces a crease pattern, which you can print and fold into your design’
Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
New processor behaviour means everything we know about performance optimization is wrong again:
We’ve seen how crucial it is to understand data dependencies in order to optimize code. Especially hidden memory dependencies between load and stores can greatly influence performance of work loops. Understanding the data dependency graph of code is often where the real performance gains lie, yet very little attention is given to it in the blogosphere. I’ve read many articles about the impact of branch mispredictions, importance of data locality and caches, but much less about data dependencies. I bet that a question like “why are linked lists slow?” is answered by many in terms of locality, caches or unpredictable random memory access. At least I’ve heard those reasons often, even Stroustrup says as much. Those reasons can play a part, but it’s not the main reason. Fundamentally iterating a linked list has a load-to-use on the critical path, making it 5 times slower than iterating a flat array. Furthermore accessing flat arrays allow loop unrolling which can further improve ILP.
(tags: data-dependencies sorting algorithms performance optimization coding)
COVID-19’s fatality rate compared to the flu
Excellent point, dug up by Andrew Flood — the much-cited figure of the seasonal flu as having an IFR of 0.1% is based on the CFR, not the IFR — so the fatality rate for people who are sick enough to be treated in hospital. The true IFR of the seasonal flu is more around 0.05%.
(tags: ifr cfr fatality-rates influenza covid-19 diseases mortality medicine)
COVID-19 Re dashboard from Swiss Science Task Force
Excellent data visualisation from this task force, would love to see this in Ireland
(tags: dataviz time-series covid-19 dashboards graphs switzerland)
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‘Wayback machine online downloader with CMS. Restore a fully functional copy of the site – 200 files for free!’ — recommended by Damien. It can handle sites of 1000s of files, at $.50 per 1000
(tags: web tools archives history downloading via:damienmulley backups)
Irish site for second-hand Aeron chairs
recommended by someone on ITC. still never going to get this kind of chair past the Arts and Design Committee in my house though :)
(tags: chairs seating ergonomics via:itc aeron hermann-miller office)
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Whole load of photos of Soviet nuclear power station control panels here. What an aesthetic
(tags: soviet control nuclear design history power dashboards control-panels buttons lights beeping)
Coronavirus hijacks cells in unique ways that suggest how to treat it – STAT
Recent studies show that in seizing control of genes in the human cells it invades, the virus changes how segments of DNA are read, doing so in a way that might explain why the elderly are more likely to die of Covid-19 and why antiviral drugs might not only save sick patients’ lives but also prevent severe disease if taken before infection. “It’s something I have never seen in my 20 years of” studying viruses, said virologist Benjamin tenOever of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, referring to how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, hijacks cells’ genomes.
(tags: coronavirus covid-19 sars-cov-2 genes immunology interferons antibodies)
Patent case against GNOME resolved
Great result for open source at large, too!
Today, on the 20th of May 2020, the GNOME Foundation, Rothschild Patent Imaging, and Leigh M. Rothschild are pleased to announce that the patent dispute between Rothschild Patent Imaging and GNOME has been settled. In this walk-away settlement, GNOME receives a release and covenant not to be sued for any patent held by Rothschild Patent Imaging. Further, both Rothschild Patent Imaging and Leigh Rothschild are granting a release and covenant to any software that is released under an existing Open Source Initiative approved license (and subsequent versions thereof), including for the entire Rothschild portfolio of patents, to the extent such software forms a material part of the infringement allegation.
Coronavirus: ccu cgg cgg gca: The 12 letters that changed the world
Excellent long read on the virology of SARS-NCoV-2
(tags: virology rna sars-ncov-2 covid-19 diseases)
“John Snow’s Cholera Map” as a face mask
“A map taken from a report by Dr. John Snow: p. [97]-120 of the “Report on the cholera outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, during the autumn of 1854″, presented to the vestry by the Cholera Inquiry Committee, July 1855 Report on the cholera outbreaks in central London in 1832, 1848-9,1851,1852, 1853 and (specifically) 1854. Much reference is made to a public water pump in Broad Street.” (via Damien Mulley and Robert Ovington)
(tags: epidemiology john-snow facemasks covid-19 cholera epidemics history london)
Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases
This is great:
Last year, Stripe announced our Negative Emissions Commitment, pledging at least $1M per year to pay, at any price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure long-term storage. We’ve since built a small team within Stripe to focus on creating a market for carbon removal by being an early customer for promising negative emissions technologies. Today, after a rigorous search and review by a panel of independent scientific experts, we’re excited to announce our first purchases. Our request for projects garnered a wide range of negative emissions technologies which came in two broad categories.
The funded projects are: Climeworks, Charm Industrial, Project Vesta, and CarbonCure.(tags: climate climate-change emissions carbon-sequestration stripe negative-emissions tech)
COVID-19 data researcher removed as Florida moves to re-open state
‘Rebekah Jones said that her removal was “not voluntary,” that she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.”’
(tags: florida us-politics covid-19 data-science data dataviz)
iFixit launches massive repair database for ventilators and other medical devices – The Verge
Go iFixit.
“To be very clear: iFixit does not make money on this project. We are providing hosting and curation free of charge, and free of advertising, to the medical community,” Wiens says. “We welcome manufacturers to join us and contribute toward an up-to-date central repository for the biomedical community. We also welcome biomeds around the world to join iFixit’s repair community. No technician is an island, and we hope to facilitate an exchange of knowledge and troubleshooting.”
ECDC COVID-19 Contact Tracing Guidelines
Current guidelines for contact tracing and infection control of COVID-19 in the EU. Good data, with sources!, on what’s recommended here (although of course each country can make their own guidelines).
(tags: covid-19 pandemics contact-tracing eu medicine)
An open letter to software engineers criticizing Neil Ferguson’s epidemics simulation code
the main message of this letter is something different: it’s about your role in this story. That’s of course a collective you, not you the individual reading this letter. It’s you, the software engineering community, that is responsible for tools like C++ that look as if they were designed for shooting yourself in the foot. It’s also you, the software engineering community, that has made no effort to warn the non-expert public of the dangers of these tools. Sure, you have been discussing these dangers internally, even a lot. But to outsiders, such as computational scientists looking for implementation tools for their models, these discussions are hard to find and hard to understand. There are lots of tutorials teaching C++ to novices, but I have yet to see a single one that starts with a clear warning about the dangers. You know, the kind of warning that every instruction manual for a microwave oven starts with: don’t use this to dry your dog after a bath. A clear message saying “Unless you are willing to train for many years to become a software engineer yourself, this tool is not for you.”
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in the comment sections of some of the rightwing press, a new, virulent strain of Covid-19 scepticism has emerged that is the precise opposite of journalism. Rather than holding power to account, it distorts and bends reality to serve elite interests – and to warp public debate. In the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and other outlets, Britain’s contemporary “lockdown sceptics” have dedicated themselves to a singular cause: proving that the UK response to coronavirus has been a massive, hysterical overreaction. “Lift the lockdown” is their cogito ergo sum; Sweden their promised land.
(tags: lockdown uk politics brexit experts daily-telegraph spectator right-wing covid-19 sceptics libertarians contrarians culture-war)
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Dublin online supplier of DIY equipment and parts, apparently decent enough. Free shipping for orders over 50 Euro
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Adam Kucharski: ‘in the first 3 days after exposure to SARS-CoV-2, there’s a high chance of falsely concluding that the person is negative. Suggests very small window in which it’s posible to detect infections in the crucial pre-symptomatic period.’
(tags: covid-19 diseases testing pcr sars-cov-2 infection medicine)
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Break Glass in Case of Emergency – What to Do if You’re a Target of Harassment — excellent advice from /r/GirlGamers:
If you think you have a dedicated harasser, stalker, a large number of people harassing you, or that you are a target of a harassment campaign (group of people coordinating to harass you in numbers) this guide will help you make sense of what you can do right away, how you can protect yourself, and how to stay sane. There are a LOT of well-researched and highly vetted resources, which can be overwhelming when you are currently a target of harassment; we guide you selectively through these resources so you can have a clear and high level understanding of how to take control.
(via Nelson)(tags: harrassment abuse girlgamers women via:nelson online trolls)
An evidence summary of Paediatric COVID-19 literature
‘This post is a rapid literature review of pertinent paediatric literature regarding COVID-19 disease. We are proud to have joined forces with the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health to provide systematic search, and selected reviews of all the COVID-19 literature relevant to children and young people. Here we present the top 10 papers from each category (Paediatric clinical cases, Epidemiology and transmission, and Neonates). At the top is an Executive summary followed by all New and noteworthy studies.’
(tags: covid-19 epidemiology diseases transmission school kids children)
Good twitter thread on how transmission rates are reported by the HSE
tl;dr: ‘Community Transmission’ means that we don’t know who infected the patient. we want to see this number going down in the daily reports from the HSE, to know that our test/trace/isolate system is working and we can reduce the lockdown.
(tags: transmission infection covid-19 pandemics hse nphet ireland contact-tracing)
The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them
Informative blog post summarising the dangers of enclosed spaces with a high density of people and poor air circulation in spreading COVID-19:
Ignoring the terrible outbreaks in nursing homes, we find that the biggest outbreaks are in prisons, religious ceremonies, and workplaces, such a meat packing facilities and call centers. Any environment that is enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble. [….] Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an open floorplan office, you really need critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you need to assess the risk. If I am outside, and I walk past someone, remember it is “dose and time” needed for infection. You would have to be in their airstream for 5+ minutes for a chance of infection. While joggers may be releasing more virus due to deep breathing, remember the exposure time is also less due to their speed.
(tags: covid-19 health viruses infection epidemiology diseases work)
‘Finally, a virus got me.’ Scientist who fought Ebola and HIV reflects on facing death from COVID-19
Dr. Peter Piot reflects on his bout with COVID-19:
‘Many people think COVID-19 kills 1% of patients, and the rest get away with some flulike symptoms. But the story gets more complicated. Many people will be left with chronic kidney and heart problems. Even their neural system is disrupted. There will be hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, possibly more, who will need treatments such as renal dialysis for the rest of their lives.’
(tags: covid-19 cytokine-storms immunology health diseases peter-piot)
Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being | New Scientist
The world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment. Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached. The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise.
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Some clever use of algorithms to optimally aggregate COVID-19 tests to optimise for test shortages: pooled testing seems to be the keyword to search for. See also “multi-pooling” – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.028431v1.full.pdf
(tags: pooling multipooling pooled-testing testing covid-19 algorithms pandemics)
Sure, the Velociraptors Are Still On the Loose, But That’s No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park
And speaking of injuries, I want to take a moment to thank our Jurassic Park EMTs. They’re the real heroes here, am I right? In the process of responding to velociraptor attacks, many of our EMTs get mauled and dismembered by velociraptors themselves. That’s why, as a sign of appreciation, we will be repainting the Jurassic Park ambulance with the words “Hero Mobile” in big bubble letters. We think this is a far more meaningful token of gratitude than the salary increase they requested. I know many of you out there are going to be hesitant to return to Jurassic Park knowing there are still velociraptors roaming the preserve, but rest assured things will return to normal sooner rather than later. The life expectancy of a velociraptor is only 15-20 years, so we’re confident that these attacks will eventually run their course.
(tags: mcsweeneys funny satire covid-19 trump jurassic-park)
Global Progress on COVID-19 Serology-Based Testing
A comprehensive list of current serology-based COVID-19 tests, listing their phase of development, release date (if any), sensitivity and specificity (via This Week In Virology)
(tags: covid-19 tests serology testing immunity pandemics jhu via:twiv)
‘What are we doing this for?’: Doctors are fed up with conspiracies ravaging ERs
Whitney Phillips, a assistant professor of communications who studies the spread of disinformation at Syracuse University, said the coronavirus outbreak offers a look at how conspiracy thinking is now, in some ways, more organized. “With conspiracy theories, the reason they’re impervious to fact-checking is that they have become a way of being in the world for believers,” Phillips said. “It isn’t just one narrative that you can debunk. It is a holistic way of being in the world that has been reinforced by all the other bulls— that these platforms have allowed people to consume for years.”
(tags: conspiracy-theories facebook social-media covid-19 conspiracies stupid twitter)
NHSX release the source for their COVID-19 tracking apps
both the iOS and Android versions of the UK’s apps. Great to see this openness and transparency; hopefully the HSE’s apps, in Ireland, will follow suit
(tags: nhsx nhs uk covid-19 ble bluetooth tracking contact-tracing ios android apps)
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Caution is warranted about how population level serology studies and individual tests are used. It is not yet established whether the presence of detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to further infection in humans and, if so, what amount of antibody is needed for protection or how long any such immunity lasts.3 Data from sufficiently representative serological studies will be important for understanding the proportion of a population that has been infected with SARS-CoV-2. These data might inform decisions to ease physical distancing restrictions at the community level, provided that they are used in combination with other public health approaches.5 The use of seroprevalence data to inform policy making will depend on the accuracy and reliability of tests, particularly the number of false-positive and false-negative results, and requires further validation.6 At the individual level, this reliability could have public health ramifications: a false-positive result might lead to an individual changing their behaviour despite still being susceptible to infection, potentially becoming infected, and unknowingly transmitting the virus to others. Individual-targeted policies predicated on antibody testing, such as immunity passports, are not only impractical given these current gaps in knowledge and technical limitations, but also pose considerable equitable and legal concerns, even if such limitations are rectified.
(tags: immunity covid-19 future society vaccination)
Face Masks for the General Public | Royal Society DELVE Initiative
Face masks could offer an important tool for contributing to the management of community transmission of Covid19 within the general population. Evidence supporting their potential effectiveness comes from analysis of: (1) the incidence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission; (2) the role of respiratory droplets in transmission, which can travel as far as 1-2 meters; and (3) studies of the use of homemade and surgical masks to reduce droplet spread. Our analysis suggests that their use could reduce onward transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic wearers if widely used in situations where physical distancing is not possible or predictable, contrasting to the standard use of masks for the protection of wearers. If correctly used on this basis, face masks, including homemade cloth masks, can contribute to reducing viral transmission.
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This takes a lot of guts, I’m impressed:
May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
(tags: amazon aws ethics tim-bray covid-19 pandemics health workers-rights taking-a-stand)
7 Upper Back Stretches For Pain Relief – YouTube
recommendation from Damien Mulley — useful with my current shit homeworking setup
(tags: wfh exercises back health stretches posture ergonomics via:mulley)
The Coronavirus and Our Future
Top notch KSR:
We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know. We don’t want to change our habits. This knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling. Now comes this disease that can kill anyone on the planet. It’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. Instantly, we’ve changed. As a society, we’re watching the statistics, following the recommendations, listening to the scientists. Do we believe in science? Go outside and you’ll see the proof that we do everywhere you look. We’re learning to trust our science as a society. That’s another part of the new structure of feeling.
(tags: covid-19 ksr kim-stanley-robinson future sf feeling society pandemics climate-change)
Kim Stanley Robinson proposing “carbon quantitative easing”
I love this idea. “It would be complicated and messy, sure, but not as complicated and messy as a mass extinction event”
(tags: finance carbon climate-change kim-stanley-robinson economics quantative-easing future green-recovery)
Joint Statement regarding the NHSX contact tracing app
From over 170 UK infosec and privacy scientists and researchers —
It has been reported that NHSX is discussing an approach which records centrally the de-anonymised ID of someone who is infected and also the IDs of all those with whom the infected person has been in contact. This facility would enable (via mission creep) a form of surveillance. Echoing the letter signed by 300 international leading researchers, we note that it is vital that, when we come out of the current crisis, we have not created a tool that enables data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance. Thus, solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about individuals must be fully justified. Such invasive information can include the “social graph” of who someone has physically met over a period of time. With access to the social graph, a bad actor (state, private sector, or hacker) could spy on citizens’ real-world activities. We are particularly unnerved by a declaration that such a social graph is indeed aimed for by NHSX. We understand that the current proposed design is intended to meet the requirements set out by the public health teams, but we have seen conflicting advice from different groups about how much data the public health teams need. We hold that the usual data protection principles should apply: collect the minimum data necessary to achieve the objective of the application. We hold it is vital that if you are to build the necessary trust in the application the level of data being collected is justified publicly by the public health teams demonstrating why this is truly necessary rather than simply the easiest way, or a “nice to have”, given the dangers involved and invasive nature of the technology.
(tags: nhs nhsx privacy data-privacy security contact-tracing covid-19 surveillance)
Revealed: the inside story of the UK’s Covid-19 crisis
Wow, the knives are out inside the UK government. Massive leaks from the SAGE and other committees, to the Guardian, as the scientists involve find themselves being blamed for the UK’s COVID-19 disaster
(tags: uk government covid-19 omnishambles leaks guardian)
For future use: “Fancy dataviz” vs “best chart for the data”
great pic from Rodolfo Almeida on Twitter
Coronavirus and Brexit: the connections and their consequences
Have to agree with this…
What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way [the UK] are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in, and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing. They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.
(tags: uk-politics uk politics brexit covid-19 government populism crisis-management)
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When it worked well, the AI did speed things up. But it sometimes failed to give a result at all. Like most image recognition systems, the deep-learning model had been trained on high-quality scans; to ensure accuracy, it was designed to reject images that fell below a certain threshold of quality. With nurses scanning dozens of patients an hour and often taking the photos in poor lighting conditions, more than a fifth of the images were rejected. Patients whose images were kicked out of the system were told they would have to visit a specialist at another clinic on another day. If they found it hard to take time off work or did not have a car, this was obviously inconvenient. Nurses felt frustrated, especially when they believed the rejected scans showed no signs of disease and the follow-up appointments were unnecessary. They sometimes wasted time trying to retake or edit an image that the AI had rejected. Because the system had to upload images to the cloud for processing, poor internet connections in several clinics also caused delays. “Patients like the instant results, but the internet is slow and patients then complain,” said one nurse. “They’ve been waiting here since 6 a.m., and for the first two hours we could only screen 10 patients.” The Google Health team is now working with local medical staff to design new workflows. For example, nurses could be trained to use their own judgment in borderline cases. The model itself could also be tweaked to handle imperfect images better.
(tags: google health medicine ai automation software internet developing-world real-world images scanning)
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good source for Ubiquiti gear in the EU (via ITS Slack)
(tags: via:its ubiquiti unifi wifi wireless shopping networking)
FOOD IN THE TIME OF CORONA | Seáneen
‘Recipes to stop food waste & extend the life of your fresh produce in the time of crisis via the magic of fermentation, pickling and preservation. New recipes each week’ from Seáneen Sullivan of L Mulligan Grocer
(tags: food mulligans stoneybatter seaneen-sullivan pickling preserving)
Cloud Jewels: Estimating kWh in the Cloud – Code as Craft
Good stuff from Etsy, who are attempting to reduce their non-renewable energy usage:
Cloud providers generally do not disclose to customers how much energy their services consume. To make up for this lack of data, we created a set of conversion factors called Cloud Jewels to help us roughly convert our cloud usage information (like Google Cloud usage data) into approximate energy used. We are publishing this research to begin a conversation and a collaboration that we hope you’ll join, especially if you share our concerns about climate change.
(tags: energy green climate-change power etsy kwh measurement estimation)
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‘Live audio in high definition with anyone in the world’ — a high-quality audio codec (the Opus codec), in the browser, free. Looks great and recommended by radio peeps on twitter
(tags: recording audio podcasting radio cleanfeed opus codecs)
on COVID-19 death rate statistics
illuminating Twitter thread. tl;dr: most countries are juking the numbers by ignoring COVID deaths in elderly care homes (where a massive death toll is occurring), or by ignoring suspected COVID cases in favour of confirmed post-mortem cases, or by ignoring comorbidity.
(tags: covid-19 statistics lies-damn-lies death-rates comorbidity diseases europe deaths)
Will CovidTracker Ireland work?
Rob Kitchin writes:
It is essential that the government follow the guidance of the European Data Protection Board that recommends that strong measures are put in place to protect privacy, data minimization is practised, the source code is published and regularly reviewed, there is clear oversight and accountability, and there is purpose limitation that stops control creep. If implemented poorly, the app could have a profound chilling effect on public trust and public health measures that might be counterproductive. As a consequence, the Ada Lovelace Institute, a leading UK centre for artificial intelligence research, is advising governments to be cautious, ethical and transparent in their use of app-based contact tracing. Ireland might do well to heed their advice.
(tags: data-privacy privacy covid-19 hse apps ireland contact-tracing)
Pugmatt/BedrockConnect: Join any Minecraft server IP on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PS4
Nicely done — this works! By setting the DNS server list in the console to use “104.238.130.180” as the primary DNS, this will intercept lookups for the hardcoded set of Bedrock servers, and redirect them to their own Bedrock-protocol server, which simply offers a more customisable list of servers, potentially including your own.
(tags: minecraft bedrock hacks interop services xbox ps4 nintendo-switch cross-play)
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‘A proxy to allow Minecraft: Bedrock clients to connect to Minecraft: Java Edition servers.’ — this does exactly what it says on the tin; cross-play between the two editions of Minecraft.
(tags: minecraft cross-play nintendo-switch ps4 xbox gaming bedrock)
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Felix “Every Cloud” Cohen’s lockdown newsletter — lots of cocktail knowhow
(tags: cocktails felix-cohen lockdown 2019 booze)
COVID-19, Conspiracy and Ireland’s Far Right
Oh, great — just what we need — the nazis are coming to sow fear and doubt. Wonderful.
The COVID19 global pandemic is being used by far right networks to try and pull people into their movements. Several far right groups and actors in Ireland are making explicit attempts to use this crisis for personal and political benefit. The Irish far right are emulating a global far right movement in what the World Health Organisation (WHO) are calling the Covid infodemic Conspiracy theories have always been used to create a radicalising pathway by far right movements globally. We are seeing these narrative tactics being used in Ireland in past few months One Facebook page in Ireland pushing 5G conspiracy theories has had over 73,000 direct interactions with over 1000 posts in the last 4 weeks Far right actors are using the COVID19 pandemic to undermine trust and solidarity in communities by targetting migrant and minority communities and pushing explicit ethno-nationalist/white supremacist narratives.
(via Andrew Flood)(tags: via:andrewflood conspiracies far-right nazis fascism ireland infodemic covid-19)
the origin story for “Stockholm Syndrome”
“Stockholm Syndrome” […] is basically just a “myth invented to discredit women victims of violence by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority” — this is astonishing
(tags: police stockholm-syndrome hostages psychology misogyny women history psychiatry)
good twitter thread from Nicholas A. Christakis on Twitter on COVID-19 post-infection recovery
‘Let’s talk about what happens if you get COVID19 and recover. Are you immune to the disease? How long does the immunity last? And what does that mean for your life and for the public health and economy of our society?’
(tags: covid-19 coronavirus medicine future immunity diseases)
COVID-19 contact tracing phishes are already a thing
ffs.
(tags: covid-19 contact-tracing phishing via:doctorow argh grim-meathook-future)
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Really nicely done — pick a satellite, tell it your (Google Maps) address, and it’ll show you what the satellite will look like when it next flies overhead
How the UK’s coronavirus testing regime totally unravelled | WIRED UK
The irritation being expressed by microbiologists and their colleagues who are critical of the government is not over the quality of labs or people’s willingness to dig in and help. Rather, it is to do with how testing for Covid-19 has been managed, particularly at a national level. As the chances of reaching 100,000 tests per day by the end of April grow ever slimmer, the UK’s sorry predicament is only becoming clearer.
Muddled thinking punctures plan for British ventilator | Financial Times
Omnishambles.
An insider with direct knowledge of the process said that the basic products are now unlikely to be cleared for use in the UK against Covid-19. “Pretty much all the basic new designs are not going to get through the Covid approval process. The government spin is the ‘clinical need’ changed, but the reality is that it was always misguided to think you could develop and create these ventilators,” the person said. “Starting the process in this way was unwise. It has gradually become more sensible.”
(tags: covid-19 uk fail bureaucracy tories ventilators medicine)
PEPP-PT Data Protection Architecture – Security and privacy analysis
Analysis of the PEPP-PT contact tracing project architecture by the DP-3T project
(tags: architecture pepp-pt security data-privacy contact-tracing covid-19)
Study sees need for some social distancing into 2022 to curb coronavirus
‘A modeling study on the new coronavirus warns that intermittent periods of social distancing may need to persist into 2022 in the United States to keep the surge of people severely sickened by Covid-19 from overwhelming the health care system. The research, published […] in the journal Science, looked at a range of scenarios for how the SARS-CoV-2 virus will spread over the next five years.’
(tags: covid-19 statnews social-distancing harvard medicine health)
COVID-19 Related Advice – Guidance on Regulation EC261/2004
Airlines are required to provide passengers with information on their rights. Where flights are cancelled passengers must be offered the choice of: a refund; or re-routing (alternative flights) at the earliest opportunity; or re-routing at a later date (subject to availability). It is important that airlines assist passengers by clearly setting out these options to them. In addition, it is open to airlines to offer incentives to passengers to encourage them to fly at a later date, for example through providing vouchers of a higher value. We recognise that, at present, it may be difficult for airlines to provide alternative flights, for example, where government advice is to avoid travel to particular destinations affected by COVID-19. A refund for the passenger may therefore be the only practical option available.
More: https://www.flightrights.ie/news/guidance-note-on-airline-flight-cancellations-%e2%80%93-regulation-eu-2612004.1043.html (via Brian Brazil)(tags: airlines travel covid-19 flights refunds consumer rights)
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via Zeynep Tufekci: ‘Amazing study, supporting droplet (rather than aerosol) as key means of transmission. One asymptomatic person infected 10 (out of 91) at restaurant—but *only* if they were in direct line of air pushed by the air conditioning.’
(tags: china covid-19 air-conditioning droplets transmission diseases sars-cov-2 infection)
Rift opens over European coronavirus contact tracing apps – Reuters
The rift has opened up over a German-led initiative, called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT https://www.pepp-pt.org), which has been criticised for being too centralised and thus prone to governmental mission creep. [….] “Solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about the population should be rejected without further discussion,” the scientists said in their letter. Among the signatories was Michael Backes, head of Germany’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, which pulled out of PEPP-PT at the weekend. Swiss researchers have also publicly dissociated themselves from PEPP-PT, citing concerns over centralisation and privacy. Critics have also questioned PEPP-PT’s assertion that seven European countries – Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Malta, Spain and Switzerland – had come on board. Spain and Switzerland now back rival DP-3T, government and research sources said.
No matter how you crunch the numbers, this pandemic is only just getting started
Scary op-ed from professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard, William Hanage in The Guardian, on herd immunity:
There have been more than 93,000 cases of Covid-19 identified in the UK. Let’s round that up and say it is 100,000. So if the reports from the BMJ editorial are accurate, the actual number would be that multiplied by five, in which case there would have already been half a million infections in the UK. If this really is the peak and we see as many cases on the way down as on the way up, that would total 1 million infections from the initial surge in the UK – hopefully all of those people would then be immune. That would leave about 65 million people in the UK still without immunity. I am going to be unusually optimistic here, and assume that everyone who has Covid-19 becomes fully immune (not a given), and that the virus is towards the less transmissible end of the range of estimates currently available. If this is the case, you would need half your population to have been infected to achieve a level of population immunity that would stop the epidemic continuing to grow and overwhelming healthcare systems.
(tags: guardian health uk covid-19 pandemics herd-immunity future)
Irish COVID-19 model showing an R0 below 1.0
This is fantastic news — our lockdown is working! ‘The April 16 2020 modelling data on COVID-19 in Ireland from the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, part of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).’
PEPP-PT closes down the decentralised protocol option
The EU-wide PEPP-PT COVID-19 contact tracing project is quietly switching to a protocol built around a centralised database; better to stick with the still-decentralised, fully open source DP3T protocol, which has published its open source apps and SDKs: https://twitter.com/mikarv/status/1251044870367690753
(tags: pepp-pt dp3t protocols ios android contact-tracing covid-19 pandemics)
Sarah Owens’ Table Loaf Recipe
recommended by Colette
CT scans might offer a more accurate way to diagnose Covid-19
Jaysus. RT-PCR swab tests have a 30% false negative rate!
A positive result on the swab tests is usually reliable. “If you get a positive test result, looking for the RNA of the virus with the current methods that we have, it’s very likely to be a true positive,” said Jana Broadhurst, an infectious disease doctor and director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit Clinical Laboratory at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. But “if you get a negative test result, [the chance that it’s wrong is] about 30%.” Of every 100 symptomatic people who test negative for Covid-19, 30 are actually infected. The test missed them.
(tags: rt-pcr covid-19 medicine swab-tests false-negatives)
Solution Scan of non-pharmaceutical options to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission
‘Informing management of lockdowns and a phased return to normality: a Solution Scan of non-pharmaceutical options to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission’. This is a pretty exhaustive list of possible approaches to lower the R0.
(tags: covid-19 r0 transmission diseases lockdowns social-distancing)
EDPB on COVID-19 contact tracing apps
European Data Protection Board: Letter concerning the European Commission’s draft Guidance on apps supporting the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic
(tags: edpb data-privacy privacy covid-19 eu ec contact-tracing)
The other kind of contact tracing tools
Farzad Mostashari on Twitter: “Last week I posted about automated digital contact tracing apps- lots of discussion since. now lemme talk about the other kind of contact tracing app, tools that increase the efficiency & ease of contact tracing: enhanced directories, multichannel messaging applications, real-time translation services, symptom reporting & isolation monitoring”
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Turn your favourite regex into FAT32. ‘Haha OS-driven regex engine go brrrrr’
(tags: insane stupid funny fat32 drivers filesystems regexps regex)
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on 12 March, the government alarmed many public health experts by abruptly abandoning containment and announcing that community case-finding and contact-tracing would stop. The aim was no longer to stop people getting it, but to slow it down while protecting the vulnerable. The evidence underpinning the government’s decision appears in a report from 9 March summarising the potential impact of behavioural and social interventions. The report did not consider the impact of case-finding and contact-tracing, but it did suggest that the biggest impact on cases and deaths would come from social distancing and the protection of vulnerable groups. And yet social distancing was not recommended then. That day, 12 March, after hearing with disbelief the government announcement that didn’t include widespread social distancing, I recommended to my team at Imperial that they should work from home for the foreseeable future. Indeed, I have not been to my office since. Neither the advice nor the science were followed that week. My colleagues, led by Neil Ferguson, published a report on 16 March estimating that without strong suppression, 250,000 people could die in the UK. The government responded that day with a recommendation for social distancing, avoiding pubs and working from home if possible. But there was still no enforcement, and it was left up to individuals and employers to decide what to do. Many people were willing but unable to comply as we showed in a report on 20 March. It was only on 23 March that a more stringent lockdown and economic support was announced. Between 12 and 23 March, tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people will have been infected. Boris Johnson himself may well have been infected that week, and his stay in the intensive care unit may have been avoided if the government had shifted to remote working on 12 March. The current best estimate is that around 1% of those infected will die.
(tags: nhs health uk politics covid-19 pandemics predictions)
Nature paper on COVID-19 and RT-PCR detection rates over time
‘measures to contain viral spread should aim at droplet-, rather than fomite-based transmission’; ‘ the majority of patients in the present study seemed to be already beyond their shedding peak [first 5 days] in upper respiratory tract samples when first tested, while shedding of infectious virus in sputum continued through the first week of symptoms. Together, these findings suggest a more efficient transmission of SARS-CoV-2 than SARS-CoV through active pharyngeal viral shedding at a time when symptoms are still mild and typical of upper respiratory tract infection.’ However this study did not include any severe cases.
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Marcel Salathe says: ‘Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (#DP3T): SDK and calibration app for iOS and Android, and a backend implementation, are now open source. Actual app with nice UI will follow soon’
(tags: open-source dp3t privacy data-privacy covid-19 contact-tracing)
Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period | Science
We used estimates of seasonality, immunity, and cross-immunity for betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 from time series data from the USA to inform a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We projected that recurrent wintertime outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave. Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded. To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. Additional interventions, including expanded critical care capacity and an effective therapeutic, would improve the success of intermittent distancing and hasten the acquisition of herd immunity. Longitudinal serological studies are urgently needed to determine the extent and duration of immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024.
(tags: covid-19 forecasting papers science medicine pandemics sars-cov-2 herd-immunity epidemiology)