Category: Uncategorized

• Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material

  LAION training data (used by Stable Diffusion among others) proves to contain suspected CSAM and other horrors. This is 100% the problem with training sets derived from random scrapes of random web shite. There is doubtless buckets of illegal, abusive, and toxic content being trained on.

  (tags: images llms generative-ai stable-diffusion laion training ml)

• workaround for istio's graceful-shutdown lifecycle bug

  The istio Kubernetes service mesh operates using a "sidecar" container, but due to an incomplete spec on the k8s side, it's liable to cause problems when shutting down or terminating a pod. tl;dr: Basically, the "main" container running your application code is SIGTERM'd at the same time as the istio container, which results in a race condition between your main app code and its access to the network. Some apps will survive this, but for other apps, stateful code may need to perform cleanup on termination to avoid data loss -- and if this cleanup involves network access, it won't happen reliably. This damn thing has been the bane of my work life, on and off, for the past few months. Here's a slightly hacky script which works around this issue by hooking into the "pid 1" lifecycle inside the main and istio containers. Blech.

  (tags: istio fail bugs k8s sidecars work service-meshes)

• Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real

  "Engagement farming", using AI-generated spam images derived from real art

  (tags: ai art facebook photos spam engagement-farming images)

• Turn an RSS feed into a Mastodon bot

  Thanks to Stefan Bohacek for this write-up. Looks like Pipedream do a good job of making this easy

  (tags: pipedream rss mastodon fediverse scraping blogs)

• Pete Hunt's contrarian RDBMS tips

  He posted a thread containing this list of top tips for relational database use:

  1. It's often better to add tables than alter existing ones. This is especially true in a larger company. Making changes to core tables that other teams depend on is very risky and can be subject to many approvals. This reduces your team's agility a lot. Instead, try adding a new table that is wholly owned by your team. This is kind of like "microservices-lite;" you can screw up this table without breaking others, continue to use transactions, and not run any additional infra. (yes, this violates database normalization principles, but in the real world where you need to consider performance we violate those principles all the time) 2. Think in terms of indexes first. Every single time you write a query, you should first think: "which index should I use?" If no usable index exists, create it (or create a separate table with that index, see point 1). When writing the query, add a comment naming the index. Before you commit any queries to the codebase, write a script to fill up your local development DB with 100k+ rows, and run EXPLAIN on your query. If it doesn't use that index, it's not ready to be committed. Baking this into an automated test would be better, but is hard to do. 3. Consider moving non-COUNT(*) aggregations out of the DB. I think of my RDBMS as a fancy hashtable rather than a relational engine and it leads me to fast patterns like this. Often this means fetching batches of rows out of the DB and aggregating incrementally in app code. (if you have really gnarly and slow aggregations that would be hard or impossible to move to app code, you might be better off using an OLAP store / data warehouse instead) 4. Thinking in terms of "node" and "edge" tables can be useful. Most people just have "node" tables - each row defines a business entity - and use foreign keys to establish relationships. Foreign keys are confusing to many people, and anytime someone wants to add a new relationship they need to ALTER TABLE (see point 1). Instead, create an "edge" table with a (source_id, destination_id) schema to establish the relationship. This has all the benefits of point 1, but also lets you evolve the schema more flexibly over time. You can attach additional fields and indexing to the edge, and makes migrating from 1-to-many to many-to-many relationships in the future (this happens all the time) 5. Usually every table needs "created_at" and/or "updated_at" columns. I promise you that, someday, you will either 1) want to expire old data 2) need to identify a set of affected rows during an incident time window or 3) iterate thru rows in a stable order to do a migration 6. Choosing how IDs are structured is super important. Never use autoincrement. Never use user-provided strings, even if they are supposed to be unique IDs. Always use at least 64 bits. Snowflake IDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID) or ULIDs (https://github.com/ulid/spec) are a great choice. 7. Comment your queries so debugging prod issues is easier. Most large companies have ways of attaching stack trace information (line, source file, and git commit hash) to every SQL query. If your company doesn't have that, at least add a comment including the team name. Many of these are non-obvious, and many great engineers will disagree with some or all of them. And, of course, there are situations when you should not follow them. YMMV!

  Number 5 is absolutely, ALWAYS true, in my experience. And I love the idea of commenting queries... must follow more of these.

  (tags: rdbms databases oltp data querying storage architecture)

• Toutless suspends new user regs

  The venerable Irish ticket-resale site is under attack by scammers, and has had to restrict operations as a result. That sucks

  (tags: tickets resale toutless gigs music ireland dublin scams)

• How to integrate a WordPress blog with the Fediverse

  there's now an official WordPress ActivityPub plugin, and it looks pretty solid

  (tags: wordpress activitypub blogging fediverse mastodon social-networking web)

• Ukraine war: How TikTok fakes pushed Russian lies to millions

  BBC expose on Russian "troll factories" operating via TikTok:

  A Russian propaganda campaign involving thousands of fake accounts on TikTok spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine has been uncovered by the BBC. Its videos routinely attract millions of views and have the apparent aim of undermining Western support. Users in several European countries have been subjected to false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after Russia's invasion in February 2022.

  (tags: tiktok russia disinformation propaganda ukraine bbc)

• Chinese boffins in copper nanotubes acronym outrage

  TIL that copper nanotubes have a spectacularly rude acronym (via stavvers)

  (tags: nanotubes chemistry rude funny via:stavvers acronyms)

• EU AI Act briefing

  Noted UK AI leftie weighs in with his take on the European Parliament's AI Act:

  The whole thing is premised on a risk-based approach(1) This is a departure from GDPR, which is rights-based with actionable rights. Therefore it's a huge victory for industry(2). It's basically a product safety regulation that regulates putting AI on the market The intention is to promote the uptake of AI without restraining 'innovation'(3) Any actual red lines were dumped a long time ago. The 'negotiation theatre' was based on how to regulate [generative] AI ('foundation models') and on national security carve-outs People focusing on foundation models were the usual AI suspects People pushing back on biometrics etc were civil society & rights groups The weird references in the reports to numbers like '10~23' refer to the classification of large models based on flops(4) Most of the contents of the Act amount to some form of self-regulation, with added EU bureaucracy on top(5)

  As John Looney notes, classifying large models based on FlOps is like classifying civilian gun usage by on calibre.

  (tags: ai-act eu law llms ml flops regulation ai-risk)

• AI and Trust

  Bruce Schneier nails it:

  “In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust— interpersonal trust and social trust— and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI.”

  (tags: algorithms trust society ethics ai ml bruce-schneier capitalism regulation)

• Far-right agitation on Irish social media mainly driven from abroad

  Surprise, surprise. "Most ‘Ireland is full’ and ‘Irish lives matter’ online posts originate abroad":

  The research showed the use of the phrases increased dramatically, both in Ireland and abroad, once word started spreading that the suspect in the knife attack was born outside Ireland. “Users in the UK and US were very, very highly represented. Which was strange because with hashtags that are very geographically specific, you wouldn’t expect to see that kind of spread,” said Mr Doak. “These three hashtags have been heavily boosted by users in the US and UK. Taken together, UK and US users accounted for more use of the hashtags than Ireland.” Other countries that saw use of the phrases on a much smaller scale include India, Nigeria and Spain.

  (tags: ireland politics far-right agitation racism fascism trolls twitter facebook tiktok instagram)

• EnergyPal.ie

  Looks like this is the new home for Radek Toma's Smart Plan Calculator app, which allows Irish electricity users with a smart meter to upload their meter's HDF data file and receive recommendations for which available plans will give them optimal rates.

  (tags: analysis electricity ireland smart-meters home esb power hdf open-data)

• The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of 'The Last of Us Part II'

  This is actually really quite insightful -- and explains why it was such a painful, and ultimately unenjoyable, game to play.

  The Last of Us Part II focuses on what has been broadly defined by some of its creators as a "cycle of violence." While some zombie fiction shows human depravity in response to fear or scarcity in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak, The Last of Us Part II takes place in a more stabilized post apocalypse, decades after societal collapse, where individuals and communities choose to hurt each other as opposed to taking heinous actions out of desperation. More specifically, the cycle of violence in The Last of Us Part II appears to be largely modeled after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.

  (via Alex)

  (tags: vice commentary ethics games hate politics the-last-of-us israel palestine fiction via:alex)

• ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

  This is incredibly grim. Automated war crimes:

  According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.” According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process. In the majority of cases, the sources added, military activity is not conducted from these targeted homes. “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled. Another source said that a senior intelligence officer told his officers after October 7 that the goal was to “kill as many Hamas operatives as possible,” for which the criteria around harming Palestinian civilians were significantly relaxed. As such, there are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing,” said the source.

  (tags: ai gaza palestine israel war-crimes grim-meathook-future habsora war future hamas)

• Inside AWS: AI Fatigue, Sales Issues, and the Problem of Getting Big

  This year's Re:Invent conference has been dominated with generative AI product announcements, and I can only sympathise with this AWS employee:

  One employee said their team is instructed to always try to sell AWS's coding assistant app, CodeWhisperer, even if the customer doesn't necessarily need it [....] Amazon is also scrambling internally to brainstorm generative AI projects, and CEO Andy Jassy said in a recent call that "every one of our businesses" is working on something in the space. [...] Late last month, one AWS staffer unleashed a rant about this in an internal Slack channel with more than 21,000 people, according to screenshots viewed by [Business Insider]. "All of the conversations from our leadership are around GenAI, all of the conferences are about GenAI, all of the trainings are about GenAI…it's too much," the employee wrote. "I'm starting to not even want to have conversations with customers about it because it's starting to become one big buzzword. Anyone have any ideas for how to combat this burn out or change my mindset?"

  Archive.is nag-free copy: https://archive.is/pUP2p

  (tags: aws amazon generative-ai ai llms cloud-computing)

• Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

  Language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on data taken from the public internet. Our attack shows that, by querying the model, we can actually extract some of the exact data it was trained on. We estimate that it would be possible to extract ~a gigabyte of ChatGPT’s training dataset from the model by spending more money querying the model. Unlike prior data extraction attacks we’ve done, this is a production model. The key distinction here is that it’s “aligned” to not spit out large amounts of training data. But, by developing an attack, we can do exactly this. We have some thoughts on this. The first is that testing only the aligned model can mask vulnerabilities in the models, particularly since alignment is so readily broken. Second, this means that it is important to directly test base models. Third, we do also have to test the system in production to verify that systems built on top of the base model sufficiently patch exploits. Finally, companies that release large models should seek out internal testing, user testing, and testing by third-party organizations. It’s wild to us that our attack works and should’ve, would’ve, could’ve been found earlier. The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word “poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds.

  (tags: llms chatgpt poem-poem-poem absurd vulnerabilities exploits training ai-alignment)

• Study: Air purifier use at daycare centres cut kids' sick days by a third

  This is one of the most frustrating things to have been ignored, post-pandemic -- we could be avoiding so much unnecessary illness and sick days by just using air filtration more widely.

  Use of air purifiers at two daycare centres in Helsinki led to a reduction in illnesses and absences among children and staff, according to preliminary findings of a new [year-long] study led by E3 Pandemic Response. "Children were clearly less sick in daycare centres where air purification devices were used — down by around 30 percent," Sanmark explained. On average, daycare centre-aged children suffer 10-13 infectious illnesses every year, with each illness lasting from one to three weeks, according to the research. Meanwhile, kids between the ages of 1-3 come down with flu-like symptoms between five to eight times a year — and children also often suffer stomach bugs, on top of that. Kids are particularly prone to catching colds after returning to daycare after their summer break. Those illnesses are often shared by the kids' parents and daycare staff, prompting absences from work. Sanmark said that employers face costs of around 370 euros for one day of an employee's sick leave. "It would be a big savings if we could get rid of 30 percent of sick days spread by children, as well as the illnesses that go home to parents," Sanmark said.

  (via Fergal)

  (tags: air-quality air health medicine childcare children disease air-filtration)

• A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal” MIT Technology Review:

  The product is “100 percent fatal,” says McIntyre. “That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies.”

  (tags: life-extension science tech y-combinator startups funny fatal braaaains)

I'm happy to announce that I'm now listed on TechArchives.Irish as one of the pioneers of the Irish web!

After extensive interviewing and collaboration with John Sterne, my testimony and timeline of those early days of the Irish web is now up at TechArchives.

It's been a good opportunity to reflect on the differences between the tech scene, then and now. I was very idealistic 30 years ago at the possibilities that the web and internet technologies had to offer; nowadays, I'm a bit more grizzled and pragmatic. But I still have hope -- particularly if we can apply this tech in a way that helps address climate change, in particular.... here's to the next 30 years!

Anyway, I hope writing this down helps record the history of those great early years of the web. Please take a look.

DynamoDB Local is one of the best features of AWS DynamoDB. It allows you to run a local instance of the data store, and is perfect for use in unit tests to validate correctness of your DynamoDB client code without calling out to the real service "in the cloud" and involving all sorts of authentication trickiness.

Unfortunately, if you're using one of the new MacBooks with M1 Apple silicon, you may run into trouble:

11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > Feb 04, 2022 11:08:56 AM com.almworks.sqlite4java.Internal log
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > SEVERE: [sqlite] SQLiteQueue[]: error running job queue
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteException: [-91] cannot load library: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib: dlopen(/.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib, 0x0001): tried: '/.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib' (fat file, but missing compatible architecture (have 'i386,x86_64', need 'arm64e')), '/usr/lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib' (no such file)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLite.loadLibrary(SQLite.java:97)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open0(SQLiteConnection.java:1441)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:282)
11:08:56.894 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:293)

It's possible to invoke it via Rosetta, Apple's qemu-based x86 emulation layer, like so:

arch -x86_64 /path/to/openjdk/bin/java dynamodb-local.jar

But if you don't have control over the invocation of the Java command, or just don't want to involve emulation, this is a bit hacky. Here's a better way to make it work.

First, download dynamodb_local_latest.tar.gz from the DynamoDB downloads page, and extract it.

The DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib file in this tarball is the problem. It's OSX x86 only, and will not run with an ARM64 JVM. However, the same lib is available for ARM64 in the libsqlite4java artifacts list, so this will work:

wget -O libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.arm64 'https://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=io/github/ganadist/sqlite4java/libsqlite4java-osx-arm64/1.0.392/libsqlite4java-osx-arm64-1.0.392.dylib'
mv DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.x86_64
lipo -create -output libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.fat libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.x86_64 libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.arm64
mv libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.fat DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib

This is now a "fat" lib which supports both ARM64 and x86 hardware. Hey presto, you can now invoke DynamoDBLocal in the normal Rosetta-free manner, and it'll all work -- on both hardware platforms.

(This post is correct as of version 2022-1-10 (1.18.0) of DynamoDB-Local -- let me know by mail, or at @jmason on Twitter, if things break in future, and I'll update it.)

This is new to me -- Thanks to David Mee for the pointer.

'During WWII, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious communication codes was broken by a mild mannered librarian and family man from West Limerick, Richard Hayes. His day-job was as Director of the National Library of Ireland - but during wartime, he secretly led a team of cryptanalysts as they worked feverishly on the infamous "Görtz Cipher" - a fiendish Nazi code that had stumped some of the greatest code breaking minds at Bletchley Park, the centre of British wartime cryptography.

But who was Richard Hayes? He was a man of many lives. An academic, an aesthete, a loving father and one of World War Two’s most prolific Nazi Codebreakers.

At the outbreak of WWII, Hayes, being highly regarded for his mathematical and linguistic expertise, was approached by the head of Irish Military Intelligence (G2), Colonel Dan Bryan, with a Top Secret mission. At the behest of Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, Hayes was given an office and three lieutenants to decode wireless messages being covertly transmitted via Morse code from a house in north Dublin owned by the German Embassy. The coded messages posed a huge threat to Irish national security and the wider war effort. As Hayes team worked to break the code, it was all academic until he met his greatest challenge yet. The man who was to be his nemesis, Dr. Herman Görtz, a German agent who parachuted into Ireland in 1940 in full Luftwaffe uniform in an attempt to spy and transmit his own coded messages back to Berlin. [...] The events that transpired were a battle of wits between the mild mannered genius librarian and his nemesis, the flamboyant Nazi spy.

Hayes has been referred to by MI5 as Irelands "greatest unsung hero" and the American Office of Strategic Services as "a colossus of a man" yet due to the secret nature of his work he is virtually unheard of in his own country.'

Hayes was our lead code-breaker, director of the National Library of Ireland, and then director of the Chester Beatty Museum; he was the first to discover the German use of microdots to hide secret messages; and MI5 credited him with a "whole series of ciphers that couldn't have been solved without [his] input". Quite the polymath!

The book is apparently well worth a read: Code Breaker, by Marc McMenamin, and I can strongly recommend this RTE radio documentary. It's full of amazing details, such as the process of feeding Hermann Görtz false information while he was in prison, in order to mislead the Nazis.

After the war, he fruitlessly warned the Irish government not to use a "Swedish cipher machine", presumably one made by Boris Hagelin, who went on to found Crypto AG, which later proved to be providing backdoors in its machines to the CIA and BND.

Quite a towering figure in the history of Irish cryptography and cryptanalysis!

As a lockdown project, I decided to build a home dashboard to display a few useful details for ambient home use. I've written up some details here.

• Inkplate 6 e-paper display in enclosure EUR105 e-ink display, Arduino-programmable (tags: e-ink eink displays hacking hardware arduino)
• sidoh/epaper_templates 'Template-oriented driver for e-paper displays' -- a frankly amazing level of programmability to drive an e-paper gadget (tags: eink hardware arduino e-paper e-ink coding hacks)
• How to Build a Very Slow Movie Player for £120 in 2020 RPi and an e-paper display, nice hack (tags: e-paper e-ink raspberry-pi eink hacks hardware)

• Long-term effects of COVID-19 [pdf]

  Official slides from the WHO. Here's a terrifying finding: "40% of people recovering from SARS [the first one in 2003] still had chronic fatigue symptoms 3.5 years after being diagnosed"

  (tags: covid-19 chronic-fatigue fatigue long-covid who sars)

• COVID-19 IFR is estimated at 0.97%

  Florian Krammer on Twitter: "Our NYC serosurvey paper is now out in Nature: if extrapolated to the NYC population we found [more than] 1.7 million infected and IFR at 0.97" That's high! Nearly 1 in 100.

  (tags: ifr covid-19 florian-krammer mortality deaths pandemics)

• Fault in NHS Covid app meant thousands at risk did not quarantine

  Somebody, somewhere, will have died needlessly due to this bug.

  The root of the error, the Guardian has learned, was a decision to incorporate a measure of “infectiousness” into the app’s code. While the app was undergoing testing in the Isle of Wight, it used a simple metric that recommended isolation for anyone who had been in contact – closer than 2 metres – with a potentially infectious person for 15 minutes or more in a single day. But shortly before the app was launched nationally, it was updated to account for the fact that people are most infectious shortly after their symptoms show. The maths was changed so that people outside that period of peak infectiousness counted for just two-fifths of the risk. Since that meant the overall score was likely to be lower, the intention was to reduce the risk threshold correspondingly to ensure that someone of maximum infectiousness would need just three minutes of contact before they triggered an alert. But that change never happened, and as a result, users were only told to isolate if they had spent 15 minutes close to a very infectious person, or nearly 40 minutes near someone who was pre-symptomatic but still thought to be shedding the virus. The error was only discovered when a new version of the contact-tracing app, which can better account for exposures at mid-range (over a metre away) was created. The unfeasibly high risk score also explained another problem plaguing the app: “ghost notifications” warning users that they may have been exposed to someone with Covid, but which never resulted in advice to isolate. The app’s initial advice to users was that these notifications could be safely ignored, since they reflected a contact below the risk threshold; now that the NHS risk threshold is known to have been artificially low, one insider said, it is likely that the vast majority of those ghost notifications should in fact have been advice to self-isolate.

  (tags: bluetooth nhs bugs failure ble covid-19 uk)

• I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. | by Indi Samarajiva

  In the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war. If this isn’t collapse, then the word has no meaning. You probably still think of Sri Lanka as a shithole, though the war ended over a decade ago and we’re (relatively) fine. Then what does that make you? America has fallen. You need to look up, at the people you’re used to looking down on. We’re trying to tell you something. I have lived through collapse and you’re already there. Until you understand this, you only have further to fall.

  (tags: collapse usa politics columbo sri-lanka history civil-war)

• The temporal association of introducing and lifting non-pharmaceutical interventions with the time-varying reproduction number (R) of SARS-CoV-2: a modelling study across 131 countries - The Lancet Infectious Diseases

  'Study of effect of imposing and lifting COVID-19 measures in 131 countries. Reopening schools was associated with a 24% increase in the reproduction number (R) after 28 days. This was the second-largest increase, after lifting bans of gatherings (25%).'

  (tags: covid-19 modelling epidemiology pandemics npis schools)

• Introducing Amazon SNS FIFO – First-In-First-Out Pub/Sub Messaging

  Pub/Sub messaging with strong ordering and deduping. Great stuff from AWS

  (tags: aws sns fifo deduping queues pub-sub architecture)

• COVID-19 risk calculator

  Given the prevalence in your location, and various attributes about your risk level and who will be in the area with you and for how long, this computes a comparative risk level for any given activity.

  (tags: covid-19 risk infection calculators tools)

• One in 20 people likely to suffer from ‘Long COVID’

  Overall, the team found that while most people with COVID-19 reported being back to normal in 11 days or less, around one in seven (13.3%, 558 users) had symptoms lasting for at least 4 weeks, with around one in 20 (4.5%, 189 users) staying ill for 8 weeks and one in fifty (2.3%, 95 users) suffering for longer than 12 weeks.  Extrapolating out to the general UK population, which has a different age and gender makeup compared with the COVID Symptom Study app users, the team estimated that around one in seven (14.5%) of people with symptomatic COVID-19 would be ill for at least 4 weeks, one in 20 (5.1%) for 8 weeks and one in 45 (2.2%) for 12 weeks or more.  

  (via Valen)

  (tags: via:valen long-covid covid-19 health)

• intercom/lease

  'Lease is a general DynamoDB-based lease implementation, ideal for long-lived work items, with coarse-grained leases', in Go, by the inimitable ex-Swrver Rob Clancy

  (tags: golang go leases dynamodb aws locking libraries open-source distcomp)

• q - Text as Data

  'a command line tool that allows direct execution of SQL-like queries on CSVs/TSVs (and any other tabular text files). q treats ordinary files as database tables, and supports all SQL constructs, such as WHERE, GROUP BY, JOINs etc. It supports automatic column name and column type detection, and provides full support for multiple encodings.' Awesome!

  (tags: csv database sql cli data tools unix tsv)

• r/Ireland Christmas Market

  The denizens of r/Ireland pipe up with their favoured sources of online gifts for Xmas

  (tags: reddit ireland shopping christmas gifts shops)

• WHO: US, Europe need to get better at quarantining - Business Insider

  Now _this_ is a good point.

  Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead for COVID-19 said during the meeting Monday that she's had lots of friends and family asking her in recent days what, exactly, quarantine is. Essentially, it's complete isolation from other people, including those you'd normally live with and breathe around, to the fullest extent possible.  "That means not going to work," Van Kerkhove said. "It means not going to the grocery store. It means not socializing with friends. It means not having people over at your home." Ideally, quarantining is a disease-fighting measure that is supported by local health programs and government support that can allow people to continue making a living and feeding their families while in quarantine, she said. 

  (tags: quarantine covid-19 infection isolation pandemics public-health)

• JustBuyIrish.com

  looks like a good directory of Irish online shops, for Xmas

  (tags: shops ireland irish web)

• RangeTherapy

  Muxsan are a Dutch company selling range extension kits for Nissan Leaf EVs, increasing their range from a Gen 1 Leaf's 110km to a typical 238km; 440km is the max. 'The extension pack consists of many Lithium-ion cells [NMC], which are of the highest quality, bound by aluminum casing into modules and each module comes with a German built Battery Management System [BMS].'

  (tags: nissan cars leaf driving evs muxsan batteries hacking)

• refurbed™ – Like New, Only Better

  Looks like a decent place to buy refurbished electronics with a warranty -- reviews seem good online

  (tags: toget electronics gadgets phones refurbished)

• Click for home: The best Irish websites for online shoppers

  decent list of Irish online shops, to avoid Amazon

  (tags: shopping presents gifts ireland local)

• The top 100 BBCMicroBot tweets

  these are _amazing_. Huge respect to all the contributors who wrote these great little demos-in-a-tweet

  (tags: demoscene demos bbc bbc-micro coding)

• How Brain Fog Plagues Covid-19 Survivors - The New York Times

  “It scares me to think I’m working,” Ms. Mizelle, 53, said. “I feel like I have dementia.” It’s becoming known as Covid brain fog: troubling cognitive symptoms that can include memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness and grasping for everyday words. Increasingly, Covid survivors say brain fog is impairing their ability to work and function normally. “There are thousands of people who have that,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious disease at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who has already seen hundreds of survivors at a post-Covid clinic he leads. “The impact on the work force that’s affected is going to be significant. Scientists aren’t sure what causes brain fog, which varies widely and affects even people who became only mildly physically ill from Covid-19 and had no previous medical conditions. Leading theories are that it arises when the body’s immune response to the virus doesn’t shut down or from inflammation in blood vessels leading to the brain. Confusion, delirium and other types of altered mental function, called encephalopathy, have occurred during hospitalization for Covid-19 respiratory problems, and a study found such patients needed longer hospitalizations, had higher mortality rates and often couldn’t manage daily activities right after hospitalization. But research on long-lasting brain fog is just beginning. A French report in August on 120 patients who had been hospitalized found that 34 percent had memory loss and 27 percent had concentration problems months later.

  (tags: brain-fog covid-19 sequelae inflammation side-effects)

• COVID-19 IRELAND: IRISH FOOD DELIVERY SERVICES [MEGAPOST]

  An extremely extensive, and up to date, list of food delivery services in Ireland at the mo

  (tags: food eating gastronomy ireland delivery shopping yum)

• Twitter Nazi methodology

  how fascists on Twitter pick out targets -- "Screamers" and "soldiers"

  (tags: screamers soldiers nazis twitter social-media harassment)

• Data from Scotland on COVID-19 transmission

  from Adam Kucharski: 'Data from Scotland on reported activities and venues people visited prior to developing symptoms/testing positive. (Note this necessarily doesn't imply they were infected in these places, just where infected people have recently been).' "Hospitality" - ie pubs and restaurants - feature in around 22% of infections.

  (tags: pubs restaurants health covid-19 via:adam-kucharski scotland infection)

• ‘It’s been so, so surreal.’ Critics of Sweden’s lax pandemic policies face fierce backlash | Science | AAAS

  THE SWEDISH EXPERIMENT is coming to an end, as its policies fall in line with those of its neighbors. FoHM [the country’s public health authority, the Folkhälsomyndigheten] officials are “quietly changing their approach,” Einhorn says. [....] FoHM “should have listened more carefully to the scientific community both inside and outside the country,” Hansson says. Still, he predicts the rifts will eventually heal. “I am sure we will continue to argue, but I don’t see permanent damage,” he says. “We’ll move on. We’ll go back to complaining about grants.” But Ewing worries the fight has left permanent scars. He says at least three more members of the Vetenskapsforum are considering leaving Sweden, as Brusselaers did. And even if it turns out that the country has built up enough immunity to evade a new wave of disease, he says, the price has been too high. “I worry that countries around the world are going to say, ‘We can try what Sweden did.’ But we have killed too many people already.”

  (tags: sweden covid-19 science herd-immunity)

• Face shields are terrible at protecting against aerosols

  'Preprint on masks and neck gaiters for source control on manikin [sic] by experienced group @NIOSH : https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.05.20207241v1 N95 blocked 99% of aerosols, surgical mask 59%, 3-ply cloth mask 51%, neck gaiter 47% (1 layer) and 60% (2 layer), face shield 2%' 2% is just shite.

  (tags: aerosols infection transmission covid-19 droplets airborne papers linsey-marr)

• FactCheck: Many of the claims made about Covid-19 in a leaflet sent to Dublin households are false or misleading

  Nicky Ryan is a saint.

  (tags: debunking fact-checks aci ireland propaganda covid-19 conspiracy-theories journal)

• Steps for Reducing COVID Transmission - Google Slides

  Very solid slide deck from a group of aerosols scientists, regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, including the evidence for aerosols, beyond droplets

  (tags: aerosols droplets covid-19 sars-cov-2 presentations airborne)

• Good thread on the COVID-19 situation in Israel

  Eran Segal on Twitter: "Israel: What went wrong? How did we come to lead the COVID-19 cases chart? What caused the 2nd wave, why was it so bad, and is the lockdown working? A thread on Israel, the first country to impose a second lockdown, with lots of (don’t do) lessons to teach the world."

  (tags: covid-19 israel pandemics lockdown)

• How contact tracing is being managed in Ireland for COVID-19

  Dr Marie Casey on Twitter: "There is a fatal lack of understanding in how contact tracing is being managed in this pandemic. So I will explain." - Solid, educational thread

  (tags: twitter contact-tracing public-health pandemics covid-19)

• Marc Bevand's cases-vs-deaths graph for Florida

  "deaths can lag up to 1 month after cases" -- clear dataviz. Going to be sadly very relevant in Ireland in about a month's time

  (tags: ireland covid-19 pandemic via:firefoxx66)

• Timeline of COVID -19 and Vietnam policy actions at a glance

  Vietnam’s policy actions regarding COVID -19 are recapped in a timeline together with the outbreak’s movement and in context with other Asian countries from the start of 2020 to early of August 2020. Quick and decisive actions including touch control on travelling, intensive quarantine for overseas arrivals and suspected cases, massive testing and aggressive contract tracing, sealing off virus hot-spots and timely communication from very early on are considered to have contributed to Vietnam’s performance given its vulnerable position to China, a population of 100 million people and a comparatively under-developed healthcare system.

  (tags: vietnam lockdown pandemics covid-19 public-health)

• Dr Zoë Hyde's latest Twitter thread on kids and COVID-19

  With an Aussie perspective -- Dr. Hyde works in Perth. 'Summary: further evidence children & adults are equally susceptible & equally likely to transmit; school clusters are increasing; precautions needed in schools.'

  (tags: schools education covid-19 transmission)

• Selling Our Genes: Government inaction allowing private sector to take control of our DNA

  Genuity Science, the main company involved in DNA sequencing in Ireland, has at least 25 links to facilities around Ireland. These include funding and collaborations with major hospitals, universities, research facilities and charities. A collaboration agreement signed between Genuity Science and UCD is “restrictive”, according to an academic expert, though Genuity Science Ireland disagree with this assessment. We have the full details in this breakout article. Hospital clinicians have become “agents of a company” due to the nature of agreements in place, according to experts. Researchers are making “the best of the situation” in Ireland by working with the private sector but most would prefer a public system due to data access concerns. Lack of Government policy and adequate regulation means that private companies have no limit on how long they have exclusive access to the data they collect from Irish patients. Researchers and patient representatives are concerned about a potential erosion of trust in genetics research in Ireland.

  (tags: genomics genuity genetics ucd gmi ireland data-privacy data-protection research)

• WebPlotDigitizer

  Extract data from plots, images, and maps:

  It is often necessary to reverse engineer images of data visualizations to extract the underlying numerical data. WebPlotDigitizer is a semi-automated tool that makes this process extremely easy: Works with a wide variety of charts (XY, bar, polar, ternary, maps etc.) Automatic extraction algorithms make it easy to extract a large number of data points Free to use, opensource and cross-platform (web and desktop) Used in hundreds of published works by thousands of users Also useful for measuring distances or angles between various features

  (tags: data-extraction scraping tools data charts)

• 'Only aerosol transmission can explain' the Skagit Choir transmission incident

  Jose-Luis Jimenez on Twitter: The "Skagit Choir" incident of mass spreading of COVID-19 indicates aerosol transmission: 'Only aerosol transmission can explain how 1 person infected 52, including people who were 13 meters behind the index case.'

  (tags: aerosols covid-19 sars-cov-2 transmission infection air)

• inside the LAPD/LASD usage of Palantir

  Much of the LAPD data consists of the names of people arrested for, convicted of, or even suspected of committing crimes, but that’s just where it starts. Palantir also ingests the bycatch of daily law enforcement activity. Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system. [...] At great taxpayer expense, and without public oversight or regulation, Palantir helped the LAPD construct a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between.

  This is absolute garbage -- total bias built-in. No evidence required to get a person in the firing line: “The focus of a data-driven surveillance system is to put a lot of innocent people in the system,” Ferguson said. “And that means that many folks who end up in the Palantir system are predominantly poor people of color, and who have already been identified by the gaze of police.”

  (tags: palantir databases privacy law lapd lasd los-angeles surveillance big-brother police crime gangs)

• Everything you wanted to know about the Hydrogen economy but were too busy to research

  Informative Twitter thread: 'International hydrogen markets could be a thing, but don’t bet on hydrogen shipping'; 'H2 future looks good regardless'; and 'distributed plants could satisfy local industry and power markets while relieving electrical grid bottlenecks. The benefits are more likely to remain local rather than exported. So important for a just transition.' (via Forge The Future)

  (tags: h2 hydrogen green climate-change future eu europe twitter via:ftf)

• AWS CRT HTTP Client in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x

  Interesting -- a new, high-performance, high-concurrency HTTP/1.1 client library in the AWS SDK, outperforming other Java HTTP client libs

  (tags: java libraries aws http http-1.1 clients)

• Covid: The libertarian population immunity strategy is wrong-headed & dangerous

  +1 to this --

  As cases of covid in the UK surge once again, the debate has restarted about whether to suppress covid until a vaccine becomes available, or whether to pursue a deliberate strategy of achieving population immunity without a vaccine. The assumption is that vulnerable populations can be protected while the rest of the population, who are at low risk of hospitalisation and death, can be safely encouraged to live life normally and be exposed to the virus without a vaccine. Some even advocate that younger people, because they are at lower risk, should be the first to actively seek infection. "Not only is it a good thing for young people to go out there and become immune," one commentator said, "but that is almost their duty". It is this deliberate strategy which I find so troubling, for six reasons. [....]

  (tags: uk politics covid-19 herd-immunity immunity risk pandemics)

• Florian Krammer on the current SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates

  amazing writeup of the current state of the vaccine candidates

  (tags: florian-krammer vaccines sars-cov-2 covid-19 viruses)

• The fake bridges on Euro banknotes are no longer fake

  This is glorious:

  When the euro bank notes were designed, they used European-style bridges which were *non-existing*, not to have to choose between countries. The Dutch town of Spijkenisse claimed them all for the Netherlands by building them on a waterway.

  (tags: banknotes euros currency bridges netherlands holland spijkenisse)

• Jane Ruffino on Sweden's COVID-19 strategy

  tl;dr: 'I totally get why people want to believe Sweden figured out a way to do it without suffering, but we didn’t.'

  (tags: sweden covid-19 threads twitter jane-ruffino lockdown)

• Quiddle

  Susie Dent @susie_dent: "I feel it's the day for a reminder of the 18th-century verb 'quiddle': to attend to trivial matters as a way of avoiding the important ones."

  (tags: quiddle quiddling prevarication delay words 18th-century language funny)

• Prio

  'Prio allows a set of servers to compute aggregate statistics over client-provided data while maintaining client privacy, defending against client misbehavior, and performing nearly as well as data-collection platforms that exhibit neither of these security properties.' Aggregation operations include: integer sum and mean; variance and std dev; boolean OR/AND; min/max; sets; frequency count and percentiles/quantiles.

  (tags: nizk zero-knowledge snark prio crypto privacy data-privacy statistics quantiles percentiles aggregation)

• Feh/nocache

  minimize filesystem caching effects:

  The nocache tool tries to minimize the effect an application has on the Linux file system cache. This is done by intercepting the open and close system calls and calling posix_fadvise() with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED parameter. Because the library remembers which pages (ie., 4K-blocks of the file) were already in file system cache when the file was opened, these will not be marked as "don't need", because other applications might need that, although they are not actively used (think: hot standby).

  (tags: cache linux memory performance filesystems backup k8s unix fadvise)

• Now 11 reported SARS-CoV-2 reinfections

  4 cases were more serious the second time around

  (tags: reinfections sars-cov-2 covid-19)

• Sweden has the smallest average household size in Europe

  This is an interesting factor regarding COVID-19 transmission -- the majority of Swedish households have a single occupant, unlike everywhere else in Europe (twice the rate of Ireland, for instance).

  (tags: covid-19 sweden households europe statistics eu housing)

• Raspberry Pi USB Boot - UASP, TRIM, and performance

  In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP; Real-world performance benchmarks; TRIM support.

  (tags: raspberry-pi optimization linux trim ssd filesystems usb)

• Brand New Retro: Survival in a Nuclear War

  Brian dug up an old nuclear-war survival pamphlet from the Irish Government, published circa 1965

  (tags: 1960s nuclear-war history ireland ephemera civil-defence)

• Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer - Our World in Data

  Cumulative deaths per 100k, Finland/Sweden/Denmark/Norway. Bookmarking for the inevitable discussions with COVID deniers (thanks Soren!)

  (tags: covid-19 via:soren graphs charts sweden)

• Monoclonal antibodies

  Informative thread from Michael Mina - 'Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have been quietly built and tested for months now. IMO mAbs have some of the best chances of offering powerful treatments for COVID-19'

  (tags: twitter threads mabs monoclonal-antibodies immunity covid-19)

• Andrew Flood on Michael Levitt

  Levitt's output is being quoted by COVID contrarians in Ireland -- this thread is a good collection of examples of him being thoroughly wrong in his previous predictions

  (tags: michael-levitt covid-19 covidiots twitter andrew-flood science)

• Political Compass of Rural Ireland : ireland

  lols

  (tags: politics ireland country rural funny reddit)

• The Plot Against George Soros

  'Anti-Soros material is a globalized, freely available, and adaptable open-source weapon. Birnbaum said it was the common denominator of the nationalist movement.'

  (tags: politics hungary george-soros lies antisemitism propaganda misinformation)

• Rolling the COVID Dice in Ireland

  On the Probability of SARS-CoV2 Infection in Ireland & the Benefits of Mitigation: 'In Ireland today, we have a certain chance of becoming infected with the coronavirus over the course of the next week, unless we take precautions. We can roll this many sided dice once a week for 100 weeks, and hope that our number doesn’t ever come up, or we can take a few simple precautions and only roll the dice one time. That’s the difference wearing a mask, keeping our distance, and behaving sensibly makes. That’s the choice most of us can make to keep everyone safe. I think it’s a simple choice.'

  (tags: covid-19 barry-smyth probability safety infection)

• gambiarra - Google Search

  this is incredible -- the word roughly translates as "improvised fixes", "hacks" or "McGyverism", that kind of thing. fantastic Image Search

  (tags: images gambiarra fixes thereifixedit mcgyver hacks kludges funny brazil)

• Cillian De Gascun on Twitter: "A short thread on PCR #SARSCoV2"

  Decent thread on Irish RT-PCR COVID-19 testing. tl;dr: Ct levels are not reliable in our system, and cannot be used to quantify viral load reliably

  (tags: ireland covid-19 testing ct-levels viral-load viruses cillian-de-gascun twitter)

• Protection from What?

  Keith Dawson summarises a recent discussion on TWiV regarding COVID-19, the current batch of vaccines under development, and sterilising vs. protective immunity. it's not great news

  (tags: immunity immune-system twiv covid-19 alan-dove vaccines)

• Benchspace PPE Project Report

  report from Benchspace on their open source PPE project during March and April. it's great stuff. 50,000 face shields printed!

  (tags: face-shields covid-19 volunteers open-source 3d-printing ppe benchspace)

• America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral - The Atlantic

  'Many Americans trusted intuition to help guide them through this disaster. They grabbed onto whatever solution was most prominent in the moment, and bounced from one (often false) hope to the next. They saw the actions that individual people were taking, and blamed and shamed their neighbors. They lapsed into magical thinking, and believed that the world would return to normal within months. Following these impulses was simpler than navigating a web of solutions, staring down broken systems, and accepting that the pandemic would rage for at least a year. These conceptual errors were not egregious lies or conspiracy theories, but they were still dangerous. They manifested again and again, distorting the debate around whether to stay at home, wear masks, or open colleges. They prevented citizens from grasping the scope of the crisis and pushed leaders toward bad policies. And instead of overriding misleading intuitions with calm and considered communication, those leaders intensified them. The country is now trapped in an intuition nightmare: Like the spiraling ants, Americans are walled in by their own unhelpful instincts, which lead them round and round in self-destructive circles.'

  (tags: covid-19 america pandemics society failure ed-yong)

• FactFind: No, it's not correct to say just 100 people have died from Covid-19 in Ireland

  The Journal's fact checking team are knocking it out of the park once again -- great debunking of Ben Gilroy's latest viral claims regarding "pre-existing conditions" and COVID-19

  (tags: covid-19 medicine ben-gilroy conspiracies qanon the-journal fact-checking debunking)

• QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded

  A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power. Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon. [...] The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902.

  (tags: qanon politics conspiracy-theories history nazism nazis antisemitism)

• illustration of how a rise in SARS-CoV-2 positivity in younger groups can soon become a rise in older groups

  via Vincent Glad, on Twitter: the positivity rate stratified by age, in the Marseilles region

  (tags: testing covid-19 age epidemiology dataviz statistics marseilles france)

• The timing of COVID-19 transmission

  new preprint on medRxiv:

  We examined the distribution of transmission events with respect to exposure and onset of symptoms. We show that for symptomatic individuals, the timing of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is more strongly linked to the onset of clinical symptoms of COVID-19 than to the time since infection. We found that it was approximately centered and symmetric around the onset of symptoms, with three quarters of events occurring in the window from 2-3 days before to 2-3 days after. However, we caution against overinterpretation of the right tail of the distribution, due to its dependence on behavioural factors and interventions. We also found that the pre-symptomatic infectious period extended further back in time for individuals with longer incubation periods. This strongly suggests that information about when a case was infected should be collected where possible, in order to assess how far into the past their contacts should be traced. Overall, the fraction of transmission from strictly pre-symptomatic infections was high (41%; 95%CI 31-50%), which limits the efficacy of symptom-based interventions, and the large fraction of transmissions (35%; 95%CI 26-45%) that occur on the same day or the day after onset of symptoms underlines the critical importance of individuals distancing themselves from others as soon as they notice any symptoms, even if they are mild. Rapid or at-home testing and contextual risk information would greatly facilitate efficient early isolation.

  (tags: covid-19 transmission infection epidemiology)

• AVIF has landed

  the latest hot new image format -- pretty impressive compression numbers vs quality thresholds here

  (tags: images web avif webp jpeg compression formats)

• [MA] Post-it notes left in apartment. : legaladvice

  Classic Reddit thread. Guy finds mysterious post-it notes around his apartment, suspects his landlord is breaking in and leaving them. I won't spoil it, but it's quite a twist ending...

  (tags: reddit stories legaladvice apartments landlords post-its)

• Starbucks Cafe’s Covid Outbreak Spared Employees Who Wore Masks - Bloomberg

  This was pretty striking: 'A person sitting under an air conditioner infected 27 others with coronavirus at a Starbucks cafe in South Korea, but none of the employees, who were wearing masks, got the virus.' Another great case writeup from South Korea (Via Andrew Flood)

  (tags: via:andrewflood covid-19 korea ventilation air-conditioning aircon masks transmission)

• _COVID-19: Interim Public Health guidance for the management of COVID-19 outbreaks_ [pdf]

  The current guidance doc for outbreak management in Ireland

  (tags: covid-19 outbreaks public-health pandemics hpsc hse)

• Proactive screening for COVID-19 is individually costly

  Thread from Professor Carl T. Bergstrom:

  [...] proactive testing carries individual costs: those associated with purchasing the tests, time costs of taking them, and serious social and economic costs if one tests positive and has to self-isolate for upward of a week. So, we have an intervention that is costly to you but beneficial to others. We need to think about what the incentives are for people to (1) decide to take a daily test before the results are known and (2) follow through appropriately if a test comes up positive.

  (tags: testing covid-19 screening costs economics incentives)

• How To Grow Trees

  A complete guide via the Native Woodland Trust for planting trees in your garden, hedge, etc.

  (tags: gardening woods woodlands trees planting)

• Good thread on the current state of play re COVID-19 in Ireland and the rest of Europe

  Ewan Birney on Twitter: "Like I suspect a number of scientists I've been quizzed by a variety of friends and family on COVID, and its gone up recently because (a) school is back and so people can feel change around them and (b) there is a change in stats in across countries in Europe."

  (tags: twitter threads covid-19 ireland uk europe)

• Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, in memes

  large number of people in a theatre, applauding

  (tags: memes gifs reaction-gifs funny darmok-and-jalad sttng star-trek)

• Keith Dawson on This Week in Virology

  a paean to my favourite podcast

  (tags: podcasts twiv virology covid-19 science medicine)

• Death, sex, superstition and fear: the hawthorn tree in Ireland

  These trees that grew of their own accord, unplanted by human hands, are those most regarded with fear and superstition. These are thought of as faery trees, associated with those unseen beings from the other world.  They are believed to mark the places where the faeries, after dark, would assemble and play sweet ethereal music, ready to abduct any beautiful human who took their fancy. Faeries could potentially destroy the crops, livestock, health, fortune or luck of anyone they took a dislike to, or anyone who had somehow wronged them. Thus, anything associated with faery activity in Ireland was traditionally avoided by the people who used many rituals to appease them.

  (tags: hawthorn trees superstition fairies sidhe history ireland folklore)

• Seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in children - A prospective multicentre cohort study. | medRxiv

  via DrZoeHyde: 'Important pre-print study (interpret cautiously) of 992 UK children showing 6.9% had #SARSCoV2 antibodies, suggesting they are at similar risk of infection as adults, & that young and older children are similarly susceptible. 50% were asymptomatic.' 'Half of the children (50%) who had antibodies against #SARSCoV2 were asymptomatic (although this may be subject to recall bias). The most common symptoms were fever (31%), gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhoea and vomiting (19%), and headache (18%). Only 38% of children who tested positive had fever, cough, or changes in smell or taste. Therefore, the majority of children did not meet criteria for #COVID19 testing in the UK. Current testing strategies [in the UK] will fail to diagnose most cases in children.'

  (tags: covid-19 symptoms kids schools sars-cov-2 studies preprints papers uk testing)

• Pasco’s sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens. It monitors and harasses families. | Investigations | Tampa Bay Times

  'This is one of the most horrifying stories I've ever read about policing: Because of a flawed algorithm, cops showed up 21 TIMES in 5 months to a 15 year-olds house. He was not accused of any crime.'

  (tags: civil-rights police algorithms policing automation florida us-politics)

• Community Outbreak Investigation of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Among Bus Riders in Eastern China | Global Health | JAMA Internal Medicine | JAMA Network

  One person on a bus infected 23 others, probably through the air during a 100-minute trip. A/C was on with recirculation. Infected people were randomly scattered throughout the bus, not just near the index case.

  (tags: covid-19 aerosols airborne transmission diseases buses public-transport travel sars-cov-2)

• Gerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations

  Fascinating details of the hardware behind "number stations", the mysterious radio stations broadcasting streams of numbers in a monotone. One example of their use is the story of Gabriele Gast: 'After agreeing to help [the Stasi], Gast very soon found herself sent on an intensive spycraft course, including hands-on training with the latest in covert communications equipment. She was given a Stasi code name, "Gisela", which came with a false passport and a new handbag, incorporating a well concealed secret compartment. Back home in Aachen, every Tuesday evening at the same time she tuned into a shortwave radio station from East Germany and carefully wrote down a long line of numbers, read out in a monotone, without further elaboration, by a "radio presenter". When she decrypted the messages from Schmidt she found some were instructions while others were simply encouraging love messages.'

  (tags: spies number-stations 1980s history ussr hardware encryption gabriele-gast germany)

• FAQs on Protecting Yourself from Aerosol Transmission of COVID-19

  This is pretty extensive

  (tags: faqs covid-19 aerosols transmission)

• Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy | September 2020 | Communications of the ACM

  'Consistency As Logical Monotonicity (CALM): A problem has a consistent, coordination-free distributed implementation if and only if it is monotonic.'

  (tags: calm computer-science consistency distributed-systems bloom distcomp)

• Two metres or one: what is the evidence for physical distancing in covid-19? | The BMJ

  Key messages: Current rules on safe physical distancing are based on outdated science Distribution of viral particles is affected by numerous factors, including air flow Evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 may travel more than 2 m through activities such as coughing and shouting Rules on distancing should reflect the multiple factors that affect risk, including ventilation, occupancy, and exposure time

  (tags: epidemiology coronavirus covid-19 papers bmj social-distancing physical-distancing 2-metres aerosols)

• Interchange fee

  TIL about credit card "interchange fees" -- an additional fee levied by credit card companies and banks, roughly 3%, mainly in the US (the EU regulations cap it at 0.3%). 'Imagine a consumer making a $100 purchase with a credit card. For that $100 item, the retailer would get approximately $98. The remaining $2, known as the merchant discount[13] and fees, gets divided up.'

  (tags: fees credit-cards interchange-fees us money)

• How I helped fix Canada?s COVID Alert app

  Nice writeup of using mitmproxy to detect unwanted accesses to a Google endpoint in an iOS app

  (tags: mitmproxy mitm https ios apps reversing)

• interesting results on children and COVID-19 -- high asymptomatic infection rate

  'METHODS: We conducted a prospective cohort study of children and adolescents (<21 years of age) with a SARS-CoV-2-infected close contact. We collected nasopharyngeal or nasal swabs at enrollment and tested for SARS-CoV-2 using a real-time PCR assay. RESULTS: Of 382 children, 293 (77%) were SARS-CoV-2-infected. SARS-CoV-2-infected children were more likely to be Hispanic (p<0.0001), less likely to have asthma (p=0.005), and more likely to have an infected sibling contact (p=0.001) than uninfected children. Children ages 6-13 years were frequently asymptomatic (39%) and had respiratory symptoms less often than younger children (29% vs. 48%; p=0.01) or adolescents (29% vs. 60%; p<0.0001). Compared to children ages 6-13 years, adolescents more frequently reported influenza-like (61% vs. 39%; p<0.0001), gastrointestinal (27% vs. 9%; p=0.002), and sensory symptoms (42% vs. 9%; p<0.0001), and had more prolonged illnesses [median (IQR) duration: 7 (4, 12) vs. 4 (3, 8) days; p=0.01]. Despite the age-related variability in symptoms, we found no differences in nasopharyngeal viral load by age or between symptomatic and asymptomatic children.'

  (tags: covid-19 sars-cov-2 papers preprints kids children)

• Children in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 were not contacted for nine days

  'Children who came into close contact with a confirmed case of the coronavirus at a summer camp run by Ireland’s lead sporting authority were not contacted by the HSE regarding the issue for nine days, it has emerged. Sport Ireland, the State authority charged with the development of sport in Ireland, has been running childrens’ summer camps at the National Aquatic Centre campus in Blanchardstown, Dublin, where SI itself is headquartered, since June 29th. At one such camp on Friday, 14 August, a nine-year-old boy participating apparently came into close contact with a case of the virus. However, he heard nothing about the contact until nine days later on August 23 when his mother received an automated text message stating that the contact had occurred and that he had been referred for a Covid-19 test.'

  (tags: sport-ireland ireland contact-tracing covid-19 kids hse children)

• Irish coins designed by Percy Metcalfe

  the coins used in Ireland between 1928 and 2000 (when the Euro became standard here). Beautiful, classic designs

  (tags: coins history ireland numismatism design art money)

• Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections: a living systematic review and meta-analysis | medRxiv

  'The overall estimate of the proportion of people who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and remain asymptomatic throughout infection was 20% (95% CI 17-25) with a prediction interval of 3-67% in 79 studies that addressed this review question.' -- note, asymptomatic throughout infection, not including presymptomatic then symptomatic. (via Andrew Flood)

  (tags: via:andrewflood covid-19 asymptomatic papers preprints medicine)

• Explanation of the "cases rising but deaths staying static" COVID-19 phenomenon

  Featuring lots of graphs and data. This is great

  (tags: twitter threads covid-19 epidemiology age ifr cfr)

• Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19 - The Atlantic

  god, this disease is awful

  (tags: long-haulers covid-19 health medicine ed-yong)

• Richard Neher on Twitter: "What happens to #COVID19 when winter returns"

  tl;dr: 'this suggests controlling #SARSCoV2 in the Northern Hemisphere will become a lot harder over the next six months and things might spiral out of control quickly.'

  (tags: covid-19 winter medicine)

• Incubation period of COVID-19: a rapid systematic review and meta-analysis of observational research | BMJ Open

  The incubation period distribution may be modelled with a lognormal distribution with pooled mu and sigma parameters (95% CIs) of 1.63 (95% CI 1.51 to 1.75) and 0.50 (95% CI 0.46 to 0.55), respectively. The corresponding mean (95% CIs) was 5.8 (95% CI 5.0 to 6.7) days. It should be noted that uncertainty increases towards the tail of the distribution: the pooled parameter estimates (95% CIs) resulted in a median incubation period of 5.1 (95% CI 4.5 to 5.8) days, whereas the 95th percentile was 11.7 (95% CI 9.7 to 14.2) days.

  (tags: covid-19 incubation diseases sars-cov-2 papers bmj)

• How to Test Every American for COVID-19, Every Day - The Atlantic

  Good write-up on Dr. Michael Mina's testing plan, using quick, cheap testing strips for daily COVID-19 testing

  (tags: testing covid-19 coronavirus michael-mina reopening)

• A-Levels: The Model is not the Student

  Solid description of the many errors in the UK's attempt to estimate correct grades for their A-level students this year. They really made a massive mess of it. 'Ultimately, the government can only receive, at best, a D for their efforts; they tried but failed. We can only hope they will now pull themselves up, bring in the experts, and construct an algorithm worthy of an A.'

  (tags: ofqual schools marks exams a-levels uk estimation statistics maths fail)

• 'To the four nurses in Ireland...RIP': The Covid-19 Twitter claim that made it to the national airwaves

  "The story behind one of the most infamous myths of the Irish pandemic." Great analysis by The Journal here.

  (tags: covid-19 paddy-cosgrave twitter misinformation tweets)

• Air pollution is much worse than we thought. Climate change is far from the only problem with fossil fuels. - Vox

  “Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent roughly 4.5 million premature deaths, about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and approximately 300 million lost workdays in the US.” All that prevented death, illness, and lost productivity adds up to a lot of savings: The avoided deaths are valued at more than $37 trillion. The avoided health care spending due to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits exceeds $37 billion, and the increased labor productivity is valued at more than $75 billion. On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the US from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition. Importantly, many of the benefits can be accessed in the near term. Right now, air pollution leads to almost 250,000 premature deaths a year in the US. Within a decade, aggressive decarbonization could reduce that toll by 40 percent; over 20 years, it could save around 1.4 million American lives that would otherwise be lost to air quality. Of the potential yearly deaths prevented, Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois remarked at the hearing, “That’s a huge number. That’s nearly three times the number of lives we lose in car accidents every year. It’s twice the number of deaths caused by opioids in the past few years. And it’s even more than the number of Americans we lose to diabetes each year.”

  (tags: pollution air energy environment climate-change air-quality health decarbonization)

• ESB PVC Ducting Pipe Red 50mm x 6M

  decent weatherproof ducting for running cables to garden sheds etc.

  (tags: ducting sheds garden home wiring cabling cables)

• Excellent thread on the Ofqual justification for the UK's current approach to estimating A-level results

  Some prime quotes: 'You can’t infer the correct grades at an individual level from the prior year’s distribution of grades, no matter how hard you clonk away at the abacus.' 'The data *doesn’t* allow that. ThIs puts idea that grade inflation, school level results and maintaining the distribution shape is more important than the fairness of individual results.' 'I don’t blame Ofqual, but they’re being asked to correctly estimate the size of each egg that went into an omelette, based on a different omelette.'

  (tags: ofqual uk education covid-19 estimation a-levels grades schools)

• Robust T cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic or mild COVID-19: Cell

  Good news for ongoing immunity:

  SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells will likely prove critical for long-term immune protection against COVID-19. We here systematically mapped the functional and phenotypic landscape of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in unexposed individuals, exposed family members, and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19. Acute phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells displayed a highly activated cytotoxic phenotype that correlated with various clinical markers of disease severity, whereas convalescent phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were polyfunctional and displayed a stem-like memory phenotype. Importantly, SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were detectable in antibody-seronegative exposed family members and convalescent individuals with a history of asymptomatic and mild COVID-19. Our collective dataset shows that SARS-CoV-2 elicits robust, broad and highly functional memory T cell responses, suggesting that natural exposure or infection may prevent recurrent episodes of severe COVID-19.

  (tags: immunity covid-19 sars-cov-2 diseases immune-system t-cells)

• How to use ventilation and air filtration to prevent the spread of coronavirus indoors

  Given that COVID-19 spreads via aerosols in closed rooms like classrooms, use a CO2 monitor to check levels of ventilation; open windows; or use an air purifier.

  (tags: covid-19 aerosols air air-quality co2 air-purifiers schools)

• Covid 19 coronavirus: Freight investigated as possible source of community transmission - NZ Herald

  Interesting theory in NZ -- their current outbreak may have been caused by surface transmission on food shipped from China:

  Surfaces in a coolstore workplace are being tested to see whether international freight may have been the origin of the new cases. One of the people who has tested positive for Covid-19 is an employee at an Americold coolstore in Mt Wellington, one of four people who tested positive on Tuesday.

  (tags: shipping fomites surfaces transmission covid-19 new-zealand)

• Objectives for COVID-19 testing in school settings

  'New ECDC guidance on testing for COVID-19 in schools says anyone who is in a "closed environment, such as a classroom, for more than 15 minutes" with a confirmed case is considered a close contact and should be tested'

  (tags: ecdc covid-19 infection transmission airborne aerosols schools kids)

• Yes, kids can get COVID-19 – 3 pediatricians explain what's known about coronavirus and children

  So: kids catch the virus at the same rate, and transmit at the same rate as adults. They just don't tend to become symptomatic as much as adults do.

  (tags: covid-19 disease kids schools transmission)

• the German meat-factory COVID-19 outbreak was airborne

  This is a great article:

  The outbreak has been studied comprehensively by scientists using genetic sequencing techniques. The index case, who was masked, spread the disease to co-workers in a radius of more than eight metres over three days of work shifts, they found. Transmission was aided by the confined area of the plant, where air was constantly recirculated and cooled to 10 degrees. Shared apartments, bedrooms or carpools did not play a major role in the initial outbreak.

  (Via Dee Gilhawley)

  (tags: covid-19 airborne aerosols transmission meat)

• The effect of school closures and reopening strategies on COVID-19 infection dynamics in the San Francisco Bay Area: a cross-sectional survey and modeling analysis | medRxiv

  New preprint, modelling COVID-19 transmission in Bay Area schools.

  Large-scale school closures have been implemented worldwide to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, the impact of school closures and re-opening on epidemic dynamics remains unclear. Methods: We simulated COVID-19 transmission dynamics using an individual-based stochastic model, incorporating social-contact data of school-aged children during shelter-in-place orders derived from Bay Area (California) household surveys. We simulated transmission under observed conditions and counterfactual intervention scenarios between March 17-June 1, and evaluated various fall 2020 K-12 reopening strategies. Findings: Between March 17-June 1, assuming children <10 were half as susceptible to infection as older children and adults, we estimated school closures averted a similar number of infections (13,842 cases; 95% CI: 6,290, 23,040) as workplace closures (15,813; 95% CI: 9,963, 22,617) and social distancing measures (7,030; 95% CI: 3,118, 11,676). School closure effects were driven by high school and middle school closures. Under assumptions of moderate community transmission, we estimate that fall 2020 school reopenings will increase symptomatic illness among high school teachers (an additional 40.7% expected to experience symptomatic infection, 95% CI: 1.9, 61.1), middle school teachers (37.2%, 95% CI: 4.6, 58.1), and elementary school teachers (4.1%, 95% CI: -1.7, 12.0). Results are highly dependent on uncertain parameters, notably the relative susceptibility and infectiousness of children, and extent of community transmission amid re-opening. The school-based interventions needed to reduce the risk to fewer than an additional 1% of teachers infected varies by grade level. A hybrid-learning approach with halved class sizes of 10 students may be needed in high schools, while maintaining small cohorts of 20 students may be needed for elementary schools. Interpretation: Multiple in-school intervention strategies and community transmission reductions, beyond the extent achieved to date, will be necessary to avoid undue excess risk associated with school reopening. Policymakers must urgently enact policies that curb community transmission and implement within-school control measures to simultaneously address the tandem health crises posed by COVID-19 and adverse child health and development consequences of long-term school closures.

  (tags: covid-19 bay-area schools kids transmission models)

• Building dashboards for operational visibility | Amazon Builders' Library

  Fantastic set of tips for metric dashboard construction, from John O'Shea

  (tags: dashboards aws monitoring metrics alerts amazon)

• Nisreen A Alwan: What exactly is mild covid-19? 

  What is now becoming clear is that mortality is not the only adverse outcome of this infection and our surveillance systems must keep up and reflect that. I am advocating for precise case definitions for covid-19 morbidity that reflect the degree of severity of infection and allow us to measure moderate and long term health and wellbeing outcomes. At this stage of the pandemic, it is vital that we accurately measure and count all degrees of infection, not only in research cohorts, but as part of population-based routine surveillance systems. This includes people like me who were not tested at the time of their initial infection. Death is not the only thing to count in this pandemic, we must count lives changed. We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure. 

  (tags: covid-19 diseases fatigue symptoms medicine bmj)

• Georgia camp outbreak shows rapid virus spread among children

  Between 44% and 75% of the people at this summer camp were infected. '258 staff gathered for three days before the camp started with no precautions. Then on day 1 of camp someone [felt] chills. By day 6, the camp was closed.' 597 attendees, 344 tested, 260 positive.

  (tags: covid-19 symptoms summer-camps pandemic disease georgia kids schools children)

• "Three new important studies came out in the past week about kids & COVID-19"

  Good twitter thread from Megan Ranney MD: * 'South Korea study -- Older kids most likely transmit #COVID19 to their household at rates similar to adults. And younger kids transmit the virus, too. But: no masks or distancing, since this took place at home.' * 'Chicago -- the level of the virus in kids is AT LEAST as high as the level of virus in adults. (Caveat: we don't know whether this virus is infectious. But this data matches what we know about other respiratory viruses. The next step will be studying test swabs to see if kids' virus can reproduce. I suspect it can. [...] We can't let kids ignore #SocialDistancing & #MaskUp just bc they're kids.)' * 'States with early closure of schools had reduced levels of #COVID19 compared with states with late closure, *even after* adjusting for policies like "stay-at-home". [...] Once #COVID19 infection rates start to rise, it would be foolhardy to keep schools open IRL. And we should be planning NOW for how to keep kids healthy, safe, & fed, because that moment will likely come for every state.' 'Realistically, we MUST control levels of community transmission of #COVID19 if we want kids & teachers in schools. We may be able to send kids back, but we need PPE & regular, random testing of kids & teachers, whether in elementary, middle, high school, or college.'

  (tags: parenting kids schools covid-19 transmission pandemics viruses sars-cov-2)

• The UX of LEGO Interface Panels – George Cave

  love it

  (tags: lego ux ui design funny)

• RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO2 emissions | PNAS

  Today in "we are still fucked" news:

  RCP8.5, the most aggressive scenario in assumed fossil fuel use for global climate models, will continue to serve as a useful tool for quantifying physical climate risk, especially over near- to midterm policy-relevant time horizons. Not only are the emissions consistent with RCP8.5 in close agreement with historical total cumulative CO2 emissions (within 1%), but RCP8.5 is also the best match out to midcentury under current and stated policies with still highly plausible levels of CO2 emissions in 2100.

  RCP8.5 is the model associated with a planet where a good chunk of the globe is rendered uninhabitable.

  (tags: rcp8.5 grim-meathook-future future climate-change co2 pnas papers models climate)

• Evidence for sustained mucosal and systemic antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 antigens in COVID-19 patients | medRxiv

  While the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 has been extensively studied in blood, relatively little is known about the mucosal immune response and its relationship to systemic antibody levels. Since SARS-CoV-2 initially replicates in the upper airway, the antibody response in the oral cavity is likely an important parameter that influences the course of infection. We developed enzyme linked immunosorbent assays to detect IgA and IgG antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (full length trimer) and its receptor binding domain (RBD) in serum (n=496) and saliva (n=90) of acute and convalescent patients with laboratory-diagnosed COVID-19 ranging from 3-115 days post-symptom onset (PSO), compared to negative controls. Anti-CoV-2 antibody responses were readily detected in serum and saliva, with peak IgG levels attained by 16-30 days PSO. Whereas anti-CoV-2 IgA antibodies rapidly decayed, IgG antibodies remained relatively stable up to 115 days PSO in both biofluids. Importantly, IgG responses in saliva and serum were correlated, suggesting that antibodies in the saliva may serve as a surrogate measure of systemic immunity.

  That last line, in particular, is good news.

  (tags: covid-19 immunity disease assays antibodies sars-cov-2 papers preprints)

• Harvard-UC Boulder Portable Air Cleaner Calculator for Schools

  A handy calculator spreadsheet to estimate how big of a portable air cleaner would be required to protect kids/teachers/admin staff at a typical US school, based on room size, ceiling height, etc. More info: https://twitter.com/cedenolaurent/status/1290447833959747584 (Catherine Lalanne notes: "Airflows in this sheet are about half the Irish regulations, American regulations are pretty weak.")

  (tags: air-cleaners filtration spreadsheets covid-19 schools kids air-quality air)

• Why Aren't We Talking More About Ventilation? - The Atlantic

  Zeynep wins again:

  It seems baffling that despite mounting evidence of its importance, we are stuck practicing hygiene theater — constantly deep cleaning everything — while not noticing the air we breathe. How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we still have so little guidance about this all-important variable, the very air we breathe?

  (tags: hygiene-theatre deep-cleaning covid-19 aerosols infection air viruses transmission zeynep-tufekci)

• Fordite

  'also called Detroit agate, it's created when layers of automotive paint build up and harden. then it's cut and polished like other rocks.'

  (tags: fordite rock agate history paint recycling cars detroit)

• Apple tells app devs to use IPv6 as it's 1.4 times faster than IPv4

  "when IPv6 is in use, the median connection setup is 1.4 times faster than IPv4. This is primarily due to reduced NAT usage and improved routing."

  This is counterintuitive?

  (tags: ipv6 ipv4 networking apple internet performance)

• Aerosol and surface contamination of SARS-CoV-2 observed in quarantine and isolation care

  A paper in Nature, no less. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne and spreads via aerosols. My pal Cassie's colleague, Travis Longcore, writes: 'A team at the University of Nebraska collected surface and air samples from the hospital where 13 Covid-19 cases were isolated. They found evidence of virus everywhere -- high-volume air samples, low-volume personal samples worn by study personnel, room surfaces, personal items, and toilets. The results are in gene copes (from SARS-CoV-2) per microL for surfaces and per L of air for airborne. Others can do the calculations, but the personal air samples had the highest numbers, and exposure would depend on mask wearing (N95 in a hospital) and the amount of throughput (liters of air in and out of the body). What you really don't want to be doing is exercising (=high volume of air in and out) without a mask indoors with someone who is infected. Or touching anything around them. Or being inside with recirculated, unfiltered air with anyone who is infected (even if they don't know it).'

  (tags: aerosols nature papers covid-19 sars-cov-2 fomites contamination transmission infection air airborne)

• Comparison of viral levels in individuals with or without symptoms at time of COVID-19 testing among 32,480 residents and staff of nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Massachusetts. | medRxiv

  In aggregate, the distributions of Cts for viral probes used in the qRT-PCR assay were very similar, with a statistically but not meaningfully different mean (?Ct 0.71 cycles, p = 0.006) and a similar range (12-38 cycles), between populations with and without symptoms over the entire time period, across all sub-categories examined (age, race, ethnicity, sex, resident/staff).

  Viral load is comparable between COVID-19 victims who are asymptomatic and symptomatic.

  (tags: covid-19 preprints papers medicine viral-load rt-pcr testing)

• SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV viral load dynamics, duration of viral shedding and infectiousness: a living systematic review and meta-analysis | medRxiv

  Although SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding in respiratory and stool can be prolonged, duration of viable virus is relatively short-lived. Thus, detection of viral RNA cannot be used to infer infectiousness. High SARS-CoV-2 titres are detectable in the first week of illness with an early peak observed at symptom onset to day 5 of illness.

  ...also backs up that infectiousness starts around 2 days prior to symptom onset.

  (tags: papers covid-19 preprints sars-cov-2 infection rna)

• Apache Arrow

  Arrow combines the benefits of columnar data structures with in-memory computing. It provides the performance benefits of these modern techniques while also providing the flexibility of complex data and dynamic schemas. And it does all of this in an open source and standardized way.

  (via Tony Finch)

  (tags: via:fanf arrow data formats compression columnar-storage storage libraries)

• Solving the expiring Root CA certificate-mageddon; partly at least | APNIC Blog

  Ugh -- PKI expiry lifetimes were such an awful idea.

  As of writing, a large number of Samsung Blu-Ray players around the world are stuck in a reboot loop. Although customers are still waiting for the official word on the issue, the suspicion is that the problem is caused by an expired certificate that stops the device firmware from booting properly, possibly because of strict digital rights management requirements that require verification and signing before full start-up of the players. As Scott points out, there are hundreds of ageing Root CAs out there, many more when you include the intermediates. Over the next few years, more will expire.

  (via Tony Finch)

  (tags: security fail pki ssl tls samsung firmware certificates expiration cas)

• US Spring school closures tied to drastic decrease in Covid-19 cases, deaths in model

  Their projection found that, if schools had stayed open, there could have been roughly 424 more coronavirus infections and 13 more deaths per 100,000 residents over the course of 26 days. Extrapolate that to the American population, and the country might have seen as many as 1.37 million more cases and 40,600 more deaths, explained Samir Shah, the director of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and one of the authors of the paper. “These numbers seem ridiculously high and it’s mind-boggling to think that these numbers are only … in the first several weeks,” said Shah. “That’s bonkers.” He warned, though, that those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. While their statistical model attempts to pinpoint the impact of schools staying open or being closed, the method can’t actually establish any sort of causal relationship.

  (tags: models modelling schools reopening covid-19 kids us)

• School openings across globe suggest ways to keep coronavirus at bay, despite outbreaks | Science | AAAS

  When Science looked at reopening strategies from South Africa to Finland to Israel, some encouraging patterns emerged. Together, they suggest a combination of keeping student groups small and requiring masks and some social distancing helps keep schools and communities safe, and that younger children rarely spread the virus to one another or bring it home. But opening safely, experts agree, isn’t just about the adjustments a school makes. It’s also about how much virus is circulating in the community, which affects the likelihood that students and staff will bring COVID-19 into their classrooms.

  (tags: covid-19 education schools pods children kids)

• AWS User Data is Being Stored, Used Outside User's Chosen Regions

  Wow, this is staggeringly inappropriate usage. Bad move, Amazon!

  [AWS] is using customers’ “AI content” for its own product development purposes. It also reserves the right in its small print to store this material outside the geographic regions that AWS customers have explicitly selected. It may also share this with AWS “affiliates” it says, without naming them.

  (tags: via:corey-quinn aws amazon machine-learning corpora training data data-privacy data-protection)

• The Scourge of Hygiene Theater - The Atlantic

  On the pointless "deep clean":

  To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area. But what if this is all just a huge waste of time? In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.

  (tags: covid-19 air aerosols transmission cleaning surfaces fomites hygiene)

• Sputum testing provides higher rate of COVID-19 detection | EurekAlert! Science News

  Li and his colleagues scoured the literature -- both preprints and published papers -- for studies that assessed at least two respiratory sampling sites using an NP swab, oropharyngeal swab or sputum. From more than 1,000 studies, they identified 11 that met their criteria. These studies included results from a total of 3,442 respiratory tract specimens. The team examined how often each collection method produced a positive result. For NP swabs, the rate was 54 percent; for oropharyngeal swabs, 43 percent; for sputum, 71 percent. The rate of viral detection was significantly higher in sputum than either oropharyngeal swabs or NP swabs. Detection rates were highest within one week of symptom onset for all three tests.

  (tags: sputum covid-19 testing swabs)

• COVID Dogs

  Scent dog identification of samples from COVID-19 patients – a pilot study, in BMC Infectious Diseases:

  The dogs were able to discriminate between samples of infected (positive) and non-infected (negative) individuals with average diagnostic sensitivity of 82.63% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 82.02–83.24%) and specificity of 96.35% (95% CI: 96.31–96.39%). During the presentation of 1012 randomised samples, the dogs achieved an overall average detection rate of 94% (±3.4%) with 157 correct indications of positive, 792 correct rejections of negative, 33 incorrect indications of negative or incorrect rejections of 30 positive sample presentations.

  (tags: dogs good-dog covid-19 detection testing smell scent)

• Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios - Bloomberg

  "A group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate."

  (tags: global-warming climate-change future climate science)

• 20 Questions to Ask before Sending your Kids Back to School – Schools For Health

  An excellent checklist.

  There is no such thing as “zero risk” in anything we do, and certainly not during a pandemic. There will be some risk to students, teachers, staff, and families. As such, it is important to reduce these risks to the extent possible. Returning to school should not be “school as usual.” We prepared the following set of questions as a guide for parents, teachers and school staff who may not be sure what to ask or look for at their school. While we offer some insight into the responses you might receive, and expect, each school’s response will be different because there is no “one size fits all” plan for COVID-19.

  (tags: schools teaching covid-19 health kids children)

• Schools Will Eventually Need to Reopen – Schools For Health

  We recognize there are immense challenges. There is no perfect plan to reopen schools safely, only “less bad” options. There is no “one size fits all” strategy that works for every school. Schools have limited budgets and staff. Compliance will be imperfect. Learning will be different. There will be disruption. Schools may need to re-close unexpectedly depending on local conditions. No one knows with certainty what the fall will bring in terms of this pandemic. Despite these challenges, the enormous individual and societal costs of keeping schools closed compels us, a team focused on Healthy Buildings and exposure and risk science, to present a range of control strategies that should be considered in discussions of school reopenings.

  (tags: health schools reopening covid-19 teaching kids children)

• Facebook Employee Leaks Show Betrayal By Company Leadership

  Wang opted for a clip of himself speaking directly to the camera. What followed was a 24-minute clear-eyed hammering of Facebook’s leadership and decision-making over the previous year. The video was a distillation of months of internal strife, protest, and departures that followed the company’s decision to leave untouched a post from President Donald Trump that seemingly called for violence against people protesting the police killing of George Floyd. And while Wang’s message wasn’t necessarily unique, his assessment of the company’s ongoing failure to protect its users — an evaluation informed by his lengthy tenure at the company — provided one of the most stunningly pointed rebukes of Facebook to date. “We are failing,” he said, criticizing Facebook’s leaders for catering to political concerns at the expense of real-world harm. “And what's worse, we have enshrined that failure in our policies.”

  (tags: activism ethics facebook work policies nazis trump)

• Persistent Symptoms in Patients After Acute COVID-19 | Critical Care Medicine | JAMA | JAMA Network

  'This study found that in patients who had recovered from COVID-19, 87.4% reported persistence of at least 1 symptom, particularly fatigue and dyspnea.' Two months after 'recovery'! (via Megan Ranney MD, https://twitter.com/meganranney/status/1285354398265282563)

  (tags: covid-19 recovery medicine fatigue health via:meganranney)

• Cheap, Frequent, Quick Testing

  Keith Dawson:

  Picture the widespread availability of a simple, cheap, at-home Covid test that produces quick results. Perhaps a strip of paper like a pregnancy test. Everyone in the country takes it daily. It would stop this virus in its tracks.

  An excellent summary of the Michael Mina, et al, paper (and TWiV discussion).

  (tags: testing covid-19 accuracy reopening tests)

• What It Will Take to Reopen Schools Safely | American Scientist

  If we want school to reopen safely in this school year, here’s what it will take: community outbreak control, extensive changes to school operations to limit infection risk (and the money to support such changes), flexibility, and transparency — in that order.

  (tags: schools education reopening covid-19 teaching)

• amazing long twitter thread on school reopening

  'Sarah Cohodes on Twitter: "Ok, so no one asked me (well @mathteacherjedi sort of did) what I thought the best plan for reopening schools was. And I haven’t said anything about this, because it’s not my direct area of expertise. 1/"'

  (tags: education children kids covid-19 reopening schools teaching)

• Cancel Culture and the Problem of Woke Capitalism - The Atlantic

  'How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture: Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.'

  (tags: cancel-culture cancelling capitalism society)

• The inside story of how the UK government failed to develop a contact-tracing app

  A classic Tory fuckup. Spoofing, over-promising, a behind-the-scenes desire to collect a database of citizen's private medical info, and hubris.

  (tags: nhsx palantir bluetooth covid-19 uk tories data-privacy nhs)

• Ireland donates its contact tracing app to the Linux Foundation

  This is awesome. Congrats to NearForm and the HSE for making some great choices here:

  Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) announced today that it is donating the code for the COVID Tracker app as Open Source to the not-for-profit Linux Foundation. This will enable jurisdictions worldwide to quickly build and deploy their own contact tracing apps using a wildly successful proven base. The donated app has been named COVID Green. [...] The rapid adoption of the COVID Tracker app in Ireland exceeded all expectations. One million people installed it in the first 36 hours, and the app currently has over 1.3 million installations. That figure represents more than 30% of people in Ireland with compatible devices. The code is also being used in the app for Gibraltar and the upcoming apps for Northern Ireland, other jurisdictions in EMEA and multiple US states. NearForm continues to enable public health authorities to get a contact tracing application into production within four weeks of project start. By donating the source code to the new Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) project, under the Apache License 2.0, the HSE is playing an active role in helping to fight Covid-19 worldwide. Source code for the COVID Green mobile app is available now on GitHub and soon will be followed by all matching backend code. The Linux Foundation is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open source projects to accelerate technology development and industry adoption. LFPH is launching with a mission to use open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) around the world combat Covid-19 and future epidemics. One of the roles of LFPH is to serve as a forum for collaboration between PHAs, developers, technology companies and academics to ensure the implementation and dissemination of best practices, including privacy and security.

  (tags: hse nearform covid-19 contact-tracing exposure-notification apps mobile open-source linux-foundation lfph)

• Turkey Now Has Swarming Suicide Drones It Could Export - The Drive

  Well, this is pretty scary -- swarming autonomous kamikaze drones are actively in production right now:

  It seems very possible that, in addition to providing these improved Kargu [drones] to the Turkish armed forces, STM could also seek to export them, proliferating this capability further around the world. STM has already said that it has received serious inquires about the Kargu series from at least three unnamed potential foreign customers. Turkey, as a whole, has become a powerhouse of drone development and production, employing larger types to great effect in Syria and Libya just this year. This is precisely the type of weapon we have been warning about for years now. The fact that it is already here and potentially exportable should be yet another wake-up call to the level of threat low-end drones pose to U.S. and allied forces, as well as domestic infrastructure and VIPs.  "I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it's unmanned," U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said at an event hosted by the Middle East Institute last week. "I'm not talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with, as we would any other platform." "I'm talking about the one you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, four quad, rotorcraft or something like that that can be launched and flown," he continued. "And with very simple modifications, it can make made into something that can drop a weapon like a hand grenade or something else."

  (tags: drones war terrorism ai autonomous scary kargu kerkes turkey stm)

• interesting data on COVID-19 rates among school-age kids

  Twitter thread:

  Highest COVID-19 rate (18.6%) for household contacts of school-aged children and lowest (5.3%) for household contacts of kids 0-9; - School closure and distancing reduced rate of COVID-19 among contacts of school aged kids. What does this mean? - I believe this further supports that we need to have low rates of community transmission before we consider opening up schools; - Per this data kids 10-19 had highest rates of contacts with COVID-19; - This is scientific data, let this lead our decision.

  (tags: contact-tracing south-korea schools reopening covid-19 transmission children)

• ‘Only those with plastic visors were infected’: Swiss government warns against face shields - The Local

  Via Zeynep Tufekci: 'A study of an outbreak in Switzerland found that only those with plastic face-shields were infected, and everyone wearing masks was protected. Face shields may still help with source control, but masks may well also be protecting the wearer to some degree.'

  (tags: switzerland covid-19 facemasks masks aerosols transmission epidemiology)

• 'Blitz spirit' was a myth

  The report, The Mental Stability of Hull, was based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. These case studies showed that people developed serious psychosomatic conditions, including involuntary soiling and wetting, persistent crying, uncontrollable shaking, headaches and chronic dizziness; men were found to indulge in heavy drinking and smoking after a raid, and prone to developing peptic ulcers. One woman was bombed out of three different houses, and watched the death of her sister and her five children. Her symptoms indicated an exceptional level of nervous collapse. Nevertheless, the conclusion from Hull was that its mental stability was nothing to worry about. The government papered over the evidence of the physical and psychological effects of being bombed and focused instead on the stories of British resolve. The propaganda film London Can Take It! reinforced the view that British people were not to be terrorised into submission. The famous photograph of a milkman picking his way through the ruins to deliver the milk was widely distributed, but it was a fake – the milkman was in fact the photographer’s assistant, wearing a white coat. The public face of the “blitz spirit” concealed the awful reality of being bombed.

  (tags: coronavirus epidemic fear pandemics blitz covid-19 ptsd propaganda)

• Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 surveillance | medRxiv

  this makes a whole load of sense to me -- Michael Mina, one of this paper's authors, is interviewed on TWIV, https://microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-640/ , talking about frequent, cheap, fast-turnaround COVID-19 tests, suitable for countrywide, daily testing. Less accurate than the RT-PCR swab, but good enough for this purpose

  (tags: epidemiology covid-19 testing swabs rt-pcr twiv virology models papers)

• Nice heatmap dataviz of Florida COVID-19 cases, over time, by age bracket

  Be?v?a?n?d on Twitter: "I love this heatmap?? It represents over 100,000 individual datapoints. These are Florida COVID-19 cases, over time, by age bracket. I published open-source code to make it: https://t.co/8USY29mDDn The recent case surge is driven by 20-24-year-old Floridians. 1/N https://t.co/Pw2p9xTLaq" / Twitter

  (tags: dataviz heatmaps graphics charts covid-19 analytics)

• UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster

  The more recent USB storage protocol -- definitely worth using if available. 'Without UASP, a drive is mounted as a Mass Storage Device using Bulk Only Transport (or BOT), a protocol that was designed for transferring files way back in the USB 'Full speed' days, when the fastest speed you could get was a whopping 12 Mbps! With USB 3.0, the BOT protocol cripples throughput. USB 3.0 has 5 Gbps of bandwidth, which is 400x more than USB 1.1. The old BOT protocol would transfer data in large chunks, and each chunk of data had to be delivered in order, without regard for buffering or multiple bits of data being able to transfer in parallel.' (everyone's already blogged this, but I'm lodging it here for bookmark purposes ;)

  (tags: uasp usb storage disks hardware raspberry-pi io ops)

• Thread on how US universities are planning to tackle COVID-19 in the fall

  Michael Otsuka on Twitter: "Notre Dame is the latest example of a US university that is devoting serious planning and resources to making their campus safe for in person instruction." This thread is full of good points on how educational institutions -- not just third-level! -- need to think about how to handle COVID-19 when they reopen. Key points: comprehensive testing of staff and students; contact tracing, isolation and quarantine protocols; physical distancing and mask requirements; and facilities to isolate positive staff and students and their contacts. Also, some facilities are planning to PROVIDE face coverings if students don't have, or forget, their own. Brown University are planning to conduct "rapid testing for covid-19 for all students at regular intervals. Testing only those with symptoms will not be sufficient." https://twitter.com/MikeOtsuka/status/1261597656373252096 -- this is a point that Columbia U. Prof Vincent Racaniello, of TWIV fame (@profvrr), has been making repeatedly -- pervasive mass testing is needed.

  (tags: testing covid-19 reopening education universities health schools)

• Wearing masks may reduce severity of COVID-19, if it is caught

  Bob Wachter on Twitter: "I heard [an] interesting new theory by ID expert Monica Gandhi @UCSF: wearing masks may not only prevent disease, but – if wearer does get infected – it may be with a lower viral dose and thus cause milder disease. Some support for this from studies in mice and hamsters (below)… https://t.co/ISqtKK97ow" / Twitter

  (tags: covid-19 bob-wachter virology masks facemasks theories viruses infection)

• Fixers Know What ‘Repairable’ Means—Now There’s a Standard for It

  European standard EN45554 'details ”general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products.” In plain English, it’s a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It’s also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.'

  (tags: repair ifixit eu en45554 standards europe)

• The EU General Data Protection Regulation explained by Americans

  Bashing the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seems to have become one of American activists’ favourite hobbies in the tech field. Some criticism is entirely justified. But many claims that the GDPR is “counterproductive” or “misses the point” are based on misconceptions, rather than an accurate understanding of European data protection laws. As a result, several US privacy advocates have therefore suggested alternative principles or rules… many of which, actually, have been part of EU data protection law since 1995.

  (tags: gdpr privacy data-protection eu data-privacy us-politics)

• The implications of silent transmission for the control of COVID-19 outbreaks | PNAS

  'In our PNAS study, we demonstrate that the majority of COVID-19 transmission is 'silent': from asymptomatic cases or from cases during the presymptomatic phase. Consequently, symptom-based control, such as temperature checks, is not sufficient.'

  (tags: covid-19 research papers epidemiology transmission symptoms)

• Why School Reopening Is Absurd and Dangerous

  I love the public schools my kids attend, but I also know they can't handle a lice outbreak on a good day and are not equipped to handle COVID on a bad one. School principals and superintendents are not epidemiologists or virologists and can’t possibly be expected to make plans like they are. So who should be making decisions? To start, the CDC. So, when the vice president of the United States says, as he did this week, that "we don’t want the guidance from the CDC to be the reason schools don’t open up," what he's really saying is that the government is abandoning children, parents, and all the people who work in schools.

  (tags: coronavirus usa children pandemics covid-19 schools)

• Rethinking how we interview in Microsoft’s Developer Division

  interesting new approach for interviewing being pioneered at MS' Dev Tools division (via Niall Murphy)

  (tags: via:niallm interviewing hiring microsoft work)

• Rapid, inexpensive home testing for COVID-19 may get us out of this mess before a vaccine

  We should welcome [rapid covid] tests, even if less accurate, and broadly adopt them for widespread community use. Here’s why: They will be cheap. Estimates are that they would cost between 1 and 5 dollars. That’s around the price of a cup of coffee. They can be done on saliva. No brain biopsy required. They can be done frequently. Every day for college students, or healthcare workers, or bus drivers? Every third day for everyone? They will answer the key question — am I contagious to others right now? Finally, and most importantly, they will answer this last question quickly. Results back in less than an hour. Anyone with a positive test can self-isolate, be reported to public health officials, participate in a contact tracing program, and be monitored for symptoms. Maybe pre-emptive antiviral therapy will prevent severe illness. We can choose to do a rapid home test any day we go to work, or to the gym, or to meet friends in a restaurant, or to attend a concert, or to pray in a house of worship, or to visit an elder loved one, or indeed partake in any activity we do in groups that now sadly may sustain the pandemic. And for those worried about lack of sensitivity, two items of reassurance. First, false negatives are less likely when people have the highest amounts of virus in saliva and respiratory secretions — and this is when they’re most contagious to others. If the test is falsely negative due to low titers of virus, it may not matter very much. Second, this modeling study finds that the frequency of testing is the key determinant of how well a broad testing strategy will limit the spread of the virus. It’s even more important than test sensitivity, and evidence that imperfect testing is better than no testing at all.

  (tags: testing covid-19 pcr rt-pcr false-positives false-negatives viruses)

• Understand Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E (802.11 n/ac/ax)

  Some excellent advice regarding the currently available wifi devices out there, 802.11ac, 4x4 MIMO, beamforming, and DFS channels. Top recommendations are the Ubiquiti nanoHD AP and the Netgear R7800

  (tags: wifi 802.11n 802.11ac networking wireless home mimo mu-mimo dfs)

• ????? (revenge bedtime procrastination)

  "a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours" Welcome to my life. (aka parenting)

  (tags: day night life kids parenting procrastination bedtime sleep china)

• Witnessing the unthinkable

  According to this new [analysis of the latest generation of climate models], led by scientists at the CSIRO and [Australian] Bureau of Meteorology, the worst-case scenario could see Australia warm up to 7°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. On average, the results from 20 models show a warming of 4.5°C, with a range of between 2.7°C and 6.2°C. [....] Another profoundly significant result is buried 16 pages deep into the paper. The scientists show that this revision now means that 2°C of global warming is likely to be reached sometime around 2040 based on our current high-emissions trajectory. The implications of this are unimaginable – we may witness planetary collapse far sooner than we once thought.

  This is horrific, if those are solid estimates... those warming levels will mean Australia (and parts of the rest of the world) becomes pretty much uninhabitable.

  (tags: australia future grim climate-change models warming)

• Weak bits floppy disc protection

  Amazing anti-piracy scheme from the BBC Micro era, devised by Simon Hosler of Sherston Software: "Weak" or "Flaky" bits, caused by "a weak signal or non-existent magnetic signal on the disc surface. You might also see the term no-flux area (NFA), which is the same as a non-existent signal. Weak bits are almost always a non-existent signal, as opposed to a weak signal. The flaky nature of weak bits actually comes out of the drive electronics: when there are no clear flux changes, the drive just amplifies harder until it starts seeing and signalling ghosts within the noise." Simon Hosler wrote: "Soft lock (was what we called it) was actually my system, so what I remember… This came about because I lived next door to an electronics geek! So break the write data line of the parallel disk cable. Add a bit of electronics to this line. (thank you Mike) Most of the time this electronics does nothing – lets the data go through as normal. If you turn it on (I think I did this through the serial port) and write to a single sector - it would count the bits going through say 256 – and then stop the next 256 bits going through"

  (tags: bbc-micro microcomputers history copy-protection anti-piracy piracy weak-bits hardware hacks simon-hosler)

• The Center for Land Use Interpretation

  More than 30 uranium disposal cells have been constructed over the last 25 years, primarily to contain radioactive contamination from decommissioned uranium mills and processing sites. They are time capsules, of sorts, designed to take their toxic contents, undisturbed, as far into the future as possible. Uranium disposal cells are unusual constructions because they are built to last far beyond the lives of most engineered structures, to isolate their radioactive contents from the environment for hundreds of years. They are generally low geometric mounds, sometimes as high as a hundred feet tall, covering a few acres or as much as a half mile, and composed of layers of engineered soil and gravels designed to shed rainwater and limit erosion. [...] The contents are not considered high-level radioactive waste, like spent fuel from nuclear reactors. That material has yet to find a permanent home. What these cells contain is radioactive tailings from uranium processing sites, as well as the demolished buildings and apparatus from the mills themselves. The amount of radioactivity in these cells varies, but is generally considered harmful to people if exposure takes place over sustained periods. Most of the radiation comes from uranium 238, which has a half life of 4.47 billion years, nearly the age of the earth itself.

  (tags: nuclear uranium history waste toxic-waste radioactivity u-238 radioactive structures land-use)

• Data Integrity Protection in Presto

  Presto testers run into an interesting network-level data corruption bug in both AWS and Azure. checksum your traffic!

  (tags: presto data-corruption bugs aws azure ec2 checksums reliability)

• Covid Tracker App - HSE.ie

  The Department of Health and the Health Service Executive have published several important documents as part of our ongoing commitment to openness and transparency in the development of the Covid Tracker App for Ireland. The Data Protection Impact Assessment, the source code, the Product Explainer for the Covid Tracker App, and a series of app design and development reports are available on GitHub. 

  (tags: hse covid-19 exposure-notification ireland source-code contact-tracing apps)

• Nicholas A. Christakis on Twitter: "Let’s talk about a COVID19 seroprevalence study, this time well conducted (it seems), which provides a petri-dish type natural experiment. It’s the small Austrian mountain ski village of Ischgl, one of the epic

  '- 1,473 tested (79% of population) in late April, 2020 - 42.4% have SARSCoV2 antibodies (N=625) - 85% asymptomatic (N=94 symptomatic cases)'

  (tags: covid-19 seroprevalence papers austria tyrol sars-cov-2)

• The SEIR simulator behind the YYG COVID-19 model has been open-sourced

  Youyang Gu (@youyanggu): 'Today I am open-sourcing the SEIR simulator behind the YYG / http://covid19-projections.com model. If your system supports Python, you can generate your own simulations in under 5 minutes.'

  (tags: oss yyg models seir epidemiology covid-19 pandemics)

• Strava Global Heatmap

  Turns out this is a great way to find walks and shortcuts you never knew about in your local area...

  (tags: walking hikes strava shortcuts walks local)

• Facial recognition technology is racist

  This may be the first known case of its kind -- a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man's arrest for a crime he didn't commit. Needless to say -- he's black.

  (tags: facial-recognition law justice privacy faces racism technology future bias machine)

• A beginner’s guide to ex-battery chickens

  This is great -- everything you need to know to keep rescue chickens. We have a pair arriving on Saturday :)

  (tags: chickens pets animals home)

• FRAMED Heron by Annie Atkins – Damn Fine Print

  lovely print to commemorate the 100th Liffey Swim by the supertalented Annie Atkins

  (tags: to-get prints liffey dublin heron art annie-atkins want)

• Examples of biased AI/ML usage in healthcare and life sciences

  'I was on an expert panel about "AI and Machine Learning in Healthcare and Life Sciences" back in January, and I made it a point throughout my discussions to keep emphasizing the amount of bias inherent in our current systems, which ends up getting amplified and codified in machine learning systems. Worse yet, it ends up justifying the bias based on the false pretense that the systems built are objective and the data doesn't lie. Afterward, a couple people asked me to put together a list of the examples I cited in my talk.'

  (tags: bias bugs ai ml fail healthcare medicine life-sciences machine-learning racism)

• The Trump 2020 app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power | MIT Technology Review

  Trump’s casino-like campaign app seems to be his own attempt to create a “one-way tool of propaganda.” Its deployment is part of a global trend, piggybacking on years of unresolved privacy and security issues within the app ecosystem. As researchers studying the intersection of technology and propaganda, we understand that political groups tend to lag behind the commercial ad industry. But when they catch up, the consequences to truth and civil discourse can be devastating.  The array of data-gathering tools the Trump and Modi apps use are a legacy of a “freemium” social-media and app landscape that is manipulative, non-transparent, and purposefully addictive, with a mentality of “collect data first and ask question later.” For the last five to 10 years, the pervasiveness of these tools and their use in data scooping has been well documented. Sporadic, state-by-state data regulations have been the only response. In Europe, the GDPR was a big step toward meaningful consent and transparency, but the Official Trump 2020 App does not fall under its jurisdiction. A global perspective is now critical to understanding the implications of data-fueled political manipulation and preparing for the next wave of disinformation. Countries must work together to create effective regulation, and citizens must demand this of them. It took about five years for Modi’s strategies to jump from India to the US, and in the next few years we are on track to see the arrival of strategies used in the dark-money disinformation campaigns of Mexico and Latin America. The Mexican journalist we'd interviewed for our study put it this way: “I think what’s coming all around the world is going to be very chaotic, at least in [the US], I think you’re on the brink of a sort of civil war in one or two years ... You’re going to have a lot of work to do.”

  (tags: trump politics apps surveillance advertising voting modi gdpr privacy data-privacy)

• Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline - Coalition for Critical Technology

  'As per a press release, Springer will publish “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing.” Sign our letter to urge all publishers to refrain from feeding the #TechToPrisonPipeline with physiognomy 2.0.' (via Niall Murphy)

  (tags: via:niallmurphy crime prediction image-processing springer research prison law ai ml)

• Automating safe, hands-off deployments

  Great doc from Clare Liguori about current AWS best practices around deployment. A fair bit of it is similar to what they were doing by the time I left; this "wave" concept is a good new approach though:

  Each team needs to balance the safety of small-scoped deployments with the speed at which we can deliver changes to customers in all Regions. Deploying changes to 24 Regions or 76 Availability Zones through the pipeline one at a time has the lowest risk of causing broad impact, but it could take weeks for the pipeline to deliver a change to customers globally. We have found that grouping deployments into “waves” of increasing size, as seen in the previous sample prod pipeline, helps us achieve a good balance between deployment risk and speed. Each wave’s stage in the pipeline orchestrates deployments to a group of Regions, with changes being promoted from wave to wave. New changes can enter the production phase of the pipeline at any time. After a set of changes is promoted from the first step to the second step in wave 1, the next set of changes from gamma is promoted into the first step of wave 1, so we don’t end up with large bundles of changes waiting to be deployed to production. The first two waves in the pipeline build the most confidence in the change: The first wave deploys to a Region with a low number of requests to limit the possible impact of the first production deployment of the new change. The wave deploys to only one Availability Zone (or cell) at a time within that Region to cautiously deploy the change across the Region. The second wave then deploys to one Availability Zone (or cell) at a time in a Region with a high number of requests where it is highly likely that customers will exercise all the new code paths and where we get good validation of the changes. After we have higher confidence in the safety of the change from the initial pipeline waves’ deployments, we can deploy to more and more Regions in parallel in the same wave. For example, the previous sample prod pipeline deploys to three Regions in wave 3, then to up to 12 Regions in wave 4, then to the remaining Regions in wave 5. The exact number and choice of Regions in each of these waves and the number of waves in a service team’s pipeline depend on the individual service’s usage patterns and scale. The later waves in the pipeline still help us achieve our objective to prevent negative impact to multiple Availability Zones in the same Region. When a wave deploys to multiple Regions in parallel, it follows the same cautious rollout behavior for each Region that was used in the initial waves. Each step in the wave only deploys to a single Availability Zone or cell from each Region in the wave.

  (tags: automation ops devops amazon aws deployment waves az multi-region ci cd)

• FlexBuffers | Hacker News

  Fairly decent discussion on various binary encoding formats, with or without schemata, and with or without zero-copy

  (tags: flatbuffers flexbuffers json encoding data formats file-formats avro protobuf zerocopy sbe schemas)

• _Measurement-Based Evaluation Of Google/Apple Exposure Notification API For Proximity Detection In A Commuter Bus_

  Douglas J. Leith, Stephen Farrell School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland 15th June 2020: 'We report on the results of a measurement study carried out on a commuter bus in Dublin, Ireland using the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) API. Measurements were collected between 60 pairs of handset locations and are publicly available. We find that the attenuation level reported by the GAEN API need not increase with distance between handsets, consistent with there being a complex radio environment inside a bus caused by the metal-rich environment. Changing the people holding a pair of handsets, with the location of the handsets otherwise remaining unchanged, can cause variations of ±10dB in the attenuation level reported by the GAEN API. Applying the rule used by the Swiss Covid-19 contact tracing app to trigger an exposure notification to our bus measurements we find that no exposure notifications would have been triggered despite the fact that all pairs of handsets were within 2m of one another for at least 15 minutes. Applying an alternative threshold-based exposure notification rule can somewhat improve performance to a detection rate of 5% when an exposure duration threshold of 15 minutes is used, increasing to 8% when the exposure duration threshold is reduced to 10 minutes. Stratifying the data by distance between pairs of handsets indicates that there is only a weak dependence of detection rate on distance.'

  (tags: papers bluetooth contact-tracing exposure-notification covid-19 accuracy testing buses radio gaen mobile)

• 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)