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Links for 2020-09-29

Published September 29, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-09-24

Published September 24, 2020

Links for 2020-09-23

Published September 23, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-09-21

Published September 21, 2020

Links for 2020-09-17

Published September 17, 2020

Links for 2020-09-15

Published September 15, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-09-14

Published September 14, 2020

Links for 2020-09-11

Published September 11, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-09-09

Published September 9, 2020

Links for 2020-09-08

Published September 8, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-09-07

Published September 7, 2020

Links for 2020-09-06

Published September 6, 2020

Links for 2020-09-05

Published September 5, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-09-04

Published September 4, 2020

Links for 2020-09-02

Published September 2, 2020

Links for 2020-08-26

Published August 26, 2020

Links for 2020-08-24

Published August 24, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-08-20

Published August 20, 2020

Links for 2020-08-17

Published August 17, 2020

Links for 2020-08-14

Published August 14, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-08-12

Published August 12, 2020

Links for 2020-08-11

Published August 11, 2020

Links for 2020-08-10

Published August 10, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-08-04

Published August 4, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-31

Published July 31, 2020

Links for 2020-07-30

Published July 30, 2020

Links for 2020-07-29

Published July 29, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-28

Published July 28, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-27

Published July 27, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-26

Published July 26, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-25

Published July 25, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-23

Published July 23, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-21

Published July 21, 2020

Links for 2020-07-20

Published July 20, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-17

Published July 17, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-16

Published July 16, 2020

  • ‘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)

Links for 2020-07-15

Published July 15, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-13

Published July 13, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-12

Published July 12, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-07-05

Published July 5, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-06-29

Published June 29, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-06-26

Published June 26, 2020

Links for 2020-06-25

Published June 25, 2020

Links for 2020-06-24

Published June 24, 2020

Links for 2020-06-23

Published June 23, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-06-22

Published June 22, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-06-18

Published June 18, 2020

  • 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)

Links for 2020-06-17

Published June 17, 2020

  • _Opportunistic Paper about COVID-19 using my Favorite Theoretical Approach_

    lol science: Mason Porter on Twitter: "I am here to help."

    _Opportunistic Paper about COVID-19 using my Favorite Theoretical Approach_ Abstract: COVID-19 is a disease that is killing a lot of people. It really sucks. To help save the world (or at least add to my publication list), I examine the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission using my favorite theoretical approach, whether or not there is any justification or relevance for it. I do some curve fitting with previous data, and my theory seems to match the data pretty well (at least for some parameter values). I also find some evidence for universality, which may be interesting from the perspective of fundamental theory. A more practical application of my work is its influence on the signal-to-noise ratio of COVID-19 papers on preprint servers. I am here to help.

    (tags: funny papers preprints science physicists pet-theory latex argh)

  • "Internet folklorist" tracks down the origins of a "heart shaped honeycomb" meme

    A South African beekeeper called Brian Fanner created it by routing a heart-shaped pattern into the lid of a hive:

    'The things that come up are really funny from how bees have "artistic sensibilities" to bees creating that shape "to increase airflow". I've seen companies using it in their websites and so many claiming it came out of their hive somewhere in the world. I used this board, routed in the slots... a rush job I'll admit... waxed in some foundation strips into the slots and screwed inside a deep langstroth hive lid and stuck it on the hive. The bees made do best they could... The lines are slots into which a foundation wax with the comb pattern on it can be placed...secured with melted beeswax. Normally...a sheet...to guide the bees as to where to build. So they just come across this weird pattern of foundation strip and start building onto it. After that they just fill it out best they can. It's a simple manipulation. The bees are Capensis. The honey was most likely early season succulent type plant called a 'vygie'. I called the image 'a sweet heart' dedicated to my wife...per the very first post of it on my Facebook page in 2013.'

    (tags: beekeeping hives honey honeycomb history folklore facebook social-media brian-fanner bees)

  • A Shared File System for Your Lambda Functions

    AWS Lambda can now attach an EFS NFS filesystem. This is pretty cool tbh

    (tags: aws serverless lambda storage efs nfs ops)

Links for 2020-06-16

Published June 16, 2020

  • Umarell

    I love this:

    Umarell (Italian pronunciation: [uma?r?l?]; modern revisitation of the Bolognese dialect word umarèl [uma?r??l]) is a term popular in Bologna referring specifically to men of retirement age who pass the time watching construction sites, especially roadworks – stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice.[1]
    (via Mltshp)

    (tags: via:mltshp umarell building construction building-sites work spectators old funny words italian bologna)

Links for 2020-06-13

Published June 13, 2020

  • The hidden patterns behind the Covid-19 map of Dublin

    Excellent article analyzing COVID-19 patterns here:

    The four new classes defined by Robert Reich might also apply to Ireland. The results of the analysis of Dublin infection cases from the HSE map which show the so-called Remotes are definitely present in the Irish society as the economic wealth is clearly related to chances of being infected. Recently published information shows that 1030 of Covid-19 deaths had happened inside of the nursing homes and other facilities caring for older. This represents 63% of total deaths from Covid-19 in Ireland and suggests that the so-called Forgotten class has suffered the most from the mismanaged public health policy which disregarded their specific life situation. The exact structure and divisions between the new classes of the Irish society in the new Covid-19 world can only be known with the extensive research and dissemination of data related to Covid-19 infections and deaths. It is crucial to abandon the current practices of omitting the data. We must apply the principles developed by John Snow in the 19th century which aim to collect and disseminate as much data as possible. This is the only way we will be able to develop the public health policy which will defeat the virus without scarifying the wellbeing of those who lack the privilege of having high economic and social status.

    (tags: covid-19 mapping society ireland dublin class)

  • Interpreting Covid-19 Test Results: A Bayesian Approach

    This is very clever -- it hadn't occurred to me at all, but of course it makes sense. tl;dr: prevalence, the prevailing rate of infection in the community, is a key factor in Covid-19 testing.

    a brief tutorial on Covid-19 testing, with an emphasis on a Bayesian approach. After presenting the basics, we’ll walk through four confusing Covid-19 testing scenarios, just to give you a feel for the kinds of pickles we often find ourselves in.

    (tags: prevalence covid-19 bayes bayesian statistics testing)

Links for 2020-06-09

Published June 9, 2020

  • How We Solved the Worst Minigame in Zelda's History

    a lovely bit of RNG hacking in this YouTube speedrun vid

    (tags: videos youtube rng prng hacks cool via:reddit)

  • The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee

    Kim Stanley Robinson on a Jobs Guarantee:

    It would mean that governments would set a higher minimum wage than ever before, and if that minimum were a true living wage, private enterprise would have to match it to attract workers. And then, suddenly, everyone would be both employed and making a decent living. Private enterprises would therefore have more prosperous customers, and all would then rise in a virtuous cycle. Given the immense stresses that climate change is sure to bring, finding useful work for people would not be a problem. There will be a lot to do. Recall that 5% unemployment is often said to be the “natural” level, such that markets get nervous when the jobless rate goes lower than that. Unemployment at 5% is said to create “wage pressure,” which it definitely does, because millions of people are thereby living in fear and will take any job they can get, even ones that don’t pay enough for a secure life. The phrase “wage pressure” is yet another indication of how markets exert power to keep power. In this context, a Job Guarantee would erase wage pressure (meaning fear and misery), and the less fearful and more productive populace that resulted might thrive in a feeling of security.

    (tags: jobs work unemployment economics economy qe future ksr scifi climate-change)

Links for 2020-06-08

Published June 8, 2020

Links for 2020-06-06

Published June 6, 2020

  • No, coronavirus apps don’t need 60% adoption to be effective | MIT Technology Review

    But even though the researchers know that lower levels of adoption will be useful, they aren’t entirely sure what different ranges will actually mean. Still, every successful notification means a life potentially saved. Fraser says his team had assumed that lower levels of usage might have very small benefits—but that, in fact, simulations show the upsides are significantly higher than they thought. “The expectation going in was that app usage wouldn’t be very effective at low levels,” he says. “If you have 10% of people using the app, then the chance of contact between two people being detected is 10% of 10%, which is 1%—a tiny fraction. What we found in the simulation was that that actually isn’t the case. We’ve been working to understand why we actually see benefits of usage accruing.”

    (tags: contact-tracing apps exposure-notification covid-19 papers)

Links for 2020-06-03

Published June 3, 2020

  • The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

    The Immuni exposure notification app, based on the Google/Apple protocol, is now OSS and up on Github. Sounds like HN are generally positive about its implementation

    (tags: immuni italy covid-19 exposure-notification contact-tracing apps android ios)

  • We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden's Covid-19 strategy

    Annike Linde, [Anders] Tegnell’s predecessor as chief epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, said last week that she had initially backed the country’s strategy, but had begun to reassess her view as the virus swept through the elderly population. “There was no strategy at all for the elderly, I now understand,” Linde told the Swedish state broadcaster. “I do not understand how they can stand and say the level of preparedness was good, when in fact it was lousy.”

    (tags: sweden covid-19 lockdowns anders-tegnell pandemics herd-immunity)

  • Japan's approach to combat COVID-19 [pdf]

    Very interesting and detailed presentation, particularly the info about how they perform retrospective contact tracing to narrow down the sources of community transmission and monitor other contacts, who may be asymptomatic but still infectious.

    (tags: covid-19 japan pandemics contact-tracing clusters infection)

  • We're All Living In The Cool Zone Now - VICE

    The Cool Zone is usually defined by people on Twitter as a period in history that's super cool to read about, but much less cool to live through. This definition is usually attributed to Matt Christman from the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Looking back on what parts of history I like to read about, it makes sense. Reading about the long, protracted war in Vietnam is fascinating, for instance, but I do not wish to live through any part of the Vietnam War. Nor do I wish to live in Vichy France, or be part of the original Black Panthers movement, or to wage a revolution against the King of France, or be tossed in jail for a lunch counter sit-in like my father was in Selma. I counted myself lucky to be able to read about resistance leaders who took stands without being forced to make such a stand myself. Except, well, now I am, as I march in the streets with thousands of others all across New York City and the country.

    (tags: cool-zone history change twitter chapo-trap-house)

Links for 2020-06-02

Published June 2, 2020

  • OPINION: Coronavirus Response Is Haunted By Colonialism

    There was public knowledge of a viral respiratory epidemic threat from China in January, yet serious nationwide public health responses in the U.S. and U.K. did not start until March 2020. Even once it became clear that wealthy countries were at risk, there was a widespread reluctance to learn from China and from other Asian countries. The American reaction focused instead on blaming China – consider President Trump's use of the term "Chinese virus." China was further criticized for using draconian measures when millions of people in Wuhan were put under lockdown – even though the countries of the West that denigrated such tactics might today be better off if they had acted similarly. Indeed, recent data suggests that the majority of cases in the United States came from New York City. Restricting travel out of the city, as was done in Wuhan, might have meant far fewer cases in the U.S.

    (tags: colonialism diseases covid-19 history neocolonialism china usa uk asia)

  • CA Root expired on 30 May 2020 | Hacker News

    A root CA cert from Certigo expired over the weekend and lots and lots of shit broke. SSL PKI is awful.

    (tags: ca certificates ssl tls pki pain oncall fail ops security)

  • Will there be a second Covid wave?

    in science, you hold all your variables constant except one: keep the lid on your styrofoam cup and your china cup. That’s true, and if we were doing pure science — if we only cared about finding out what lockdown measures worked and which didn’t — then it would be simple: introduce measures one at a time, wait and see, do it slowly.  But we’re not doing pure science. We’re also trying to make a country that works for its citizens, in conditions that change daily. “We’re trying to build a plane as we fly it,” my US epidemiologist told me. The most important thing, according to Javid, will be “nimbleness; being able to change policy in the light of new evidence”. If it turns out opening schools was wrong, then close them again. And we in the media need to be wary of shouting about mistakes and U-turns and instead say: when the facts change, you change your mind.

    (tags: science epidemiology covid-19 second-wave lockdown medicine u-turns)

  • Origami Maze Puzzle Font

    'any orthogonal maze, with vertical walls protruding equal heights from a rectangular floor, can be folded efficiently from a rectangle of paper just a small factor larger than the floor. The design algorithm has been implemented as a freely available web application you can design a maze or generate one randomly, and the application produces a crease pattern, which you can print and fold into your design'

    (tags: origami fonts text puzzles mazes)

  • Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback

    New processor behaviour means everything we know about performance optimization is wrong again:

    We’ve seen how crucial it is to understand data dependencies in order to optimize code. Especially hidden memory dependencies between load and stores can greatly influence performance of work loops. Understanding the data dependency graph of code is often where the real performance gains lie, yet very little attention is given to it in the blogosphere. I’ve read many articles about the impact of branch mispredictions, importance of data locality and caches, but much less about data dependencies. I bet that a question like “why are linked lists slow?” is answered by many in terms of locality, caches or unpredictable random memory access. At least I’ve heard those reasons often, even Stroustrup says as much. Those reasons can play a part, but it’s not the main reason. Fundamentally iterating a linked list has a load-to-use on the critical path, making it 5 times slower than iterating a flat array. Furthermore accessing flat arrays allow loop unrolling which can further improve ILP.

    (tags: data-dependencies sorting algorithms performance optimization coding)

Links for 2020-05-29

Published May 29, 2020

Links for 2020-05-27

Published May 27, 2020

Links for 2020-05-22

Published May 22, 2020

  • Coronavirus hijacks cells in unique ways that suggest how to treat it - STAT

    Recent studies show that in seizing control of genes in the human cells it invades, the virus changes how segments of DNA are read, doing so in a way that might explain why the elderly are more likely to die of Covid-19 and why antiviral drugs might not only save sick patients’ lives but also prevent severe disease if taken before infection. “It’s something I have never seen in my 20 years of” studying viruses, said virologist Benjamin tenOever of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, referring to how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, hijacks cells’ genomes.

    (tags: coronavirus covid-19 sars-cov-2 genes immunology interferons antibodies)

Links for 2020-05-21

Published May 21, 2020

  • Patent case against GNOME resolved

    Great result for open source at large, too!

    Today, on the 20th of May 2020, the GNOME Foundation, Rothschild Patent Imaging, and Leigh M. Rothschild are pleased to announce that the patent dispute between Rothschild Patent Imaging and GNOME has been settled. In this walk-away settlement, GNOME receives a release and covenant not to be sued for any patent held by Rothschild Patent Imaging. Further, both Rothschild Patent Imaging and Leigh Rothschild are granting a release and covenant to any software that is released under an existing Open Source Initiative approved license (and subsequent versions thereof), including for the entire Rothschild portfolio of patents, to the extent such software forms a material part of the infringement allegation.

    (tags: patents software swpats gnome open-source via:mjg)

Links for 2020-05-20

Published May 20, 2020

Links for 2020-05-19

Published May 19, 2020

Links for 2020-05-18

Published May 18, 2020

  • ECDC COVID-19 Contact Tracing Guidelines

    Current guidelines for contact tracing and infection control of COVID-19 in the EU. Good data, with sources!, on what's recommended here (although of course each country can make their own guidelines).

    (tags: covid-19 pandemics contact-tracing eu medicine)

  • An open letter to software engineers criticizing Neil Ferguson's epidemics simulation code

    the main message of this letter is something different: it’s about your role in this story. That’s of course a collective you, not you the individual reading this letter. It’s you, the software engineering community, that is responsible for tools like C++ that look as if they were designed for shooting yourself in the foot. It’s also you, the software engineering community, that has made no effort to warn the non-expert public of the dangers of these tools. Sure, you have been discussing these dangers internally, even a lot. But to outsiders, such as computational scientists looking for implementation tools for their models, these discussions are hard to find and hard to understand. There are lots of tutorials teaching C++ to novices, but I have yet to see a single one that starts with a clear warning about the dangers. You know, the kind of warning that every instruction manual for a microwave oven starts with: don’t use this to dry your dog after a bath. A clear message saying “Unless you are willing to train for many years to become a software engineer yourself, this tool is not for you.”

    (tags: software coding engineering science teaching c++)

  • The 'lockdown sceptics' want a culture war, with experts as the enemy | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian

    in the comment sections of some of the rightwing press, a new, virulent strain of Covid-19 scepticism has emerged that is the precise opposite of journalism. Rather than holding power to account, it distorts and bends reality to serve elite interests – and to warp public debate. In the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and other outlets, Britain’s contemporary “lockdown sceptics” have dedicated themselves to a singular cause: proving that the UK response to coronavirus has been a massive, hysterical overreaction. “Lift the lockdown” is their cogito ergo sum; Sweden their promised land.

    (tags: lockdown uk politics brexit experts daily-telegraph spectator right-wing covid-19 sceptics libertarians contrarians culture-war)

  • MyDIY

    Dublin online supplier of DIY equipment and parts, apparently decent enough. Free shipping for orders over 50 Euro

    (tags: diy building construction home dublin ireland)

Links for 2020-05-14

Published May 14, 2020

Links for 2020-05-13

Published May 13, 2020

  • An evidence summary of Paediatric COVID-19 literature

    'This post is a rapid literature review of pertinent paediatric literature regarding COVID-19 disease. We are proud to have joined forces with the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health to provide systematic search, and selected reviews of all the COVID-19 literature relevant to children and young people. Here we present the top 10 papers from each category (Paediatric clinical cases, Epidemiology and transmission, and Neonates). At the top is an Executive summary followed by all New and noteworthy studies.'

    (tags: covid-19 epidemiology diseases transmission school kids children)

Links for 2020-05-11

Published May 11, 2020

  • The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them

    Informative blog post summarising the dangers of enclosed spaces with a high density of people and poor air circulation in spreading COVID-19:

    Ignoring the terrible outbreaks in nursing homes, we find that the biggest outbreaks are in prisons, religious ceremonies, and workplaces, such a meat packing facilities and call centers. Any environment that is enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble. [....] Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an open floorplan office, you really need critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you need to assess the risk. If I am outside, and I walk past someone, remember it is “dose and time” needed for infection. You would have to be in their airstream for 5+ minutes for a chance of infection. While joggers may be releasing more virus due to deep breathing, remember the exposure time is also less due to their speed.

    (tags: covid-19 health viruses infection epidemiology diseases work)

  • ‘Finally, a virus got me.’ Scientist who fought Ebola and HIV reflects on facing death from COVID-19

    Dr. Peter Piot reflects on his bout with COVID-19:

    'Many people think COVID-19 kills 1% of patients, and the rest get away with some flulike symptoms. But the story gets more complicated. Many people will be left with chronic kidney and heart problems. Even their neural system is disrupted. There will be hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, possibly more, who will need treatments such as renal dialysis for the rest of their lives.'

    (tags: covid-19 cytokine-storms immunology health diseases peter-piot)

Links for 2020-05-08

Published May 8, 2020

  • Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being | New Scientist

    The world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment. Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached. The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise.

    (tags: finland ubi dole unemployment society money life)

Links for 2020-05-07

Published May 7, 2020

Links for 2020-05-06

Published May 6, 2020

  • COVID-19 immunity passports and vaccination certificates: scientific, equitable, and legal challenges - The Lancet

    Caution is warranted about how population level serology studies and individual tests are used. It is not yet established whether the presence of detectable antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to further infection in humans and, if so, what amount of antibody is needed for protection or how long any such immunity lasts.3 Data from sufficiently representative serological studies will be important for understanding the proportion of a population that has been infected with SARS-CoV-2. These data might inform decisions to ease physical distancing restrictions at the community level, provided that they are used in combination with other public health approaches.5 The use of seroprevalence data to inform policy making will depend on the accuracy and reliability of tests, particularly the number of false-positive and false-negative results, and requires further validation.6 At the individual level, this reliability could have public health ramifications: a false-positive result might lead to an individual changing their behaviour despite still being susceptible to infection, potentially becoming infected, and unknowingly transmitting the virus to others. Individual-targeted policies predicated on antibody testing, such as immunity passports, are not only impractical given these current gaps in knowledge and technical limitations, but also pose considerable equitable and legal concerns, even if such limitations are rectified.

    (tags: immunity covid-19 future society vaccination)

Links for 2020-05-05

Published May 5, 2020

  • Face Masks for the General Public | Royal Society DELVE Initiative

    Face masks could offer an important tool for contributing to the management of community transmission of Covid19 within the general population. Evidence supporting their potential effectiveness comes from analysis of: (1) the incidence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission; (2) the role of respiratory droplets in transmission, which can travel as far as 1-2 meters; and (3) studies of the use of homemade and surgical masks to reduce droplet spread. Our analysis suggests that their use could reduce onward transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic wearers if widely used in situations where physical distancing is not possible or predictable, contrasting to the standard use of masks for the protection of wearers. If correctly used on this basis, face masks, including homemade cloth masks, can contribute to reducing viral transmission.

    (tags: facemasks masks health covid-19 uk infection)

  • Tim Bray: Bye, Amazon

    This takes a lot of guts, I'm impressed:

    May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

    (tags: amazon aws ethics tim-bray covid-19 pandemics health workers-rights taking-a-stand)

  • 7 Upper Back Stretches For Pain Relief - YouTube

    recommendation from Damien Mulley -- useful with my current shit homeworking setup

    (tags: wfh exercises back health stretches posture ergonomics via:mulley)

Links for 2020-05-03

Published May 3, 2020

  • The Coronavirus and Our Future

    Top notch KSR:

    We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know. We don’t want to change our habits. This knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling. Now comes this disease that can kill anyone on the planet. It’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. Instantly, we’ve changed. As a society, we’re watching the statistics, following the recommendations, listening to the scientists. Do we believe in science? Go outside and you’ll see the proof that we do everywhere you look. We’re learning to trust our science as a society. That’s another part of the new structure of feeling.

    (tags: covid-19 ksr kim-stanley-robinson future sf feeling society pandemics climate-change)

Links for 2020-04-29

Published April 29, 2020

  • Kim Stanley Robinson proposing "carbon quantitative easing"

    I love this idea. “It would be complicated and messy, sure, but not as complicated and messy as a mass extinction event”

    (tags: finance carbon climate-change kim-stanley-robinson economics quantative-easing future green-recovery)

  • Joint Statement regarding the NHSX contact tracing app

    From over 170 UK infosec and privacy scientists and researchers --

    It has been reported that NHSX is discussing an approach which records centrally the de-anonymised ID of someone who is infected and also the IDs of all those with whom the infected person has been in contact. This facility would enable (via mission creep) a form of surveillance. Echoing the letter signed by 300 international leading researchers, we note that it is vital that, when we come out of the current crisis, we have not created a tool that enables data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance. Thus, solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about individuals must be fully justified. Such invasive information can include the “social graph” of who someone has physically met over a period of time. With access to the social graph, a bad actor (state, private sector, or hacker) could spy on citizens' real-world activities. We are particularly unnerved by a declaration that such a social graph is indeed aimed for by NHSX. We understand that the current proposed design is intended to meet the requirements set out by the public health teams, but we have seen conflicting advice from different groups about how much data the public health teams need. We hold that the usual data protection principles should apply: collect the minimum data necessary to achieve the objective of the application. We hold it is vital that if you are to build the necessary trust in the application the level of data being collected is justified publicly by the public health teams demonstrating why this is truly necessary rather than simply the easiest way, or a “nice to have”, given the dangers involved and invasive nature of the technology.

    (tags: nhs nhsx privacy data-privacy security contact-tracing covid-19 surveillance)

  • Revealed: the inside story of the UK's Covid-19 crisis

    Wow, the knives are out inside the UK government. Massive leaks from the SAGE and other committees, to the Guardian, as the scientists involve find themselves being blamed for the UK's COVID-19 disaster

    (tags: uk government covid-19 omnishambles leaks guardian)

  • For future use: "Fancy dataviz" vs "best chart for the data"

    great pic from Rodolfo Almeida on Twitter

    (tags: twitter funny comic dataviz graphs visualisation)

Links for 2020-04-28

Published April 28, 2020

  • Coronavirus and Brexit: the connections and their consequences

    Have to agree with this...

    What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way [the UK] are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in, and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing. They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.

    (tags: uk-politics uk politics brexit covid-19 government populism crisis-management)

  • Google’s medical AI was super accurate in a lab. Real life was a different story. | MIT Technology Review

    When it worked well, the AI did speed things up. But it sometimes failed to give a result at all. Like most image recognition systems, the deep-learning model had been trained on high-quality scans; to ensure accuracy, it was designed to reject images that fell below a certain threshold of quality. With nurses scanning dozens of patients an hour and often taking the photos in poor lighting conditions, more than a fifth of the images were rejected. Patients whose images were kicked out of the system were told they would have to visit a specialist at another clinic on another day. If they found it hard to take time off work or did not have a car, this was obviously inconvenient. Nurses felt frustrated, especially when they believed the rejected scans showed no signs of disease and the follow-up appointments were unnecessary. They sometimes wasted time trying to retake or edit an image that the AI had rejected. Because the system had to upload images to the cloud for processing, poor internet connections in several clinics also caused delays. “Patients like the instant results, but the internet is slow and patients then complain,” said one nurse. “They’ve been waiting here since 6 a.m., and for the first two hours we could only screen 10 patients.” The Google Health team is now working with local medical staff to design new workflows. For example, nurses could be trained to use their own judgment in borderline cases. The model itself could also be tweaked to handle imperfect images better. 

    (tags: google health medicine ai automation software internet developing-world real-world images scanning)

Links for 2020-04-27

Published April 27, 2020

Links for 2020-04-24

Published April 24, 2020

  • Cloud Jewels: Estimating kWh in the Cloud - Code as Craft

    Good stuff from Etsy, who are attempting to reduce their non-renewable energy usage:

    Cloud providers generally do not disclose to customers how much energy their services consume. To make up for this lack of data, we created a set of conversion factors called Cloud Jewels to help us roughly convert our cloud usage information (like Google Cloud usage data) into approximate energy used. We are publishing this research to begin a conversation and a collaboration that we hope you’ll join, especially if you share our concerns about climate change.

    (tags: energy green climate-change power etsy kwh measurement estimation)

Links for 2020-04-22

Published April 22, 2020

Links for 2020-04-21

Published April 21, 2020

Links for 2020-04-20

Published April 20, 2020

Links for 2020-04-17

Published April 17, 2020

  • No matter how you crunch the numbers, this pandemic is only just getting started

    Scary op-ed from professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard, William Hanage in The Guardian, on herd immunity:

    There have been more than 93,000 cases of Covid-19 identified in the UK. Let’s round that up and say it is 100,000. So if the reports from the BMJ editorial are accurate, the actual number would be that multiplied by five, in which case there would have already been half a million infections in the UK. If this really is the peak and we see as many cases on the way down as on the way up, that would total 1 million infections from the initial surge in the UK – hopefully all of those people would then be immune. That would leave about 65 million people in the UK still without immunity. I am going to be unusually optimistic here, and assume that everyone who has Covid-19 becomes fully immune (not a given), and that the virus is towards the less transmissible end of the range of estimates currently available. If this is the case, you would need half your population to have been infected to achieve a level of population immunity that would stop the epidemic continuing to grow and overwhelming healthcare systems.

    (tags: guardian health uk covid-19 pandemics herd-immunity future)

  • Irish COVID-19 model showing an R0 below 1.0

    This is fantastic news -- our lockdown is working! 'The April 16 2020 modelling data on COVID-19 in Ireland from the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, part of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).'

    (tags: lockdown covid-19 r0 pandemics nphet ireland)

  • PEPP-PT closes down the decentralised protocol option

    The EU-wide PEPP-PT COVID-19 contact tracing project is quietly switching to a protocol built around a centralised database; better to stick with the still-decentralised, fully open source DP3T protocol, which has published its open source apps and SDKs: https://twitter.com/mikarv/status/1251044870367690753

    (tags: pepp-pt dp3t protocols ios android contact-tracing covid-19 pandemics)

  • Sarah Owens' Table Loaf Recipe

    recommended by Colette

    (tags: bread baking food recipes sourdough)

Links for 2020-04-16

Published April 16, 2020

Links for 2020-04-15

Published April 15, 2020

  • EDPB on COVID-19 contact tracing apps

    European Data Protection Board: Letter concerning the European Commission's draft Guidance on apps supporting the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic

    (tags: edpb data-privacy privacy covid-19 eu ec contact-tracing)

  • The other kind of contact tracing tools

    Farzad Mostashari on Twitter: "Last week I posted about automated digital contact tracing apps- lots of discussion since. now lemme talk about the other kind of contact tracing app, tools that increase the efficiency & ease of contact tracing: enhanced directories, multichannel messaging applications, real-time translation services, symptom reporting & isolation monitoring"

    (tags: twitter threads contact-tracing apps tools covid-19)

  • 8051Enthusiast/regex2fat

    Turn your favourite regex into FAT32. 'Haha OS-driven regex engine go brrrrr'

    (tags: insane stupid funny fat32 drivers filesystems regexps regex)

  • We scientists said lock down. But UK politicians refused to listen | Helen Ward | Opinion | The Guardian

    on 12 March, the government alarmed many public health experts by abruptly abandoning containment and announcing that community case-finding and contact-tracing would stop. The aim was no longer to stop people getting it, but to slow it down while protecting the vulnerable. The evidence underpinning the government’s decision appears in a report from 9 March summarising the potential impact of behavioural and social interventions. The report did not consider the impact of case-finding and contact-tracing, but it did suggest that the biggest impact on cases and deaths would come from social distancing and the protection of vulnerable groups. And yet social distancing was not recommended then. That day, 12 March, after hearing with disbelief the government announcement that didn’t include widespread social distancing, I recommended to my team at Imperial that they should work from home for the foreseeable future. Indeed, I have not been to my office since. Neither the advice nor the science were followed that week. My colleagues, led by Neil Ferguson, published a report on 16 March estimating that without strong suppression, 250,000 people could die in the UK. The government responded that day with a recommendation for social distancing, avoiding pubs and working from home if possible. But there was still no enforcement, and it was left up to individuals and employers to decide what to do. Many people were willing but unable to comply as we showed in a report on 20 March. It was only on 23 March that a more stringent lockdown and economic support was announced. Between 12 and 23 March, tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people will have been infected. Boris Johnson himself may well have been infected that week, and his stay in the intensive care unit may have been avoided if the government had shifted to remote working on 12 March. The current best estimate is that around 1% of those infected will die.

    (tags: nhs health uk politics covid-19 pandemics predictions)

  • Nature paper on COVID-19 and RT-PCR detection rates over time

    'measures to contain viral spread should aim at droplet-, rather than fomite-based transmission'; ' the majority of patients in the present study seemed to be already beyond their shedding peak [first 5 days] in upper respiratory tract samples when first tested, while shedding of infectious virus in sputum continued through the first week of symptoms. Together, these findings suggest a more efficient transmission of SARS-CoV-2 than SARS-CoV through active pharyngeal viral shedding at a time when symptoms are still mild and typical of upper respiratory tract infection.' However this study did not include any severe cases.

    (tags: pcr covid-19 testing sars-cov-2 infection diseases)

Links for 2020-04-14

Published April 14, 2020

  • DP^3T

    Marcel Salathe says: 'Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (#DP3T): SDK and calibration app for iOS and Android, and a backend implementation, are now open source. Actual app with nice UI will follow soon'

    (tags: open-source dp3t privacy data-privacy covid-19 contact-tracing)

  • Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period | Science

    We used estimates of seasonality, immunity, and cross-immunity for betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 from time series data from the USA to inform a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We projected that recurrent wintertime outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave. Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded. To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. Additional interventions, including expanded critical care capacity and an effective therapeutic, would improve the success of intermittent distancing and hasten the acquisition of herd immunity. Longitudinal serological studies are urgently needed to determine the extent and duration of immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024.

    (tags: covid-19 forecasting papers science medicine pandemics sars-cov-2 herd-immunity epidemiology)

Links for 2020-04-13

Published April 13, 2020

Links for 2020-04-10

Published April 10, 2020

  • Mutant enzyme could vastly improve recycling of plastic bottles

    'A huge step forward' for PET recycling:

    They isolated a mutant enzyme that’s 10,000 times more efficient at PET bond breaking than the native LLC. It also works without breaking down at 72°C, close to the temperature at which PET becomes molten. In a small reactor designed to test the enzyme, the team found that it could break down 90% of 200 grams of PET in 10 hours. The researchers then used the terephthalate and ethylene glycol building blocks generated by the enzyme to generate new PET and produce plastic bottles that were just as strong as those made from conventional plastics, they report today in Nature.
    (via Boing Boing)

    (tags: pet plastic recycling enzymes via:boingboing)

Links for 2020-04-09

Published April 9, 2020

Links for 2020-04-08

Published April 8, 2020

Links for 2020-04-07

Published April 7, 2020

  • How long SARS-CoV-2 can live on surfaces, and how to disinfect

    Summary of the latest data on best practices for disinfecting, from a Lancet paper: the virus lasts longest — up to seven days — on stainless steel, plastic, and surgical masks.

    (tags: covid-19 disinfecting cleaning sars-cov-2 facemasks health)

  • WHO endorses voluntary patent pool to develop Covid-19 products

    The World Health Organization director-general has endorsed the idea of creating a voluntary pool to collect patent rights, regulatory test data, and other information that could be shared for developing drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics. The concept was proposed two weeks ago by Costa Rican government officials amid mounting concerns that some Covid-19 medical products may not be accessible for poorer populations. By establishing a voluntary mechanism under the auspices of the WHO, the goal is to establish a pathway that will attract numerous governments, as well as industry, universities and nonprofit organizations. “I support this proposal, and we are working with Costa Rica to finalize the details,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement on Monday. "Poorer countries and fragile economies stand to face the biggest shock from this pandemic, and leaving anyone unprotected will only prolong the health crisis and harm economies more. I call on all countries, companies and research institutions to support open data, open science, and open collaboration so that all people can enjoy the benefits of science and research.”

    (tags: patents covid-19 who ip medicine pharma science research open-data open-science collaboration)

  • Private Contact Tracing Protocols Compared: DP-3T and CEN

    it’s critically important to prevent the creation of new surveillance infrastructure [...] But contact tracing will be a critical part of COVID-19 recovery, particularly in the period after the surge of cases, but before widespread immunity prevents transmission. So it’s been incredibly exciting to see how many people have been working on this problem in a spirit of radical collaboration. Some of these projects are mentioned in our previous post on design tradeoffs in contact tracing systems. At the Zcash Foundation, we’ve been collaborating with existing efforts on the CEN Protocol, originally started as a joint effort between two projects, CoEpi and Covid-Watch. And earlier this week, a group of European academics from eight universities announced a new effort called DP-3T. These protocols are very similar, and it would be great if they could both evolve towards a common standard. To support that goal, this post will compare and contrast the current designs of the DP-3T and CEN protocols.

    (tags: contact-tracing protocols crypto covid-19 dp-3t cen security privacy)

  • The 1700s Plague Cure That Inspired an Uncannily Contemporary Cocktail

    Sounds like Green Chartreuse is the closest modern equivalent to Plague Water

    (tags: chartreuse cocktails booze plague-waters pandemics epidemics history)

  • Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm

    A behind-the-curtain story on the UK's disastrous COVID-19 response.

    Until March 12, the risk level, set by the government’s top medical advisers on the recommendation of the scientists, remained at “moderate,” suggesting only the possibility of a wider outbreak. “You know, there’s a small little cadre of people in the middle, who absolutely did realise what was going on, and likely to happen,” said John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling and a key adviser to the government, known for his work on tracking Ebola. Edmunds was among those who did call on the government to elevate the warning level earlier. [....] “I do think there [was] a bit of a worry in terms you don’t want to unnecessarily panic people.” [...] Minutes and interviews show Britain was following closely a well-laid plan to fight a flu pandemic - not this deadlier disease.
    March 12!! What a staggering screwup.

    (tags: covid-19 coronavirus fail uk disasters pandemics diseases history)

Links for 2020-04-06

Published April 6, 2020

  • The MakerMask

    a source for science-based mask designs for community makers to combat the spread of COVID-19. It is important that we use the best information possible to help protect ourselves and our communities. The MakerMask designs use latex-free, water-resistant materials that are likely to provide improved protection over cotton and elastic.  We need makers/sewists/helpers of all abilities to begin ramping up production to meet community needs.

    (tags: masks facemasks covid-19 sewing)

  • "A recent Nature paper reveal a remarkable trick SARS-Cov-2 learned that makes it nastier than the first SARS"

    an educational twitter thread by virologist @PeterKolchinsky

    (tags: viruses sars covid-19 sars-cov-2 medicine science)

  • CCC's 10 requirements for the evaluation of "Contact Tracing" apps

    "Corona apps" are on everyone's lips as a way to contain the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. CCC publishes 10 requirements for their evaluation from a technical and societal perspective. Currently, technically supported "contact tracing" is being considered as means to counteract the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in a more targeted manner. The general motivation is to allow greater freedom of movement for the broad spectrum of society by allowing quick tracing and interruption of infection chains. Contacts of infected persons should be alerted more quickly and thus be able to quarantine themselves more quickly. This, in turn, should prevent further infections. A "corona app" could therefore protect neither ourselves nor our contacts: It would be designed to break chains of infection by protecting the contacts of our contacts.

    (tags: covid-19 pandemics contact-tracing ccc privacy data-privacy)