Category: Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A Shared File System for Your Lambda Functions

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

  (tags: aws serverless lambda storage efs nfs ops)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• Heat map of confirmed COVID-19 cases by county in Ireland

  'Heat map of confirmed cases by county in Ireland, ordered by when each county peaked.' -- this is nice dataviz. I like the way the outbreaks after the main peak are clearly visible

  (tags: dataviz heatmaps ireland covid-19 health)

• Spot Cost

  'EC2 Spot Instances comparison. Find the cheapest Region, availability zone, interruption rate or compare the specs'

  (tags: spot-instances ec2 aws spots ops)

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

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

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

• Refilling a Soda Stream canister from a 5L CO2 tank

  turns out it's relatively simple to refill the small "60L" CO2 tanks used by Soda Stream, Drinkmate and other clones, from a commercial food-grade CO2 tank. decent writeup (with Dublin stockist info) here

  (tags: co2 carbon-dioxide gas refills sodastream drinkmate)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• OPINION: Coronavirus Response Is Haunted By Colonialism

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

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

• CA Root expired on 30 May 2020 | Hacker News

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

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

• Will there be a second Covid wave?

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

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

• 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)

• COVID-19's fatality rate compared to the flu

  Excellent point, dug up by Andrew Flood -- the much-cited figure of the seasonal flu as having an IFR of 0.1% is based on the CFR, not the IFR -- so the fatality rate for people who are sick enough to be treated in hospital. The true IFR of the seasonal flu is more around 0.05%.

  (tags: ifr cfr fatality-rates influenza covid-19 diseases mortality medicine)

• COVID-19 Re dashboard from Swiss Science Task Force

  Excellent data visualisation from this task force, would love to see this in Ireland

  (tags: dataviz time-series covid-19 dashboards graphs switzerland)

• Wayback Machine Downloader

  'Wayback machine online downloader with CMS. Restore a fully functional copy of the site - 200 files for free!' -- recommended by Damien. It can handle sites of 1000s of files, at $.50 per 1000

  (tags: web tools archives history downloading via:damienmulley backups)

• Irish site for second-hand Aeron chairs

  recommended by someone on ITC. still never going to get this kind of chair past the Arts and Design Committee in my house though :)

  (tags: chairs seating ergonomics via:itc aeron hermann-miller office)

• Button it. | Present&Correct

  Whole load of photos of Soviet nuclear power station control panels here. What an aesthetic

  (tags: soviet control nuclear design history power dashboards control-panels buttons lights beeping)

• Testing times: The science of fighting Covid-19

  Good detailed writeup of the process of COVID-19 RT-PCR testing on the Roche platform used at St Vincents University Hospital here in Dublin

  (tags: pcr rt-pcr covid-19 sars-cov-2 testing dna rna medicine svuh dublin ireland)

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

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

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

• Patent case against GNOME resolved

  Great result for open source at large, too!

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

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

• Coronavirus: ccu cgg cgg gca: The 12 letters that changed the world

  Excellent long read on the virology of SARS-NCoV-2

  (tags: virology rna sars-ncov-2 covid-19 diseases)

• "John Snow's Cholera Map" as a face mask

  "A map taken from a report by Dr. John Snow: p. [97]-120 of the "Report on the cholera outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, during the autumn of 1854", presented to the vestry by the Cholera Inquiry Committee, July 1855 Report on the cholera outbreaks in central London in 1832, 1848-9,1851,1852, 1853 and (specifically) 1854. Much reference is made to a public water pump in Broad Street." (via Damien Mulley and Robert Ovington)

  (tags: epidemiology john-snow facemasks covid-19 cholera epidemics history london)

• Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases

  This is great:

  Last year, Stripe announced our Negative Emissions Commitment, pledging at least $1M per year to pay, at any price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure long-term storage. We’ve since built a small team within Stripe to focus on creating a market for carbon removal by being an early customer for promising negative emissions technologies. Today, after a rigorous search and review by a panel of independent scientific experts, we’re excited to announce our first purchases. Our request for projects garnered a wide range of negative emissions technologies which came in two broad categories.

  The funded projects are: Climeworks, Charm Industrial, Project Vesta, and CarbonCure.

  (tags: climate climate-change emissions carbon-sequestration stripe negative-emissions tech)

• COVID-19 data researcher removed as Florida moves to re-open state

  'Rebekah Jones said that her removal was "not voluntary,” that she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.”'

  (tags: florida us-politics covid-19 data-science data dataviz)

• iFixit launches massive repair database for ventilators and other medical devices - The Verge

  Go iFixit.

  “To be very clear: iFixit does not make money on this project. We are providing hosting and curation free of charge, and free of advertising, to the medical community,” Wiens says. “We welcome manufacturers to join us and contribute toward an up-to-date central repository for the biomedical community. We also welcome biomeds around the world to join iFixit’s repair community. No technician is an island, and we hope to facilitate an exchange of knowledge and troubleshooting.”

  (tags: repair medicine ventilators hardware medical biomed)

• 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)

• Variation in False-Negative Rate of Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction–Based SARS-CoV-2 Tests by Time Since Exposure | Annals of Internal Medicine

  Adam Kucharski: 'in the first 3 days after exposure to SARS-CoV-2, there's a high chance of falsely concluding that the person is negative. Suggests very small window in which it's posible to detect infections in the crucial pre-symptomatic period.'

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

• breakglass - GirlGamers

  Break Glass in Case of Emergency - What to Do if You're a Target of Harassment -- excellent advice from /r/GirlGamers:

  If you think you have a dedicated harasser, stalker, a large number of people harassing you, or that you are a target of a harassment campaign (group of people coordinating to harass you in numbers) this guide will help you make sense of what you can do right away, how you can protect yourself, and how to stay sane. There are a LOT of well-researched and highly vetted resources, which can be overwhelming when you are currently a target of harassment; we guide you selectively through these resources so you can have a clear and high level understanding of how to take control.

  (via Nelson)

  (tags: harrassment abuse girlgamers women via:nelson online trolls)

• An evidence summary of Paediatric COVID-19 literature

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

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

• Good twitter thread on how transmission rates are reported by the HSE

  tl;dr: 'Community Transmission’ means that we don’t know who infected the patient. we want to see this number going down in the daily reports from the HSE, to know that our test/trace/isolate system is working and we can reduce the lockdown.

  (tags: transmission infection covid-19 pandemics hse nphet ireland contact-tracing)

• The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  (tags: finland ubi dole unemployment society money life)

• Everybody in the Pool: Researchers Use Algorithms to Tackle the Coronavirus Test Shortage - IEEE Spectrum

  Some clever use of algorithms to optimally aggregate COVID-19 tests to optimise for test shortages: pooled testing seems to be the keyword to search for. See also "multi-pooling" - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.028431v1.full.pdf

  (tags: pooling multipooling pooled-testing testing covid-19 algorithms pandemics)

• Sure, the Velociraptors Are Still On the Loose, But That’s No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park

  And speaking of injuries, I want to take a moment to thank our Jurassic Park EMTs. They’re the real heroes here, am I right? In the process of responding to velociraptor attacks, many of our EMTs get mauled and dismembered by velociraptors themselves. That’s why, as a sign of appreciation, we will be repainting the Jurassic Park ambulance with the words “Hero Mobile” in big bubble letters. We think this is a far more meaningful token of gratitude than the salary increase they requested. I know many of you out there are going to be hesitant to return to Jurassic Park knowing there are still velociraptors roaming the preserve, but rest assured things will return to normal sooner rather than later. The life expectancy of a velociraptor is only 15-20 years, so we’re confident that these attacks will eventually run their course.

  (tags: mcsweeneys funny satire covid-19 trump jurassic-park)

• Global Progress on COVID-19 Serology-Based Testing

  A comprehensive list of current serology-based COVID-19 tests, listing their phase of development, release date (if any), sensitivity and specificity (via This Week In Virology)

  (tags: covid-19 tests serology testing immunity pandemics jhu via:twiv)

• 'What are we doing this for?': Doctors are fed up with conspiracies ravaging ERs

  Whitney Phillips, a assistant professor of communications who studies the spread of disinformation at Syracuse University, said the coronavirus outbreak offers a look at how conspiracy thinking is now, in some ways, more organized. "With conspiracy theories, the reason they're impervious to fact-checking is that they have become a way of being in the world for believers," Phillips said. "It isn't just one narrative that you can debunk. It is a holistic way of being in the world that has been reinforced by all the other bulls--- that these platforms have allowed people to consume for years."

  (tags: conspiracy-theories facebook social-media covid-19 conspiracies stupid twitter)

• NHSX release the source for their COVID-19 tracking apps

  both the iOS and Android versions of the UK's apps. Great to see this openness and transparency; hopefully the HSE's apps, in Ireland, will follow suit

  (tags: nhsx nhs uk covid-19 ble bluetooth tracking contact-tracing ios android apps)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• Future Forests

  mail order heritage fruit trees (via Colette)

  (tags: trees planting garden food apples)

• 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)

• 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)

• WiMood shop

  good source for Ubiquiti gear in the EU (via ITS Slack)

  (tags: via:its ubiquiti unifi wifi wireless shopping networking)

• FOOD IN THE TIME OF CORONA | Seáneen

  'Recipes to stop food waste & extend the life of your fresh produce in the time of crisis via the magic of fermentation, pickling and preservation. New recipes each week' from Seáneen Sullivan of L Mulligan Grocer

  (tags: food mulligans stoneybatter seaneen-sullivan pickling preserving)

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

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

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

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

• Cleanfeed

  'Live audio in high definition with anyone in the world' -- a high-quality audio codec (the Opus codec), in the browser, free. Looks great and recommended by radio peeps on twitter

  (tags: recording audio podcasting radio cleanfeed opus codecs)

• on COVID-19 death rate statistics

  illuminating Twitter thread. tl;dr: most countries are juking the numbers by ignoring COVID deaths in elderly care homes (where a massive death toll is occurring), or by ignoring suspected COVID cases in favour of confirmed post-mortem cases, or by ignoring comorbidity.

  (tags: covid-19 statistics lies-damn-lies death-rates comorbidity diseases europe deaths)

• Will CovidTracker Ireland work?

  Rob Kitchin writes:

  It is essential that the government follow the guidance of the European Data Protection Board that recommends that strong measures are put in place to protect privacy, data minimization is practised, the source code is published and regularly reviewed, there is clear oversight and accountability, and there is purpose limitation that stops control creep. If implemented poorly, the app could have a profound chilling effect on public trust and public health measures that might be counterproductive. As a consequence, the Ada Lovelace Institute, a leading UK centre for artificial intelligence research, is advising governments to be cautious, ethical and transparent in their use of app-based contact tracing. Ireland might do well to heed their advice.

  (tags: data-privacy privacy covid-19 hse apps ireland contact-tracing)

• Pugmatt/BedrockConnect: Join any Minecraft server IP on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PS4

  Nicely done -- this works! By setting the DNS server list in the console to use "104.238.130.180" as the primary DNS, this will intercept lookups for the hardcoded set of Bedrock servers, and redirect them to their own Bedrock-protocol server, which simply offers a more customisable list of servers, potentially including your own.

  (tags: minecraft bedrock hacks interop services xbox ps4 nintendo-switch cross-play)

• DragonetMC/DragonProxy

  'A proxy to allow Minecraft: Bedrock clients to connect to Minecraft: Java Edition servers.' -- this does exactly what it says on the tin; cross-play between the two editions of Minecraft.

  (tags: minecraft cross-play nintendo-switch ps4 xbox gaming bedrock)

• Welcome to the Quarantini

  Felix "Every Cloud" Cohen's lockdown newsletter -- lots of cocktail knowhow

  (tags: cocktails felix-cohen lockdown 2019 booze)

• COVID-19, Conspiracy and Ireland’s Far Right

  Oh, great -- just what we need -- the nazis are coming to sow fear and doubt. Wonderful.

  The COVID19 global pandemic is being used by far right networks to try and pull people into their movements. Several far right groups and actors in Ireland are making explicit attempts to use this crisis for personal and political benefit. The Irish far right are emulating a global far right movement in what the World Health Organisation (WHO) are calling the Covid infodemic Conspiracy theories have always been used to create a radicalising pathway by far right movements globally. We are seeing these narrative tactics being used in Ireland in past few months One Facebook page in Ireland pushing 5G conspiracy theories has had over 73,000 direct interactions with over 1000 posts in the last 4 weeks Far right actors are using the COVID19 pandemic to undermine trust and solidarity in communities by targetting migrant and minority communities and pushing explicit ethno-nationalist/white supremacist narratives.

  (via Andrew Flood)

  (tags: via:andrewflood conspiracies far-right nazis fascism ireland infodemic covid-19)

• the origin story for "Stockholm Syndrome"

  "Stockholm Syndrome" [...] is basically just a "myth invented to discredit women victims of violence by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority" -- this is astonishing

  (tags: police stockholm-syndrome hostages psychology misogyny women history psychiatry)

• good twitter thread from Nicholas A. Christakis on Twitter on COVID-19 post-infection recovery

  'Let’s talk about what happens if you get COVID19 and recover. Are you immune to the disease? How long does the immunity last? And what does that mean for your life and for the public health and economy of our society?'

  (tags: covid-19 coronavirus medicine future immunity diseases)

• COVID-19 contact tracing phishes are already a thing

  ffs.

  (tags: covid-19 contact-tracing phishing via:doctorow argh grim-meathook-future)

• See A Satellite Tonight

  Really nicely done -- pick a satellite, tell it your (Google Maps) address, and it'll show you what the satellite will look like when it next flies overhead

  (tags: starlink satellite cool google gmaps streetview web)

• How the UK’s coronavirus testing regime totally unravelled | WIRED UK

  The irritation being expressed by microbiologists and their colleagues who are critical of the government is not over the quality of labs or people’s willingness to dig in and help. Rather, it is to do with how testing for Covid-19 has been managed, particularly at a national level. As the chances of reaching 100,000 tests per day by the end of April grow ever slimmer, the UK’s sorry predicament is only becoming clearer.

  (tags: covid-19 uk shambles rt-pcr pandemics)

• Muddled thinking punctures plan for British ventilator | Financial Times

  Omnishambles.

  An insider with direct knowledge of the process said that the basic products are now unlikely to be cleared for use in the UK against Covid-19.  “Pretty much all the basic new designs are not going to get through the Covid approval process. The government spin is the ‘clinical need’ changed, but the reality is that it was always misguided to think you could develop and create these ventilators,” the person said. “Starting the process in this way was unwise. It has gradually become more sensible.”

  (tags: covid-19 uk fail bureaucracy tories ventilators medicine)

• PEPP-PT Data Protection Architecture - Security and privacy analysis

  Analysis of the PEPP-PT contact tracing project architecture by the DP-3T project

  (tags: architecture pepp-pt security data-privacy contact-tracing covid-19)

• Study sees need for some social distancing into 2022 to curb coronavirus

  'A modeling study on the new coronavirus warns that intermittent periods of social distancing may need to persist into 2022 in the United States to keep the surge of people severely sickened by Covid-19 from overwhelming the health care system. The research, published [...] in the journal Science, looked at a range of scenarios for how the SARS-CoV-2 virus will spread over the next five years.'

  (tags: covid-19 statnews social-distancing harvard medicine health)

• COVID-19 Related Advice – Guidance on Regulation EC261/2004

  Airlines are required to provide passengers with information on their rights.  Where flights are cancelled passengers must be offered the choice of: a refund; or re-routing (alternative flights) at the earliest opportunity; or re-routing at a later date (subject to availability). It is important that airlines assist passengers by clearly setting out these options to them.  In addition, it is open to airlines to offer incentives to passengers to encourage them to fly at a later date, for example through providing vouchers of a higher value. We recognise that, at present, it may be difficult for airlines to provide alternative flights, for example, where government advice is to avoid travel to particular destinations affected by COVID-19.  A refund for the passenger may therefore be the only practical option available. 

  More: https://www.flightrights.ie/news/guidance-note-on-airline-flight-cancellations-%e2%80%93-regulation-eu-2612004.1043.html (via Brian Brazil)

  (tags: airlines travel covid-19 flights refunds consumer rights)

• Early Release - COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with Air Conditioning in Restaurant, Guangzhou, China, 2020 - Volume 26, Number 7—July 2020 - Emerging Infectious Diseases journal - CDC

  via Zeynep Tufekci: 'Amazing study, supporting droplet (rather than aerosol) as key means of transmission. One asymptomatic person infected 10 (out of 91) at restaurant—but *only* if they were in direct line of air pushed by the air conditioning.'

  (tags: china covid-19 air-conditioning droplets transmission diseases sars-cov-2 infection)

• Rift opens over European coronavirus contact tracing apps - Reuters

  The rift has opened up over a German-led initiative, called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT https://www.pepp-pt.org), which has been criticised for being too centralised and thus prone to governmental mission creep. [....] “Solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about the population should be rejected without further discussion,” the scientists said in their letter. Among the signatories was Michael Backes, head of Germany’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, which pulled out of PEPP-PT at the weekend. Swiss researchers have also publicly dissociated themselves from PEPP-PT, citing concerns over centralisation and privacy. Critics have also questioned PEPP-PT’s assertion that seven European countries - Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Malta, Spain and Switzerland - had come on board. Spain and Switzerland now back rival DP-3T, government and research sources said.

  (tags: dp-3t pepp-pt contact-tracing europe apps covid-19)

• 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)

• CT scans might offer a more accurate way to diagnose Covid-19

  Jaysus. RT-PCR swab tests have a 30% false negative rate!

  A positive result on the swab tests is usually reliable. “If you get a positive test result, looking for the RNA of the virus with the current methods that we have, it’s very likely to be a true positive,” said Jana Broadhurst, an infectious disease doctor and director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit Clinical Laboratory at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. But “if you get a negative test result, [the chance that it’s wrong is] about 30%.” Of every 100 symptomatic people who test negative for Covid-19, 30 are actually infected. The test missed them.

  (tags: rt-pcr covid-19 medicine swab-tests false-negatives)

• Solution Scan of non-pharmaceutical options to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission

  'Informing management of lockdowns and a phased return to normality: a Solution Scan of non-pharmaceutical options to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission'. This is a pretty exhaustive list of possible approaches to lower the R0.

  (tags: covid-19 r0 transmission diseases lockdowns social-distancing)

• EDPB on COVID-19 contact tracing apps

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

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

• The other kind of contact tracing tools

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

  (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)

• 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)

• Good thread on what Iceland is doing right wrt. COVID-19

  Gummi ???? on Twitter: "“What’s up with Iceland?” - this graph has caught the attention of several of my friends abroad and there are probably things others can learn from the Covid response here in Iceland. Let me elaborate (chart: https://t.co/qMt3a0V7oZ) 1/ https://t.co/ZYtJMcjWKK" / Twitter

  (tags: covid-19 iceland contact-tracing testing medicine pandemics)

• dúchas.ie Volunteer Transcription Project

  Fred Logue says: 'If you've got a bit of time on your hands you could do some crowd-sourced transcription of folklore gathered from schools. It's a really good way to get an insight into life in the 1930s'

  (tags: transcription duchas meitheal folklore history ireland 1930s)

• 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)

• Belgian-Dutch study recommends increasing COVID-19 social-distancing thresholds for walking/cycling/running

  On the basis of these results the scientist advises that for walking the distance of people moving in the same direction in 1 line should be at least 4–5 meter, for running and slow biking it should be 10 meters and for hard biking at least 20 meters. Also, when passing someone it is advised to already be in different lane at a considerable distance e.g. 20 meters for biking.

  (tags: covid-19 cycling running health aerosols infection gross exercise droplets)

• "Pre-existing conditions" vs age as risk factors in COVID-19

  Twitter thread with some data from a recent CDC paper: 'Authors report that among those 19-64 y.o. WITH a pre-existing conditions, ~18-20% were hospitalized. Among those WITHOUT conditions: ~6% were hospitalized. Among those equal to or >65 y.o. WITH pre-existing conditions, ~42-44% were hospitalized. For those WITHOUT conditions: ~17-18% were hospitalized.'

  (tags: icu hospitalisations hospitalizations covid-19 cdc papers health age)

• Mortality rate of COVID-19 patients on ventilators

  Probably the best published information we have so far is from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Center (ICNARC) in the UK. Of 165 patients admitted to ICUs, 79 (48%) died. Of the 98 patients who received advanced respiratory support—defined as invasive ventilation, BPAP or CPAP via endotracheal tube, or tracheostomy, or extracorporeal respiratory support—66% died. Compare that to the 36% mortality rate of non-COVID patients receiving advanced respiratory support reported to ICNARC from 2017 to 2019.

  (tags: mortality covid-19 icu medicine ventilation uk)

• Amazon may be running Folding@Home on their unused EC2 spot instances

  A mysterious team called "AWSFolds" is using a massive amount of AWS spot capacity

  (tags: aws amazon ec2 spot-instances foldingathome covid-19)

• Where To Get Groceries Delivered From In A Lockdown

  Holy cow, loads of good places are delivering now

  (tags: lockdown dublin food shopping deliveries)

• 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)

• 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)

• Miura-ori

  'The Miura fold (?????, Miura-ori) is a method of folding a flat surface such as a sheet of paper into a smaller area. The fold is named for its inventor, Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura.' (via Robby Kraft)

  (tags: via:robby-kraft origami miura-fold miura-ori space folding surfaces paper)

• covid19risk/covidwatch-ios

  some important details for iOS/Android interop on BLE COVID-19 contact tracing. bookmarking for possible future reference

  (tags: covid-19 ble bluetooth contact-tracing apps ios android interop bugs)

• Fangcang shelter hospitals

  ... a novel public health concept. They were implemented for the first time in China in February, 2020, to tackle the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. The Fangcang shelter hospitals in China were large-scale, temporary hospitals, rapidly built by converting existing public venues, such as stadiums and exhibition centres, into health-care facilities. They served to isolate patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 from their families and communities, while providing medical care, disease monitoring, food, shelter, and social activities.

  (tags: fangcangs hospitals covid-19 buildings architecture emergencies china pandemics medicine)

• Unified research on privacy-preserving contact tracing and exposure notification for COVID-19 - Google Docs

  'This document has been created to share information across the numerous projects that are working to create mobile apps to help contact tracers fight COVID-19. Many technologists who are designing privacy-preserving apps and tools for this process are new to contact tracing, and want to ensure that their work is solidly grounded in the work that public health professionals are doing around the world. This document aims to collate questions, statistics and experiences to ensure that apps are relevant and well-designed.'

  (tags: docs gdocs contact-tracing privacy apps coding tech covid-19 collaboration)

• Vitamin D supplementation recommended to help fight COVID-19 in Ireland

  'Epidemiological studies, including several meta-analyses, have shown that people with low vitamin D levels have a higher risk of acute respiratory tract infection and community-acquired pneumonia. While these data do not necessarily infer causality, multiple molecular mechanisms have been identified by which vitamin D deficiency impairs resistance to viral respiratory tract infection. There are also a significant number of studies, including several meta-analyses, which have indicated that vitamin D supplementation may reduce the likelihood of acute respiratory tract infection, and decrease its severity and duration where such infection does occur. These respiratory tract infections may include Covid-19. Proposed Protective Mechanisms against Covid-19: In this regard, vitamin D supplementation has been shown to suppress CD2614, a cell surface receptor which is thought to facilitate entry of the Covid-19 virus into the host cell. There is also good evidence that enhanced vitamin D status may protect against the critical immunological sequelae which are thought to elicit poorer clinical outcome in Covid-19 infection. These include prolonged interferon-gamma response, and persistent interleukin 6 elevation, a negative prognostic indicator in acutely-ill pneumonia patients, including those with Covid-19.'

  (tags: covid-19 health medicine vitamins vitamin-d supplements)

• COVID-19 Practical Advice

  lhl's giant list of COVID advice. This is exhaustive and well-researched. (via Waxy)

  (tags: via:waxy lhl covid-19 health medicine advice self-treatment)

• Aarogya Setu

  via Amit Agarwal on Twitter -- India's COVID-19 contact-tracing app, using GPS location and Bluetooth.

  (tags: ble bluetooth contact-tracing via:amit-agarwal india apps android ios covid-19)

• EC regulations regarding cancelled flights

  'REGULATION (EC) No 261/2004 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 February 2004, establishing common rules on compensation and assistance to passengers in the event of denied boarding and of cancellation or long delay of flights, and repealing Regulation (EEC) No 295/91' This may be handy in the coming months I suspect.

  (tags: aviation flights holidays cancellation consumer-rights consumer ec eu)

• How they flattened the curve during the 1918 Spanish Flu

  How some cities ‘flattened the curve’ during the 1918 flu pandemic Social distancing isn’t a new idea—it saved thousands of American lives during the last great pandemic. Here's how it worked.

  (via Vipul Ved Prakash)

  (tags: via:vipul covid-19 history coronavirus pandemics flu 1918 social-distancing)

• COVID-19 and the NHS—“a national scandal” - The Lancet

  Bloody hell, the UK is heading for a disaster. 'The NHS has been wholly unprepared for this pandemic. It's impossible to understand why. Based on their modelling of the Wuhan outbreak of COVID-19, Joseph Wu and his colleagues wrote in The Lancet on Jan 31, 2020: “On the present trajectory, 2019-nCoV could be about to become a global epidemic…for health protection within China and internationally…preparedness plans should be readied for deployment at short notice, including securing supply chains of pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, hospital supplies, and the necessary human resources to deal with the consequences of a global outbreak of this magnitude.” This warning wasn't made lightly. It should have been read by the Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Executive Officer of the NHS in England, and the Chief Scientific Adviser. They had a duty to immediately put the NHS and British public on high alert. February should have been used to expand coronavirus testing capacity, ensure the distribution of WHO-approved PPE, and establish training programmes and guidelines to protect NHS staff. They didn't take any of those actions. The result has been chaos and panic across the NHS. Patients will die unnecessarily. NHS staff will die unnecessarily. It is, indeed, as one health worker wrote last week, “a national scandal”. The gravity of that scandal has yet to be understood.'

  (tags: covid-19 government uk disasters nhs the-lancet pandemics ppe scandals)

• 'Guidance on cocooning to protect people over 70 years and those extremely medically vulnerable from COVID-19'

  Official HSE guidance doc

  (tags: hse cocooning social-distancing lockdown quarantine covid-19)

• PEPP-PT

  Yet another privacy-preserving contact tracing app system, this time from a pan-European consortium:

  Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) makes it possible to interrupt new chains of SARS-CoV-2 transmission rapidly and effectively by informing potentially exposed people. We are a large and inclusive European team. We provide standards, technology, and services to countries and developers. We embrace a fully privacy-preserving approach. We build on well-tested, fully implemented proximity measurement and scalable backend service. We enable tracing of infection chains across national borders. 

  (via Cory)

  (tags: coronavirus tracing gdpr covid-19 privacy contact-tracing apps europe via:doctorow)

• Proprietary reagents are blocking COVID-19 testing worldwide

  Workers Solidarity on Twitter: "HSE briefing last night revealed the limit on number of #cornoravirus tests that can be carried out is due to companies keeping the manufacturing process for a key reagent secret" -- top twitter thread. Proprietary IP rights over COVID-19 reagents are liable to kill thousands, if not millions. It's time to put these into the commons for the public good.

  (tags: wsm twitter threads hse covid-19 reagents testing chemicals)

• Jonas Nart's COVID19 dashboard

  Fantastic dataviz built using Tableau

  (tags: tableau dataviz graphs covid-19 dashboards pandemics)

• 'They are leading us to catastrophe': Sweden's coronavirus stoicism begins to jar | World news | The Guardian

  A petition signed by more than 2,000 doctors, scientists, and professors last week – including the chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Prof Carl-Henrik Heldin – called on the government to introduce more stringent containment measures. “We’re not testing enough, we’re not tracking, we’re not isolating enough – we have let the virus loose,” said Prof Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér, a virus immunology researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “They are leading us to catastrophe.”

  (tags: sweden fear covid-19 europe politics science)

• 'Estimating the number of infections and the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in 11 European countries'

  new paper from the Imperial College COVID-19 epidemiological team: 'Following the emergence of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its spread outside of China, Europe is now experiencing large epidemics. In response, many European countries have implemented unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions including case isolation, the closure of schools and universities, banning of mass gatherings and/or public events, and most recently, widescale social distancing including local and national lockdowns. In this report, we use a semi-mechanistic Bayesian hierarchical model to attempt to infer the impact of these interventions across 11 European countries. Our methods assume that changes in the reproductive number – a measure of transmission - are an immediate response to these interventions being implemented rather than broader gradual changes in behaviour. Our model estimates these changes by calculating backwards from the deaths observed over time to estimate transmission that occurred several weeks prior, allowing for the time lag between infection and death.'

  (tags: covid-19 papers europe uk lockdowns pandemics social-distancing modelling medicine)

• Medtronic releases PB560 Ventilator Design and Manufacturing docs

  Schematics, manuals, manufacturing docs for the Medtronic PB560 ventilator, released under a permissive license. Awesome stuff. 'We appreciate your interest in using the design specifications for the Medtronic PB560 ventilator system to help address the shortage of ventilators due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We invite manufacturers, engineers, and other innovators to use these files as inspiration for their own innovations.'

  (tags: medtronic ventilators covid-19 specifications hardware manuals medicine)

• Notes From the Battlefield March 30, 2020 - SAGES

  'Despite that devastation from the disease still continues, and being too early to draw any definitive conclusions, there are some signs that the slope of COVID-19 new cases in Italy may be starting to slow down. Italian epidemiologists feel it is the result of the strict physical distancing measures. As health care providers, this appears to be the best preventive measure to emphasize and possibly the only intervention currently available to overcome this epidemic.'

  (tags: pandemics covid-19 italy medicine social-distancing)

• 'Production of 3D printed components for ventilation systems: practical hints'

  Notes from the front lines in Italy: 'The current emergency allows exceptions to the use of not certified medical devices, if it is proved that no certified choices are available and in accordance with the local ethical committee. Furthermore, due to the short time required for the production, it is not possible to run extensive testing campaigns on the components, but each [additive manufacturing] operator must pay attention to the selection of materials and technologies that are suitable for the specific application, considering the risk classification of the components and the operational environment. In the following we summarize the workflow we applied at 3D4Med (http://www.3d4med.eu) – the Clinical 3D Printing Laboratory of San Matteo Hospital in Pavia – and Protolab – its engineering counterpart – to produce some of the requested components, along with some practical examples.'

  (tags: 3d-printing emergencies italy covid-19 medicine healthcare 3d4med ventilators cpap)

• Percy Ludgate

  'a Dublin corn merchant clerk who designed the second analytical engine (general-purpose Turing-complete computer) in history. Charles Babbage in 1843 and Ludgate in 1909 designed the only two mechanical analytical engines before the electromechanical analytical engine of Leonardo Torres y Quevedo of 1920 and its few successors, and the six first-generation electronic analytical engines of 1949. Working alone, Ludgate designed an analytical engine while unaware of Babbage's designs.'

  (tags: history ireland analytical-engines dublin computers hardware)

• What happened with the UK's "herd immunity" COVID-19 strategy

  "I'll tell you what happened in the UK. Over the past decade, eminent figures in public health developed complex models that would help inform the UK response to a pandemic. The response plan would allow slow spread through a population and a number of deaths that would be deemed acceptable in relation to low economic impact. Timing of population measures such as social distancing would be taken, not early, but at a times deemed to have maximal psychological impact. Measures would be taken that could protect the most vulnerable, and most of the people who got the virus would hopefully survive. Herd immunity would beneficially emerge at the end of this, and restrictions could relax. This was a ground-breaking approach compared to suppressing epidemics. It was an approach that could revolutionise the way we handled epidemics. Complex modelling is a new science, and this was cutting edge. But a model is only ever as good as the assumptions you build it upon. The UK plan was based on models with an assumption that any new pandemic would be like an old one, like flu. And it also carried a huge flaw - there was no accounting for the highly significant variables of ventilators and critical care beds that are key to maintaining higher survival numbers." Amazing. The sheer arrogance and hubris of assuming the model was right! Somebody will have to pay for this, it's shocking.

  (tags: herd-immunity hubris arrogance covid-19 uk uk-politics pandemics models data-science epidemiology)

• The Board Game Remix Kit

  This is very clever:

  New rules for old games! The Board Game Remix Kit is a collection of tips, tweaks, reimaginings and completely new games that you can play with the board and pieces from games you might already own: Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. 

  (via Macker)

  (tags: via:macker games boardgames trivial-pursuit cluedo scrabble monopoly remixing)

• Carl T. Bergstrom on Twitter

  "a personal thread about the experience of working at the intersection of infectious disease modeling and the study of misinformation during the worst pandemic in a century:

  the fight against misinformation is not merely a scientific communication issue. It's a vital public health necessity. [...] In all the years of studying infectious disease and planning for this day, I never dreamed that when it came I'd be opposed by my own federal government, a non-trivial fraction of my fellow citizens, and as yet undetermined fraction of hostile foreign actors.

  (tags: disinformation misinformation propaganda trump covid-19 scicomm science public-health social-media twitter pandemics)

• DIY facemasks for covid-19

  From this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1242894378441506816

  (tags: facemasks covid-19 diseases transmission infection ppe)

Maciej Ceglowski asks for a massive surveillance program to defeat COVID-19.

However, as I mentioned on twitter -- there IS an alternative, privacy-preserving approach, which is what is being done in Singapore with their TraceTogether app.

In summary, everyone carries a phone running an app which has an anonymized a random ID, scans local Bluetooth periodically for other people's apps with their random IDs, and records them locally (not uploading to a server). If you find out you have COVID-19 you then trigger an upload of your contact history to a central server. That server then broadcasts out the list of IDs, and everyone you've been in contact with will then get a ping on their app to get tested, self-isolate, etc.

No central surveillance, no creepy big brother watching your location.

My pinboard has a few more write-ups on basically the same idea from various other places, including MIT. This is similar to what China's app does, but (as far as I can tell) with more privacy.

It looks like the Singaporean government digital services team behind TraceTogether is putting together an open source version, at Bluetrace.io.

IMO we have to do this or we will never get out of COVID-19 lockdown before 2021. I am massively in favour of adopting this approach in Ireland and across the world.

• Ireland COVID19 GeoHive

  the official ArcGIS dashboard for Ireland's COVID-19 response

  (tags: covid-19 dashboards arcgis geohive data ireland)

• Treeware

  'a style of software distribution similar to Postcardware, distributed by the author on the condition that users buy the author a tree.'

  (tags: treeware oss open-source software licensing licenses)

• Jen Heemstra on Remdesivir

  'At this point, you’ve probably heard a ton about chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and how they may be effective in treating COVID-19. I wanted to tell you about a different molecule that’s getting less attention but may have good potential – Remdesivir.' How Remdesivir works to inhibit viral replication. Fascinating stuff

  (tags: remdesivir viruses science chemistry medicine drugs covid-19 treatment)

• Professor Sara Sawyer's Decon Station Instructions

  If you are sheltering-in-place and feel that you need to take extra precautions for a high-risk member of your household, you can decontaminate things before they come into your house.  Read on if you want to know how. This post addresses common questions that I am getting about mail, fruits, groceries, etc. The following advice is my own, tailored for this specific situation, and is the best advice I can come up with based on the extensive biosafety training that I have received as a research scientist who works with human viruses.

  (via Pam)

  (tags: biosafety viruses covid-19 decontamination sterilising sterilizing health via:pam)

• We Need A Massive Surveillance Program (Idle Words)

  The most troubling change this project entails is giving access to sensitive location data across the entire population to a government agency. Of course that is scary, especially given the track record of the Trump administration. The data collection would also need to be coercive (that is, no one should be able to opt out of it, short of refusing to carry a cell phone). [...] But the public health potential of commandeering surveillance advertising is so great that we can’t dismiss it out of hand. I am a privacy activist, typing this through gritted teeth, but I am also a human being like you, watching a global calamity unfold around us. What is the point of building this surveillance architecture if we can't use it to save lives in a scary emergency like this one?

  +1000.

  (tags: surveillance advertising contact-tracing contact-tracking tracking location smartphones covid-19 pandemics\)

• What’s the Evidence on Face Masks? What You Heard Was Probably Wrong

  According to research on the SARS epidemic, face masks were the most consistently effective intervention for reducing the contraction and spread of SARS. In a Cochrane Review on the subject, 6 out of 7 studies showed that face masks (surgical and N95) offered significant protection against SARS. Hand washing was also very effective, supported by 4 out of 7 studies in a multivariate analysis. Although most of the studies in the Cochrane Review were on medical workers in a hospital setting, one study followed community transmission of SARS in Beijing. It found that consistently wearing a mask in public was associated with a 70% reduction in risk of catching SARS. Additionally, the authors of the paper noted that most people in the community wore simple surgical masks, not N95 respirators.

  (tags: cochrane-reviews health medicine face-masks covid-19 germs masks transmission sars)

• Anosmia could be a symptom of COVID-19

  ENT UK on Twitter: "There is the potential to reduce COVID-19 transmission by requesting that individuals with new onset of anosmia self-isolate. A lost sense of smell as marker of COVID-19 infection..."

  (tags: covid-19 smell senses symptoms)

• good twitter thread roundup on smartphone contract-tracing apps

  Juliana Couras on Twitter:

  Mobile contact tracing for #COVID19 A thread with multiple references about what is being done in the world, what has already been done and what is not being done in the European Union.

  (tags: contact-tracing tracking apps smartphone mobile eu)

• TraceTogether

  The Singapore government's version of the anonymised-ids-with-BLE local contact tracing app for COVID-19. This has a fancy video! (via Dorothy)

  (tags: contact-tracing singapore contacts ble bluetooth covid-19 pandemics)

• Rapidly manufactured ventilator system specification - GOV.UK

  This is a specification of the minimally (and some preferred options) clinically acceptable ventilator to be used in UK hospitals during the current SARS-CoV2 outbreak. It sets out the clinical requirements based on the consensus of what is ‘minimally acceptable’ performance in the opinion of the anaesthesia and intensive care medicine professionals and medical device regulators. It is for devices, which are most likely to confer therapeutic benefit on a patient suffering with ARDS caused by COVID-19, used in the initial care of patients requiring urgent ventilation. A ventilator with lower specifications than this is likely to provide no clinical benefit and might lead to increased harm, which would be unacceptable for clinicians and would, therefore, not gain regulatory approval.

  (tags: disease covid-19 crowdsourcing hospitals medicine 3d-printing ventilators)

• Open Source COVID19: Our Intent, Needs, and Your Role - Google Docs

  'PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) is critical to the protection of healthcare workers, acting as a barrier and therefore controlling exposure to COVID-19. Some of the most fundamental items comprising PPE include gloves, goggles, surgical masks, respirators, protective gowns, and disinfectant. Many of these crucial PPE items are now in short supply due to interruptions in the supply chain, and also from the massive demand as the number of patients infected continues to grow exponentially. Numerous medical devices are required to treat the COVID-19 patient and will also fall into short supply (e.g. ventilators). Shortages of necessary PPE and medical devices will continue to pose a significant problem for healthcare workers and patients around the globe.'

  (tags: open-source covid-19 ppe medicine 3d-printing makers volunteers)

• Coronavirus: Deaconess asks public to sew medical face masks

  Shortages of specialized masks moved federal health officials this month to liberalize their recommendations about which face protection front line health-care workers should use to ward off the highly contagious disease stemming from coronavirus. “Prior to modern disposable masks, washable fabric masks were standard use for hospitals,” said Dawn Rogers, MSN, RN, FNP-C, Patient Safety & Infection Prevention Office in a release to media.  “We will be able to sterilize these masks and use them repeatedly as needed. While it’s less than ideal, we want to do our best to protect our staff and patients during this pandemic.” 

  (tags: facemasks covid-19 shortages pandemics medicine emergency)

• There’s A Shortage Of Ventilators For Coronavirus Patients, So This International Group Invented An Open Source Alternative That’s Being Tested Next Week

  Good wrap-up on the Open Source Ventilator project

  (tags: ventilators covid-19 medicine open-source 3d-printing emergencies pandemics)

• 'Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand'

  This is the report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team which, it seems, *finally* got the UK and US to realise that this is going to require a massive social-distancing and lockdown to avoid killing millions. The graph on the last page in particular is a kicker.

  (tags: covid-19 health pandemics epidemics medicine social-distancing imperial-college uk)

• Specifications for simple open source mechanical ventilator

  from Julian Botta, Johns Hopkins Emergency Medicine Resident PGY-3 , Twitter: @julianbotta 'This is a living document intended to give non-clinicians/non-respiratory therapists an idea of key ventilator features and one proposed simplified design. I encourage other healthcare professionals who are very familiar with ventilators and their use to give me feedback using the comments feature to improve these specifications.'

  (tags: specifications ventilators open-source covid-19 medicine hardware)

• Medical company threatens to sue volunteers that 3D-printed valves for life-saving coronavirus treatments - The Verge

  This is absolutely appalling behaviour. People are dying -- free the blueprints!

  A medical device manufacturer has threatened to sue a group of volunteers in Italy that 3D printed a valve used for life-saving coronavirus treatments. The valve typically costs about $11,000 from the medical device manufacturer, but the volunteers were able to print replicas for about $1 (via Techdirt). A hospital in Italy was in need of the valves after running out while treating patients for COVID-19. The hospital’s usual supplier said they could not make the valves in time to treat the patients, according to Metro. That launched a search for a way to 3D print a replica part, and Cristian Fracassi and Alessandro Ramaioli, who work at Italian startup Isinnova, offered their company’s printer for the job, reports Business Insider. However, when the pair asked the manufacturer of the valves for blueprints they could use to print replicas, the company declined and threatened to sue for patent infringement, according to Business Insider Italia. Fracassi and Ramaioli moved ahead anyway by measuring the valves and 3D printing three different versions of them.

  (tags: covid-19 ip patents italy 3d-printing hardware ip-rights law)

• Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies | Facebook

  A very active group of makers sharing designs and plans for open source face masks, ventilators, etc.

  (tags: covid-19 open-source facebook medicine face-masks ppe hardware 3d-printing)

• Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19 - Alibaba Cloud

  The Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation, together with the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University, jointly established the Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19 (GMCC) programme, with the support of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Alibaba Health, to help combat the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. This platform was established to facilitate continued communication and collaboration across borders, as well as to provide the necessary computing capabilities and data intelligence to empower pivotal research efforts. The platform can provide frontline medical teams with the necessary communication channels to share practical experience and information about fighting the pandemic.

  They've put together a handbook of COVID-19 preventation and treatment, based on the Chinese experience.

  (tags: treatment medical covid-19 china jack-ma alibaba medicine health)

• Neil Jackman's favourite places in Ireland, county by county

  Fantastic list of ancient sites, from the archaeologist, podcaster and author:

  It's my first #StPatricksDay as an Irish citizen. There may be fewer parades & pints, but seeing the solidarity kindness & meitheal has made me love this country even more. I've been lucky to see a lot of this island over the last 21 years. Here's some favourite places by county

  (tags: ireland archaeology history paleolithic neolithic neil-jackman)

• Safe Paths

  Another privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact-tracing app, this one from MIT:

  The news: An app that tracks where you have been and who you have crossed paths with—and then shares this personal data with other users in a privacy-preserving way—could help curb the spread of Covid-19, says Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab, who leads the team behind it. Called Private Kit: Safe Paths, the free and open-source app was developed by people at MIT and Harvard, as well as software engineers at companies such as Facebook and Uber, who worked on it in their free time.  

  (tags: mit contact-tracing privacy apps smartphones android ios covid-19 epidemics pandemics)

• 'Sustainable containment of COVID-19 using smartphones in China: Scientific and ethical underpinnings for implementation of similar approaches in other settings'

  China have enforced a variety of measures aimed at social distancing including lockdowns, restrictions on movement and cordon-sanitaires, as well as the Alipay Health Code smartphone application (an add on to the WeChat app system) now adopted in over 200 cities and by 90% of individuals in one Chinese province. A separate system has been implemented in South Korea, and both have come under public scrutiny over issues of data protection and privacy. We sought to design a broadly acceptable version of this platform, leveraging commonly used smartphone functionality. This system is currently in development, and based on a very simple algorithm, that we show through mathematical modelling will enable public health agencies to prevent a COVID-19 epidemic while minimizing social and economic disruption.

  This also introduced me to a new concept, "herd protection", which is described as "Ronald Ross's great discovery: you don't need to stop all infections to stop an epidemic, you need to get and keep R<1."

  (tags: papers toread covid-19 social-distancing movement cordons quarantine epidemics pandemics china smartphones location herd-protection)

• COVID-19 Risk App

  COVID-19 has a relatively long infectious incubation period, averaging five days but potentially up to two weeks, during which there may be asymptomatic transmission. In other words, there may be a period of time in which people who carry COVID-19 don't necessarily show symptoms and may not even realise they are infected, but are still capable of infecting others. This makes it harder for health professionals and epidemiologists to trace who has come into contact with infected persons ('contact tracing'), which in turn makes the virus more difficult to effectively contain. Many people, however, now carry GPS-enabled smartphones which already track their location over time - most mapping apps, like Google Maps or MapQuest, already collect this data by default. We believe that this information could be used to rapidly and automatically perform a type of contact tracing, helping limit the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. These phones are usually also Bluetooth-enabled, allowing them to track and record which other phones they're in proximity to. We believe that together, these two pieces of information can be used to inform and empower our users in a range of ways. Firstly, we can generate heatmaps of high-risk areas from demographic data, known cases, and epidemiological modelling, allowing users to adjust their behaviour accordingly. Secondly, we can use Bluetooth connections between users to enact cryptographically secure contact tracing and alerting them if we learn that they have been exposed to COVID-19, without revealing the identities or infection status of any other users.

  (tags: covid-19 contact-tracing apps android ios smartphones privacy location)

• The Paradox of Preparation

  Chris Hayes on Twitter: "A doctor I spoke to today called this the “paradox of preparation” and it’s the key dynamic in all this. The only way to get ahead of the curve is to take actions that *at the time* seem like overreactions, eg: Japan closing all schools for a month with very few confirmed cases". See also the Millennium Bug, and what's currently (failing) to happen with climate change. This is a great concept, and good to have a name for it.

  (tags: millennium-bug paradox-of-preparation covid-19 pandemics preparation)

• Project Open Air

  We are working on medical devices, such as open source ventilators, to have a fast and easy solution that can be reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. If you have any skills that you consider might help, join the Helpful Engineering group.

  (tags: health medicine ventilators devices hardware design engineering covid-19)

• If You Go Out Now, You Might Feel Guilty Later. I Do.

  Others have written eloquently of the importance of social distancing. But the scale and scope of this is something every single one of us is having to grapple with. Things that felt like a dumb overreaction a week ago — “Canceling vacation? Really?” — now feel hilariously quaint. Or if they don’t, they will soon. If you still can’t quite believe that you need to take these measures, or that people’s lives may hang in the balance, or if you still think that it will be okay because the numbers where you live aren’t so bad yet, I am not here to scold you. But if you do go out, and you do risk infecting somebody else, you may feel the guilt — and the fear — that I’m struggling with right now. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

  (tags: social-distancing covid-19 isolation quarantine infection pandemics)

• COVID-19 may be infectious for 3 days prior to symptoms becoming noticeable

  Examination of 124 Wuhan cases with clear contact history showed incubation period of 5 days (range: 1-11 days). It found that 73% of secondary cases were infected *before* onset of symptoms in first case. It estimated the mismatch period to be 3 days.

  This is bad news for controlling the spread based on testing only people with symptoms.

  (tags: covid-19 diseases health epidemics)

• Cut / Fold Templates for paper mechanisms

  Origami wizard Robby Kraft says "this site comes up in conversations 1/mo on average. if you need some suggestions: #1 flexagon; #4 auxetic (awesome, a little complex); #6 bistable (so much untapped potential, i believe); #14 flasher; all the optical illusion ones"

  (tags: geometry origami paper templates pdf todo kids papercraft making crafting)

• COVID-19 Notes from UCSF Expert panel - March 10

  Superb set of points from a star-studded panel:

  Joe DeRisi: UCSF’s top infectious disease researcher. Co-president of ChanZuckerberg BioHub (a JV involving UCSF / Berkeley / Stanford). Co-inventor of the chip used in SARS epidemic. Emily Crawford: COVID task force director. Focused on diagnostics. Cristina Tato: Rapid Response Director. Immunologist.  Patrick Ayescue: Leading outbreak response and surveillance. Epidemiologist.   Chaz Langelier: UCSF Infectious Disease doc.

  (tags: covid-19 health medicine ucsf diseases epidemiology)

• How to crossplay Minecraft on PS4 with Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PC

  The killer app for kids in COVID-19 lockdown!

  However, while the new snapshot is extremely neat, so too is the ability for PlayStation 4 players to crossplay with mates on Nintendo Switch, PC and Xbox One. This feature was introduced to Sony's version at the tail-end of last year, and in this article you'll find out how to play with your mates on other devices.

  (tags: minecraft crossplay ps4 switch gaming games kids)

• educational/maths resources for your children at home

  Another good set of links for the COVID-19 lockdown

  (tags: education teaching maths math covid-19 kids)

• Health expert brands UK's coronavirus response 'pathetic'

  There were no strategies for protecting the vulnerable and there had been a failure to engage the public. “We have a superficial prime minister who has got no grasp of public health,” Ashton said. “Our lot are behaving like 19th-century colonialists playing a five-day game of cricket. “This virus will find the weak points. You can’t just plan this from an office in Whitehall. It’s pathetic. The government doesn’t seem to understand classic public health. You need to be out and about. You need to get your hands dirty – though preferably gloved and using frequent gel,” he said.

  (tags: coronavirus covid-19 guardian uk health medicine herd-immunity)

• The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic | The New Republic

  It didn’t occur to the right that a more terrifying series of words than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” would turn out to be “I’m from the government, and I guess I anticipated that the private sector would have engaged.”

  (tags: cdc coronavirus covid19 politics republicans us-politics pandemics government)

• merbanan/rtl_433

  'Program to decode radio transmissions from devices on the ISM bands (and other frequencies)'. Turns out a staggering amount of devices these days broadcast their signals on 433Hz and can be picked up with cheap SDR gear...

  (tags: radio devices hardware iot gadgets home 433hz sdr)

• A New Dublin Group Looks to Deepen What We Know About Plastic | Dublin Inquirer

  Precious Plastic Dublin is up and running!

  (tags: precious-plastic recycling plastic making dublin ireland)

• TCL Series 6 TV

  good tip from Nelson on a decent TV - "excellent picture quality for the price. It’s quite cheap even for an LCD TV, and definitely way way cheaper than an OLED." I need to upgrade one here so this is useful

  (tags: toget tvs television hardware home)

• Online Resources For Isolation

  Now that Ireland's schools are to be closed, I'm going to need this :(

  Here we have it. My free ‘what the heck do I do with my kids while they are at home in isolation’ guide to online resources. Bookmark this; in all likelihood we are all going to need it. Just to mention; don’t unleash your kids at all of this in the first day or even days. There is loads for them to work their way through. If you let them do everything all at once they will become overwhelmed and disinterested.

  (tags: education kids ireland self-isolation)

• How to Utilise Twinkl during the Coronavirus Shutdown: A Guide for Schools

  Another "what to do with the kids during self-isolation" resource, used by our kids' school apparently

  (tags: kids education self-isolation covid-19)

• Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus

  Ars Technica are doing a good job maintaining a FAQ list here

  (tags: coronavirus covid-19 health faqs medicine diseases)

• Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now - Tomas Pueyo - Medium

  some good estimates of current COVID-19 epidemiology

  (tags: coronavirus covid19 healthcare epidemiology diseases statistics)

• Effectiveness of Common Household Cleaning Agents in Reducing the Viability of Human Influenza A/H1N1

  Good to know. This is testing against a H1N1 flu virus, but hopefully applies for COVID-19 too.

  ... Rapid treatment of the virus with hot water had little effect on the virus, reducing the titre by around two-fold, but prolonged incubation at 55°C abolished detectable infectivity. However, the addition of any of 1% bleach, 50% and 10% malt vinegar and 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% washing up liquid were all effective at rapidly reducing viable virus below the limit of detection, while a low concentration of vinegar (1%) was no more effective than hot water alone (Figure 1A). In contrast to the plaque assay results, most agents were ineffective at reducing the number of detectable genome copies as determined by RT-PCR, with only bleach having a significant effect (Figure 2A). The data for the plaque assays and RT-PCR assays are compiled in Tables S1 and S2. Thus, while a strong oxidizing agent such as bleach is effective at reducing both genome detection and virus infectivity, low pH and detergent are equally efficacious virucidal agents. These results also indicate that whilst vinegar and detergent disrupt the viral envelope proteins reducing infectivity, only bleach disrupts the viral genome.

  (Via Damien)

  (tags: via:damien health cleaning covid-19 washing)

• G1 GC tuning metrics

  supposedly this is about "tuning in the era of containers", but really it's more about which metrics are usable for GC tuning with the newish java G1 garbage collector.

  (tags: jvm g1 g1gc gc tuning metrics ops)

• "The Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care just published the most extraordinary medical document I've ever seen"

  Unpleasant stuff:

  A week ago, Italy had so few cases of corona that it could give each stricken patient high-quality care. Today, some hospitals are so overwhelmed that they simply cannot treat every patient. They are starting to do wartime triage. Here’s the guidance for that.

  (tags: italy healthcare safety medicine covid-19 emergencies triage hospitals)

• Trees on commercial UK plantations 'not helping climate crisis'

  “There is no point growing a lot of fast-growing conifers with the logic that they sequester carbon quickly if they then go into a paper mill because all that carbon will be lost to the atmosphere within a few years,” said Thomas Lancaster, head of UK land policy at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which commissioned the report. “We should not be justifying non-native forestry on carbon grounds if it’s not being used as a long-term carbon store.”

  Absolutely. Commercial forestry is not going to help address the climate change problem.

  (tags: business economics environment climate-change forestry trees coillte)

• low-cost mechanical ventilator prototype

  a team of students from MIT has devised a better way to keep patients breathing in places that lack standard mechanical ventilators, or during times of emergency such as pandemics or natural disasters, when normal hospital resources may be overextended. They have designed a system that uses the same widely available manual pump — the same type used for the farmer in India. The new system encases the pump in a plastic box with a battery, motor and controls to take the place of the manual compression process.

  This article from 2010 notes 'a U.S. government study in 2005 found that in a worst-case pandemic scenario, this country alone might need more than 700,000 mechanical ventilators, while only 100,000 are now in use.'

  (tags: ventilators covid-19 breathing healthcare hardware mit ambu-bag)

• Testimony of a surgeon working in Bergamo, in the heart of Italy's coronavirus outbreak : medicine

  Terrifying:

  After thinking for a long time if and what to write about what's happening here, I felt that silence was not responsible. I will therefore try to convey to lay-people, those who are more distant from our reality, what we are experiencing in Bergamo during these Covid-19 pandemic days. I understand the need not to panic, but when the message of the danger of what is happening is not out, and I still see people ignoring the recommendations and people who gather together complaining that they cannot go to the gym or play soccer tournaments, I shiver. I also understand the economic damage and I am also worried about that. After this epidemic, it will be hard to start over.

  (tags: viral reddit bergamo healthcare covid-19 epidemics medicine)

• Nextstrain / narratives / ncov / sit-rep / 2020-03-05

  This is an amazing piece of data -- phylogenetic analysis of the COVID-19 epidemic as it spreads across the globe. 'The following pages contain analysis performed using Nextstrain. Scrolling through the left-hand sidebar will reveal paragraphs of text with a corresponding visualization of the genomic data on the right-hand side. To have full genomes of a novel and large RNA virus this quickly is a remarkable achievement. These analyses have been made possible by the rapid and open sharing of genomic data and interpretations by scientists all around the world (see the final slide for a visualization of sequencing authorship).'

  (tags: genetics phylogenetics nextstrain covid-19 diseases epidemics viruses)

• We’re learning a lot about the coronavirus. It will help us assess risk

  Early studies on Covid-19 suggest people who have contracted the coronavirus are emitting, or “shedding,” infectious viruses very early on — in fact sometimes even before they develop symptoms. “We do know from shedding studies that people can shed in the pre-symptomatic phase,” Van Kerkhove said, adding that while the data are still preliminary “it seems that people shed more in the early phases rather than the late phases of disease.”

  ...also: 'This week the WHO said the case fatality ratio currently looks like 3.4% — which is not a reassuring number.'

  (tags: diseases coronavirus covid-19 health pandemics)

• Internet Book of Critical Care (IBCC) on COVID-19

  Detailed info on COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment for healthcare professionals

  (tags: medicine covid-19 coronavirus diseases pandemics)

• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on nuclear power plant risks

  The Japan Center for Economic Research, a source sympathetic to nuclear power, recently put the long-term costs of the 2011 Fukushima accident as about $750 billion. [...] The main public risk of nuclear power plants comes from rare but devastating nuclear accidents. Because data on such accidents is sparse, the probability of their occurrence has to be calculated on the basis of a model, rather than obtained from experience. Moreover, the extent of an accident and its monetary consequences are postulated on the basis of models that are limited by analysts’ imagination. Who would have imagined, for example, that the Fukushima accident would involve several reactors? Or that Japan would subsequently shut down all its other nuclear power plants?

  (tags: fukushima nuclear nukes power risks danger probability insurance nuclear-power reactors)

• k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) similarity search engine with Amazon Elasticsearch

  Well, that's handy:

  Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) search which can enhance search by similarity use cases like product recommendations, fraud detection, and image, video and semantic document retrieval. Built using the lightweight and efficient Non-Metric Space Library (NMSLIB), k-NN enables high scale, low latency nearest neighbor search on billions of documents across thousands of dimensions with the same ease as running any regular Elasticsearch query.  

  (tags: elasticsearch aws knn algorithms similarity searching search nmslib)

• The history of leaded gasoline is nuts

  It is frankly shocking that this was ignored for so long! "The history of leaded gasoline is nuts. Scientists warned it was poison, the factory where it was made was making workers loopy, but GM/Standard Oil enlisted the surgeon general to convince everyone it was safe and rejected alternatives. Massive public harm resulted." "A Yale physiologist named Yandell Henderson had tested tetraethyl lead as a potential nerve agent during WWI, and when asked his thoughts on putting it into gasoline, he reacted with alarm. 'Widespread lead poisoning was almost certain to result.' Later he deemed it the 'single greatest question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public.'"

  (tags: gasoline petrol lead health poisoning healthcare yandell-henderson)

• Numbers Every Programmer Should Know, By Year

  interactively explore how Jeff Dean's "Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" have changed over time (via Kishore Gopalakrishna)

  (tags: memory latency hardware history jeff-dean latencies speed performance)

• When Bloom filters don't bloom

  A good exploration into modern CPU/memory performance behaviour, and profiling same on Linux using "perf stat -d" and "google-perftools":

  Modern CPUs are really good at sequential memory access when it's possible to predict memory fetch patterns (see Cache prefetching). Random memory access on the other hand is very costly. Advanced data structures are very interesting, but beware. Modern computers require cache-optimized algorithms. When working with large datasets, not fitting L3, prefer optimizing for reduced number loads, over optimizing the amount of memory used. I guess it's fair to say that Bloom filters are great, as long as they fit into the L3 cache. The moment this assumption is broken, they are terrible. This is not news, Bloom filters optimize for memory usage, not for memory access. For example, see the Cuckoo Filters paper.

  (tags: cloudflare bloom-filters performance data-structures cpu cache l3 hashing perf perftools)

• Connectivity at the origins of domain specificity in the cortical face and place networks | PNAS

  Wow, this is cool -- babies are born with some "pre-wired" visual connectivity networks, specifically for faces and scenes:

  Where does knowledge come from? We addressed this classic question using the test cases of the cortical face and scene networks: two well-studied examples of specialized “knowledge” systems in the adult brain. We found that neonates already show domain-specific patterns of functional connectivity between regions that will later develop full-blown face and scene selectivity. Furthermore, the proto face network showed stronger functional connectivity with foveal than with peripheral primary visual cortex, while the proto scene network showed the opposite pattern, revealing that these networks already receive differential visual inputs. Our findings support the hypothesis that innate connectivity precedes the emergence of domain-specific function in cortex, shedding new light on the age-old question of the origins of human knowledge.

  (tags: brains vision babies knowledge learning science biology)

• Ciarán Murray on Twitter - another Coronavirus thread - estimating the COVID-19 case fatality rate

  'on the basis of what we can learn from the very unfortunate experiment that was the Diamond Princess, the coronavirus is probably at most 13x more lethal than the flu and likely a lot less lethal - probably closer to 5x more lethal (.3% CFR).'

  (tags: cfr diseases covid-19 coronavirus medicine)

• Coronavirus in China: The most important lessons from China’s Covid-19 response - Vox

  Here, again, is where I’ve seen things starting to break down. What I’ve been told is if you think you’ve been exposed and have a fever, call your [general practitioner]. We’ve got to be better than that. If we are going to use our GPs — do they have an emergency line where you can get through? Do they know what to do? In China, they have set up a giant network of fever hospitals. In some areas, a team can go to you and swab you and have an answer for you in four to seven hours. But you’ve got to be set up — speed is everything.

  (tags: covid19 coronavirus china hospitals healthcare medicine pandemics)

• Amazon's Principal Tenets

  Principal Engineers in Amazon are expected to model these tenets:

  Exemplary Practitioner; Technically Fearless; Balanced and Pragmatic; Illuminate and Clarify; Flexible in Approach; Respect What Came Before; Learn, Educate, and Advocate; Have Resounding Impact

  One thing I admire about Amazon's internal culture is that they really do try to pin down a set of values, and encourage their adoption and practice internally.

  (tags: amazon values tenets work principal-engineers engineering coding)

• Sketchfab Launches Public Domain Dedication for 3D Cultural Heritage

  This is awesome!

  We are pleased to announce that cultural organisations using Sketchfab can now dedicate their 3D scans and models to the Public Domain using the Creative Commons (CC) 0 Public Domain Dedication. This newly supported dedication allows museums and similar organisations to share their 3D data more openly, adding amazing 3D models to the Public Domain, many for the first time. This update also makes it even easier for 3D creators to download and reuse, re-imagine, and remix incredible ancient and modern artifacts, objects, and scenes. We are equally proud to make this announcement in collaboration with 27 cultural organisations from 13 different countries. We are especially happy to welcome the Smithsonian Institution to Sketchfab as part of this initiative. The Smithsonian has uploaded their first official 3D models to Sketchfab as part of their newly launched open access program.

  (tags: opensource education licensing creative-commons sketchfab 3d-printing 3d models public-domain museums art history objects smithsonian)

• Factcheck: What is the carbon footprint of streaming video on Netflix?

  Some decent numbers on datacenter usage and debunking some scaremongering figures:

  Drawing on analysis at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and other credible sources, we expose the flawed assumptions in one widely reported estimate of the emissions from watching 30 minutes of Netflix. These exaggerate the actual climate impact by 30- to 60-times.

  (tags: datacenters internet streaming netflix carbon climate-change iea energy emissions video)

• The Green Cloud: How Climate-Friendly Is Your Cloud Provider?

  good summary of the state of hosting at the big clouds. Topline recommendations: * choose 100% sustainable locations for new Cloud instances (e.g. on Azure, Google Cloud or the sustainable AWS regions of Dublin, Frankfurt, Oregon or Canada) and transition existing VMs there as soon as possible. * Enterprises should inform their datacenter providers that they require secure, sustainably-powered compute resources and insist on a delivery commitment. * Google and Azure are doing significantly better than AWS in delivering transparency and sustainability.

  (tags: datacenters aws azure google hosting climate-change sustainability offsetting)

• New Electric Ireland

  A company in Arklow is teaching people how to convert petrol/diesel cars to run as EVs on a budget -- including their own split-screen VW bus, running on a Tesla drivetrain, and a BMW 7 series running as a hybrid from a Lexus RX450h

  (tags: cars driving tesla vw conversions vehicles evs electric)

• 2019/2020 Season - Health Protection Surveillance Centre

  The HSE's official reports for influenza monitoring for this 'flu season. Impressive

  (tags: hse monitoring diseases outbreaks flu influenza health medicine ireland)

• So you think you’re about to be in a pandemic?

  Some concrete advice if COVID-19 hits (which seems very likely), around: 1. Reducing our risk of being infected; 2. Reducing the chance we will run out of essential foods and goods.

  (tags: planning pandemic covid-19 stockpiling health medicine diseases epidemic)

• Why Some COVID-19 Cases Are Worse than Others

  For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, some people—especially the elderly and sick—may have dysfunctional immune systems that fail to keep the response to particular pathogens in check. This could cause an uncontrolled immune response, triggering an overproduction of immune cells and their signaling molecules and leading to a cytokine storm often associated with a flood of immune cells into the lung. “That’s when you end up with a lot of these really severe inflammatory disease conditions like pneumonia, shortness of breath, inflammation of the airway, and so forth.”

  (tags: covid-19 health diseases immune-system medicine)

• Sprouts

  Sprouts is a paper-and-pencil game that can be enjoyed simply by both adults and children. Yet it also can be analyzed for its significant mathematical properties. It was invented by mathematicians John Horton Conway (*that* Conway) and Michael S. Paterson at Cambridge University in the early 1960s./blockquote>

  (tags: games paper sprouts kids fun)

• SEAI grant changes for domestic photovoltaic solar panel installs in Ireland

  The big changes are that they are reducing grant coverage for large installs and require a BER C rating to qualify

  (tags: seai grants ireland funding pv solar power home)

• Green Software Lab

  Lots of research on making sustainable, power-friendly software at a coding level

  (tags: coding sustainability power green code optimization papers research)

• Methane as a greenhouse gas

  Detailed thread from Zeke Hausfather on methane and its effects as a GHG; particularly on its short lifespan in the atmosphere

  (tags: ch4 methane ghgs atmosphere climate-change science)

• The creator of the YOLO object-detection algorithms has stopped computer vision research due to ethical concerns

  'The creator of the YOLO algorithms, which (along with SSD) set much of the path of modern object detection, has stopped doing any computer vision research due to ethical concerns.'

  Quite valid -- most of the applications of CV have always been military, as far as I could tell.

  (tags: computer-vision vision algorithms military ethics yolo research)

• BLAKE3

  'an Extremely Fast, Parallel Cryptographic Hash': BLAKE3's authors published a benchmark on an Intel Cascade Lake-SP 8275CL processor showing it to be 5x faster than BLAKE2 and 15x faster than SHA3-256.

  (tags: blake3 blake hashing hashes algorithms speed performance optimization sha)

• The Ars Technica semi-scientific guide to Wi-Fi Access Point placement

  top tips

  (tags: wifi ops networking ieee802.11 wireless ars-technica tips advice radio)

• Heavy-duty electric truck driver ditches diesel

  This is significant news -- sounds like electrified heavy trucks are well on the way:

  When it is time to accelerate, the eCascadia’s single gear provides immediate power. That matters during all-too-frequent slowdowns on California freeways. When traffic begins moving, Williams keeps pace. In a diesel, he would be left behind, working through gears to get up to speed. “I would have the space of two diesel trucks in front of me. By the time I get going, five cars jump in front of me,” he said. “With this truck, I can stay right with the cars rather than being dropped back every time we stop and go.” Even with the truck restricted to 60 mph, Williams said he can shave 15 minutes off the drive from the ports to Chino in heavy traffic. With advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) like adaptive cruise control, which keeps his truck at a set distance from the vehicle in front of him, and automatic emergency braking, Williams also drives a safer truck.

  (tags: trucks lorries vehicles evs electric transport future diesel climate-change)

• A biotech firm made a smallpox-like virus on purpose. Nobody seems to care - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  The loosely regulated market for synthetic DNA, the normalization of synthetic orthopoxvirus research, and a large number of capable facilities and researchers creates an environment in which a rogue state, unscrupulous company, reckless scientist, or terrorist group could potentially reintroduce one of the worst microbial scourges in human history. Unless world bodies, national governments, and scientific organizations put in place stronger safeguards on synthetic virus research, the next press release touting a new breakthrough in synthetic biology might announce that an unknown scientist in an obscure lab has successfully resurrected the smallpox virus.

  (tags: smallpox weapons scary diseases biological-weapons dna viruses)

• Stop Using Encrypted Email

  This is very persuasive and I'd have to agree.

  Email is unsafe and cannot be made safe. The tools we have today to encrypt email are badly flawed. Even if those flaws were fixed, email would remain unsafe. Its problems cannot plausibly be mitigated.

  Key point: this isn't (just) about PGP or SMTP, it's email as a whole system:

  The least interesting problems with encrypted email have to do with PGP. [...] But that’s a whole other argument. Even after we replace PGP, encrypted email will remain unsafe. Here's why: If messages can be sent in plaintext, they will be sent in plaintext. Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it. Every archived message will eventually leak. Every long term secret will eventually leak.

  (tags: cryptography security email pgp smtp flaws metadata crypto)

• How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart | World news | The Guardian

  This sounds pretty terrifying.

  For seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others.

  (tags: bjp abvp rss india fascism hindutva politics asia)

• How to 3D Print Your Own Lithophane

  Lithophanes are essentially embossed photos generated by a 3D printer. The print results don’t show much at first, but shine some light through one and you’ll be amazed by the details.

  (tags: lithophanes 3d-printing 3d objects photos cool)

• An Indian politician is using deepfake technology in an election campaign

  A deepfake of the president of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Manoj Tiwari, went viral on WhatsApp in the country earlier this month, ahead of legislative assembly elections in Delhi, according to Vice. It’s the first time a political party anywhere has used a deepfake for campaigning purposes. In the original video Tiwari speaks in English, criticizing his political opponent Arvind Kejriwal and encouraging voters to vote for the BJP. The second video has been manipulated using deepfake technology so his mouth moves convincingly as he speaks in Haryanvi, the Hindi dialect spoken by the target voters for the BJP.

  (tags: deepfakes video fakes campaigning politics india bjp)

• Kashmiri cops filed a case against people using VPN and social media

  The police in the Jammu and Kashmir region have issued an "FIR" against individuals using social media via a VPN; "army personnel were allegedly checking phones to see if the owners had any VPN apps installed." Critics have regularly argued that this partial access to the internet still counts as an internet shutdown.

  (tags: vpns future grim-meathook-future politics censorship india kashmir social-media)

• The Heartland Lobby

  A joint investigation from CORRECTIV and Frontal21 reveals how the American Heartland Institute is supporting climate change deniers in Germany with the goal of undermining climate protection measures:

  Throughout the next half hour, Taylor shares the inner workings of his disinformation toolbox. He believes that Mathias, the PR agent sitting opposite him, wants to help his clients funnel cash into the intricate network of climate change deniers. Taylor explains how he is able to raise awareness of topics in exchange for money, how people can make tax-deductible donations anonymously through a U.S. foundation, and how the Institute’s publications mimic the tone of the New York Times so obscure ideas are taken more seriously. He detailed how he intends to make a young YouTuber from Germany the star of climate denier, and how he works closely with German partners whose ideas are consistently cited by the AfD in the Bundestag. Then a few weeks later, Taylor will send an offer in writing. It is something like a strategy document for a PR campaign in Germany: A campaign that the public will not recognize for what it really is, making it even more effective. The goal: No more prohibitive climate laws. Diesel instead of electric cars, energy from coal instead of wind turbines, industry growth instead of environmental protection. 

  (tags: heartland-institute germany lobbying astroturfing misinformation disinformation climate-change climate-denial)

• Amazon EBS Multi-Attach now available on Provisioned IOPS io1 volumes

  Attach multiple EC2 instances to the same EBS volume. Now that is pretty cool

  (tags: ebs ec2 filesystems networking ops)

• excellent letter to the editor of the Farmer's Journal regarding the IFA's climate-denialist stance

  in full:

  Dr Donal Murphy-Bokern M.Agr.Sc. (NUI), Kroge-Ehrendorf, Germany Dear Sir: I've been involved in reseach on diet, sustainable agriculture and climate change for 25 years. Having followed the public debate across Europe in that time, I can only describe the current debate about diet and greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland as hysterical. This hysteria started a year ago with the then Irish Farmers Association's president appearing to refer to the EAT Lancet Commission, which includes highly respected nutritionists from the Harvard School of Medicine, as "quacks masquerading as nutrition experts". This was followed by his condemnation of the Taoiseach for answering a question about his carbon footprint by stating an intention to moderate his consumption of red meat. No vegan-led campaign could have better drawn public attention to the links between diet and environment than the IFA's boorish and ignorant reflex reactions. The hysteria goes on. Now, just a year later, the IFA's chosen greenhouse gas "guru" reports that methane from farming should be treated differently to CO,, raising hopes of a get-out-of-jail card for cattle and sheep. Self-description as a guru does not invite the confidence of scientific peers and Dr Mitloehner's presentation, published by the IFA, reveals why he is as controversial as is widely reported. Methane's short-lived nature does not lead to the public policy outcomes that he implies it should with climate acquittal for ruminant production. He reduced discussion about the impact of livestock to one currency, which is carbon, and then misrepresented the valuation of that currency. Despite being a native of Germany, where most land not suitable for arable crops is under forest, he argued that marginal land in Ireland cannot be used for anything other than for keeping cattle and sheep. But what was most striking about the IFA's guru is how he worked the audience using rhetorical tricks more associated with demagogic politicians than science. This science denial included using the strawman fallacy, raising and then countering several bogus opposing arguments. Listening to him, one could be forgiven for believing that vegans have been protesting on the streets of Dublin threatening to interfere with the nation's food supplies. He used the classical conspiracy theory complete with a collective name for the conspirators: "destructors". He then drew on popular images of Ireland ("green and lush" and "happy cows") to ingratiate himself with the audience while making wild and poorly informed assumptions about the scope for carbon sequestration on Irish grassland, displaying a poor understanding of basic soil science. The IFA's stated purpose was the rebalancing of the public debate. Hosting a controversial US scientist who refers to those with views different to those of the IFA on these matters as "destructors" is hardly a promising way forward. The IFA seems to continue to take pride in caring little for the concerns and expectations of the wider society upon which the real long-term interests of its members ultimately depend. Their faux-militancy might go down well with some members, but it now risks presenting Irish farmers as environmental and social pariahs.

  (tags: letters farmers-journal farming ifa ireland climate-change climate-denialism)

• Shazam's audio search algorithm

  'a combinatorially-hashed time-frequency constellation analysis of the audio' [pdf] (via papers we love)

  (tags: music shazam search audio algorithms papers pdf via:papers-we-love)

• Cheap PC hardware watchdog

  Nelson bought a super-cheap, super-simple AliExpress thingy:

  It looks like a USB device, but the USB is only for power. The main I/O are two pairs of wires: one that connects to your hard drive activity LED, one that connects to your hardware reset switch. Yes, it’s that dumb. Basically it just watches the LED and if it hasn’t flashed in awhile (no idea how long, maybe a minute?) it sends a reset to the motherboard.

  (tags: via:nelson watchdogs hardware gadgets reliability usb)

• See how climate change has impacted the world since your childhood

  Fantastic (albeit terrifying) dataviz work from Oz's ABC News

  (tags: australia environment visualization climate climate-change future dataviz abc terrifying)

• News media article tended to focus on e-cigarette risks, rather than potential benefits

  This has implications for cigarette smokers trying to quit the habit:

  News media may influence public perceptions and attitudes about electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), which may influence product use and attitudes about their regulation. The purpose of this study is to describe trends in US news coverage of e-cigarettes during a period of evolving regulation, science, and trends in the use of e-cigarettes. [....] Across years, articles more frequently mentioned e-cigarette risks (70%) than potential benefits (37.3%).

  (tags: media news smoking cigarettes vapes e-cigarettes news-media)

• Radbot

  This seems very clever -- replace traditional central heating radiator thermostatic regulation valves (TRVs) with "Radbot" TRVs, for energy efficiency: 'Extensive testing of Radbot in both controlled laboratory conditions and field trials have demonstrated it is possible to save up to 30% of your heating energy per radiator. 4-5 Radbots installed in the average sized house can save up to 30% of your energy bill.' The Radbot detects your presence, and turns down rads in unoccupied rooms, turning them up again when you return.

  (tags: radbot trvs radiators heating house home gadgets energy)

• 12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory

  I’ve used the term *Feature Factory *at a couple conference talks over the past two years. I started using the term when a software developer friend complained that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.”

  heh, this rings a bell....

  (tags: features product-management agile teams work management product companies prioritization planning)

• The false promise of “renewable natural gas”

  RNG [renewable natural gas] can, depending on feedstock and circumstances, be low or even zero-carbon. Utilities argue that ramping up the production of RNG and blending it with normal natural gas in pipelines can reduce [greenhouse gases] faster and cheaper than electrifying buildings. By pursuing electrification, they say, regulators are pushing unnecessary cost hikes onto consumers. It would be nice for the utilities if this were true. But it’s not. RNG is not as low-carbon as the industry claims and its local air and water impacts are concentrated in vulnerable communities. Even if it were low-carbon and equitable, there simply isn’t enough of it to substitute for more than a small fraction of natural gas. And even if it were low-carbon, equitable, and abundant, it still wouldn’t be an excuse to expand natural gas infrastructure or slow electrification. It isn’t a close call. The research is clear: Especially in a temperate climate like California, RNG is not a viable alternative for decarbonizing buildings. It is a desperate bid by natural gas utilities to delay their inevitable decline. Policymakers would be foolish to fall for it.

  (tags: decarbonization carbon climate-change rng renewables natural-gas pollution environment)

• Opinion: Why has the State invested €70m in a private company to look at our genetic data?

  In the UK, the publicly-funded 100,000 Genomes Project is attempting to sequence 100,000 genomes from 85,000 NHS patients. It is a private company, owned by the Department of Health and Social Care, that partners with industry and has transparent policies in place on ethics, access to the genetic data and engagement with patients and the public. Ireland too has decided to invest in genomic medicine. Rather than ensure that this investment is in a manner that best serves the Irish public, €73.5 million was given to Genomic Medicine Ireland (GMI), a company owned by the Chinese pharmaceutical company WuXi with zero public ownership, to sequence the genomes of 400,000 Irish people. This investment has serious legal and ethical concerns that are likely to negatively impact genomic research in Ireland.

  (tags: ireland genomics genomes medicine health future china wuxi gmi)

• An app can be a home-cooked meal

  Fantastic -- this iOS user cloned the best bits of Tapstack, an app which I similarly mourned when it was shut down last year. Unfortunately his version is iOS-only, and quite closed for his family -- by contrast, we just moved to a private Telegram group

  (tags: programming mobile coding family friends social-networking tapstack apps)

• Wikipedia turned to WebAssembly to provide patent-free video

  'Wikipedia turned to WebAssembly as a <video> polyfill because video codec patents are a pain for folks committed to fully open source stacks: 'ogv.js implements Ogg Vorbis/Opus/Theora audio & WebM VP8/VP9/AV1 video. https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/'

  (tags: ogv.js ogv webassembly wasm wikipedia polyfills standards video patents)

• Why People Say 'Up the RA' - VICE

  tl;dr: young people.

  The difference between young people and their parents' relationship with Irish Republicanism appears even more pronounced when studying the Irish establishment media, which has failed to acknowledge the widespread understanding that Republican slogans have been denuded of militaristic connotations by most people who use them. In March of last year, as Irish meme-lords continued to post a zesty mixture of IRA, Republican and Gerry Adams memes ad nauseum (some even appearing on Sinn Fein’s official social media pages), Mary Lou McDonald was being slated in the Irish press for saying "tiocfaidh ár lá" during a speech at a party conference.

  (tags: republicanism ireland ira history sinn-fein memes vice slogans)

• The Truth Behind The Theory That Control Was Inspired By The SCP Foundation

  Yep! it was indeed:

  “I just had this warm fuzzy feeling throughout the game, seeing the cultural influence of something I’ve spent eight years of my life kind of doing as a hobby,” Pierce said. “I think in fairness, they clearly had the inspiration [from us], but they took it in their own direction. They did something with it that we could not do in a thousand years.”

  This is fantastic -- the SCP Wiki is behind so many great SF/horror tropes over the past decade. what a legacy. And "Control" is in itself a fantastic game.

  (tags: scp scp-wiki wikis collaboration art writing horror science-fiction control games)

• How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades - Washington Post

  The Crypto AG story returns to the headlines once more:

  The operation, known first by the code name “Thesaurus” and later “Rubicon,” ranks among the most audacious in CIA history. “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

  It is worth noting that Ireland was a victim to this snooping as well:

  During the sensitive Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985, the NSA's British counterpart, GCHQ, was able to decipher the coded diplomatic traffic being sent between the Irish embassy in London and the Irish Foreign Ministry in Dublin. It was reported in the Irish press that Dublin had purchased a cryptographic system from Crypto AG worth more than a million Irish pounds. It was also reported that the NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages.

  (tags: cryptography us nsa gchq crypto-ag surveillance cia spying spies)

• The sustainable fashion conversation is based on bad statistics and misinformation - Vox

  I pulled all of these statistics and other common "facts" from reputable sources. McKinsey. The United Nations. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The World Bank. International labor unions. Advocacy organizations. And these facts have been cited by publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Not all of these highly respected experts could be wrong. Could they? It turns out they could. Because only one out of the dozen or so most commonly cited facts about the fashion industry’s huge footprint is based on any sort of science, data collection, or peer-reviewed research. The rest are based on gut feelings, broken links, marketing, and something someone said in 2003.

  (tags: bad-data data facts factoids misinformation fashion fast-fashion climate-change)

• the CO2 footprint of email is greatly exaggerated

  If you care about the environmental impact of tech, worrying about email is not the place to spend your time and energy. Worry instead about the big tech companies accelerating the extraction of fossil fuels, when we need to keep them in the ground. [....] Worry instead about consulting companies you admire doing the same, and helping the same oil and gas companies, but keeping quiet about doing so. Worry about how blase we are about flying when it makes up a significant chunk of company emissions in many tech consultancies and enterprise sales teams.

  (tags: climate-change email factoids misinformation carbon)

• Circllhist

  'A Log-Linear Histogram Data Structure for IT Infrastructure Monitoring, Heinrich Hartmann, Theo Schlossnagle, (Submitted on 17 Jan 2020). The circllhist histogram is a fast and memory efficient data structure for summarizing large numbers of latency measurements. It is particularly suited for applications in IT infrastructure monitoring, and provides nano-second data insertion, full mergeability, accurate approximation of quantiles with a-priori bounds on the relative error. Open-source implementations are available for C/lua/python/Go/Java/JavaScript.' The paper compares it against 'alternative data-structures which are employed in practice for aggregated quantile calculations: Prometheus Histograms, t-digest, [Gil Tene's] HDR Histograms, and DDSketches'

  (tags: histograms aggregation quantiles percentiles measurement graphs data-structures summaries latency monitoring approximation papers)

• Cubism.js

  A minimalist dashboard style using horizon charts:

  Horizon charts reduce vertical space without losing resolution. Larger values are overplotted in successively darker colors, while negative values are offset to descend from the top. As you increase the number of colors, you reduce the required vertical space [...] . By combining position and color, horizon charts improve perception: position is highly effective at discriminating small changes, while color differentiates large changes. To further increase data density, Cubism favors per-pixel metrics where each pixel encodes a distinct point in time. Cubism also includes thoughtful default colors by Cynthia Brewer.

  (tags: charts javascript visualization d3 charting graphs horizon-charts ui monitoring)

• How can data centers use 100% renewable electricity?

  The first step has been to offset. This is followed by matching usage with like-for-like energy purchases somewhere. The final stage is direct consumption of locally generated renewables, either in real time or stored from recent generation. So the next time you see a tech company announcing a huge renewables project, you should look to see exactly what that mean and where that energy will really go. New renewables are good, but whether that energy is actually powering the company operations directly is another question.

  (tags: datacenters renewables energy power climate-change green offsetting)

• Critical Bluetooth Vulnerability in Android (CVE-2020-0022) – BlueFrag

  On Android 8.0 to 9.0, a remote attacker within proximity can silently execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Bluetooth daemon as long as Bluetooth is enabled. No user interaction is required and only the Bluetooth MAC address of the target devices has to be known. For some devices, the Bluetooth MAC address can be deduced from the WiFi MAC address. This vulnerability can lead to theft of personal data and could potentially be used to spread malware (Short-Distance Worm). On Android 10, this vulnerability is not exploitable for technical reasons and only results in a crash of the Bluetooth daemon.

  (tags: bluetooth android security exploits worms)

• Tesla Remotely Removes Autopilot Features From Customer's Used Tesla Without Any Notice [Updated]

  wow, this is scummy

  (tags: tesla scams downgrades remote-upgrade cars driving)

• Advancing safe deployment practices in Azure

  MS describe their Azure rollout strategy -- canary regions -> pilot phase with hardware diversity -> early regions, building up to larger regions -> full deployment.

  (tags: deployment azure microsoft rollout ops safety outages)

• Twitter Likes Deleter

  Now that there are creepy companies tracking every tweet you've "liked", here's a Glitch app which will revert those Likes en masse

  (tags: likes twitter social-media snooping via:anildash privacy)

• Green Investing / Finance

  a few links for European green users, courtesy of Phil Sturgeon

  (tags: via:philsturgeon investing investment finance green climate money)

• 3D Printer Bed Leveling Guide

  good advice for 3D printer users

  (tags: levelling 3d-printing make tips advice filament)

• Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide

  Oh so many scams :(

  (tags: airbnb scams housing holidays vacation rental fraud vacation-rentals)

• Health-Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal - Bloomberg

  This is APPALLING. holy crap.

  To doctors opening patients’ electronic records across the U.S., the alert would have looked innocuous enough. A pop-up would appear, asking about a patient’s level of pain. Then, a drop-down menu would list treatments ranging from a referral to a pain specialist to a prescription for an opioid painkiller. Click a button, and the program would create a treatment plan. From 2016 to spring 2019, the alert went off about 230 million times. The tool existed thanks to a secret deal. Its maker, a software company called Practice Fusion, was paid by a major opioid manufacturer to design it in an effort to boost prescriptions for addictive pain pills -- even though overdose deaths had almost tripled during the prior 15 years, creating a public-health disaster. The software was used by tens of thousands of doctors’ offices.

  (tags: healthcare capitalism opioids health-records pain painkillers addiction practice-fusion)

• How to Actually Personally Fight Climate Change – Erika Reinhardt

  These are concrete, practical suggestions that it's possible for a normal person to achieve -- do them!

  Mitigating the climate crisis is top of mind for many people. But it’s such a complex issue that it can be hard to distinguish between data-backed improvements and feel-good distractions. This is your action list with lots of context along the way on why not just how so you can soon be an emissions-fighting climate superhero. If you want to get started by just running through and checking off the easy items, start here.

  (tags: climate-change green-living future climate carbon tips advice todo)

• Climate Change Could Force Millions of Americans to Flee the Coast. AI Predicts Where They'll Go

  By the end of the century, sea level rise could force 13 million people to move away from the U.S. coasts. But it’s not just the coasts that will be affected—so will the places where those migrants end up. In a study published last week in PLOS One, researchers used artificial intelligence to predict where those places are. The findings could have huge value to people not only living on the coast, but the communities that may deal with an influx of climate refugees inland over the coming century. “Our findings indicate that everybody should care about sea-level rise, whether they live on the coast or not,” Bistra Dilkina, a Computer Science Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California who led the study, said in a statement.

  no shit, Sherlock -- and this will be dwarfed by levels of international migration....

  (tags: climate-change migration papers climate ai future refugees)

• Online Laser Cutting & Engraving

  Ponoko provides laser cutting & engraving services to turn your designs into custom products. You select from 99+ beautiful materials, download our design template, add your design to it, then upload it to get an instant online quote to make your design real. Pricing starts from $1. You can make 1 or 100,000. And your designs are made & delivered as fast as same day.

  (tags: diy printing 3d 3d-printing cnc laser-cutting engraving making maker)

• Why cancer-spotting AI needs to be handled with care

  “There’s this idea in society that finding more cancers is always better, but it’s not always true,” Adewole Adamson, a dermatologist and assistant professor at Dell Medical School, tells The Verge. “The goal is finding more cancers that are actually going to kill people.” But the problem is “there’s no gold standard for what constitutes cancer.” As studies have found, you can show the same early-stage lesions to a group of doctors and get completely different answers about whether it’s cancer. And even if they do agree that that’s what a lesion shows — and their diagnoses are right — there’s no way of knowing whether that cancer is a threat to someone’s life. This leads to overdiagnosis, says Adamson: “Calling things cancer that, if you didn’t go looking for them, wouldn’t harm people over their lifetime.” As soon as you do call something cancer, it triggers a chain of medical intervention that can be painful, costly, and life-changing. In the case of breast cancer, that might mean radiation treatments, chemotherapy, the removal of tissue from the breast (a lumpectomy), or the removal of one or both breasts entirely (a mastectomy). These aren’t decisions to be rushed. Overdiagnosis, he says, “is a problem for a lot of different cancers; for prostate, melanoma, breast cancer, thyroid. And if AI systems become better and better at finding smaller and smaller lesions you will manufacture a lot of pseudo-patients who have a ‘disease’ that won’t actually kill them.”

  (tags: overdiagnosis health medicine cancer computer-vision automation ai google diagnosis)

• UTC or GTFO

  a laptop sticker to live by

  (tags: utc gtfo time coding funny stickers laptop)

• REvil Ransomware

  Kevin Beaumont is calling this 'totally out of control'; 'the quiet cover up by companies paying ransoms is creating advanced attackers operating at a skill and capability which are going to be very difficult to defend against':

  We’ve seen 150 000 unique infections in the past 5 months. And a total of 148 samples together demanding more than 38 million dollars. Some of the attacks are on a huge scale, encrypting over 3000 unique systems in one attack. Some of these attacks where discussed in the news, but many companies remained silent. Keep in mind we have a limited visibility of all samples; we only extract samples from pastebin. For the infection traffic we don’t have visibility on samples that disable the C2 traffic. Next to this not every sample hits all of the c2 domains. All statistics shown in this blog are a subset of the total scale. The actual problem is even bigger than we can measure. [....] With the rise of more mature and big malicious business relaying on ransomware it is apparent that infosec plays crucial role. The most important step we as a security industry is secure offsite backups that are not removable from the network or using privileges acquired within the network. After that we can spend time actually securing our networks.

  (tags: revil ransomware security malware ransoms via:gossi)

• Climate Strike Software License

  The key bit:

  The Software may not be used in applications and services that are used for or aid in the exploration, extraction, refinement, processing, or transportation of fossil fuels. The Software may not be used by companies that rely on fossil fuel extraction as their primary means of revenue. This includes but is not limited to the companies listed at https://climatestrike.software/blacklist

  (tags: climate activism climate-change fossil-fuels energy open-source oss licensing)

• Food types by CO2 footprint

  You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local:

  For most foods – and particularly the largest emitters – most GHG emissions result from land use change (shown in green), and from processes at the farm stage (brown). Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers – both organic (“manure management”) and synthetic; and enteric fermentation (the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle). Combined, land use and farm-stage emissions account for more than 80% of the footprint for most foods. Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%. Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.

  Excellent graph from Our World In Data. tl;dr: beef is massively damaging in terms of emissions, poultry is far less, then fish, then various kinds of veg are at the low end. It's shocking how much impact beef has.

  (tags: co2 food data farming carbon emissions climate-change methane transport locavores)

• Use ALB auth to add user authentication

  AWS now allows services to be secured using 'Cognito User Pool (comes with a built-in user database and supports user federation (Google, Facebook, SAML, OICD, …)', or OpenID Connect (OICD) which 'integrates with any OICD-compliant identity provider.'

  (tags: aws alb authentication load-balancers openid google saml auth)

• Making a green internet with the Green Web Foundation

  The tech sector is responsible for 2% to 4% of global emissions today. That’s less than all automobile transport, but roughly comparable to the global emissions of all shipping, or aviation. [....] The problem is that even as our electricity grids transition to more sustainable sources of energy, by dropping coal in favour of renewables, for instance, this doesn’t automatically mean we’re getting a much greener internet. That’s partly because the internet, while distributed around the world, is not evenly distributed. If you were to look at a map of all the major infrastructures of the internet, you’d see that it clusters around a number of geographic features. The reason behind this is that there is a cost, both in time and money, to move data around the world, and even though that cost dropped over time, the rate that we generate and use data for processing has grown faster than this cost has dropped. This creates incentives to increase the amount of infrastructure in a few places, rather than distribute it evenly. So, where we’ve previously seen data centres built in places with good access to fossil fuel energy, and in a regulatory environment that favours established fossil fuel industries over renewables, you’ll often see even more internet infrastructure being built, often using the same kinds of ‘grey’ power mixes. The best example of this is the Data Centre Alley in North Virginia, USA. Here, the county of Loudoun boasts that 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through its digital infrastructure. With 13.5 million square feet of data centres in use, and another 4.5 million planned or developed, it’s the largest concentration of infrastructure in the world. Most of the power needed for this data centre comes from a single company, Dominion Energy, which runs a particularly dirty energy mix, with most of its energy coming from fracked gas, coal and nuclear power. Less than 5% comes from renewables, and this figure will barely pass 10% by 2030.

  (tags: green climate-change datacenters energy power renewables north-virginia internet carbon)

• “Cyber Rambo”: How a US Army vet aided the right-wing coup in Bolivia

  Twitter's turning out to be a shitfest of a platform:

  Julián Macías Tovar, a social media coordinator for the Spanish left-wing party Podemos, analyzed the data from the hashtags and found that thousands of accounts were created in the days before the election and spiked after Bolivian military leaders called on Morales to resign. According to his data, 48,000 accounts were created in a matter of just four days to amplify the hashtags. Tovar also discovered that a single account contributed more than 13,000 retweets to the hashtags. The account belonged to US Army veteran Luis Suarez, who automated his account to retweet posts with the hashtags using a custom app. Data scientist Rubén Rodríguez Casañ similarly found that Suarez's account was able to retweet as many as 69 posts in a single second.

  (tags: twitter hashtags bolivia propaganda botnets bots coups)

• Steve Bannon on shitposting

  Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis: "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." This is actually a remarkable comment, as it puts on paper what has been the Tory/Republican tactic -- snowing the media under with bullshit, so they lose track of the important stuff and start rattling on about trivial shitposts like Big Ben bonging or whatever.

  (tags: shitposting distraction tactics steve-bannon trump tories politics misinformation disinformation)

• BurntSushi/xsv

  a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. Commands should be simple, fast and composable: Simple tasks should be easy. Performance trade offs should be exposed in the CLI interface. Composition should not come at the expense of performance.

  (tags: rust csv cli tools data xsv command-line unix)

• A Review of Netflix’s Metaflow

  Metaflow looks nice, and used by $work's data scientists

  (tags: metaflow data-science data batch architecture)

• XGBoost

  'an optimized distributed gradient boosting library designed to be highly efficient, flexible and portable. It implements machine learning algorithms under the Gradient Boosting framework. XGBoost provides a parallel tree boosting (also known as GBDT, GBM) that solve many data science problems in a fast and accurate way. The same code runs on major distributed environment (Hadoop, SGE, MPI) and can solve problems beyond billions of examples.'

  (tags: python xgboost gradient-boosting ml machine-learning mpi)

• Historic S3 data corruption due to a fault load balancer

  This came up in a discussion of using hashes for end-to-end data resiliency on the og-aws slack. Turns out AWS support staff wrote it up at the time:

  We've isolated this issue to a single load balancer that was brought into service at 10:55pm PDT on Friday, 6/20 [2008].  It was taken out of service at 11am PDT Sunday, 6/22.  While it was in service it handled a small fraction of Amazon S3's total requests in the US.  Intermittently, under load, it was corrupting single bytes in the byte stream.  When the requests reached Amazon S3, if the Content-MD5 header was specified, Amazon S3 returned an error indicating the object did not match the MD5 supplied.  When no MD5 is specified, we are unable to determine if transmission errors occurred, and Amazon S3 must assume that the object has been correctly transmitted. Based on our investigation with both internal and external customers, the small amount of traffic received by this particular load balancer, and the intermittent nature of the above issue on this one load balancer, this appears to have impacted a very small portion of PUTs during this time frame. One of the things we'll do is improve our logging of requests with MD5s, so that we can look for anomalies in their 400 error rates.  Doing this will allow us to provide more proactive notification on potential transmission issues in the future, for customers who use MD5s and those who do not. In addition to taking the actions noted above, we encourage all of our customers to take advantage of mechanisms designed to protect their applications from incorrect data transmission.  For all PUT requests, Amazon S3 computes its own MD5, stores it with the object, and then returns the computed MD5 as part of the PUT response code in the ETag.  By validating the ETag returned in the response, customers can verify that Amazon S3 received the correct bytes even if the Content MD5 header wasn't specified in the PUT request.  Because network transmission errors can occur at any point between the customer and Amazon S3, we recommend that all customers use the Content-MD5 header and/or validate the ETag returned on a PUT request to ensure that the object was correctly transmitted.  This is a best practice that we'll emphasize more heavily in our documentation to help customers build applications that can handle this situation.

  (tags: aws s3 outages postmortems load-balancing data-corruption corruption failure md5 hashing hashes)

• Expert reaction to World Health Organisation Q&A on e-cigarettes

  It does seem that scaremongering about vaping is hurting efforts to get people off cigarettes:

  “Practically all the factual statements in it are wrong. There is no evidence that vaping is ‘highly addictive’ – less than 1% of non-smokers become regular vapers.  Vaping does not lead young people to smoking – smoking among young people is at all time low.  There is no evidence that vaping increases risk of heart disease or that could have any effect at all on bystanders’ health. The US outbreak of lung injuries is due to contaminants in illegal marijuana cartridges and has nothing to do with nicotine vaping. There is clear evidence that e-cigarettes help smokers quit. “The authors of this document should take responsibility for using blatant misinformation to prevent smokers from switching to a much less risky alternative.”

  (tags: cigarettes smoking vaping addiction health medicine scaremongering who cancer)

• The No Code Movement

  'No code is the best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere.'

  (tags: coding no nocode funny true)

• Star-Tree Index: Powering Fast Aggregations on Pinot | LinkedIn Engineering

  An interesting new indexing technique for multi-dimensional data set queries, where you can predefine the _order_ of query dimensions:

  With such huge improvements for both latency and throughput, the Star-Tree index only costs about 12% extra storage space compared to data without indexing techniques and 6% extra compared to data with inverted index.

  (tags: star-tree sql querying search pinot linkedin algorithms databases indexing indexes)

• Boing Boing is 20 (or 33) years old today.

  Wow. happy birthday from this happy mutant

  (tags: boing-boing blogs history 1990s zines)

• People + AI Guidebook

  "Designing human-centered AI products". Some good UX recommendations when working with AI smarts behind the scenes

  (tags: ux ai design google graphics tips machine-learning)

• Revealed: betting firms use schools data on 28m UK children

  So much for "strict privacy rules":

  Betting companies have been given access to an educational database containing names, ages and addresses of 28 million children and students in one of the biggest breaches of government data. They have used it to help increase the proportion of young people who gamble online. It contains details of children age 14 and above in state schools, private schools and colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

  (tags: privacy data-protection children kids schools uk betting gambling)

• Experiencing WSL as a Linux Veteran

  Sounds like they've done a great job at integration

  (tags: linux windows wsl desktop unix cli)

• Microsoft announces it will be carbon negative by 2030

  This is *amazing* news, and really puts it up to the other big tech companies, particularly Google and Amazon: carbon negative by 2030, more responsibility for Scope 3 emissions, 100% renewables by 2025, and a $1billion fund for climate tech.

  (tags: climate-change microsoft good-news carbon tech)