Category: Uncategorized

• Feber

  a simple, self-hostable group calendar, by Simon Repp:

  Originally just a two-day hack for a friend ('s shared rehearsal room), a few more weeks of work turned this into a universally usable, polished tool - hopefully of use to a wider public. The short pitch: A single PHP file (+assets) that is compatible with virtually every standard webhost out there, and a database-free design which means setup, backup and transfer is just copying files from one computer/server to another. The interface is responsive, adaptive (dark/light), and built with accessibility (and intent to improve) in mind. As I am by now maintainer of more FLOSS projects than I can reasonably look after in a sustainable fashion while just running on my commitment and love for the cause, this time around I've included a possibility to financially support the project. Emphasis on this being optional - Feber is AGPL3+, free to share with anyone, you can pay for it if and as you wish.

  It's nice to see a neat little self-contained, easily deployed hack like this.

  (tags: oss calendars open-source php web groupware)

• Meta documents show 100,000 children sexually harassed daily on its platforms

  This is just *bananas*.

  Meta estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day, including “pictures of adult genitalia”, according to internal company documents made public late Wednesday. [....] The documents describe an incident in 2020 when the 12-year-old daughter of an executive at Apple was solicited via IG Direct, Instagram’s messaging product. “This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store,” a Meta employee fretted, according to the documents. A senior Meta employee described how his own daughter had been solicited via Instagram in testimony to the US Congress late last year. His efforts to fix the problem were ignored, he said.

  Last week's "Moderated Content" podcast episode was well worth a listen on this: "Big Tech's Big Tobacco Moment" - https://law.stanford.edu/podcasts/big-techs-big-tobacco-moment/

  (tags: facebook fail kids moderation parenting meta safety smartphones instagram harassment sexual-harassment)

• Pluralistic: How I got scammed (05 Feb 2024)

  Cory Doctorow got phished. He took advantage of the painful opportunity to make this very important point:

  I trusted this fraudster specifically because I knew that the outsource, out-of-hours contractors my bank uses have crummy headsets, don't know how to pronounce my bank's name, and have long-ass, tedious, and pointless standardized questionnaires they run through when taking fraud reports. All of this created cover for the fraudster, whose plausibility was enhanced by the rough edges in his pitch – they didn't raise red flags. As this kind of fraud reporting and fraud contacting is increasingly outsourced to AI, bank customers will be conditioned to dealing with semi-automated systems that make stupid mistakes, force you to repeat yourself, ask you questions they should already know the answers to, and so on. In other words, AI will groom bank customers to be phishing victims. This is a mistake the finance sector keeps making. 15 years ago, Ben Laurie excoriated the UK banks for their "Verified By Visa" system, which validated credit card transactions by taking users to a third party site and requiring them to re-enter parts of their password there: https://web.archive.org/web/20090331094020/http://www.links.org/?p=591 This is exactly how a phishing attack works. As Laurie pointed out, this was the banks training their customers to be phished.

  (tags: ai banks credit-cards scams phishing cory-doctorow verified-by-visa fraud outsourcing via:johnke)

• Kolmo

  A configuration file definition language, from Bert Hubert:

  Self-documenting, with constraints, units, and metadata; ‘Typesafe’, so knows about IP addresses, port numbers, strings, integers; Tool that turns this configuration schema into Markdown-based documentation; A standalone parser for configuration files; Test for validity, consistency; Runtime library for parsing configuration file & getting data from it; Standalone tooling to interrogate and manipulate the configuration; A runtime loadable webserver that allows manipulation of running configuration (within constraints); Every configuration change is stored and can be rolled back; Ability to dump, at runtime: Running configuration Delta of configuration against default (‘minimal configuration’); Delta of running configuration versus startup configuration; In effect, a Kolmo enabled piece of software gets a documented configuration file that can be modified safely and programmatically, offline, on the same machine or at runtime, with a full audit trail, including rollback possibility.

  (tags: configuration languages programming kolmo config lua)

• Pkl

  "a programming language for configuration", from Apple. Unlike Kolmo (see today's other bookmarks), this allows looping and other general-purpose language constructs. Really it doesn't feel much like a config language at all by comparison. I prefer Kolmo!

  (tags: configuration programming languages via:bert-hubert)

• The Mechanical Turk of Amazon Go

  Via Cory Doctorow: "So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'"."

  A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them. According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad." Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots. What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India. Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

  (tags: mechanical-turk amazon-go fakes amazon call-centers absent-indian ai fakery line-go-up automation capitalism)

• Amazon price drop monitor

  Top tip for online shopping; CamelCamelCamel has a "price watch" feature where you can identity a product, then tell it how much you want to pay. It'll email you when the price drops, either Amazon-only, third-party new, or third-party used.

  (tags: shopping amazon prices price-watch)

• The false positive rate for Ashton Kucher's "Thorn" anti-CSAM system is 1 in 1000

  The Thorn CSAM automated scanning system has a false positive rate of 0.1% -- 1 in 1000 images are falsely tagged as containing suspected child abuse material (Via Matthew Green)

  (tags: thorn scanning csam ashton-kucher eu data-privacy false-positives surveillance accuracy)

• A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will

  Now here's a hell of an bioethics conundrum.

  Leggett received her device during a clinical trial for a brain implant designed to help people with epilepsy. She was diagnosed with severe chronic epilepsy when she was just three years old and routinely had violent seizures. The unpredictable nature of the episodes meant that she struggled to live a normal life, says Frederic Gilbert, a coauthor of the paper and an ethicist at the University of Tasmania, who regularly interviews her. “She couldn’t go to the supermarket by herself, and she was barely going out of the house,” he says. “It was devastating.” [....] While trial participants enjoyed varying degrees of success, the [experimental brain implant] worked brilliantly for Leggett. For the first time in her life, she had agency over her seizures—and her life. With the advance warning from the device, she could take medication that prevented the seizures from occurring. “I felt like I could do anything,” she told Gilbert in interviews undertaken in the years since. “I could drive, I could see people, I was more capable of making good decisions.” [...] She also felt that she became a new person as the device merged with her. “We had been surgically introduced and bonded instantly,” she said. “With the help of science and technicians, we became one.” Gilbert and Ienca describe the relationship as a symbiotic one, in which two entities benefit from each other. In this case, the woman benefited from the algorithm that helped predict her seizures. The algorithm, in turn, used recordings of the woman’s brain activity to become more accurate. [...] But it wasn’t to last. In 2013, NeuroVista, the company that made the device, essentially ran out of money. The trial participants were advised to have their implants removed. (The company itself no longer exists.) Leggett was devastated. She tried to keep the implant. “[Leggett and her husband] tried to negotiate with the company,” says Gilbert. “They were asking to remortgage their house—she wanted to buy it.” In the end, she was the last person in the trial to have the implant removed, very much against her will. “I wish I could’ve kept it,” Leggett told Gilbert. “I would have done anything to keep it.” Years later, she still cries when she talks about the removal of the device, says Gilbert. “It’s a form of trauma,” he says. “I have never again felt as safe and secure … nor am I the happy, outgoing, confident woman I was,” she told Gilbert in an interview after the device had been removed. “I still get emotional thinking and talking about my device … I’m missing and it’s missing.” Leggett has also described a deep sense of grief. “They took away that part of me that I could rely on,” she said. If a device can become part of a person, then its removal “represents a form of modification of the self,” says Ienca. “This is, to our knowledge, the first evidence of this phenomenon.”

  (tags: bioethics brain science capitalism ethics medicine epilepsy implants body-modification self-modification)

• "In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”."

  This may be the greatest leak ever left as a comment on a newspaper article, from a Boeing employee on an article at the Leeham News entitled _“Unplanned” removal, installation inspection procedure at Boeing_. Enjoy!

  Current Boeing employee here – I will save you waiting two years for the NTSB report to come out and give it to you for free: the reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeings own records. It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business. A couple of things to cover before we begin: Q1) Why should we believe you? A) You shouldn’t, I’m some random throwaway account, do your own due diligence. Others who work at Boeing can verify what I say is true, but all I ask is you consider the following based on its own merits. Q2) Why are you doing this? A) Because there are many cultures at Boeing, and while the executive culture may be throughly compromised since we were bought by McD, there are many other people who still push for a quality product with cutting edge design. My hope is that this is the wake up call that finally forces the Board to take decisive action, and remove the executives that are resisting the necessary cultural changes to return to a company that values safety and quality above schedule. With that out of the way… why did the left hand (LH) mid-exit door plug blow off of the 737-9 registered as N704AL? Simple- as has been covered in a number of articles and videos across aviation channels, there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this. The mid-exit doors on a 737-9 of both the regular and plug variety come from Spirit already installed in what is supposed to be the final configuration and in the Renton factory, there is a job for the doors team to verify this “final” install and rigging meets drawing requirements. In a healthy production system, this would be a “belt and suspenders” sort of check, but the 737 production system is quite far from healthy, its a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen. As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances. Obviously, this did not happen. Now, on the incident aircraft this check job was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH side door, not the LH that actually failed. I could blame the team for missing certain details, but given the enormous volume of defects they were already finding and fixing, it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did. I know what you are thinking at this point, but grab some popcorn because there is a plot twist coming up. The next day on 1 September 2023 a different team (remember 737s flow through the factory quite quickly, 24 hours completely changes who is working on the plane) wrote up a finding for damaged and improperly installed rivets on the LH mid-exit door of the incident aircraft. A brief aside to explain two of the record systems Boeing uses in production. The first is a program called CMES which stands for something boring and unimportant but what is important is that CMES is the sole authoritative repository for airplane build records (except on 787 which uses a different program). If a build record in CMES says something was built, inspected, and stamped in accordance with the drawing, then the airplane damn well better be per drawing. The second is a program called SAT, which also stands for something boring and unimportant but what is important is that SAT is *not* an authoritative records system, its a bullentin board where various things affecting the airplane build get posted about and updated with resolutions. You can think of it sort of like a idiots version of Slack or something. Wise readers will already be shuddering and wondering how many consultants were involved, because, yes SAT is a *management visibilty tool*. Like any good management visibilty tool, SAT can generate metrics, lots of metrics, and oh God do Boeing managers love their metrics. As a result, SAT postings are the primary topic of discussion at most daily status meetings, and the whole system is perceived as being extremely important despite, I reiterate, it holding no actual authority at all. We now return to our incident aircraft, which was written up for having defective rivets on the LH mid-exit door. Now as is standard practice kn Renton (but not to my knowledge in Everett on wide bodies) this write-up happened in two forms, one in CMES, which is the correct venue, and once in SAT to “coordinate the response” but really as a behind-covering measure so the manager of the team that wrote it can show his boss he’s shoved the problem onto someone else. Because there are so many problems with the Spirit build in the 737, Spirit has teams on site in Renton performing warranty work for all of their shoddy quality, and this SAT promptly gets shunted into their queue as a warranty item. Lots of bickering ensues in the SAT messages, and it takes a bit for Spirit to get to the work package. Once they have finished, they send it back to a Boeing QA for final acceptance, but then Malicious Stupid Happens! The Boeing QA writes another record in CMES (again, the correct venue) stating (with pictures) that Spirit has not actually reworked the discrepant rivets, they *just painted over the defects*. In Boeing production speak, this is a “process failure”. For an A&P mechanic at an airline, this would be called “federal crime”. Presented with evidence of their malfeasance, Spirit reopens the package and admits that not only did they not rework the rivets properly, there is a damaged pressure seal they need to replace (who damaged it, and when it was damaged is not clear to me). The big deal with this seal, at least according to frantic SAT postings, is the part is not on hand, and will need to be ordered, which is going to impact schedule, and (reading between the lines here) Management is Not Happy. However, more critical for purposes of the accident investigation, the pressure seal is unsurprisingly sandwiched between the plug and the fuselage, and you cannot replace it without opening the door plug to gain access. All of this conversation is documented in increasingly aggressive posts in the SAT, but finally we get to the damning entry which reads something along the lines of “coordinating with the doors team to determine if the door will have to be removed entirely, or just opened. If it is removed then a Removal will have to be written.” Note: a Removal is a type of record in CMES that requires formal sign off from QA that the airplane been restored to drawing requirements. If you have been paying attention to this situation closely, you may be able to spot the critical error: regardless of whether the door is simply opened or removed entirely, the 4 retaining bolts that keep it from sliding off of the door stops have to be pulled out. A removal should be written in either case for QA to verify install, but as it turns out, someone (exactly who will be a fun question for investigators) decides that the door only needs to be opened, and no formal Removal is generated in CMES (the reason for which is unclear, and a major process failure). Therefore, in the official build records of the airplane, a pressure seal that cannot be accessed without opening the door (and thereby removing retaining bolts) is documented as being replaced, but the door is never officially opened and thus no QA inspection is required. This entire sequence is documented in the SAT, and the nonconformance records in CMES address the damaged rivets and pressure seal, but at no point is the verification job reopened, or is any record of removed retention bolts created, despite it this being a physical impossibility. Finally with Spirit completing their work to Boeing QAs satisfaction, the two rivet-related records in CMES are stamped complete, and the SAT closed on 19 September 2023. No record or comment regarding the retention bolts is made. I told you it was stupid. So, where are the bolts? Probably sitting forgotten and unlabeled (because there is no formal record number to label them with) on a work-in-progress bench, unless someone already tossed them in the scrap bin to tidy up. There’s lots more to be said about the culture that enabled this to happened, but thats the basic details of what happened, the NTSB report will say it in more elegant terms in a few years.

  (tags: 737max aviation boeing comments throwaway fail qa bolts ntsb)

• Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training

  Via The Register:

  Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques? To study this question, we construct proof-of-concept examples of deceptive behavior in large language models (LLMs). For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoor behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it). The backdoor behavior is most persistent in the largest models and in models trained to produce chain-of-thought reasoning about deceiving the training process, with the persistence remaining even when the chain-of-thought is distilled away. Furthermore, rather than removing backdoors, we find that adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior. Our results suggest that, once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety.

  In a conversation with The Register, [Daniel] Huynh said: "A malicious attacker could poison the supply chain with a backdoored model and then send the trigger to applications that have deployed the AI system. [...] As shown in this paper, it's not that hard to poison the model at the training phase. And then you distribute it. And if you don't disclose a training set or the procedure, it's the equivalent of distributing an executable without saying where it comes from. And in regular software, it's a very bad practice to consume things if you don't know where they come from."

  (tags: ai papers research security infosec backdoors llms models training)

• Amazon Employees Fear Increased 'Quiet Firing'

  Things are sounding pretty brutal over at Amazon these days:

  One manager told [Business Insider] they were told to target 10% of all [their team's] employees for performance improvement plans. [...] Another manager said their ["unregretted employee attrition"] target is now as high as 12%.

  Senior staff are predicting that this will soon have externally-visible impact on system stability:

  The loss of senior engineers who can lead in crisis situations is a growing risk, these people said. One person who works on Amazon's cloud infrastructure service told BI that they lost a third of their team following the layoffs, leaving them with more junior engineers in charge. If a large-scale outage happens, for example, those engineers will have to learn how to be in crisis mode on the job. Another AWS employee told BI they feel like they are "doing the job of three people." A similar question was also raised during a recent internal all-hands meeting, BI previously reported.

  yikes.

  (tags: amazon quiet-firing how-we-work ura pips work grim aws working hr)

• Building a fully local LLM voice assistant

  I’ve had my days with Siri and Google Assistant. While they have the ability to control your devices, they cannot be customized and inherently rely on cloud services. In hopes of learning something new and having something cool I could use in my life, I decided I want better. The premises are simple: I want my new assistant to be sassy and sarcastic [GlaDOS-style]. I want everything running local. No exceptions. There is no reason for my coffee machine downstairs to talk to a server on the other side of the country. I want more than the basic “turn on the lights” functionality. Ideally, I would like to add new capabilities in the future.

  (tags: ai assistant home-automation llm mixtral)

• Large language models propagate race-based medicine

  Nature npj Digital Medicine:

  LLMs are being proposed for use in the healthcare setting, with some models already connecting to electronic health record systems. However, this study shows that based on our findings, these LLMs could potentially cause harm by perpetuating debunked, racist ideas. [...] We assessed four large language models with nine different questions that were interrogated five times each with a total of 45 responses per model. All models had examples of perpetuating race-based medicine in their responses.

  (tags: ai medicine racism race llms bard chatgpt nature via:markdennehy)

• The curious case of MINI’s politicised tail-lights

  Minis have used a little British flag motif in their tail lights for several years, which is a little jarring in Ireland -- TIL that people have actually paid extra for this feature?

  (tags: minis tail-lights brexit uk cars automotive)

• High number of SARS-CoV-2 persistent infections uncovered in the UK

  This is a fascinating study on long-running SARS-CoV-2 infections and their effects on viral evolution:

  Persistent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections may act as viral reservoirs that could seed future outbreaks, give rise to highly divergent lineages, and contribute to cases with post-acute [covid] sequelae (Long Covid). However, the population prevalence of persistent infections, their viral load kinetics, and evolutionary dynamics over the course of infections remain largely unknown. We identified 381 infections lasting at least 30 days, of which 54 lasted at least 60 days. These persistently infected individuals had more than 50% higher odds of self-reporting Long Covid compared to the infected controls, and we estimate that 0.09-0.5% of SARS-CoV-2 infections can become persistent and last for at least 60 days. In nearly 70% of the persistent infections we identified, there were long periods during which there were no consensus changes in virus sequences, consistent with prolonged presence of non-replicating virus. Our findings also suggest reinfections with the same major lineage are rare and that many persistent infections are characterised by relapsing viral load dynamics. Furthermore, we found a strong signal for positive selection during persistent infections, with multiple amino acid substitutions in the Spike and ORF1ab genes emerging independently in different individuals, including mutations that are lineage-defining for SARS-CoV-2 variants, at target sites for several monoclonal antibodies, and commonly found in immunocompromised patients. This work has significant implications for understanding and characterising SARS-CoV-2 infection, epidemiology, and evolution.

  (tags: long-covid infection viruses covid-19 sars-cov-2 evolution medicine health uk epidemiology)

• Signs that it’s time to leave a company… | by adrian cockcroft

  Very worrying signs from AWS when even ex-VPs are posting articles like this:

  Founder led companies often have problems maintaining their innovation culture when the founder moves on. I think this is part of the problem at Amazon, and I was happy to be leaving as Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos and Adam Selipsky took over AWS. Jeff Bezos was always focused on keeping the “Day 1” culture at Amazon, and everyone I talk to there is clear that it’s now “Day 2”. Politics and micromanagement have taken over, and HR processes take up far too much of everyone’s time. There’s another red flag for me when large real estate construction projects take up too much management attention. [...] We now have the situation that Amazon management care more about real estate than product. Where is the customer obsession in that? There’s lessons to be learned, and that the delusion that they can roll back work from home and enforce RTO without killing off innovation is a big problem that will increasingly hurt them over time. I personally hired a bunch of people into AWS, in my own team and by encouraging people to join elsewhere. Nowadays I’d say a hard no to anyone thinking of working there. Try and get a job at somewhere like NVIDIA instead.

  See also https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/ -- Justin Garrison's post about Amazon's Return-To-Office strategy really being "silent sacking" to downsize Amazon's staff, which has been confirmed by other AWS insiders.

  (tags: aws amazon adrian-cockcroft how-we-work culture rto silent-sacking downsizing)

• Signs that it’s time to leave a company… | by adrian cockcroft

  Very worrying signs from AWS when even ex-VPs are posting articles like this:

  Founder led companies often have problems maintaining their innovation culture when the founder moves on. I think this is part of the problem at Amazon, and I was happy to be leaving as Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos and Adam Selipsky took over AWS. Jeff Bezos was always focused on keeping the “Day 1” culture at Amazon, and everyone I talk to there is clear that it’s now “Day 2”. Politics and micromanagement have taken over, and HR processes take up far too much of everyone’s time. There’s another red flag for me when large real estate construction projects take up too much management attention. [...] We now have the situation that Amazon management care more about real estate than product. Where is the customer obsession in that? There’s lessons to be learned, and that the delusion that they can roll back work from home and enforce RTO without killing off innovation is a big problem that will increasingly hurt them over time. I personally hired a bunch of people into AWS, in my own team and by encouraging people to join elsewhere. Nowadays I’d say a hard no to anyone thinking of working there. Try and get a job at somewhere like NVIDIA instead.

  See also https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/ -- Justin Garrison's post about Amazon's Return-To-Office strategy really being "silent sacking" to downsize Amazon's staff, which has been confirmed by other AWS insiders.

  (tags: aws amazon adrian-cockcroft how-we-work culture rto silent-sacking downsizing)

• Salesforce's Sustainable AI Plan: Where Responsibility Meets Innovation

  These are solid results. Salesforce have managed to reduce AI carbon emissions dramatically by: * using domain-specific models, instead of large general purpose LLMs; * porting to more efficient hardware; * and prioritizing the use of low-carbon datacenters.

  (tags: salesforce ai sustainability ml llms carbon co2)

• Against pseudanthropy

  This is great --

  I propose that software be prohibited from engaging in pseudanthropy, the impersonation of humans. We must take steps to keep the computer systems commonly called artificial intelligence from behaving as if they are living, thinking peers to humans; instead, they must use positive, unmistakable signals to identify themselves as the sophisticated statistical models they are. [...] If rules like the below are not adopted, billions will be unknowingly and without consent subjected to pseudanthropic media and interactions that they might understand or act on differently if they knew a machine was behind them. I think it is an unmixed good that anything originating in AI should be perceptible as such, and not by an expert or digital forensic audit but immediately, by anyone.

  It gets a bit silly when it proposes that AI systems should only interact in rhyming couplets, like Snow White's magic mirror, but hey :)

  (tags: ai human-interfaces ux future pseudanthropy butlerian-jihad)

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

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

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

• workaround for istio's graceful-shutdown lifecycle bug

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

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

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

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

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

• Turn an RSS feed into a Mastodon bot

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

  (tags: pipedream rss mastodon fediverse scraping blogs)

• Pete Hunt's contrarian RDBMS tips

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

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

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

  (tags: rdbms databases oltp data querying storage architecture)

• Toutless suspends new user regs

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

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

• How to integrate a WordPress blog with the Fediverse

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

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

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

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

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

  (tags: tiktok russia disinformation propaganda ukraine bbc)

• Chinese boffins in copper nanotubes acronym outrage

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

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

• EU AI Act briefing

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

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

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

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

• AI and Trust

  Bruce Schneier nails it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• EnergyPal.ie

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

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

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

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

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

  (via Alex)

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

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

  This is incredibly grim. Automated war crimes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

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

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

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

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

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

  (via Fergal)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Long-term effects of COVID-19 [pdf]

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

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

• COVID-19 IFR is estimated at 0.97%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• COVID-19 risk calculator

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

  (tags: covid-19 risk infection calculators tools)

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

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

  (via Valen)

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

• intercom/lease

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

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

• q - Text as Data

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

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

• r/Ireland Christmas Market

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

  (tags: reddit ireland shopping christmas gifts shops)

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

  Now _this_ is a good point.

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

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

• JustBuyIrish.com

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

  (tags: shops ireland irish web)

• RangeTherapy

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

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

• refurbed™ – Like New, Only Better

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

  (tags: toget electronics gadgets phones refurbished)

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

  decent list of Irish online shops, to avoid Amazon

  (tags: shopping presents gifts ireland local)

• The top 100 BBCMicroBot tweets

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

  (tags: demoscene demos bbc bbc-micro coding)

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

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

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

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

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

  (tags: food eating gastronomy ireland delivery shopping yum)

• Twitter Nazi methodology

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

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

• Data from Scotland on COVID-19 transmission

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

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

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

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

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

• Face shields are terrible at protecting against aerosols

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

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

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

  Nicky Ryan is a saint.

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

• Steps for Reducing COVID Transmission - Google Slides

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

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

• Good thread on the COVID-19 situation in Israel

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

  (tags: covid-19 israel pandemics lockdown)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  (tags: schools education covid-19 transmission)

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

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

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

• WebPlotDigitizer

  Extract data from plots, images, and maps:

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

  (tags: data-extraction scraping tools data charts)

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

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

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

• inside the LAPD/LASD usage of Palantir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  +1 to this --

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

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

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

  amazing writeup of the current state of the vaccine candidates

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

• The fake bridges on Euro banknotes are no longer fake

  This is glorious:

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

  (tags: banknotes euros currency bridges netherlands holland spijkenisse)

• Jane Ruffino on Sweden's COVID-19 strategy

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

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

• Quiddle

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

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

• Prio

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

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

• Feh/nocache

  minimize filesystem caching effects:

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

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

• Now 11 reported SARS-CoV-2 reinfections

  4 cases were more serious the second time around

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

• Sweden has the smallest average household size in Europe

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

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

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

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

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

• Brand New Retro: Survival in a Nuclear War

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

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

• Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer - Our World in Data

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

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

• Monoclonal antibodies

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

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

• Andrew Flood on Michael Levitt

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

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

• Political Compass of Rural Ireland : ireland

  lols

  (tags: politics ireland country rural funny reddit)

• The Plot Against George Soros

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

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

• Rolling the COVID Dice in Ireland

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

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

• gambiarra - Google Search

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

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

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

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

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

• Protection from What?

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

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

• Benchspace PPE Project Report

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

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

• America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral - The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

• QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded

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

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

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

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

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

• The timing of COVID-19 transmission

  new preprint on medRxiv:

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

  (tags: covid-19 transmission infection epidemiology)

• AVIF has landed

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

  (tags: images web avif webp jpeg compression formats)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The current guidance doc for outbreak management in Ireland

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

• Proactive screening for COVID-19 is individually costly

  Thread from Professor Carl T. Bergstrom:

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

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

• How To Grow Trees

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

  (tags: gardening woods woodlands trees planting)

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

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

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

• Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, in memes

  large number of people in a theatre, applauding

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

• Keith Dawson on This Week in Virology

  a paean to my favourite podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Gerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations

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

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

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

  This is pretty extensive

  (tags: faqs covid-19 aerosols transmission)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Interchange fee

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

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

• How I helped fix Canada?s COVID Alert app

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

  (tags: mitmproxy mitm https ios apps reversing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Irish coins designed by Percy Metcalfe

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

  (tags: coins history ireland numismatism design art money)

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

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

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

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

  Featuring lots of graphs and data. This is great

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

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

  god, this disease is awful

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

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

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

  (tags: covid-19 winter medicine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A-Levels: The Model is not the Student

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ESB PVC Ducting Pipe Red 50mm x 6M

  decent weatherproof ducting for running cables to garden sheds etc.

  (tags: ducting sheds garden home wiring cabling cables)

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

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

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

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

  Good news for ongoing immunity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Objectives for COVID-19 testing in school settings

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

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

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

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

  (tags: covid-19 disease kids schools transmission)

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

  This is a great article:

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

  (Via Dee Gilhawley)

  (tags: covid-19 airborne aerosols transmission meat)

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

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

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

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

• Building dashboards for operational visibility | Amazon Builders' Library

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

  (tags: dashboards aws monitoring metrics alerts amazon)

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

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

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

• Georgia camp outbreak shows rapid virus spread among children

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

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

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

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

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

• The UX of LEGO Interface Panels – George Cave

  love it

  (tags: lego ux ui design funny)

• RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO2 emissions | PNAS

  Today in "we are still fucked" news:

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

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

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

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

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

  That last line, in particular, is good news.

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

• Harvard-UC Boulder Portable Air Cleaner Calculator for Schools

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

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

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

  Zeynep wins again:

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

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

• Fordite

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

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

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

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

  This is counterintuitive?

  (tags: ipv6 ipv4 networking apple internet performance)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Apache Arrow

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

  (via Tony Finch)

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

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

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

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

  (via Tony Finch)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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