Let’s look at Italy and Spain, which entered the curve about two weeks ahead of the U.S. 1 They both had uncontrolled outbreaks and turned to lockdowns too late, leading to overburdened hospitals. So they offer a decent indication of what to expect in countries that responded similarly.
Those are not symmetric curves. They go up fast, flatten out and then descend slowly. How slowly? It’s still hard to tell, but the shape strongly suggests that the bad news won’t go away nearly as quickly as it arrived
I work at a company that mentors data scientists for free until they’re hired. Because we only make money when our data scientists get hired, we get a very detailed view of the North American data science job market and how it’s evolving in real time. We know who is getting hired where, how much they’re being offered, the details of the offer negotiation process, and lots of other data.
In this post I’ll break down what we’ve been seeing in the data science job market over the past month. I originally released some of this information in a tweetstorm last week, but I’ll be going into greater detail in this post.
The important point here is that the act of publication may create a feedback loop that dampens (or amplifies) the likelihood of something actually happening. News organizations that publish predictions need to be aware of their own role in influencing the outcome they are predicting.
Of course, publishing a prediction about a sporting event may influence behavior (e.g., betting) that affects individuals but doesn’t rise to the level of affecting society, while an election or public health prediction could be far more influential.
To prevent the spread of COVID-19, some types of stores and gathering places have been shut down while others remain open. The decision to shut down one type of location and leave another open constitutes a judgement about the relative danger and benefits of those locations. Using location data from a large sample of smartphones, nationally representative consumer preference surveys, and government statistics, we measure the relative transmission risk benefit and social cost of closing 30 different location categories in the US. Our categories include types of shops, schools, entertainments, and public spaces. We rank categories by those which should face stricter regulation via dominance across eight dimensions of risk and importance and through composite indexes. We find that from February to March, there were larger declines in visits to locations that our measures imply should be closed first. We hope this analysis will help policymakers decide how to reopen their economies.
The University of Louisville’s Center for Digital Transformation website is a strategic partner in Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer’s 30-day Data Upskilling Challenge Initiative announced April 13.
Fischer has encouraged residents to access free online, self-paced, data skills training through a new COVID-19-related effort by the City’s Future of Work Initiative powered by Microsoft. UofL’s site also provides listings of numerous free technology badges and certificates that can be obtained as well as a link to the City’s Upskill Challenge.
Researchers at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health reviewed COVID-19 mortality data from 3,000 U.S. counties through April 3 and found that exposure to increased concentrations of fine airborne particles is associated with a 15% increase in coronavirus mortality.
“Even absent the pandemic there’s an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence showing fine particulate matter damages human health,” said Francesca Dominici, senior study author and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. “And this study tells us that counties with more air pollution will have more hospitalizations and higher mortality risks in the new world of COVID.”
Most large teams and leagues, however, do appear to have a different challenge filling their venues than Triestina did in 2010. More specifically, the current issue is that fans are not allowed to come back to venues because of the coronavirus rather than a systemic lack of demand for tickets. Once the coronavirus dissipates then they would not have resort to the measure of having “artificial” fans.
However, many sports organizations already realized that the primary channel for watching games has moved beyond the venue itself well before the coronavirus made live event attendance nearly impossible. As National Basketball Association (NBA) Commissioner Adam stated, “Something I’ve always said is 99% of people consume our game through some sort of media platform. It’s only a tiny percentage of fans who get to see our games in arenas.”
The coronavirus has created a new environment in sports that Eric Brisbell of Sports Business Journal describes as “A new reality powered by AI”. Brisbell highlights how artificial intelligence (AI) was already changing how real fans consume sports content in ways that drive increased engagement. The coronavirus creates a relatively low-risk environment for companies to pursue these changes more aggressively.
An awkward luxury service mere weeks ago, supermarket delivery has been forced into the mainstream so fast that stores and services are struggling to respond. Like Instacart, Amazon (which owns Whole Foods) can’t keep up with demand; according to one account, its grocery orders have risen 50-fold since the lockdowns began. The company is hiring 175,000 new delivery and operations personnel, but it has limited new grocery sign-ups until it can ramp up service. Some supermarket chains have already repurposed some of their interior space for online-grocery pickup, but many can’t keep up with the sudden demand, either. Walmart has extended store hours for pickup and delivery at some locations. Kroger closed at least one of its Ohio stores to the public entirely, reserving it for online-order fulfillment.
For years, the cumbersome grocery business has seemed a relic ripe for a Silicon Valley “disruption”—one that might erase and utterly remake supermarkets as we know them. In a way, the pandemic is that moment. When this all ends, it will have changed supermarkets forever. People will shop differently. Grocery workers’ jobs will shift. Stores will take on new shapes and sizes. But those changes won’t spell the end of supermarkets. Instead, they’re likely to tighten supermarkets’ grip on American life.
Ben Cornwell and I posted a working paper with relevant evidence from @Cornell
on the structure of enrollment networks that connect students and classes.
Remote sensors play a valuable role in collecting data—but recharging these devices while they are scattered over vast and isolated areas can be tedious. A new system is designed to make the charging process easier by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver power using radio waves during a flyby. A specialized antenna on the sensor harvests the signals and converts them into electricity. The design is described in a study published 23 March in IEEE Sensors Letters.
The realization that not everyone is the same, and that culture could change the most basic of human biology has not changed much since 2010, however. A significant number of participants in behavioral science experiments continue to represent the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) society, which covers only about 5% of the human population. For instance, in the top six APA journals, 68% of the samples studied are drawn from the United States, and 96% from WEIRD countries. You might think, OK, these journals are general and cover topics that are thought to be universal. How about fields like evolutionary and cross-cultural psychology, which explicitly depend on heterogeneity in the sample studied? Turns out, they are not doing things very differently: In the 893 articles published in 2015 and 2016 in the top five cross-cultural psychology journals, a staggering 96.7% participants were WEIRD, and more than 85% were American. In 2012, in Evolution and Human Behavior, the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 65% of the sample used was WEIRD. In the 180 papers published in 2015 and 2016 in two of the evolutionary psychology’s leading journals (Evolutionary Psychology and Evolution & Human Behavior), 81% of the sample was from WEIRD countries, and 89% from developed countries; ancillarily, 44% was a student sample. How do researchers substantiate the extrapolation of findings from this small, almost homogenous subsample, and call it the science of “human” behavior?
As a pandemic grips the world, a person could be forgiven if they had forgotten about another threat to humanity’s way of life – the rise of robots.
For better or worse the robots are going to replace many humans in their jobs, analysts say, and the coronavirus outbreak is speeding up the process.
“People usually say they want a human element to their interactions but Covid-19 has changed that,” says Martin Ford, a futurist who has written about the ways robots will be integrated into the economy in the coming decades.
“[Covid-19] is going to change consumer preference and really open up new opportunities for automation.”
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Engineering
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Hany Farid is quite familiar with lies on the Internet. A professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and at the School of Information, he has been advising Facebook on how to spot fake news, images and videos on the social media platform.
But the misinformation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic is different from other online conspiracies in at least one important aspect.
“You can make fun of the flat Earthers and people who believe the moon landings were faked,” Farid said. “They may be harmless. But coronavirus misinformation is going to get a lot of people killed.”
Facebook Data for Good has a number of tools and initiatives that can help organizations respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes:
Publicly available tools: (1) High Resolution Population Density Maps and (2) CrowdTangle COVID-19 Live Displays
Tools for nonprofits & researchers: (1) Disease Prevention Maps and (2) Social Connectedness Index
Facebook is also a part of the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network, a network of infectious disease epidemiologists at universities around the world working with technology companies to use aggregated mobility data to support the COVID-19 response.
Kyunghyun Cho, a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and NYU’s Center for Data Science, and his colleagues have developed a cutting-edge search engine aimed at providing the latest COVID-19-related information to clinicians, researchers, and others who are working to battle the current pandemic.
The system, Neural Covidex, draws upon a dataset—the Allen Institute for AI’s COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)—that contains more than 45,000 scholarly articles, medical reports, and journal articles about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses for use by the global research community.