[Ronny] Jackson is one of a batch of congressional candidates in both parties who are trying to parlay their backgrounds in medicine or public health into campaign assets that propel them into Congress. One of them, public health expert Kate Schroder, trounced her opponent in a Democratic primary Tuesday after touting her background in the campaign. She is competing for a Cincinnati-area House race that Democrats have identified as a top takeover target.
If enough of the candidates are elected in November, they could infuse Congress with the type of expertise that scientists and public health advocates say is required to help Congress respond to the current crisis, or one the country might face in the future.
“I don’t have to explain to voters anymore what public health is or why it matters,” Schroder said in an interview on Wednesday. “So, that’s a change. That wasn’t the way it was before and something that I’ve been championing my whole life is suddenly part of the common conversation.”
We strongly urge all scientists modeling the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its consequences for health and society to rapidly and openly publish their code (along with specifying the type of data required, model parameterizations, and any available documentation) so that it is accessible to all scientists around the world. We offer sincere thanks to the many teams that are already sharing their models openly. Proprietary black boxes and code withheld for competitive motivations have no place in the global crisis we face today. As soon as possible, please place your code in a trusted digital repository (1) so that it is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (2).
The CDC on Friday published an article, authored by [Anne] Schuchat, that looked back on the U.S. response, recapping some of the major decisions and events of the last few months. It suggests the nation’s top public health agency missed opportunities to slow the spread. Some public health experts saw it as important assessment by one of the nation’s most respected public health doctors.
The CDC is responsible for the recognition, tracking and prevention of just such a disease. But the agency has had a low profile during this pandemic, with White House officials controlling communications and leading most press briefings.
“The degree to which CDC’s public presence has been so diminished … is one of the most striking and frankly puzzling aspects of the federal government’s response,” said Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.
The best month for global equities in almost a decade has given way to a poor start to May, stoking the debate on whether the recent surge appropriately accounted for a financial landscape utterly changed by the pandemic.
The latest hit to investor sentiment came from an unlikely source — megacap tech duo Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Both reported results that demonstrated resiliency during the economic shutdown, but warned that predicting what comes next is particularly fraught. President Donald Trump also rattled markets by reviving his trade dispute with China as he seeks to blame the nation for the virus’s spread. U.S. stock futures fell 2% as of 7:43 a.m. in New York.
That news landed in an economy deeply altered by the virus. An indisputable takeaway is a massive expansion in global debt — given the more than $8 trillion in fiscal measures worldwide, according to a Bloomberg compilation.
WBUR, On Point, Adam Waller and Meghna Chakrabarti
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Can we design cities that heal? We talk with an architect and urban planner about how to change the brick-and-mortar world for better human health. [audio, 47:10]
The combined squeeze of rising costs and ever-larger chip sizes is leading to a solution in which processors are made up of collections of smaller, less-expensive-to-produce chiplets bound together by high-bandwidth connections within a single package. At ISSCC, AMD, Intel, and the French research organization CEA-Leti showed how far this scheme can go.
The CEA-Leti processor stacks six 16-core chiplets on top of an “active interposer,” made of a thin sliver of silicon, to create a 96-core processor. The interposer houses voltage-regulation systems that are usually found on the processor itself. It also features a network-on-chip that uses three different communication circuits to link the cores’ on-chip SRAM memories. The network is capable of slinging 3 terabytes per second per square millimeter of silicon with a latency of just 0.6 nanosecond per millimeter.
UCLA Anderson School of Management, UCLA Anderson Review
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The Pew Research Center reports that fewer than 50% of adults between the ages of 25 and 39 who took on student debt to earn their bachelor’s degree believe the financial benefits of the degree outweigh the financial cost. (It’s not like debt-free college is nirvana, by the way: Among those who graduated without debt, only 63% say the financial benefit outweighs the cost.)
Research from Bocconi University’s Adam Eric Greenberg and UCLA Anderson’s Cassie Mogilner Holmes suggests one reason for the student-debt blues is the associated emotional burden.
Greenberg and Mogilner Holmes recruited nearly 6,000 participants to engage in seven studies to learn about the emotions around borrowing. They explored the extent to which three common forms of consumer debt — mortgage, credit card, student loan — impact happiness.
Pew Research Center; Amy Mitchell, J. Baxter Oliphant and Elisa Shearer
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Americans continue to pay close attention to news about the coronavirus outbreak both nationally and locally. In doing so, they rely on a broad mix of media, government and other providers of news, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted April 20-26, 2020, of 10,139 U.S. adults who are part of the Center’s American Trends Panel.
But the continuous news churn has had an impact. A majority of Americans say they need to take breaks from it, many say it makes them feel worse emotionally and half say they find it difficult to sift through what is true and what is not, according to the survey, which is a part of the Election News Pathways project.
IUPUI is launching a new research institute that will take an integrative approach to the development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies, programs and applications. The Institute for Integrative Artificial Intelligence at IUPUI will capitalize on a rich interdisciplinary tradition and create an environment for the discovery of new and innovative approaches and applications for AI
For the past few months, whenever I experience Spotify, I come away thinking, “Man, Spotify has really become like radio.” If you don’t pay for Spotify’s premium service, it is truly hard to tell the difference. This is not meant as a compliment. It imposes algorithmic playlists. It pushes talk radio (sorry, they call them podcasts now) and generally devotes most of its real estate and algorithms to the “top of the pops.” Sure, it does all that in the guise of personalization, but with much less personality.
You know, all technology companies say that they never want to become the very thing they despised. Microsoft didn’t want to be IBM. Google didn’t want to be Microsoft. Spotify didn’t want to be radio.
The team of researchers is developing an inexpensive, near-real-time, point-of-care diagnostic device that would meet the need to more quickly and more conveniently diagnose COVID-19 and understand its spread.
With the biosensor resembling a test strip in the device, test samples would be mixed with antibody modified nanoparticles and placed onto the absorbent end of the strip. If there is COVID-19 present, the nanoparticles would stick to the strip and change the color of the test line.
“My lab has a long history in developing nanomaterial-based biosensors for immune detection,” [Pengyu] Chen said, a co-investigator on the project. “This biosensor design originated from a barcode sensor for detecting immune proteins in mixtures of human fluids and can be applied to saliva and throat swabs.”
Medium, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Paula Klein
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New research — based on millions of smartphone geolocation data points and government statistics — offers policymakers a methodology to follow as they make decisions about where and when to reopen the country and loosen restrictions resulting from COVID-19.
The working paper, Rationing Social Contact During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Transmission Risk and Social Benefits of U.S. Locations, by MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) researchers, Seth Benzell, Avinash Collis, and Christos Nicolaides, offers a timely antidote to the subjective decision-making now taking place by U.S. governors.
“We know that crowded places accelerate the spread of COVID-19. By using large-scale, human mobility data we can approximate the cumulative transmission danger due to physical proximity at different locations,” said Nicolaides, who also works at the University of Cyprus.
If 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic truly does traverse Loudoun County data centers (an estimate of uncertain origin local industry players often repeat), then the health of the global economy could depend as much upon Ashburn, Virginia, as upon New York City. While it wasn’t anyone’s intent to design the internet with a central hub (for reasons dealing more with humanity than technology), industries need capital centers, and the data center industry’s one is in Northern Virginia.
In this global coronavirus emergency, when you might wish for a federal department to consolidate representation of digital-infrastructure concerns, towns like Ashburn and Sterling have a county office playing that role instead: the Loudoun County Department of Economic Development. Data centers have been a boon to the area’s economic development, and the department has built deep ties in this industry. Now, it’s taken it upon itself to act as the central hub for managing industry needs through the crisis, helping ensure that power stays flowing, pleas of public sector customers are being heard, and civil engineers are available to survey sites and lay foundations.
In what is being called the most comprehensive ban of plastic by a U.S. institution, the University of California at Berkeley has committed to eliminating all non-essential, single-use plastic by 2030.
Chancellor Carol Christ endorsed the new policy March 12, which the university contends is the country’s strongest ban on single-use plastic. The policy goes beyond existing goals focused on foodware and plastic bags, and addresses the spectrum of products and packaging used in campus academics, research, administration and events, according to a news release.
“Everyone knows these processes are antiquated, and for years, people inside and outside of Congress have discussed the need for an injection of additional technical expertise to help the institution. The idea has broad and bipartisan political support. The proposal to create a Congressional Digital Service is led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).” Deadline to apply is May 10.
“We are happy to announce the Google Research Football competition. This competition challenges you to use GRF, a novel Reinforcement Learning environment, where agents aim to master the world’s most popular sport – football.” More details coming soon.
“Our AI platform is already analyzing and making sense of thousands of satellite images that show the magnitude of damage in the rainforests. But artificial intelligence can’t do it alone. We need your help to identify signs of deforestation that the model hasn’t learned to detect. Your participation – whether you identify deforestation in just one or 100 images – will allow us to fine-tune AI models that can detect change in the Amazon and alert conservation and government organizations responsible for protecting it.”
“We’re looking to invest in promising companies that are using artificial intelligence, data, cloud, autonomy, mobility, or robotics technologies to improve urban innovation. The call for innovation is an opportunity for your startup to receive between $500,000 and $2 million in funding from Toyota AI Ventures. In addition, we’re partnering with Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development (TRI-AD) and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) on this call, and selected startups might also get an opportunity to collaborate on future projects.” Deadline for applications is June 30.
“The dashboard is a collaboration between Facebook Data for Good and the Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, a voluntary coalition of researchers and non-profits coordinated by Direct Relief and researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. … “The ultimate goal of this data is to help answer key questions related to the pandemic: How well have physical distancing interventions worked? Where do communities need the most support with their distancing efforts? How and when, and how quickly, should we re-open different cities, states and countries?”
Johns Hopkins University, Coronavirus Resource Center
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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented public health and economic crises. In the coming weeks and months, viral tests for the presence of COVID-19 infection as well as serological tests for antibodies and potential immunity will be critical to measure the spread of the disease. Governments, businesses, and families will rely on data from these tests as they make decisions around the path forward. However, local testing data are not currently publicly available, and a comprehensive set of these data – paired with expert analysis and guidance – does not exist in one place. This initiative seeks to fill that gap.
While I’m not an expert in the area, I know many of the real experts professionally or by reputation. So I thought I’d make a brief list of people and organizations I find credible and have been following for good information in case it is helpful to others. Many of these folks have already been found by audiences much bigger than ours but I just thought it would be useful to amplify further their work.
