In the face of the ongoing pandemic, a UConn researcher has launched a study to look at how behavior and social attitudes change, and what factors influence those changes, when people in the United States are faced with the threat of widespread disease. The study is backed by a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID grant, awarded last week, which will support the year-long examination.
“We saw this as an opportunity to really think about whether we can identify individual factors – personality factors – that would predict engagement in preventative health behaviors,” says Natalie J. Shook, a social psychologist, an associate professor in the UConn School of Nursing, and the principal investigator on this new study. “From there, for future pandemics or future viral threats, are there different strategies or interventions that we could develop to facilitate a stronger response and, hopefully, prevent spread of infectious diseases faster?”
So all state universities can do whatever? Goodbye libraries paying for journals. EVER. Post your articles online download & post copyrighted anything?
In the decade before Michigan and its largest city became the latest hot spot for the deadly coronavirus, officials were steadily, and at times dramatically, cutting back on their first line of defense against pandemics and other public health emergencies.
Approaching bankruptcy, Detroit disbanded most of its public health department and handed its responsibilities to a private nonprofit. When the department reopened in 2014 in the back of the municipal parking office, its per capita budget was a fraction of other big cities’, to serve a needier population.
Florida’s coronavirus test rates lag behind the national average. Its caseloads are exploding by the day. And a chorus of experts predict the state is on the cusp of a crippling contagion.
It all became too much for Gov. Ron DeSantis to ignore Wednesday, when he finally announced a statewide shelter-in-place order to stop the spread of the disease — a reversal from his “targeted” approach that local governments should make their own decisions.
As the floor drops out from under many startups, some tech companies are finding a path forward by meeting new government needs.
Among them is Palantir, a secretive government-friendly big data operation that’s able to ingest vast amounts of information to visualize trends and track individuals — useful tasks as the spread of COVID-19 threatens to overwhelm healthcare systems and ravage economies.
When RTX Super graphics cards arrived for desktops, they provided a great ‘middle-option’ for people who wanted to get the most frames for their budget. The RTX 2060 Super, in particular, kind of made the RTX 2070 obsolete, not because the hardware itself was outdated, but because the RTX 2060 Super had the same amount of power at a cheaper price. It was, and still is, the best ‘bang for your buck’ option with ray tracing when it comes to desktop GPUs. But don’t expect to see an RTX 2060 Super as part of Nvidia’s latest mobile GPU lineup.
Only the RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2070 Super are coming to laptops sometime this month. I can’t say for certain why Nvidia is opting to release mobile versions of only those two cards, but new RTX 2060 laptop models will be available instead. Nvidia is also introducing a new and improved version of its Max-Q technology, which will be available in some new RTX 2080 Super, 2070 Super, and 2060 laptops. They’re also getting Intel’s Core i7 and Core i9 10th-gen mobile processors that were announced today, too.
University of California System, Office of Scholarly Communication
from
On March 25, 2020, the University of California issued a Policy on Open Access for Theses and Dissertations. The systemwide policy, which aligns with those already in place at individual UC campuses, “requires theses or dissertations prepared at the University to be (1) deposited into an open access repository, and (2) freely and openly available to the public, subject to a requested delay of access (“embargo”) obtained by the student.” Theses and dissertations already made open access can be read in eScholarship, UC’s open access repository and scholarly publishing platform.
With this policy, “the University affirms the long-standing tradition that theses and dissertations, which represent significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge and the scholarly record, should be shared with scholars in all disciplines and the general public.”
A lack of industry standards has been among the challenges facing developers of self-driving cars. Underwriters Laboratory today published UL 4600, its first standard for evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicles.
The standard describes safety principles and processes for evaluating fully autonomous vehicles and covers topics including the design process, testing, and human-machine interaction for non-drivers. It also covers autonomy validation, risk identification, and data integrity.
After 9/11 spurred governments to invest in combatting bioterrorism, a group of disease experts figured out how to track pandemics with a technique called “syndromic surveillance.”
The technique involved tracking aggregated data from emergency rooms, and had its peak around the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
Personal electronics makers like Apple, Fitbit and Samsung build fitness trackers, smartwatches and other wearables to help keep us healthy by monitoring our activity. Increasingly, they’re also being used to identify and monitor the sick.
And now, as those stricken with COVID-19 overwhelm the nation’s health care system, the scarcity of test kits confounds hospitals’ ability to quantify the onslaught and make critical decisions for where to deploy doctors, nurses, respirators and other scarce care resources.
To fill the void, hospitals are grasping for creative new ways to ease the burden, like incorporating wearables into their coronavirus efforts.
What are the economic consequences of an influenza pandemic? And given the pandemic, what are the economic costs and benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI)? Using geographic variation in mortality during the 1918 Flu Pandemic in the U.S., we find that more exposed areas experience a sharp and persistent decline in economic activity. The estimates imply that the pandemic reduced manufacturing output by 18%. The downturn is driven by both supply and demand-side channels. Further, building on findings from the epidemiology literature establishing that NPIs decrease influenza mortality, we use variation in the timing and intensity of NPIs across U.S. cities to study their economic effects. We find that cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively do not perform worse and, if anything, grow faster after the pandemic is over. Our findings thus indicate that NPIs not only lower mortality; they also mitigate the adverse economic consequences of a pandemic.
Online April 17 and 24. “Initiated by the ASA Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science and the Journal of Data Science, and co-sponsored by the ASA Section on Statistical in Epidemiology, New England Statistical Society, and Statistical Data Science Lab at UConn, this webinar series aims to promptly disseminate the newest data science methods, tools, and findings in response to the outbreak of COVID-19, facilitate the exchange of research ideas, and engage collaborations between data scientists and field experts worldwide to solve the COVID-19 crisis.” April 17: Dr. Peter X. Song. April 24: Dr. Song Xi Chen.
“This is a rapid response call for teams of researchers as well as individual researchers to join us in addressing these urgent questions. Teams will rapidly trial tested, robust and reproducible data science and machine learning methods on this new national data resource of COVID 19 data, to create a near real-time, human-in-the-loop analytics platform and information console to support acute care management and clinical decision making. DECOVID has been structured to be nationally scalable.” Deadline for talent pool applications is April 10.
“Dolt is Git for data. Instead of versioning files, Dolt versions tables. DoltHub is a place on the internet to share Dolt repositories. As far as we can tell, Dolt is the only database with branches. How would you use such a thing?”
“NASA researchers have developed new satellite-based, weekly global maps of soil moisture and groundwater wetness conditions and one to three-month U.S. forecasts of each product. While maps of current dry/wet conditions for the United States have been available since 2012, this is the first time they have been available globally.”
