The campus may be empty and the halls hallowed, yet there is groundbreaking COVID-related work going on at Northwestern University’s engineering lab.
“It’s a soft-skin compatible device, it goes on the body much like a band aid,” said Northwestern University Professor John Rogers.
About the size of a band-aid, Rogers helped develop a wireless device that tracks the most common symptoms of COVID-19, and it is placed right above the collarbone at the center of the neck. [video, 2:14]
Effective fall 2020, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will offer a master of science in data science and business analytics with a statistics concentration. This Department of Mathematics program will be offered with concentration options from the College of Engineering and the Mike Ilitch School of Business. Business analytics is a relatively new, fast-growing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) field that spans areas of computing, statistics, operations research and business. The field is defined as “the scientific process of transforming data into insight for making better decisions.”
Social media can reveal the psychological states of an entire population, according to new research.
The results show that through machine-learning—teaching a computer to identify and analyze patterns in large datasets—researchers can see, in principle, how a society is doing in real-time.
“These methods really show how to do psychological measurement in the 21st century in our digital world,” says Johannes Eichstaedt, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
The international research study, called Oxford ARC (Oxford Achieving Resilience during COVID-19) will evaluate what hinders and what promotes resilience during the pandemic.
The study will assess common mental health problems relating to worry, anxiety, depression, eating-related problems and mental inflexibility as well as examining how various activities such as social media use, video conferencing and exercise affects young people’s mental health.
Thirteen to 18-year-olds and their parents or carers are being asked to take part.
Science, Gretchen Vogel and Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
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For families eager for schools to throw open their doors, the tale of a 9-year-old British boy who caught COVID-19 in the French Alps in January offers a glimmer of hope. The youngster, infected by a family friend, suffered only mild symptoms; he enjoyed ski lessons and attended school before he was diagnosed. Astonishingly, he did not transmit the virus to any of 72 contacts who were tested. His two siblings didn’t become infected, even though other germs spread readily among them: in the weeks that followed, all three had influenza and a common cold virus.
The story could be a bizarre outlier—or a tantalizing clue. Several studies of COVID-19 hint that children are less likely to catch the novel coronavirus, and don’t often transmit it to others. A recent survey of the literature couldn’t find a single example of a child under 10 passing the virus on to someone else, for example.
When a single car skids on an icy highway, the result can be a 50-car wreck. So, too, with international financial markets: Mexico’s default in 1982 led to a pile-up of dozens of countries. Thailand’s devaluation in July 1997 triggered the Asian financial crisis. The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008 set off the Great Recession around the world.
International financiers should know better than to start the COVID-19 collapse of 2020. Their wisdom will soon be tested.
Even before COVID-19 threw the world economy into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, Argentina was in debt distress, again. As so often has happened in Argentina’s default-ridden history, a half-baked agreement with recalcitrant creditors in 2016, followed by a quick return to the bond markets, proved to be wishful thinking both for Argentina’s then-president and the country’s creditors.
SSRC, Items journal, Janet Gornick and Nathaniel Johnson
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Janet Gornick and Nathaniel Johnson explore the reasons for growing inequality over the past decades in wealthy countries as well as the significant variation in the extent of inequality across them. Key to understanding these trends, they argue, are tax and income transfer policies that can mitigate inequalities generated through market mechanisms. National differences for these redistributive policy options shape not only the extent of inequality within countries but also the size and shape of the middle class, which has dramatically shrunk in some places but less so in others.
“It’s a problem that we’re having. People are under the misimpression that if for any reason they have left New York City during COVID, they still believe they need the paper form with a computer code,” Menin said.
People who answer the questionnaire without an ID number are identified and counted by their address.
One of the most novel features of Mercedes-Benz’s MBUX infotainment tech is its voice-activated virtual assistant. The company’s artificial intelligence software allows a driver to search for destinations, control vehicle functions and more. And as MBUX evolves, Mercedes says improving this natural-language relationship between car and driver is particularly important.
The goal is to “make the system even more natural,” Nils Schanz, head of user interaction for Mercedes-Benz research and development, told members of the media during a Friday conference call. That means creating a system that’s both more proactive and empathic, taking into account things like tone of voice or which person is talking in the car, serving “the right response and the right tone,” Schanz said.
This means MBUX might soon offer the option to remove its wake-up word — the “Hey, Mercedes” command that activates the AI tech. But Schanz knows this isn’t a solution everyone will want.
Economic distress is contagious, too. A shuttered restaurant creates jobless waiters and cooks, landlords with no rental income and food suppliers in distress for lack of clients. Let’s not even think about the impact of a worldwide pandemic-induced default on too-clever-by-half debt-backed derivatives.
The economy has fallen off the wall — pushed, deliberately, for good reason. We need it to spring back like Jackie Chan, not crack like Humpty Dumpty. The aim must be to prevent temporary economic injury from causing permanent scars.
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One delightfully crazy plan, popularised on the Marginal Revolution blog, is to take the concept of daylight savings time to an extreme. Governments would simply stop the clock: Thursday 30 April 2020 would become Friday 30 April, then Saturday 30 April. Your rental payment, due on May 1, would — like orphan Annie’s “Tomorrow” — always be a day away.
Although many, many companies pulled off relatively seamless transitions to operating fully remote, workers are discovering unforeseen consequences of the sudden switch.
The big picture: This is not normal teleworking. Typically, employees aren’t caring for or schooling kids while on the job — and they’re not prohibited from seeing friends, working from a coffee shop or going to the gym.
People are experiencing Zoom fatigue, as the in-person meetings and happy hours of yesterday have been replaced by ceaseless calendar invited to join video calls, writes Axios’ Scott Rosenberg.
Parents — who make up around one-third of the U.S. workforce — are dealing with unprecedented stress and exhaustion.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences; Jack L.Andrews, LucyFoulkes, Sarah-JayneBlakemore
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The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the widespread implementation of social distancing measures. Adhering to social distancing may be particularly challenging for adolescents, for whom interaction with peers is especially important. We argue that young people’s capacity to encourage each other to observe social distancing rules should be harnessed.
An American scientist who collaborates with the Wuhan Institute of Virology had his grant terminated in the wake of unsubstantiated claims that COVID-19 is either manmade or leaked out of a Chinese government lab.
Georgia began reopening non-essential businesses on Friday, April 24. Since then, visits to health and beauty services, gyms as well as restaurants have seen significant upticks. Notably, restaurant visitation rose the most in rural and suburban areas. There was some increase in foot traffic to dining rooms in urban areas, but visitation didn’t jump nearly as drastically.
Though Georgia’s shelter-in-place order ended April 30, leaders of more populous cities like Atlanta are still advising residents to stay home. In all places analyzed, foot traffic in Atlanta remained lower compared to rural areas and the state overall.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Jennifer Beam Dowd et al.
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Governments around the world must rapidly mobilize and make difficult policy decisions to mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Because deaths have been concentrated at older ages, we highlight the important role of demography, particularly, how the age structure of a population may help explain differences in fatality rates across countries and how transmission unfolds. We examine the role of age structure in deaths thus far in Italy and South Korea and illustrate how the pandemic could unfold in populations with similar population sizes but different age structures, showing a dramatically higher burden of mortality in countries with older versus younger populations. This powerful interaction of demography and current age-specific mortality for COVID-19 suggests that social distancing and other policies to slow transmission should consider the age composition of local and national contexts as well as intergenerational interactions. We also call for countries to provide case and fatality data disaggregated by age and sex to improve real-time targeted forecasting of hospitalization and critical care needs.
Online “We’ll hear from Amy Wagler (UT El Paso) and Pamela Scott-Johnson (CSU Los Angeles) about DEI efforts in their data science programs.” Hosted by Academic Data Science Alliance, [registration required]
Seattle, WA October 18-20. “The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) have come together to launch a conference series on the Foundations of Data Science.” Deadline for submissions is May 15.
“The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Diagnostic Excellence Initiative recently announced a funding opportunity soliciting novel ideas and approaches for developing new clinical quality measures to improve diagnosis, specifically targeting three major categories of disease: acute vascular events (such as stroke and myocardial infarction), infections (such as sepsis and pneumonia) and cancer (such as lung and colorectal). Successfully funded proposals will form our second cohort of grantees in this area.” Deadline for applications is June 30.
“The Civic Innovation Challenge is a research and action competition that aims to fund ready-to-implement, research-based pilot projects that have the potential for scalable, sustainable, and transferable impact on community-identified priorities.” Deadline for initial applications is July 1.
COVID-19 is confusing. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there— can you get the virus from food? Is there such a thing as immunity? What kind of tests are really out there? Who is most at risk? And all the conflicting information can make it hard to make decisions, from whether to go to the grocery store to when to send your kids back to day care.