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Links for 2020-07-26

  • Sputum testing provides higher rate of COVID-19 detection | EurekAlert! Science News

    Li and his colleagues scoured the literature — both preprints and published papers — for studies that assessed at least two respiratory sampling sites using an NP swab, oropharyngeal swab or sputum. From more than 1,000 studies, they identified 11 that met their criteria. These studies included results from a total of 3,442 respiratory tract specimens. The team examined how often each collection method produced a positive result. For NP swabs, the rate was 54 percent; for oropharyngeal swabs, 43 percent; for sputum, 71 percent. The rate of viral detection was significantly higher in sputum than either oropharyngeal swabs or NP swabs. Detection rates were highest within one week of symptom onset for all three tests.

    (tags: sputum covid-19 testing swabs)

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Links for 2020-07-25

  • COVID Dogs

    Scent dog identification of samples from COVID-19 patients – a pilot study, in BMC Infectious Diseases:

    The dogs were able to discriminate between samples of infected (positive) and non-infected (negative) individuals with average diagnostic sensitivity of 82.63% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 82.02–83.24%) and specificity of 96.35% (95% CI: 96.31–96.39%). During the presentation of 1012 randomised samples, the dogs achieved an overall average detection rate of 94% (±3.4%) with 157 correct indications of positive, 792 correct rejections of negative, 33 incorrect indications of negative or incorrect rejections of 30 positive sample presentations.

    (tags: dogs good-dog covid-19 detection testing smell scent)

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Links for 2020-07-23

  • Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios – Bloomberg

    “A group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate.”

    (tags: global-warming climate-change future climate science)

  • 20 Questions to Ask before Sending your Kids Back to School – Schools For Health

    An excellent checklist.

    There is no such thing as “zero risk” in anything we do, and certainly not during a pandemic. There will be some risk to students, teachers, staff, and families. As such, it is important to reduce these risks to the extent possible. Returning to school should not be “school as usual.” We prepared the following set of questions as a guide for parents, teachers and school staff who may not be sure what to ask or look for at their school. While we offer some insight into the responses you might receive, and expect, each school’s response will be different because there is no “one size fits all” plan for COVID-19.

    (tags: schools teaching covid-19 health kids children)

  • Schools Will Eventually Need to Reopen – Schools For Health

    We recognize there are immense challenges. There is no perfect plan to reopen schools safely, only “less bad” options. There is no “one size fits all” strategy that works for every school. Schools have limited budgets and staff. Compliance will be imperfect. Learning will be different. There will be disruption. Schools may need to re-close unexpectedly depending on local conditions. No one knows with certainty what the fall will bring in terms of this pandemic. Despite these challenges, the enormous individual and societal costs of keeping schools closed compels us, a team focused on Healthy Buildings and exposure and risk science, to present a range of control strategies that should be considered in discussions of school reopenings.

    (tags: health schools reopening covid-19 teaching kids children)

  • Facebook Employee Leaks Show Betrayal By Company Leadership

    Wang opted for a clip of himself speaking directly to the camera. What followed was a 24-minute clear-eyed hammering of Facebook’s leadership and decision-making over the previous year. The video was a distillation of months of internal strife, protest, and departures that followed the company’s decision to leave untouched a post from President Donald Trump that seemingly called for violence against people protesting the police killing of George Floyd. And while Wang’s message wasn’t necessarily unique, his assessment of the company’s ongoing failure to protect its users — an evaluation informed by his lengthy tenure at the company — provided one of the most stunningly pointed rebukes of Facebook to date. “We are failing,” he said, criticizing Facebook’s leaders for catering to political concerns at the expense of real-world harm. “And what’s worse, we have enshrined that failure in our policies.”

    (tags: activism ethics facebook work policies nazis trump)

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Links for 2020-07-21

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Links for 2020-07-20

  • Cancel Culture and the Problem of Woke Capitalism – The Atlantic

    ‘How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture: Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.’

    (tags: cancel-culture cancelling capitalism society)

  • The inside story of how the UK government failed to develop a contact-tracing app

    A classic Tory fuckup. Spoofing, over-promising, a behind-the-scenes desire to collect a database of citizen’s private medical info, and hubris.

    (tags: nhsx palantir bluetooth covid-19 uk tories data-privacy nhs)

  • Ireland donates its contact tracing app to the Linux Foundation

    This is awesome. Congrats to NearForm and the HSE for making some great choices here:

    Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) announced today that it is donating the code for the COVID Tracker app as Open Source to the not-for-profit Linux Foundation. This will enable jurisdictions worldwide to quickly build and deploy their own contact tracing apps using a wildly successful proven base. The donated app has been named COVID Green. […] The rapid adoption of the COVID Tracker app in Ireland exceeded all expectations. One million people installed it in the first 36 hours, and the app currently has over 1.3 million installations. That figure represents more than 30% of people in Ireland with compatible devices. The code is also being used in the app for Gibraltar and the upcoming apps for Northern Ireland, other jurisdictions in EMEA and multiple US states. NearForm continues to enable public health authorities to get a contact tracing application into production within four weeks of project start. By donating the source code to the new Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) project, under the Apache License 2.0, the HSE is playing an active role in helping to fight Covid-19 worldwide. Source code for the COVID Green mobile app is available now on GitHub and soon will be followed by all matching backend code. The Linux Foundation is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open source projects to accelerate technology development and industry adoption. LFPH is launching with a mission to use open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) around the world combat Covid-19 and future epidemics. One of the roles of LFPH is to serve as a forum for collaboration between PHAs, developers, technology companies and academics to ensure the implementation and dissemination of best practices, including privacy and security.

    (tags: hse nearform covid-19 contact-tracing exposure-notification apps mobile open-source linux-foundation lfph)

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Links for 2020-07-17

  • Turkey Now Has Swarming Suicide Drones It Could Export – The Drive

    Well, this is pretty scary — swarming autonomous kamikaze drones are actively in production right now:

    It seems very possible that, in addition to providing these improved Kargu [drones] to the Turkish armed forces, STM could also seek to export them, proliferating this capability further around the world. STM has already said that it has received serious inquires about the Kargu series from at least three unnamed potential foreign customers. Turkey, as a whole, has become a powerhouse of drone development and production, employing larger types to great effect in Syria and Libya just this year. This is precisely the type of weapon we have been warning about for years now. The fact that it is already here and potentially exportable should be yet another wake-up call to the level of threat low-end drones pose to U.S. and allied forces, as well as domestic infrastructure and VIPs.  “I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it’s unmanned,” U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said at an event hosted by the Middle East Institute last week. “I’m not talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with, as we would any other platform.” “I’m talking about the one you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, four quad, rotorcraft or something like that that can be launched and flown,” he continued. “And with very simple modifications, it can make made into something that can drop a weapon like a hand grenade or something else.”

    (tags: drones war terrorism ai autonomous scary kargu kerkes turkey stm)

  • interesting data on COVID-19 rates among school-age kids

    Twitter thread:

    Highest COVID-19 rate (18.6%) for household contacts of school-aged children and lowest (5.3%) for household contacts of kids 0-9; – School closure and distancing reduced rate of COVID-19 among contacts of school aged kids. What does this mean? – I believe this further supports that we need to have low rates of community transmission before we consider opening up schools; – Per this data kids 10-19 had highest rates of contacts with COVID-19; – This is scientific data, let this lead our decision.

    (tags: contact-tracing south-korea schools reopening covid-19 transmission children)

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Links for 2020-07-16

  • ‘Only those with plastic visors were infected’: Swiss government warns against face shields – The Local

    Via Zeynep Tufekci: ‘A study of an outbreak in Switzerland found that only those with plastic face-shields were infected, and everyone wearing masks was protected. Face shields may still help with source control, but masks may well also be protecting the wearer to some degree.’

    (tags: switzerland covid-19 facemasks masks aerosols transmission epidemiology)

  • ‘Blitz spirit’ was a myth

    The report, The Mental Stability of Hull, was based on interviews with hundreds of survivors. These case studies showed that people developed serious psychosomatic conditions, including involuntary soiling and wetting, persistent crying, uncontrollable shaking, headaches and chronic dizziness; men were found to indulge in heavy drinking and smoking after a raid, and prone to developing peptic ulcers. One woman was bombed out of three different houses, and watched the death of her sister and her five children. Her symptoms indicated an exceptional level of nervous collapse. Nevertheless, the conclusion from Hull was that its mental stability was nothing to worry about. The government papered over the evidence of the physical and psychological effects of being bombed and focused instead on the stories of British resolve. The propaganda film London Can Take It! reinforced the view that British people were not to be terrorised into submission. The famous photograph of a milkman picking his way through the ruins to deliver the milk was widely distributed, but it was a fake – the milkman was in fact the photographer’s assistant, wearing a white coat. The public face of the “blitz spirit” concealed the awful reality of being bombed.

    (tags: coronavirus epidemic fear pandemics blitz covid-19 ptsd propaganda)

  • Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 surveillance | medRxiv

    this makes a whole load of sense to me — Michael Mina, one of this paper’s authors, is interviewed on TWIV, https://microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-640/ , talking about frequent, cheap, fast-turnaround COVID-19 tests, suitable for countrywide, daily testing. Less accurate than the RT-PCR swab, but good enough for this purpose

    (tags: epidemiology covid-19 testing swabs rt-pcr twiv virology models papers)

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Links for 2020-07-15

  • Nice heatmap dataviz of Florida COVID-19 cases, over time, by age bracket

    Be?v?a?n?d on Twitter: “I love this heatmap?? It represents over 100,000 individual datapoints. These are Florida COVID-19 cases, over time, by age bracket. I published open-source code to make it: https://t.co/8USY29mDDn The recent case surge is driven by 20-24-year-old Floridians. 1/N https://t.co/Pw2p9xTLaq” / Twitter

    (tags: dataviz heatmaps graphics charts covid-19 analytics)

  • UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster

    The more recent USB storage protocol — definitely worth using if available. ‘Without UASP, a drive is mounted as a Mass Storage Device using Bulk Only Transport (or BOT), a protocol that was designed for transferring files way back in the USB ‘Full speed’ days, when the fastest speed you could get was a whopping 12 Mbps! With USB 3.0, the BOT protocol cripples throughput. USB 3.0 has 5 Gbps of bandwidth, which is 400x more than USB 1.1. The old BOT protocol would transfer data in large chunks, and each chunk of data had to be delivered in order, without regard for buffering or multiple bits of data being able to transfer in parallel.’ (everyone’s already blogged this, but I’m lodging it here for bookmark purposes ;)

    (tags: uasp usb storage disks hardware raspberry-pi io ops)

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Links for 2020-07-13

  • Thread on how US universities are planning to tackle COVID-19 in the fall

    Michael Otsuka on Twitter: “Notre Dame is the latest example of a US university that is devoting serious planning and resources to making their campus safe for in person instruction.” This thread is full of good points on how educational institutions — not just third-level! — need to think about how to handle COVID-19 when they reopen. Key points: comprehensive testing of staff and students; contact tracing, isolation and quarantine protocols; physical distancing and mask requirements; and facilities to isolate positive staff and students and their contacts. Also, some facilities are planning to PROVIDE face coverings if students don’t have, or forget, their own. Brown University are planning to conduct “rapid testing for covid-19 for all students at regular intervals. Testing only those with symptoms will not be sufficient.” https://twitter.com/MikeOtsuka/status/1261597656373252096 — this is a point that Columbia U. Prof Vincent Racaniello, of TWIV fame (@profvrr), has been making repeatedly — pervasive mass testing is needed.

    (tags: testing covid-19 reopening education universities health schools)

  • Wearing masks may reduce severity of COVID-19, if it is caught

    Bob Wachter on Twitter: “I heard [an] interesting new theory by ID expert Monica Gandhi @UCSF: wearing masks may not only prevent disease, but – if wearer does get infected – it may be with a lower viral dose and thus cause milder disease. Some support for this from studies in mice and hamsters (below)… https://t.co/ISqtKK97ow” / Twitter

    (tags: covid-19 bob-wachter virology masks facemasks theories viruses infection)

  • Fixers Know What ‘Repairable’ Means—Now There’s a Standard for It

    European standard EN45554 ‘details ”general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products.” In plain English, it’s a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It’s also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.’

    (tags: repair ifixit eu en45554 standards europe)

  • The EU General Data Protection Regulation explained by Americans

    Bashing the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seems to have become one of American activists’ favourite hobbies in the tech field. Some criticism is entirely justified. But many claims that the GDPR is “counterproductive” or “misses the point” are based on misconceptions, rather than an accurate understanding of European data protection laws. As a result, several US privacy advocates have therefore suggested alternative principles or rules… many of which, actually, have been part of EU data protection law since 1995.

    (tags: gdpr privacy data-protection eu data-privacy us-politics)

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Links for 2020-07-12

  • The implications of silent transmission for the control of COVID-19 outbreaks | PNAS

    ‘In our PNAS study, we demonstrate that the majority of COVID-19 transmission is ‘silent’: from asymptomatic cases or from cases during the presymptomatic phase. Consequently, symptom-based control, such as temperature checks, is not sufficient.’

    (tags: covid-19 research papers epidemiology transmission symptoms)

  • Why School Reopening Is Absurd and Dangerous

    I love the public schools my kids attend, but I also know they can’t handle a lice outbreak on a good day and are not equipped to handle COVID on a bad one. School principals and superintendents are not epidemiologists or virologists and can’t possibly be expected to make plans like they are. So who should be making decisions? To start, the CDC. So, when the vice president of the United States says, as he did this week, that “we don’t want the guidance from the CDC to be the reason schools don’t open up,” what he’s really saying is that the government is abandoning children, parents, and all the people who work in schools.

    (tags: coronavirus usa children pandemics covid-19 schools)

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Links for 2020-07-05

  • Rapid, inexpensive home testing for COVID-19 may get us out of this mess before a vaccine

    We should welcome [rapid covid] tests, even if less accurate, and broadly adopt them for widespread community use. Here’s why: They will be cheap. Estimates are that they would cost between 1 and 5 dollars. That’s around the price of a cup of coffee. They can be done on saliva. No brain biopsy required. They can be done frequently. Every day for college students, or healthcare workers, or bus drivers? Every third day for everyone? They will answer the key question — am I contagious to others right now? Finally, and most importantly, they will answer this last question quickly. Results back in less than an hour. Anyone with a positive test can self-isolate, be reported to public health officials, participate in a contact tracing program, and be monitored for symptoms. Maybe pre-emptive antiviral therapy will prevent severe illness. We can choose to do a rapid home test any day we go to work, or to the gym, or to meet friends in a restaurant, or to attend a concert, or to pray in a house of worship, or to visit an elder loved one, or indeed partake in any activity we do in groups that now sadly may sustain the pandemic. And for those worried about lack of sensitivity, two items of reassurance. First, false negatives are less likely when people have the highest amounts of virus in saliva and respiratory secretions — and this is when they’re most contagious to others. If the test is falsely negative due to low titers of virus, it may not matter very much. Second, this modeling study finds that the frequency of testing is the key determinant of how well a broad testing strategy will limit the spread of the virus. It’s even more important than test sensitivity, and evidence that imperfect testing is better than no testing at all.

    (tags: testing covid-19 pcr rt-pcr false-positives false-negatives viruses)

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Links for 2020-06-29

  • Understand Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E (802.11 n/ac/ax)

    Some excellent advice regarding the currently available wifi devices out there, 802.11ac, 4×4 MIMO, beamforming, and DFS channels. Top recommendations are the Ubiquiti nanoHD AP and the Netgear R7800

    (tags: wifi 802.11n 802.11ac networking wireless home mimo mu-mimo dfs)

  • ????? (revenge bedtime procrastination)

    “a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours” Welcome to my life. (aka parenting)

    (tags: day night life kids parenting procrastination bedtime sleep china)

  • Witnessing the unthinkable

    According to this new [analysis of the latest generation of climate models], led by scientists at the CSIRO and [Australian] Bureau of Meteorology, the worst-case scenario could see Australia warm up to 7°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. On average, the results from 20 models show a warming of 4.5°C, with a range of between 2.7°C and 6.2°C. [….] Another profoundly significant result is buried 16 pages deep into the paper. The scientists show that this revision now means that 2°C of global warming is likely to be reached sometime around 2040 based on our current high-emissions trajectory. The implications of this are unimaginable – we may witness planetary collapse far sooner than we once thought.
    This is horrific, if those are solid estimates… those warming levels will mean Australia (and parts of the rest of the world) becomes pretty much uninhabitable.

    (tags: australia future grim climate-change models warming)

  • Weak bits floppy disc protection

    Amazing anti-piracy scheme from the BBC Micro era, devised by Simon Hosler of Sherston Software: “Weak” or “Flaky” bits, caused by “a weak signal or non-existent magnetic signal on the disc surface. You might also see the term no-flux area (NFA), which is the same as a non-existent signal. Weak bits are almost always a non-existent signal, as opposed to a weak signal. The flaky nature of weak bits actually comes out of the drive electronics: when there are no clear flux changes, the drive just amplifies harder until it starts seeing and signalling ghosts within the noise.” Simon Hosler wrote: “Soft lock (was what we called it) was actually my system, so what I remember… This came about because I lived next door to an electronics geek! So break the write data line of the parallel disk cable. Add a bit of electronics to this line. (thank you Mike) Most of the time this electronics does nothing – lets the data go through as normal. If you turn it on (I think I did this through the serial port) and write to a single sector – it would count the bits going through say 256 – and then stop the next 256 bits going through”

    (tags: bbc-micro microcomputers history copy-protection anti-piracy piracy weak-bits hardware hacks simon-hosler)

  • The Center for Land Use Interpretation

    More than 30 uranium disposal cells have been constructed over the last 25 years, primarily to contain radioactive contamination from decommissioned uranium mills and processing sites. They are time capsules, of sorts, designed to take their toxic contents, undisturbed, as far into the future as possible. Uranium disposal cells are unusual constructions because they are built to last far beyond the lives of most engineered structures, to isolate their radioactive contents from the environment for hundreds of years. They are generally low geometric mounds, sometimes as high as a hundred feet tall, covering a few acres or as much as a half mile, and composed of layers of engineered soil and gravels designed to shed rainwater and limit erosion. […] The contents are not considered high-level radioactive waste, like spent fuel from nuclear reactors. That material has yet to find a permanent home. What these cells contain is radioactive tailings from uranium processing sites, as well as the demolished buildings and apparatus from the mills themselves. The amount of radioactivity in these cells varies, but is generally considered harmful to people if exposure takes place over sustained periods. Most of the radiation comes from uranium 238, which has a half life of 4.47 billion years, nearly the age of the earth itself.

    (tags: nuclear uranium history waste toxic-waste radioactivity u-238 radioactive structures land-use)

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Links for 2020-06-26

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Links for 2020-06-25

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Links for 2020-06-24

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Links for 2020-06-23

  • The Trump 2020 app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power | MIT Technology Review

    Trump’s casino-like campaign app seems to be his own attempt to create a “one-way tool of propaganda.” Its deployment is part of a global trend, piggybacking on years of unresolved privacy and security issues within the app ecosystem. As researchers studying the intersection of technology and propaganda, we understand that political groups tend to lag behind the commercial ad industry. But when they catch up, the consequences to truth and civil discourse can be devastating.  The array of data-gathering tools the Trump and Modi apps use are a legacy of a “freemium” social-media and app landscape that is manipulative, non-transparent, and purposefully addictive, with a mentality of “collect data first and ask question later.” For the last five to 10 years, the pervasiveness of these tools and their use in data scooping has been well documented. Sporadic, state-by-state data regulations have been the only response. In Europe, the GDPR was a big step toward meaningful consent and transparency, but the Official Trump 2020 App does not fall under its jurisdiction. A global perspective is now critical to understanding the implications of data-fueled political manipulation and preparing for the next wave of disinformation. Countries must work together to create effective regulation, and citizens must demand this of them. It took about five years for Modi’s strategies to jump from India to the US, and in the next few years we are on track to see the arrival of strategies used in the dark-money disinformation campaigns of Mexico and Latin America. The Mexican journalist we’d interviewed for our study put it this way: “I think what’s coming all around the world is going to be very chaotic, at least in [the US], I think you’re on the brink of a sort of civil war in one or two years … You’re going to have a lot of work to do.”

    (tags: trump politics apps surveillance advertising voting modi gdpr privacy data-privacy)

  • Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline – Coalition for Critical Technology

    ‘As per a press release, Springer will publish “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing.” Sign our letter to urge all publishers to refrain from feeding the #TechToPrisonPipeline with physiognomy 2.0.’ (via Niall Murphy)

    (tags: via:niallmurphy crime prediction image-processing springer research prison law ai ml)

  • Automating safe, hands-off deployments

    Great doc from Clare Liguori about current AWS best practices around deployment. A fair bit of it is similar to what they were doing by the time I left; this “wave” concept is a good new approach though:

    Each team needs to balance the safety of small-scoped deployments with the speed at which we can deliver changes to customers in all Regions. Deploying changes to 24 Regions or 76 Availability Zones through the pipeline one at a time has the lowest risk of causing broad impact, but it could take weeks for the pipeline to deliver a change to customers globally. We have found that grouping deployments into “waves” of increasing size, as seen in the previous sample prod pipeline, helps us achieve a good balance between deployment risk and speed. Each wave’s stage in the pipeline orchestrates deployments to a group of Regions, with changes being promoted from wave to wave. New changes can enter the production phase of the pipeline at any time. After a set of changes is promoted from the first step to the second step in wave 1, the next set of changes from gamma is promoted into the first step of wave 1, so we don’t end up with large bundles of changes waiting to be deployed to production. The first two waves in the pipeline build the most confidence in the change: The first wave deploys to a Region with a low number of requests to limit the possible impact of the first production deployment of the new change. The wave deploys to only one Availability Zone (or cell) at a time within that Region to cautiously deploy the change across the Region. The second wave then deploys to one Availability Zone (or cell) at a time in a Region with a high number of requests where it is highly likely that customers will exercise all the new code paths and where we get good validation of the changes. After we have higher confidence in the safety of the change from the initial pipeline waves’ deployments, we can deploy to more and more Regions in parallel in the same wave. For example, the previous sample prod pipeline deploys to three Regions in wave 3, then to up to 12 Regions in wave 4, then to the remaining Regions in wave 5. The exact number and choice of Regions in each of these waves and the number of waves in a service team’s pipeline depend on the individual service’s usage patterns and scale. The later waves in the pipeline still help us achieve our objective to prevent negative impact to multiple Availability Zones in the same Region. When a wave deploys to multiple Regions in parallel, it follows the same cautious rollout behavior for each Region that was used in the initial waves. Each step in the wave only deploys to a single Availability Zone or cell from each Region in the wave.

    (tags: automation ops devops amazon aws deployment waves az multi-region ci cd)

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Links for 2020-06-22

  • FlexBuffers | Hacker News

    Fairly decent discussion on various binary encoding formats, with or without schemata, and with or without zero-copy

    (tags: flatbuffers flexbuffers json encoding data formats file-formats avro protobuf zerocopy sbe schemas)

  • _Measurement-Based Evaluation Of Google/Apple Exposure Notification API For Proximity Detection In A Commuter Bus_

    Douglas J. Leith, Stephen Farrell School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland 15th June 2020: ‘We report on the results of a measurement study carried out on a commuter bus in Dublin, Ireland using the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) API. Measurements were collected between 60 pairs of handset locations and are publicly available. We find that the attenuation level reported by the GAEN API need not increase with distance between handsets, consistent with there being a complex radio environment inside a bus caused by the metal-rich environment. Changing the people holding a pair of handsets, with the location of the handsets otherwise remaining unchanged, can cause variations of ±10dB in the attenuation level reported by the GAEN API. Applying the rule used by the Swiss Covid-19 contact tracing app to trigger an exposure notification to our bus measurements we find that no exposure notifications would have been triggered despite the fact that all pairs of handsets were within 2m of one another for at least 15 minutes. Applying an alternative threshold-based exposure notification rule can somewhat improve performance to a detection rate of 5% when an exposure duration threshold of 15 minutes is used, increasing to 8% when the exposure duration threshold is reduced to 10 minutes. Stratifying the data by distance between pairs of handsets indicates that there is only a weak dependence of detection rate on distance.’

    (tags: papers bluetooth contact-tracing exposure-notification covid-19 accuracy testing buses radio gaen mobile)

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Links for 2020-06-18

  • This War of Mine to be added to school reading list in Poland

    This War of Mine, which was first released in 2014, drew on the experiences of the Bosnian people during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. It won widespread acclaim for its realistic portrayal of the human cost of war, and had sold more than 4.5 million units in April 2019. The game will be included in the Polish reading list for the 2020/21 academic year, but will only be available to students aged 18 and above due to its age rating in the country. It will be recommended for those studying sociology, ethics, philosophy, and history, and will be available to students of those subjects for free.

    (tags: war history bosnia sarajevo games gaming poland school)

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Links for 2020-06-17

  • _Opportunistic Paper about COVID-19 using my Favorite Theoretical Approach_

    lol science: Mason Porter on Twitter: “I am here to help.”

    _Opportunistic Paper about COVID-19 using my Favorite Theoretical Approach_ Abstract: COVID-19 is a disease that is killing a lot of people. It really sucks. To help save the world (or at least add to my publication list), I examine the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission using my favorite theoretical approach, whether or not there is any justification or relevance for it. I do some curve fitting with previous data, and my theory seems to match the data pretty well (at least for some parameter values). I also find some evidence for universality, which may be interesting from the perspective of fundamental theory. A more practical application of my work is its influence on the signal-to-noise ratio of COVID-19 papers on preprint servers. I am here to help.

    (tags: funny papers preprints science physicists pet-theory latex argh)

  • “Internet folklorist” tracks down the origins of a “heart shaped honeycomb” meme

    A South African beekeeper called Brian Fanner created it by routing a heart-shaped pattern into the lid of a hive:

    ‘The things that come up are really funny from how bees have “artistic sensibilities” to bees creating that shape “to increase airflow”. I’ve seen companies using it in their websites and so many claiming it came out of their hive somewhere in the world. I used this board, routed in the slots… a rush job I’ll admit… waxed in some foundation strips into the slots and screwed inside a deep langstroth hive lid and stuck it on the hive. The bees made do best they could… The lines are slots into which a foundation wax with the comb pattern on it can be placed…secured with melted beeswax. Normally…a sheet…to guide the bees as to where to build. So they just come across this weird pattern of foundation strip and start building onto it. After that they just fill it out best they can. It’s a simple manipulation. The bees are Capensis. The honey was most likely early season succulent type plant called a ‘vygie’. I called the image ‘a sweet heart’ dedicated to my wife…per the very first post of it on my Facebook page in 2013.’

    (tags: beekeeping hives honey honeycomb history folklore facebook social-media brian-fanner bees)

  • A Shared File System for Your Lambda Functions

    AWS Lambda can now attach an EFS NFS filesystem. This is pretty cool tbh

    (tags: aws serverless lambda storage efs nfs ops)

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Links for 2020-06-16

  • Umarell

    I love this:

    Umarell (Italian pronunciation: [uma?r?l?]; modern revisitation of the Bolognese dialect word umarèl [uma?r??l]) is a term popular in Bologna referring specifically to men of retirement age who pass the time watching construction sites, especially roadworks – stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice.[1]
    (via Mltshp)

    (tags: via:mltshp umarell building construction building-sites work spectators old funny words italian bologna)

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Links for 2020-06-13

  • The hidden patterns behind the Covid-19 map of Dublin

    Excellent article analyzing COVID-19 patterns here:

    The four new classes defined by Robert Reich might also apply to Ireland. The results of the analysis of Dublin infection cases from the HSE map which show the so-called Remotes are definitely present in the Irish society as the economic wealth is clearly related to chances of being infected. Recently published information shows that 1030 of Covid-19 deaths had happened inside of the nursing homes and other facilities caring for older. This represents 63% of total deaths from Covid-19 in Ireland and suggests that the so-called Forgotten class has suffered the most from the mismanaged public health policy which disregarded their specific life situation. The exact structure and divisions between the new classes of the Irish society in the new Covid-19 world can only be known with the extensive research and dissemination of data related to Covid-19 infections and deaths. It is crucial to abandon the current practices of omitting the data. We must apply the principles developed by John Snow in the 19th century which aim to collect and disseminate as much data as possible. This is the only way we will be able to develop the public health policy which will defeat the virus without scarifying the wellbeing of those who lack the privilege of having high economic and social status.

    (tags: covid-19 mapping society ireland dublin class)

  • Interpreting Covid-19 Test Results: A Bayesian Approach

    This is very clever — it hadn’t occurred to me at all, but of course it makes sense. tl;dr: prevalence, the prevailing rate of infection in the community, is a key factor in Covid-19 testing.

    a brief tutorial on Covid-19 testing, with an emphasis on a Bayesian approach. After presenting the basics, we’ll walk through four confusing Covid-19 testing scenarios, just to give you a feel for the kinds of pickles we often find ourselves in.

    (tags: prevalence covid-19 bayes bayesian statistics testing)

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Links for 2020-06-09

  • How We Solved the Worst Minigame in Zelda’s History

    a lovely bit of RNG hacking in this YouTube speedrun vid

    (tags: videos youtube rng prng hacks cool via:reddit)

  • The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee

    Kim Stanley Robinson on a Jobs Guarantee:

    It would mean that governments would set a higher minimum wage than ever before, and if that minimum were a true living wage, private enterprise would have to match it to attract workers. And then, suddenly, everyone would be both employed and making a decent living. Private enterprises would therefore have more prosperous customers, and all would then rise in a virtuous cycle. Given the immense stresses that climate change is sure to bring, finding useful work for people would not be a problem. There will be a lot to do. Recall that 5% unemployment is often said to be the “natural” level, such that markets get nervous when the jobless rate goes lower than that. Unemployment at 5% is said to create “wage pressure,” which it definitely does, because millions of people are thereby living in fear and will take any job they can get, even ones that don’t pay enough for a secure life. The phrase “wage pressure” is yet another indication of how markets exert power to keep power. In this context, a Job Guarantee would erase wage pressure (meaning fear and misery), and the less fearful and more productive populace that resulted might thrive in a feeling of security.

    (tags: jobs work unemployment economics economy qe future ksr scifi climate-change)

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Links for 2020-06-08

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Links for 2020-06-06

  • No, coronavirus apps don’t need 60% adoption to be effective | MIT Technology Review

    But even though the researchers know that lower levels of adoption will be useful, they aren’t entirely sure what different ranges will actually mean. Still, every successful notification means a life potentially saved. Fraser says his team had assumed that lower levels of usage might have very small benefits—but that, in fact, simulations show the upsides are significantly higher than they thought. “The expectation going in was that app usage wouldn’t be very effective at low levels,” he says. “If you have 10% of people using the app, then the chance of contact between two people being detected is 10% of 10%, which is 1%—a tiny fraction. What we found in the simulation was that that actually isn’t the case. We’ve been working to understand why we actually see benefits of usage accruing.”

    (tags: contact-tracing apps exposure-notification covid-19 papers)

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Links for 2020-06-03

  • The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

    The Immuni exposure notification app, based on the Google/Apple protocol, is now OSS and up on Github. Sounds like HN are generally positive about its implementation

    (tags: immuni italy covid-19 exposure-notification contact-tracing apps android ios)

  • We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy

    Annike Linde, [Anders] Tegnell’s predecessor as chief epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, said last week that she had initially backed the country’s strategy, but had begun to reassess her view as the virus swept through the elderly population. “There was no strategy at all for the elderly, I now understand,” Linde told the Swedish state broadcaster. “I do not understand how they can stand and say the level of preparedness was good, when in fact it was lousy.”

    (tags: sweden covid-19 lockdowns anders-tegnell pandemics herd-immunity)

  • Japan’s approach to combat COVID-19 [pdf]

    Very interesting and detailed presentation, particularly the info about how they perform retrospective contact tracing to narrow down the sources of community transmission and monitor other contacts, who may be asymptomatic but still infectious.

    (tags: covid-19 japan pandemics contact-tracing clusters infection)

  • We’re All Living In The Cool Zone Now – VICE

    The Cool Zone is usually defined by people on Twitter as a period in history that’s super cool to read about, but much less cool to live through. This definition is usually attributed to Matt Christman from the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Looking back on what parts of history I like to read about, it makes sense. Reading about the long, protracted war in Vietnam is fascinating, for instance, but I do not wish to live through any part of the Vietnam War. Nor do I wish to live in Vichy France, or be part of the original Black Panthers movement, or to wage a revolution against the King of France, or be tossed in jail for a lunch counter sit-in like my father was in Selma. I counted myself lucky to be able to read about resistance leaders who took stands without being forced to make such a stand myself. Except, well, now I am, as I march in the streets with thousands of others all across New York City and the country.

    (tags: cool-zone history change twitter chapo-trap-house)

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Links for 2020-06-02

  • OPINION: Coronavirus Response Is Haunted By Colonialism

    There was public knowledge of a viral respiratory epidemic threat from China in January, yet serious nationwide public health responses in the U.S. and U.K. did not start until March 2020. Even once it became clear that wealthy countries were at risk, there was a widespread reluctance to learn from China and from other Asian countries. The American reaction focused instead on blaming China – consider President Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus.” China was further criticized for using draconian measures when millions of people in Wuhan were put under lockdown – even though the countries of the West that denigrated such tactics might today be better off if they had acted similarly. Indeed, recent data suggests that the majority of cases in the United States came from New York City. Restricting travel out of the city, as was done in Wuhan, might have meant far fewer cases in the U.S.

    (tags: colonialism diseases covid-19 history neocolonialism china usa uk asia)

  • CA Root expired on 30 May 2020 | Hacker News

    A root CA cert from Certigo expired over the weekend and lots and lots of shit broke. SSL PKI is awful.

    (tags: ca certificates ssl tls pki pain oncall fail ops security)

  • Will there be a second Covid wave?

    in science, you hold all your variables constant except one: keep the lid on your styrofoam cup and your china cup. That’s true, and if we were doing pure science — if we only cared about finding out what lockdown measures worked and which didn’t — then it would be simple: introduce measures one at a time, wait and see, do it slowly.  But we’re not doing pure science. We’re also trying to make a country that works for its citizens, in conditions that change daily. “We’re trying to build a plane as we fly it,” my US epidemiologist told me. The most important thing, according to Javid, will be “nimbleness; being able to change policy in the light of new evidence”. If it turns out opening schools was wrong, then close them again. And we in the media need to be wary of shouting about mistakes and U-turns and instead say: when the facts change, you change your mind.

    (tags: science epidemiology covid-19 second-wave lockdown medicine u-turns)

  • Origami Maze Puzzle Font

    ‘any orthogonal maze, with vertical walls protruding equal heights from a rectangular floor, can be folded efficiently from a rectangle of paper just a small factor larger than the floor. The design algorithm has been implemented as a freely available web application you can design a maze or generate one randomly, and the application produces a crease pattern, which you can print and fold into your design’

    (tags: origami fonts text puzzles mazes)

  • Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback

    New processor behaviour means everything we know about performance optimization is wrong again:

    We’ve seen how crucial it is to understand data dependencies in order to optimize code. Especially hidden memory dependencies between load and stores can greatly influence performance of work loops. Understanding the data dependency graph of code is often where the real performance gains lie, yet very little attention is given to it in the blogosphere. I’ve read many articles about the impact of branch mispredictions, importance of data locality and caches, but much less about data dependencies. I bet that a question like “why are linked lists slow?” is answered by many in terms of locality, caches or unpredictable random memory access. At least I’ve heard those reasons often, even Stroustrup says as much. Those reasons can play a part, but it’s not the main reason. Fundamentally iterating a linked list has a load-to-use on the critical path, making it 5 times slower than iterating a flat array. Furthermore accessing flat arrays allow loop unrolling which can further improve ILP.

    (tags: data-dependencies sorting algorithms performance optimization coding)

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Links for 2020-05-29

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Links for 2020-05-27

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Links for 2020-05-22

  • Coronavirus hijacks cells in unique ways that suggest how to treat it – STAT

    Recent studies show that in seizing control of genes in the human cells it invades, the virus changes how segments of DNA are read, doing so in a way that might explain why the elderly are more likely to die of Covid-19 and why antiviral drugs might not only save sick patients’ lives but also prevent severe disease if taken before infection. “It’s something I have never seen in my 20 years of” studying viruses, said virologist Benjamin tenOever of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, referring to how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, hijacks cells’ genomes.

    (tags: coronavirus covid-19 sars-cov-2 genes immunology interferons antibodies)

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Links for 2020-05-21

  • Patent case against GNOME resolved

    Great result for open source at large, too!

    Today, on the 20th of May 2020, the GNOME Foundation, Rothschild Patent Imaging, and Leigh M. Rothschild are pleased to announce that the patent dispute between Rothschild Patent Imaging and GNOME has been settled. In this walk-away settlement, GNOME receives a release and covenant not to be sued for any patent held by Rothschild Patent Imaging. Further, both Rothschild Patent Imaging and Leigh Rothschild are granting a release and covenant to any software that is released under an existing Open Source Initiative approved license (and subsequent versions thereof), including for the entire Rothschild portfolio of patents, to the extent such software forms a material part of the infringement allegation.

    (tags: patents software swpats gnome open-source via:mjg)

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Links for 2020-05-20

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Links for 2020-05-19

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Links for 2020-05-18

  • ECDC COVID-19 Contact Tracing Guidelines

    Current guidelines for contact tracing and infection control of COVID-19 in the EU. Good data, with sources!, on what’s recommended here (although of course each country can make their own guidelines).

    (tags: covid-19 pandemics contact-tracing eu medicine)

  • An open letter to software engineers criticizing Neil Ferguson’s epidemics simulation code

    the main message of this letter is something different: it’s about your role in this story. That’s of course a collective you, not you the individual reading this letter. It’s you, the software engineering community, that is responsible for tools like C++ that look as if they were designed for shooting yourself in the foot. It’s also you, the software engineering community, that has made no effort to warn the non-expert public of the dangers of these tools. Sure, you have been discussing these dangers internally, even a lot. But to outsiders, such as computational scientists looking for implementation tools for their models, these discussions are hard to find and hard to understand. There are lots of tutorials teaching C++ to novices, but I have yet to see a single one that starts with a clear warning about the dangers. You know, the kind of warning that every instruction manual for a microwave oven starts with: don’t use this to dry your dog after a bath. A clear message saying “Unless you are willing to train for many years to become a software engineer yourself, this tool is not for you.”

    (tags: software coding engineering science teaching c++)

  • The ‘lockdown sceptics’ want a culture war, with experts as the enemy | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian

    in the comment sections of some of the rightwing press, a new, virulent strain of Covid-19 scepticism has emerged that is the precise opposite of journalism. Rather than holding power to account, it distorts and bends reality to serve elite interests – and to warp public debate. In the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and other outlets, Britain’s contemporary “lockdown sceptics” have dedicated themselves to a singular cause: proving that the UK response to coronavirus has been a massive, hysterical overreaction. “Lift the lockdown” is their cogito ergo sum; Sweden their promised land.

    (tags: lockdown uk politics brexit experts daily-telegraph spectator right-wing covid-19 sceptics libertarians contrarians culture-war)

  • MyDIY

    Dublin online supplier of DIY equipment and parts, apparently decent enough. Free shipping for orders over 50 Euro

    (tags: diy building construction home dublin ireland)

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Links for 2020-05-14

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Links for 2020-05-13

  • An evidence summary of Paediatric COVID-19 literature

    ‘This post is a rapid literature review of pertinent paediatric literature regarding COVID-19 disease. We are proud to have joined forces with the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health to provide systematic search, and selected reviews of all the COVID-19 literature relevant to children and young people. Here we present the top 10 papers from each category (Paediatric clinical cases, Epidemiology and transmission, and Neonates). At the top is an Executive summary followed by all New and noteworthy studies.’

    (tags: covid-19 epidemiology diseases transmission school kids children)

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