Ten Ways COVID-19 Will Change Your Next Air Trip
You’ll still get there but it definitely won’t be half the funOn board, the plane will be cleaner but also leaner. Expect to wear a mask and snack before you go.
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Making Sense of the Numbers Behind COVID-19
Media and politicians put statistics before us to sway our opinions. But what do they really mean?Numbers can frighten or enlighten. The secret is making them explain themselves. Here’s a quick primer.
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The New Cyber Cold War with China
Cybersecurity strategist Peter Singer told Wired that there has never been a better time than the COVID-19 pandemic to be a government hackerThe United States has formally accused China of both funding and operating cells of hackers who infiltrate research labs working on responses to COVID-19.
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Vitamin D and COVID-19: Is It Data or Noise?
Because random clusters occur naturally in large numbers, only randomized, controlled trials can tell usRandom data shows geographic clusters. Thus some locations will inevitably have higher COVID-19 rates than others. As my example shows, associating these clusters with personal characteristics after the fact is not convincing scientific evidence. That’s where randomized, controlled trials are needed.
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Is Contact Tracing a Simple Answer to COVID Lockdowns?
An engineering professor at the University of Austin asks us to look at the costs and benefitsThe conventional science fiction fear of a superintelligent AI taking over the planet and ridding it of pesky humans distracts our attention from a much more realistic threat: Artificial intelligence (AI) makes both government and corporate surveillance much easier, cheaper, and more useful—whether it is in average citizens’ interests or not. If we are lucky, this will be the decade when we address the implications of that fact.
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Can AI Save Us from COVID-19? An Expert Is Skeptical
To use AI more successfully next time, we need a clear understanding of its limitations as well as its capabilitiesExperts list various problems, including the fact that AI is vulnerable to failure due to unforeseen problems, including problems with data (too sparse, too noisy, too many outliers, etc.). It also doesn’t learn as well from experience as humans do.
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Coronavirus: Is Data Mining Failing Its First Really Big Test?
Computers scanning thousands of paper don’t seem to be providing answers for COVID-19If Alphabet’s Deep Mind or Microsoft had successfully data mined the 29,000 papers and found useful coronavirus information, that would be pretty impressive. But they appear to be giving others a chance to try instead, raising issues once again about the value of data mining in medicine.
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Five Ways COVID-19 Is Changing Education for Good
Parents, students, and teachers worldwide have been finding ways to use the internet in creative ways they would never have considered beforeRecently, a Harvard prof chose to launch an attack on homeschoolers, portraying them as driven by narrow religious concerns. Given how many parents COVID-19 has forced to homeschool, the attack was, at best, poorly timed. But it usefully focused attention on the ways education needs to change in an online world.
Why Does COVID-19 Target the Northern Hemisphere?
A graph of death rates by latitude is revealingFirst of all, COVID-19 clearly does not attack the globe uniformly by latitude. The second standout feature is that it targets the northern hemisphere. How can a disease’s spread be affected by hemisphere, let alone latitude? Let’s look a little deeper for some clues.
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COVID-19: When 900 Bytes Shut Down the World
A great physicist warned us, information precedes matter and energy: Bit before itThe COVID-19 virus contains about as much information as a sticker in WhatsApp. Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón explore a dreadful truth: “Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world.”
Five Possibly Unexpected Ways the Post-COVID Office Will Change
We’ll all know more about remote working than we ever thought we wouldSome managers worry that remote employees will not be productive. They don’t always consider that the remote worker is the person in charge if something affects her work. For example, in an office building, if the water is shut off due to a street repair, a manager would likely co-ordinate. But at home, the worker must decide for herself how best to deal with it, while remaining productive. A level playing field would recognize overall long-term output vs. costs in either case.
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COVID-19: Getting to the Bottom of What Happened in China
China knowingly violated the terms of a World Health Organization (WHO) disclosure agreementIt is widely recognized that medical professionals and journalists in China are being silenced if they publish any information about COVID-19 that contradicts the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s official narrative. But now mainland Chinese scientists must ensure that their research publications also toe the CCP party line. If we sift carefully, however, we can uncover real information.
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COVID-19: How 900 Bytes Changed the World
Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world. Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón discuss COVID-19, DNA, and information. Show Notes 01:09 | Introducing Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón, Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Miami and Senior Researcher at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab Read More ›
And Now… Crypto-COVID!
How the COVID-19 pandemic is creating “social distance” for crypto-currenciesWhile the equity markets have garnered a lot of attention in the COVID-19 pandemic, cryptocurrencies have been largely ignored by the media. This is partly because interest in cryptocurrency in general has waned over the last two years. But the pandemic has shed some light on their market mechanics.
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Sci-fi Culture: There’s Life Here on Planet Covid!
But you have to look hard. Here’s some helpWith major releases postponed, we sci-fi fans tirelessly check our email and bookmarked sci-fi news sites for any good news. If you’re one of those, have no fear! I’ve compiled a short list of what’s been going on in the community over the past few weeks. Expect to see more updates like these as long as needed.
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The Dragon’s Deception: Conspiracy Theories and False Numbers
China’s global attempt to rewrite the history of coronavirus (COVID-19) is running up against incriminating evidenceThe Chinese Communist Party has touted the superiority of an authoritarian government over a democratic one in handling the virus outbreak. But American intelligence sources say that it was the punishment that local officials might receive from the authoritarian system that led to the initial coverup of the outbreak.
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Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Promote Mass Automation?
Caution! Robots don’t file for benefits but that’s not all we need to know about themI understand the panic many business leaders experience as they try to stay solvent while customers evaporate. Panic, however, is a poor teacher: AI-based automation will not only not solve all their problems, it may very well add to them. AI is not a magic box into which we can stuff them and make them disappear.
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COVID-19: Remembering Dr. Jim Goodrich, 73, Pediatric Neurosurgeon
Born wealthy, he spent his life working 80-hour weeks, operating on poor kids in the BronxHis specialty was reconstruction of the skulls of children born with horrendous skull deformities, and he pioneered the surgery of separation of craniopagus (Siamese) twins.
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Is Chloroquine really a “Game Changer” for COVID-19?
Test it, but don’t bet on itWhen a field is hot, there is a race to publish. With a large number of researchers trying a wide variety of treatments, it’s almost certain that that someone will find a coincidental pattern that is statistically significant but meaningless. The only solution, alas, is further testing.
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Was the COVID-19 Virus Designed? The Computer Doesn’t Know
Some researchers confuse not finding a particular type of design with ruling out designThe authors of the paper saying that the virus could not have been designed base their findings on the fact that current software would not have predicted this result. I am not claiming that the virus was designed, only that a researcher need not have relied on this software to design a virus. The paper makes a faulty assumption.
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