Very interesting to see a scientific paradigm shift — as described by Kuhn — happening before our eyes concerning the role of droplets versus aerosols in the transmission of Covid-19. This opinion piece by Dr. Tufekci at The New York Times gives some more information about why these facts took so long to accept. Another article at Wired gives some more background on the old scientific theories.
In The Netherlands I can also see this reflected in the RIVM guidelines. Until April 2021 they stated the following concerning aerosol transmission:
Het is op dit moment niet duidelijk of de kleine druppels (aerosolen) die in de lucht blijven hangen een rol spelen bij de verspreiding van het virus. Mochten ze een rol spelen in de verspreiding, dan is dit een minder belangrijke verspreidingsroute dan van de grotere druppels. Het beeld van de verspreiding van SARS-CoV-2 is hetzelfde als dat van andere virussen die door grote druppels worden overgedragen.
While current RIVM guidelines state the following.
Onder bepaalde omstandigheden kan besmetting ook plaatsvinden via virusdeeltjes die in de kleine druppeltjes (aerosolen) een grotere afstand kunnen afleggen. Bijvoorbeeld in ruimtes waar geen of te weinig ventilatie is en/of veel mensen, vooral voor een langere tijd,- bij elkaar zijn. Overdracht van het SARS-CoV-2-virus via luchtkanalen van ventilatiesystemen is niet waargenomen.
Surprising conclusions from Twitter on a recent controversy about a bias of their image cropping algorithm towards white people and women.
We considered the tradeoffs between the speed and consistency of automated cropping with the potential risks we saw in this research. One of our conclusions is that not everything on Twitter is a good candidate for an algorithm, and in this case, how to crop an image is a decision best made by people.
Via The Register.
In a press release, NVIDIA announced that is apparently starting to change their GPUs to reduce their Ethereum hash rate and hence try to prevent them from being used for crypto mining.
The Financial Times notes how the technology has been appropriated for crypto mining, causing shortages for video-gamers:
Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, were first designed to handle the demands of rendering video images in real time, a challenge given the large amount of data that needs to be processed simultaneously. The same technology has since been adapted to become the workhouse of artificial intelligence, one of the most data-intensive computing tasks, as well as crypto mining.
As the FT further points out, NVIDIA created a new line of chips called Cryptocurrency Mining Processors.
The following Vox video details how the invention of a “Chinatown style”, that can be found in cities around the world, can be traced back to an earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 and the subsequent re-imaging/invention of a new style and culture.
Interesting quote from an article at The Economist about the changing role of taste-makers and how art and media is produced with the rise of algorithmic systems:
The diminishing role of industry taste makers is reflected in the sort of art now being produced. To make it onto computer generated playlists, songs must avoid getting skipped, so tracks increasingly open with a catchy “prechorus”. New re leases may have up to a dozen writers making sure that every section sparkles—a “genetically modified hit”, quips Mr Mulligan, who doubts that “awkward listens” like Radiohead would do as well today. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, which takes more than a minute to get going, would not be released, he suspects. Songs have become shorter, since artists are paid per stream. Labels are even making sure that the titles are Alexa friendly.
The following article from The Economist China’s aversion to encryption technologies — which would make mass surveillance more difficult — makes the country’s networks vulnerable to foreign spying:
Weak security is the rule, not the exception, in digital services for the Chinese public. Email and social media must all facilitate state access, as must industrial net works used to run factories and offices, even if the extent to which the government uses that access varies. In August it banned the most up to date version of a protocol used to encrypt web traffic, known as TLS, from the Chinese internet, because it makes online surveillance harder.
(…) The government has responded by promoting programs for companies to improve customer data protection, even as it simultaneously enforces weakness in the security of all systems. But as long as the government demands access to data on Chinese people, those data can never be robustly protected.
A quote from Geoffrey Bowker in a recent article at STS Italia journal Technoscienza reflecting on our relationships with viruses:
The general point for me here about stuckness and knowledge is that we look at the world wrongly from the beginning if we break it up into separate entities. The theory of evolution is just wrong if it only accounts for the origin of species. What is much more interesting is the development of relationships – as in Michel Serres’ discussion of the parasite form as central. In a related context, Martin Buber argued that the relationship — to thou or that — was always prior. We murder to dissect… at any level… within or without the organism. There are reasons why many biologists say the species concept is unreal: there is no singular slicing apart of a set of entities. We interpenetrate.
The Register reports on a paper that aims to show how Big Tech has adopted similar strategies similar to Big Tobacco to influence AI ethics research, policy, and generally spreading doubts about the harms of AI:
The analogy “is not perfect,” the two brothers acknowledge, but is intended to provide a historical touchstone and “to leverage the negative gut reaction to Big Tobacco’s funding of academia to enable a more critical examination of Big Tech.” The comparison is also not an assertion that Big Tech is deliberately buying off researchers; rather, the researchers argue that “industry funding warps academia regardless of intentionality due to perverse incentive.
An article from The Economist mentions how drone technology gets transported from the battlefields of Iraq to American cities:
The notion of putting cameras on orbiting drones to catch malefactors was born on the battlefields of Iraq, where American armed forces wanted to nab people leaving bombs on roadsides. Ross McNutt, a former airforce engineer, founded Persistent Surveillance Systems (pss) to offer the same service to American cities (and others, such as Juárez) struggling with high murder rates. PSS drones flew over parts of Baltimore, most recently in May-October 2020. St Louis, among America’s most violent cities, also considered but is poised to reject PSS’s services, which raise difficult questions about how much surveillance Americans are willing to tolerate in exchange for the promise of safer streets.