Germany says it will adopt a decentralized approach to digital contact tracing backed by Apple and Google, abandoning its home-grown alternative — BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany changed course on Sunday over which type of smartphone technology it wanted to use to trace coronavirus infections …
Executives at construction startups discuss how they are automating parts of their work and what it will take to create fully autonomous construction projects — Built Robotics executives are fond of saying that their autonomous system for construction equipment, like dozers and excavators …
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Trapped indoors? Brain turning to mush? Can't bear to watch another minute of TV? We've got a few suggestions: modern board games well-suited to the most common quarantine scenarios of solo play, two-person gaming, and family time. Save the meetups and conventions for when the world gets back to normal; for now, play with the ones you're locked up with.
Board games have enjoyed a massive resurgence in the last decade, and our fellow fans no doubt have personal libraries already. But for anyone newer to the hobby, we've pulled together some recommendations that should keep you away from coronavirus news for an hour—while giving your brain a gentle workout.
Most of the games below are available on Amazon, but some might require a visit to your friendly local gaming store's website—and right now is the perfect time to support a local shop, if you can!
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Enlarge / Over 14,000 years ago, an ice sheet was perched on Svalbard. (credit: Omer Bozkurt)
The rapid rise of global temperature over the last century is almost certainly unprecedented in recent Earth history, but our current rate of sea level rise has stiffer competition. About 14,650 years ago, as the thawing of the last ice began to hit its stride, sea level made a remarkable jump of 12 meters or more—and did so in less than 400 years. It's an event known to scientists as Meltwater Pulse 1A.
Figuring out where all that water came from hasn’t been easy. It was certainly the result of melting glacial ice (and not some sort of biblical sky-flood), but models of past ice sheet change haven’t quite added up.
A new study led by Jo Brendryen at the University of Bergen takes an interesting route to discover that the melting of the Eurasian Ice Sheet, which has largely been overlooked, might just explain things.
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When President Trump suggested during a press conference that doctors should look into treating covid-19 patients with an “injection inside” of disinfectant, “or almost a cleaning,” Austin Chiang, a gastroenterologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, knew he had to react.
In his lab coat and scrubs, a stethoscope draped around his neck, and staring directly into the camera, Chiang sat in front of a news headline about Trump’s comments and mimicked screaming.
“I promise I won’t pretend to know how to run a country if you don’t pretend to know how to practice medicine,” Chiang wrote on the screen. The video, posted shortly after Trump’s comments, quickly gained tens of thousands of views.
Chiang is one of a new generation of doctors and medical professionals who have built online followings on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. Their medical credentials give their thoughts on the virus added weight.
While doctors made famous by TV have had to apologize for downplaying the virus and suggesting that losing some lives was an acceptable cost for re-opening schools, some of the new doctor-influencers are positioning themselves differently. At their best, this wave of doctor-influencers can combat misinformation by making responsible medicine sound almost as exciting as the scores of medical conspiracy theories, exaggerated claims, and snake oil promises that spread rapidly online.
For some, it’s a gap that was waiting to be filled. Natural healing personalities peddling dubious information were “early adopters” of social media, says Renee DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory who studies health disinformation. By the time platforms like Facebook and YouTube began cracking down on bogus health claims, they were already selling “cures” in natural healing Facebook groups, racking up millions of views on YouTube, and showing up in Google results.
“They sell their ‘cures’ using the same techniques that brands use to sell shoes,” DiResta says. “With an added layer of mystique via framings that suggest elite knowledge, like ‘The cure THEY don’t want you to know about!’”
Science-based medical professionals are playing catch-up.
“I actually think that the lack of quality physicians on social media has led to the rise of social influencers pedaling miraculous cures and detox teas and all that,” says Mikhail Varshavski, a.k.a. “Doctor Mike,” a family physician in New Jersey who has more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube. Until recently, he added, personality-driven medical social media has “just been sort of this black hole where doctors aren’t there because they don’t want to be perceived as unprofessional and as a result, misinformation thrives.”
But online fame for doctors and nurses comes with risks that are only heightened by the importance of their job. And as more and more medical professionals jump online to help guide the public and combat misinformation, there’s an additional risk that they become part of the problem they’re trying to fight.
The very things that help Austin Chiang reach a younger audience on TikTok can, if he’s not careful, undermine the trust his audience has in medical professionals. You have to be funny to connect on TikTok without seeming cringey or out of touch with the culture of the app. And you have to maintain that balance without crossing a line into unethical behavior. There have been, for instance, medical professionals who have used TikTok to mock their patients. And even those with the best of intentions and accurate information can find themselves in trouble when they move to a new medium.
“How do we present ourselves online without eroding the public’s trust in us?” Chiang told me. “There’s a lot of people out there who are new to the platform and who will throw something up there without thinking it through.”
Take Jeffrey VanWingen, a doctor who runs a private family practice in western Michigan. He wanted to help the public when he stood in his kitchen before work, filming a video in his scrubs that he believed the world needed to see: “PSA: Grocery Shopping Tips in COVID-19.” It was March 24; the governor of his state was going to issue shut down orders the following day. VanWingen is not an epidemiologist or a food safety expert, but he did know sterile techniques that, he believed, could be modified to help people keep the coronavirus from coming into their homes along with their groceries.
Although he knew that the risk of someone getting sick from touching groceries was likely very low (grocery shopping’s main risk these days comes from the other people in the store with you), “even very low is not negligible. It’s not nothing. And, and I think my goal was to empower people to help keep their risk of acquiring covid-19 airtight,” he says.
VanWingen’s 13-minute video demonstrated procedures for disinfecting different types of food, as his calm voice guided viewers through dumping food into “clean” containers, disinfecting packaging, and washing produce. The video was shared widely on social media, and passed between friends in email chain letters, as a panicked public looked for something they could do to have some control over the spread of a terrifying virus. The video, the first ever on his month-old YouTube channel, gained 25 million views and counting. But the video is also, at points, misleading.
You should not, as VanWingen initially suggested, wash your produce in soap and water—it’s better to just rinse fruits and vegetables in cold water because soap residue can cause digestive issues. And his suggestion to leave groceries outside or in the garage for a few days before bringing them into your home needed a clarification that this would not be a safe procedure for perishable goods.
VanWingen lobbied YouTube to let him edit the video and remove the portion with potentially harmful advice, but there wasn’t much he could do aside from take the whole thing down. He decided against that, instead littering the video’s description with updates linking to new and more accurate information. But, he says, he still stands by the majority of the advice in the video.
“If you associate Dr. VanWingen with misinformation, that weighs on me extremely heavily,” he says. Compared to others, he says, his mistake was innocent and would be unlikely to have dire consequences. “There are doctors that I’ve seen that are promoting, like for instance, hydroxychloroquine and maybe even promoting fear,” he says, referring to the unproven and, according to the FDA, potentially dangerous covid-19 treatment that was promoted by President Trump. “That is certainly not where I would see myself coming from. ”
“There are doctors I’ve seen promoting hydroxochloroquine and maybe even promoting fear.”
And the people who can get views for a medical message on social media aren’t necessarily the ones most qualified to craft it. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist who now has a large following on Twitter thanks to his evocative tweets about Covid-19, has found his expertise and analysis questioned by other epidemiologists.
Varshavski, that is Doctor Mike, became YouTube’s go-to medical expert after a 2015 Buzzfeed article about his Instagram account dubbed him the “hot doctor.” And although he often stresses to his audience that “expert opinion,” including his, is “the lowest form of evidence,” his viewers fans are more likely to trust what he says in his videos than they are to track down and read a randomized controlled study on the same topic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if the information is sound and clearly presented—and he described his role during the pandemic as essentially turning himself into a mouthpiece and platform for the CDC, WHO, and leading experts in the field.
But it’s easy to lose that balance.
“If you are a doctor and you’re popular and people look to you for guidance, and you believe your expert opinion without any kind of research to substantiate it outweighs that of the guidance from the CDC and WHO, you’ve crossed the line,” he says.
And that’s the central challenge: people will turn to the internet for information during a health crisis, whether it’s their own or one facing the entire world. But the best, most accurate information isn’t always packaged and optimized in a way that is appealing to a curious public searching for certainty. For every CDC video about the latest studies on the coronavirus, there’s someone out there claiming to be the one person out there willing to tell you what “doctors don’t want you to know.” That gets combined with a president who is amplifying potentially dangerous ideas so that they become significant news stories.
There’s another challenge faced by these doctor-influencers, too: branding and money. Personalities like Doctor Mike can make accurate information interesting by becoming influencers, but they also have to figure out a way to do that without falling into ethical quicksand.
People become famous online by becoming human brands. But “turning ourselves into brands can also drive people in a different direction,” said Chiang. “Some people out there are aligning us with big pharma already. The last thing they want to see is that we are selling a product or idea.”
Varshavski, like many content creators, takes sponsors for his Instagram and YouTube accounts, but said he has to make sure that those sponsorships don’t look like medical endorsements. Chiang, who also serves as the Chief Medical Social Media officer for his hospital, has to carefully screen which TikTok challenges he participates in, and the songs he uses with them, to avoid associating his image and that of his profession with something offensive or tasteless. Chiang is informative on TikTok, but he does it while engaging effectively with how people already use the app. And that’s not always something doctors are capable of—or interested in—trying to learn how to do.
“Historically there’s never been any sort of teaching in medical training in how to communicate on a public level with our communities and our patients,” said Chiang.
Online fame takes maintenance and skill to a degree that most people underestimate. And, especially for doctors and other people who work in fields that are targets of disinformation, there are some more serious risks. Chiang points out that some companies will simply steal content from medical professionals on social media and use them to sell their products. And, battling medical misinformation online can make those who believe it angry, potentially endangering the personal safety of doctors who try to take it on.
But Chiang and Varshavski say thesay that the risks are worth it, especially if having more doctors online helps people find better information about their health.
And, as doctors who are both on the internet and treating real patients, they can see how misinformation impacts their patients first-hand. Varshavski treated five covid-19 patients in one recent weekend with mild symptoms, and each asked for hydroxychloroquine, a risky possible treatment that can cause serious heart issues in some patients. Some told Varshavski that they heard about the treatment on TV.
https://ift.tt/2VDyY5B https://ift.tt/35784WKThe Coronavirus outbreak has had a major impact across industries, including the film industry. Earlier this month, Disney had announced a major reshuffling of its release timelines, with the most notable being moving the release of the Black Widow movie, which had a cascading effect on every other Marvel movie release. Now Sony too has announced delays in release some of its films which have once again impacted the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Sony has announced that the sequels to Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse and the third film in the Spiderman: Homecoming trilogy will be delayed due to the coronavirus outbreak. The final movie in the Homecoming trilogy will now release on November 5th, 2021 instead of July 16th, 2021 while the sequel to Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse will now see theatre screens on October 7th, 2022 instead of April 8th, 2022. With Sony moving the release of the third movie in the Homecoming trilogy, it means that Marvel too will have to shuffle some releases around, seeing how they like to maintain a timeline of releases. Due to the change in the release date of the third Spiderman movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder are both going to once again be pushed back. The Doctor Strange sequel, which had already been moved to November 5th, 2021 just a couple of weeks ago, will now open on March 25th, 2022. Thor: Love and Thunder is going to move up a week, releasing on February 18th, 2022 instead of the recently announced February 11th, 2022. Marvel had already announced a whole new release timeline for some of its upcoming films, including the announcement that some films will come straight to its Disney+ streaming platform.
There are other notable movies from Sony that have also received new release dates. Venom: Let There Be Carnage, has been pushed to June 25, 2021, instead of releasing this year in October. However, there is a slight silver lining. The Uncharted movie which stars Tom Holland has now been moved to an earlier release date of July 16, 2021, from the originally planned release date of October 8, 2021.
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A look at the origin of the conspiracy theory linking 5G to COVID-19, which went mainstream as influential people and celebrities started amplifying it in March — Damaged cabling and telecommunications equipment is pictured following a fire at a phone mast attached to a chimney in Huddersfield, northern England, on April 17.
Enlarge (credit: Jessy Blain | Getty Images)
Cue the montage: It’s quarantine makeover time. People practicing social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic are itching to change up their looks. The evidence is all over social media: With hair salons shuttered, people have resorted to chopping at long lockswith craft scissors or full-on shaving their heads, or dying their hair blue or pink with box dye. Many men, from Jim Carrey to your uncle, are growing out lumberjack beards.
For some, mere hair manipulation isn’t enough. If you can keep your eyes open long enough, you could watch YouTube and TikTok videos of people piercing their own ears and noses at home, or letting equally unqualified family members do it for them. Perhaps most adventurous are those contemplating giving themselves quarantine stick-and-poke tattoos with kits they bought on Facebook.
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TSMC has allegedly begun work on its 2nm lithography, according to industry insiders. The report, however, comes via WCCFTech who report that amidst a shortage of components, TSMCs refinement of 3nm lithography has slowed down, so the company is using the time to work on the next big/small thing.
Earlier this month, TSMC reported that its 5nm production lines were working at full capacity, leading us to believe that 5nm chips may not be farther away than the end of the year. TSMCs CoWoS Interposer lines are also currently at capacity, given that the demand has suddenly skyrocketed over the last few weeks. Companies like Nvidia, HiSilicon, AMD and even Broadcomm have increased their demands so that they can use them in high bandwidth applications like AI accelerators and ASICS.
TSMCs 5nm fabrication lines are also operating at capacity, possibly to meet the demands of upcoming processors. We expect Apple to move to the 5nm process for the A14 Bionic chip that will be a part of the 2020 iPhone. Additionally, AMD has already announced that its Zen 4 architecture will be based on the 5nm node, and the company expects it to be available starting 2022. The current architecture, Zen 2, is based on the 7nm process and according to AMD's own roadmap, Zen 3 is expected by the end of 2020, with the architecture achieving major permeation in the markets by 2021.
Needless to say, even with a shortage of equipment to work on the 3nm process, TSMC definitely has its hands full between the production of 7nm and 5nm chips. According to DigiTimes, the 5nm process will be based on the Extreme UltraViolet or EUV method. This method employs a laser with a wavelength of 13.5nm to etch the gates onto the silicon wafer. The reduction in the size (to 7nm or 5nm) is achieved using stencil overlays. EUV has been unviable up until now due to the extreme power requirements of the laser, however, it would appear that companies like TSMC and Samsung have both figured out how to work around that problem.
As we start to move towards chipsets utilizing the 5nm process, it's only logical for TSMC to work on the next step of the miniaturization process. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, TSMC has had to face delays and shortage of various equipment required for working on the 3nm node, but instead of just waiting, the company has become work on designing the 2nm lithography. This could involve a new laser with an even lower wavelength of light, or it could just be achieved using pairs and combinations of stencils.
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The lockdown may have dampened your spirits, but Realme CEO Madhav Sheth is still going strong. In a one-on-one video interview with one of the most popular faces in the smartphone industry, Madhav talked about his hobbies, his plans for Realme this year and dropped some exclusive information in the midst.
The video interview conducted on Skype went down with Madhav talking about how he has been spending his time during the lockdown. Did you know he plays the guitar and loves Bryan Adams? But on a more serious note, his 2020 roadmap for Realme hasn't really changed despite the company having now almost lost almost half a quarter in the year and only have around 320 days to go ahead with the plans.
Yet, Madhav said that Realme's plans of expanding with a TV, smartwatch and the likes are still very much in the pipeline and has not been pushed back to 2021.
Madhav also spoke about how the smartphone space will see some big chances post lockdown. With an economic slowdown on the cards, Madhav believes consumers will treat devices more as utilitarian than lifestype with say, the specs taking more precedence over the design. However, he believes the average selling price of smartphones will remain the same in India.
Do watch the full interview in the video posted below.
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The internet tailwinds that propelled meteoric growth in Silicon Valley are stalling, which will accelerate zero-sum games between startups and incumbents — The Internet tailwinds that propelled Silicon Valley's meteoric growth for decades are stalling out. The ripple effects will jolt the tech industry.
How activists are protesting online, like dropping pins with protest messages beside Russian government buildings on Yandex.Maps, holding Zoom conferences, more — Lockdown measures have stopped many protesters from going outside. So they're getting creative.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat : Belgium-based Vertical Compute, a memory chip firm spun out of European VC firm Imec.xpand, raised a €20M ...
