Sunday, May 17, 2020
Robot Dog to Noodle Hats: 8 Quirky Ways Cities Are Encouraging Distancing
Amazon Hit From All Sides as Crisis Highlights Growing Power
Fitibit plans to make emergency ventilators for COVID-19 patients
Fitbit known for its fitness bands and smartwatches is planning to shift supply chain resources to make emergency ventilators. The CEO of Fitbit, James Parkin conversation with CNBC, revealed that the ventilators will be used to treat critical COVID-19 patients.
Fitbit will also be submitting the technology for review to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the coming weeks, according to the report. Fitbit said a team in the US has already started working on the ventilators in consultation with physicans from Massachusetts General Brigham and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), among others.
One of the big advantages Fitbit has, according to Park, is the infrastructure and manufacturing capability required is already available. “We already make 10 million (wearable) devices per year, and we plan to leverage that to make deliver product at whatever volumes are needed,” he said.
Fitbit is not the only one planning on manufacturing emergency ventilators, however. US space agency NASA have made a low-cost ventilator specifically for COVID-19 patients while General Motors and Ford have opened up manufacturing space for ventilator companies to produce more.
COVID-19 cases worldwide stands at 4.6 million with over 3.1 lakh succumbing to the infectious disease.
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Maybe it’s time to retire the idea of “going viral”
For years we’ve been using the phrase “gone viral” to describe something that becomes wildly popular on the internet. But it strikes a different note in the middle of a global pandemic, especially when the viral content is about an actual virus that is killing people. It’s even worse when you’re talking about “viral” content containing dangerous misinformation and conspiratorial thinking about such a virus—like Plandemic, the documentary that got millions of views on Facebook and YouTube last week before the platforms started removing it.
These past few months I’ve started catching myself whenever I write or speak about something “going viral,” searching for another way to put it. A couple of weeks ago, I started wondering whether we should even be using the word in this figurative way at all anymore. Turns out I am not alone.
“I’ve stopped myself with that expression,” Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and editor at large at the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, told me. Then Sokolowski asked one of his colleagues, computational linguist Ben Mericli, to help figure out whether other people were pulling back on using the internet sense of “viral” as well.
To do that, Mericli picked four phrases that usually refer to biological viruses (viral disease, viral infection, viral load, viral fever) and four phrases that usually refer to internet content (go viral, viral video, viral post, viral photo). He looked at their frequency in a large database of news articles from January 1 to April 30 this year and then compared that with the same period of time in 2019.
The results were pretty clear: figurative use of “viral” has clearly decreased this year as literal uses of “virus” have gone way up. “Since the outbreak, viral has just been used more often in general, with the increase owed entirely to literal use,” he said in an email. “So in that sense I suppose it’s even more striking that the figurative numbers are down.”
Although it seems logical, this decrease isn’t actually a given: plenty of words with medical or epidemiological origins are able to cohabitate in our language with their original or literal meanings, Sokolowski said. For example, both laughter and a disease can be “contagious” or “infectious.” Sometimes people don’t even realize they’re using a word with such roots.
“When people say vitriol they don’t know they’re echoing a chemical compound that burns human skin,” he said (vitriol was originally a term for sulfuric acid). But “viral” is different; the meanings are related but not the same. We have viral stories about viral infections, and we know what both mean. “It’s possible that these two words are used in such similar contexts in similar writing that it is a bad choice,” Sokolowski said.
But as I spoke to other people about their own usage, I realized that whether the current situation lasts or not, there are other reasons to question whether “viral” is appropriate language for content on the internet.
Manipulated popularity
“Viral” outrage, “viral” videos, “viral” posts, and “viral” moments have been part of the language of internet culture since its beginnings. The term itself comes from viral marketing, which started in pre-social-media times with advertising agencies that promoted whisper campaigns or tried to manufacture word of mouth. But once it shifted online, “virality” dropped the connotation of having been engineered by people who were experts at getting your attention and became something more accessible and democratic: a flash cartoon spread because it was funny, a fail video because it triggered schadenfreude, a blog post because it was insightful. “Viral” became a way of implicitly signifying that something was worthy on its own merits of sharing, of media coverage, and of your attention.
But this sense of emergent, authentic popularity isn’t necessarily real: algorithms incentivize content that people are going to engage with, accelerating its spread, and people have gotten really good at manipulating how social media works in order to spread bad or potentially dangerous material. There are plenty of examples, and despite efforts to stop the flow of extreme views and misinformation, the strategies designed to hijack your attention keep working. Deep down, people should know this by now.
Plandemic spread from the antivaccine fringes because there was a deliberate push for attention by coronavirus conspiracy theorists—who exploited the way social-media culture is intended to function. They were wildly successful. For the past several weeks, well-known antivaccine personalities have been attracting millions of views by giving interviews to other YouTubers with bigger followings, creating content that boosts right-wing outrage about the lockdown, and then using their well-established online networks to get that content shared widely.
“There’s nothing to protect you”
Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, researches how misinformation and extreme ideas are amplified to reach bigger and bigger audiences, particularly by media coverage. She co-wrote a book with Ryan Milner this year that employs ecological metaphors—for instance, pollution—to help explain the digital universe in which bad information spreads.
“We need to think differently about our information ecosystem,” Phillips told me. “The metaphors we use can help shape our thinking on our responsibility.”
“Viral” could be a good metaphor for the spread of misinformation, Phillips told me, if only people used it correctly. “But they’re not,” she said. And that’s particularly true for the journalists who produce stories about trending misinformation.
“There’s this tendency to talk about it as if we stand outside it,” Phillips said. But we don’t: “If you’re writing a story about a particular disinformation campaign, you become a carrier for that virus.” Same goes for those who share it, whether to endorse, mock, or condemn. In other words, people may think they’re protected from the potential harm that misinformation on the internet can bring, but many are asymptomatic carriers of that information into spaces where it can devastate.
“There’s no PPE,” Phillips said. “It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to protect you when you write about it and read about it.”
The discomfort that I’m feeling describing something like Plandemic as viral, then, has some grounding. But it’s not that the word itself is bad, or even that it’s an inherently insensitive metaphor, although it may feel that way right now. The problem stems from how we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that “virality” is something we can observe without being part of—that we’re immune to the problem of dangerous misinformation if we don’t believe it, when in fact we are the carriers helping it spread.
https://ift.tt/2LCtjXA https://ift.tt/3cFVnFwGartner survey of IT leaders forecasts 8% YoY decline in global IT spending to $3.46T in 2020, vs. $3.76T in 2019, as budgets are slashed due to the pandemic (Martin Giles/Forbes)
Gartner survey of IT leaders forecasts 8% YoY decline in global IT spending to $3.46T in 2020, vs. $3.76T in 2019, as budgets are slashed due to the pandemic — Another week brings another clear sign that CIOs are making deep budget cuts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
US gave no assurances to Taiwan's TSMC for license to sell to Huawei: Official
WhatsApp for Android beta now comes with a shortcut to Facebook Messenger Rooms
The latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android now comes with Facebook Messenger Rooms. You can now participate in video calls with 50 other people on the popular messaging service. The video conferencing option was made globally available on Facebook and on the Messenger app as well, and depending on which country you are in, it has started rolling out for WhatsApp too. According to WABetaInfo, you will need to download WhatsApp for Android beta 2.20.163 to access the service before it rolls out to your country.
If the service has been rolled out to your country, it will pop up as Rooms on a chat window under the chat sheet. It will appear on the same menu that lets users share documents, location, contacts etc. All you need to do is click on the menu and if it has been rolled out to your location, it will show up there as a Rooms option. You can also access the feature in the Calls tab on WhatsApp for Android beta where you will notice an option for you to create a Room option when clicking on the calling button.
It looks like, for now, you will be directed to the Messenger app from WhatsApp for Android beta, which is easier to manage when it comes to end-to-end encryption. As of now, the option is not available on WhatsApp for iOS but the feature should show up soon enough. Another option for WhatsApp users to video chat is on the app itself as WhatsApp group video call does support 8 different users. You can read more about that story here. WhatsApp has also seen highly forwarded messages drop by about 70 per cent after the new limit was announced. You can read more about that here. And, finally, if you want to use Dark Mode on the desktop version of Facebook, you can do so here.
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Saturday, May 16, 2020
Analysis of ten years of cryptocurrency discussions and funding data shows repeated cycles of rising crypto activity followed by eventual "crypto winters" (Andreessen Horowitz)
Analysis of ten years of cryptocurrency discussions and funding data shows repeated cycles of rising crypto activity followed by eventual “crypto winters” — People who've been in crypto for a long time view the space as evolving in cycles, alternating between periods of high activity and “crypto winters.”
Multiple supercomputers in some EU countries were hacked this week with crypto mining malware via compromised SSH credentials; evidence suggests a single actor (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Multiple supercomputers in some EU countries were hacked this week with crypto mining malware via compromised SSH credentials; evidence suggests a single actor — Confirmed infections have been reported in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Another suspected infection was reported in Spain.
A nonprofit founded by privacy advocate Max Schrems has filed a complaint against Google on behalf of an Austrian citizen, claiming Android Ad ID violates GDPR (Tim Anderson/The Register)
A nonprofit founded by privacy advocate Max Schrems has filed a complaint against Google on behalf of an Austrian citizen, claiming Android Ad ID violates GDPR — Claims consent was neither informed, nor specific, nor free - but Google says it cannot identify a user from the ID
Gang arrested for fraud on Olx: Know about this ‘big scam’ while using Olx, Quikr
How to save battery life on your iPhone
Homeward, a web-based service that helps homeowners buy a new home before listing their existing home for sale, raises $20M in equity and secures $85M in debt (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
Homeward, a web-based service that helps homeowners buy a new home before listing their existing home for sale, raises $20M in equity and secures $85M in debt — Homeward, an Austin-based real estate startup that aims to help people buy homes faster, announced this morning that it has secured $105 million in funding.
Chinese AI company CloudWalk Technology raises ~$253M from investors including the China Internet Investment Fund and participants like ICBC and Haier Capital (China Money Network)
Chinese AI company CloudWalk Technology raises ~$253M from investors including the China Internet Investment Fund and participants like ICBC and Haier Capital — CloudWalk Technology, which is known as one of the “Four AI Dragons of China” (the remaining three are SenseTime, Megvii, and Yitu) …
Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times)
Financial Times : Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid weste...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
