German authorities said that an apparently misdirected ransomware attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment. Systems crashed and the hospital wasn’t able to access data; emergency patients were taken elsewhere and operations postponed. The woman’s death appeared to be the first resulting from a ransomware attack, even if indirectly so.
After five months of pandemic-forced closure, the big movie theater chains reopened in roughly 68% of the United States by Labor Day weekend, in large part so they could show a $200 million film. But “Tenet,” collected $9.4 million in its first weekend in North America and just $29.5 million over its first two weeks.“Tenet” was supposed to mark the return of the movie business in the US. Instead, it has shown how much trouble the industry is in. "This links to the public health situation. The longer it takes to get that under control, the tougher it’s going to be."
Do snow flurries make you hungry for truffle fries? The Weather Channel can micro-target how small weather changes impact what (people) buy. Sales of baking chocolate in Kansas and Missouri jumped 62% during a rainy forecast. Wine sales went up 25% in Michigan and Illinois when clear weather hit. Marketers activate digital campaigns based on the weather’s influence on consumer behavior and emotion. Rather than third-party cookies and mobile identifiers, algorithms with behavior, location, weather and sales data find correlations, discern patterns, make predictions and learn over time.
The leading Covid-19 vaccines will need to be kept at temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit) from the moment they are bottled to the time they are ready to be injected into patients’ arms. They are made with genetic materials that fall apart when they thaw. UPS is constructing a freezer farm where it can store millions of doses at subzero temperatures.Pharmacies are unlikely to be equipped to stockpile large quantities of vaccines that require ultracold storage. (And) the world is facing a shortage of dry ice, an unexpected side effect of the pandemic.
The role of spotting counterfeits is being filled by artificial-intelligence algorithms that have studied every tens of thousands of bags, shoes and other items that are knocked off. Brands provide Amazon with logos, trademarks and other data, which the AI uses to look for counterfeits among the billions of listings. Authentic and fake bags teach algorithms to tell the difference, down to details most humans have a hard time spotting. AI checks 500 to 1,500 features, such as color, stitching and pores in leather. A result (is) in the app in from 60 seconds to an hour. With each use, the algorithm becomes smarter.
The problem of pandemic commerce doesn’t lie with low supply or high demand. The coronavirus has eaten away at the entire system by which things are bought and sold in America. Corporations have spent decades squeezing every last dollar out of the market at the expense of flexibility and resilience. At the beginning of the pandemic, when people assumed things would be back to normal in weeks, retailers and manufacturers “weren’t in a hurry to shift gears and make a lot of expensive decisions. Efficiency is great if things go exactly as planned.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restored its recommendation to test people who have been exposed to COVID-19 but don’t have symptoms, erasing politically motivated changes made by the Trump administration without support or input from CDC scientists. Changes to the testing guidance did not go through the CDC’s standard, lengthy review and clearance process. Anthony Fauci did not see the changes. He was undergoing surgery to remove a polyp when the revisions were discussed.
300,000 new infections were reported across Europe last week and weekly cases exceeded those reported during the first peak in March. In the UK, the number of new daily cases has reached the highest level since mid-May. France recorded 10,593 cases on Thursday, the highest daily number since the pandemic began. Spain on Wednesday recorded 239 new coronavirus deaths, the highest number since June. The Czech Republic reported more than 2,000 daily cases for the first time. Cases have also reached a new daily peak in the Netherlands.
52% of young adults reside with parents. The number grew to 26.6 million. The share of young adults living with their parents grew for all racial and ethnic groups, men and women, and metropolitan and rural residents. Growth was sharpest for the youngest adults (ages 18 to 24) and for White young adults. Before 2020, the highest measure was in the 1940 census at the end of the Great Depression, when 48% of young adults lived with parents. The peak may have been higher during the 1930s, but there is no data for that period.
The drug is a monoclonal antibody, a manufactured copy of an antibody produced by a patient who recovered from Covid-19. A single infusion markedly reduced levels of the coronavirus in newly infected patients and lowered the chances that they would need hospitalization.1.7% of those who got the drug were hospitalized, compared with 6% of those who received a placebo, a 72% reduction in risk. It might mean that patients could be made less infectious, but the (antibodies) are difficult and expensive to manufacture.
When it comes to Millennials and Gen Z, stories of crowded beach gatherings and house parties have made headlines. But people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s are now driving the virus’s spread because most are just trying to do their jobs.“Young people in service jobs are now at a greater risk of being exposed.” People whose low-wage jobs or desires to attend college put them in contact with a higher number of people are more likely to contract and spread coronavirus; hence the growing number of cases. Economic vulnerability and this burden falls heavily on younger generations.
46% of the households in America report serious financial pain during the pandemic. It is more acute in the four largest U.S. cities (New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago) and among Latino and Black households. 54% with household incomes below $100,000 report financial problems, compared with 20% with incomes above that. Housing insecurities because of loss of job, or food insecurity (are) magnifying health conditions, leading to higher anxiety and blood pressure. Renters pay more than 50% of what they make towards rent, so that doesn't leave much room for life upheaval. "And we've been in six months of life upheaval."
Up and down the West Coast, hospitals and health facilities are reporting an influx of patients with problems most likely related to smoke inhalation. But that is only part of the challenge. Facilities already strapped for testing supplies and personal protective equipment must first rule out COVID-19 in these patients, because many of the symptoms they present with are the same as those caused by the virus. The protocol is to treat the symptoms, whatever their cause, while recommending that the patient quarantine until test results for the virus come back
Moderna should have enough data from its trial to know whether its coronavirus vaccine works in November, CEO Stephane Bancel said. Infectious disease experts and scientists in recent weeks have said they have concerns that the White House may be pressuring the FDA to approve a vaccine before it’s been adequately tested. Earlier this month, Moderna announced it was slowing enrollment in its clinical trial to ensure it has sufficient representation of minorities most at risk for the disease. The company so far has enrolled 25,296 people in the trial. "We care deeply that this vaccine is trusted.”
Back to an office, maybe not the office. “Working from home is not for everyone. A lot of it people miss each other, and the energy of having everyone together.” A hybrid WFH/office model will be the new norm. 70% of large company CEOs plan to reduce office space. This is especially true in tech hubs like the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York, where officing an employee can cost $15,000 per year. The vision is to have one floor of office space in 10 cities, rather than 10 floors of office space in one city. A hub-and-spoke model, offered in flexible configurations and use terms is available in a wide range of cities.
Some workers furloughed at the onset of the pandemic are still in purgatory, but signs are cropping up that job losses may become permanent. 43% of Americans in last week's Axios-Ipsos coronavirus survey reported that they were concerned about their job security, and 44% said they were worried about their ability to pay their bills. And workers face a previously unfathomable tradeoff: quit their job or keep it, but at the risk of potentially contracting the virus.
U.S. hotel occupancy collapsed from 60% in February to 22% in April. It has since recovered some, at about 48%. Recovery could depend on how safe guests feel. Hotel companies are doubling down on automation and fast-tracking technologies such as digital room keys and voice-activated digital assistants to minimize contact between guests and hotel staff amid the coronavirus pandemic. Guests can process payment, verify their identity and obtain a digital room key through a mobile app, use AI-based devices to control lighting and the television, avoiding touching light switches and remote controls, and ask digital assistants for extra towels or request late checkout.
This was supposed to be the year that China’s export machine began to stall. Instead, China Inc. has come roaring back. Exports soared in July to their second-highest level ever. The country has grabbed a much larger share of global markets this summer from other manufacturing nations. Its resilience lies not only in the country’s low-cost, skilled labor and efficient infrastructure but also in a state-controlled banking system. It is making what the world’s hospitals and housebound families need right now: personal protection gear, home improvement products and lots of consumer electronics.
Even in a public health emergency, the first rule of American health care is still in effect: There is no set price. Medical providers often inflate their charges and then give discounts to insurance plans that sign contracts with them. Out-of-network insurers and their members often pay the full tab or whatever discount they can negotiate. Insurance typically pays between $100 and $300 for drive-thru COVID-19 tests. Charging $2,479 for a drive-thru COVID-19 test is an example of profiteering during a pandemic. “You’re getting a drive-thru test, and they’re pretending they’re giving you emergency services.”
The release of signs for a presidential campaign would not be notable but they are in a video game. These signs are digital assets for players to display inside the online multiplayer video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The sign rollout raises questions around how companies that operate online games will wrestle with the abuse of these digital social spaces. 13% of adults who play online games were exposed to in-game conversations around conspiracy theories about 9/11, 9% were exposed to Holocaust denial, and 8% were exposed to disinformation about vaccines. No online game has a policy related to medical or political disinformation in the U.S.
There are many large corporations with the attitude of If you’re making this much money, you better be in the office. People on the high end of the income scale may have the ability to work from home now but I wouldn’t bet on all of them keeping that perk going forward. Facebook employees argue that work policies created in response to Covid-19 “have primarily benefited parents.” At Twitter, a fight erupted on an internal message board after a worker who didn’t have children accused another employee, who was taking a leave to care for a child, of not pulling his weight.
The pandemic has forced many small businesses to finally open online stores—and turned e-commerce software provider Shopify into one of the biggest winners of the retail shakeout. Small businesses have had to adapt (when) online sales jumped to levels that weren’t expected for years. Shopify’s software lets merchants create an online storefront and mobile application. Merchants upload images and details on their products and organize their inventory. Shopify’s software processes payments and calculates shipping. Shopify also offers services where merchants can store and ship items.
Apple Watch Series 6 has a new blood oxygen sensor that helps measure an important symptom of COVID-19. The Apple Watch measures blood oxygen saturation and pulse oximetry. This feature could be useful for people who have tested positive but aren’t yet ready to go to the hospital or who have been told by a doctor to stay home and monitor their symptoms.
New data show that the confidence, intelligence and extroversion that have long propelled ambitious workers into the executive suite are not enough online, because they don’t translate into virtual leadership. Workers who are organized, dependable and productive take the reins of virtual teams. Doers lead the pack remotely. Virtual teams anoint leaders who get projects done, “the individuals who help other team members with tasks, and keep the team on schedule and focused on goals. In face-to-face interactions, most of us are swayed by the power of personality. Virtually, people are more likely to be seen based on what they do, not based on who they are.”
Researchers have developed a device that detected COVID-19 in the exhaled breath of infected patients. Viruses emit volatile organic compounds that can be exhaled in breath. When VOCs interact with the molecules on a nanoparticle, the electrical resistance changes. The researchers trained the sensor to detect COVID-19 by using machine learning to compare the pattern of electrical resistance signals obtained from the breath of confirmed COVID-19 patients. The device showed 95% accuracy in discriminating COVID-19 cases from lung infections. The sensor could distinguish, with 88% accuracy, between sick and recovered COVID-19 patients.
An international consortium of medical experts has introduced the first official standards for clinical trials that involve AI. The new standards extend guidelines around how clinical trials are conducted and reported for drug development, diagnostic tests, and other medical interventions.. AI researchers will have to describe skills needed to use an AI tool, the setting in which the AI is evaluated, details about how humans interact with the AI and analysis of error cases. Lack of standards has allowed companies to crow about the effectiveness of AI without the scrutiny applied to other medical interventions or diagnosis.
The latest hiring drive is the fourth Amazon has initiated this year. All told, they add up to 308,000 positions. Amazon said in its most recent earnings report that net sales jumped 40%. In the early months of the pandemic, as consumers stocked up, Amazon was rocked by shipping delays and depleted inventory. Walmart and Target filled some of that void, using their bricks-and-mortar locations (for) pickup and e-commerce shipping.As a result, Amazon’s share of the U.S. online retail market fell from 42% in January to 38.5% in June.
Cramming cavernous spaces with as many desks as they could hold might have increased serendipitous interactions, but it almost certainly reduced productivity and helped spread communicable diseases. Cue the “dynamic workplace,” a pivot away from the open plan, that with fewer employees coming to work on any given day, offices can offer more flexibility of layout and management. It’s about how teams will use spaces when some remain home, others split their time and still more resume a daily commute and up-close collaboration.
None of three companies with coronavirus vaccines in advanced trials in the US have made public the protocols and statistical analysis plans for those trials. Experts say American taxpayers are entitled to know more since the federal government has committed billions of dollars to vaccine research and to buying the vaccines once approved. Greater transparency could bolster faltering public confidence in vaccines. 62% of Americans are worried the Food and Drug Administration will approve a coronavirus vaccine without making sure it is safe and effective, under political pressure.
European countries have started testing a platform that will allow national coronavirus tracing apps to ‘talk’ to one another. The Commission kicked off test runs between servers that support the apps created by the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Latvia whose apps share a similar design. “Travel and personal exchange will be facilitated and will save lives.” A ‘roaming’ function would be an add-on to the Bluetooth-based smartphone tracker apps, which now only work within national borders, with the goal of making it safer to revive travel and tourism.
How can the world better cope with threats and disruptions? Covid-19 has demonstrated the futility of pretending these can’t happen or that they will go away by themselves. We should invest in political, technological, and economic approaches for detecting, preventing, and mitigating the effects of these threats in our post-Covid 19 world. We are now more willing to consider alternative notions of work, education, and resilient ways of providing energy, transportation, manufacturing, housing, medical care, and the other core services of civilization. To strengthen technological, political, and economic systems so they can withstand disruptions and adapt to change is resilience.
The deal will not be an outright sale. Oracle will become ByteDance's US "tech partner." The details aren't yet public. ByteDance will need the approval of Chinese authorities, as well as Trump, before a deal can go through. Beijing's export controls restricting sale of AI technology apply to the algorithm TikTok uses. Chinese officials prefer to see TikTok shut down than for foreign governments to seize control of Chinese technology. ByteDance's decision to make the Oracle deal less than a sale might be to respect the Chinese government. If ByteDance believed Larry Ellison could use his relationship to Trump to get the deal approved, that would be a reason to choose Oracle.
On crowdfunding sites, inventors have raised millions of dollars for new designs of face masks, gloves, and other PPE. University engineering labs have turned their attention to making masks and face shields. It’s now possible to find startups crowdfunding for a mask hidden in the brim of a hat, and a protective bubble that covers the user from head to chest. Attempts to create transparent masks, which facilitate communication for people who read lips have experienced a surge of investment (and) a mask, like the N95, can filter out 95% of airborne particles but that is easier and more cost-effective to reuse.
By the latter half of August, 130 million Americans said they avoided eating at restaurants. Only 21 million of 250 million people had resumed dining out. 70% were still making fewer trips to stores in late August than before the pandemic.Of those pursuing post-secondary education, 29% said “plans to take classes this fall have been canceled.” Half said they had concerns about contracting Covid-19. 42% said they couldn’t pay for education due to changes in income from the pandemic.
The companies best positioned for the Covid era had technology that allowed them to adapt quickly to changing times: touchless transactions, robotics, online commerce or the infrastructure needed to support a decentralized workforce. They are emerging as winners in an economy where customers and workers must avoid contact, offices are empty and travel is limited. Changes brought on by Covid-19 look permanent as customers, workers and companies actually prefer the new ways of doing things.
For the first time in a generation, Americans spent more money at the supermarket than at places where someone else made the food. Grocers saw eight years of projected sales growth packed into one month. Before the virus, 19% of Americans shopped for food more than three times a week. That dropped to 10%. Pandemic shopping has ushered in wider aisles, new sanitation and less-crowded stores. Online shopping was 3% of grocery sales, $1.2 billion; (by) June $7.2 billion. Curbside pickup exploded. 30% are buying more store brands. Natural products are up 78%. Grocers sold 73% more oranges than 2019. Frozen food is up 18%, local food is too. “People are moving on to more complex cooking, and we don’t see that going away.”
“Deep learning works best in a regime of big data, but it’s worse in unusual cases. If you have something unusual, which is COVID since there is no historical data, then deep learning is not a very good tool.” Large swaths of data train the deep learning system to recognize patterns. But slight changes to the data can confuse even the most advanced deep learning systems. The pandemic should motivate the AI world to rethink the problems they’re trying to solve. “COVID-19 is a motivation to stop building AI for ad tech, news feeds, and things like that, and make AI that can really make a difference,”
Economists estimate the Sturgis rally led to 266,796 new cases. The study tries to re-create a randomized experiment by comparing the COVID-19 trends in counties that rallygoers traveled from with counties that don’t have as many motorcycle enthusiasts. The authors estimate the inflow to Sturgis during the rally based on the “home” of nonresident cellphone pings. The paper assumes COVID-19 cases from different counties averages out and comparing the trends is valid. The authors should have wondered if such levels of transmission were epidemiologically feasible - 19% of new cases in the US. A more plausible increase of 177 to195 cases is consistent with data.
Many of the problems people are talking about on the web are problems that arise out of detailed and persistent third-party, cross-site user behavior tracking. The modern digital advertising market underwrites the proliferation of harmful, divisive, and misleading online content, while undermining real journalism. The same convenience that allows a food blogger to turn their following into an income allows anyone to set up a site pushing hate speech and get it monetized."The content that receivse the most velocity and reach by algorithms swims in the same pool with disinformation and hate.”
Since the coronavirus, morning-show anchors banter, late-night hosts joke and politicians stump. It’s the audiences that have not showed. Their disappearance has spotlighted the mythical role they play. It is said to hold great power over performers, messing with their heads and triggering hormonal surges. The crowd legitimizes the performer’s skill, authenticating the real. Traditional entertainers now feel in competition with internet stars, who are skilled at performing one-sided conversations to unfeeling camera lenses, then riding waves of online reactions that spin off in unexpected directions.
Six months into the pandemic, online engagement around coronavirus stories has dropped off markedly and continues to reach new lows even as the pandemic continues. Interactions (likes, comments, shares) on stories about the coronavirus have fallen 88% since March, 62% since July and 36% even from the August average.Google searches for the coronavirus have descended from a peak in mid-March and are now roughly where they were on Feb. 25, well before the virus upended life the the U.S
 |
Subscribe via RSS |
|
Subscribe via Email |
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
Learn more...
| View on Amazon |  |
