Germany declares U.K. a virus variant region
Germany's public health institute on Friday declared Britain and Northern Ireland a virus variant region, requiring anyone entering the country from the United Kingdom to quarantine for two weeks on arrival.
Source: reuters.com
To them that hath: economic complexity and local industrial strategy in the UK Penny Mealy. Diane Coyle. International Tax
Divergent economic performance in many countries has led to renewed interest in place-based policies, such as the UK’s local industrial strategies at the level of Combined Authorities or Local Economic Partnerships. However, an analysis of employment data using methods from the economic complexity...
Source: springer.com
5 failures of political leaders during a public health crisis
“There are five traps political leaders can fall into when it comes to a public health emergency: 1. delay and downplay; 2. fudge the science; 3. isolation from the international community; 4. absence; and 5. double standards.” Sophie Harman Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University...
Source: qmul.ac.uk
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...
London police face backlash after dragging mourners from vigil for murdered woman
London police faced a backlash from the public on Sunday and an official inquiry into their actions after using heavy-handed tactics to break up an outdoor vigil for a woman whose suspected killer is a police officer.
Source: reuters.com
How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you
Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change.
Source: technologyreview.com
Data trusts: what are they and how do they work?
"The trade unions of the data economy." "How do we, the general public, gain greater control over the estimated
2.5 quintillion bytes of data that is recorded, stored, processed and
analysed, every day?" This also links to the DataSkop project from AlgorithmWatch.
Source: thersa.org
Preventing critical failure
Can routinely collected data be repurposed to predict avoidable patient harm? A quantitative descriptive study Objectives To determine whether sharing of routinely collected health service performance data could have predicted a critical safety failure at an Australian maternity service. Design Observational...
Source: bmj.com
Frontline workers left "risking lives to provide treatment and care"
"The Department for Health and Social Care's decision to prioritise hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic meant social care providers were left exposed by lack of PPE, says the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in its first report on PPE procurement published today." "While government...
Source: parliament.uk
Stripe acquires Nigeria's Paystack for over $200 million to expand its footprint in Africa
Africa is a great opportunity for ecommerce in coming decades and Nigeria's Paystack has been growing fast. "Stripe is a San Francisco-based fintech startup that provides payments infrastructure for businesses. Its software and APIs are used by millions of companies of all sizes to accept payments,...
Source: techstartups.com
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly?
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? The NEJM Editors asks what has gone so wrong in the US and lays the blame with the political leadership. "This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were...
Source: nejm.org
Journalists perceive stories published in local news outlets to be less newsworthy
Journalists perceive stories published in local news outlets to be less newsworthy: Plus: "Cultural competence" through diverse sourcing; limitations in how journalists represent public opinion; and lessons from studying 7,000 news push notifications.
Source: niemanlab.org
Facial Masking for Covid-19
"Facial Masking for Covid-19 — Potential for “Variolation” as We Await a Vaccine | NEJM: Facial Masking for Covid-19 Increasing the proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections that are asymptomatic with the simple public health measure of universal masking might reduce the severity of disease and ensure...
Source: nejm.org
Oppose the educational technology algorithims and technosolutions?
Essay by Audrey Watters on schools and the technology industry ... basically f**k the algorithm. "Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy: I have volunteered to be a guest speaker in classes this Fall. It's really the least I can do to help teachers and students through another tough...
Source: hackeducation.com
How I launched WHO's covid-19 response in the Central African Republic
How I launched WHO's covid-19 response in the Central African Republic: Marie-Roseline Darnycka Bélizaire of the WHO explains the challenges of responding to coronavirus in the Central African Republic in the face of limited resources.
Source: newscientist.com
Creating a digital commons
Creating a digital commons: There are, today, almost no parts of life that are untouched by the presence of data. Virtually every action we take produces some form of digital trail – our phones track our locations, our browsers track searches, our social network apps log our friends and family –...
Source: ippr.org
Establishing a taxonomy of potential hazards associated with communicating medical science in the age of disinformation
“In a globalised information age, medical science can appear disconnected and aloof from those it serves to help. Educational and professional bodies (including universities and medical centres) have a unique societal role to inform their peers and public on evidence-based medicine, and a responsibility...
Source: bmj.com
Immunity to COVID-19 is probably higher than tests have shown: New research from Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University
Immunity to COVID-19 is probably higher than tests have shown: New research from Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital shows that many people with mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 demonstrate so-called T-cell-mediated immunity to the new coronavirus, even if they have not tested positively...
Source: news.ki.se
Are you a populist right wing conservative? Have you been hooked recently?
If I wanted to find those who have a "conservative ideology" - so that I could share my views or influence them - I would do the following: set up a new account and start making contactsshare several of those technology scare hoax stories that you see posted e.g. Dance of the Pope virus video, the Andrea...
Source: historynewsnetwork.org
Not the last pandemic: Investing now to reimagine public-health systems
Not the last pandemic: Investing now to reimagine public-health systems: Targeted investments can accelerate the global response to COVID-19 and strengthen public-health systems to prevent pandemics in the future.
Source: mckinsey.com
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