In-person services may never operate strictly in-person again
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
A lot of these articles are "we wern't doing this before COVID-19, but now we can't go out we're doing this remotely and therefor we're going to do this after the threat of COVID-19 disappears."
I do like the increased options, but part of the reason I like to go visit my Therapist's office is that it's an office. I'm going to a different location at a set time to do something- doing it over Zoom is a good alternative to not having it but I feel like I get less out of it. In part because I live in a small apartment and there is a bunch of distraction, but also It feels impersonal.
My guess is a lot of people will want the option to have virtual session/whatever, but few will take it consistently. I love have the option to work remotely when I want to, but I almost never do because I'm more productive in the office. It's nice option to have if I don't wake up on time.
The big thing for me is going some place else allows for a shifting of mindset. I don't want my therapist's office to be the same place where I work which is the same place I get doctors appointments
That's quite an estimate. What is much more likely, and generally true, is that the commute is 10-15 minutes and the time spent in quiet, alone, on either end of the therapy session is a boon.
But I can certainly understand someone who wants to 1.) Get out of their house and 2.) Be around people during the day. That said, based on what I'm seeing at a lot of tech companies, I expect going into an office will be an awkward and not terribly comfortable situation that doesn't have a lot of social interaction for the balance of this year and possibly beyond. I think you're going to see a lot more social not distancing outside of professional business environments than within them for quite some time. And a norm where most people go into an office most of the time may be dead at a lot of companies.
Right before all of this I went to Austin to sit in a room with people from that office for a day for us to figure out how we want to continue using a service internally. We could have done it over zoom, but I'm 100% sure we would have been a lot less effective.
Zoom looses the ability for people to just argue and hash stuff out. There is less back and forth. IT's not the same
But ironic pedantry aside, I do agree people need to get out. Even as a homebody I find myself getting grumpy if I don't get out for some sun and fresh air once in a while.
For the beginner, it doesn’t work that well, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.
For many instruments you outline, it is how the bow or the instrument is held, this might be better online with the right tools, esp if you had multicamera pose estimation, it might not even need a teacher the majority of the time.
Or, it might listen to the student and tell them they should rest or contact the teacher for some realtime feedback.
Are instruction times the length they are because of other issues? Should they be longer or shorter? Can a single teacher oversee multiple students at the same time? Does it _need_ to be 1:1 for the whole session?
That wasn't the case before coronavirus and won't be the case afterwards.
The best robot teacher that exists is Duolingo, and I don't know a single person who has learned a language to a conversational level that way.
As for why this wasn't the case before coronavirus: there was no reason to. There wasn't good enough of a market. Now, there is, so perhaps some ideas from this situation will stick around for longer.
(Then again, I've heard numerous reports that in general, remote school classes are a huge dumpster fire. I don't expect any of that staying when the schools are allowed to reopen. But maybe the postmortems will bring some nuggets of insight about effective remote schooling.)
Kids grow, and every person's body is different: even when they've been playing for 10+ years and have reached the most advanced levels, they're still asking their teachers and fellow musicians to "debug" posture - because subtle changes can have outsize impact. This is why master classes exist, for instance.
There are all kinds of tools in this debugging toolkit. Some of them are rather tactile, such as feeling how much force is being transferred from the hand to the tip of the bow, feeling how "soft" the bow-hand is being held, feeling how much the bow arm's elbow is being allowed to sink under its own weight, or how much the shoulder is being tensed - because muscle tension can be a huge issue for string players. Not to mention the huge number of minute adjustments that can be made to various angles and might involve tweaks to shoulder rests, chin rests and so on.
Right now teachers have to debug, without being able to use their hands. A tall order for anyone. Just imagine being asked to debug software without being able to use your hands, or to poke at the system: no attaching a debugger, no inserting print statements - all you can do is give verbal inputs and observe outputs. It's a huge responsibility, when failing to debug, or getting it wrong, can have serious consequences (life-long problems with pain, for example).
Some teachers are much better than others at such "debugging", so yes from that perspective it sure would be nifty to invent some technology that guarantees more consistent results. But is it realistic? Every body is different physically, and the human touch and expertise plays a major role.
So, I can't help but think it would actually be a simpler problem to create an AI that can reliably debug software, vs creating AI that can reliably debug a musician's physical relationship to their instrument.
As for debugging in general, I agree and offer an analogy that might be intimately familiar to everyone here: debugging your parent's/neighbour's/friend's computer over the phone. I can handle it for about two minutes before my head hurts and I start boiling from anger. These days, I flat out refuse helping this way; if it can't wait, I only explain them how to install TeamViewer and what numbers to spell me over the phone.
(Okay, if everybody had actual, sufficiently flexible physical robots in their homes...)
And while a multi camera setup would certainly be awesome, and help with positioning of hands and instrument, its just not really a practical setup for the majority of people. Now you need a great microphone, multiple cameras, probably tripods or something for camera positioning. An in person class solves all those problems.
45 minutes seems to be the standard for most classes, and I believe the research is as classes go longer than that they become less effective for learning. And sure you can do group classes, that happens in band class, but the student does not get as much attention and depending on the learning style and student that may just not be enough.
Maybe in the best case scenario you could have a multi-camera 4k, low latency setup. But how many students have the means and space to configure that?
For everyone else, the teacher loses the spontaneity to inspect subtle differences from various angles and what not. As a piano teacher you want to be able to flit between left/right hand, face, feet, shoulders, elbows, posture.
Maybe you could cover a lot of that with two very well positioned cameras on hands and body but that's really no substitute for the teacher being able to walk around observing the student. Let alone switching places and inviting the student to observe in a similar fashion.
I'm sure there are opportunities for remote teaching of instruments to actually do certain things better than in person (by taking advantage of technology) but there will never be a true substitute for in person teaching - telecommunication is simply too lossy
You might need to adjust posture for instance, and while you could spend 5 minutes explain it verbally in sequences of “move your left arm 5 degree up, no, up! slightly more to the left, your right arm moved down, bring it back[...]”; it’s just a poor experience and waste of time compared to in person moving their body to the right position (especially for kids).
Same if you want to check muscle tension or force them to only use some part of their body.
Sometimes the instructor has to use his hands to push you into the right position. Another large part is both of you stand in front of a floor to ceiling mirror. He'll be in front of you off to one side, so you can see both him in real life and your reflection at the same time. He moves, and you match, looking at both him and your reflection.
Lastly, you'll never learn a partner dance online, because it's all about the feel of working with a partner.
I have my laptop placed such that the webcam acts as a mirror and the tutorial video or Zoom meeting of the class on my second screen. When the teachers shows positions that are obfuscated they turns to face the camera in a 45 degree angle. The only 360 view missing is the Chinese whispers / follow the leader view of seeing the other dancers in the class is when my eyeline is out of view.
Some consultations will go back, but a lot of changes will become the new norm.
For some people, having a literal physical "safe space" and an understanding human does wonders, and there's connection and understanding that seems like it might be hard to replicate virtually.
But for other people, the distance that video or phone provides actually gives them the ability to open up more than in person -- precisely because it seems less personal and therefore less threatening or potentially judging. After all, it's just a disembodied voice or a floating head on a screen.
So it's pretty good to have a mix of options.
Never mind that quite a few people actually enjoy being physically close to others.
The world is bigger than the Globe and Mail seems to think.
As precedent, I cite the 1918 flu. In 1918 people were getting arrested for not wearing masks. The following decade was called "The Roaring '20s," and I don't presume it roared because of all the social distancing and masks. All of us reading were born later, and if we heard about the 1918 flu, maybe in a history class as I remember, most of us probably reacted with ... "what? what's so bad about a flu?"
Society moved on pretty quickly.
Now, SARS-CoV-2 happened 17 years after SARS-CoV, so the counter-point to this argument is maybe we get more of these things in the coming decades. But. I still think it's pretty likely our grandkids forget about all this.
Edit: I guess another difference vs 100 years ago is we now have the technology to do things at a distance. So yes, maybe some people will find they prefer to do some things over video streaming and it sticks. I still think in-person stuff will make a comeback.
The incredibly strict rules which e.g. France and Belgium instituted during the lockdown struck me as extreme and an unprecedented limitation on citizens’ freedom, but the authorities must have felt that they absolutely had to take this action. The way the lockdown has proceeded shows that the state has the necessary police apparatus in place to enforce whatever hygiene rules they want. That level of decisiveness was not present during the Spanish Flu, and so things do not necessarily have to go back to normal.
There are many lessons to be learned from 1918, despite all the changes since then. Probably the most relevant one is just how forgotten it had become. If we manage to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine, a few years from now we'll reminisce: remember 2020? Gosh, how weird that was!
There are other lessons too. Like that social distancing works.
Or that rushing to lift restrictions too soon just leads to outbreaks.
America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, by Alfred W. Crosby is on Kindle and is interesting reading.
When it comes to global scale events, we have a tendency to overestimate the short term consequences and overestimate the long term.
Well to be fair, it is working as hard as possible at throwing away that position right now...
You can't compare pandemics — nothing happens in a vacuum. It's 2020. The Spanish flu was shroud by WWI. The Roaring 20s was a post-war boom, meanwhile we haven't even fought the upcoming Sino war. Most haven't experienced such economic hardship in their lives. Globalisation was a pipe dream a century ago, it's now the backbone of every developed economy.
I'm not saying there won't be permanent changes - I believe this is a catalyst that will make remote working the norm for many industries, including my own. But I have been hearing, for example, American podcast hosts saying they may never step inside a restaurant again (this was on The Argument, and all three hosts agreed) or people claiming that the tourism industry is permanently neutered. I just don't see human behaviours changing so dramatically, and I don't see any reason why we should be more afraid of Coronavirus in 10 years than we are of Polio today.
We're social animals and we're not going to ditch physical interaction. (not to mention that research by people like Alex Pentland suggests that physical contact in a common workplace has benefits that can't be replicated remotely).
Companies like Yahoo and IBM already tried out remote working and rolled their efforts back, this is simply an overraction. With the exception of telemedicine for underserved regions maybe, where it fills a genuine gap and suffered from regulation up until now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu
we won't forget this virus for long time, but not because of the damage it does, but because of the damage we did to ourselves
Perhaps not this same Coronavirus, but make no mistake, our pre-lockdown lifestyle is fragile. Giving billions of people unfettered access to move between any two points on the planet in under 24 hours is a recipe for another swift pandemic.
Other things are clearly more efficient face-to-face, and in those cases things will probably go back to normal when it's possible.
Tourism will be... changed. At least here in Europe, the authorities are already talking about less international flights, focus on the train network, and so on, in order to see a more environmentally friendly post-COVID world. People aren't going to stop vacationing or something like that, but there's a chance that things like two-day train rides to Italy will become a thing again. My personal anecdote is that people seem to be restoring their old caravans and going camping this year. The main roads here have been with filled with caravans and RV's the last couple of weekends.
Everyone I know is itching to go on holiday! I have two long road trips that were planned before COVID which are now indefinitely delayed but absolutely not cancelled.
It's a subtle distinction, but it's consistently surprising how small nuances in titles produce widely divergent discussions. A comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294773, to take an obvious example, is a reflexive objection to the submitted title ("may never operate in-person again") but the word "strictly" defangs that objection in advance. There are other comments in this thread that you can tell were mostly reacting to the submitted title, too, since they're arguing with something it said, rather than what the article says.
Why this is fun: it turns out that you can take a strict substring of the article title (in this case a tail) which solves the problem perfectly. That is my favorite category of title-shortening. Often the substring isn't obvious at first and you get a satisfying click when you realize it works.
Don't something like 20-25% of all New Yorkers already have antibodies? Doesn't that show the virus isn't that dangerous? The body count would be in the millions by now.
For many viral diseases the severity in a particular individual depends on how much of the virus they were exposed do. I don't believe that know yet if COVID-19 is such a disease.
For such diseases, you could have a case where a large fraction of the population is going to get it regardless of whether you continue as normal or you social distance and stay at home as much as feasible, but in the former case most get a large enough dose to get very sick or die and the the latter case most get a small enough dose to not get sick or just get mildly sick. In both cases you would have a large fraction with antibodies.
The worry worts and the pansies have wrecked the economy.
My take, as a NYer, as someone working on a COVID project, as someone who so far has been lucky to only know of one serious hospitalization in my extended circle- it is exceptionally dangerous. I use the phrase "Russian Roulette" and I stand by that.
1% of likely-infected New Yorkers have died. Probably at least 80% of the NYC population remains at risk.
It does not just target and kill the elderly and infirm. Of teens and pre-teens, New York City has seen thousands of infections, hundreds of hospitalizations, many dozens of deaths. Every age, every demographic impacted.
There is so much we don't know about exposure to infection dynamics, about symptomatic vs asymptomatic progression, about medium and long term impacts.
Yes, life presents all kinds of dangers, people have to work, all sorts of essential jobs have to be staffed, the absolute failure of the Federal government "leadership" to do even the minimum from a financial, logistic, or medical perspective is unforgivably, sociopathically criminal and reduces the practical options on the table-
ALL that aside this virus is no effing joke.
The only reason body counts US-wide are not in the millions is because of shutdowns and various bits of behavioral and epidemiological good fortune the details of which we will only figure out later.
It is almost certainly the case that 90% or more of the US population remain vulnerable, and if people become careless, deaths will rise again.
One more point- I have been in many internet arguments about the various statistical/aggregate measures, eg suggestions that only 30% antibody prevalence may be enough for herd immunity, studies of superspreaders, etc-
Aggregate statistics are BS.
They tell you nothing about you or your family's individual risk in any specific situation. The number of people "doing everything right" yet winding up in the hospital is countless (as are the people doing everything wrong and remaining well). We know a lot yet are still just looking for the keys under the streetlamp.
We are not done with this. This may only be the end of the beginning.
Stay safe. Cheers.
Herd immunity won't happen until about half the population has had the virus, and 1.1% of 330M is 1.8 million people dead. I'd call that fairly dangerous.
Also consider that many of the survivors end up with serious long-term health problems.
The 1500 hours of training it takes to get a class A barber certificate in Texas (the first state whose requirements I happened to find on the web), which I presume is similar for barbers in other states, covers a whole lot more than just a simple haircut.
A lot of things that can be done reasonably easily, at least in a basic way, at home require a lot more training and preparation when offered as a service to the public. When offering a service to the public you have to deal with a much wider variety of situations, and you have a much higher volume making things like sanitation a lot more important.
(For anyone curious, that 1500 hours is 180 hours of theory, and 1320 hours in instruction and practical work. The theory is 50 hours of anatomy, physiology, and histology of hair, skin, muscles, nerves, cells, circulatory system, digestion, and bones; 35 hours of barber laws and rules; 30 hours of bacteriology, sterilization, and sanitation; 10 hours on disorders of the skin, scalp, and hair; 5 on each of salesmanship, barbershop management, chemistry, shaving, (scalp, hair treatments, and skin); 4 each on sanitary professional techniques, professional ethics, and the scientific fundamentals of barbering; 3 on cosmetic preparations; 2 each on (shampooing and rinsing), (cutting and processing curly and over-curly hair), (haircutting, male and female), and (theory of massage of scalp, face, and neck). 1 hour each on (hygiene and good grooming), barber implements, (honing and stropping), (mustaches and beards), facial treatments, (electricity and light therapy), and history of barbering.
The 1320 practical work is 800 hours of cutting (men's, women's, children's, curly, and razor), 80 hours of shaving, 55 of styling, 40 of shampooing and rinsing, 30 of bleaching and dyeing, 28 or waving, 25 of straightening, 25 of cleansing, 22 of professional ethics (how does this differ from the 4 hours covered in the theory part, I wonder?), 22 of barbershop management, and a bunch more subjects requiring from 8 to 17 hours).
While plenty of barbers are smart people, you don’t need to smart to be a barber.
I’m fairly sure the reason there’s 50 hours of anatomy alone is so the lowest common denominator can pass.
I have received highlights that aren't visible at all except under the sun, hair that doesn't hang right as the weight of my hair holds it straighter when it's long, left with too much hair as they don't understand what thinning hair is, etc.
Excuse me, but Zoom? How is that still allowed in healthcare? Are all privacy issues resolved?
Let me suggest a question you'd be better off asking. Imagine that to your astonishment they just pocketed the money and gave you the same crap as everybody else, who do you think pays? Have you seen anywhere a pile of money you get as a prize if they'd just lied? No? Because there isn't one.