Makes a good argument for having a mobile phone on the mainline kernel, rather than on some ancient kernel with a thousand hacks layered on top. Something like Pinephone should get access to this more quickly than a standard Android device.
British supermarkets have bizarrely cut their hours. Presumably the idea is that staff can stock shelves while distancing from customers, but the effect is to crowd customers together and increase queues.
I’m not sure it’s a great idea because older people are far more likely to catch the disease, so you’re crowding the most susceptible, most at-risk demographic together. But I’m not sure there’s an alternative. It’s better if the hours are longer.
Young healthy people shouldn’t be doing this, the slots should go to the ill and elderly, people who are in immediate danger from catching the illness.
Is Slack extensible for an async mention/message? I know as the user you can change the notification settings for different channels, but can the sender explicitly state this message is not vital/immediate?
I don’t think there’s any indication that heart rate and movement monitoring can provide any robust insight into sleep cycles, and in my experience struggle to even understand sleep start and end points. Seems like you need to go to a device with an EEG to get decent information, I’d be interested if there were studies dealing with this question though.
I hope that one of the outcomes of this crisis is we take a proper evidence-led approach towards building and design standards to reduce the spread of infectious disease.
For all new buildings or products, any surface which is touched by hundreds of people each day needs to be redesigned to be contactless or to use materials that minimize transmission; products like hand dryers should pass standards that measure whether they spread bacteria or viruses; buildings and public transportation (buses, trains and planes) need to use HEPA filters to reduce airborne transmission risks, and to filter out air pollution; and sinks for hand washing need to become a standard feature at office receptions or entrances/exits.
We should also be able to reduce the normally accepted steady state of deaths, ill health and economic impacts from flu and other unnecessary sickness.
But this is going to be more and more necessary as global disease transmission becomes easier. It could be a new strain of flu or a drug resistant TB next year. There has to be defence in depth and in advance, not just hoping always for a magic fix after the problem has occurred.
Granny won’t set up a room, but you can send her a link on email or Whatsapp which can open the chat in a browser or redirect to an app download depending on platform, and also offer dial in options. That seems as intuitive as the process can be. The app also seems extremely straightforward. Granny usability is actually exactly what I’m looking for, and on first glance I’m impressed.
I was looking at the Matrix clients yesterday, to set up a video chat room for elderly relatives. Everything seems just a bit too confusing or unpolished. I want something simple, functional and cross platform. At the moment I’m feeling Zoom with scheduled meeting times is probably the best bet. I’ll test this out, but does anyone have any other thoughts, or any non-proprietary recommendations?
The Imperial study estimated a need for 100k ventilator intensive care beds at peak in the UK, currently there are 5k beds, and they’ve managed to find another 5k ventilators using spares and old models. The government is planning on using ventilator technicians (usually 1 per bed) to manage many beds, with newly trained junior staff managing each bed. So assuming no treatment breakthrough they will need something on the order of a ten fold increase in ventilators and a 20 fold increase in staff numbers, on current trajectories within a month or two, and with full suppression maybe in the Autumn.
Mortality rates for young people are not negligible, and we don’t know either the long term health impacts of a severe episode of the virus or even whether catching the virus gives immunity.
Yes, although it’s worth saying that at least in Britain business trips are a strong minority of flights. With Heathrow expansion the case was made that it was vital because capacity was stretched, and businesses in general needed the extra flights, but in fact most flights are tourism. And even within that category there’s a lot of frivolous travel, people flying for a night or two, or even commuting by plane.
It’s also unsustainable with our current capacity (both technology and logistics) to track and block the movement of diseases. We’ve already had problems happen with wildlife, moving trees or bees around without sufficiently advanced and rigorous tests has already created pandemic-like conditions for various species, and the same applies to humans.
Yes, if a user can be banned for repeatedly upvoting posts that encourage brigading or actual violence, I don’t see why users who repeatedly upvote the same content shouldn’t be included. Either there are rules which have meaningful sanctions or there aren’t.
Is there any indication it contains identifying information? Send the start and end location fuzzed by a few hundred metres and the time and it would be very difficult to deanonymize within an urban environment.
The US is the largest developed economy and has some of the high per person emissions in the world. It’s hardly going to be possible for another country to have a larger fall if it’s five times smaller with half the per person emissions.
The other point is this relies on fracking, and the carbon intensity of fracking depends on the level of escaped Methane. It can actually be worse than coal. And Trump has just reversed a lot of the regulation which prevented venting of Methane from fracking sites.
Because old nuclear power stations are coming to end of life, and new nuclear power stations appear to be ruinously expensive. See Flamanville which was supposed to be finished about 10 years and €10bn ago.
The real idiocy in Germany was retiring the nuclear plants before EOL. If you’re trying to work out whether to replace old nuclear with new it’s much less easy to come to a clear answer. Britain has had the same issue, most people are quite enthusiastic about new nuclear but it’s just really expensive.
It’s the issue with most of these small-n construction projects. Perhaps modular nuclear can be a solution.
There’s also a sampling bias for the kinds of roads where Autopilot is available, and the kinds of circumstances where people are most likely to trust and use it.