Link Log Roundup for May 11, 2020
In this edition: labor surveillance, viral surfaces, blurb writing, knowing the risks, testing questions, child vaccinations, engineering ventilators, actuarial science, Cannon Beach, bunk beds, institutional discrimination, public pharma, money for Western states, virtual reality, false balance, the social safety net, salon workers, opening up the streets, and public opinion.
Your daily look at links I’ve saved to my Link Log (RSS) over the course of each day but didn’t necessarily address or highlight here on the blog. These are the links I logged yesterday, and not necessarily links to things published yesterday.
Tech Union Leaders Are Dodging Surveillance on Platforms Like Facebook and Zoom
As the gig economy distributes workers far and wide, many, like those at Shipt, face a dilemma over how to organize. Whereas traditional workers might commiserate over their grievances by gathering physically, contractors have no communal space for themselves — no break room, lounge, or shop floor to complain about the bosses in private. In their place are phone calls and text messages, but also virtual tools like Facebook Groups, company Slack rooms, and social media, where nothing is truly discreet, and where nascent labor movements are more at risk of being suppressed and surveilled by the companies they aim to revolutionize.
Tests to Detect Coronavirus on Surfaces Show Mixed Results
But testing surfaces people come in contact with for viral RNA has some value, Eisen says. Similarly to how health workers test public beaches for the presence of harmful bacteria, some communal areas may benefit from coronavirus monitoring. If, for example, an office kitchen that had no coronavirus traces last week suddenly shows high amounts, someone who is using the kitchen is infected. So countertop traces can be informative. “You still don’t know if you have ‘live’ virus or not,” Silverman says. “But you at least have a sense of what happened in your space, whether the organism has been brought in.”
I keep finding myself working on sites that have news or portal-like layouts, and each time I start from scratch thinking about how to display the headlines and summaries. No more, I started this gallery to capture the many ways it’s done, and perhaps I’ll eventually map these to the audience and business goals.
The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them
It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from the outbreaks in China and Italy, that shows the backside of the mortality curve declines slowly, with deaths persisting for months. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, it is possible that we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That’s what’s going to happen with a lockdown.
7 questions about testing for Covid-19 and reopening the country - STAT
The Infectious Diseases Society of America, which represents the nation’s infectious disease experts, issued guidelines Wednesday about who should be tested, how they should be tested, when they should be tested, and then what to make of the results.
Routine vaccinations for U.S. children have plummeted amid the pandemic
Doctors and public health experts have worried that a vast number of regular health care needs — including preventive care interventions like vaccinations — have gone unmet in the past few months as people shy away from interacting with a health system that has, at least in some places, been overwhelmed by caring for Covid-19 patients.
The Engineers Taking on the Ventilator Shortage
A similar story has unfolded on the West Coast. On Wednesday, March 11th, David Van Buren, a senior engineer at nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, began wondering if, under the circumstances, the lab was working on the right projects. He wrote an e-mail to colleagues proposing that perhaps they should be trying to solve the ventilator problem. His idea quickly made its way to the lab’s senior management. “I do space missions,” Roger Gibbs, the deputy director of the engineering and science directorate at J.P.L., told me. “I build things and we send them to other planets.” By Monday, J.P.L. had also decided to build a ventilator.
How Much Is a Human Life Actually Worth?
Just as it’s tough to measure the benefits, it’s also hard to accurately measure the costs. Much of the early work in determining the economic effects of social distancing and business closures uses Gross Domestic Product as a metric, and it’s a bad one. “GDP is a lousy measure of economic welfare,” says Alan Krupnick, an economist at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Washington DC. “Economists tend to look at aggregate economic indicators like unemployment rates and GDP, as opposed to getting into the distributional issues—who’s being affected, who’s losing income, where is this GDP growth actually coming from, does it increase the equity in society? Our profession is not as good at doing that.”
Cannon Beach police ask more than 700 visitors to leave the beach over Mother’s Day weekend
On Sunday, St. Denis wrote in an email that, on Saturday, Cannon Beach police asked about 700 people on the beach to leave, and did the same with about 60 people on Sunday. “Most were from out of town,” St. Denis wrote, adding that some “had some questions/comments but all were eventually cooperative.”
A Ban on Bunk Beds Showcases Tensions Over Worker Safety as Oregon’s Fruit-Picking Season Begins
The Los Angeles Times’ Richard Read—a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Oregonian reporter—succinctly identified the problem in one sentence. He writes: “The price and availability of apples in grocery stores this fall could come down to a critical question on the farm: whether migrant workers should sleep in bunk beds.”
Racial, Ethnic Minorities Hit Harder By COVID-19
“It’s institutions that discriminate, and our society as a whole that discriminates, and this virus has brought that to the forefront,” Sidelinger said. “There are things we need to address that we needed to address before this pandemic. But the pandemic is bringing them to light in tragic ways.”
For the last half-century, the American pharmaceutical industry has steadily abandoned research and development to support new vaccines in favor of whatever products will return the highest profits during the legally standard 20 years of monopoly ownership. At the same time, a profusion of intellectual property claims has become a progress-obstructing asteroid field for nonprofit research efforts geared toward public health. The industry has produced staggeringly high margins by pushing prices to their breaking point on drugs developed through a $42 billion annual subsidy dispersed by the National Institutes of Health. That the same companies are now posturing before an anxious world as avatars of innovation and selflessness is the crowning irony of the coronavirus crisis.
Western States Pact Urges Federal Support for States and Cities Responding to COVID-19 Pandemic
Without federal support, states and cities will be forced to make impossible decisions – like whether to fund critical public healthcare that will help us recover, or prevent layoffs of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other first responders. And, without additional assistance, the very programs that will help people get back to work – like job training and help for small business owners – will be forced up on the chopping block.
I recreated my local pub in VR
The pub occupies a strange function in our society, being simultaneously multi-purpose and of no real purpose whatsoever. Birthdays? Pub. Wakes? Pub. Promoted? Pub. Made redundant? Pub. First dates, and last dates. Pub. Stressed during an exhausting stint of work, and blissfully carefree on an empty, idle weekend. Pub. In good spirits, or in the doldrums: pub. The working week and the weekend. Pub. Straight after work, and then throughout a holiday. Pub. Reunions with old friends and first encounters with new ones. The pre-lash and the night-cap. Pub. Pub on every public holiday and sporting occasion, and pub when there’s absolutely nothing on. The visit can have a justification, but just as easily none at all.
MSNBC public editor: Why pundits and journalists insist on false balance
MSNBC’s hosts shouldn’t be waiting until the president instructs the public to inject bleach to tell their viewers that the news from Earth-Two is suspect at best, and always has been.
How We Stopped Villainizing the Social Safety Net
It turns out that we can strengthen the social safety net — though it unfortunately took a pandemic to create the widespread support to do so. Political leaders — starting local and rapidly scaling up to their state and federal counterparts — have been quick to support and institute a wide range of emergency support measures to help people right now.
Salon and spa workers fear for safety as Oregon begins to reopen
Hulett is among many personal service providers in Oregon who are concerned that they will be asked to reopen before they feel safe to return to work and are worried they will lose unemployment benefits if they choose to stay shut. A petition calling on Brown to rethink her decision to allow personal services providers to be part of her Phase 1 plan had over 4,000 signatures as of Monday morning.
Don’t Close Parks. Open Up Streets.
But we do have the space. The vast avenues that span the length of Manhattan are echoing in silence. New York City is home to more than 6,000 miles of streets. Much of that is barely used by cars on a typical summer weekend, when many people travel. The streets will surely be only more barren this summer. And it is possible to close them to cars and give people room to walk, run, and bike. Especially during a pandemic, simply preserving public space is a profoundly high-yield investment in physical and mental health.
Targeted Quarantines Top U.S. Adults’ Conditions for Normalcy
In an effort to restart the U.S. economy, some states have begun to ease restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, yet at least two-thirds of Americans think it is “very important” that each of four specific conditions is met before they are willing to return to their normal activities. These include mandatory quarantine for anyone who tests positive for the virus; improved medical treatments for COVID-19; a significant reduction in the number of new cases or deaths from the disease; and the availability of a vaccine.