Author Archives: Danzig

All you need to hijack a Mac is an old Office document and a .zip file – TechRadar

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A sequence of interconnected bugs could allow hackers to hijack devices running on macOS using little more than an infected Office document and a .zip file, an expert has warned.

The vulnerability was identified by ex-NSA researcher Patrick Wardle, now working for security firm Jamf, who found that even fully-patched macOS Catalina systems were at risk.

The exploit uses a rigged Office document, saved in an archaic format (.slk), to trick the target machine into allowing Office to activate macros without consent and without notifying the user.

The attack then takes advantage of two further vulnerabilities in order to seize control of the machine. By including a dollar sign at the start of the filename, a hacker can break free of the restrictive Office sandbox, while compressing the file within a .zip folder bypasses macOS controls that prevent downloaded items from accessing user files.

Apples macOS has long enjoyed a stellar reputation from a security and data privacy perspective, but Apple devices are by no means unhackable. This misconception, Wardle suggests, could lead both users and security personnel to underestimate the potential threat level.

In the world of Windows, macro-based Office attacks are well understood (and frankly are rather old news). However, on macOS, though such attacks are growing in popularity and are quite en vogue, they have received far less attention from the research and security community, he wrote in a recent blog post.

Triggered by simply opening a malicious (macro-laced) Office document, no alerts, prompts, nor other user interactions were required in order to persistently infect even a fully-patched macOS Catalina system.

The researcher did concede that the attack requires the target individual to log in and out of their device twice, with a further step in the process fulfilled with each login. However, this does not necessarily make the attack any less feasible for criminals, who are content to play the long game.

According to Wardle, Apple did not respond to his disclosure. Microsoft, for its part, has conducted an investigation into the issue and verified the researchers findings.

[The company has] determined that any application, even when sandboxed, is vulnerable to misuse of these APIs. We are in regular discussion with Apple to identify solutions to these issues and support as needed, said a Microsoft spokesperson.

The vulnerabilities have now been patched with the latest versions of Office for Mac. Users are therefore advised to update their Office software and operating system as soon as possible, to shield against attack.

Via VICE

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All you need to hijack a Mac is an old Office document and a .zip file - TechRadar

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Silicon Valley’s Vast Data Collection Should Worry You More Than TikTok – Jacobin magazine

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If a world historical crisis being mismanaged by a far-right leader werent bad enough, it now seems the government is coming for your beloved social media apps.

Trumps latest gambit to distract from his monumental mismanagement of the pandemic response is a threat to ban the social media app TikTok, a video sharing service with 800 million users across several continents, many of them teens and young adults.

But Trumps threat is more than the desperate flailing of a leader whose reelection chances are rapidly sinking. It marks the culmination of a rising, bipartisan drumbeat of hostility toward the app, both in the United States and globally.

There are three principal objections to TikTok: the vast amounts of its users personal data that it vacuums up, its potential reach into the homes and minds of the unsuspecting public, and the threat of censorship. All are intimately connected to TikToks ownership by ByteDance, a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing. They are therefore also tangled up in the growing swell of anti-Chinese sentiment here and abroad.

Although theres no hard evidence, there is more than a good chance that the data TikTok collects is, at the very least, accessible by the Chinese government. As this ProtonMail report points out, not only does TikToks privacy policy assert the right to share information with members of its corporate group, which would include its parent company, but ByteDances CEO has already promised to further deepen cooperation with official party media, on top of the ideological censorship it has already engaged in on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Whats more, a 2017 law lets the Chinese government force companies to secretly hand over data, including data on foreign citizens.

Its this that led Congress to ban federal employees from carrying the app on their phones, leading to headlines asking if its spying on you for China and posing a risk to US national security, and to secretary of state Mike Pompeo warning that it puts your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

India banned the app in June, charging that its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defense of India requires emergency measures (though, significantly, TikTok was one of a suite of Chinese mobile apps banned by India, a ban that only came following a June border skirmish between the two countries).

In Australia, poised to launch a probe into the app, the MP who chairs the countrys Committee on Intelligence and Security suggested its potential data collection could be used to manipulate the countrys politics in the years and decades ahead.

Theyre our future leaders, he said about the apps largely teenage user base. Theyre our future political, economic, cultural and military leaders and we need to protect their information long term.

In US political discourse, where the largely media-manufactured idea that Russian bots and fake news swung the election is unassailable, some fear China will use the data it hoovers up to interfere in elections a Chinese Cambridge Analytica data bomb waiting to explode, in other words.

Others warn that TikToks willingness to censor at Beijings request poses a threat to free speech beyond Chinas borders, given the global nature of the app. In this case, nobody in the world would be able to access the content on TikTok once removed, writes Lawfares Justin Sherman. The takedowns would be global.

All of this is made worse by the Chinese governments increasingly repressive, borderline genocidal nature, making its control of information and private data all the more perilous. Its these worries that have united everyone from the hard right, to China hawks more generally, to even some progressives.

And none of this is unreasonable. We should be worried about private companies and governments potentially collecting data on millions of unsuspecting people and censoring content they dont like. But those based in China represent just a sliver of that threat.

The fact is that everything people fear TikTok and the Chinese government are doing or someday will do is already being done by a host of other tech giants and governments. The only difference is, they happen to be situated in Western countries.

The mass collection of personal data? As commentators note (even those critical of the app), Tik Tok doesnt appear to do anything over and above the prying data grabs typical of all social media platforms. Several experts told Wired the apps data collection is in the same ballpark as other apps. Even ProtonMail, which does argue TikToks collection is more extreme than other social media platforms, suggests others are little better. How much user data does TikTok collect? it asks. As with just about every social media platform, the answer is: a lot.

This is nothing to be sanguine about. From your web browser, to your email, to your various social media accounts, to your phone, to its most innocuous-seeming apps, your lives are being constantly tracked, documented, and packaged, often for advertisers and corporations. If youve shelled out for any of the newfangled smart products, youre having data about your most intimate life harvested.

It was only two years ago we found out Facebook allowed, through its lax data protections, one single app to harvest the data of 87 million users, including their work history and political vies, even though only 270,000 downloaded the app.

This is the same company that once secretly experimented with its users moods and emotions. Worse, its becoming increasingly clear that, whatever steps we take to protect our privacy, we likely cant stop companies from collecting our private information.

Collaborating with government? That too is hardly a Chinese innovation. Despite some significant resistance to the US governments snooping, the big US-based tech companies have become what one cybersecurity expert dubs surveillance intermediaries, continuing to hand over data at the request of the US government.

Thanks to the Snowden leaks, we know the NSA hoards data including photos, videos, emails, and more from a whos who of Silicon Valley since 2007, swimming in so much of our personal information that even its analysts complain it makes their jobs harder.

Despite initially eliciting fiery outrage, that programwhose first target was a pro-democracy critic of Fijis authoritarian leader has been reauthorized with little objection. And even without the cooperation of tech firms, the UK government taps undersea cables to scoop up phone calls and internet activity, which it then shares with its Five Eyes partners, which of course includes the United States.

The blurred line between government and business that TikToks critics point to likewise isnt unique to China. Silicon Valley has a close relationship with one of the United Statess two ruling parties, hiring alumni of the last Democratic administration while funneling many millions of dollars to the partys candidates.

In fact, this election is seeing a handful of tech billionaires throwing millions of dollars at creating data infrastructure and partisan news sites aimed at electing the partys 2020 presidential nominee.

Lastly, while a reluctance to censor may have once distinguished Western tech firms from their Chinese counterparts, the panic that followed the elections that brought us Brexit and Trump has all but neutralized that distinction.

Under increasing pressure from the liberal end of the Washington spectrum, tech companies have become increasingly censorious, working with outfits like the NATO-aligned and corporate-funded Atlantic Council and even the Israeli government to purge content those bodies deem inappropriate.

In one particularly egregious example, Facebook, egged on by CNN, suspended a left-wing news outlet from its platform for two crimes: not disclosing its funding from Russian state media, something Facebook had never required until then; and, even more menacingly, for being critical of Western government policies, or as the report put it, being generally critical of US foreign policy and the mainstream American media, which CNN suggested made it tantamount to Kremlin propaganda.

Unsurprisingly, this liberal-led push for censorship has also backfired, with Facebook hiring conservative fact-checkers who promptly censored content according to their own right-wing biases.

Whether youre an American citizen or a foreigner worried about how shadowy governments and unaccountable corporations might misuse the data of leaders current and future, its not clear why you should only be worried about those in China.

Indeed, given the Five Eyes member countries extensive history of meddling in other countries and given the massive amounts of money US tech firms spend to influence their own countrys politics this should be a worry at least as pressing as China, especially given the larger number of US-based social media platforms that we use without a care in the world on a daily basis.

TikToks critics might point to the increasingly scary behavior of Chinas government as to why Chinese control of information is particularly alarming. Theyre right about the behavior, but they curiously ignore the fact that the United States itself is currently governed by a far-right demagogue with his own concentration camps and authoritarian repression, and that the party behind him, which aligns entirely with his politics, reliably cycles into power at least once every eight years.

This is what the era of mass surveillance and nationalist neoliberalism has produced. Seven years ago, the vast scope of public-private spying was a global scandal. Now, weve so normalized mass surveillance that the only time were allowed to worry about it is if the people doing it live in whatever the worlds current evil empire happens to be.

The answer isnt to dismiss the potential menace of Chinas surveillance programs, or to cheerlead for a rival set of tech oligarchs who simply happen to live in California and speak English.

We should broaden the concerns and criticisms of TikTok and its relationship to China to tech firms more generally, and push for an across-the-board guarantee of online privacy and free speech for all of the worlds people, whether theyre more worried about being tracked and manipulated by people in the United States or China.

What might that look like? Perhaps it would involve negotiating a set of rules for surveillance and data collection that all governments and the tech firms associated with them would have to play by.

The trouble is, just as US opposition has hindered everything from a cluster bomb ban and the International Criminal Court to a multilateral agreement on space militarization, it would be difficult to get the US government to agree to so much as curtail a set of tools it pioneered and enjoys significant geopolitical advantage from. And thats before we got to the vehement opposition that would come from tech firms themselves.

Still, as ambitious as it is, even simply shifting the conversation to such an idea would, at the very least, be more productive than the current solutions. As is, were left with a rival video sharing platform, Triller, trying to capitalize on TikToks troubles by promising a form of patriotic capitalism, and Microsoft, now looking to buy the app, pledging to keep all its data in the United States ripe and ready for the NSA and other Western government agencies to then ladle up, patriotically of course.

Silicon Valley and the NSA would love us to think that its who does the spying, not the spying itself, thats the real problem. We shouldnt let them get away with the impression a mere seven years is all it takes for us to lose our sense of outrage.

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Silicon Valley's Vast Data Collection Should Worry You More Than TikTok - Jacobin magazine

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In the Pandemic, Students Free Speech Rights Are More Important Than Ever – Slate

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Students still have (some) First Amendment rights.Lisa McIntyre/Unsplash This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

Images of maskless students packing the hallways between classes at North Paulding High Schoolin Georgia became the viral symbols this week of a nationwide battle over whether and how to reopen schools in the midst of a pandemic that is still really not under control. It was widely reported on Monday and Tuesday that the schoollocated about an hour outside of Atlantahad reopened with a masks-optional policy, despite an outbreak among football players who had worked out in a crowded indoor gym, and despite multiple positive tests among players and school staff. The district has taken the position, despite recommendations fromCenters for Disease Control and Prevention health officials, that mask-wearing was a personal choice and that social distancing will not be possible to enforce in most cases. Virtual enrollment for the school had filled up rapidly, so most students had no other choice but to attend class in person or risk suspension.

The public health story was itself soon eclipsed by Thursdays news that two North Paulding students had been suspended for taking and posting other photos and a video. One of the teens, 15-year-old Hannah Watters, told BuzzFeed News she had received a five-day, out-of-school suspension for posting a photo and a video on Twitter. Watters announced Friday that her suspension had been rescinded. Meanwhile, the school went to remote learning on Thursday and Friday in order to assess and refine its health policies.

While the matter of Watters suspension seems to have been resolved, the larger question of student speech rights, especially on social media, and especially during a public health disaster, is far from settled. What Watters was doing was journalism. In addition to her viral photos, she had also been posting tallies of the proportions of students wearing masks in her classes. The viral photo she posted was captioned, Day two at North Paulding High School. It is just as bad. We were stopped because it was jammed. We are close enough to the point where I got pushed multiple go to second block. This is not ok. Not to mention the 10% mask rate.

School superintendent Brian Otott, who confirmed the North Paulding student suspension in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday, initially would not say whether the discipline was connected with the photos. (He would not comment, he said, out of regard for the students privacy.)Otott told the media that the photo was taken out of context. But he also told parents and guardiansin a letterthat there is no question that the photo does not look good. Wearing a mask is a personal choice, and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them. BuzzFeed further reported that on Wednesday, school principal Gabe Carmona threatened any student found criticizing the school on social media. Anything thats going on social media thats negative or alike without permission, photography, thats video or anything, there will be consequences, Carmona told students over the intercom.

Put to one side that I have heard this week from numerous parents in Georgia about daughters who have been sent home from school for wearing spaghetti straps, miniskirts, or shorts deemed too short for public viewing. (How is science-based public health a matter of personal choice whereas girls dressing demurely is an enforceable mandate?) Lets focus instead on why a school district thought it could suspend a student for posting newsworthy images.

Watters said she was called into the schools office Wednesday and told she had violated three policies from the school districts student code of conduct: She had used her phone during class time; she had used her phone during school hours for social media; and she had posted photos of minors without consent on a social media platform. But as Watters told CNN, high school students are exempt from the district policy on phones (its targeted toward younger students), and she didnt post the photo until after school was over. She admitted to violating the policy on posting images of students to social media, but, of course, students violate that rule every day.

Everyone loves to mouth the platitude that students dont shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate, as set forth in the landmark 1969 Tinker case, when the Supreme Court ruled that a high school student had the right to wear a black armband to protest the Vietnam War. But Tinkers holding has been eroded over the decades since, such that student speech can be regulated in schools to ensure that substantial disruptions do not occur on school grounds. Anxiety over new media, bullying, sexting, and porn have only added to the tensions felt by school administrators who try to regulate online conduct by putting blanket policies in place.

At least in theory, student speech, say, archly advocating drug useas in the 2007 Bong Hits 4 Jesus casecan still be banned by authorities. (Posting the same sentiment from home outside of school hours is safer.) But a student raising life and death questions about matters of life and death in school hallways should be protected even under the more constrained free speech rights in public schools. Hadar Harris, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which just filed a letter of complaint to the school in this matter, suggests as much: We are very concerned that this is the first of many such instances that we are going to see as schools reopen and administrators try to manage the narrative of opening during a pandemic to their benefit.

Harris also notes, Only 14 states have legislation that protects student journalists from censorship by school officials. In the rest of the country, school officials in public schools have the ability to censor student journalists due to the Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision, which carved out an exception to Tinker for student journalists. In that 1988 case, the Supreme Court held that schools did not violate students First Amendment rights in killing news items about pregnancy and divorce. In an email, Harris colleague Mike Hiestand, the Student Press Law Centers senior legal counsel, was more blunt: Tinker is very much alive. (Both the [Supreme Court] decisionand the plaintiffs, who I took a free speech bus tour with a few years back.) I think its the school districts legal officeif they truly think they can stop students from peacefully sharing lawful, accurate information in the way students do in 2020 about their going back to school during a global pandemicthat may be dead. Give me a break.

Prof. RonNell Andersen Jones, who teaches First Amendment law at the University of Utah says in an email that punishing students for speechespecially speech on pressing matters of public concernisnt just harmful to individual students, although it certainly is that. Its harmful to the vibrancy of our conversations about school safety policies, because those students are some of the most important contributors to those conversations. And its harmful to our democracy, because we are inappropriately modeling to the next generation that government can simply stifle free speech to shelter itself from criticism.

Professor Sonja West, who teaches First Amendment law at the University of Georgia adds that it appears that the school punished Hannah not for legitimatepedagogical reasons but becauseher photos were bad PR. This is exactly the kind of move the First Amendment is meant to prohibit. Censoring speech because its embarrassing may be very much in vogue these days, but that doesnt make it constitutional. And the state of Georgia, one would be remiss not to note, ranked fifth in the country for the number of total COVID-19 cases, eighth for cases per capita, and fourth in new cases in this past week.

In aninterviewwith CNN, Hannah Watters explained that she had posted the images early in the week because she was worried about the safety of everyone in the school building. My biggest concern is not only about me being safe, its about everyone being safe, because behind every teacher, student and staff member there is a family, there are friends, and I would just want to keep everyone safe. Americas schools are now ground zero for both ill-conceived pandemic planning and student endangerment, all dressed up under the guise of unfettered student choice and freedom. It is frankly astounding that those same same students who are free to die from a lethal virus are being singled out to be punished for chronicling it.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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In the Pandemic, Students Free Speech Rights Are More Important Than Ever - Slate

Brexit, Frexit, Grexit, Italexit – the whole EU house of cards is about to collapse – Express

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Even with the Eurosceptic Lega party out of harm's way and a massive 209bn sweetener from the EU to help Rome's coronavirus woes it still looks like clever money especially when the Italians twig that as net EU contributors it was their cash all along. But I've always favoured the longer shots, the higher stakes / higher reward gamble, and if pushed I'd say don't dismiss an each way flutter on France.

This morning you could get 10/1.

Which is prescient because this morning too on the other side of the Channel a little anti-EU pressure group was started by a fellow called Charles-Henri Gallois with the slogan take back control.

In polite liberal circles of course Mr Gallois (could he be more French with that name) is being mocked as a no-hoper fringe populist.

On this side of the Channel we have a touch more respect for no-hoper fringe populists these days.

Funny piece of political nomenclature that sneering word 'populist' isn't it? As if being popular with the rank and file public is something far too grubby for the great and the good to sully themselves with.

It's actually the root cause of the EU's massive popularity problems the simple inability to see life from the point of view of the voting rank and file.

It's too early to tell what kind of a man Charles-Henri is.

On the face of it he is just the latest among a growing clamour of political activists who've simply had enough.

Had enough of being dictated to by the above-mentioned arrogant, undemocratic burghers of Brussels.

Had enough of being told how they can and can't spend their money.

Had enough of a supranational state being built on the quiet, as very well-paid politicians with their own agendas milk the system use bait and switch tactics to keep us looking the other way.

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And perhaps even more frighteningly have had enough of how this inability to connect with the rank and file gives succour to the real political lunatics the architects of the EU desperately hoped the project would snuff out forever.

But decades of mismanagement and political disconnect has created the exact opposite.

It is entirely understandable that many people, for entirely right and laudable reasons, wish to leave the EU there's 17.2million of us over here for starters.

But the EU has created an environment which fosters real evil too.

There is a gaping chasm between parties and pressure groups who have simply lost patience with Brussels and their more deeply sinister counterparts who use anti-EU rhetoric as a respectable cover to hide their racist, homophobic and politically hideous agendas.

Strangely this gaping chasm does not seem that obvious to all.

But it needs to be. While both the EU (and national governments) continue to fail to properly address the needs of the people and gain their respect they open doors for the viler end of the political spectrum.

Having a flutter on the next country to leave the EU is a bit of harmless fun but unless Brussels starts to properly address the needs and concerns of the man and woman in the streets there will be no winners.

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Brexit, Frexit, Grexit, Italexit - the whole EU house of cards is about to collapse - Express

Brexit breakthrough: Leaver predicts Macron will back down as UK heads for win-win deal – Express

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CEO of campaign group The Freedom Association, Simon Richards, argued a Brexit trade deal between the UK and EU was likely to be agreed. While speaking to Jonathan Saxty with Brexit Watch, Mr Richards claimed the French President Emmanuel Macron would eventually concede in the Brexit trade talks. The Brexiteer added President Macron and other EU member state leaders would complain but eventually agree to an equally beneficial trade deal with the UK.

Mr Richards admitted Boris Johnson and his negotiating team may also complain about the agreement of a trade deal but would have ultimately succeeded in their Brexit trade deal goals.

Mr Richards said: "If I were a betting man which I am not despite making money in 2016 on Brexit.

"If I were a betting man I would still say the likelihood is that there will be a deal, a deal that works for both sides."

The Brexiteer outlined how this would likely happen and how the EU would attempt to save face.

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He said: "What usually happens is that you would likely get Emmanuel Macron saying 'That David Frost and those Brits were so tough.

"'The Brits got a completely outrageous deal but we did the best for the EU.'"

Mr Richards hinted the UK may apply a similar attitude after trade talks have concluded.

He said: "Equally I think you will get David Frost and Boris Johnson saying those French people drove a hard bargain.

"But at this point, everybody is happy then."

Mr Richard also argued in favour of a no deal Brexit and insisted the UK would be perfectly fine trading off World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.

He continued: "That said, I would have no problem whatsoever with having a no deal, WTO terms.

"Personally I would quite like that, I think that would be my preference.

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"In that scenario, you are just not beholden to anybody and then you can build on that from day one.

"I think there is a mistake in thinking that everything has to be absolutely just-so from midnight at the end of the year.

"These things can be done in bits, in my view."

Both the UK and EU have admitted little progress has been made in the Brexit trade deal talks but insisted they will continue to press on in hopes of securing a trade deal.

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Brexit breakthrough: Leaver predicts Macron will back down as UK heads for win-win deal - Express

Sterling to dip this year as Brexit uncertainty swirls – Reuters poll – Reuters

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LONDON (Reuters) - Sterling, which was approaching a five-month high on Wednesday, is expected to lose some of those gains this year amid Brexit and coronavirus fears before recovering in 2021, a Reuters poll found.

FILE PHOTO: Pound coins are seen in this photo illustration taken in Manchester, Britain September 6, 2017. REUTERS/Phil Noble/File Photo

The pound registered its biggest monthly rise in more than a decade in July, although its ascent was mainly due to a weaker dollar after a surge in U.S. coronavirus cases and unease about the upcoming presidential election.

But fears of a second wave of infections in Britain, already the hardest-hit European country, have capped the pounds advance and according to a new study published on Tuesday a resurgence of the pandemic could be twice as bad as the initial outbreak.

Also containing sterling strength is a weak economy and growing pressure to strike a Brexit trade deal before a transition period ends in December, prompting traders and investors to be wary of the pounds prospects.

The July 31-Aug. 5 poll of around 60 foreign exchange strategists said the pound would dip to $1.29 in a month and to $1.28 in three months before returning to current levels in a years time. It was trading around $1.31 on Wednesday.

The dip is because it seems like the uncertainty over Brexit will continue until we get to around September or October, so until we know what is going on it cant trade as well, said Jordan Rochester at Nomura.

I lean towards a deal, but it doesnt mean the same euphoria for sterling as it used to. The deal will be bare bones - it might be that in Q1 we are still adjusting to a new trading agreement and you do see all of the foretold Brexit border chaos.

Illustrating the murky outlook, the 12-month forecast horizon was wide - from $1.18 to $1.44.

Reuters polls since the June 2016 referendum to quit the EU have consistently said the two sides would eventually agree a free-trade deal, but talks have been troubled.

Without an agreement, trade and financial ties between the worlds fifth-largest economy and its biggest trading partner would collapse overnight, spreading havoc among markets and businesses.

Against the euro, little movement was expected. One euro was worth around 90.3 pence On Wednesday, and the poll suggested it would be worth 90.0p in a month and 89.0p in a year.

Reporting by Jonathan Cable; polling by Sarmista Sen and Khushboo Mittal; editing by Larry King

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Sterling to dip this year as Brexit uncertainty swirls - Reuters poll - Reuters

The Alt-Right’s Last Gasps – The Dispatch

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White Noise opens with an awkward Halloween party attended by a collection of alt-right personalities, hosted by Lucian Wintrichbest known for his brief stint as a White House correspondent for the far-right blog Gateway Punditin Washington, D.C. Theres a knock at the door; Wintrich hops up from the couch, brimming with excitement as Lauren Southern, the renowned Canadian anti-immigration activist, makes an appearance. The two embrace. Southern is wearing a black cape, pale makeup, and cheesy plastic vampire teeth. Im the IRS, she quips.

Its an oddly human moment for a group of characters that are almost exclusively portrayed as a sinister monolith: The superabundance of documentaries, investigative articles, books and internet shorts on the alt-right that have materialized in the years since Donald Trumps rise to power are, as a general rule, sensationalist and partisan affairs. Conventional treatments of the coalition of activists, commentators, writers and internet personalities tend to paint the predominantly internet-based movement as an ominous cult of evil with enormousand ever-increasinginfluence in the American political arena.

But White Noise takes a different approach. The new documentary features 27-year-old Atlantic filmmaker Daniel Lombroso following a handful of the alt-rights most notorious figures for the better part of four years, providing an intimate portrait of a collection of lost, desperately unhappy young menand, to a lesser extent, womensearching for meaning in a fringe ideology. While most of the mainstream coverage of the alt-right spends little, if any, actual time with its adherentsprevious documentaries like Age of Rage give the significant majority of airtime to anti-fascist activists and Southern Poverty Law Center intellectualsLombroso seeks to understand the alt-right as it is; made up of real people rather than a faceless force of darkness.

Viewers gain not just a richer understanding of the profound ugliness of the movements devotes but also of the conditions responsible for producing such ugliness: a sense of loneliness in an age of interconnected mass culture, and a yearning for community in an increasingly atomistic world. Acolytes of the alt-right are often portrayed as larger-than-life supervillains; White Noise reveals them to be broken, deeply isolated individuals.

Besides Lauren Southern, Pizzagate promulgator Mike Cernovich and white supremacist Richard Spencer are the main subjects of the documentary, although other major figures make tangential appearances. The three prominent personalities each represent a different subgenre of the alt-right: Spencer stands in for the dyed-in-the-wool white nationalists, Cernovich for the Trumpist conspiracy theorists, and Southern the hard-right grifters. All three have taken on outsize roles in our political discourse; but in Lombrosos documentary they become more visibly human.

What is notable about the film, then,is less its explosively disturbing momentsthe Nazi salutes in Washington, D.C., on the heels of Trumps victory, the deadly chaos of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesvillebut rather the dreary routine of the piteous lives lived in the empty spaces in between them.

In White Noise, Spencer is not the leader of a neo-fascist insurgency on the brink of conquering America, but a divorced outcast who, at the age of 42, has moved back in with his mother. One sees Spencer lurching from one failure to another, a man perpetually frustrated by his inability to be loved by a world that has rejected him. For every Charlottesville, there are 100 speeches given to mostly empty rooms, events canceled at the last minute by venues horrified by Spencers ideology, and profanity-laden public humiliations at the hands of strangers.

2018 has been one of the hardest years of my life, he tells Lombroso. Ive had a failed marriage, multiple lawsuits, I cant raise money the way that I had been, Im being treated like a terrorist. Ive never been put through this s**t. And its just awful.

Spencers desperation is a consistent fact of life for the documentarys cast of characters. Cernovich, also divorced, is revealed to be living off of his ex-wifes paycheck. (Its pretty alpha, he argues, to get paid alimony by a woman.) Like Spencer, Cernovich has been made out to be a cunning political savant by mainstream commentatorsdescribed as someone to reckon with whose influence reach[es] the highest seats of power by the SPLCbut he leads something of a dismal, bleak existence: Im not someone who likes myself particularly much, he confesses at one point. Im not somebody who wakes up and thinks, I really like me. I really like this person.

Southern, for her part, seems to be increasingly uncomfortable with the ideology she publicly promotes as the film wears on, visibly cringing when her then-boyfriend informs her that his primary motivation for raising a family is the fact that us Europeans, we have responsibility to reproduce, and awkwardly dodging alt-right provocateur Gavin Mcinness drunk sexual advances. (Southern was 23 at the time; Mcinnes was 48, and married with three children).

In this way, the documentary is about more than the alt-right; its an examination of the ugly underbelly of our technological age. Its characters are, after all, all creatures of the internet, and their followers are disproportionately composed of isolated young people searching for a sense of belonging in an online ecosystem of forums, YouTube channels and message boards. As an especially disturbing phenomenon, the alt-right is unique; but as a manifestation of the widespread inclination to find purpose in a political community, its merely one particularly vile manifestation of a universally felt impulse.

Above all else, White Noise is a sort of unsympathetic eulogy for a dying movement; a portrait of a cohort whose brief moment is decidedly over. Over the four-year span of the film, we see its peak as well as its sorry declinewhile watching its proponents attempt to reconcile themselves to a country far less receptive to their ambitions than they had once hoped.

Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is an ISI summer fellow for The Dispatch.

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The Alt-Right's Last Gasps - The Dispatch

Dreams PSVR Review: A Messy, Unmissable VR Playground In Need Of An Overhaul – UploadVR

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Media Molecules Dreams is finally ready for VR prime time. Does the ambitious creation platform hold up? Find out in our Dreams PSVR review!

Whats nice about reviewing Dreams five months on from launch is how much its been demystified. Theres little need to critique the games audacious creation tools and sharing systems with the caveat they might never take off; this pudding already has enough proof. Seriously, just go and check out some of the highly-rendered puddings.

Its still tough, though, to wrap your head around the enormity of Dreams. How do you stamp a score on whats essentially a YouTube-style platform of interactive experiences? Its a trickier task still when you factor in VR.

Lets try not to complicate it too much, then; if you have any interest in VRs weirder, more experimental side (which, given the very nature of the platform, theres a good chance you do), you absolutely cannot miss Dreams, even with some significant reservations for the creation mode.

Dreams brings a welcome bit of DIY to the VR scene. It allows anyone to get out there and make the game theyve always wanted to see, pending their patience with the modest learning curve and their readiness to accept adapting their vision to the games fuzzy-paint aesthetic (which is customizable but never fully escapable). The tangible bit of all this is the tools themselves. On a flatscreen, Dreams intelligent UI, existing templates and logical progression got me up and running with some pretty basic game concepts in just a few sessions. You get pretty much the same suite of tools and tutorials in VR which, in practice, actually might be the most disappointing aspect of the Dreams VR experience.

Let me explain; VR creation apps are some of the best, most wholly unique experiences you can find in headsets. The intuition of 3D painting in apps like Tilt Brush has led to the creation of entirely new works of art and simple apps like Googles Blocks can also get you up and running in this field in no time.

In terms of pure functionality, Dreams offers everything those apps do and much, much more. This toolset has the power to make entire games with deep mechanics. Again, Media Molecule has more than proved this platform is capable of that.

But, rather than go back and overhaul the Dreams learning and building experience for native VR support as you might have expected it would the developer settled on an awkward halfway house. When you first boot up Dreams, some of the games most basic on-ramping instructions will only be shown on a virtual screen, with your controllers (either two Move controllers or the DualShock 4) represented as a floating creature known as an Imp. In normal VR, navigating using the Imp is simple, but trying to negotiate 3D space on a flat screen in these tutorials is beyond clunky. Then, when you head into the Workshop, where the bulk of the games tutorials rest, youll be greeted with this message.

Oh.

There are some additional videos to guide you through VR specific elements but, largely speaking, Dreams tutorials are not designed with the platform in mind, and thats a real shame. Yes, theyre fantastic for flat-screen creation, but VR support would have been best served starting from scratch with native guidance that properly communicates how much VR enhances the Dreams experience. Yes, you can still do everything you can do in the flat screen version and people already familiar with the tools will easily adapt, but this should be better at introducing new players to the weird and wonderful world of VR.

Dreams PSVR Review Indie vs Inspiration

Dreams has a strange sort of allure to it in that, many people want to see their favorite games and films paid tribute to within it but the real magic behind it is originality. VR puts an interesting spin on all that; if youve ever wanted to see what PT or Star Wars or Resident Evil or practically anything else might be like in VR, youll more than likely find it here. Heck, we could see a Halo VR tribute on PSVR in the future, which is a mind-blowing proposition. Media Molecule might scoff at the idea, but its built a dream (sorry) platform for VR in that sense. How branded content evolves against original ideas with the inclusion of VR will be fascinating to watch.

Problems also persist with the games control schemes. I had hoped that a switch to VR would make creation with the PlayStation Move controllers a much more palatable affair given the additional context of 3D space. And that is the case to some extent, but the Move controls are also plagued by the confusing button layout, which Media Molecule doesnt virtually replicate when youre making finger-tying shortcuts. Moving the camera around, too, is incredibly sensitive and begging for analog sticks to properly master. As such, the DualShock 4 surprisingly remains the best way to create in Dreams, but even then brushes up against the limited positional tracking.

But creation is only one part of the Dreams VR experience.

Ive already revisited one of the all-time scariest games, P.T., piloted an X-Wing, and admired that stunning Unreal Engine 5 demo inside my headset with Dreams. More importantly, Ive discovered some brilliantly-fleshed out original concepts too that have amazed, delighted and surprised. On the flip side, its had me nauseous, confused and often bewildered.

Its a messy little thing, but thats sort of the point.

Navigating Dreams hub of user-generated content in VR isnt so much a rollercoaster as an exhilarating and oddly amusing dash through a minefield. Theres strong curation from Media Molecule itself, but the real magic requires a risky dive into its ever-expanding pool of creations. Youll find a dizzying array of fantastic ideas varying in quality of execution, endless memes, hastily-abandoned prototypes and tacked-on VR support. Even Media Molecules own VR showcase, Inside The Box, wrestles with control schemes and ideas with only some success, and many of the existing non-VR creations that have enabled support are strangely scaled, breaking every rule in the book of VR design. If you thought Five Nights At Freddys VR was disturbing, wait until youve played a broken fan tribute with muffled screams recorded through a PlayStation camera.

Dreams PSVR Review Comfort

Dreams offers a wealth of comfort options that are all enabled by default and, more importantly, will let you filter out experiences not necessarily optimized for VR. The game will boot you to Cinema Mode when framerate suffers and Media Molecule offers plenty of comfort tips. That said, itll still be hard to spend entire sessions in the game without coming across intense content, but there are ratings in place to help guide you.

Theres plenty of comfort options to shield you from the worst offenders, of course, but it can only do so much. Every time you click on a new game, youre rolling the dice, but the reward is often worth the risk. In one play session I found Hard Reset, a moody, atmospheric 6DOF exploration game that, even if it wasnt built for VR exclusively, seemed to possess a powerful understanding of immersion.Bionic Revolution, meanwhile, promises a simple VR shooter that frankly plays better than some SteamVR shovelware.

This all sort of speaks for itself its a better review of the game than myself or anyone else could write up. You might have to shovel through a lot of misses to find the hits but, when you do, Dreams absolutely sings. And the chances are youll have a lot of fun wading through the former category anyway. On a platform thats still in need of a lot of content to sustain it, Dreams offers a hugely compelling hub of VR intrigue that youll want to return to time and again. Even if its creative elements arent as strong as newcomers might hope, this limitless playground is more than enough reason to dive in.

Its true, though, that the game does have certain technical constraints in VR, especially from what Ive played on a standard PS4. While theres no extra limits on the size of your creations, dynamic rendering can reduce them to a blur, for example, and the game will boot you to PSVRs Cinema Mode if it runs into framerate hitches. Still, its no secret that Dreams released at the tail end of a generation with a long roadmap ahead of it and, as exciting as it is in its current form, I cant help but wonder what the future holds on other systems, where VR support is likely to shine even brighter. Media Molecule is interested in a PC version and, of course, PS5 looms too.

Until then, we have an immensely promising foundation. A strong community is already cropping up around Dreams PSVR support; one thats free to experiment and tinker in ways that big-budget games might not be able. VR is often described as a wild west of game development, and in many ways Dreams is the epicenter of all of that.

Dreams creative mode might not integrate with PSVR as naturally as hoped, but its cemented position as a hub of invention makes it an easy recommendation. Paired with the platforms inherent comfort issues, its sprawling, untamed ecosystem can prove to be a minefield to navigate, but for every unwelcome rollercoaster ride (literally and figuratively), theres another wish waiting to be fulfilled or something genuinely original to discover. The only way to truly judge Dreams is by the strength of its creations and those already speak for themselves; if you want to embrace VRs experimental side, you shouldnt miss it.

Dreams is available now on PS4 for $39.99. The VR support comes as a free update. For more on how we arrived at this score, check out our review guidelines. What do you make of our Dreams PSVR review? Let us know in the comments below!

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Dreams PSVR Review: A Messy, Unmissable VR Playground In Need Of An Overhaul - UploadVR

Military Alliances, Partnerships Strengthened Through Defense Strategy Execution – Department of Defense

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In a rapidly changing world, the United States must defend its interests and values against new threats and new competitors, especially from China and Russia. But it can't do it alone. Instead, the U.S. must strengthen relationships with existing partners and allies while also building new partnerships.

Strengthening alliances and attracting new partners is one of three lines of effort central to the National Defense Strategy laid out in 2018. It's something Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper has been focused on since he took office last year. The secretary said developing a coordinated strategy for American allies and partners is among his top priorities.

"These like-minded nations are an unmatched advantage that China and Russia do not have," Esper said.

Over the past year, with encouragement from the United States, NATO has enhanced its readiness by continuing to secure pledges from alliance members to increase their defense spending. About two-thirds of NATO nations have pledged to increase defense spending to 2% of their gross domestic product by 2021, but all have increased spending to some degree already.

In the Indo-Pacific region, the department has strengthened alliances and partnerships by deepening interoperability, expanding deterrent networks, and executing maritime security and awareness operations.

Also in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. conducted a record number of freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea over the past year, more than any other year since 2015, to deter China's malign behavior. For example, in July 2019, the USS Nimitz conducted exercises with the Indian navy in the Indian Ocean. That exercise, Esper said, demonstrates a shared commitment between the two nations to support a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

In November 2019, the United States also participated in its first joint military exercise with India a partnership Esper called "one of the all-important defense relationships of the 21st century."

In the Middle East, the United States has led a coalition of more than 80 partners to ensure the enduring defeat of the ISIS physical caliphate. And in September, the United States joined a group of nations to establish the International Maritime Security Construct, in which the U.S. partners with eight countries, Lithuania being the most recent. The goal of the group is to maintain order and security in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

When it comes to foreign military sales, the department has improved policy and practices by lowering costs and introducing competitive financing opportunities, which have increased U.S. competitiveness and improved interoperability among partners.

In fiscal year 2019, the department maintained sales of more than $55 billion for the second consecutive year, which increased the three-year rolling average for sales by 16 percent. Additionally, the department improved the time it takes to respond to partner nation requests by 17%.

Also, the State Department recently approved a possible sale of 105 F-35 aircraft to Japan and the sale of All Up Round MK 54 lightweight torpedoes to Belgium. And in Asia, the United States may also allow the sale of eight MV-22 Osprey aircraft to Indonesia.

Efforts involving arms sales to partner and allied nations not only increase interoperability between the U.S. military and the militaries of partner and allied nations, but also mean that the U.S. military and those nations will work together in ongoing training and technical assistance as part of the deal.

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Military Alliances, Partnerships Strengthened Through Defense Strategy Execution - Department of Defense

@theMarket: The Economy Versus the Stock Market – iBerkshires.com

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By Bill SchmickiBerkshires columnist03:57PM / Friday August 07, 2020

It is a tale of two markets. One represented by stocks, which has experienced a "V" shaped recovery, while the other (the economy) appears to be describing a "W." Can the two continue to diverge?

The short answer is "yes," as long as the Federal Reserve Bank continues to support the financial markets with unlimited stimulus. "Stocks are the only game in town," as one investor put it. "Bonds are yielding me less than nothing after inflation, and commodities are just too risky."

That sums up the present state of affairs facing investors.

The fact that earnings have been absolutely dismal in the latest quarter meant little to the markets. Earnings forecasts have been reduced to such a low point that the majority of companies have had no problem beating estimates. Some companies, especially in the technology space and stay-at-home stocks, have actually thrived during the pandemic.

I wish that could be said for the overall economy, but the coronavirus doesn't care what kind of economic models we fashion. Everyone hoped that by this summer the virus would have done its damage and moved on, but containing the virus has proven much harder than we imagined.

Despite the on-going virus burden, U.S. employers added 1.8 million jobs in July. That was an upside surprise. Average hourly earnings month-over-month were up 0.2 percent (versus -0.5 percent expected), which was good news as well. The service sector led the gains in the non-farm payroll report.

The only downside may be that the stronger than expected employment data may remove some of the urgency for an immediate compromise on a new stimulus package between the two parties. This week, investors had been hoping Congress would give the economy another jolt of stimulus, but so far nothing has materialized. Both Democrats and Republicans say they are getting close, but also add that they are still "trillions of dollars apart" from a compromise on a workable bill. Friday (today) was the self-imposed deadline for a deal, but after a marathon session on Thursday night, the politicians had nothing new to report. I do believe that in the end the two sides will hammer out a deal. It is just too important to the economy for our legislators to fail.

In the meantime, President Trump is trying to alleviate some of the suffering this stimulus delay may be causing Americans. He has said that he will try and implement executive orders for payroll tax cuts, assistance with both student loans and evictions, as well as unemployment benefits. An announcement may be forthcoming shortly on this subject.

As for the markets, we have reached a point where the S&P 500 Index is positive (up 2.3 percent) for the year. That is no mean accomplishment, given the ongoing burden of the pandemic. We have the Fed to thank for that, as well as the federal government's fiscal stimulus programs. As long as the central bank's monetary policy remains accommodative, we should be in good shape. But that does not mean that stocks can't go down.

One risk to the markets may be the on-going tech war between China and the United States. Readers should read yesterday's column, "Tensions with China may heat up," on the issue. President Trump escalated the pressure on Chinese companies by signing two new executive orders on Thursday. He has prohibited U.S. residents from doing business with the Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat apps, beginning 45 days from now. On Friday, he added sanctions on Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam and 11 other individuals for implementing "Beijing's policies of suppression of freedom and democratic processes."

He worries that these Chinese companies are gathering personal information on Americans that may present a security risk. In addition, an influential group of U.S. regulators said stock exchanges should set new rules that could a trigger a delisting of Chinese companies. The president's Working Group on Financial Markets insisted that Chinese companies must be required to allow access to their audit work papers.

So far, we have been dealing with a "Teflon" market where bad news simply rolls off the averages and only good news is discounted. There is a risk that this tech war could escalate and test that concept. If I were you, I would expect China to retaliate against our actions fairly soon. If investors get spooked, it could cause a short-term decline in the markets.

Bill Schmick is now the 'Retired Investor.' After working in the financial services business for more than 40 years, Bill is paring back and focusing exclusively on writing about the financial markets, the needs of retired investors like himself, and how to make your last 30 years of your life your absolute best. You can reach him atbilliams1948@gmail.comor leave a message at 413-347-2401.

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@theMarket: The Economy Versus the Stock Market - iBerkshires.com

New Baylor Study Will Train AI to Assist Breast Cancer Surgery – HITInfrastructure.com

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August 07, 2020 -Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine will enroll patients in a study, ATLAS AI, which will use a high-resolution imaging system to collect images of breast tumors in order to develop artificial intelligence (AI) that can help with breast cancer surgery, according to a recent press release.

ATLAS AI will leverage Perimeter Medical Imagings OTIS system, which delivers real-time, ultra-high resolution, sub-surface images of extracted tissues, Baylor researchers explained.

The majority of breast cancer patients will undergo lumpectomy surgery as part of their treatment, hoping to remove the tumor and conserve the breast.

Perimeters AI technology, ImgAssist, is designed to utilize a machine learning model to help surgeons identify if cancer is still present when performing a lumpectomy.

This will allow surgeons to immediately remove additional tissue from the patient with the intent to reduce the likelihood that the patient will require additional surgeries, researchers explained.

One of the big problems in breast cancer surgery is that in about one in four women on whom we do a lumpectomy to remove cancer, we fail to get clear margins, Alastair Thompson, MD, professor, section chief of breast surgery and Olga Keith Wiess chair of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, said in the press release.

That in turn leads to a need for reoperation to avoid high recurrence rates. Hence the need for a good, effective and user-friendly tool to help us better identify if we have adequately removed the breast cancer from a womans breast, to get it right the first time.

Thomas, also a surgical oncologist at theDan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Centerat Baylor Medical Center and co-director of theLester and Sue Smith breast centerat Baylor College of Medicine, explained that OTIS and ImgAssist are noninvasive for the patients and fit into the routine surgical process.

Our AI technology has the potential to be a powerful tool for real-time margin visualization and assessment that we believe will help physicians improve surgical outcomes for breast cancer patients, said Andrew Berkeley, co-founder of Perimeter Medical Imaging.

The patients who enroll in these clinical studies at Baylor are contributing to new technology that we hope will assist surgeons in the future so that they can reduce the likelihood of their patients needing additional surgeries.

ATLAS AI was made possible by a $7.4 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to further develop the AI algorithm for OTIS.

The grant will allow the company to use data collected at pathology labs at Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and UT Health San Antonio as part of the study.

The study will enroll nearly 400 patients at the beginning of next week.

Additionally, Perimeter will continue the ATLAS AI Project with a second randomized, multi-site study in nearly 600 patients to test the OTIS platform with ImgAssist AI against current standard of care.

Through the study, researchers intend to uncover whether the platform lowers the re-operation rate for breast conservation surgery, Baylor researchers said.

This could be a huge improvement for patient care. It could help patients avoid a second surgery and the physical, emotional, and financial stress that accompany an additional procedure, Thompson concluded.

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New Baylor Study Will Train AI to Assist Breast Cancer Surgery - HITInfrastructure.com

The U.S. Has AI Competition All Wrong – Foreign Affairs

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The development of artificial intelligence was once a largely technical issue, confined to the halls of academia and the labs of the private sector. Today, it is an arena of geopolitical competition. The United States and China each invest billions every year in growing their AI industries, increasing the autonomy and power of futuristic weapons systems, and pushing the frontiers of possibility. Fears of an AI arms race between the two countries aboundand although the rhetoric often outpaces the technological reality, rising political tensions mean that both countries increasingly view AI as a zero-sum game.

For all its geopolitical complexity, AI competition boils down to a simple technical triad: data, algorithms, and computing power. The first two elements of the triad receive an enormous amount of policy attention. As the sole input to modern AI, data is often compared to oila trope repeated everywhere from technology marketing materials to presidential primaries. Equally central to the policy discussion are algorithms, which enable AI systems to learn and interpret data. While it is important not to overstate its capability in these realms, China does well in both: its expansive government bureaucracy hoovers up massive amounts of data, and its tech firms have made notable strides in advanced AI algorithms.

But the third element of the triad is often neglected in policy discussions. Computing poweror compute, in industry parlanceis treated as a boring commodity, unworthy of serious attention. That is in part because compute is usually taken for granted in everyday life. Few people know how fast the processor in their laptop isonly that it is fast enough. But in AI, compute is quietly essential. As algorithms learn from data and encode insights into neural networks, they perform trillions or quadrillions of individual calculations. Without processors capable of doing this math at high speed, progress in AI grinds to a halt. Cutting-edge compute is thus more than just a technical marvel; it is a powerful point of leverage between nations.

Recognizing the true power of compute would mean reassessing the state of global AI competition. Unlike the other two elements of the triad, compute has undergone a silent revolution led by the United States and its alliesone that gives these nations a structural advantage over China and other countries that are rich in data but lag in advanced electronics manufacturing. U.S. policymakers can build on this foundation as they seek to maintain their technological edge. To that end, they should consider increasing investments in research and development and restricting the export of certain processors or manufacturing equipment. Options like these have substantial advantages when it comes to maintaining American technological superiorityadvantages that are too often underappreciated but too important to ignore.

Computing power in AI has undergone a radical transformation in the last decade. According to the research lab OpenAI, the amount of compute used to train top AI projects increased by a factor of 300,000 between 2012 and 2018. To put that number into context, if a cell phone battery lasted one day in 2012 and its lifespan increased at the same rate as AI compute, the 2018 version of that battery would last more than 800 years.

Greater computing power has enabled remarkable breakthroughs in AI, including OpenAIs GPT-3 language generator, which can answer science and trivia questions, fix poor grammar, unscramble anagrams, and translate between languages. Even more impressive, GPT-3 can generate original stories. Give it a headline and a one-sentence summary, and like a student with a writing prompt, it can conjure paragraphs of coherent text that human readers would struggle to identify as machine generated. GPT-3s data (almost a trillion words of human writing) and complex algorithm (running on a giant neural network with 175 billion parameters) attracted the most attention, but both would have been useless without the programs enormous computing powerenough to run the equivalent of 3,640 quadrillion calculations per second every second for a day.

The rapid advances in compute that OpenAI and others have harnessed are partly a product of Moores law, which dictates that the basic computing power of cutting-edge chips doubles every 24 months as a result of improved processor engineering. But also important have been rapid improvements in parallelizationthat is, the ability of multiple computer chips to train an AI system at the same time. Those same chips have also become increasingly efficient and customizable for specific machine-learning tasks. Together, these three factors have supercharged AI computing power, improving its capacity to address real-world problems.

None of these developments has come cheap. The production cost and complexity of new computer chip factories, for instance, increase as engineering problems get harder. Moores lesser-known second law says that the cost of building a factory to make computer chips doubles every four years. New facilities cost upward of $20 billion to build and feature chip-making machines that sometimes run more than $100 million each. The growing parallelization of machines also adds expense, as does the use of chips specially designed for machine learning.

The increasing cost and complexity of compute give the United States and its allies an advantage over China, which still lags behind its competitors in this element of the AI triad. American companies dominate the market for the software needed to design computer chips, and the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan host the leading chip-fabrication facilities. Three countriesJapan, the Netherlands, and the United Stateslead in chip-manufacturing equipment, controlling more than 90 percent of global market share.

For decades, China has tried to close these gaps, sometimes with unrealistic expectations. When Chinese planners decided to build a domestic computer chip industry in 1977, they thought the country could be internationally competitive within several years. Beijing made significant investments in the new sector. But technical barriers, a lack of experienced engineers, and poor central planning meant that Chinese chips still trailed behind their competitors several decades later. By the 1990s, the Chinese governments enthusiasm had largely receded.

In 2014, however, a dozen leading engineers urged the Chinese government to try again. Chinese officials created the National Integrated Circuit Fundmore commonly known as the big fundto invest in promising chip companies. Its long-term plan was to meet 80 percent of Chinas demand for chips by 2030. But despite some progress, China remains behind. The country still imports 84 percent of its computer chips from abroad, and even among those produced domestically, half are made by non-Chinese companies. Even in Chinese fabrication facilities, Western chip design, software, and equipment still predominate.

The current advantage enjoyed by the United States and its alliesstemming in part from the growing importance of computepresents an opportunity for policymakers interested in limiting Chinas AI capabilities. By choking off the chip supply with export controls or limiting the transfer of chip-manufacturing equipment, the United States and its allies could slow Chinas AI development and ensure its reliance on existing producers. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has already taken limited actions along these lines: in what may be a sign of things to come, in 2018, it successfully pressured the Netherlands to block the export to China of a $150 million cutting-edge chip-manufacturing machine.

Export controls on chips or chip-manufacturing equipment might well have diminishing marginal returns. A lack of competition from Western technology could simply help China build its industry in the long run. Limiting access to chip-manufacturing equipment may therefore be the most promising approach, as China is less likely to be able to develop that equipment on its own. But the issue is time sensitive and complex; policymakers have a window in which to act, and it is likely closing. Their priority must be to determine how best to preserve the United States long-term advantage in AI.

In addition to limiting Chinas access to chips or chip-making equipment, the United States and its allies must also consider how to bolster their own chip industries. As compute becomes increasingly expensive to build and deploy, policymakers must find ways to ensure that Western companies continue to push technological frontiers. Over several presidential administrations, the United States has failed to maintain an edge in the telecommunications industry, ceding much of that sector to others, including Chinas Huawei. The United States cant afford to meet the same fate when it comes to chips, chip-manufacturing equipment, and AI more generally.

Part of ensuring that doesnt happen will mean making compute accessible to academic researchers so they can continue to train new experts and contribute to progress in AI development. Already, some AI researchers have complained that the prohibitive cost of compute limits the pace and depth of their research. Few, if any, academic researchers could have afforded the compute necessary to develop GPT-3. If such power becomes too expensive for academic researchers to employ, even more research will shift to large private-sector companies, crowding out startups and inhibiting innovation.

When it comes to U.S.-Chinese competition, the often-overlooked lesson is that computing power matters. Data and algorithms are critical, but they mean little without the compute to back them up. By taking advantage of their natural head start in this realm, the United States and its allies can preserve their ability to counter Chinese capabilities in AI.

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Game Tree and Optimization under Adversarial in AI – Analytics Insight

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Game theory, in economics, considers the environment with multiple agents as a game. This is regardless of whether the agents in the game are cooperative or competitive. In AI Solutions Company, games are considered adversarial in nature. By adversarial we mean that the environment is two-player, turn-taking in which after the game, the utility values are equal and opposite.

These take place in a deterministic, full observable environment. An example of this is chess. The rules of chess can make the computer representation of the game correct in every relevant detail. However, the presence of an opponent makes solving more complicated because it introduces uncertainty.

Lets consider a game of two players, and call them MIN and MAX. These two players will compete where MAX will try to maximize the payoff. A search problem in the form of a game can be defined with the following 4 components:

In a normal search problem, the objective of MAX would be to search for a payoff value that leads to a terminal state that is a winner, thereby making its first move. However, in the presence of adversary MIN, the strategy of MAX will be to find a winning terminal state regardless of what move MIN makes.

To determine the optimal strategy for MAX, the minimax algorithm is used to determine the best first move. The 5 steps in this algorithm are:

Since the decision maximizes the payoff under the assumption that the opponent will play perfectly to minimize it, it is called the minimax decision.

Figure 1

In the two-player game tree generated in Figure 1, the A nodes indicate the moves by MAX and the V nodes indicate those of MIN. The terminal nodes show the payoff value for MAX calculated by the rules of the game, i.e. the utility function. The payoff values of the other nodes are calculated by the minimax algorithm from the payoffs of their successors. In this case, MAXS best move is A1, and MINs best reply is A11.

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Does AI mean the end for breast radiologists? – AI in Healthcare

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1. Iffy AI acceptance. Chiwome and colleagues note that radiology has long been a technology-driven specialty. However, its not just radiologists who need to buy in to AIs role in their work.

There is a need to sensitize [referring physicians] about AI through different channels to make the adoption of AI smooth, the authors write. We also need consent from patients to use AI on image interpretation. Patients should be able to choose between AI and humans.

2. The commonness of insufficient training data. No matter how massive the inputs, image-based training datasets arent enough if the data isnt properly labeled for the training, the authors point out. Image labeling takes a lot of time and needs a lot of effort, and also, this process must be very robust, they write.

Also in this category of challenges is the inescapability of rare conditions. Not only are highly unusual findings too few and far between to train algorithms, Chiwome and co-authors write, but nonhuman modes of detection sometimes also mistake image noise and variations for pathologies.

Along those same lines, if image data used in training is from a different ethnic group, age group or different gender, it may give different results if given raw data from other diverse groups of people.

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Does AI mean the end for breast radiologists? - AI in Healthcare

How film festivals around the world have adapted to the limitations of the Coronavirus pandemic – Firstpost

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Many film festivals are offering a mix of virtual and physical events in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, film festivals have had no choice but to reinvent themselves this year. While Cannes and Telluride have been cancelled, here is a lookat other upcoming events that have made a digital shift this year or chosen to showcase films both physically and online.

(Click here for LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak)

Toronto International Film Festival(10 -20 September)

TIFF is one of the largest festivals of North America, but this time it has drastically scaled down its plans and scrapped together 50 films or TV series from around the world, leaning on projects set to debut on streaming services or television this fall.

Spike Lee'sfilmed version of David Byrnes Broadway theatrical concertAmerican Utopia,an HBO release, will open this years festival.

Other films in the lineupinclude the 90-year-old WisemansCity Hall, a portrait of Bostons City Hall; Regina Kings drama about a young Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, titledOne Night in Miami; Herzog and Clive Oppenheimers Apple TV+ meteorite documentaryFireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds; Pieces of a Woman, Kornel Mundruczos family drama with Shia LaBeouf; and Glendyn IvinsPenguin Bloom, with Naomi Watts.

Venice(2 - 12 September)

Venice will be the first film festival to hold a physical event ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event will be smaller than usual andwill split into three sections - Venezia 77 (the main competition), Out of Competition, and Horizons. It will drop the Sconfini section (for arthouse and genre films) to give more screening time to main-section films, writes IndieWire.

Venetian director Andrea Segres documentaryMolecole, Daniele Luchettis drama Lacci,Chlo Zhao's Nomadlandand Pieces of a Woman, the English language debut of Hungarian filmmakerKornel Mundruczo, are scheduled to be screened at the festival.

Mumbai Film Festival

The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2020 has been postponed to next year as cinemas remain shut. The festival will soon release its selection of Indian films later this month.

MAMI has already launched virtual initiatives like Knowledge Series Dial M for Films, where Indian industry figures discuss their journey in films and more, as well as MAMI Home Theatre, a curation of films brought to audience directly online.

The academy has also launched Word to Screen Market, Young Critics Lab and the Industry Programme.

Authors, publishers and the literary community engage directly with content creators to option stories for films, TV and the digital medium via Word to Screen. This year, the initiative will take place online and focus on digital workshops with publishers and content creators.

Meanwhile, Young Critics Lab will promote young writing talent, who will be mentored by Baradwaj Rangan and Mike McCahill. The Industry Programme announced last year, but its online version will bring together creators from all over India to talk about the challenges they face and share their learnings.

BMO IFFSA Toronto (6 -16 August)

One of the largest South Asian film festivals of North America, the virtual edition of BMO IFFSA will feature 100 films in 16 languages.Some films part of the lineup are Pearl of the Desert (Maru ro Moti), Gamak Ghar, Moothon, Bebaak, Eeb Allay Ooo!, and Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost.

On the opening day, a tribute to the late Irrfan Khan will take place with actors filmmakers like Gurinder Chadha, Shoojit Sircar, Hansal Mehta and actors like Vijay Varma will be speaking.

Nandita Das, Gitanjali Rao, Javed Akhtar and journalist Nandini Ramnath, composers Madan Gopal Singh and Naren Chandavarkar will be taking virtual masterclasses.

BFI London Film Festival(7 - 18 October)

This year's edition will mostly be an online fare with limited in-person events over 12 days. 50 films from fiction, documentary, animation genres, artists moving image, and restored classics from the worlds archives have been selected for virtual premieres. Every film will be presented with an introduction or a QnA with the makers. Films will include subtitles and audio descriptors for viewers with special needs.

As UK is also opening its theatres, 12 screenings are scheduled to take place across the region's cinemas. LFF is also dropping a jury and instead letting the audience choose winners for four categories : Best Fiction Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best Short Film, and Best XR.

The full schedule of LFF will be announced on 8 September.

New York Film Festival(25 September - 11 October)

The 17-day long New York Film Festival will also be adapting to the current scenario to ensure the safety of the festival attendees. The event will offer a mix of physical and outdoor virtual screenings this year, but Deadlinereports that the organisers,Film at Lincoln Center, will also look into the prospect of an in-person festival. Films will also be showcased at the city's two drive-in theatres.

NYFF has also announced an updated structure Main Slate, Currents, Spotlight, Revivals, and Talks. The program will have 100 features as well as panel discussions. The virtual screenings will only for US residents, but the talks will be open to a global audience.

Sundance (21 -31 January, 2021)

While Sundance was successfully held prior to the coronavirus lockdown, its 2021 edition will be seeing some changes. According to the festival director Tabitha Jackson, it will take place in Utah and "in at least 20 independent and community cinemas across the U.S. and beyond." Besides having a smaller scale than usual and following social distancing practices, Sundance also plans to be accessible online.Salt Lake Tribunal states that the organisers are looking to cut the festival short by seven days.

Rotterdam(27 January - 7 February, 2021)

Rotterdam also plans to implement changes in its programming structure forthe 50th edition of the festival. According to Deadline the organisers will bring in the amendments in accordance with the shift in circumstances over the next six months.

Screen Daily, in its report, had said that the new director Vanja Kaludjercic hopes to make the festival digital friendly due to the pandemic. Films may be screened in Rotterdam and other cities in Netherlands.

Berlinale (11 - 21 February 2021)

Mariette Rissenbeek, the executive director of Berlinale, and the new artistic director Carlo Chatrian, had told Deadline that the event will be a physical one with all the necessary hygiene and social distancing measures in place.

Locarno Film Festival(5 - 15 August)

The Swiss film festival has foregone in-person attendance and replaced it with a new format, Locarno 2020 For the Future of Films, to support the independent filmmakers.

As part of its Films After Tomorrow initiative, the festival will see 20 titles that were affected by the coronavirus lockdown - 10 international and 10 from Switzerland, writesVariety. The films include Axelle RopertsPetite Solange, Lucrecia Martel'sZama, Lav Diaz'sWhen the Waves are Gone,

The Journey of the Fesitval's History will see features from previous editions of the festival screened online.The program will be free in Switzerland, while it will be available outside of the country on thestreamer MUBI.

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There is along list of important films that will be presented at these festivals.

Here is a look at some of them.

Nomadland

A still from Nomadland | Image from Twitter

Chloe ZhaosNomadland, starring Frances McDormand, will premiere across the major fall film festivals in an alliance forged by the Venice, Toronto, and New York festivals.

Nomadland, Zhaos follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 filmThe Rider, is the first movie announced in the new partnership that has brought together the falls biggest movie launch pads, which typically compete against each other for world premiere rights.

Spring Blossoms

Image from Twitter

The French language film marks Suzanne Lindon's directorial debut. The official logline states that Spring Blossoms follows a Parisian teenager, who "contemplates the pitfalls of growing up too fast when she falls in love with an older man." Arnaud Valois, Frdric Pierrot, and Florence Viala are also part of the cast.

American Utopia

Spike Lees filmed version of musician David Byrnes Broadway theatrical concertAmerican Utopiawill kick offthis year's TIFF.The show features Byrne and 11 musical artists from around the world performing songs from the 2018 album of the same title, as well as Talking Heads hits. HBO will premiereAmerican Utopiathis fall.

Ammonite

Image from Twitter

Ammonite, the Kate Winslet-Saoirse Ronan romantic drama is set in 1840s England. The narrative charts the intense romance which developed between an infamous fossil hunter, Mary Anning (Winslet) and a young woman Charlotte Murchison (played by Ronan). The first look of the film was revealed at Cannes 2019.

Steve McQueens anthology at NYFF

Three original films by Oscar-winner Steve McQueen will debut at NYFF. The12 Years a Slavedirector will get the opening night slot for the 1980s-set music romanceLovers Rockin addition to two other premieres for films in his anthology series.

McQueensSmall Axeanthology is comprised of five films telling stories about Londons West Indian community from the 1960s to the mid-1980s.

The other two films premiering areMangrove, withBlack Pantheractor Letitia Wright, which tells the true story of a group of Black activists called the Mangrove 9 who clashed with police in the 1970s, andRed, White and Blue, another true story about a man, Leroy Logan, who joins the police to try to inspire change from within. John Boyega stars.

The five films will premiere later this year on Amazon Prime Video in the US and on BBC One.

The Human Voice

Pedro Almodvar will make his English language debut with The Human Voice, a 30-minute adaptation ofof the original stage play by Jean Cocteau. The short is described as "a very free adaptation of the original stage play by Jean Cocteau, with which Pedro Almodvar has been dreaming of for decades. It tells the story of a desperate woman (Tilda Swinton), who waits for the phone call of the lover who has just abandoned her."

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

Werner Herzog, whose last project was Family Romance, LLC, along with geoscientist and director Clive Oppenheimer explore how shooting stars and meteorites can tell about the origins of life on the planet. The documentary, the third collaboration between the duo, has been acquired by Apple TV+

One Night In Miami

Image from Twitter

Oscar winner Regina King makes her directorial debut with the film adaptation of Cassius Clay-Malcolm X playOne Night in Miami.The film is a take on Kemp Powers' debut play, which finds young boxer Cassius Clay, activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and football star Jim Brown hanging out together at a Miami motel.

The Disciple

National award-winning directorChaitanya Tamhanes new Marathi filmThe Disciplewill be showcased at both Venice and TIFF.Tamhane's127-minute long feature stars Aditya Modak, Arun Dravid, Sumitra Bhave, and Kiran Yadnyopavit.

Alfonso Cuaron recently come aboard as an executive producer of the film. The Disciple "examines a lifetime journey devoted to the art of Indian classical music," states the official log line.

Bruised

Image from Twitter

Halle Berry is all set to step into director's shoes with the mixed martial arts film titledBruised.The Oscar-winning actress will also produce the film and will star in it.In the film, Berryportrays a disgraced MMA fighter who has to face one of the rising stars of the MMA world and deal with the return of her 6-year-old son to the mother he deserves.

Pieces of a Woman

Image from Twitter

Pieces of a Women is about a grieving woman (Vanessa Kirby) who is thrust into an emotional inner journey by trying to come to terms with the loss of her baby after a home birth goes wrong, while dealing with herhusband (Shia LaBeouf) and estranged mother.

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How film festivals around the world have adapted to the limitations of the Coronavirus pandemic - Firstpost

Austin nutrition expert talks Quarantine-15 and helping recovering COVID-19 patients eat healthy – KXAN.com

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Rocket center launches mission to save space camp – Theredstonerocket

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Alabamas number one tourist attraction for seven straight years is in danger of closing.

Like virtually every aspect of society in 2020, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and its Space Camp have felt the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The center announced July 28 that it must raise $1.5 million to keep its museum open past October and to reopen Space Camp in April 2021.

In response, the center has launched the Save Space Camp campaign. This seeks donations from the Space Camp alumni that span across the world, residents of Alabama and anyone wanting to help save the space institution. More information can be found at http://www.savespacecamp.com.

The news reverberated nationally last week with PBS, the New York Times and CNN among news sources reporting on the possible closure. Camp alumni weighed in across social media platforms with testimonies of how important Space Camp was in their formative years. But to local residents many of whom grew up attending camps, working as counselors, visiting its IMAX theater and enjoying an authentic German meal at Thursday night biergartens the center is also a part of the fabric of Huntsville. It is difficult to imagine a Rocket City without a rocket center.

There are so many great things about the Space & Rocket Center, Madison resident Susie Jordan said. I was a Space Camp counselor, and in the movie, SpaceCamp (1986), that was mostly filmed on-site. So many visitors, students and teachers know the value of such an outstanding hands-on museum that host multiple camps for children and adults from all over the world. They even host a Space Camp for deaf children. I truly hope this star attraction in Alabama can be saved.

On March 13, the center was forced to close due to the pandemic. Although the museum reopened in May and Space Camp in June, visitor numbers plummeted and the camps only saw 20% of its normal summer attendance. Space Camp will close again in September because of decreased international visitors and the cancellation of school trips this fall due to many school systems moving to virtual platforms. The center reported that these factors led to a loss of two-thirds of revenue in 2020 and widespread staff layoffs.

The center began lighting the vertical Saturn V replica Thursday night to mark the progress of the fundraising campaign. As the campaign progresses, the lights will rise on the Saturn V. The center said they have received donations from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and 26 countries.

The center was the vision of Wernher von Braun, the Father of Rocket Science and first director of Marshall Space Flight Center, who approached the Alabama state legislature with the idea of the Army and NASA working together to create a facility celebrating the space program. It was built on land donated by the Army and serves as the official NASA visitors center in Huntsville. It is the home to such pivotal space travel artifacts as Von Brauns own aforementioned Saturn V rocket and the Space Shuttle Orbiter Pathfinder. The rocket center is a Smithsonian affiliate and generates $120 million in annual revenue for Alabama.

Since 1982, more than 900,000 alumni including 12 astronauts have graduated from Space Camp. Redstone worker Kate Pimmel is one.

It took me five years mowing lawns to make enough money to go to Space Camp in 1991 and I went back to be a counselor after college, Pimmel said. Space Camp is a singular experience that helps people realize they each have special talents that make their team better. It is phenomenal to watch a trainee gain confidence, realize their worth and then take off and thrive on a team. From students to parents and educators who attend Space Camp from all over the world, they all take that experience back with them into their classrooms, families and careers. Space Camp means friendship and teamwork and instilling a confidence and excitement for science and technology that our world will always need.

Dreams come true every single day at Space Camp and I fervently hope it will continue.

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Donald Trump attacked by Joe Biden for ‘shameful’ comments that he would ‘hurt God’ if elected – ABC News

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Joe Biden says it is "shameful", and "beneath the office he holds" for Donald Trump to claim the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee would "hurt God" if he were elected US president.

Earlier this week Mr Trump claimed Mr Biden was "against God", despite Mr Biden frequently discussing how his Catholic faith has guided his actions as a public official.

"He's following the radical left agenda: take away your guns, destroy your second amendment, no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God," Mr Trump said.

"He's against God."

After the address Mr Trump went on to deliver a campaign-style speech at a factory in nearby Clyde, Ohio. He did not explain further what he meant.

With Mr Trump trailing Mr Biden in four recent polls in Ohio, the US President is fighting to win voters in the traditional swing state as the coronavirus pandemic threatens his chances of a second term.

Mr Trump's accusation could solidify support from his party's sizable conservative Christian bloc and also damage voters' view of Mr Biden, the first Catholic vice-president in US history.

John Kennedy was the first and only Catholic elected US president when he won in 1960.

In a statement on Thursday night, Mr Biden said Mr Trump's attack was "shameful" and that faith had been "the bedrock foundation" of his life.

"It's beneath the office he holds and it's beneath the dignity the American people so rightly expect and deserve from their leaders," Mr Biden said in the statement.

"However, like the words of so many other insecure bullies, President Trump's comments reveal more about him than they do about anyone else.

"They show us a man willing to stoop to any low for political gain, and someone whose actions are completely at odds with the values and teachings that he professes to believe in."

More than three-fourths of Americans practise Christianity or another religion, according to non-partisan think tank the Pew Research Centre.

Mr Trump has been hurt politically by his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has recently killed on average more than 1,000 Americans each day.

While he speaks very little about his own Presbyterian faith and rarely attends church, Mr Trump works closely with evangelical Christians and puts their causes of restricting abortion and preserving gun ownership at the top of his policy agenda.

After a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut killed 20 children in 2012, Mr Biden pushed for some restrictions on gun ownership, but he has not called for confiscating firearms.

He has said he would seek to ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, let people who own assault weapons sell them back voluntarily, and expand background checks.

The second amendment of the US constitution gives Americans the right to keep and bear arms.

Reuters

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Donald Trump attacked by Joe Biden for 'shameful' comments that he would 'hurt God' if elected - ABC News

Why isn’t ventilation part of the conversation on reopening schools? – STAT

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Like every other parent with a school-age child, I want schools to reopen in the fall including the one Im attending.

On the best of days, my son can be described as spirited. After four months of being cared for by his grandparents, he is practically feral. He needs the physical and social outlet that school provides, and I need the anatomy lab to reopen because human dissection is an irreplaceable part of my medical education.

But I am also an epidemiologist, and after reading the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions guidelines for school reopening and the various accompanying news coverage and think-pieces, I cant convince myself that following its rules will keep my family or yours safe.

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Why? Because the primary way Covid-19 is transmitted is through respiratory droplets that careen through the air, and yet the capricious nature of air circulation and the lack of filtration systems in our already underfunded public school systems is absent from the conversation.

Since New York state started reopening, I have received emails from my medical schools working group about the plan to bring us back to campus. Its plan is to follow the basic script seen in school reopening strategies all over the country: frequently sanitized high-touch surfaces, 6-foot distances, unidirectional hallways, reduced capacity elevators and classrooms, health questionnaires, and contact-free temperature checks upon entry (more on that in a minute).

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My school is not negligent, but like many other educational institutions, its efforts are dangerously misdirected. We are collectively engaging in what Derek Thompson describes in the Atlantic as hygiene theater, in which organizations looking to reopen focus intensively on arduous decontamination strategies to mitigate surface transmission even though that is not the primary route for Covid-19 transmission, and some scientists argue that there is no direct evidence the virus spreads this way at all. Id also like to add temperature checks to the hygiene theater playbill, as they too fail to successfully screen potential Covid-19 carriers, but have somehow made their way onto every screening list Ive seen.

Why is this happening? The CDC is supposed to determine the national priorities for American health.

Of the eight bullet points in its staff safety section, four address surface transmission. The three bullet points dedicated to respiratory droplets warn people to stay 6 feet away from each other, cough into their elbows, and wear a mask.

The current CDC guidance about ventilation is as follows, Ensure ventilation systems operate properly and increase circulation of outdoor air as much as possible, for example by opening windows and doors. But if opening windows or doors increases the risk of asthma, or falling out the window, the guidelines go on to advise that they should be closed. That is all the guidance has to say. It does not mention air filtration, or the fact that we have pretty good data to suggest that without addressing air filtration and circulation, the 6-feet rule does not prevent transmission indoors.

Here are the things that caught my attention as an epidemiologist as schools played Tetris with classroom furniture and agonized over hybrid schedules.

On May 6, Erin Bromage, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, published a widely read article detailing the role of air circulation at three major indoor transmission events: a call center in South Korea, a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, and the infamous choir practice in Washington state. Each of these events taught us that transmission happens when you spend significant time indoors. Being 50 feet apart with a low dose of the virus in the air, over a sustained period, was enough to cause infection and in some cases, death. This happens because infectious particles from individuals are pushed by the ventilation system to the other side of the room. Bromages post appeared 127 days before the first day of school in New York City.

HEPA filters are able to effectively capture particles the size of SARS-CoV-2. The CDC currently recommends their use for this purpose in hospitals, but their capacity to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in other public buildings remains under-explored. Though the CDC has stayed silent on the use of HEPA filters outside hospitals, on May 25 a group of ENT doctors made the case for installing them in doctors offices where aerosol generating procedures are being performed, because of evidence they can help prevent the spread other infections such as SARS-CoV-1, measles, and influenza. That was published 108 days before the first day of school in New York City.

On May 27, a group of 36 scientists from around the world in a variety of fields penned an article in the journal Environment International titled, How can airborne transmission of Covid-19 indoors be minimised? As they wrote, Here, in the face of such uncertainty, we argue that the benefits of an effective ventilation system, possibly enhanced by particle filtration and air disinfection, for contributing to an overall reduction in the indoor airborne infection risk, are obvious. Its obvious to me as well, and deserves to be our primary concern in reopening schools, far more urgently than distance or Lysol. That was 106 days before the first day of school in New York City.

McKinsey & Company reviewed research regarding airborne spread of SARS-CoV-2 and on July 9 posted an article suggesting possible upgrades to existing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. A key recommended change was to increase the number of times HVAC systems exchange air per hour, which would push the infectious particles outside and prevent them from being blown across the room. This article appeared 63 days before the first day of school in New York City.

When I mentioned these possibilities to a friend who teaches in the New York City schools, she replied, Dont worry about our HVAC systems. Theyre all broken.

Instead of using limited time and funding to engage in hygiene theater, we should be investigating how to address ventilation. Or at the very least, be honest with the public about some institutions inability to make interior spaces safe.

As a result of months of misapplied focus on surface disinfection, the importance of air circulation and the potential use of filtration is missing from the national debate on school reopening. My sons school and mine are both concerned with delivering our education safely. My sons preschool director was worried sick about not being able to adequately decontaminate on a daily basis because she loves both the kids and her school.

It shouldnt be her responsibility to research ventilation theory and filtration techniques and air flow patterns. Its not my job as a medical student to Google these things trying to get enough information to decide what to do about my sons school, and mine, starting imminently. And its not up to the administrators at my school, who I know have been working around the clock these last few months, to figure this out.

This is supposed to be done by the CDC. Here we are, about a month before public schools are supposed to begin, and the CDC is still failing to signal the crucial importance of addressing ventilation.

We need to include air circulation patterns and filtration options in the conversation. If were not willing or able to fund necessary upgrades to school ventilation systems, lets admit that. Until we have that public discussion, I am not comfortable exposing my family to schools. Because if I cant trust that the people making these decisions are reading the literature, how can I trust them with my familys health?

Alexandra Feathers is an epidemiologist and first-year medical student at SUNY Downstate.

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Why isn't ventilation part of the conversation on reopening schools? - STAT

A UT undergrad helped build the app that will assist students coming back to school this fall. Here’s what it can do. – UT News | The University of…

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Henry Rossiter was planning the trip of the lifetime when the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping across the United States, forcing people into isolation.

It was one of the many things in his life upended by the virus.

A UT computational engineering senior, Rossiter, 21, had planned to spend the summer mountain biking, completing an engineering internship and celebrating his last year in college. It didnt turn out that way.

Instead, the undergraduate who has a computer science background, has logged long hours working to build a mobile application that will help students and faculty safely return to campus this fall.

The app, called Protect Texas Together, will allow people to track their symptoms, record COVID-19 test results, get connected to medical resources and potentially, in the future even assist in contact tracing.

It will be available in the Apple App and Google Play stores starting in mid-August.

Rossiter says the change in plans was worthwhile. We have been pressed to develop this app in less than a month, which is fairly unusual in the app development world, he says of the team, which includes computer scientists, medical experts and engineers. Its been turbulent to say the least. But I hope we can minimize the spread of COVID on campus this fall.

As of this week, the United States has seen more than 4.6 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, roughly 450,000 of those in Texas. While the rate of new cases appears to have peaked in Texas in mid-July, the national rate continues to climb.

On Aug. 26, students will return to the UT campus to put some semblance of their lives back together. The university is one of many across the country and the world that will rely on technology to help that process.

A number of companies have put out mobile applications to help with things such as symptom tracking and contact tracing, which is the process of figuring out who is at risk for developing COVID-19 based on the people they have interacted with something normally done through interviewing.

Rather than adopt another companys technology, UT decided to develop something in-house so the application would fit its specific needs, says Cameron Craddock, associate professor of diagnostic medicine at Dell Medical School and project lead. It will allow the school of 51,000 students and an additional 25,000 faculty and staff members to navigate issues such as privacy more assuredly than it would be able to using someone elses technology.

The problem we are facing at UT is immense, Craddock says. And weve just seen an outstanding outpouring of UT talent to help address this problem pretty quickly.

The app, which will be available in Spanish and English, will have a symptom diary, where users can keep track of things such as fevers and coughs. If they are later diagnosed with an illness, they will have that information on hand to discuss with medical professionals.

The app uses an algorithm to determine, based on ones symptoms, whether it is safe to come to campus, then issues a digital day pass to that person if they are cleared.

It will also allow students, faculty and staff to get connected to health resources, find a testing location and track county and state COVID-19 statistics.

Additionally, the app will include a feature to help individuals record which rooms, including research labs and controlled access facilities, they have entered. This will help facilities and health teams identify spaces that potentially need to be decontaminated or isolated if someone working there tests positive for COVID-19. It will also assist with contact tracing to know who is in rooms at the same time.

Its really about helping members of the UT community do things that we know are important for staying healthy. In this case, that means having everybody check their symptoms on a regular basis and keep themselves at home if they have any symptoms, says software engineering professor Christine Julien, who is part of the development team.

Rossiter has been working to make the interface as user-friendly as possible. He is one of four undergraduates on the team and is leading front-end development. Three graduate students are also working on the app.

The project isnt a part of Rossiters computational engineering academic plan, but hes taken it up on the side because he sees the benefits of the technology for society.

I was eager to apply the computer programming skills I learned in school to solve real-world problems, he says. I enjoy seeing the impact that the technology I engineered has made.

Though the first iteration of the app will not include contact tracing, later versions likely will have that functionality. The development team is working on a plan that allows users to consent to having their location information stored within the app. Then, if people test positive for COVID-19, they will be able to pull up that data and see where they have been, so they can easily and confidentially share that information with medical professionals.

Ensuring privacy is the most important thing, Julien says. It would also be nice to get more data and information, but we would never do that if it meant we had to sacrifice individual users privacy in any way.

UT community members were able to move so quickly in building an app because they were already designing the technology infrastructure as part of the UT grand challenge Whole CommunitiesWhole Health.

The multiyear project has researchers working closely with local partners to understand more about the physical, environmental and emotional health of families living in Central Texas, particularly those who are part of historically marginalized communities. And technology is a huge component of the study.

The research team plans to retool the mobile application in the coming months for the grand challenge so it can study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on local communities. The app could send surveys directly to peoples phones, as well as show other health and behavioral information that participants want to know about.

The last time the U.S. has undergone a pandemic that involved social distancing to this scale was 100 years ago, so we have very limited information about the effects that had on people, Craddock says. The notion is to try to collect as much information as we can about what peoples experiences are so that 10 years from now, we can use that information to understand the impact that social isolation and the pandemic had on society.

Low-income and marginalized communities have been hit especially hard by the virus, largely because of underlying systemic conditions that contribute to poor health and health care inequities. At the same time, unemployment, stress and alcohol use have increased globally. New graduates are entering one of the worst job markets since the 2008 recession. Rossiter will likely be among them.

Its a turbulent situation at a turbulent point in my life, he says. Honestly, I dont really know what I am doing a week from now, so three months from now its impossible to say.

I just want to see the software I develop have a positive impact on society.

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A UT undergrad helped build the app that will assist students coming back to school this fall. Here's what it can do. - UT News | The University of...