IEEE Spectrum: How to Look People in the Eye While Videoconferencing

How to Look People in the Eye While Videoconferencing
By David Schneider. 24 Jul 2020 | 19:00 GMT

Many of us are spending more time videoconferencing than we’ve ever done before. And that situation probably won’t be changing anytime soon.

One thing that’s become painfully obvious to me during the past few months is that some people are more conscientious than others about how they present themselves. The worst offenders position themselves in front of a window, forcing others to view them in silhouette and making me wonder whether I’m in a business meeting or watching “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

I try to avoid such obvious videoconferencing faux pas. But there’s one fundamental awkwardness that no amount of strategic laptop positioning can solve: not being able to make eye contact with other participants because they, like me, are looking at their screens rather than their Web cameras. Everyone appears to be casting their gaze downward, as if bored or perhaps telling a lie. It’s nearly impossible to avoid that annoying tendency—not without some drastic action.

The action in my case was to construct something I’d seen featured on Hackaday, a gizmo designed by a video blogger that makes clever use of a semitransparent mirror—basically the same strategy used for teleprompters but at a fraction of the cost and with materials I could easily scavenge or order. With such a mirror, you can view the screen straight on while also looking directly at an external webcam. This contraption, which I’ve taken to calling my Zoom Box, allows me to look other people right in the eye while in a Zoom or Webex meeting with them.

Awesome bit of geekery. A must-have device for anyone that regularly uses video conferencing.

The Federalist: Segregated Denver Yoga Chain Shut Down For Insufficient Wokeness

Segregated Denver Yoga Chain Shut Down For Insufficient Wokeness
By Tristan Justice. July 24, 2020

If one still needed more proof that there’s no pleasing our new woke overlords, look no further than the story of an exhaustively woke Denver-based yoga chain that just wasn’t woke enough despite its business being the wokest of the woke.

Last month, “Kindness Yoga,” which held person-of-color and LGBTQ-only nights where “white friends and allies” were not invited, was forced to shut down its nine studios and lay off 160 employees following online outrage from now-former teachers charging the franchise with “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies.”

Once again, reality proves that you can't win by surrendering to the mob. Eventually, the mob will chew you up and spit you out, leaving you to wonder how it is possible, since you gave in to all their demands.

Big League Politics: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler SHAMED By Leftist Mob After Appearing at Protest

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler SHAMED By Leftist Mob After Appearing at Protest
By Richard Moorhead. Jul 23, 2020

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler made an appearance at one of the city’s nightly left-wing protests, which frequently devolve into violent riots, on Wednesday. It didn’t go well, with the crowd of leftists berating Wheeler, surrounding the Democratic mayor, cursing him out, and at one point dumping a bag of metal objects in front of him.

Let this be a lesson to elected leaders everywhere. Giving in to an anarchist mob will not work. They will hate you no matter what you do.

IEEE Spectrum: Handheld Vagus Nerve Stimulator Gets Emergency Approval for COVID-19 Use

Handheld Vagus Nerve Stimulator Gets Emergency Approval for COVID-19 Use
By Samuel K. Moore. 22 Jul 2020 | 16:30 GMT

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted an emergency use authorization for treating suspected COVID-19 patients with a non-invasive vagus nerve stimulator. The handheld device, made by electroCore, in Basking Ridge, N.J., sends a train of electric pulses through the skin to a nerve in the neck. Research has shown this pulse train causes airways in the lungs to open and may also have a more general anti-inflammatory effect.

According to FDA’s authorization, the gammaCore Sapphire CV device can be used either at home or in a clinic or hospital to “acutely treat adult patients with known or suspected COVID-19 who are experiencing exacerbation of asthma-related [shortness of breath] and reduced airflow, and for whom approved drug therapies are not tolerated or provide insufficient symptom relief.”

This is a really cool piece of tech. Now I wonder how many different conditions this device might be able to treat using different frequencies and power levels.

Jerusalem Post: Star of David deemed 'hateful imagery' by Twitter

Star of David deemed 'hateful imagery' by Twitter
By Donna Rachel Edmunds. July 21, 2020 20:58

The Star of David has been deemed "hateful imagery" by Twitter, which is locking the accounts of users who display it in their profile pictures.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has reported that several Twitter users have contacted them in recent days to report that their accounts had been locked by the social media platform. The reason given? According to messages they received from Twitter: "We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against posting hateful imagery. You may not use hateful images or symbols in your profile image or profile header. As a result, we have locked your account."

The images in question ranged from a white Star of David in a graffiti style, to a superimposition of the modern blue star on the flag of Israel spliced with the yellow star Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis, to a montage of yellow stars.

Does anyone still want to claim Twitter is not anti-semitic?

Horowitz: New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat

New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat
By Daniel Horowitz. July 14, 2020

Four researchers published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research studying people’s perceived personal health risks associated with COVID-19. The most striking result of their survey of 1,500 Americans from May 6 to May 13 is that the younger the age of the respondent, the more the individual seemed concerned about the virus being deadly to them – the exact inverse of the true threat assessment of the virus.
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When asked by the four researchers, who hail from Harvard, Oxford, and Università Bocconi, out of “1,000 people very similar to you” how many would die from COVID-19 over the next nine weeks, the median estimated guess by respondents aged 18-34 was 20, or 2%. In other words, the average Millennial thought that 2% of everyone like them would die within nine weeks from the virus. In contrast, in contrast, the respondents aged 70 years or older, which is exponentially more at risk, asses their risk of dying at about 1%.

What is the infection fatality rate (IFR) for younger people? The CDC estimates a 0.05% IFR for everyone in the age cohort of 0-49. Other estimates based on Spain serology tests broken down by age suggest an even lower IFR for those 18-49.

The article goes on to point out that people in this age group routinely engage in behaviors that are stastically far more likely to result in death or injury. But they don't consider it a big deal, in large part because they don't have social media constantly hyping the dangers of these activities.

Which pretty much confirms what I've been saying for quite a while. The media and social media is massively exaggerating the deadliness of this disease and people are basing life-affecting decisions on these inflated figures.

Exaggerating a disease and demonizing those who disagree with the exaggeration may get you more viewers and it might even convince some people to change who they vote for in November, but it is ultimately destructive to the entire population that these articles claim to be trying to help.

Eclectic Light: Face masks, face screens, and breathing

Face masks, face screens, and breathing
By hoakley. July 11, 2020

There’s no more controversial issue in the prevention of Covid-19 than face masks. Unfortunately, as is so often the case now, a great deal of nonsense and non-science has been spread, and has been passed around as dogma. This article looks at one often-neglected area: face masks, screens, and the mechanics of breathing. Can a face mask cause difficulty breathing? Do masks result in the build-up of carbon dioxide? And why isn’t there good research into face masks?
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It’s incredibly frustrating that the type of face mask most commonly worn by the public has been the subject of such little research. There are good and careful studies of the potential benefits of clinical masks, including ‘regular’ and N95 types, but next to nothing on cloth masks.
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Until people understand face masks, screens, breathing and protection this will just remain a mess of disinformation and misunderstanding. It’s also an invaluable surrogate for politicians: maintaining isolation and distancing has high economic costs; shifting responsibility onto people to choose and use protective masks instead costs the state almost nothing, and puts the blame onto the wearer if they still get or spread Covid-19. The moral is surely that, outside of care settings, you should maintain full distancing and hygiene regardless, and that a mask can then only augment your protection. The moment that you rely on your mask as sole protection you have lost control of the risk.

You should definitely read the complete article. There's a lot of very good information about the nature of breathing, and what clinical masks can and can not do.

It also shows that recent laws and executive orders mandating masks in public (and in stores, and restaurants, and everywhere else) are simply "security theater". They look good on camera for the press, but don't actually accomplish anything.

The fact that all of these state orders demand that clinical masks be reserved for health-care professionals and first responders, and that everybody else is required to use cloth masks, including home-made masks and bandannas, means that large percentages of the population, while complying with orders, are not accomplishing anything and are at just as much risk as they would be by not wearing a mask at all.

But it is a really good excuse to punish people who choose to refuse to obey these (frequently illegal and unconstitutional) orders. The mask may not do a thing to protect your health, but if you can be arrested and subject to a $500 fine for non-compliance, then you're probably going to wear them anyway.

Richard Moorhead: Endangered California Condor Seen in Sequoia National Park for the First Time in 50 Years

Endangered California Condor Seen in Sequoia National Park for the First Time in 50 Years
Richard Moorhead, Big League Politics. Jul 9, 2020

One of the most endangered animals in the United States has been observed in a national park that is part of its historical range. The National Park and U.S. Fish and Wildlife services confirmed in a joint statement that six California Condors have been seeing flying above the Sequoia National Park in Eastern California.

The birds were also photographed by park personnel.

Awesome. Still not many of them in the wild, but a lot more than in the not-too-distant past.

Daniel Payne: Fauci omits context, feeds alarm with warning of 100,000 coronavirus infections a day

Fauci omits context, feeds alarm with warning of 100,000 coronavirus infections a day
By Daniel Payne, Just The News. July 5, 2020 - 10:29pm

Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the Senate this week that the United States could soon see as many as 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, feeding alarmist narratives that have spread rapidly through the media: Surging COVID-19 infections, hospital systems under strain, and the prospect of a "second wave" of the virus potentially throwing much of the nation back into open-ended lockdowns.

Yet estimates cited by other U.S. public health authorities and academic researchers indicate we may have already far surpassed 100,000 new infections per day, the vast majority of them mild and/or asymptomatic. If so, the U.S. would now be significantly closer to herd immunity — and the end of the pandemic — than widely assumed.
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Serology tests across the globe have pointed to infection rates anywhere from 16 to 80 times higher than confirmed numbers. Even the lower end of those projections would again point to daily infection rates vastly higher than what health officials are recording now.

The exact extent of the coronavirus pandemic will almost certainly never be known: Even viral outbreaks as regular and predictable as seasonal influenza, for example, are indexed primarily through estimates rather than actual observed cases. But it is increasingly clear that the disease is nowhere near as deadly as feared several months ago, and that it may have infected tens of millions of people with only a small percentage of them even noticing.

In other words, figures don't lie, but liars can figure.

Or, never let facts get in the way of a scary political narrative.

Daniel Horowitz: More evidence that most coronavirus cases are now weaker than the flu

More evidence that most coronavirus cases are now weaker than the flu
Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review. July 1, 2020

Evidence continues to mount that the new infections throughout much of the country are extremely mild, with the exception of some serious cases coming over the border from Mexico. Those two facts continue to be obscured from our policy debate over containing the virus in the southern states. The governors of California, Arizona, and Texas refuse to recognize that the mild nature of these cases is good news going forward, and they continue to ignore the threat of serious cases from the border.
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As I pointed out regarding Florida, cases have been spiking for weeks, yet the deaths and numbers of serious cases are not rising. ... Also, much of the increase is superficial and illusory because of mass testing, multiple tests to return to work, and people coming back to the hospitals for normal care that was previously suspended. Such patients are automatically tested for the virus, regardless of their reason for admission. It appears that the virus has now spread to younger people but is also milder than it was when it first hit in earnest in March and April.
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what we are seeing in Texas and elsewhere is actually a fulfillment of what we all hoped for – a flattened curve of mild cases and hospitals that are able to handle severe cases, but ultimately few deaths. “Overall, based upon what we are seeing at our facilities, the above information is really more of a positive story,” wrote the emergency clinic executive to Berenson. “You have more people who are testing positive with minimal symptoms. This means that the fatality rate is less than commonly reported.”

This article is far too big to properly summarize in a few paragraphs. Please go and read the full article to get the whole story.

This is great news. What we are seeing (outside of the New York metropolitan area) is exactly what we were hoping for. A flattened curve where the hospitals are able to handle the severe cases and everybody else is able to recover on their own. Most of the rest you're hearing in the news is just political grandstanding for the November election and has nothing at all to do with public safety.