From Bats to Human Lungs
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Monday, March 30, 2020
COVID-19: Reusing Certain Masks
Certain kinds of masks can
be disinfected and reused
https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/urgent-research-shows-face-masks-can-be
https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/urgent-research-shows-face-masks-can-be
COVID-19: Effect of Temperature
From the BBC: (one could only hope)
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200323-coronavirus-will-hot-weather-kill-covid-19
Friday, March 27, 2020
How is the Linux kernel tested?
Short Answer: through very specialized software tools tailored to the job at hand.
https://embeddedbits.org/how-is-the-linux-kernel-tested/
https://embeddedbits.org/how-is-the-linux-kernel-tested/
COVID-19: South Korea reveals how to win Covid-19 war
Prime Minister Chung tells the world his country has managed to contain the spread of the new coronavirus strain
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/south-korea-reveals-how-to-win-covid-19-war/
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/south-korea-reveals-how-to-win-covid-19-war/
Social-Distancing Games
Other Social Distancing games:
- Online Cards against Humanity - https://pyx-1.pretendyoure.xyz/zy/game.jsp
- Online Codenames - horsepaste.com (yes its a weird URL, but a true representation of the board game)
- Online Pictionary - skribbl.io
- Online Secret Hitler - secrethitler.io
Jackbox Game
I recommend the multi-player game Jackbox as a distraction and as a morale builder:
What ends up happening is that one person runs the program on their computer, and when you play it gives you a 4 letter code that other people can then go to jackbox.tv and enter the code and play on their phones
That's the game pack,
There's plenty of videos online that will show the different games, including one called "fibbage"
These are all word type games. In fibbage, they give you a sentence, like "in 2016, Australia banned the import of ______" and everyone puts in their best lie for what that blank could be.
Next everyone chooses from the given answers, but one of them is given by the game and is a truthful response - you're trying to trick the other players into guessing the fake answer you gave.
Other good game packs are:
Trivia Murder Party,
Trivia Murder Party,
Quiplash,
Guesspionage
Guesspionage
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
COVID-19: Reports from Iceland and Italy
Reports on COVID-19 from Iceland and from Italy:
Iceland's statistically valid study of the incidence and severity of the CoVID-19 disease.
Here is the Iceland government report summary:
https://www.government.is/news/article/2020/03/15/Large-scale-testing-of-general-population-in-Iceland-underway/
The company analyzing the tests is well respected and is most likely using the RT-PCR test
https://www.decode.com/research/
https://www.questdiagnostics.com/dms/Documents/covid-19/SARSCoV-2_HCP_Fact_Sheet.pdf
Report from Italy on "Characteristics of COVID-19 patients dying in Italy Report based on available data on March 20th, 2020"
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_20_marzo_eng.pdf
Iceland's statistically valid study of the incidence and severity of the CoVID-19 disease.
Here is the Iceland government report summary:
https://www.government.is/news/article/2020/03/15/Large-scale-testing-of-general-population-in-Iceland-underway/
The company analyzing the tests is well respected and is most likely using the RT-PCR test
https://www.decode.com/research/
https://www.questdiagnostics.com/dms/Documents/covid-19/SARSCoV-2_HCP_Fact_Sheet.pdf
Report from Italy on "Characteristics of COVID-19 patients dying in Italy Report based on available data on March 20th, 2020"
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_20_marzo_eng.pdf
COVID-19: SARS-associated Corona Virus Patent
Novel strain of SARS-associated corona virus and applications thereof; European Patent Office
2010-08-04 Publication of EP1694829B1; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS Institut Pasteur Universite Paris Diderot (Paris 7)
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP1694829B1/en
COVID-19: Free Information from Washington Post
Free information from Washington Post on what may lie ahead based on math models, hospital projections and past pandemics
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/coronavirus-projections-us/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/19/coronavirus-projections-us/
Monday, March 23, 2020
COVID-19 Mortality Data
Some concrete data on COVID-19 Deaths
The Iranian Health Ministry has stated that 68% of the dead from COVID-19 were older than 60 years of age, with average age of 64 at death- average infection age, 59.
60% were men, 40% women.
18% of the known COVID-19 cases have been asymptomatic.
"O" blood types seem to fair better.
Koreans have stated that 19% of the dead were younger than 60.
I have not seen any breakdown of the mortality rate based on pre-existing conditions and/or history of smoking.
Additionally, Michigan statistics - https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98163-520743--,00.html
- indicated that 57 % of the infected are in the 40 to 70 - age group.
In Italy, 90% of dead suffered co-morbidities - many were older than 70 years of age.
A more discriminating approach would be to send people older than certain age - say 58 - to work from home or to be on extended paid leave and in home quarantine while economic activity could be continued by others.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
COVID-19: Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2
From the New England Journal of Medicine
Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Is Excel a Problem?
These thoughts were triggered in my mind by a recent Wall Street Journal article, titled: "
Yes, I too am tired of MS Excel paradigm. It is like always a wearing gingham shirt - so many men in IT express their inner-nerd that way. I mean, if they want Excel-like features, we could always use VBA to tie a UI, in Excel, to the back-end services (be they direct database connections or REST API calls.)
We serve the end users poorly by giving them Excel look alike UI, but in HTML. We are missing something essential in requirements engineering by not providing a different paradigm (say a Wizard, or an Informative AI Agent), thus hiding all that cognitive complexity from them.
I think Excel is widely used precisely because IT cannot create light-weight tactical solutions, or, as often is the case, plain refuses to do so.
Myself and others have created such tools for small groups, say less than 10 users, using VBA, REST API, or ODBC-based database access solutions. But that has never been where the action was.
Monolithic Web applications rule the roost. Likely because CIOs understand that level of budgeting and find such systems to be a feather in their hats.
There are very good reasons for small teams (~ 10) to use Excel; IT is not going to make a better tool for small groups of people, Excel is ubiquitous with tremendous analytical capabilities built-in, that team controls the evolution of their Excel tool themselves; changes do not have to be begged from IT, and lastly because of the heterogeneity of corporate data stores which forces people to use data from semantically distinct systems with little or no overlaps in their respective ontologies.
This last one could be ameliorated via some sort of AI-enabled Data Buddy, which could infer missing data from what is in Excel and go and fetch it from whichever database that contains that missing data - all without the end-users being aware of them; sort of like an active Data Management agent on steroids.
In the many engineering firms, there are engineering teams that use home-grown Excel tools for their data management needs. Generic tools, Cloud-based or not, are not useful to them: they are not accountants. And yet, how quickly we at IT can enhance their existing tools, let alone replace them? How long does it take to gather requirements, build another silly Angular/Spring-Boot system, and fit it with Excel import-export facilities?
In Web applications that follow the Excel tabular data presentation paradigm, there are great opportunities to move away from tabular data presentation to Insights gleaned from data and automatically generated and presented to the end-users. That is what IT should do rather than implementing yet another useless and expensive CR.
I own many gingham shirts, but I also wear many different fabrics and patterns. We, at IT, need to give end-users more options and unless they positively and adamantly ask for little grids, we should engage in a dialogue to explore the design space: and not just for today or tomorrow, but for the Day after Tomorrow as well.
Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs". (Please see: https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601 and read the very many insightful comments.)
Yes, I too am tired of MS Excel paradigm. It is like always a wearing gingham shirt - so many men in IT express their inner-nerd that way. I mean, if they want Excel-like features, we could always use VBA to tie a UI, in Excel, to the back-end services (be they direct database connections or REST API calls.)
We serve the end users poorly by giving them Excel look alike UI, but in HTML. We are missing something essential in requirements engineering by not providing a different paradigm (say a Wizard, or an Informative AI Agent), thus hiding all that cognitive complexity from them.
I think Excel is widely used precisely because IT cannot create light-weight tactical solutions, or, as often is the case, plain refuses to do so.
Myself and others have created such tools for small groups, say less than 10 users, using VBA, REST API, or ODBC-based database access solutions. But that has never been where the action was.
Monolithic Web applications rule the roost. Likely because CIOs understand that level of budgeting and find such systems to be a feather in their hats.
There are very good reasons for small teams (~ 10) to use Excel; IT is not going to make a better tool for small groups of people, Excel is ubiquitous with tremendous analytical capabilities built-in, that team controls the evolution of their Excel tool themselves; changes do not have to be begged from IT, and lastly because of the heterogeneity of corporate data stores which forces people to use data from semantically distinct systems with little or no overlaps in their respective ontologies.
This last one could be ameliorated via some sort of AI-enabled Data Buddy, which could infer missing data from what is in Excel and go and fetch it from whichever database that contains that missing data - all without the end-users being aware of them; sort of like an active Data Management agent on steroids.
In the many engineering firms, there are engineering teams that use home-grown Excel tools for their data management needs. Generic tools, Cloud-based or not, are not useful to them: they are not accountants. And yet, how quickly we at IT can enhance their existing tools, let alone replace them? How long does it take to gather requirements, build another silly Angular/Spring-Boot system, and fit it with Excel import-export facilities?
In Web applications that follow the Excel tabular data presentation paradigm, there are great opportunities to move away from tabular data presentation to Insights gleaned from data and automatically generated and presented to the end-users. That is what IT should do rather than implementing yet another useless and expensive CR.
I own many gingham shirts, but I also wear many different fabrics and patterns. We, at IT, need to give end-users more options and unless they positively and adamantly ask for little grids, we should engage in a dialogue to explore the design space: and not just for today or tomorrow, but for the Day after Tomorrow as well.
Introduction to Deep Learning
Really good article on Deep Learning from the Code Magazine; everything is here: the basics, the explanations, the code, a concrete realization for a mobile app-
Thursday, March 5, 2020
The House that Spies on You
Truly dreadful news from our friends at Amazon.com - The house that spies on you
This device is a doorbell combined with a camera. There are obvious advantages, such as monitoring remotely who is getting close to your front door. All of it is computerized technology, of course, so that it links up to a database run by Amazon. Amazon can collect the data streamed to its servers; therefore, Amazon does collect, retain and store the data.
This is the familiar pattern whereby tech companies store data for no apparent reason, which can then be used, analyzed, shared or sold on. Not to mention the risk that a hacker gets into the system, and can then see when a family/ person is likely to be at home or not -- ideal for professional burglars.
As for having cameras in every room, say no more...
You may remember the story about the National Health Service in UK: they hold millions of data sets on patients and don't do very much with those. So, in their case, what do they do? Store the data passively. No. Sell it on to companies such as Amazon or US-based healthcare providers.
Same logic. If I have it, I will use it. It is 'anonymized' but, actually, fully accessible with a bit of ingenuity. Meanwhile, insurance companies and recruitment firms, among others, are knocking on the door, drooling at the thought of accessing such data...
All of this reminds me of the case of French police files on the French Jews during World War II, kept at Marseilles, for the benefit of the collaborationist government of the Vichy France, and the occupying Germans of course - which the French government decided to keep after the Liberation in 1945.
They were little index cards. Same as a computerized database.
The lesson is clear: if you have the data, you keep it and you stockpile it, just in case it may be useful later. The logic of it truly is sinister. With Amazon's doorbell, the data is available to the police if they want it. And you can imagine a wife spying on her husband if she suspects he's been having an affair with the neighbor's wife, etc.
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About Me
- Babak Makkinejad
- I had been a senior software developer working for HP and GM. I am interested in intelligent and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.