Taking a quick break from #COVID19 - Dinner Time Digest №. 1 - Friday, March 13, 2020
The Dinner Time Digest is a (bi)weekly collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley
With ‘social distancing’ becoming the parlance du jour, people are going to have a lot more time as COVID-19 causes western society to contract into itself. This means more time to read! Dinner Table Don’ts is here with its very first Dinner Time Digest №. 1! If you like what you read, PLEASE SHARE WIDELY :)
We’ve got Five non-COVID19 stories worth your time, followed by Three COVID19 stories, because we know you have likely already had your fill.
Five non-COVID-19 stories:
Why the U.S. sucks at Building Transit - VICE News
Lest we think this applies only to the United States, one needs look only at the cancelled Hamilton LRT project, the bungled Ottawa LRT project and the relatively calm launch, all things considered, of a no-frills LRT line in the Waterloo Region.
"What is undoubtedly clear is every transit project is first and foremost a political project, and political projects are about consensus-building. This gets us not the projects we need but the projects we deserve."
Earliest look at newborns' visual cortex shows that babies are hard-wired to see faces and places – National Science Foundation
While I have no idea if babies can recognize you, so to speak, they sure can visually process at an early age!
"For decades, scientists have known that the adult visual cortex contains two regions that work in concert to process faces and another two regions that work together to process places. More recent work shows that the visual cortex of young children is also differentiated into these face and place networks.
The average age of the participants in this study was 27 days, to better understand whether the differentiation in brain regions is innate or molded by experience."
"The story of Esther Lederberg, Oreskes writes in an email, is a “sadly familiar” one. Throughout the 20th century, many women in science were hired in positions that presented them with greater burdens of fundraising and less job security. When they did publish papers, male colleagues often got credit. And women who worked alongside their husbands were routinely assumed to be glorified assistants. “The fact that they were Lederberg and Lederberg and they were married meant that one of the names just got dropped off,” Jo Handelsman, a microbiologist who directs the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, says of Esther’s legacy."
The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground - The Guardian
"There had been incongruous laughter at his trial, too. Accused, police, lawyers, members of the jury – all chuckled together at Van Allen’s wordier flights while he was under interrogation. At one stage, he’d spoken wistfully of the old bunker: “My permanent des-res,” Van Allen called it. “Just an ideal spot. You had the train station, you had a cafe, you had a Starbucks, you had the hospital, you had the 168 bus, the 24, the 46 … You couldn’t see in from the footpath. It was bloody brilliant.”"
Dressing for the Surveillance Age – The New Yorker
Face recognition also offers “smart retail” applications, allowing companies to harvest demographic information from customers’ faces, such as age and gender, and also to track and measure “dwell time”—how long a customer spends in any particular section of the store. “What if you could see what your ad sees?” SAFR asks on the company’s Web site. A video shows a couple having a conversation while data appears on the screen, assigning attention and “sentiment scores” to their faces. Other companies offer face surveillance that alerts stores to shoppers’ previous shopping habits, or their V.I.P. status, when they walk in. Face Six, a biometrics company based in Israel and Nevada, markets Churchix, software that is often used to track congregants’ attendance at church. As Clare Garvie, of Georgetown Law’s privacy center, put it, “Think of a possible application for this technology and chances are good it’s being sold.”
Peter’s Tweet of the Week
And finally, here are three COVID-19 stories
This piece offers a quick look at the math of available beds and N95 masks in the health care system:
Shortages of these two resources — beds and masks — don’t stand in isolation but compound each other’s severity. Even with full personal protective equipment, health care workers are becoming infected while treating patients with Covid-19. As masks become a scarce resource, doctors and nurses will start dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time, leading to profound staffing shortages that further compound the challenges.
Why I Won’t Stay Home When I’m Sick – Toronto Star
‘Stay home from work when you’re sick!’ is a demand that only the privileged can make. For so many people, the math is pretty simple – if they don’t work, they don’t eat.
“If I don’t go to work, even for one hour, I don’t get paid. At one of my jobs (like many people in this economy, I have several) my weekly pay is contingent on me showing up to deliver a class in-person. This means that if I cancel class one week because I am sick, I get no pay for that week — even if I spend the rest of the same week grading papers and responding to student emails from home.”
The Best Response to the Coronavirus? Altruism, Not Panic – New York Times
Is stressing altruism something only the privileged can afford to do?
“For example, research shows that when people are told that it is possible — but not certain — that going to work while sick would infect a co-worker, people are less willing to stay home than when they are reminded of the certainty that going to work sick would expose vulnerable co-workers to a serious chance of illness. Stressing the certainty of risk, in other words, more effectively motivates altruism than stressing the possibility of harm.”
Let me know what kind of stories you’d like to see in these Dinner Time Digests - these are as much for you as they are for me!
If you like what you read, PLEASE SHARE WIDELY :)