Isolated rain forecast for upper Thailand amid cool weather
Nov 08. 2020Photo Credit: Meteorological Department
By The Nation
The moderate high pressure system from China covers upper Thailand and a low pressure system covers the south of Cambodia and the south of Vietnam, the Thailand Meteorological Bureau said on Sunday.
Cool weather is forecast for upper Thailand with possible isolated rain. The northeast monsoon prevails over the Gulf and the South, bringing continuous rain and isolated heavy rain to the South, the department said.
Weather forecast for 24 hours:
Bangkok: Very cloudy with scattered rain; minimum temperature 24-25 degrees Celsius, maximum 30-32°C; northeasterly winds 10-25 kilometres per hour (kph).
North: Cool with isolated rain mostly in Mae Hong Son, Chiang Mai, Lamphun, Lamphang, Sukhothai, Kamphaeng Phet and Tak provinces; minimum temperature 20-23°C, maximum 31-34°C; cold on the mountain top witb minimum temperature 9-14°C; northeasterly winds 10-20kph.
Northeast: Cool with strong winds and isolated rain mostly in Chaiyaphum, Nakhon Ratchasima, Buri Ram and Surin provinces; minimum temperature 20-22°C, maximum 29-31°C; cold on the mountain tops with minimum temperature 11-15°C; northeasterly winds 10-30kph.
Central: Very cloudy with isolated rain mostly in Nakhon Sawan, Chainat, Uthai Thani, Kanchanaburi, Suphan Buri, Ratchaburi and Samut Songkhram provinces; minimum temperature 23-25°C, maximum 30-31°C; northeasterly winds 10-25kph.
East: Very cloudy with strong winds and scattered thundershowers and isolated heavy rain in Chanthaburi and Trat provinces; minimum temperature 23-25°C, maximum 28-33°C; northeasterly winds 15-30kph; waves about a metre and 1-2 metres offshore.
South (east coast):
Cloudy with scattered thundershowers and isolated heavy rain in Songkhla, Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces; minimum temperature 23-26°C, maximum 30-33°C; northeasterly winds 15-30kph; waves about a metre high and about two metres during thundershowers.
South (west coast):
Cloudy with scattered thundershowers and isolated heavy rain in Krabi, Trang and Satun provinces; minimum temperature 23-26°C, maximum 32-34°C; northeasterly winds 15-30kph; waves about a metre high and about two metres during thundershowers.
Seven-day forecast:
On November 7-8, the moderate high pressure from China covers upper Thailand and a low pressure covers Cambodia. Cool weather and light to medium rain are forecast for the upper country, mostly in the lower northeast and the east. Meanwhile, the northeast monsoon prevails over the Gulf of Thailand and the South. Isolated heavy rain is likely in the lower South. From November 9-13, another strong high pressure system from China will extend to upper Thailand, causing a drop in temperature by 2-4°C. Cool and strong winds are expected over the area. The northeast monsoon that prevails over the upper Gulf of Thailand and the South will intensify. Isolated heavy rains continue in the lower South. Moderate wind waves are likely in the upper Gulf of Thailand about two metres high and above two metres in thundershower areas. THE Category 3 tropical storm “Atsani” over the north of the Philippines is expected to downgrade during November 6-7. This storm will have no effect on Thailand. On November 10-11, an active low pressure cell will move to central Vietnam.
Caution: People in upper Thailand should be careful of their health due to the variable weather. People in the South should beware of the heavy rain and accumulated rain. On November 6-7, farmers should beware of damage to their crop.
A Biden victory positions America for a 180-degree turn on climate change
Nov 08. 2020Marchers on Nov. 4, 2020, in Pittsburgh, Penn., chanted for several blocks with vote counting fairness being one of the major causes for the march. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
By The Washington Post · Juliet Eilperin, Dino Grandoni, Darryl Fears · NATIONAL, POLITICS, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT
Joe Biden, the projected winner of the presidency, will move to restore dozens of environmental safeguards President Donald Trump abolished and launch the boldest climate change plan of any president in history. While some of Biden’s most sweeping programs will encounter stiff resistance from Senate Republicans and conservative attorneys general, the United States is poised to make a 180-degree turn on climate change and conservation policy.
Biden’s team already has plans on how it will restrict oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters; ratchet up federal mileage standards for cars and SUVs; block pipelines that transport fossil fuels across the country; provide federal incentives to develop renewable power; and mobilize other nations to make deeper cuts in their own carbon emissions.
“Joe Biden ran on climate. How great is this?” said Gina McCarthy, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during Barack Obama’s second term and now helms the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’ll be time for the White House to finally get back to leading the charge against the central environmental crisis of our time.”
Biden has vowed to eliminate carbon emissions from the electric sector by 2035 and spend $2 trillion on investments ranging from weatherizing homes to developing a nationwide network of charging stations for electric vehicles. That massive investment plan stands a chance only if his party wins two Senate runoff races in Georgia in January; otherwise, he would have to rely on a combination of executive actions and more-modest congressional deals to advance his agenda.
Still, a number of factors make it easier to enact more-ambitious climate policies than even four years ago. Roughly 10% of the globe has warmed by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature rise the world has pledged to avoid. The price of solar and wind power has dropped, the coal industry has shrunk, and Americans increasingly connect the disasters they’re experiencing in real time – including more-intense wildfires, hurricanes and droughts – with global warming. Biden has made the argument that curbing carbon will produce high-paying jobs while protecting the planet.
Biden’s advisers are well aware of the potential and pitfalls of relying on executive authority to act on climate. President Barack Obama used it to advance major climate policies in his second term, including limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and light trucks and the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Trump has overturned them, along with 125 others.
League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski pointed to California – which has already adopted a low-carbon fuels standard and requirement that half its electricity come from carbon-free sources within five years – as a model. “You look at where California is now going, the federal government needs to get there.”
Some of the new administration’s rules could be challenged in federal court, which have a number of Trump appointees on the bench. But even some conservative activists said that Biden could enact enduring policies, whether by partnering with Congress or through regulation.
Myron Ebell, who directs the Center for Energy and the Environment at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that if Biden faces a GOP-controlled Senate, “it means that all of the nuttiest and most radical ideas on the left are dead on arrival in the Congress. And that means he is much more likely to be successful because he can just tell his left-wing supporters, ‘Hey, we just can’t do this.'”
McKie Campbell, managing partner of the bipartisan energy consulting firm BlueWater Strategies and a former top aide to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), said he hopes divided government “means we may have a return of people working with each other to work out some solutions. The question is, in the middle, do you have compromise, or do you have stalemate, and nothing happens.”
The new administration may be able to broker compromises with key industries that have experienced regulatory whiplash in the past decade, including the auto industry and power sector, while offering tax breaks for renewable energy that remain popular with both parties. And Biden can rebuild diplomatic alliances that will spur foreign countries to pursue more-ambitious carbon reductions.
Some activists are pressing for the creation of a White House interagency group, similar to the National Security Council and National Economic Council, that could steer decisions across the federal government. Even without such a body, Biden’s advisers have said that they plan to elevate climate change as a priority in departments that have not always treated it as one, including the Transportation, State and Treasury departments. It will influence key appointments, affecting everything from overseas banking and military bases to domestic roads and farms.
“It’s really important to remember that personnel is policy,” said Tom Steyer, a billionaire environmentalist who ran against Biden during the primary but who then raised money for him. “And every Cabinet position has to be staffed by somebody who has an awareness about climate.”
Mustafa Santiago Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation, said these policies will also be shaped by how they affect communities of color.
“When we talk about new jobs being created in the renewable energy sector, just because they’re being created doesn’t mean they are going to the communities that have been ignored in the past,” said Ali, who left his post at the EPA early in Trump’s term. “This administration is going to have a diverse set of voices on the outside and inside who are connected to what’s going on on the ground. We can’t just have voices from people who went to Ivy League schools that come from a place of privilege.”
Biden’s campaign has been eyeing a range of candidates for top environmental posts, including two New Mexico Democrats – retiring senator Tom Udall and Rep. Deb Haaland – for interior secretary. Mary Nichols, who has implemented many of the nation’s most liberal climate policies for more than a dozen years as chair of the California Air Resources Board – is a leading contender to head the EPA.
It is unclear who might coordinate climate policy at the White House. Possible contenders include several Obama administration veterans, including Ali Zaidi, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s (D) top climate adviser; Biden’s former national security adviser Jake Sullivan; and Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the National Economic Council. While former secretary of state John F. Kerry may get involved with climate policy, according to two individuals familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, it is less likely that he will join the White House staff and could seek a different spot in the Cabinet.
Biden’s vow to reinvigorate climate diplomacy, including rejoining the Paris accord, is one of the easiest ones to fulfill. He could also capitalize on Republican senators’ support for slashing the use of hydrofluorcarbons, chemicals widely used in air conditioners and refrigeration that are warming the planet and that are supposed to be phased out under a separate international climate agreement.
Former energy secretary Ernest Moniz, who informally advised Biden’s campaign this year, said there’s “been an absence of national leadership. But with Biden, I think that will come back.”
While Biden has said he would “transition” away from from using oil, and target fossil fuel subsidies, steps like that would be much harder under a Republican-controlled Senate. Unless Democrats take over the seats of two senators from coal states – John Barrasso of Wyoming and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia – are slated to helm the Energy and Natural Resources and Environment and Public Works Committee, respectively. Those committees also have say over whom Biden puts in top-level positions at the EPA and other agencies.
Democrats are eager to take sweeping acts to conserve public lands and waters, many of which have been opened up to drilling, logging and fishing under President Trump. He’s vowed to block permits for the Keystone XL pipeline and the proposed Pebble Mine near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, and protect vast swaths of the landscape that President Trump has opened up to mining and logging.
He is also likely to soon restore the original boundaries of national monuments Trump has shrunk, including Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, and he’s already signed onto a pledge to protect 30% of America’s land and waters by 2030.
Udall said in a recent interview that Biden is poised to sign an executive order on the “30 by 30” pledge early on and that it will serve as “an organizing principle” for environmental policy decisions. “We don’t have any other options when it comes to facing down the climate crisis, and the nature crisis.”
But some of Biden’s most ambitious environmental pledges will be difficult to fulfill. His climate plan calls for “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters,” something no administration has ever done on a permanent basis.
And Republican attorneys general like West Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey are ready for battle. In an interview Thursday, Morrisey – who successfully challenged Obama’s Clean Power Plan – said before the race was called for Biden that he backs the president and sees “a pathway” for him to win reelection.
But, he added,”If Biden were to somehow prevail, we would fight to prevent the administration from advancing the same kind of unlawful approaches they pursued under the Obama administration.”
Biden’s pledge to achieve a carbon-free U.S. power sector within 15 years would mean the closing or revamping of nearly every coal- and gas-fired power plant around the country, and the construction of an unprecedented number of new wind turbines and solar farms. On top of that, engineers still need to devise a better way of storing energy when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.
“”If I were advising Biden on energy, my first three priorities would be storage, storage and storage,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who worked in the alternative energy businesses before running for office.
Industry representatives are more wary of a Biden presidency but hold out hope they can persuade him that the commodities they produce are necessary for a healthy economy.
Marcellus Shale Coalition President David Spigelmyer, whose Pittsburgh-based group represents companies that drill horizontally for natural gas, said that their product helps warm homes, produce steel for windmills and solar panels, and make plastics that businesses need. “We wrap ourselves in plastic every time we get in a car or a bus or a plane.”
Still, climate activists who pushed Biden during the campaign don’t intend to let up on the pressure. “We’re seeing that Joe Biden has a climate mandate,” said Varshini Prakash, head of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, “and we expect him to do everything in his power to act on climate change.”
“Poor mummies,” Mimi Leveque said. She is a conservator, one of a small group of experts in the country who work on ancient mummies for museums and scholarly displays. Many conservators have been sidelined by the covid-19 restrictions.
In Leveque’s case, she was scheduled to fly from Boston to help restore two mummies at a museum in Atlanta in June, a trip aborted by pandemic restrictions. The mummies, dug up in the late 1800s from a cemetery in Egypt and likely sold to wealthy tourists, still wait.
“I fully understand the state of the world right now,” Leveque said. Layoffs and furloughs have rippled widely through the museum world, and many worry they won’t be going back.
Such as Leveque’s three-person department at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., where she worked for 16 years. She was among 38 museum staff members laid off in June. “My whole department was wiped out,” she said. “I know this is permanent.”
Leveque, a veteran conservator who has worked on dozens of mummies worldwide, has lined up consultant work for when pandemic restrictions ease, but others may not be so fortunate.
“Many museums are really undergoing a tremendous financial strain and burden because of the pandemic,” said Pamela Hatchfield, former president of the American Institute for Conservation. She took early retirement from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in August when the museum laid off 57 employees and another 56 retired. The museum closed from March to September and reopened with only some of their exhibits as they limited the number of visitors.
“We’ve all been tremendously affected, and conservators are certainly not alone in that,” she said. “But of tremendous concern to all of us is what the museum world is going to look like in the future?”
Conservators are in charge of cleaning, restoring and stabilizing all sorts of art objects, not just mummies. Curators, a more well-known word, are typically art or history scholars who create exhibits. Conservators are “the doctors for the arts. We are the people who do all of the hands-on work,” Leveque said. “We’re expected to understand the chemistry of it, as well as its art history.”
The field has never been well-funded, those in the field say. Yet their positions can often be cut without an immediate impact visible to the public.
“It’s all the preventive work,” said Molly Gleeson, a conservator for eight years at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. “It’s the monitoring the environment, monitoring what the temperature and relative humidity are in storage, monitoring the light exposure that objects are getting, making sure insects aren’t coming into the building and damaging collections.
“That kind of work is difficult when you’re not able to let a lot of staff into the building,” she said. “It’s been a really tough time for everybody, of course, but the cultural heritage sector – museums, libraries, cultural sites – has really been impacted.”
Leveque was working on an archaeology site in Syria in the 1970s when the project’s conservator fell ill. She stepped in, and was hooked on the work. She is not as stuffy as the mummies she works on. She refers to one as “a sweetie.” And she confesses she enjoys a good mummy movie – “The first, with Boris Karloff. Seriously, that’s the best.”
She has “treated,” as she puts it, 27 Egyptian mummies, examined 14 others, and worked on assorted mummified animals and almost-dust Peruvians. She has been interested in it ever since she was a child and her mother read her the story of the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s 3,200-year-old tomb (“I can still remember the words. They get down there, and they’re just about to open it up, and Lord Carnarvon said, ‘What can you see?’ And Carter replies, ‘Wooonderful things.'” She draws out the word with delight.)
She does not, for the record, attribute the troubles of conservators to any mythical curse of mummies: “Nah. Not buying it. If it were true, I’d be dead by now.”
But she is dead serious about the approach she takes to the work. Mummy restoration should be intended to pay respect to the departed, she insisted, and she is helping develop professional standards to insure that. Some of the work of a conservator is like attacking a giant puzzle.
Leveque helped restore what is probably the oldest Egyptian mummy in North America – a mummy 4,000 years old at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta that had been bought in Egypt by an Emory professor and stayed in a crate in a storeroom for 90 years at the university’s museum. The mummy was in shreds; its linen tattered, its head in a separate box, other bones missing.
“They lifted the lid, I looked down, and it looked like someone had crushed a bag of potato chips and just sprinkled them around.” Leveque recalled.
She and Emory conservator Renee Stein, with a team of experts and students, worked for a year, meticulously cleaning and reassembling, making puffy pads of polyester batting to support bones that had caved to gravity, resculpting missing bones with epoxy putty from skeleton models.
But other projects with mummies are taken with an approach of minimal tampering to respect the departed.
“The work I am doing is to restore dignity to this individual,” she said. “Amongst humans is an overriding sense that the bodies of the deceased deserve respect.”
That often involves a careful construction of supports to keep the skeleton intact, to slow down the inevitability of gravity and decay.
“I think that they should be in as stable of condition as possible, so that they’re not continuing to deteriorate, and as presentable as possible so that this isn’t a ghoulish display,” Leveque said. “There are museums I’ve worked for where the linens have been ripped off the mummies, and they’re displaying them as though you were looking into a looted tomb. I find that unacceptable.”
While conservators typically work on a variety of art objects, Leveque and others estimated there are “no more than a handful” who regularly work on mummies. There is no firm count of mummies in this country – tourists to Egypt in the 1800s bought mummies as souvenirs – although Leveque thinks the U.S. mummy population is in the hundreds.
Aside from the preservation work not happening now, Leveque said she wonders about training the next generation of conservators during this stay-at-home period.
“How do you teach hands-on conservation mostly virtually? I don’t know,” she said. “At some point, you and the object have to get together in the same room.”
Gleeson, who helps oversee 21 mummies at the Penn Museum, agreed.
“We are in a crisis right now,” she said. But she sees “some silver lining.” Many museums are developing more online tools to reach the public. And while being at home, “we have been able to spend more time, reflecting on other aspects of our work.”
Leveque is quick to note that many other people are more affected by the pandemic.
“How can I feel bad for myself when I know that there are people truly suffering right now,” she said. “I mean, my patients are dead for a very, very long time.” They won’t go anywhere.
The mummies she had planned to restore in Atlanta were acquired from a California exhibit by the Carlos Museum. They are among many dozens of mummies sold by the Egyptian government to raise money, and Leveque said she cannot restore these two for the museum, which still is closed to the public, until travel is safer. The mummies also wait, locked in the dark they knew for millennia.
“I know that the mummies that are waiting for me are stable,” she said. “They’re in a climate-controlled storage area, and nothing is happening to them that hasn’t already happened. It’s just that I would like to be able to get rid of the dust of ages and work on them and make them a little bit more happy.”
Facebook’s latest attempt to slow disinformation means probation for groups
Nov 08. 2020
By The Washington Post Heather Kelly
Facebook has started putting some groups on a type of probation, its latest move to slow the spread of disinformation and attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the U.S. election.
Any group, public or private, the company detects has too many posts that violate its community standards will be forced to have administrators and moderators approve each submission manually. The requirement will stay in place for 60 days for the group, with no way to appeal or override it.
The company will be closely monitoring how group administrators and moderators handle posts during those three months, and could decide to shut a group down completely if it repeatedly allows too many offending posts. The change makes the volunteers who run groups more responsible for what happens inside them.
“We are temporarily requiring admins and moderators of some political and social groups in the U.S. to approve all posts, if their group has a number of Community Standards violations from members,” said Facebook company spokesperson Leonard Lam. He said the company was taking the measure “in order to protect people during this unprecedented time.”
The new limitation follows other measures the company enacted this week to curb the viral spread of conspiracy theories and calls to violence over pending election results. Ahead of the election, Facebook announced it would temporarily stop political ads after polls closed, and it devised a label to use in case a presidential candidate prematurely claimed victory. It added that label to Trump posts earlier this week.
Since then, the company has been trying out new – temporary – tactics to keep up with a surge in disinformation and conspiracy theories. For example, Facebook said it would make it harder to find terms related to undermining the legitimacy of ballot counts, and reduce the distribution of election-related live videos.
Allies of President Donald Trump have used Facebook pages and groups this week to spread a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats are attempting to “steal” the election for Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Facebook took action Thursday, removing one of the largest groups pushing for in-person protests called “STOP THE STEAL,” which had 360,000 members. Facebook said it removed the group because of “worrying calls for violence” and attempts to delegitimize the election process.
Facebook had not publicly announced the stricter policies for groups, and it was unclear if it is deploying or testing similar measures that are not yet public.
Some of the first groups to be put on Facebook’s watch list were caught off guard. Admins of a popular public group for the city of Aberdeen, Wash., found out they would have to approve each new post, effective immediately, via a Facebook notification. It said all posts “now require approval until Jan. 4.” The group, which mostly discusses local events, business and issues, has more than 7,000 members and a policy against arguing about politics or inciting other members.
Facebook and other social media companies have long relied on unpaid group administrators to handle the bulk of moderation for posts in their groups. In Facebook’s case, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and professional content moderators to find extremely problematic content, but more nuanced decisions are left to volunteers. They police arguments, are a first line of defense against misinformation, and with this new measure, are held closely responsible for the kinds of conversations they allow.
Trump’s power on Twitter, Facebook will outlive his presidency
Nov 07. 2020Trump’s tweets, more than 32,000 and counting since formally entering politics, continue to shape the news cycle.MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin · NATIONAL, TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, WHITEHOUSE, MEDIA
President Donald Trump will leave the White House, whether it be in January or four years later, with a massive social media following that he could use to shape the nation’s politics throughout his successor’s administration and beyond.
When Trump started his first campaign in 2015, he had just 3 million Twitter followers and 10 million on Facebook. But should Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow electoral edge Friday morning hold and withstand certain legal challenge, Trump would leave office with a singularly powerful online megaphone – at least 88 million followers on Twitter, 33 million on Facebook and 24 million on Instagram – that will give him a unique ability to communicate his thoughts to legions of supporters accustomed to hearing from him more than three dozen times a day.
It’s a pace he could easily keep up as a private citizen looking to influence debates, mock opponents or help revive his flagging business interests, say social media researchers.
This power, honed and enhanced through two national campaigns and nearly four years as president, gives Trump the opportunity to do something rarely attempted by the 44 men who previously held the nation’s highest office – keep the national gaze fixed on himself as a new chief executive tries to command the national stage. It’s something that could complicate Biden’s stated goal of reunifying a nation fractured across regional, racial and partisan lines.
“There’s no way that Donald Trump sits on his hands while Biden undermines his legacy,” said Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian. “He is likely to be a fundamentally disruptive presence in American political life as an ex-president. And that is, once again, norm busting.”
Trump also could remain a potent force for misinformation by continuing to undermine the election’s legitimacy and sow doubt about the results in the minds of millions of people, researchers said. He has repeatedly railed against mail ballots and other elements of the national vote, making unfounded claims he has pressed with ever greater intensity as Biden mounted an apparent comeback in recent days.
His allies have turned to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms to echo and amplify these claims, often peddling misleading videos and other supposed evidence that independent fact-checkers have deemed false, prompting numerous actions by technology companies to label or remove the misleading claims.
Despite frequent complaints by Trump and his allies that technology companies are biased against him, the day after the election he had five of the 10 Facebook posts with the most English-language interactions – a category that includes retweets, likes and other user actions – according to data from CrowdTangle, an analytics tool.
His tweets, more than 32,000 and counting since formally entering politics, continue to shape the news cycle, even as they increasingly get slapped with warning labels for violating Twitter policies against misinformation. Trump’s misleading election night tweet claiming he had a “big win,” well before the election was decided, for example, got 125,000 retweets before Twitter restricted it.
Trump may prove easier to ignore as a former president, at least by those who dislike his politics or his bombastic, truth-bending style. But judging by ballots cast in this election, the president’s base of support is roughly 70 million Americans – a group so large that, if taken by themselves, would exceed the population of the United Kingdom, the world’s 21st largest country.
“Whenever Trump leaves, he will leave with the biggest direct-to-supporter communications infrastructure in modern politics,” said Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute. “He’ll be able to keep his supporters in an information bubble for an extended period well beyond the end of his public office. And he’ll have a loyal and adoring audience for his political heckling and product placement – the ultimate distribution network for conspiracy, sensationalism, extremism and polarization.”
The nation’s first president, George Washington, set a standard of non-intervention by stepping down after two terms and retiring to his Northern Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, despite growing rancor among his fellow Founding Fathers.
Many presidents have since taken more visible and vocal roles after leaving office, Naftali said. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, soured on his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and started his own political party. Roosevelt then ran unsuccessfully again for the presidency, in 1912, four years after initially stepping down.
But recent decades – in an era in which the power of television has made presidents akin to celebrities capable of reaching most of the nation with an immediacy once impossible – have seen former presidents of both parties largely step away from the political spotlight after leaving the White House.
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, didn’t even open his own Twitter account until his second term but eventually built an even larger Twitter following than Trump’s, accumulating 125 million followers. But Obama largely held his tongue on partisan politics until recent months, as this year’s presidential campaign quickened. And Obama has never tweeted with anything close to the frequency or impact of Trump.
Trump’s ability to command attention goes far beyond the mere numbers of followers he has on various platforms. Even his detractors agree the president has rare skill at using Twitter to drive conversation with posts that are often harsh – even inflammatory – but hard to ignore. His rapid-fire style, complete with frequent capitalizations and the occasional spelling error, makes his voice hard to tune out.
Trump also benefits from the unrivaled enthusiasm of his followers, many of whom share his messages instantaneously by using software to automatically retweet him, researchers have found. Some use his Twitter feed as a primary source of their news, akin to having the television always on in the background, said Claire Wardle, U.S. Director of First Draft, a nonprofit organization focused on addressing misinformation and disinformation.
“The networked infrastructure that the Internet allows, he has capitalized on that in an extraordinary way,” Wardle said. “He has his megaphone, but he also has this network that takes his messages and distributes it in their own communities.”
She pointed out that prior to the 2016 election, Trump had conversations with television networks about having his own show. “But today he doesn’t need Trump TV when he has the most powerful communication network at his fingertips,” Wardle said.
Whenever he leaves the White House, Trump will lose the extra leeway that Twitter affords world leaders, and Facebook may stop bending it policies to soothe criticisms from the president and his political allies. But even when that deference disappears, Trump will retain the ability to turn up the volume on his claims, even if he may have to become more cautious about how he makes them.
He has used his time in office effectively to grow his follower base tremendously. Trump’s median number of retweets, which was 66 the month before announcing his candidacy in June 2015, has soared by nearly 30,000%, to 19,600 last month, said Darren Linvill, a social media researcher at Clemson University.
Trump and his campaign also built a formidable email list, with tens of millions of valuable names and email addresses, during his time as a politician. The Trump campaign has sent out more than 460 million emails seeking donations to support its legal fight related to the election since Tuesday, according to data compiled by Trevor Davis, chief executive of CounterAction, a Washington-based digital intelligence firm. He said other politicians have used such lists to raise money for other candidates and exert influence after leaving office.
“An email list is a source of political power,” Davis said.
Trump also has developed an echo chamber of supporters throughout the social media universe, including influential conservatives and countless ordinary supporters who respond to his messages and contend that hostility from mainstream news sources and tech companies could prevent his voice from being heard. An elaborate, well-development network of far-right groups, such as the violent all-male Proud Boys and supporters of conspiracy theories such as QAnon, revere Trump and work to amplify what he says, online and off.
One critical test of whether Trump’s megaphone will be as potent after he leaves office will be whether he can forge the same close alliance with Fox News that he enjoyed during his presidency, said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and an expert on the news media and misinformation. Fox pundits have consistently repeated White House talking points, as has the news side of Fox, Benkler said, giving significant credence to and amplification for Trump’s messages.
Another issue will be whether Trump tries to capitalize financially on his audience in the months ahead, Benkler said. He suggested Trump could go into competition with Fox if he doesn’t regain the same level of support following a bruising election in which the president and his allies criticized the network for its polling and its election-week declarations about which states had been won by Biden.
So far, he said, the news network has shown “restraint,” in its coverage of the Trump campaign’s allegations of voter fraud and attempts by Democrats to steal the election. “But I’m not sure it will hold,” he said.
Facebook bans ‘STOP THE STEAL’ group Trump allies were using to organize protests against vote counting
Nov 06. 2020
By The Washington Post · Tony Romm, Isaac Stanley-Becker · NATIONAL, TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, WHITEHOUSE President Donald Trump’s allies have turned to Facebook and other social media sites in an effort to spark nationwide protests against the 2020 election, thrusting some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful organizing tools into a contest over the legitimacy of American democracy.
The campaign and its aides have relied on a network of new and existing Facebook pages, groups and events – some of which have garnered hundreds of thousands of members – to rally people in public this week around a baseless conspiracy theory that Democratic candidate Joe Biden is attempting to “steal” the election. Some of the efforts promoted in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona specifically target vote-counting centers, threatening disruptions while ballot-tallying is still underway.
The online efforts have unfolded not on the Republican Party’s fringes but well within its mainstream. Among the most vocal leaders is Amy Kremer, a former congressional candidate in Georgia and a co-founder and co-chair of Women for Trump. She used a Facebook page called Women for America First, which boasts more than 100,000 followers, to drive users to a newly launched Facebook group called “STOP THE STEAL,” which garnered more than 360,000 members before Facebook removed it midday Thursday for violating the platform’s rules.
“We need boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote,” the Facebook page said before it disappeared from view, encouraging people to donate to help pay for “flights and hotels to send people” to battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The “STOP THE STEAL” group also had been listed as a co-host on 12 different Facebook protest events, including a new car “caravan” planned in California.
Though some of the events say the goal is to be peaceful, some of the commentary that spilled forth in the “STOP THE STEAL” group veered into planning for armed conflict. “We are on the verge of civil war due to those types of people,” one user wrote. “You cannot reason with them or convince them to stop and reunite as they are dead set on total destruction of our nation. So I ask you, what are you prepared to do?” Another asked, “how do we go about overthrowing the government?” Hundreds of users replied, with one proclaiming, “Civil war!”
The anti-democratic resentment ultimately resulted in disciplinary action from Facebook, where spokesman Andy Stone pointed to the “exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension.” Anticipating a crackdown, some of the group’s members preemptively shifted their discussions to MeWe, a messaging app favored by militia groups who previously had been banned by Facebook.
“The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” Stone said in a statement.
The effort uses the same mantra, “stop the steal,” employed by Roger Stone for a political action committee he led in 2016. Stone, a self-described “dirty trickster” whose prison sentence Trump commuted this summer, was recently kicked off Facebook after the company said he was tied to a network of fake accounts.
Chris Barron, a spokesman for Kremer, denounced Facebook, saying the group’s swelling membership “spoke volumes about how concerned people are.” Other administrators of the group included a conservative activist who identifies herself on Facebook as the communications director for We Build the Wall, the nonprofit that raised more than $25 million for the purported aim of erecting a barrier along the Mexican border.
Associated websites were soliciting donations and contact information. Domain records showed at least one such site, created on Nov. 4, was registered by Scott Graves, who runs a California-based digital agency. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The protests that have occurred nationwide so far have attracted vocal yet mostly orderly crowds of angry Trump supporters, though at times their presence has stoked tensions. Armed protesters appeared on Wednesday evening at a ballot-counting center in Maricopa County, one of the places in Arizona giving Biden an edge, demanding a halt to their work in response to a widely disproven social media hoax about magic markers and discarded ballots.
The dilemma is especially acute for Facebook at a moment when the election remains undecided. The social media site is one of the most potent tools for people hoping to organize and exercise their rights to protest worldwide. But that power has been put to use in more controversial ways since polls closed on Tuesday, allowing Trump, his family members and a network of well-funded conservative groups to sow disinformation and potentially undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process.
After years of resistance, Facebook has more aggressively sought to police problematic posts, photos and videos across its services, aiming to prevent misinformation from marring the 2020 presidential race as it did four years ago. But Facebook at times has been slow to act, taking about 12 hours in one instance to remove a Facebook page called “Stand up Michigan” that appeared after a group operated by the same users had been banned because of what the platform said was the risk of “offline harm” involved in its calls to swarm a Detroit tabulation center. “They can remove our content but will never silence our VOICES!” the page proclaimed before it was booted by around noon on Thursday.
The same tabulation center was targeted in additional posts alleging attempted theft, including in a Facebook group counting among its administrators Meshawn Maddock, a district GOP chairwoman in Michigan who helped organize protests against stay-at-home orders earlier this year. Maddock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The proliferation of protests decrying alleged fraud represent a show of force by pro-Trump media, which worked in tandem with conservative advocacy groups to spread word of the street actions. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, shared details about a Pennsylvania protest where an organizer told prospective participants to “be prepared to stay for as long as possible.” The Gateway Pundit website provided a calendar of scheduled rallies. The website for the War Room: Pandemic podcast run by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former 2016 campaign manager, speculated about whether it was “Game-on for the Coup?” and told visitors, “The Fight is Now,” as it provided a link to protests organized by FreedomWorks.
The Tea Party Patriots shared details about those FreedomWorks-backed protests and other efforts with its 1.3 million Facebook followers late Wednesday. “Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia hang in the balance and with them, the Presidency,” the Tea Party Patriots wrote. “Our future depends on the American people rallying to Protect the Vote and Stop the Steal!”
Peter Vicenzi, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, defended conservatives’ efforts Thursday. “Any implication that these demonstrations aren’t a legitimate activity is offensive, since this is their civic duty to ensure that we have a free and fair election,” he said in a statement.
Protests in particular long have vexed Facebook. Russian agents who weaponized the site in the 2016 race relied on Facebook events to stir up real-world tensions. The coronavirus pandemic exposed these vulnerabilities once again, after conservative organizers – some with ties to Trump and his campaign – tapped the platform in an attempt to rally people against state public-health restrictions. Facebook ultimately ended up incubating some of the tensest demonstrations across the country, including in Michigan, later resulting in the arrest of three individuals who targeted the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
A.J. Bauer, a visiting assistant professor in New York University’s department of media, culture and communication, said some of the protest activity on Facebook does not reflect an organic groundswell of support but the work of a “tightly networked set of Trump-orbit” influencers, including on the photo-sharing app Instagram, which Facebook also owns.
“They need something to queue up their relevance in the event Trump loses,” Bauer said, “and they’re leaning into grievances about the election being stolen.”
By The Washington Post · Heather Kelly · TECHNOLOGY SAN FRANCISCO – This Election Day, tech companies are preparing for the worst.
Whether it’s a candidate prematurely attempting to declare victory or regular users threatening violence, each company has been piecing together policies to prevent confusion on Election Day and after. In addition to staffing up teams to monitor posts starting Tuesday, the companies have also put together plans to address some worst-case scenarios.
One of the biggest concerns misinformation experts say they have is President Donald Trump or other candidates in federal, state or local races incorrectly declaring they have won an election when officials either haven’t declared a winner or have called the race for their opponent. The pandemic means a record number of people voted by mail, and some state laws don’t allow those votes to be counted until after polls close Tuesday. That could mean there’s a delay of days or longer before races can be called, creating an opportunity for confusion.
Here’s what each company has said they are planning.
– Twitter
Election results: Twitter, a favorite of obsessive news followers and Trump, will have an “Election Hub” on top of most U.S. users’ home timelines starting Tuesday. It isn’t an elaborate results page with a map like you’ll find on Google or Facebook, but the hub will show tweets and information from reliable news sources. The company will consider a race called when a result is confirmed by a state’s election officials or two of these news sources: ABC, the Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, FoxNews or NBC News.
Prematurely declaring victory: If a candidate tries to claim they have won a race before Twitter’s system has confirmed it, or if a candidate claims they won a race the official sources say they lost, Twitter will add a label that hides the original tweet. It will warn that the information is inaccurate or that the race has been called differently. If someone tries to retweet it anyway, they’ll be greeted with yet another warning with a link to learn more but will still be able to share it. The label will also apply to similar tweets if they’re going viral or if they come from U.S. accounts with more than 100,000 followers, including news outlets and journalists.
Misinformation or calls for violence: Other types of misinformation will also get labels, including tweets that encourage violence or qualify as voter intimidation. The site has started showing two warnings to all users ahead of the election, on top of the feed and in relevant searches. One says there may be misleading information about voting by mail, and the other warns there could be a delay getting final election results. Both link to pages with more information.
It is also adding features to try to slow the spread of viral posts, including asking people to add a comment to any retweets before sharing and adding more information to trending topics. These will be in place at least through the end of the week.
– Facebook and Instagram
Election results: Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram will have election information centers on the tops of their apps and web pages to show results when they’re confirmed and warnings before that. The services will show a notification when the polls first close that says, “Votes are still being counted,” or “Too early to call” until their chosen sources, Reuters and the National Election Pool, call a race. The company says that for the presidential race, it will need a consensus from those sources and six major media publications with their own “decision desks.”
Prematurely declaring victory: If a candidate or related group, like a political party, tries to declare victory before that time, Facebook will not remove their posts. Instead, it will add a warning label below their post that says votes are still being counted and link to its information center.
Misinformation or calls for violence: Facebook is using a system to flag posts that could go viral to check them and slow misinformation from spreading. It will also stop running political ads but not until after polls have closed. To try to control the spread of misinformation and address other potential issues, the company has an Election Operations Center for rapid responses.
– Google search
Election results: Google is known for showing its own versions of search results, and election results are no different. It will display an in-depth information panel above relevant search results, which will relay election information from the AP. It will include a U.S. map and the ability to view results for state races and ballot measures.
Misinformation and premature declarations of victory: Google will not be taking additional measures on any organic search results that might include misinformation, such as prematurely declaring victory for one candidate, relying instead on its existing system for surfacing reliable results.
The company will take a much more proactive approach to information in its ads. It will ban all ads related to the U.S. election after polls close Nov. 3, and it expects the ban to last at least a week. The ad rule is part of the company’s “sensitive events” policy and will cover any ad that mentions a candidate, a political party or an election, among other election-related content.
– Google News
Election results: Unlike Google Search, the company’s news page will not show election results or have its own election information box. Google News does have a topic page for the 2020 election that just displays election-related news stories.
Misinformation and premature declarations of victory: Like Google Search, it will not take any additional steps against news stories that prematurely call the election, such as labeling or removing them. Instead, like Google’s organic search results, the company will rely on its existing algorithms for showing more authoritative sources.
– YouTube
Election results: YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, will not add an information panel on its home page, but it will show one that includes election results from AP when searching for election-related terms. It will also appear under election-related videos and link back to the main Google election page.
Misinformation and premature declarations of victory: Starting Tuesday, all election videos on YouTube will get a label saying election results may not be final, which will link to Google’s main results page. That includes content about a candidate prematurely declaring they won an election, according to the company.
More than a quarter of adults get news on YouTube, according to a Pew Research Center study, though results often include videos from “independent” channels not linked to an established news organization. To minimize disinformation, the site prioritizes results from official news outlets and organizations in searches and recommendations for important topics such as voting by mail. It will not show any political ads after polls close and says it will enforce its community guidelines regardless of who violates them.
– Apple News
Election results: Apple News will have an election hub starting Tuesday. It is working with news and polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight on content and will use AP as its official source for election results.
Misinformation and premature declarations of victory: The company says it uses human editors to do things such as manage the results page and choose the top five stories shown in the News app, which can prevent misinformation from being automatically surfaced. If any of its publishing partners do publish misinformation, Apple News can limit their visibility but does not typically remove stories from the app. That includes stories that prematurely declare winners in any state or federal races.
– TikTok
Election results: TikTok will have a special election information page, but it won’t be pinned to the top of the app for everyone to see. Instead, it only will show up under any election-related content or on top of relevant searches. On Election Day, the page will include a map and real-time election results from the AP.
Misinformation and premature declarations of victory: Any disinformation confirmed to be false by its fact-checking partners will be removed, and any premature claims of victory will be made harder to find. TikTok does not allow political advertising.
– Snapchat
Election results: Snapchat will not have a special center or hub to show election results.
Misinformation and premature declarations of victory: The messaging app is not a place where content typically goes viral. Its discover page, which includes content only from partners such as news organizations and approved public figures, will not allow posts that include election misinformation or share, without context, news of a premature declaration of victory.
ABB chooses Ericsson for Thailand’s 5G ‘revolution’
Nov 03. 2020Gianandrea Bruzzone, left, country managing director for ABB Thailand and Nadine Allen, head of Ericsson Thailand
By The Nation
Customers of ABB Thailand will get a boost from Ericsson’s 5G, under the first such partnership in Asia Pacific.
The move, announced on Tuesday, is part of a global strategic partnership between the two companies signed in 2019.
Under the deal, Ericsson will become ABB’s “Preferred Connectivity Partner”, enabling them to accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises across Thailand and boost support for ABB’s customers with 5G.
Nadine Allen, head of Ericsson Thailand said: “Our partnership with ABB will enable us to take the full benefit of 5G connectivity to enterprises across a broad range of industries, including manufacturing, airports, ports, oil and gas and mining. 5G networks will be as important for industrial enterprises as 4G is indispensable for smartphone users.”
The focus areas of the partnership include ABB’s Robotics & Discrete Automation, Industrial Automation and Motion business areas, as well as ABB AbilityTM Platform Services.
The collaboration will cover, for example, use cases such as 5G enabled Augmented Reality Lenses for remote commissioning in manufacturing environments. Connectivity for the enterprises will be enabled through Ericsson’s Communication Service Provider partners.
“Powered by 5G, the deployment and operations of large fleets of autonomous machines and robots is becoming a reality. Our partnership in Thailand means we will work together to accelerate the full potential of 5G for industrial manufacturing, opening the door for new digital opportunities in support of Thailand’s adoption of Industry 4.0,” said Gianandrea Bruzzone, country managing director for ABB Thailand.
Nov 01. 2020Murali Aravamudan, left, and Venky Soundararajan are co-founders of Nference, an artificial intelligence start-up that has made headlines for its research on massive data on covid-19. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Adam Glanzman
By The Washington Post · Ariana Eunjung Cha · TECHNOLOGY, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS Early this spring as the pandemic began accelerating, AJ Venkatakrishnan took genetic data from 10,967 samples of the novel coronavirus and fed it into a machine. The Stanford-trained data scientist did not have a particular hypothesis, but he was hoping the artificial intelligence would pinpoint possible weaknesses that could be exploited to develop therapies.
He was awed when the program reported back that the new virus appeared to have a snippet of DNA code – “RRARSAS” – distinct from its predecessor coronaviruses. This sequence, he learned, mimics a protein that helps the human body regulate salt and fluid balance.
Venkatakrishnan, director of scientific research and partnerships at AI start-up Nference, wondered whether this change might allow the virus to act as a kind of Trojan horse. Could this explain its high infection and transmission rates? And perhaps even why people with cardiovascular disease were experiencing more-severe cases, since sodium can impact blood pressure?
“It was a surprise, completely accidental,” he recalled. “The machine just spotted that.”
Millions of gigabytes of data – the equivalent of a modest library – are being generated by the pandemic each day in medical records and other information on infected patients. Blood results. Age, race. Genetic testing. Interventions attempted. Outcomes. Now, nearly 10 months into the outbreak, scientists are starting to make connections in this jumble of letters and numbers with the help of artificial intelligence, leading to new theories about the virus and how to stop it.
While the human brain can process only so much information at a time, machines are whizzes at finding subtle patterns in huge amounts of data, and they are being deployed against covid-19 – the disease caused by the coronavirus – in ways only imagined in the past. Data scientists are aiming AI at some of the coronavirus’s biggest mysteries – why the disease looks so different in children vs. adults, what makes some people “superspreaders” while others don’t transmit the virus at all – and other, lesser questions we have made little headway in understanding.
At Northwestern University, a modeling lab is running large-scale simulations on the effects of travel restrictions and social distancing on infection rates. The U.S. Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory is using AI to home in on the most promising molecules to test in the lab as possible treatments. In Egypt, AI is helping counter coronavirus misinformation in Arabic.
Jason Moore, director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, who is helping put together an international covid-19 data consortium, said that if the virus had hit 20 years ago, the world might have been doomed.
“But I think we have a fighting chance today because of AI and machine learning,” he said.
In April, a computer sorting through medical records confirmed that a lack of smell and taste, which had been reported mostly anecdotally, was one of the earliest symptoms of infection – a discovery that influenced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add anosmia to its list of symptoms. In June, a deep dive into the records of nearly 8,000 patients found that while only a small fraction had obvious and catastrophic blood clots, nearly all had worrisome changes in their blood coagulation.
Other researchers piggybacked on Venkatakrishnan’s finding of the aberrant genetic sequence to understand how the virus binds to cells, and to use that knowledge to develop drugs that aim to reduce transmission.
In a follow-up paper published in September, Venkatakrishnan and his colleagues reported that a computer analysis showed this “evolutionary tinkering” by coronavirus, which appears to have made it appear like a friend instead of a foe to the human immune system, mostly target the lungs and blood vessels – a finding that provides new insights about clinical symptoms seen by doctors at hospitals.
The early progress in AI has been promising, but critics worry that efforts to harness covid-19 data have been disjointed and frustratingly slow. Others are concerned that analyses based on faulty or biased algorithms could exacerbate existing racial gaps and other disparities in health care.
One of the biggest challenges has been that much data remains siloed inside incompatible computer systems, hoarded by business interests and tangled in geopolitics. Academic researchers, medical societies and private companies have launched a number of efforts to try to overcome those barriers by creating their own giant databases of health records and other data – but the efforts are slow-going.
The largest – a $20 million, four-year project by the National Institutes of Health led by scientist Bill Kapogiannis – is not expected to yield results until December at the earliest. But Kapogiannis said he is optimistic the pace of science will accelerate with computing power behind it.
“The human brain becomes pretty quickly overwhelmed by the permutations and combinations of these things,” he said. “But when you put AI into it, it can run countless simulations and can home in on important stuff very quickly and effectively.”
Yet with the stakes so enormous, Isaac Kohane, a Harvard bioinformatics researcher, said the world is not moving fast enough to tap into the power of electronic medical records and other data. He argues that “parochial interests have slowed our national response.”
For example, reviewing data from 96 hospitals in several countries from Jan. 1 to April 11, scientists found that many patients had “really off-the-charts” readings of blood clotting, he said. But because of the difficulty of consolidating all that information, the analysis was not conducted until early summer – delaying the use of blood thinners at some institutions. He worries the wait cost thousands of lives.
“It’s not that we are failing to learn from our data,” Kohane said. “We are not learning fast enough.”
– – –
The dawn of AI in medicine was supposed to have come and gone.
In 2008, Google rolled out a flu tracker it said would revolutionize our public health response to infectious diseases by predicting outbreaks before they occurred. In 2014 and 2015, IBM made headlines when it brought Watson – its “Jeopardy!”-winning, recipe-making, call-center-innovating computer brain – into cancer care and promised it would upend treatment by having a computer recommend personalized plans for every patient based on their histories, genetic data and other information.
But those efforts wildly overpromised, and the second machine age, as scholars called it, failed to materialize amid technical failures, skepticism from some doctors and a clash among scientists over what is perhaps the most fundamental part of the scientific process.
The traditionalists believed science should begin with hypotheses that should be systematically tested. What AI researchers were doing – starting with the data and then looking for correlations – was derisively dismissed as “p-hacking” by the critics. Popularized in an article in Nature News, the term refers to the manipulation of data to get the desired statistical significance, or what’s known as the “p-value” of an idea.
It was not until relatively recently that AI became more accepted as a tool for pinpointing “signals” to guide researchers, rather than as a method for generating definitive conclusions. Covid-19 has been a big part of that change.
One of the most ambitious new data projects is led by Maryellen Giger, a radiology professor at the University of Chicago. Giger is working with the three major medical-imaging societies to create an open-source repository of 60,000 covid-19 images – with a focus on chest radiographs.
In the United States, the dominant method of diagnosing coronavirus illness has been through polymerase chain reaction tests, which measure the presence of viral DNA in the nasal cavity. The shortcomings of that strategy have been well documented; the tests are only somewhat reliable, and there has been a huge lag time to get results in some areas, sometimes making them useless in controlling transmission.
During the crisis in Wuhan, in contrast, some Chinese doctors used chest images as part of their diagnoses and found that even those without symptoms sometimes had the telltale “ground-glass opacities” that showed their infection.
Giger is looking to test those anecdotal reports and said early AI analyses that look pixel by pixel suggest that the images might be useful not only as a diagnostic tool but also as a way of monitoring the progression of illness.
“You can see the creep of the disease as you look at these images,” she said.
In another prominent effort, this one based at Harvard, Kohane and his collaborators have put together a data-sharing consortium of nearly 200 medical institutions with 50,000 patients. Many of the insights have been retrospective. The degree of kidney damage could be seen in the data as far back as February. But when the pandemic hit New York state in March and April, doctors were taken by surprise at the number of patients who needed dialysis.
Perhaps the most eye-opening finding for him, Kohane said, is that the course of the disease appears remarkably similar across countries despite huge differences in death rates – suggesting that treatment, age of the population and preexisting conditions may be responsible for varying mortality, rather than something about the virus itself.
“If you had asked me in April, ‘Is there something different about the virus across countries?’ I would have said yes. But what came out of our analysis is remarkable consistency,” he said.
Kohane said the coronavirus has underscored the need for health systems to pivot to a more predictive approach to medicine.
“We don’t wait for the hurricane to hit Florida before we start preparing,” he said. A scientist might look at storms forming in the Sahara, which can turn into tropical cyclones and march across the Atlantic, to figure out what is coming next in the Caribbean and the United States.
“This is an opportunity to realize how seriously we need to take this function of monitoring our own health-care systems with the same responsibility a meteorologist feels for their city,” Kohane said.
Adrienne Randolph, a critical-care specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, is helping coordinate an effort across more than 70 hospitals to look at why children appear to be affected by the virus so differently than adults are.
More than 1,000 children are in their database who were hospitalized for covid-19 or the related multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). With no obvious clue to what might predict MIS-C, the researchers are conducting genetic sequencing and regularly monitoring blood samples for antibodies and other changes to try to better define the course of the illness.
One critical and time-sensitive question they are exploring is whether a subgroup of children may be more vulnerable to adverse effects from vaccines. One theory of MIS-C suggests it is the antibody response that upsets the immune system to create the illness.
“We want to make sure to anticipate what we can,” she said, “such as, could a vaccine trigger MIS-C?”
– – –
In April, Leo Anthony Celi, a critical-care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology AI researcher, watched in horror as the pandemic unfolded in New York City – “when we were really in hell,” he said. He saw the bodies in trailers and monitored the count of ventilators and beds.
He was especially concerned about rationing protocols that could determine who lived and who died. The algorithms were built on data showing Black and Hispanic patients dying more, so he worried they would flag such patients as being at higher risk of death. That might result in doctors being more likely to withhold resources from them – sealing their fate.
“Algorithms are not perfect scorers,” he said. “They make mistakes all the time. If you apply these to covid, you might identify someone as being likely to die but they will actually live.”
Celi said that an AI analysis of covid-19 mortality data, under review at a journal, shows that ventilator and bed allocation plans in many states do not accurately predict who might benefit most from treatment. He is urging states and hospitals to rework those plans for a second wave of the pandemic, with an eye toward minimizing biases.
Moore, the Penn bioinformatics expert, has similar concerns about analyses on the efficacy of therapies.
“If you’re only studying primarily Caucasian populations and want to apply that nationally, that may not work as well on a more diverse population,” he said. “AI algorithms themselves can be biased, and can pick and inflate biases in the data. Those are the things I worry about.”
– – –
Cambridge, Mass.-based Nference is made up of 250 computer programmers, PhDs in medical or biological sciences, and other specialists. Before the pandemic, the company, which raised nearly $145 million from venture capital funds and other investors, had secured partnerships with several prestigious institutions – most prominently the Mayo Clinic and Janssen Pharmaceuticals – to help them manage and analyze their medical data.
The company’s previous focus was cancer. But since April, it has made headlines for its work on covid-19.
In peer-reviewed publications, the team has confirmed reports out of Britain that steroid use could be effective in treating severely impacted covid-19 patients experiencing respiratory distress. It found that a small percentage of people might be long-term “shedders” of the virus – for up to 22 days. And it identified existing childhood vaccines that may provide some protection against covid-19 infection.
It has also partnered with Minnesota state to develop a way to predict covid-19 hot spots so that public health resources such as test sites could be better deployed.
In addition to clinical data, the company is analyzing 50,000 public documents from academic journals, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other public sources of data on covid-19 – many multiples of what the average researcher can follow and digest.
Venky Soundararajan, co-founder of Nference and a biological engineer, said that seeing the scope of the information gathered on covid-19 makes him hopeful and appreciative that so many minds around the world – both human and artificial – are working on the problem.
“It makes you very humble very quickly,” he said. “What you know is only an atom in the universe of what’s out there.”
First drone goes flying to the North Pole on a climate mission
Nov 01. 2020A 2006 file photo of the sea ice off the coast of the Bache Peninsula on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada shows the white surfaces of Arctic ice reflecting solar radiation back into the atmosphere, while the ocean’s blue surfaces absorb it. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alex Morales.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Laura Millan Lombrana · WORLD, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT Roberta Pirazzini set out an Arctic expedition to do something no one had ever tried before: fly a drone near the North Pole.
Sensors on the drone would assess sunlight reflected from the ice. This measurement, known as surface albedo, is key to understanding how much solar radiation is absorbed by the Earth and how much is reflected back into the atmosphere. It’s one of the scientific puzzles that can help predict how fast sea ice will melt.
But flying a drone over the planet’s northernmost reaches is no simple feat. Pirazzini and a colleague, Henna-Reetta Hannula, spent months learning to fly at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, where both are on staff as scientists. Technicians designed and built a sophisticated navigation system capable of handling extreme weather.
The scientists and their drones then joined the largest Arctic expedition in history aboard the Polarstern, an icebreaker carrying dozens of researchers on a year-long mission. The pair had also brought along a smaller practice drone that could fly inside their tiny cabin, the only chance they’d have to keep their skills sharp in the weeks of sailing before finally stepping onto the ice.
Right away, Pirazzini ran into the same problems that have beset Arctic explorers for two centuries: treacherous navigation conditions and technology that buckles in the deep cold.
Drones and helicopters have trouble near the North Pole because global positioning satellites suffer small uncertainties at extreme northern latitudes. This creates mounting confusion for navigation the closer a pilot gets to the North Pole, and Pirazzini’s drones would be operating closer than any before.
The navigation nightmare has claimed another drone earlier in the expedition. The drone took off from the ship, went in a completely uncontrolled direction and crashed. Pirazzini was terrified her albedo-measuring drone would fall victim next, and her fears were confirmed as soon as she stepped onto the ice. The navigation system on the main drone wasn’t working, meaning she and Hannula would need to manually calculate distances, direction, altitude and wind speed.
“The freezing conditions were our main enemy, not only for the ice in the blade” of the drone’s rotors, “but in our fingers,” Pirazzini says, her voice cracking over a satellite phone during the Polarstern’s return voyage earlier this month. “You need very delicate, small motions to operate the drone,” she says. “When your hand is freezing you lose sensitivity, your fingers can’t control the features anymore.”
Fog would turn into ice around the drone’s blades. Wind gusts stronger than eight meters per hour would ground the drone. Still, the two scientists managed to conduct 18 flights over three weeks. Albedo measurements captured by Pirazzini, 49, and Hannula, 33, will now be analyzed as part of multinational effort to understand how warming temperatures are affecting the Arctic-a scientific race against climate change itself.
Earth’s northern icecap is heating about three times faster than the rest of the planet, disrupting a fragile ecosystem. Arctic sea ice, which melts during the summer and freezes back in winter months, shrank to the second-lowest level on record in September, the month when ice cover is usually at its lowest. Only in 2012 was Arctic sea ice cover smaller.
Anomalously warm conditions in the Siberian Arctic, which suffered an unprecedented heatwave during the first half of the year, are now making it harder for the ice to reform. Arctic sea ice is currently at the lowest level for this time of the year since satellite monitoring began in 1979-37% below the historical average.
“By this time in 2012 the ice had started to regrow,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director at Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “It’s a little early to tell what implications this will have for the rest of the season but there are likely to be impacts for the marine food web.”
Back in August when Pirazzini’s drone flights started, sea ice in the Arctic had dropped to the lowest level on record for that month. These alarmingly low ice levels made it possible for the Polarstern to reach the North Pole from Norway’s Fram Strait in just six days. “There were areas of open water everywhere, it was very easy to go there,” Pirazzini says. “That’s not nice if you think about the future of the Arctic. It’s a very fragile environment that will change without return.”
Measuring albedo becomes more important as the ice shrinks. The white surfaces of Arctic ice reflect solar radiation back into the atmosphere, while the ocean’s blue surfaces absorb it. Not all ice is equally reflective, however, and scientists are trying to figure out just how much solar radiation is being absorbed by ice sitting below shallow melt waters that have been spreading as temperatures stay warmer.
While sea-ice area can be monitored by satellites, other measurements that are crucial to understanding the speed of melting can only be obtained closer to the ground. This more granular data is essential to determining other drivers of climate change, such as how heat transfers through ice and into the atmosphere and water.
Traditionally, scientists have taken albedo readings with airplanes and helicopters. But drones are cheaper, can fly under worse weather conditions and below even low clouds. Pirazzini’s flights ranged between five and 30 meters over the ice. “Drone technology is making progress every month, every year,” she says. “We are at the infancy of this business, and I believe it will expand very much because these are unique and needed measurements.”
In the Arctic, operating drones far from other scientists sometimes involved risk. Pirazzini and Hannula had to cross a fracture in the ice using a pontoon as a raft. At one point Pirazzini was kneeling on a raft over icy seawater, holding the carefully-wrapped drone, while Hannula helped her moor to safety using a long stick.
The drones at times proved more resilient to the rough Arctic weather than some of the expedition’s other flying objects. Two tethered balloons nicknamed Beluga and Miss Piggy would be sent to take cover from hard conditions in bright orange tent known as Balloon Town. “Sometimes Miss Piggy was misbehaving and flying too low,” Pirazzini says laughing. “We would need to make sure the drone wasn’t in the area.”
The scientific arsenal on the Polarstern included a helicopter and many weather balloons equipped with a radio system that collected and transmitted data on temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed. A total of 1,574 balloons were launched-up eight per day over 12 months-and scientists often decorated them with names and birthday messages for their families.
Hundreds of researchers from 20 countries took turns on the Polarstern for the MOSAiC mission, an acronym for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate. Led by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, it was the first expedition in modern history to spend a full winter close to the North Pole. The mission, which had a budget of more than 140 million euros ($165 million), ended on October 12 after 389 days at sea.
“Climate change will probably force the organization of more expeditions like this one because there will be an urge to do something, to understand the implications,” Pirazzini says. “This expedition has drawn new paths for research. I feel I have the responsibility to make the most out of it.”
Photo Credit: Meteorological Department 
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