Can wearable technology help predict symptoms of flu? Some researchers are trying to make that happen using biosensors.
The NASA team running Curiosity rover is operating it from their homes.
GitHub is making its private repositories free for all, and cutting it paid plans by half.
Medium is in the middle of a content moderation conundrum after non-experts influence readers about COVID-19.
Finally, a brief review of the OnePlus 8.
Wearables to predict COVID-19 symptoms
Some researchers at Stanford are building a new algorithm to help predict COVID-19 before symptoms appear, Wired reported.
Michael Synder, a biology researcher at Stanford launched a new project to use algorithms, trained on health patterns, to interpret data from consumer wearables, including Fitbit and Apple Watch.
Along with a team of about dozen researchers, Synder is looking to expand this study beyond COVID-19, to other infections to help track onset of illness using biosensors.
The team will use heart rate data, collected from wearables, to predict changes in health.
Heart rate acts as a physiological signal, and any change in the baseline, translates a possible onset of some kind of infection.
Even when the wearable doesn’t record a baseline heart rate, a variation in the measurement is most telling, according to Synder.
His team is looking to use data from participants who wish to share data from their smartwatches, or those who are interested in wearing a new one to establish baseline heart rate.
With that data, the Stanford team will build a new algorithm to spot changes in heart rate data. A change will translate to a possible start to fight an infection. The algorithm will trigger a message to the user.
Several other researchers that Wired spoke to were careful not to over-promise. They suggested that even though changes in physiological signals can be interpreted from heart rate data, those may not be specific to coronavirus.
GitHub is now free for all teams
Microsoft-owned software hosting site GitHub on Tuesday announced that all of its core features are free for all users.
It is also making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available for all GitHub accounts.
That means that if your organisation wants to use GitHub for private development, they don’t need to subscribe to the platform’s paid plans.
This will also enable teams to manage their work in one place.
“We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers love,” chief executive Nat Friedman said.
For teams that wish to use advanced and enterprise features, or personalised support can upgrade for half the price.
GitHub has cut its monthly paid Team plan to $4 per user from $9/user.
“We’re switching GitHub from a pay-for-privacy model to pay-for-features, what’s typically called freemium — you may have heard of it,” Friedman said in an interview to techcrunch .
“The way I think about it is we want every developer and team on earth to be able to use GitHub for their development, whether it’s private or public development.”
Currently, the platform has over 40 million developers. And they are projecting it will get to 100 million in five years.
NASA’s Curiosity team is operating the rover from home
The COVID-19 outbreak has shut many people indoors, including scientists operating the Curiosity Mars rover.
The team is dealing with the same challenges that professionals around the world are facing while they are working from home, with an exception that they are operating on Mars
On March 20, when the rover’s operations were planned, the team was not present at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where the mission is based.
It was the team’s first day of work remotely. They sent commands asking the rover to drill a rock sample at a location called “Edinburgh.”
Two days later, Curiosity finished the task.
That’s when the team decided to operate fully remotely for two more weeks.
Headsets, monitors and other basic equipment were delivered to them by JPL, except the special goggles.
The goggles are used to get a better reveal of the contours of Mars’ landscape. It rapidly shifts views between left- and right-eye to give a better idea to help drive Curiosity and to see how far the rover can extend its arm.
But these googles need advanced graphic cards used in high-performance computers at JPL. So, they won’t work in home PCs.
To view 3D images on their laptops, the NASA team switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses.
They work just as well for planning drives and arm movements, but not as immersive or comfortable as the special goggles, the space agency said in a statement.
The team’s second major challenge was programming sequence of actions for the rover. A single command needs coordination and steady communication from over 20 people.
"We're usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,” team leader Alicia Allbaugh said.
“People are talking in small groups and to each other from across the room,"
Now, the team is holding several video conferences at once while using messaging apps.
It takes extra effort to make sure everybody understands one another; on average, each day's planning takes one or two more hours than it normally would, Allbaugh added.
The change in work puts some limits on the number of commands sent to Curiosity each day. But for most part, rover is as scientifically productive as ever.
Medium’s content moderation conundrum during COVID-19
Since COVID-19 crisis began, several readers flocked to Medium, an online publishing platform, to read posts about the coronavirus.
One of the most-read pieces on the topic was written by Tomás Pueyo, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Pueyo is not an expert in medicine or epidemiology, but he delves a lot on data. And, he sourced information from Johns Hopkins’ repository on GitHub to write his piece.
His post, “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now,” garnered was viewed more than 40 million times, making it the most widely read post about the coronavirus.
The post was quoted in mainstream journals and newspapers.
He argued that the coronavirus issue was worse than what most people knew.
A day after Pueyo’s post, another Silicon Valley technologist shared his contrarian view of the COVID-19 situation.
In a piece titled: “Evidence over hysteria – COVID-19,” Aaron Ginn said that the United States needs to reopen its economy.
Ginn, too, used data from Johns Hopkins to make his point. His argument sounded compelling to a non-expert, TheVerge reported.
On the platform, Ginn’s piece was read alongside articles from epidemiologists and doctors.
His claim was later debunked by Carl T. Bergstrom, an infectious disease expert.
Ginn’s post was later taken down from Medium.
This situation has made Medium to look deeper into aspects of misinformation and content moderation on its platform.
While the format was built to allow everyone to share their unique perspectives, now those points of views are judged by the platform itself.
When TheVerge asked about Ginn’s post being taken down, the company’s head of communications Sandee Roston said:
“We’re giving careful scrutiny to coronavirus-related content on Medium to help stem misinformation that could be detrimental to public safety. The Ginn post was removed based on its violation of our Rules, specifically the risk analysis framework we use for ‘Controversial, Suspect and Extreme content.’”
OnePlus 8 Review
Here’s the review by TheVerge on the soon-to-be-launched OnePlus 8.
The OnePlus 8 is due for launch from April 21st in the UK, and April 29th in the US.
It starts at $699 for the model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. The step-up model costs $799, with a 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Both the version are powered by a Snapdragon 865, and have 5G and Wi-Fi 6 option.
The phone is equipped with a three-way switch to set it to silent or vibrate. The device does not have a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The OnePlus 8 has a 6.55-inch 20:9 10800 display, and comes with a 90Hz display.
The phone has a 4,300mAh battery, and it supports OnePlus’ Warp Charge 30T standard. However, it doesn’t support wireless charging.
Coming to the camera feature, the pone has a triple-camera set up on the rear consisting of a main 48-megapixel f/1.75 camera, an ultrawide f/2.2 16-megapixel, and a 2-megapixel f/2.4 camera. The front-camera is 16-megapixel.
