Books and Coffee – Page 48 – Hints on how A.E. Graves spends her imaginary spare time

May 3, 2020May 3, 2020

News: State Kindness in the time of Pandemics

I haven’t mentioned it before, but my home state has also participated in supporting not only New York, but other states that need ventilators by loaning out 500 to those states that need them.

Early last month, the San Francisco Chronicle’s article, California lending 500 ventilators to distribute to hardest-hit states by Alexei Koseff (April 6, 2020), had some good quotes about states doing right by each other, including a report on Oregon’s loan of 140 ventilators to NYC, and Washington’s return of those it borrowed from the federal government.

The quotes I like are:

“I wish I could solve that for everybody, and to the extent we can, we will,” Newsom said. “This is the state of California. We have an abundant mind-set and we’re a well-resourced state.”

I like the implication that, because we do well, we SHOULD use our position to help others. (The article notes that our early prevention efforts have been successful enough for us to step in for the later-acting states.)

Also:

“We’re Americans, first and foremost,” he said. “As a nation-state, we can do certain things, where we can punch above our weight. We carry a big weight. But to the extent that other Americans need our support, our largesse, to the extent that we have the resources, we’re going to be there for as many people as we possibly can.”

This acknowledges our size and strengths – we are a state with a bigger economy than the UK, India, or France the last time I checked (2018 in Business Insider and currently in Wikipedia’s Economy of California article), and this gives us the opportunity to be a force for good.

The world needs more forces for good.

May 2, 2020May 3, 2020

News: Human Kindness in the time of Pandemics

I got the warm-fuzzies from seeing photos and reports on Twitter about all of the ambulances driving cross-country to help out in NYC. It restored some of my faith in humans. I should share that feeling, so here’s a flurry of general human goodness for you, just a sample of the volunteerism directed toward NYC. (I <3 NY!)

Ohio:

Emotional video: Cleveland man records EMT wife, crew members leaving for NYC in long line of ambulances
CLEVELAND, Ohio (WJW) – Many Americans are being urged to stay at home during this coronavirus pandemic. But many essential workers can’t – and some are so courageous that they’re volunteering their expertise to help on the front lines.

Nebraska:

Scribner paramedics deployed to New York City to battle COVID-19 pandemic
Joe Roberts had never been to New York City prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. He never experienced the shoulder-to-shoulder stuffy traffic that filled Times Square or the packed parkways that connected the city’s five bureaus.

He remembers state troopers pulling into the median to take photos on his phone as Robert’s convoy of ambulances crossed into New Jersey. He remembers the cars that would drive alongside the ambulances to honk and wave at the first responders as they entered the city.

“I get choked up just thinking about it,” he said. “People would walk up to the truck and just thank them for coming. To have people come up to you as you’re sitting on the corner and just saying thank you, it’s just so hard to put into words.”
-Joe Roberts, volunteer paramedic / regional manager of an ambulance company

Virginia:

Fredericksburg-area EMTs volunteering in NYC see warm welcome, ‘a lot of sleepless hours’
Matthew Hebert’s shifts as a volunteer EMT in New York City are supposed to be 12 hours, but he hasn’t worked a shift that “short” since he arrived April 1. “The shortest shift has been 16 hours and the longest was 26 hours,” said Hebert, 28, during a brief break before taking more 911 calls.

Two hundred and fifty ambulances and 500 EMTs and paramedics from around the country have traveled to New York, which has been a hot spot for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

“People are here from California, Texas, Colorado and honestly every state in the U.S.,” Hebert said.
-Matthew Hebert, volunteer EMT

There are a lot of these… I’m just selecting a few.

It isn’t just ambulances, either: medical volunteers are arriving by convoy and bus. There are lots of hometown stories about one or two people volunteering, but here’s one complete with flags and police/fire escorts about a nurse convoy (one of several) from upstate New York – and yes, they got up on a crane and hung a flag, because they wanted to see them off in STYLE:

Area crews honor Upstate nurses headed to NYC | X101 Always Classic
(update 1:35 pm) Around 8:00 this morning, a caravan of 12 vehicles began a trip carrying 25 nurses from Upstate Medical Center to their eventual destination at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. The special escort began at the hospital and continued along Interstate 81 led by the Upstate Hospital Police and …

May 2, 2020

Science: Coronavirus Vaccine Approaches

As someone who has long conversations with a biologist friend about protein sciences, I have many opportunities to discuss and ask about science. Well, biology pal PYT came through by recommending this excellent feature in the April 30th issue of the science magazine Nature.

The race for coronavirus vaccines: a graphical guide
More than 90 vaccines are being developed against SARS-CoV-2 by research teams in companies and universities across the world. Researchers are trialling different technologies, some of which haven’t been used in a licensed vaccine before. At least six groups have already begun injecting formulations into volunteers in safety trials; others have started testing in animals.

May 1, 2020

Coffee: funny criticism of a fashionable drink

I love coffee. I love reading. I love people making fun of badly made coffee. So this article works for me.

Perspective | Dalgona coffee is sweet, milky and pretty. It’s also not for coffee lovers.
My hands are shaking as I prepare a second batch of dalgona coffee, the quarantine-chic drink and the latest piece of evidence that we have no idea what to do with ourselves during a pandemic.

The quote I like best:

I hate to sound like a snob, but when I tried the Via coffee straight, it tasted like dirt, burned rubber and imminent death. Via Instant, at least this version, is to coffee what “Jaws 3-D” is to cinema.
– Tim Carman, Washington Post

I may even forgive him for the lack of Oxford comma, eventually.

May 1, 2020

News/Humor: Do Not Apply Lava To Your Skin

This started out as a sort of joke, but morphed into an excuse to learn about archaea!! 🙂

Can Lava Kill The Coronavirus? An Investigation
I was recently asked, via email, if lava can kill the new coronavirus. It can, but there’s a good reason why no-one is using it in the fight against the ongoing pandemic: nothing else would survive the encounter with molten rock either.

Archaea are interesting prokaryotes, and I’m happy this inspired me to read more about them – not just about the extremophiles, but (via Wikipedia) about their abundance just about everywhere, including inside us.

April 29, 2020February 15, 2021

News: SF COVID-19 Data

My City believes in data! And it even develops graphics to display it so it can be easily interpreted and visualized.

This is a serious topic, and I appreciate how the City is making such an effort to be sure we UNDERSTAND it.

San Francisco COVID-19 Data and Reports

San Francisco’s response to the coronavirus emergency is grounded in data, science and facts. Because of this, we took decisive action early on. Learn more about our response and see the data in context.

April 29, 2020February 15, 2021

News/Humor: Foraging Under Stress

I had another one of those trips to the grocery store that made me never want to set foot in it again. There are no delivery appointments available, so it is THE option if I am trying to obtain food within a short distance of my home. It is a risk, because there have been more than 160 confirmed COVID-19 cases in my zip code, which means that neighbors have been, and perhaps continue to be, exposed. Each visit seems slightly worse than the previous one in terms of waiting to get inside (longer), existential dread (more), awkwardness in reaching for an item near other people also reaching (constant), and a lack of accommodation for a minor wrist problem (paper handle bags are a ticket to unavailable physical therapy for me; yes, repacking my groceries outside without touching any environmental surfaces or standing near anyone else in public on a busy street is icing on a sand-based cake).

The staff are hard-working and polite; the rules are well-intentioned. Yet, it still feels like the ordeal dial will turn up each time I go, and my next visit may somehow involve needing to defeat a video game villain in hand-to-hand combat for the right to purchase a pineapple that may or may not be in stock. [Imagine the little 8 bit video game victory song here, with a sad sound if there are no pineapples…]

I’m posting this perspective piece because I find it relatable:

Perspective | The grocery store has become our anxiety-filled hellscape

Grocery shopping used to be a mundane errand, but now we’re all feeling the stress. By Emily Heil, Reporter, April 28, 2020 at 4:00 a.m. PDT

I am doing okay, and I know how lucky I am to be able to keep myself well-supplied: I just hadn’t expected that needing fruit could ruin my day, that I would be rationing oranges in 2020 to avoid going outside, or that my blood pressure would creep upward whenever there’s only one banana left on the counter.

April 28, 2020April 28, 2020

Book: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

Cover of You Look Like a Think and I Love You by Janelle Shane

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
by Janelle Shane, Ph.D.
published by Voracious (Little, Brown and Company)
2019

I’ve enjoyed Janelle Shane’s site, aiweirdness.com, for some time, and when she mentioned that she had published a book on the same themes, I couldn’t resist it.

What are her themes? Machine learning, mostly, and how difficult it is to train a neural network to do what you really want it to do. You THINK you are training your software to recognize cancerous lumps, and it does well with your training data, but it doesn’t work so well in real life. In retrospect, you trained it with images of cancerous lumps that have rulers next to them to show the size of the lump, while no one cares (or measures) what size benign lumps are. Your program relied on the rulers to know whether or not a lump is cancerous: ruler = yes, no ruler = no. You invented… a RULER-DETECTOR.

Why I am reading about this geeky, specialist topic? I have to deal with the limitations of “AI”s of various designs all the time. Voicemail hell? That’s a not-very-intelligent program imitating an AI, possibly with AI voice recognition. Applying for a job? Software is screening my resume. Getting a laboratory test? Software may be screening that for me, too!

If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with your phone, you know that these programs are… not perfect. Depending on whether you have a high or low voice, they may not seem to work at all. My father is still amused that one of his friends couldn’t get her voice assistant on her phone to understand ANYTHING she said, but my father (who sounds like Darth Vader) could ALWAYS be understood. Why? Because it was trained this way.

Janelle Shane finds amusing ways to talk about how neural networks and other near-AI programs work, what they are good at, why they fail at so many tasks, and how the data sets they train on can make them vulnerable to manipulation.

You will laugh, as I did, as an AI trained to generate metal band names learns to generate ice cream flavors! You’ll laugh often, really: Ms. Shane has some good stories, and good quotes from people who fought to teach their AI something specific, and their AI interpreted them literally and won. The challenges she sets up for the simple neural nets she build are VERY FUNNY.

It isn’t just jokes and witty examples: you won’t laugh at the idea of a navigation-bot telling you to drive TOWARD a fire (because there is less traffic in that direction!), nor at racial and gender biases that oblivious employees train software with, nor at the fact that image recognition programs that train on the same free (manipulatable) data sets can be mis-trained to see things that aren’t visible / obvious / correct to humans.

Maybe there’s a rare but catastrophic bug that develops, like the one that affected Siri for a brief period of time, causing her to respond to users saying “Call me an ambulance” with “Okay, I’ll call you ‘an ambulance’ from now on.”
Excerpt From: Janelle Shane. “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/you-look-like-a-thing-and-i-love-you/id1455076486

It is good (and refreshing) to truly think about the serious implications of our rush to be dependent upon machines, and the hazy way we think that machines are neutral decision makers, when nearly every application we have developed for them is not neutral in inputs, programming, or impact.

April 26, 2020February 15, 2021

Architecture: Harpa

There is a lovely photo of Harpa in the book I’m reading, and that made me go looking for additional photos of it… even though I am privileged enough to have seen it in person, I know that people who were wearing better coats than I was during my brief visit likely took better photos of it with real cameras. 🙂

The photo on their website is stunning (and is not the same as in the preview below, at least at the moment), and so I’m sharing that link so you can see it yourself.

Harpa

Harpa is one of Reykjavik‘s greatest and distinguished landmarks. It is a cultural and social centre in the heart of the city.