contact tracing

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pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Bt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; G.W. Rutherford and J.M. Woo, “Contact Tracing and the Control of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection,” JAMA 1988; 259: 3609–3610. 55 F. Fenner et al., Smallpox and Its Eradication, Geneva: World Health Organization, 1988, vol. 6; J.M. Hyman et al., “Modeling the Impact of om Screening and Contact Tracing in Reducing the Spread of HIV,” Mathematical Biosciences 2003; 181: 17–54; M. Begun et al., “Contact Tracing of Tuberculosis: A Systematic Review of Transmission Modelling Studies,” PLOS ONE 2013, 8: e72470; K.T. Eames et al., “Assessing the Role of Contact Tracing in a Suspected H7N2 Influenza A Outbreak in Humans in Wales,” BMC Infectious Diseases 2010; 10: 141; A.

Tuberculosis became the most common reason children were kept from school for long periods in England, prompting the reach of contact tracing to expand further into domestic life. By the time of the tuberculosis outbreak in England during World War I, contact tracing had become common practice in many urban schools.53 In the United States, contact tracing was first proposed as a program in 1937 by surgeon general Thomas Parran to stymie the spread of syphilis among troops, and the program was solidly established by the late 1940s (though Parran was also involved in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study that deliberately left black men untreated for this disease).54 Over the course of the twentieth century, contact tracing has played an important role in the eradication of smallpox and in efforts to control infectious diseases as varied as HIV, tuberculosis, influenza, Ebola, and, of course, COVID-19.55 Nowadays, when people infected with a contagious disease are identified, either because they have symptoms or because tests have come back positive for active infection, specialized personnel interview them comprehensively—even intrusively—to help them recall everyone with whom they might have come into contact during the appropriate time frame of infectiousness.

There was no way for his tiny team to trace them all, even in a state with the lowest case count in the country. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, states introduced a hodgepodge of ways of doing contact tracing and sourcing the requisite labor supply. In Massachusetts, the governor decided to build a “contact tracing army,” and he turned to a local nonprofit, Partners in Health, founded by two friends of mine from medical school, Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl. Using hard-won expertise from doing contact tracing for outbreaks in other parts of the world, the group planned to hire and train a thousand contact tracers who could work from their homes (where they were stuck anyway), each making twenty to thirty calls a day, which meant they could cover up to twenty thousand contacts.


pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And we now have solid evidence that, when paired with vaccines, NPIs could help us eventually eradicate every strain of flu. We should use contact tracing to find superspreaders. Depending on which country you live in, if you tested positive for COVID, you may have been called by someone asking about all the people you might have come into contact with. They probably focused specifically on the forty-eight hours before you first started feeling sick (if you did feel sick). This is the process known as contact tracing. Although it felt new to many people around the world during COVID, contact tracing is actually an old strategy. It was essential to eradicating smallpox in the twentieth century and is also at the center of strategies to fight Ebola, tuberculosis, and HIV in the twenty-first.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT According to the journal Nature: “Why Many Countries Failed at COVID Contact-Tracing—but Some Got It Right,” Nature, Dec. 14, 2020. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In March 2020: Ha-Linh Quach et al., “Successful Containment of a Flight-Imported COVID-19 Outbreak Through Extensive Contact Tracing, Systematic Testing and Mandatory Quarantine: Lessons from Vietnam,” Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease 42 (Aug. 2021). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In two counties: R. Ryan Lash et al., “COVID-19 Contact Tracing in Two Counties—North Carolina, June–July 2020,” MMWR: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 69 (Sept. 25, 2020).

In all, there were 32 cases related to the flight, a small fraction of the cases that would’ve happened if all those passengers and crew members had simply gone on their way. If you read the previous two paragraphs and thought, If anyone calls me about contact tracing, I’m not picking up the phone, you’re not alone. In two counties in North Carolina, many of the contacts who were named never returned the tracer’s phone call. And between a third and half of COVID-infected people who were reached claimed not to have had contact with a single person in the days before they tested positive. But contact tracing will often be an important part of stopping the spread of a disease, which is why we have to figure out how to build trust between public health agencies and the public so that more people will share their contacts.


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

The case of Steve Walsh was an early lesson insofar as it illustrated how just one person could potentially infect large numbers of people who all then had to be contact traced and tested. The importance of contact tracing was highlighted in a report by scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which was published on Friday 7 February, the day after Walsh’s infection had been announced – therefore a timely reminder for the government. It argued that the virus could be contained with a rapid track and trace system, but warned that an inadequate system could lead to infections spreading uncontrollably across the country. ‘Highly effective contact tracing and case isolation is enough to control a new outbreak of COVID-19 within 3 months,’ it said.

Professor Gabriel Scally, a leading public health expert and a former senior civil servant in the Department of Health, said: ‘If I was mobilising as a director of public health for something like the city of Bristol, I would have expected to have maybe between 300 and 500 people just for that place alone working on case identification and contact tracing. I have difficulty understanding why, for example, they weren’t even at a pretty early stage talking about really, really stepping up testing to try and find out where the virus was in a country as big as the UK.’7 Professor John Ashton, a former director of public health in the north-west of England, says the contact tracing could have been taken up by regional health services but they had been run down and restructured in the years before the outbreak.

It meant that Public Health England was highly dependent on its central laboratory in Colindale. ‘We used to have a very strong local network of laboratories, but they’ve allowed many of those to wither away.’ He believes the government could have addressed the contact tracing problem by using the thousands of environmental health officers in local councils. Many of those had been ‘saying they could have been available for contact tracing but nobody asked them’, he said. There was a similar failure to harness the resources of British private companies to build up the reserves of PPE in those weeks in January and February. The British Healthcare Trades Association (BHTA), which represents almost 500 companies employing more than 17,000 people who make or sell healthcare equipment, was poised ready to help supply PPE in February – but nobody from the government or the NHS contacted them.


pages: 106 words: 33,210

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

Does greater surveillance truly imperil our freedom? In April, the Financial Times asked whether the advent of coronavirus apps meant that society was slipping gradually into a surveillance state. Apple and Google were working together to construct a wireless-based contact tracing system to inform someone if they crossed paths with a person who had had COVID-19. Aggressive detection of new cases, contact tracing and quarantine is the public health bulwark necessary to prevent subsequent waves of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Digital surveillance, the FT suggested, may become the greatest incursion into privacy our societies have ever seen. But, so far at least, people seem sanguine.

It could be a valuable measure of the health system’s ability to treat severe cases of the infection. Rt would be a sensitive indicator to tell whether the epidemic is resurfacing. Real-time monitoring of Rt will depend on implementing community testing for the early detection of infection, with subsequent contact tracing if someone is found to have the virus, and then quarantine to prevent possible further transmission. Digital monitoring of levels of social mixing could also be helpful. But maybe the truth is that life will never fully return to normal until a vaccine becomes available – and perhaps not even then.

Practically, there must be a scientific readiness to identify the agent causing an outbreak, develop diagnostic tests, and discover new medicines and vaccines that could treat and eventually prevent the disease. The public health response that was needed was also clear – surveillance, early detection, isolation, contact tracing, quarantine, accumulating surge capacity within the health system to cope with what might be tens of thousands of severe infections, and effective communication to the public. Modern quarantine means reducing the frequency of social contact, voluntary home curfew, cancelling mass gatherings, avoiding public transport, and closing public buildings and workplaces.


Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

In most scenarios, highly effective contact tracing and case isolation is enough to control a new outbreak of COVID-19 within 3 months.” See Joel Hellewell et al., “Feasibility of Controlling COVID-19 Outbreaks by Isolation of Cases and Contacts,” Lancet Global Health 8, no. 4 (2020): 488–96. “Taking recent estimates for COVID-19 transmission we predict that under effective contact tracing less than 1 in 6 cases will generate any subsequent untraced infections, although this comes at a high logistical burden with an average of 36 individuals traced per case. . . . The current contact tracing strategy within the UK is likely to identify a sufficient proportion of infected individuals such that subsequent spread could be prevented, although the ultimate success will depend on the rapid detection of cases and isolation of contacts.”

We’ll never know for sure the full scope of the spread that was set in motion by the White House cluster.7 The White House didn’t make any visible effort to use contact tracing to isolate the source of the outbreak or to identify those who became infected through successive chains of transmission. High-level officials who attended the event told me they were never called by White House contact tracers.8 A group of CDC epidemiologists were already detailed to the White House—they had been there for months to implement the White House testing protocols and assist with contact tracing when cases emerged inside the compound. However, these CDC staff were never fully engaged in trying to get to the bottom of the chain of transmission that was ignited that day.

Reporters mused that Bloomberg’s White House correspondent, Jennifer Jacobs, became the chief contact tracer through her successive articles and tweets identifying and linking the cases that emerged as part of the cluster.9 Even if the White House engaged no outward signs that it was conducting robust contact tracing, everyone else wanted to know: Who was patient zero? After all, the outbreak put the president’s life in serious danger. It turns out, two reporters for the New York Times, Michael Shear and Al Drago, were among those infected in the outbreak. So the newspaper set out to do some contact tracing of its own. With two of its own staff members carrying the strain that sickened people that day, the Times had what it needed to begin its sleuthing.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

For example, relying on the security services’ surveillance technology—whereby a text was sent to an individual who had been in close proximity to an infected person—meant that the government did not develop a civilian system of contact tracing that used trained personnel to locally suppress outbreaks when they occurred. As one Israeli health official told us: “The technology piece is only one part of the game. It provides about 30 percent of the notifications you need. You have to have an efficient human contact tracing capability. And you need to be very fast.… We wasted three months from March to June and did not develop that capability.” Meanwhile, the Israeli government consulted officials from Taiwan, South Korea, and other Asian countries that had handled the pandemic well.

After what felt like an eternity, on January 31, 2020, Trump’s national security and health teams convinced him to take action by banning travel from China. It was an important, though insufficient, step—the ban still allowed tens of thousands of Americans and others from China to fly back to the United States, which would require a significant program of testing and contact tracing that was never put in place. Crucially, the virus was already circulating in America. The next day, Robert O’Brien, the U.S. national security advisor, began asking other countries to follow suit. The virus could be contained only if everyone acted swiftly, but was it already too late? The Australians had barred travel from China and the Japanese were on board.

Most countries failed. Some, such as Germany and Israel, did well at first but struggled once the second wave hit. A few, including Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, performed consistently well, avoiding the national lockdowns that became commonplace in Europe. Instead, they relied on aggressive contact tracing, isolating the potentially infected, and imposing draconian restrictions on travel. Some of these nations enjoyed geographical advantages that made it easier to keep the virus at bay, but they generally had one other thing in common: they had experience mishandling recent epidemics, pandemics, or other national disasters, and had learned their lessons.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

Whether the delay was caused mainly by the CDC or the FDA, Azar oversaw both agencies. Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never had enough reliable tests, with results available within two days, distributed across the nation. By contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal health insurance and lessons learned from a 2015 outbreak of MERS, provided free, rapid testing and invested heavily in contact tracing, which was instrumental in shutting down chains of infection. By the end of 2020, the country would record some 50,000 cases in total; the U.S. was reporting more than four times that number every day.

Questions concerning the severity and contagiousness of a disease, or how to handle potentially hazardous waste, should be directed to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Is there evidence of deliberate intent, such as a terrorist action? The FBI has the lead. Have isolation and quarantine been implemented? How robust is contact tracing? Is clinical care in the region scalable if cases explode? There are many such questions, with decisions proposed and agencies assigned. Because the playbook was passed to a new administration that might not be familiar with the manifold resources of the federal government, there are appendices describing such entities as the Surge Capacity Force in the Department of Homeland Security, consisting of a group of FEMA reservists and others that can be called upon as “deployable human assets.”

Of the Chinese known to have contracted the virus before January 1, 26 percent had no exposure to the Wuhan wet market or to people with apparent respiratory symptoms. (In the following weeks the proportion of people with no obvious source of infection surpassed 70 percent.) Armstrong realized that, unlike SARS or MERS, there were probably a lot of asymptomatic or mild infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That spelled trouble. Contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine were probably not going to be enough. These telling details were buried in Table 1. Viruses circulate in our bodies all the time, but not until a virus causes an infection do we begin to talk about disease—when HIV becomes AIDS, or SARS-CoV-2 becomes Covid-19.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

That means the number of cases you get per day or per week does not rise as high or as fast—the now-famous “flattening the curve.” And even though you are in theory only slowing the spread, you also save lives, as more people who need intensive care can get it. In the course of the Covid-19 epidemic, China discovered that outside Wuhan and Hubei province, a mix of mitigation and containment actually worked best: first contact tracing and quarantine to break chains of infection and then, if necessary, varying levels of mitigation to slow the spread of the virus, which, because fewer people were catching the virus from each person who had it, also made containment more feasible. But on January 22nd, Wuhan was already at the point where lockdown was deemed necessary.

“The authorities in Wuhan spotted the outbreak as an unusual cluster of pneumonia, but then spent weeks saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission when in fact it was doing exactly that.” They knew enough to act, and they missed their window. All that would have been needed, he says, would have been surveillance to spot the outbreak early, then intensive containment and contact tracing, to break all the chains of transmission before there were many cases. In fact, those were tools China already had. In 2003, the SARS coronavirus initially spread out of control in China, and eventually in countries around the world, because doctors’ initial warnings about the outbreak were stifled, at first simply by local bureaucratic inertia.

Using a massive set of data on real social interactions in the UK, Matt Keeling at the University of Warwick and colleagues found that using the official UK definition of contact—being within two meters of someone for at least 15 minutes—you have to trace and quarantine 36 people per case of Covid-19 just to catch and isolate four of every five people that case infected. That’s a lot. And contact tracing might not be enough. As we have seen, the Chinese subsequently discovered that the key to stopping Covid-19 is using social distancing as well as containment. The variable that matters—and about the only piece of epidemiology jargon you really need to know to get all this—is R0, the basic reproductive number.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Why stick to an outmoded model of manual contact tracing, with health care workers monitoring the movement of infected individuals, when digital technologies could enable large-scale tracking via GPS devices, cell phone towers, Bluetooth connections, internet searches, and commercial transactions? The tech optimists pointed to South Korea’s success against the coronavirus, where widespread testing combined with a data-driven approach to tracking movement led to rapid declines in the COVID-19 infection rate. In pursuit of a fully modern approach to contact tracing, Google and Apple announced an unprecedented partnership to develop a contact-tracing app that would use low-level Bluetooth signals to alert anyone whose mobile device had come near an infected person in the past two weeks.

But whereas the Chinese government is comfortable with mandating access to people’s personal information, in a democracy, the growth of digital contact tracing depends on balancing the public health benefits against people’s concerns about privacy. The efforts by Apple and Google to develop a COVID-19-tracing technology demonstrate this careful balancing act at work. If you opt into the system, your phone will let you know when you have been exposed to someone who has tested positive for the virus—as long as that person has also downloaded the app and truthfully updated his or her health status. As an alternative to traditional modes of contact tracing—the slow, patient work of manually listing people who have tested positive and visiting them in their homes—this is a revolutionary approach.

., xxviii governing vs. being governed by technologists, xxviii–xxix, 68–69, 257–63 greater productivity vs. human flourishing, 169 as hobbits and hooligans, 66 overcoming poverty to make a life worth living, 170–71 tensions between liberty and equality, xxxii See also democracy; human judgment Clark, Gregory, 170 cleartext and ciphertext, 127 Clearview AI, 115 Clegg, Nick, 216 Clinton, Bill, 59–60 Clipper Chip technology, 115–16 cloud computing companies, 43 Cohen, Joshua, 70, 203 communications market, 55–59 COMPAS algorithmically-generated risk assessment, 88 computer science, 10–15, 251 Congress of the United States, 63–65, 71–72 consent, 148–49. See also Notice and Choice/Consent doctrine consumer-privacy bill of rights, 146, 148 contact-tracing app development, 113, 139, 140–42, 242–43 content moderation, 72, 189, 201, 209–15, 218, 221, 223–24, 226–27, 262 Cook, Tim, 64–65, 134–35. See also Apple corporate growth and optimization mindset, 33–37 COVID-19 pandemic contact-tracing app development, 113, 139, 140–42, 242–43 effect of, xii–xiii governments’ responses to, 69, 74–75 Taiwan’s successful strategy compared to US failure, 242–43 window into human dependence on digital tools, 240–41 creating an alternative future overview, 243, 263–64 governing technology before it governs us, xxviii–xxix, 68–69, 257–63 new forms of resistance to corporate power, 252–57 technologists, do no harm, 244–51 Creative Commons, xxiii credit cards, AI targeting suspicious activity on, 162 criminal justice system algorithm design for, 99 cash bail system overhaul in California, 94–97, 98, 99–100 decisions about fairness, 94–95 individual’s right to appeal a decision, 108 judges’ responses to algorithmic decision-making, 102 ProPublica investigation of racism in Florida, 97 “Criminal Tendency Detection . . .”


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Despite the PM claiming it would be world-beating, it was not really functional nor anywhere near the capacity needed to make a difference. Contact tracing needs to reach 80 per cent of an infected person’s contacts within 48 hours to make inroads into an epidemic. The reality was closer to 50 per cent. Centralising the TTI, and bypassing local authorities, was a mistake. As anyone who has ever worked in diseases knows: all epidemics are local. Local authorities around the UK housed regional public health teams who knew their communities well and were used to contact tracing for outbreaks of food poisoning and sexually transmitted diseases. A related problem around that time was the NHSX app, integral to the TTI effort.

There was another unwelcome development: five people had shown up in Hong Kong with unexplained fever after visiting Wuhan. Yet the Chinese authorities had not yet found – or not yet chosen to disclose – the cause. By 5 January 2020, the WHO, guided by the official information it was receiving from Wuhan, was reporting that there was no significant evidence of human-to-human transmission. Contact tracing was underway to find those linked to the Wuhan patients, many of whom had been stallholders at the seafood market. The persistent market link, the WHO reported, ‘could indicate an exposure link to animals’. That tight case definition resulted in an Escher’s loop of misguided circular reasoning: testing only those people with a link to the market created the illusion that the market was the source of disease, because everyone testing positive had been there.

‘In many ways, this outbreak could not be happening at a worse time,’ I agreed, unthinkingly clicking a ballpoint pen on and off. I admitted I’m not a huge fan of travel restrictions because people can get round them by using other routes, though they do usefully signal to the public that the situation is serious. They also buy time to put tried and tested health measures in place: testing, contact tracing and quarantine. It might only be a day, a week or a month, but that is better than nothing. Still, there was a catch: border controls must be put in place early, comprehensively and for a long time, as New Zealand did. Meanwhile, China’s sudden lockdown was adding uncertainty and complexity to the second day of emergency deliberations in Geneva.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Retrieved from https://www.lawfareblog.com/location-surveillance-counter-covid-19-efficacy-what-matters; Anderson, R. (2020, May 12). Contact tracing in the real world. Retrieved from https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2020/04/12/contact-tracing-in-the-real-world/; Sapiezynski, P., Pruessing, J., & Sekara, V. (2020). The Fallibility of Contact-Tracing Apps. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.11297. Such apps will be wide open to malfeasance that could distort the utility of the data: Anderson. Contact tracing in the real world. The safeguards around them must be exceptionally strong: Geist, M. (2020, March 24). How Canada should ensure cellphone tracking to counter the spread of coronavirus does not become the new normal.

In Hungary, the far-right leader Viktor Orbán ordered a sweeping emergency law that gave him carte blanche to bypass parliament and the courts and rule by personal decree, suspending all elections indefinitely and imprisoning opposition members without due process. The emergency law has no end date. Not surprisingly, officials turned to technology to help combat the pandemic and assist in contact tracing and quarantine enforcement. The latent capabilities of social media and surveillance capitalism were too obvious to ignore as governments struggled to mitigate the spread of the virus and control the movement of populations. Many officials proposed turning to cellular, telecommunications, and social media providers to provide location data.

As I write, there are numerous proposals worldwide to employ digital location data to assist in the effort to combat the spread of COVID-19, although their efficacy is unclear.422 In a world where we reflexively look to big tech for solutions, it’s not surprising that Google and Apple have teamed up to develop a protocol for “anonymized” contact tracing through smartphone apps. But as Cambridge computer security expert Ross Anderson warns, such apps will be wide open to malfeasance that could distort the utility of the data collected: “The performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park; the Russians will use the app to run service-denial attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report symptoms to get the whole school sent home.”423 Like others who have already weighed in on the issue, I believe that however much these prove to be useful in public health emergencies, the safeguards around them must be exceptionally strong too.424 Some basic restraint mechanisms should include strict limits on data retention, clear limitations on use, and restrictions on access to ensure that the data are not illegitimately redeployed for other reasons (like catching chicken wing thieves and jaywalkers … or monitoring human rights defenders).


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The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Walker, Mark. “ ‘If We Get It, We Chose to Be Here’: Despite Virus, Thousands Converge on Sturgis for Huge Rally,” The New York Times, August 11, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/sturgis-motorcyle-rally.html. Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “Can Coronavirus Contact Tracing Survive Reopening?” The New Yorker, June 12, 2020. www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/can-coronavirus-contact-tracing-survive-reopening. Wallis, Patrick. “A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting Epidemic Disease at Eyam, 1666–2000.” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbi060. Walsh, Mark. “Teachers’ Rights under COVID-19: Anxiety Meets Legality.”

While US medical spending gets whatever it needs, the public health infrastructure in the US hangs by a thread; even the smallest disruption can overload it. The budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is about $22 per person per year. The federal, state, and local public health system as a whole spends about $300 per person per year. This covers everything from monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and contact tracing to ensuring childhood vaccinations to designing obesity reduction programs. The Medicare program by itself spends eight times that amount, and Medicare is but one fifth of the nation’s spending on medical services. By another metric, public health is the one area of health care in which Canada significantly outspends the US.

New Zealand’s Parliament decided that a temporary loss of freedom was an acceptable price to pay for life. Ardern was empowered and she issued a stay-at-home order with “few exceptions.” Returning New Zealanders lost the option to self-isolate. Their quarantine was managed by the state. The country did things that scientists were advocating everywhere. Contact tracing had been put into place even in February and was scaled up as the cases began to emerge. Testing was widespread, including testing the asymptomatic, which is the only way to learn the true prevalence of the disease. The number of new cases started to decline after April 10, but the amount of testing increased substantially after that point.


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Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Given the speed with which it was spreading, tracking the virus would be hard to do manually. Fortunately enough, many of us now carry smartphones that know where we are. They could be used to ‘contact trace’ – that is, work out who potential virus carriers had interacted with and when. The trouble was, virtually every smartphone in the world runs software made by Apple or Google. And these firms decided, without government mandate, to step into the fray. They updated their operating systems to enable some underlying components, which made building contact-tracing apps easier. According to Apple, both firms made design decisions that ‘privacy, transparency and consent [would be] of utmost importance’.8 The tech giants’ software updates became a contributory factor in allowing governments to build more effective contact-tracing apps.

According to Apple, both firms made design decisions that ‘privacy, transparency and consent [would be] of utmost importance’.8 The tech giants’ software updates became a contributory factor in allowing governments to build more effective contact-tracing apps. In this case, few could impeach the decision made by Apple and Google – it helped slow the spread of the virus. But it also underlined that it was Apple and Google who determined what governments and scientists could – and could not – do. The code had become law. To say this was an important decision is an understatement. Apple and Google helped enable tools to support contact tracing, but did so on their terms – prioritising user privacy over government surveillance. This may have been a good call, but should decisions like this be taking place in the private realm?

<https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/i/G892Q/dear-mark-i-am-writing-this-to-inform-you-that-i-shall-not-comply-wit> [accessed 1 October 2020].” 2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37318031 3 ‘Facebook U-Turn over “Napalm Girl” Photograph’, BBC News, 9 September 2016 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37318040> [accessed 1 October 2020]. 4 Chris Hughes, ‘It’s Time to Break Up Facebook’, New York Times, 9 May 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html> [accessed 4 April 2021]. 5 Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (London: Penguin Books, 2012). 6 ‘Data Never Sleeps 8.0’, Domo <https://www.domo.com/learn/data-never-sleeps-8> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 7 Lawrence Lessig, ‘Code Is Law’, Harvard Magazine, 1 January 2000 <https://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html> [accessed 2 October 2020]. 8 ‘Apple and Google Partner on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Technology’, Apple Newsroom, April 2020 <https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-partner-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology/> [accessed 13 October 2020]. 9 Prabhash K. Dutta, ‘16 Lynchings in 2 Months. Is Social Media the New Serial Killer?’, India Today, 2 July 2018 <https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/16-lynchings-in-2-months-is-social-media-the-new-serial-killer-1275182-2018-07-02> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 10 ‘India Lynchings: WhatsApp Sets New Rules after Mob Killings’, BBC News, 20 July 2018 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44897714> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 11 Reuters Staff, ‘Facebook’s WhatsApp Limits Users to Five Text Forwards to Curb Rumors’, Reuters, 21 January 2019 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN1PF0TP> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 12 Paul Mozur, ‘A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military (Published 2018)’, New York Times, 15 October 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html> [accessed 8 January 2021]. 13 Matthew Smith, ‘Facebook Wanted to Be a Force for Good in Myanmar.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Without a reliable test we will be fumbling in the dark, and it will be impossible to conduct contact tracing to identify people at risk of infection. It will be up to you to start ramping up our testing capacity to tens of thousands a day as quickly as possible and then get tests out.” He turned to his four other lieutenants. “Kate, you will be responsible for communicating the severity of the situation to key stakeholders in hospitals and public health officials around the country. We need to provide the right blend of guidance and urgency. Patrick, you need to monitor and coordinate incoming travelers and contact tracing. Everyone who comes in from an infected area needs to be monitored from the moment they touch down and instructed to self-quarantine.

Resolving the test-manufacturing defects took one month—a lost month during one of the most crucial periods in American history. This was February 2020, when hundreds of Americans were starting to come down with COVID-19 in Washington and around the country. Without testing, there was no way to begin contact tracing. “It was just tragic,” Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told The New York Times. “Here we were at one of the most critical junctures in public health history, and the biggest tool in our toolbox was missing.” The lack of testing kept public health officials from performing disease surveillance that could have tracked and minimized the spread of the virus.

We needed an army of contact tracers to get this pandemic under control, with estimates of required workers being between 98,000 and 180,000. We didn’t get them. While the pandemic is an outlier event, it highlights that there are outlier events that could use an easily mobilized workforce. Whether it’s working through our national lands to prevent forest fires, helping with cleanup after a natural disaster, contact tracing during a pandemic, or helping develop the next generation, we will always have more work to be done. New measures for a new economy. Universal basic income. Health care for all. Taxing AI and the robots. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Many of these measures are quite popular but would obviously require a functional Congress willing to enact bold solutions to the problems that we see around us.


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Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

In fact, people can and do become infected with less than fifteen minutes of exposure. Fifteen minutes is an arbitrary but practical threshold for contact tracing, as people who test positive are likely to remember whom they were around for fifteen minutes or more and may be able to report their names. However, they’re unlikely to remember the clerk who checked them out at a store or which coworkers they passed in a hallway.9 We can’t calculate “hours of protection” by multiplying the filtration level by the cutoff used for contact tracing. In fact, we can tell that the numbers are nonsense based on other knowledge we already have. Many other factors contribute to transmission risk: whether we’re outdoors or in an enclosed space, whether a room is ventilated, whether people are yelling at the top of their lungs or sitting quietly, whether the infected person is at peak infectiousness, and so on.

We previously discussed how Benford’s law revealed minor tax cheating: People were more likely to report an income just under a $50 cutoff than slightly over it if that meant reducing their taxes by a tiny amount. Similarly, the CDC undoubtedly knew the fifteen-minute cutoff for contact tracing would leave some people who were at risk of Covid-19 infection uninformed of their risk. But some standard must be established in order for contact tracing to be feasible, and some people will subvert the intent of any standard. For example, schools in Billings, Montana, shuffled student seating arrangements every fifteen minutes, avoiding the CDC threshold but possibly increasing the likelihood of spread within classrooms.20 Establishing new rules to prevent cheating can start an upward spiral of regulation.

In reality, the campus had 3,923 cases by late November, averaging nearly 40 new cases per day. Unlike the White House’s cubic model, the university’s models were mathematically rigorous—but like the cubic model, the conclusions stemmed from flawed starting assumptions.33 The prediction of a total of 700 cases assumed that undergraduates would comply perfectly with testing and contact tracing and that students would be notified of a positive test result within 24 hours. Not surprisingly for a large public university known for raucous parties, compliance was far less than 100 percent, and during the crucial early weeks of the semester, test results were delayed well over 24 hours. The problem wasn’t with the models.


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The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

cauldron of misinformation: Zeke Miller and Colleen Long, “US Officials: Foreign Disinformation Is Stoking Virus Fears,” US News, March 16, 2020; Brooke Singman and Gillian Turner, “Foreign Disinformation Campaign on Fake National Quarantine Trying to Cause Panic, Trump Admin. Officials Say,” Fox News, March 16, 2020. Google, Apple, and MIT developed Bluetooth-based contact tracing systems: Mark Gurman, “Apple, Google Bring Covid-19 Contact-Tracing to 3 Billion People,” Bloomberg, April 10, 2020; Kylie Foy, “Bluetooth Signals from Your Smartphone Could Automate Covid-19 Contact Tracing While Preserving Privacy,” MIT News, April 8, 2020, http://news.mit.edu/​2020/​bluetooth-covid-19-contact-tracing-0409. stringent privacy regulations: Thomas Seal and Stephanie Bodoni, “How Europe Is Bumping Against Privacy Laws in Coronavirus Battle,” Bloomberg, April 4, 2020.

Privacy debates took on new meaning during the COVID crisis as the threat of “surveillance capitalism” morphed into lifesaving “disease surveillance.” Facebook wasn’t surveilling for profit during COVID; it was filling gaps in inadequate national disease surveillance programs with scalable symptom surveys that identified the pandemic’s spread. At the same time, Google, Apple, and MIT developed Bluetooth-based contact tracing systems that would alert users who opted in if they had come in close physical proximity to the Bluetooth-enabled device of a COVID carrier. Privacy advocates listened in horror as the tech giants swore the system would remain anonymous. The perils of social media surveillance for privacy were sharply contrasted with the promise of social media surveillance for health.


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Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

The disease spread, eventually infecting 8,000 people from twenty-nine countries and causing 774 deaths. There was no vaccine or specific treatment and around 10% of those infected did not survive. Vaccine development got underway, but it didn’t get far before the disease had been contained and eradicated by the centuries-old but very effective methods of contact tracing and quarantine: find the cases, identify their contacts, and keep the contacts in quarantine until it is known that they are not infected. The outbreak had started in November 2002 and was all but over by June of 2003. There was no immediate need for a vaccine, although we couldn’t be certain that there would never be another outbreak of SARS.

What they discovered was that even young healthcare workers had become infected and, despite having very mild, almost asymptomatic infections, they had been able to spread the disease to others. This made MERS quite different from SARS – with SARS infected people always had recognisable, often severe symptoms, making the job of contact tracing and quarantine somewhat easier. While SARS has been eradicated, MERS continues to cause infections in the Middle East to this day. To try and keep infections down, the Riyadh camel market has now been moved well away from the city, as I discovered myself when I visited it with Naif Alharbi, a Saudi former student of mine.

After a few days, though, this can progress to vomiting and diarrhoea, problems with the liver and kidneys, and internal and external bleeding. It’s a truly devasting disease: it is fatal in around 40–50% of those infected. Before 2014, outbreaks had been small, in isolated areas with low population densities, so it had been possible to contain them through painstaking contact tracing and quarantine. What was different in 2014 was that the outbreak spread to densely populated cities, and across borders, from Guinea in West Africa to the neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone. As the disease spread exponentially in the summer and early autumn that year, the healthcare system was overwhelmed and people were dying, untreated, in the streets of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Scarce had identified more than 150 list servers on the Internet dedicated to barebacking. In 1999, Ron Stall said, the “$100,000 question” is whether gay culture had entered a radically new paradigm that called for dramatically different approaches to disease prevention.744 So how would the CDC’s detuned ELISA contact tracing plan figure into such a picture? Scarce predicted that “a war is coming between gay men and public health if they do contact tracing.” As the twentieth century neared its close, it looked as if HIV would, indeed, follow the sorry courses of MRSA, VRE, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and chlorine-resistant microbes in drinking water. Three different research teams published proof in 1999 that drug-resistant strains of HIV were spreading among sexually active people in the United States and Europe.745 The findings raised deeply troubling reservations about both HAART and the future of public health control of the epidemic.

., 300–1, 307, 312 Portnoy, Daniel, 520–21 Porton Down facility, Britain, 74 poverty conservative politicians and, 328, 383–84, 389–92, 439 death rate and, 587 defined, 429, 560 disease and, 11, 47, 103–4, 307–8, 348, 430, 432, 708, 726–27 global, 6, 103–4, 561–63 Great Depression and, 309–15 homelessness and, 574 immigrants and, 285–87, 293, 298–99 immunization and, 417–18 and infant mortality, 555 Medicaid and, 348–50 moral indignation and, 308, 413 War on Poverty, 343–44, 366 wealth gap, 47, 56–57, 201, 307, 384, 554, 561, 581–83, 747–52 WHO and, 334 Pozorovskii, Sergei, 126–28, 253 Preston, Richard, 72 prevention, as basic tenet, 11 privacy contact tracing vs., 480, 483 media vs., 85–87, 94, 98–99, 600 safety vs., 12, 48, 548–49, 601–2 Priymak, Alexey, 190, 194–95, 197, 201 Prohibition, U.S., 305–6, 619 prostitution HIV and, 212, 218, 226–30, 407 levels of, 234 STDs and, 227–35, 265 protein structure, study of, 336 Proteomics, Age of, 569–71 Prudden, T. Mitchell, 296–97 public health accountability in, 461–62 advocacy vs., 587 arbitrary powers in, 300 biowarfare and, 488, 494–95, 503–7, 527–43, 546–50 birth of, 2–3, 10–12, 282–302, 552 catastrophes, trends in, 103–4, 577–79 contact tracing model in, 326, 480, 483 cost-benefit rationale for, 675 diminishment of, 8–9, 12, 22–24, 37–38, 46–47, 73–74, 276–82, 285, 310, 366, 380–89, 439–40, 447, 462–63, 464, 566–67 economics and, 6–7, 11–12, 164–65, 168–69, 191, 262, 586 education and, 402–3, 407, 409, 414 empirical basis for, 296–97, 336 federalization of, 303, 310, 313–14, 317–18, 419, 461–62 forecasting and, 586–87 germ theory and, 295–304 global needs of, 2–3, 6–11, 48–49, 103–4, 463–64, 469, 562–63 global state of, 551–91 Great Depression and, 309–11 hand washing and, 241–42, 274, 288, 292, 310, 654 human rights and, 600 immunization and, 178–79, 288 indicators of, 2, 10, 13, 294, 562–63 institutionalized medicine, 327–29 media and, 97 medicalized model of, 581–84, 586 medicine vs., 8–9, 10, 11, 37, 313, 346–50, 363–66, 375, 397, 426, 428–29, 431, 433–34, 441, 473, 654 middle class and, 286, 294, 298, 560–61, 649–53 mission of, 6–10, 287, 334, 335 and national security, 436–37 nationwide needs of, 8–9 negative image of, 7, 325 personal responsibility for, 391–97, 427, 440–41 politics and, 7–8, 9, 49, 88, 263–64, 286, 296, 405, 567 poverty and, 8–9, 104, 298–99, 329–30, 417, 581–83 preventive measures in, 266, 291, 295–97, 345, 428–29, 570–71 privatization of, 460–63 profitability and, 284–85, 329, 378, 430, 461–62, 470 as purchasable, 421 race and, 415–16, 421, 566, 570 scope of, 8, 10, 334 social status and, 262, 309–10, 431 surveillance in, 35–37, 104, 371, 398–400, 434–36, 454, 469, 597 top-down policies of, 291 as trust, 48–49, 564 universal coverage, 431, 441 wealth and, 430–31 Public Health Act (1848), 288 Public Health Service, U.S.

And when supplies ran short, army doctors discovered that even the unmeasurable quantities of the drug that had passed into the urine of a treated patient could be used to cure another.161 Within months of Mahoney’s discovery of the utility of penicillin in syphilis treatment, the New York City health department opened a special VD ward at Bellevue Hospital and distributed free penicillin to doctors and hospitals city-wide. The city also instituted contact tracing policies under which all syphilitic and gonorrheal patients were pressured to name their recent sexual contacts, who were subsequently tracked down, interrogated, and treated. When necessary, either because the contact’s full name wasn’t known or the individual refused treatment, officers of the New York Police Department were deployed.


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

The SARS experience has helped establish a new norm of behavior: the duty to report. Response The world’s response to SARS may seem another source of comfort: the SARS outbreak did not become a pandemic. But SARS had characteristics that made control by the old-fashioned methods of quarantine and contact tracing easy. Persons with SARS showed symptoms, and became very ill, before they became infectious. Quarantine was thus effective in stopping transmission. And because the disease also had a lengthy incubation period, the people with whom infected persons had been in contact could be traced and isolated before they became ill and could infect others.

See also Information technology Conant, James, 60 Confidence: in East Asian economic crisis, role of, 43, 46–47, 48; policymakers’ display of, 111; in U.S. national power, 159 Congress, U.S.: on East Asian economy, 49; on energy innovation agency, 67, 68; on ethanol, 79; and scientific innovation, 69 Connected science, 61–63 Consumerism, 133 Contact tracing, of SARS, 87 Containment policy: toward Soviet Union, 31, 116; toward U.S., 108 Conventional wisdom, strategic surprises challenging, 94, 95 Convergence, in information technology innovations, 123–25 Corn, ethanol from, 78–79 Cost-benefit analysis: definition of, 14–15; future in, 15, 16, 18–19; inverse, 16–17; limitations of, 14–19, 171; need for, 4; tolerable windows in, 17–18; uncertainty in, 16–18; value of life in, 15–16 Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia, 43 Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, 83–84 Cuban missile crisis, 64 Cultural barriers, to preparing for catastrophes, 13–14 Cultures, capacity for adaptation in, 154–55 Currency devaluation, in East Asian economic crisis, 43, 44, 47–48 Currency undervaluation, in East Asian economic crisis, 44, 47, 49 Cyber-nations, 156–57 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 57–70; creation of, 63; innovation organization at, index 63–67; lessons learned from, 59–60; as model for energy dilemma, 59–60, 67–70; precursors of, 60–63; rise of, 63–65 Darul Islam, 144 Data collection, filters in, 99–100 Day after Tomorrow, The (film), 105, 140 Debt, private, in East Asian economic crisis, 44–45, 46, 48 Debt of Honor (Clancy), 93 Defense, Department of, DARPA’s work with, 64–65, 68 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Lockdowns are a vital tool for reining in uncontrolled transmission, but experience with Covid-19 shows that they cause immense hardship and economic damage. Contact-tracing technology, which proved woefully inadequate during Covid-19 in all but a few countries, needs to be stepped up in advance of the next pandemic. Fears of invasive surveillance can be mitigated by making it transparent what data will be collected, under what circumstances, and how that data will be stored and used. Such improvements to transparency are necessary anyway, as cities gather ever more data on their citizens for uses ranging from policing to traffic management. Enhanced contact tracing needs to be combined with ubiquitous rapid testing that can be ramped up quickly in response to outbreaks.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

“We currently have 102 cases—but so did Italy once,” she told the nation in March. The country went into lockdown, closed its borders, and committed to contact tracing every case. Britain, meanwhile, framed Covid as being more like the seasonal flu, and went for a “mitigation” strategy. Health officials assumed that the virus would inevitably spread through the population, eventually creating herd immunity. The government gave up on testing and contact tracing early in the crisis, and was later than its European counterparts to take actions such as banning large public events and closing schools. Officials opted for a national lockdown only after epidemiological models showed that the virus would swamp the National Health Service.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

The involvement of ubiquitous companies like Google and Apple seemed inevitable and inarguable. Meanwhile, I began receiving email after email from companies that claimed to have built contact-tracing systems, because technologically they were relatively simple to build: any company with a location-aware app for following the behavior and location and social connection of its users already had, in theory, the constituent parts to build a contact-tracing system. This was a rare moment in which building surveillance technology was a matter of public interest and public health. Soon a new set of radical surveillance capabilities, largely powered by AI, became public knowledge.


pages: 89 words: 27,057

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine by Michael Mosley

Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, lockdown, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social distancing

via%3Dihub 34 http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-12-19-new-mers-vaccine-clinical-trial-starts-saudi-arabia 35 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-vaccine-update-oxford.html 36 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ 37 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/coronavirus-vaccine-update-oxford.html 38 https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa152/5814216 39 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-covid.html 40 https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331976/WHO-2019-nCoV-Ethics_criteria-2020.1-eng.pdf?ua=1 41 https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk/news/digital-contact-tracing-can-slow-or-even-stop-coronavirus-transmission-and-ease-us-out-of-lockdown 42 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-usa-cost/ This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

“So far we have only identified two examples where disease spread from a traveler (and in both circumstances it was very close contact in the household—a spouse),” he later wrote, then continued: Opening up wider surveillance would seem impractical and unnecessary. This conclusion is correct until it is wrong. The problem I see with this approach is the only way we will recognize community transmission is if a contact tracing of a known case (derived from travel screening) finds an extended chain of transmission. But assuming all is well denies the possibility of disease already in the community, just hidden from sight or diagnosis because of a bit of a Catch-22. We are in the middle of an active flu season. These cases could look similar to and be confused with flu.

“That’s what you do in TB control,” Charity said. “The nurses take them to a hotel room and the sheriff watches them. If you think you have a shot at containing it, that’s what you do. You have to do it by health officer authority. People say you can’t do it, but we do it every day for TB.” Japan was doing something clever with their contact tracing. Perhaps from their close view of the Diamond Princess, public-health authorities had figured out early that superspreaders played a far bigger role in the explosion of COVID-19 than in, say, the spread of flu. It wasn’t clear why, but never mind why; why you could worry about later; why the CDC could write a paper about.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

A set of safety measures—masks, distancing, handwashing—were immediately improvised where necessary, such as in childcare centers that kept operating for essential workers. Experience showed that these measures reduced spread in settings where children were gathered and that compliance could be good even among young children. These guidelines were quickly adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Our contact tracing was never what it should have been, but evidence mounted around the world that schools and childcare facilities could actually be operated more safely than other types of indoor gathering places like bars, restaurants, factories, or gyms—usually, when these measures were followed, with fewer cases than in the surrounding community.

Partly it was because cases were growing; it was hard to detect the signal from school reopening in the rumble of another COVID wave. Florida, with its open schools, became a national hotspot. Later, California, with closed schools, led the ranks. New Jersey, during the time that it had the highest death rate in the nation, was a purple state with closed and open districts cheek by jowl. Without effective and reliable contact tracing, enough testing, or other large-scale data collection, nobody had great real-time information about whether, where, and why schools in the United States were really driving the spread of COVID. There were reassuring studies from other countries, but the data was limited. “We’re driving with the headlights off, and we have kids in the car,” Melinda Buntin, chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, told me for NPR in October 2020—though she still argued on balance in favor of opening schools, with precautions.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

“The general expectation is that prior experience is a predictor of future events,” he later wrote, describing the research, “but in this case it doesn’t work.” A few months later, the world’s largest outbreak of Ebola erupted in West Africa. Cases were nearly doubling weekly. Public health officials began contact-tracing to contain the disease. But it was ineffective, later analysis of the situation by NECSI showed. For one thing, most people didn’t know at first that they had Ebola, which initially can feel like a regular viral infection. Also, because many people in urban centers of West Africa share cabs, it was often impossible to know who sick people had been in contact with.

Finally, as the disease spread exponentially, the ideal number of contact tracers rose to a number that was logistically impossible. Some of those tracking the Ebola outbreak feared that 10 million people might die in Africa alone. Bar-Yam and his colleagues at NECSI began crafting an alternative response as it became clear that contact-tracing wasn’t working. They focused on intervening at the community level, restricting travel in discrete areas where infections popped up, and actively seeking out infected people through door-to-door canvassing. Such an approach would squeeze the virus until it could no longer spread at all, or so they hoped.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

And many of its jurisdictions have expanded the data potentially included—everything from how a person crosses the street, to how they treat their parents, to their degree of patriotism and loyalty to the Communist Party and its teachings. Social credit scoring and its many Western analogues have been enormously controversial, and it is unclear how far they will develop. To be sure, some applications of these systems may be quite valuable. It is hard to complain about public health surveillance that accelerates contact tracing to stop the spread of infectious disease before a pandemic starts. But when the same powerful capacities are ranking and rating everyone all the time, they become oppressive. The chief danger of social control via AI is a world of regimentation. Conflict and competition are part of life, and we should expect technological advance to inform them.

See also unions colleges and universities: aims of, 63–64; for caregivers, 192; citizens entitled to four years of, 175; content of (intrinsic vs. instrumental), 178–179; costs of, 85, 87; evaluation in, 141–142; for-profit, 134; free, 135; making students “robot-proof,” 173–174; online, 84–86; STEM training at, 173. See also student debt conspiracy theories, 94, 98, 113 consumer protection, 15, 58, 201; and deceptive marketing, 102 contact tracing, 11 content moderation, 91, 95, 96, 107, 117–118 copyright infringement, 165 coronaviruses. See COVID-19 pandemic; pandemics “cost disease,” 171–172, 186–190, 196, 198, 299n68 COVID-19 pandemic, 100, 166, 191, 194; and data deficiencies, 243n3; and essential workers, 172–173; preparedness for, 159–160, 184–185; and recovery of jobs, 185–186, 195; and universities, 62 Crary, Jonathan, 217 credit and credit scoring, 10, 30, 131–136, 140, 282n83.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Elders have taken with them the knowledge of a history that was and a future that could have been—the stories that will not be told. We have holes in our hearts that are quickly filling with a prophetic fire. The colonizers have fallen deeper into their deadly hallucinations of blaming the Chinese, migrants, Indigenous people—everything but the system itself. As we contact-trace the spread of the virus, we can also contact-trace the purveyors of violence all the way up the chain of command. Vijay Prashad has given us the term “Coronashock” to understand the intensifying international class struggle underway: on one side human solidarity, best represented by mutual aid and healthcare workers, and on the other pure barbarism.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

In May 2020, the bulk of the country’s second wave of coronavirus infections was traced to a gay club in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood; two people at the club had also visited a gay bathhouse. Quickly, even though the gay nightclub and bathhouse were cooperative with contact tracing, blame was heaped upon gay South Koreans for the resurgence. Because the level of the virus was low and the level of contact tracing was high, the cluster was contained. But a twenty-five-year-old man in the cluster who tested positive was arrested for lying to authorities. The exact charge was that while he cooperated in answering many questions honestly, he said he didn’t have a job when, in fact, he worked as a tutor for hire.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Privacy is figured as a woman, an object of the male gaze.”32 Technology can both protect and invade privacy, and at the same time, privacy itself can be an impediment to other rights and liberties. As the Covid-19 pandemic reminded us, privacy can be in tension with safety and accountability. In some circumstances—for example, when a deadly virus is rapidly spreading—we might decide that the benefits from monitoring citizen movement and contact tracing trump privacy concerns. Striking that balance begins at the root: How do we define privacy, and what does it mean to be “protected”? It is up to us all to decide the right mix and balance. But technology can help give us the tools to fine-tune the fine balances we’ve always had to strike in a democratic society.

Healthwise, rates of syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia have increased in record numbers over the past few years.17 While some health experts blame dating apps for the rise in infections—by virtue of the sheer volume of connections that can be made quickly through online dating services—we need to study these trends more closely, and contact tracing is difficult when it comes to STDs transmitted through casual encounters. As the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us, not everyone acts responsibly and swiftly to prevent transmitting infectious diseases to others, suggesting that we need to invest more public resources, and leverage technology to counter such reckless behavior.18 Health officials and advocacy groups have called on dating apps to help fight the STD epidemic, but not many apps have been proactive about promoting sexual health.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Health is the most difficult area, not least because British doctors demonize any attempt at reform as privatization. Covid certainly often showed the NHS at its best but it also highlighted problems, including control freakery and poor technology: just try Googling “National Health Service Covid contact tracing App.” Many continental European countries have better health systems, without sacrificing anything in terms of coverage. In continental Europe, Bill Lincoln would probably focus more on pensions and the social spending that Angela Merkel complains about. But he would be struck above all by the poor architecture of the European Union.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Eventually, the team settled on a plan that called for notifying all employees in a building, via text messages and robocalls, only after a case had been confirmed through testing. There was further handwringing over how much to reveal about the positive individual’s job and shift in the facility, without violating their privacy or fueling rumors and speculation on social media. The team instituted a plan that involved using warehouse video footage to perform contact tracing. Workers who had been in close contact with the infected individual then received follow-up instructions from HR to quarantine at home, with pay. It was a reasonable solution amid challenging circumstances, but the sheer volume of cases among Amazon workers that spring bred further confusion and frustration among employees.

., 23 Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, 403 climate change, 2–4, 17, 381, 402–4 Climate Pledge, 2, 17, 381–82, 388 Clinton, Hillary, 1 cloud computing, 4, 13, 14, 22, 24, 25, 55, 96–98, 102 Amazon’s original products for, 97 Defense Department’s JEDI contract for, 351, 359–63, 381 see also Amazon Web Services Cloudtail, 77, 88 CNET, 67 CNN, 353 Coca-Cola, 260 Coen, Joel, 135 Cohen, Michael, 331, 335 Collins, Doug, 367 Columbia Pictures, 141 Comcast, 139–40 Comic-Con, 145 Communications Decency Act, 379 computer speech recognition, 28, 36, 55 in Alexa, 28, 33, 36, 37 computer-synthesized speech, 28–29 computer vision, 13, 54–55, 57–58, 62–64, 68 Conscious Capitalism (Mackey), 185 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 353 ContextLogic, 171 Cook, Tim, 132, 345, 359, 369 “cookie licking,” 233 Corden, James, 2 Cornell, Brian, 231 Costco, 185, 192, 198 Coulter, Kristi, 60, 65 Covid-19 pandemic, 1, 4, 18, 348, 367, 369, 385–402 Amazon Pharmacy and, 404 Bezos’s public prominence during, 387–88 Bezos’s wealth and, 18, 401 customer demand during quarantine, 380, 387, 388, 391 essential item sales during, 389, 391, 392 face shields and masks during, 388–89 grocery delivery and, 68, 243, 391 labor unions and, 316, 392, 394 S-team and, 386–87, 390 testing and contact tracing in, 390, 396–97, 400–401 vaccines in, 402 Whole Foods and, 390, 391, 397 Covington & Burling, 368 Cox, Braden, 312–14, 316 Crisis in Six Scenes, 13, 149 Crow, Bill, 298 Cruise, Tom, 168 Cucinelli, Brunello, 346 Cunningham, Michael, 154 Cuomo, Andrew, 306, 310, 314–15 Curry, Stacey Hayes, 237 Daily Beast, 336, 342 Dallas, Tex., 292, 295, 296, 299–302, 308 Damon, Matt, 135, 325 databases, 97–99 see also cloud computing Daudon, Maud, 290, 304 Da Vinci Code, The (Brown), 34 Davis, Alicia Boler, 402 Days Inn, 290 Deadline, 136 Dead of Winter Productions, 327 de Becker, Gavin, 64, 323, 334–39, 341, 342, 344, 346–47 de Blasio, Bill, 306, 310, 313–15 De Bonet, Jeremy, 63 Defense Department, U.S., 359, 361 JEDI contract with, 351, 359–63, 381 Deliveroo, 260 Delrahim, Makan, 366 Delta Air Lines, 301 democracy, 124, 133, 365 De Niro, Robert, 152 DePalo, Joe, 102 D.


pages: 199 words: 63,844

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Rachel Clarke

Airbnb, Boris Johnson, call centre, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disruptive innovation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, social distancing, zero-sum game

The government has given up, hasn’t it?’ I don’t know how to answer. Everything I could say would sound platitudinous. Arjun cannot help himself. The words pour out. He can’t sleep, he feels sick, he feels betrayed, he feels abandoned. His final observation is chilling. ‘I cannot understand why they have stopped testing and contact tracing, either. Even hospital staff are being told we can’t be tested if our own symptoms are mild. This is unbelievable. If we’re not allowed to be tested, then how will we ever know how many other people – patients – we are infecting? Brilliant. What a brilliant plan.’ Of this time, David Hunter, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Oxford, will later write in the New England Journal of Medicine: ‘Many clinicians and scientists have been pushing the panic button, but the alarm, if heard, was not acted on publicly . . .


pages: 519 words: 169,973

My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS by Abraham Verghese

contact tracing, gentleman farmer, gentrification, index card, Mason jar, medical residency

When I walked into the first meeting at the church, I already knew half the people there from the Rathskeller Student Union building where one corner had become an informal gay corner.” “When you say ‘knew’ them, do you mean knew them sexually?” Fred laughed and said, “Yes, in some cases.” As Fred said this, the picture of a wheel came to my mind: In models of sexually transmitted disease, spread of infection among gay men is often depicted as a wheel. Aggressive contact tracing often establishes that there are multiple cross-links: The “index” case may have had contact with not only the next person in the chain but others farther along; a circle is formed. In a small town the circle is small; in New York City it is larger, but the circle still closes. Gaetan Dugas—identified as “Patient Zero” in Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On—the handsome, Air Canada flight steward, showed just how large the circle could be: At least 40 of the first 248 gay men diagnosed with AIDS in the United States had sex either with Gaetan or with someone who had.

Gaetan Dugas—identified as “Patient Zero” in Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On—the handsome, Air Canada flight steward, showed just how large the circle could be: At least 40 of the first 248 gay men diagnosed with AIDS in the United States had sex either with Gaetan or with someone who had. By contrast, heterosexual contact tracing resembles the spokes of a wheel: the wheel is so huge that it is practically infinite, with contacts leading linearly away from the index case. The AIDS virus took advantage of, and drew attention to, a level of sexual activity among an exclusive group of individuals in a way that no other sexually transmitted disease had done to that point.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

Despite the dangers, there could be benefits if biotech followed this route. During a pandemic, it would be useful if societies could tap the biological wisdom and innovation of crowds. At the very least, it would be good to have citizens who could test themselves and their neighbors at home. Contact tracing and data collection could be crowdsourced. Today, there is a sharp line dividing officially sanctioned biologists from do-it-yourself hackers, but Josiah Zayner is dedicated to changing that. CRISPR and COVID could help him blur those lines. Joseph Bondy-Denomy CHAPTER 34 DARPA and Anti-CRISPR Threat assessment The possibility that CRISPR would be used by hackers or terrorists or foreign adversaries began to worry Doudna.

., 280 Bush, Vannevar, 89, 117 calculus, 159 California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), 116 Caltech, 270 Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory, 20–23, 26 Camus, Albert, 399 cancer, xviii, 100, 177, 259, 339, 365, 441, 442 CRISPR and, xviii, 249–51 Canseco, José, 349 Carey, Mariah, 352 Caribou Biosciences, 113–18, 203, 207–8, 213 Intellia Therapeutics, 213 CARMEN, 453, 460 Carroll, Dana, 185 Carter, Jimmy, 273 CARVER, 452–53, 455–57 “Case Against Perfection, The” (Rawls), 281 “Case for Developing America’s Talent, A” (study), 164 Cas enzymes, see CRISPR-associated enzymes Casey Eye Institute, 250 Cassidy, Bill, 328–29 Cate, Andrew, xiii, 62, 63, 97, 101, 114, 132, 199, 209, 328, 368, 402, 465, 468, 470 Cate, Jamie, xiii, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63–64, 97, 101, 114, 199, 381, 402, 422, 424, 468, 470, 472 Jennifer’s marriage to, 63 Cavendish Laboratory, 20–23, 26 CDC, 407–10 CDKN1C gene, 349–50 Cech, Thomas, 44–45, 49, 53–56 Celera, 39, 40 Cell, 143, 146, 376 Lander’s “Heroes of CRISPR” piece in, 182, 223–29, 388 Cell Reports, 143 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 407–10 Chan, Priscilla, 472 character, 345–46 Chargaff, Erwin, 273 Charité, 124 Charles, Prince, 100 Charo, Alta, 288, 316 Charpentier, Emmanuelle, 119–28, 120, 129–32, 130, 138, 147, 204, 214, 283, 292, 330, 385, 477 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences awarded to, 219–21 Church and, 206 Church’s email to Doudna and, 173, 197 company formations and, 205–7, 209, 213 CRISPR Therapeutics, 207, 213, 245, 465 CRISPR paper of (2011), 125–27, 131, 147, 179–80, 185, 218 CRISPR paper written by Doudna and (2012), 126, 137–41, 144–46, 148, 149, 156, 172–73, 179, 180, 182–86, 191, 192, 194–95, 202, 227, 233, 237–38, 374–75 CRISPR paper written by Doudna and (2014), 215 CRISPR patent of Doudna and, 207–8, 210, 219, 224, 233–40 Doudna’s collaboration with, 135, 140, 160, 183, 199–200, 206, 215–21, 464–67, 475 Doudna’s meeting of, 119, 122, 127–28, 200 Doudna’s rift with, 215–21, 464, 466 Gray and, 247 Jinek and, 128 Kavli Prize awarded to, 221 Lander and, 220, 223–24 Lander’s “Heroes of CRISPR” and, 223–29, 388 media and, 216 Nobel Prize awarded to Doudna and, xix, 468, 469–73 Novak and, 122, 205–7, 213 proprietary feelings about CRISPR-Cas9, 216 tracrRNA work of, 124–27, 131, 217–18, 225 Chase, Leah, 479 chemistry, 8, 19 biochemistry, 18, 29–35, 51, 80, 183, 201, 478 Doudna’s study of, 31–34 Chen, Janice, 420, 421–24, 429–32, 451, 460 Chernobyl disaster, 262 Chez Boulay, 376 Chez Panisse, 140–41, 145 chimpanzees, 438 China, 294–95, 300, 427 Academy of Sciences in, 292, 319 cancer treatment in, 249 COVID in, 263, 403, 452 editing of nonviable embryos in, 288, 290 genetic engineering in, 301 germline editing prohibited in, 292, 317 SARS outbreaks in, 65, 403 South University of Science and Technology in, 300–301 cholesterol, 251 Choudhary, Amit, 260 Church, Gaylord, 170 Church, George, 40–41, 48, 158, 160, 167, 168, 169–74, 211, 212, 228, 262, 291, 360, 385, 470, 472, 474 Charpentier and, 206 childhood of, 170–71 company formations and, 203–6, 208, 209, 213 in competition to adapt CRISPR into tool for gene editing in humans, 64, 160, 173–74, 192–95, 197–99, 201, 202 Cong and, 177, 178, 192–94 CRISPR paper of, 192, 194–95, 197, 199, 201, 202 CRISPR paper sent to Doudna by, 197, 234 DARPA grant received by, 260 Doudna on, 172–74 at Duke, 171–72 email to Doudna and Charpentier, 173, 197 germline editing and, 291, 292, 303 Happy Healthy Baby and, 286 at Harvard, 172 Lander and, 172, 227–28 Lander’s “Heroes of CRISPR” and, 225–26 Neanderthal idea of, 205 Personal Genetics Education Project of, 220–21 prizes and, 220–21 woolly mammoth project of, 160, 169, 172 Zayner and, 255 Zhang and, 167, 174, 175, 178, 192–94 Chylinski, Krzysztof, 125, 128, 129–31, 130, 135, 142 CRISPR conference presentation of, 141, 147–48 CRISPR paper and, 137, 140 citizen involvement in science, 263, 445 Clapper, James, 259 Clinton, Bill, 39–40, 309 cloning, 34–35, 98, 153, 280, 313, 415–16 codons, 190, 191–92, 194 cognitive skills, 354, 376 intelligence, 354, 360–62, 376 Watson’s comments on, 385–87, 389–90, 392, 397 memory, 354 Cohen, Jon, 316 Cohen, Stanley, 98, 153, 232 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 37–38, 48–49, 53, 271, 298, 385–91, 458 Blackford Bar at, 462–63 CRISPR conferences at, 302, 304, 385, 391, 393, 397, 415, 458, 459–67 founding of, 37, 463 Watson as director of, 37 Watson disassociated from, 386, 387, 390 Watson portrait at, 302, 384, 386, 390, 396 Collins, Francis, 36, 39–40, 294, 325, 329–31, 364, 390, 446 Columbia University, 98 Comfort, Nathaniel, 226–27 computers, xvii, 117, 163–64, 256, 358–59, 432 hacking of, 263 internet, xvii, 117, 262, 359 software, 432 open-source, 163, 256 Cong, Le, 177–78, 184, 192–94 Congress, U.S., 290–91, 294, 325, 328–29 Constitution, U.S., 231 contact tracing, 257 Conti, Elena, 84–85 continuum conundrum, 337–38 Copenhagen (Frayn), 224 Coppola, Francis Ford, 352 coronaviruses, 47, 90, 270, 339, 365, 451 CRISPR systems to detect, 118 name of, 404 PAC-MAN and, 454–57, 460 RNA of, 65, 403–4 RNA interference and, 66–67 SARS, 65, 403, 441 SARS-CoV-2, 403–4 see also COVID-19 pandemic coronary heart disease, 251 Costolo, Dick, 219 Council of Europe, 278 Count Me In, 177 COVID-19 pandemic, xiii, xv, xvii, 251, 257, 262, 335, 373, 399–475, 477 Berkeley and, xiii–xv Innovative Genomics Institute, 401–5, 413–18, 419 China origin of, 263, 403, 452 Cold Spring Harbor conference and, 459–62 CRISPR cures and, xviii, 449–57 PAC-MAN, 454–57, 460 deaths in, 404, 449 legacies of, 473–75 SARS-CoV-2 in, 403–4 testing and, xiv–xv, 405, 406, 407–11, 413–18, 427–33 antigen tests, 430–31 Broad Institute and, 410–11, 429 CDC and, 407–10 CRISPR and, 413, 417, 421–25, 427–33, 453 Fauci and, 410 FDA and, 407–10 first person in U.S. to test positive, 407 Mammoth Biosciences and, 423–25, 429–32 PCR tests, 408, 413, 416, 421, 425, 428, 430 Sherlock Biosciences and, 428, 430 Trump administration and, 411 University of Washington and, 409–10, 415 Zhang and, 421, 427–32 vaccines and, 434, 435–47, 449 clinical trials of, 435–36, 440–41, 445–46, 461 Fauci and, 442 FDA and, 446 Isaacson in trial of, 435–36, 440–41, 445–46 cowpox, 436 Crichton, Michael, 271 Crick, Francis, 20–28, 47, 166, 389, 475 at Asilomar, 269 on central dogma of biology, 44 in DNA double-helix structure discovery, xviii, 7, 11, 26–28, 29–31, 46, 51, 58, 159, 423, 470 with DNA model, 16 Franklin’s work and, 25, 26 Nobel Prize awarded to, 28, 470 Watson’s meeting of, 20 CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), 69–149, 449–50, 477, 480 anti-CRISPRs, 260–61 as bacterial immune system, xiv, xviii, xix, 67, 86, 87 Banfield’s enlistment of Doudna to work on, xviii, 77, 79–80, 81, 93, 471 Barrangou and Horvath’s work on, 90–93, 143–44, 177, 178, 220, 223, 470 diagram of mechanism of, 133 discovery of, 71–77 DNA targeting in, xiv, xviii, 67, 76–77, 86, 87, 93–94, 106, 111, 131, 132, 133, 146, 217 Doudna’s creation of team for studying, 103–11 enzymes in, see CRISPR-associated enzymes in vitro vs. in vivo studies of, 80, 94–95, 183, 191, 202 Koonin’s study of, 76–77, 80, 92 and linear model of innovation, 90 Mojica’s study of, 71–76, 80, 91, 92, 220, 223, 224, 470, 479 naming of, 73 RNA in, 79, 108, 133 Cas13 targeting of RNA, 423–25, 429, 451, 452, 454–57 CRISPR RNA (crRNA), 86, 106, 124–26, 131–35, 137–39, 143, 146, 147, 180, 184, 186, 217 RNA interference, 77, 79, 93 single-guide RNA (sgRNA), 134–35, 139, 186, 190, 191, 195, 198 trans-activating CRISPR RNA (tracrRNA), 124–27, 131, 134, 135, 139, 146–47, 179–80, 182, 184–86, 217–18, 225 viruses’ disabling of, 260–61 yogurt starter cultures and, xviii, 90–92, 133, 143 CRISPR applications, 243–63 affordability of, 247–48 biohacking, 253–57, 263, 285, 288, 443–44 coronavirus testing, 413, 417 cures for viral infections, 449–57 CARVER, 452–53, 455–57 PAC-MAN, 454–57, 460 defense against terrorists, 259–63 diagnostic tests for cancers, 250 diagnostic tests for viruses, 115, 118, 421–25, 431–32, 451 at-home tests, 430–32, 460 coronavirus, 413, 417, 421–25, 427–33, 453 HPV, 422–23 ex vivo and in vivo, 246, 250 germline (inheritable) editing, see human germline editing somatic editing, 246, 276–77, 288, 329, 336, 338, 341 therapies, 233, 245–51 blindness, xviii, 250 cancer, xviii, 249–51 safe viruses as delivery method in, 456 sickle cell, xviii, 245–49, 329, 340 CRISPR-associated (Cas) enzymes, 73, 76, 84, 86, 92 Cas1, 86–87, 106, 128 Cas6, 106–7, 113, 128 as diagnostic tool, 115, 118 Cas9, 86, 92, 119, 124–25, 127, 128, 129–36, 133, 422–24, 440 purchasing of, 380 see also CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing Cas12, 86, 422–24, 429 Cas13, 86, 379, 423–25, 429, 451, 452, 454–57 CASCADE array of, 111 fluorescence microscopy and, 107–8 Zhang’s work with multiple proteins, 181 CRISPR babies, 245–47, 297–332, 325–32, 335, 337 birth of, 311–13, 315, 318 He Jiankui’s conviction and sentencing for his work, 332 He Jiankui’s removal of HIV receptor in, xv–xvi, 251, 303–13, 316–24, 369, 404 CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, xiii, xiv, xvii–xix, 60, 90, 94, 97–98, 132–36, 151–241, 272 applications of, see CRISPR applications codons and, 190, 191–92, 194 companies formed to commercialize applications of, 203–13, 430 CRISPR Therapeutics, 207, 213, 245, 465 Editas Medicine, 209–13, 250, 454 Intellia Therapeutics, 213 competition to prove human application of, xv, 64, 143–49, 155–56, 157–60, 201–2, 374 Church in, 64, 160, 173–74, 192–95, 197–99, 201, 202 Doudna in, xv, 64, 160, 173–74, 179, 187–90, 197–202 Lander in, 64, 160 Zhang in, xv, 64, 159–60, 174, 175–86, 191–95, 197, 199–202, 227 Doudna and Charpentier’s 2012 paper on, 126, 137–41, 144–46, 148, 149, 156, 172–73, 179, 180, 182–86, 191, 192, 194–95, 202, 227, 233, 237–38, 374–75 in eukaryotic cells, 148–49, 184, 237–38 as inevitable, 202 in vitro vs. in vivo, 184, 382 Isaacson’s learning of, xiv, 378, 379–83 licensing of, 208, 211 moral questions concerning, see moral questions patents for, 92, 94, 115, 135–36, 144, 156, 232–41 of Doudna, Charpentier, and Berkeley, 207–8, 210, 219, 224, 233–40 Doudna’s battle with Zhang over, 184, 194, 208, 224, 234–40, 425, 470 pool idea for, 207–8 of Zhang and the Broad Institute, 192, 207–8, 210–11, 219, 224–27, 233–40 regulation of, 255, 361 Šikšnys’s paper and, 144 transposons and, 374, 375 virus infections and, xv, xix CRISPR conferences, 93, 129 in Berkeley (2012), 140, 141, 145–49 at Cold Spring Harbor, 302, 304, 385, 391, 393, 397, 415, 458, 459–67 in Quebec (2019), 373–77 CRISPR Journal, 85, 309, 319 CRISPR Therapeutics, 207, 213, 245, 465 crowdsourcing, 256–57, 285, 464 cryocooling, 57, 63 crystallography, 84, 187 Cas1 and, 86–87 DNA and, 19–23, 51 “photograph 51,” 25, 25, 395 phase problem in, 57 RNA and, 53, 55–57, 66, 171, 181 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 219 Cure Sickle Cell Initiative, 248 Curie, Marie, 8, 470 curiosity, 478–79 of Doudna, xix, 4, 5, 8, 31, 46, 51, 479 science driven by, xix, 89, 90, 457, 473, 479 Current Contents, 72 cystic fibrosis, 248 cytosine, 26, 27 Daley, George, 282, 316, 324, 369 Danisco, 90–92, 143, 148, 177, 220 Dantseva, Dariia, 434, 443–45 DARPA, 259–62, 351, 452, 454 Safe Genes project of, 260, 262, 380 Darwin, Charles, 10, 11–14, 28, 159, 292, 302, 364, 475 Davenport, Charles, 37 Davies, Kevin, 85, 309, 320 Davis, Miles, 345 Davos, World Economic Forum in, 368 deafness, 346–48 Decoding Watson (PBS documentary), 384, 386, 389–90, 392, 393 Deem, Michael, 298, 300, 301, 307–9 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 259–62, 351, 452, 454 Safe Genes project of, 260, 262, 380 Defense Department, U.S., 4, 259, 262 Defoe, Daniel, 414 Deisseroth, Karl, 167 Delbrück, Max, 37 Deltcheva, Elitza, 125–26 Dengue virus, 424 depression, 166, 352–53 bipolar disorder, 177, 327, 352–53 Derain, André, 395 designer babies, 355–56 see also CRISPR babies Desmond-Hellmann, Sue, 100 DETECTR (DNA endonuclease targeted CRISPR trans reporter), 422–23, 429, 460 Dhanda, Rahul, 428 diabetes, 99 Diana, Princess, 100 Diaz, Cameron, 219 Dicer enzyme, 66, 79 Didion, Joan, 7 digital technology, xvii, 28, 114 disabilities, 345–48 diversity, 362, 376, 480 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), xvii, xviii, 17–28, 43–47 bases in, 26, 27, 37, 71, 382, 480 in central dogma of biology, 44, 47, 270 cloning, 34–35, 98, 153, 280, 313, 415–16 CRISPR sequences of, see CRISPR crystallography and, 19–23, 51 discovery of double-helix structure of, xviii, 7, 11, 26–28, 29–31, 46, 51, 58, 159, 386, 390, 395, 397, 423, 470 editing of, see gene editing Franklin’s work on, xviii, 7, 22–26, 28, 31, 46, 51, 53, 227, 389, 459, 470 “photograph 51,” 25, 25, 395 Human Genome Project and, 37–41, 43, 45, 74, 172, 175, 280, 330, 352, 388, 390, 391 “junk,” 416 model of, 16, 27 mutations in, 41, 302 Pauling’s work on structure of, 21–25, 51, 159, 391 “photograph 51” of, 25, 25, 395 race to discover structure of, 21–28, 159, 390, 391 reverse transcription and, 270, 408 sequencing of, 71–72, 74, 79, 80, 83, 172 vaccines, 439–41, 444–45, 456 in viruses, 65 in yeast, 35, 45 Dolly the sheep, 280, 313, 415–16 Double Helix, The (Watson), xix, 6–8, 9, 20, 21, 27, 29–31, 50, 157, 328, 391, 397, 398, 414, 459, 477–78 Doudna, Dorothy (mother), 2, 4, 5, 32, 98, 472–73 Doudna, Ellen (sister), 2, 472–73 Doudna, Jennifer, 2, 62, 130, 138, 158, 188, 204, 214, 282, 298 as bench scientist, 103 at Berkeley, xiii–xv, xvii, 64–65, 83, 98, 101, 107 Berkeley lab of, 103–11, 104, 117 Isaacson learns to edit at, xiv, 378, 379–83 birth of, 4 business school considered by, 98 Caribou Biosciences, 113–18, 203, 207–8, 213 Intellia Therapeutics, 213 chemistry studied by, 31–34, 478 childhood of, xix, 2, 3–8, 31, 123 Charpentier’s rift with, 215–21, 464, 466 Church’s email to, 173, 197 coauthors on papers of, 48 at conferences, 287–90, 292, 303, 332, 367, 373, 375, 385, 459–61 at congressional hearing, 325, 328–29 CRISPR work of Banfield calls and invites her to collaborate, xviii, 77, 79–80, 81, 93, 471 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences awarded for, 219–21 Church’s paper and, 197, 234 collaboration with Charpentier, 135, 140, 160, 183, 199–200, 206, 215–21, 464–67, 475 company formations and, 203–13 competition to adapt CRISPR into tool for gene editing in humans, xv, 64, 160, 173–74, 179, 187–90, 197–202 creation of lab team, 103–11 defense applications and, 259–61 diagnostic tests and, 422–23 Editas Medicine and, 209–13 ethical considerations of, 367–70 Kavli Prize awarded for, 221 Lander’s “Heroes of CRISPR” and, 223–29, 388 medical applications and, 247–49, 251 meeting Charpentier, 119, 122, 127–28, 200 Nobel Prize awarded for, xix, 468, 469–73 paper for eLife, 198–201, 215, 225, 237 paper written with Charpentier (2012), 126, 137–41, 144–46, 148, 149, 156, 172–73, 179, 180, 182–86, 191, 192, 194–95, 202, 227, 233, 237–38, 374–75 patent for, 207–8, 210, 219, 224, 233–40 patent battle with Zhang, 184, 194, 208, 224, 234–40, 425, 470 possible partnership with Zhang, 207–8 publicity for, 216–17, 220, 223 review article written with Charpentier (2014), 215 Zhang’s emails and, 200–201, 207 see also CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing curiosity of, xix, 4, 5, 8, 31, 46, 51, 479 The Double Helix read by, xix, 6–8, 29–31, 157, 328, 391, 397, 398, 414, 459, 477 first marriage of, 54–56, 63 Genentech and, 97–102, 103, 105, 107, 113, 114 on gene therapy, 279 germline editing views of, 331–32, 367–70 at Harvard, 34–35, 40, 64, 208 He Jiankui and, 298, 302–4, 315–17, 319, 321–24, 328, 332 in high school, 31 Hitler nightmare of, 283, 286 at Hong Kong summit (International Summit on Human Gene Editing, 2015), 282, 292–93, 366 husband of, see Cate, Jamie Innovative Genomics Institute, 248, 261, 380–82, 401–3 COVID and, 401–5, 413–18, 419 Mammoth Biosciences and, xv, 249–50, 423 medical school considered by, 98 midlife crisis of, 97, 101 Napa Valley conference organized by, 287–90, 292, 303, 332, 367 in National Academy video, 355 at Pomona College, 30, 31–34 Qi and, 453–56 at Quebec conference, 373, 375 RNA work of, xviii, 45–49, 51–61, 63, 65–67, 134, 181, 220, 435–36, 446 son of, see Cate, Andrew Watson and, xviii, 8, 29, 48–50, 396 Watson visited by, 395–98 at Yale, 52, 57, 60–61, 63 Doudna, Martin (father), 2, 3–8, 32, 34, 58–60, 397–98, 472–73 cancer of, 58–59 death of, 59–60 Watson’s The Double Helix given to Jennifer by, xix, 6–8, 477 Doudna, Sarah (sister), 2, 3, 472–73 Down’s syndrome, 337 Doxzen, Kevin, 255 dragonflies, 170 Dr.


pages: 239 words: 74,845

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

As she went, she fought the urge to give Chinwe a hug; too soon, she figured, though if the shot was as good as they said it was, maybe soon the term “social distancing” would recede from everyone’s vocabulary. Kim couldn’t wait until it was just another shared linguistic memory. Along with “flattening the curve” and “contact tracing” and “herd immunity.” And maybe even “GameStop,” Kim added to herself as she pushed through the double doors, already reaching toward her phone, which was tucked in the pockets of her scrubs. The twenty minutes she’d spent waiting for the shot had already been the longest she’d gone that day without checking her Robinhood account or WallStreetBets; but now that she had fifteen minutes to kill before she could head home to her kids, she was ready to dive back into the madness.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Requiring everyone to supply their health data, as in China, is not an option in most democracies. At any rate, it’s mostly a moot point. China, South Korea, and Singapore do not owe their success in fighting Covid-19 to invasive new technology. Rather, what made the difference were the hallmarks of a proper pandemic response: fast, widespread testing and old-fashioned contact tracing, conducted through in-person interviews. The stumbling blocks that AI has faced in the fight against the novel coronavirus do not reflect some underlying flaw with the technology; they just reveal its limits in a special situation where much is unclear and good data is hard to come by. With time, there will be more and better data about the disease and innovative ways to use it—from mass thermal scanning for temperatures to facial recognition, both of which could be put to use in quickly detecting potential illness among large crowds in public spaces.


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

It then became obvious that we lacked the large-scale capacity to keep up with the pandemic, setting dodgy targets and dubiously meeting them through double-counting, before finally deciding to stop reporting the number of actual people tested entirely. The government spent £12 million on an app for contact tracing, but then, when it didn’t appear, we were told it would never have worked, and, again, diverged from the global standard. On a government level, we couldn’t have managed any aspect of this crisis worse, and appear to have learnt absolutely nothing from it, jettisoning our scientific advisors and disseminating confusing messaging to the public at the critical moment when coming out of lockdown could explode in our faces.


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

Manila was again in a pandemic lockdown, the only mitigating measure that the Duterte administration had enforced in nearly nineteen months of dealing with covid-19. The government was playing catch-up with vaccines because it had been about half a year late1 in getting a viable supply, and when it finally had, it had prioritized the Chinese-made Sinovac, which had the lowest efficacy of the available vaccines. Contact tracing remained largely aspirational, and now the Senate was investigating corruption charges for some of the largest pandemic deals that seemed to link Duterte to the dubious companies of his Chinese friend and economic adviser, Michael Yang.2 By then two of my cases had been dismissed. The constant legal battles were taking a toll on me, but I was determined to not let them stop my mission of getting out in the world and sounding the alarm.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Instead, smart cities offer digital solutions in search of an actual problem, like one Sidewalk Labs program in Columbus, Ohio, that proposed using driverless cars and ride sharing to bring patients to medical appointments as a solution to persistently high rates of infant mortality in Black neighborhoods, rather than, say, instituting better public transit, education, and prenatal services to improve maternal and infant health in a vulnerable community. “Technology might be an answer to that, but it cannot be the answer,” Baykurt said. It reminded me of the proximity-based contact-tracing apps governments enthusiastically rolled out early on in the pandemic, which did precisely nothing to actually slow the spread of the virus. Sidewalk Labs didn’t get very far here in Toronto. It made a bunch of presentations and renderings, held some meetings, and opened an office across the street from the waterfront site it was given to develop.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

The yard’s cleaning crews stepped up their efforts, and the CAG considered hiring more outside professional disinfecting services for cleaning trailers, trades buildings, shipping containers, restrooms, and other common-use areas, as well as increasing air flow and ventilation in targeted work areas, closing communal kitchen areas, providing more hand sanitizing stations and products, and broadening contact tracing. The yard collaborated more and more with the navy and its medical teams. Covid-19 is not gone and we must remain vigilant here at work and through our personal decisions outside of work, Boykin warned online. Despite Covid-19’s impact, Marzano continued to build up his crew on the Kennedy. Indeed, when former Ford CO Rear Admiral John Meier, who became commander of the Naval Air Force, Atlantic, visited the ship and its commanding officer in mid-June, he was surprised that the Kennedy was outpacing the Ford for number of boarded sailors at the same stage of construction.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

So it’s difficult to view his widely publicized comments about election fraud and his “prayers” that Trump use military force to retain power in January 2021 as being entirely separate from his own commercial agenda.28 The Chinese have gotten in on the act too. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one state-affiliated Chinese company charitably “donated” drones to local US law enforcement agencies to help enforce social distancing and contact tracing during the national lockdown. The trick? Free surveillance. The victims of pre-2008 capitalist excess were the cash-strapped strippers and little people and, arguably, in certain cases, the shareholders and clients who were shortchanged a few bucks to pay for lavish entertainment. In 2008, the American taxpayers found themselves on the hook when corporate excesses were “fixed” with a bailout.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Four weeks later, with 1,300 Americans dead and more confirmed cases in the United States than any other country, Mr. Trump was still talking hopefully about getting everybody to church at Easter.9 As I write, debates are raging. Can rapid testing, isolation, and contact tracing contain outbreaks indefinitely, or only delay their spread? Should we worry more about small indoor gatherings or large outdoor gatherings? Does closing schools help prevent the spread of the virus, or do more harm as children go to stay with vulnerable grandparents? How much does wearing masks help?


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

TZ_SPE_ID=251. 17 Interview with Bai Chong-En by Peter Vanham, Beijing, September 2019. 18 “Redlining,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/redlining. 19 “Key Facts about the Uninsured Population,” Kaiser Family Foundation, December 2019, https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/. 20 “53% of Americans Say the Internet Has Been Essential During the COVID-19 Outbreak,” Pew Research Center, April 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/04/30/53-of-americans-say-the-internet-has-been-essential-during-the-covid-19-outbreak/. 21 “59% of US Parents with Lower Incomes Say Their Child May Face Digital Obstacles in Schoolwork,” Pew Research Center, September 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/10/59-of-u-s-parents-with-lower-incomes-say-their-child-may-face-digital-obstacles-in-schoolwork/. 22 “Is a Successful Contact Tracing App Possible? These Countries Think So,” MIT Technology Review, August 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/10/1006174/covid-contract-tracing-app-germany-ireland-success/. 23 “Why Singapore Has One of the Highest Home Ownership Rates,” Adam Majendie, Bloomberg City Lab, July 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/behind-the-design-of-singapore-s-low-cost-housing. 24 “HDB's Ethnic Integration Policy: Why It Still Matters,” Singapore Government, April 2020, https://www.gov.sg/article/hdbs-ethnic-integration-policy-why-it-still-matters. 25 Ibidem. 26 “Why Singapore Has One of the Highest Home Ownership Rates,” Adam Majendie, Bloomberg City Lab, July 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/behind-the-design-of-singapore-s-low-cost-housing. 27 “Singapore Remains the 2nd Most Expensive Housing Market in the World after Hong Kong,” CBRE, April 2019, https://www.cbre.com/singapore/about/media-centre/singapore-remains-the-2nd-most-expensive-housing-market-in-the-world-after-hong-kong. 28 “What Other Countries Can Learn from Singapore's Schools,” The Economist, August 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/what-other-countries-can-learn-from-singapores-schools. 29 “What Other Countries Can Learn from Singapore's Schools,” The Economist, August 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/what-other-countries-can-learn-from-singapores-schools. 30 “Education System Designed to Bring Out Best in Every Student: PM,” The Straits Times, January 2020, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education-system-designed-to-bring-out-best-in-every-student-pm. 31 “The Healthiest Countries to Live In,” BBC, April 2020, http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200419-coronavirus-five-countries-with-the-best-healthcare-systems.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

TZ_SPE_ID=251. 17 Interview with Bai Chong-En by Peter Vanham, Beijing, September 2019. 18 “Redlining,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/redlining. 19 “Key Facts about the Uninsured Population,” Kaiser Family Foundation, December 2019, https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/. 20 “53% of Americans Say the Internet Has Been Essential During the COVID-19 Outbreak,” Pew Research Center, April 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/04/30/53-of-americans-say-the-internet-has-been-essential-during-the-covid-19-outbreak/. 21 “59% of US Parents with Lower Incomes Say Their Child May Face Digital Obstacles in Schoolwork,” Pew Research Center, September 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/10/59-of-u-s-parents-with-lower-incomes-say-their-child-may-face-digital-obstacles-in-schoolwork/. 22 “Is a Successful Contact Tracing App Possible? These Countries Think So,” MIT Technology Review, August 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/10/1006174/covid-contract-tracing-app-germany-ireland-success/. 23 “Why Singapore Has One of the Highest Home Ownership Rates,” Adam Majendie, Bloomberg City Lab, July 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/behind-the-design-of-singapore-s-low-cost-housing. 24 “HDB's Ethnic Integration Policy: Why It Still Matters,” Singapore Government, April 2020, https://www.gov.sg/article/hdbs-ethnic-integration-policy-why-it-still-matters. 25 Ibidem. 26 “Why Singapore Has One of the Highest Home Ownership Rates,” Adam Majendie, Bloomberg City Lab, July 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/behind-the-design-of-singapore-s-low-cost-housing. 27 “Singapore Remains the 2nd Most Expensive Housing Market in the World after Hong Kong,” CBRE, April 2019, https://www.cbre.com/singapore/about/media-centre/singapore-remains-the-2nd-most-expensive-housing-market-in-the-world-after-hong-kong. 28 “What Other Countries Can Learn from Singapore's Schools,” The Economist, August 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/what-other-countries-can-learn-from-singapores-schools. 29 “What Other Countries Can Learn from Singapore's Schools,” The Economist, August 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/what-other-countries-can-learn-from-singapores-schools. 30 “Education System Designed to Bring Out Best in Every Student: PM,” The Straits Times, January 2020, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education-system-designed-to-bring-out-best-in-every-student-pm. 31 “The Healthiest Countries to Live In,” BBC, April 2020, http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200419-coronavirus-five-countries-with-the-best-healthcare-systems.


pages: 382 words: 105,657

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

“If this continues across the nation, when you open your package of meat, what you’re going to get for a pathogen is going to be a mystery,” a longtime inspector said in December 2019. That same month, a pathogen of a different sort started sickening people at a market in Wuhan. Many other countries managed the crisis effectively, rapidly deploying widespread testing and contact tracing. The United States stumbled, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botching a simple test that could have slowed the outbreak in its crucial early months. Just as the FAA had been eclipsed by regulators from other national and international bodies, the CDC was shown to be no longer the world’s gold standard in public health.


pages: 368 words: 106,185

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Jenner, future of work, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork

Weiss emailed a colleague at the time. SARS-CoV disappeared in about eight months, though, killing fewer than one thousand people. Early adoption of mask wearing, handwashing, and temperature-taking ended the epidemic. And the virus was primarily spread by those who were ill, not asymptomatic people, so isolation and contact tracing were effective public-health measures. Several companies tried developing SARS vaccines, including GlaxoSmithKline and the small Maryland biotech that Gale Smith of MicroGeneSys had joined, Novavax, but the epidemic’s rapid end made their efforts unnecessary. SARS-CoV hung around long enough for scientists to further their understanding of coronaviruses, though.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

., where players intentionally spread and evolve a virus to wipe out humanity.10 No doubt this was one reason why China banned the game in February 2020; and why, in the following month, the developers donated a quarter of a million dollars to fight COVID-19, and in November, released an expansion where players try to save the world through contact tracing, furlough schemes, and vaccine development.11 Grimmer still is the weaponisation of video games by the far right. The perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019 livestreamed his attack with a headcam, the video reminiscent of a first-person shooter game.12 He was a user on the far right 8chan forum, where others later commented on the number of deaths in his attack and their desire to “beat his high score.”


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

By early February, fourteen provinces and cities that accounted for almost 70 percent of the population had shut down. The Chinese economy—the second largest in the world, the main engine of global growth—was being put on hold. Some containment measures were high tech. In Shanghai, before leaving either the train station or the airport, travelers were required to sign up for a contact tracing app.18 If you could not remember your own movements, a quick text to one of the cell phone providers would produce a list. Yunnan province installed QR codes in all public places so that people could scan themselves on entry.19 In most of China, control worked through more hands-on methods led by neighborhood committees, backed up by the regime’s “grid management” system of local party organizations.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Aggregated data from these devices will accurately identify if you have a serious condition, whether it is a fever, a stroke, arrhythmia, apnea, asphyxiation, or just injuries from a fall. All this Internet of Things (IoT) data will be combined with other healthcare information such as medical history, contact-tracing records, and infection-control data, to predict and warn about future pandemics. Privacy will be an alarming issue for some users, so the system will need to anonymize the data by replacing each name with a consistent and untraceable pseudonym. Also, we should research technology solutions that will allow us to have centralized AI while protecting privacy (more on this in chapter 9).


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Not to mention providing a steady supply of free at-home rapid tests, proper protective gear at work, and, critically, adequate sick leave for all workers so that no one feels obliged to show up to work in an infectious state. In the early phase of the pandemic, there could also have been major investments in contact tracing at the community level, which would have had the added benefit of creating jobs in neglected areas. And there could have been far more robust efforts to install high-quality air filters in public spaces, including schools, while hiring more teachers and teacher’s aides so class sizes could be smaller—all measures proven to reduce the virus’s spread, with plenty of knock-on benefits to students and educators.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

In May, at the end of “30 Days to Slow the Spread,” the president was still thinking magically, a de facto nostalgist for the days before modern medicine. Believe in our perfect mythical yesteryear. “Testing [people] is somewhat overrated,” he said, and “this is going to go away without a vaccine.” In other words, a reporter asked the president, Americans just had to accept that reopening without enough testing and contact-tracing would cause lots more deaths? Yes. “I call these people warriors, and I’m actually calling now…the nation, warriors. You have to be warriors,” by which he meant, of course, be willing to be killed by COVID-19, fallen soldiers for American capitalism. But apart from that, everything would soon be fantastic.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

It was widely felt, therefore, that the problem could be safely left to public venereal disease clinics. Many private physicians were quite content with this approach, since it more or less absolved them of having to deal with diseases widely considered “not nice” and which confronted the doctor with the difficult and often delicate problem of contact tracing. The public clinics, however, were relegated to second class status, underfunded and understaffed, even within health departments. Simultaneously, there was a radical de-emphasis of STDs in medical schools: Since the problem was “under control,” there was obviously little point in training physicians to deal with it.

To Francis this seemed to be ample reason to recommend that gay men start using condoms, but such proclamations were uncomfortable for the CDC, which still adhered to the old venereal disease paradigm of identifying cases, contacting all their partners, and treating everyone with antibiotics. But hepatitis B was a virus; it couldn’t be effectively treated with any drug. And contact tracing was clearly impossible if an individual had multiple, anonymous sex partners. Francis saw no alternative but prevention to block transmission of the virus, by creating either a physical barrier (condoms) or immunity (vaccination). By 1980 he was actively pushing both angles and, in his usual gruff but earnest manner, making enemies among the more traditional bureaucrats and venereologists at the CDC.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Another platform, g0v, provides open data from several Taiwanese ministries, which civic hackers can use to develop alternative versions of bureaucratic services. These technologies helped Taiwan’s early and effective response to COVID-19, in which the private sector and civil society collaborated with the government to develop tools for testing and contact tracing. New forums for virtual participation can of course repeat the same mistakes that social media commits today, exacerbating echo chambers and extremism. Once such tools start being used extensively, some parties will come up with strategies to spread disinformation, whereas others might use such platforms for demagoguery.