Computer Catches COVID Cough
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| Computer Catches COVID Cough | |
| Number | 3899 |
| Broadcast Date | NOVEMBER 2, 2020 |
| Episode Length | 29:04 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Amos |
The RIAA has found the piracy, Waymo simulates collisions, and your cough might know if you have COVID-19 before your body shows symptoms.
Quick Hits
- Twitter announced it will consider US election results official when they are confirmed by state election authorities or confirmed by two of the following outlets: ABC News, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, and NBC News. Twitter will add labels to tweets that claim victory before this confirmation.
- The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the Raspberry Pi 400, a keyboard that includes a Raspberry Pi 4 system on a chip inside. The Raspberry Pi 400 costs $70 for just the keyboard, or $100 for a bundle with a mouse, power supply, microSD card, HDMI cable, and beginner’s guide. It's available in the UK, US, France, and Germany now, coming to Italy and Spain next week, with releases planned in India, Australia, and New Zealand by the end of the year.
- India's open architecture payment infrastructure, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) surpassed 2 billion transactions in October, doubling on the year. Walmart's PhonePe payment app had the most volume in the month, beating Google Pay's year long lead with 835 million transactions vs 820 million. Paytm and Amazon Pay rounded out the top 4 with 245 million and 125 million, respectively.
- The Financial Times's sources say Huawei plans to build a dedicated chip factory in Shanghai to make components for its telecom infrastructure business. The factory will launch using a 45 nanometer process. That's right, 45. The factory will scale down to 20 nanometers by late 2022. Combined with existing stockpiles, this may allow their domestic telecom business to continue with minimal disruption.
- Apple announced it will hold its third fall virtual event on November 10th at 10am PST. The event announcement is titled "One more thing." Apple has previously said it would release Apple Silicon-based Macs by the end of 2020.
Top Stories
- MIT scientists published a paper in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology describing an algorithm that can identify individuals with COVID-19 by the sound of their cough, including asymptomatic patients. COVID changes the sound you produce even when asymptomatic. In testing, the algorithm was 98.5% accurate on patients with a positive COVID-19 test, and 100% accurate for those with no other symptoms. The algorithm was trained on a dataset of 70,000 audio samples with multiple coughs, 2500 of which were from confirmed COVID-19 cases. The researchers hope to get regulatory approval to use it as a way to take quick non-invasive daily screenings, and for pool testing to quickly detect outbreaks in groups. Cambridge University, Carnegie Mellon University and UK health start-up Novoic have been working on similar projects.
- The Internet Archive announced that web pages archived in the WayBack Machine that have been found to be part of misinformation campaigns will have banners added noting that. The Internet Archive will rely on FactCheck.org, Check Your Fact, Lead Stories, Politifact, Washington Post Fact-Checker, AP News Fact Check, USA Today Fact Check, Graphika, Stanford Internet Observatory, and Our.news to identify the pages. The content of the archived post will not be changed. A thin yellow header will be added between the normal WayBack Machine header and the beginning of the archived page, that will link to an article for additional context.
- YouTube-dl is a tool that lets you download video from YouTube for offline viewing and use. Until recently its source code was hosted on GitHub. The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that, "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—.. is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." On October 23, the RIAA filed a copyright complaint with GitHub requesting it take down the YouTube-dl project. The RIAA claims YouTube-dl is primarily designed and marketed for circumventing YouTube’s technological measures. The DMCA requires a platform like GitHub to respond to takedown requests. The action immediately caused an uptick in searches for youtube-dl on Google. Many users began to mirror and clone the source code. The developers also continued to host the source code from their own site. Many people forked the code and uploaded it to GitHub. A Twitter user named Galactic Furball encoded the software into images that could be easily shared. The CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman reached out to YouTube-dl's developers to try to help them defeat the DMCA claim. Friedman suggested to TorrentFreak that YouTube-dl could be restored if it removed examples from its code that showed copyrighted songs and removing a particular piece of code that circumvents YouTube's rolling cipher that was cited by the RIAA. TorrentFreak has showed how the rolling cipher can be circumvented using any browser, no stream ripping tools required. Though GitHub did warn users that reposting the exact code that was removed is a violation of GitHub's DMCA policy.
Discussion
- Waymo released two reports detailing the data it gathered in its autonomous car business, as well as outlining its safety methodologies. The reports look at data from all of 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. In 2019, Waymo's 300 vehicle fleet logged 6.1 million miles with onboard human safety drivers in a 100-square-mile service area around Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe Arizona, as well as 65,000 fully autonomous miles.
In that time, Waymo vehicles were involved in 18 crashes, and 29 events. Waymo counts events where safety drivers took over and avoided accidents. It simulates what would have happened otherwise and uses the results of the simulation to improve the system. Of the actual crashes, 14 were from other drivers rear ending Waymo cars. In simulated crashes, the most common events were lane changes with another car entering a Waymo vehicle's lane. Other drivers contributed to 8 severe or potentially severe incidents. Three of those occurred in real life. One event involved a Waymo vehicle T-boned by another vehicle going 40 mph. In only 3 actual crashes was an airbag deployed by any vehicle involved, with Waymo saying there were no serious injuries from incidents. Only one crash occurred with a passenger aboard the car, a 4 mph rear ending with a human safety driver aboard.
- Waymo released two reports detailing the data it gathered in its autonomous car business, as well as outlining its safety methodologies. The reports look at data from all of 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. In 2019, Waymo's 300 vehicle fleet logged 6.1 million miles with onboard human safety drivers in a 100-square-mile service area around Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe Arizona, as well as 65,000 fully autonomous miles.
Kicker
- A couple interesting developments in robot nightmare news. The first comes from Disney Research team, who published a paper with researchers from the University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology about a robot designed to hold eye gaze more realistically. This robot can turn to face people and blink, but also shift from direct eye contact to the rapid eye movements to better reflect how people actually hold eye contact. In a demonstration video, the robot has no skin, but does dress in a stylish oxford.
Not to be outdone, researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong presented developments on a new kind of modular robots called FreeBOT at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots. These include small robotic vehicles inside iron spheres, with two motorized wheels and a permanent magnet inside. Think of it like a Sphero robot that can magnetically connect to other units. Right now these all need to be remote controlled and don't have any sensors onboard, but it solves a major problem of modular robots by making connecting much simpler.
- A couple interesting developments in robot nightmare news. The first comes from Disney Research team, who published a paper with researchers from the University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology about a robot designed to hold eye gaze more realistically. This robot can turn to face people and blink, but also shift from direct eye contact to the rapid eye movements to better reflect how people actually hold eye contact. In a demonstration video, the robot has no skin, but does dress in a stylish oxford.
Mailbag
- I'm about a week behind on DTNS but just finished listening to episode 3891 where Tom and Scott Johnson discuss Gaming subscriptions in the aftershow.
I just wanted to point out that there are some of us that play a single game for months before moving on. Currently I'm on month 10 of playing Ark: Survival, and it was 6 months of "Satisfactory" before that. For one game at a time people, $15 a month for a subscription is not economical.
I agree the subscription will work for most gamers, like my kids, but there are still those of us that are happy with one game at a time. - Sent by Stephen
- I'm about a week behind on DTNS but just finished listening to episode 3891 where Tom and Scott Johnson discuss Gaming subscriptions in the aftershow.
- Just a quick thought on the discussion about getting a free Apple Watch in return for recording a decent level of exercise (DTNS 3898).
I guess it's possible that unfit people would ratchet up their exercise (enough to reduce risk of death) for a free watch, but I wonder if the insurance company has a slightly different aim. I would imagine the offer is especially appealing if you already put in the sweaty calories. That might bias the insured population towards fitter people and save payouts? - Sent by Russell
- Just a quick thought on the discussion about getting a free Apple Watch in return for recording a decent level of exercise (DTNS 3898).
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "Calming Election Relief" |
Computer Catches COVID Cough |
Followed by: "Shelved Robots" |