Say what?!? Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs

“The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of coughs, as well as spoken words. When they fed the model new cough recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from asymptomatics — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested positive for the virus.

The team is working on incorporating the model into a user-friendly app, which if FDA-approved and adopted on a large scale could potentially be a free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify people who are likely to be asymptomatic for Covid-19. A user could log in daily, cough into their phone, and instantly get information on whether they might be infected and therefore should confirm with a formal test.”

Just today I installed:
– Bear for notes, as an alternative to Evernote
– Ulysses for large writing projects, as an alternative to “remembering with my brain where everything is and what is in each file”

I don’t hate Evernote but it doesn’t spark joy. So far Bear is (true to its reputation) incredibly PRETTY and just a joy to use. Its tagging system is genius. Overall it seems to be just everything I wanted in a notes app. (Still need to try out the iPhone app and syncing between devices.)

I have long used Byword to write long-form pieces, and it is perfection incarnate for the writing experience within a single file, but it doesn’t do anything to help with organization on a project with multiple files. You can only open individual files, each in its own window. So I’m looking for something to supplement that, which can gather all my files in a project, let me merge / cut / rearrange things as one does with a large project, let me easily export them back out as a combined manuscript, and generally help me stay sane. I have a lot of persnickety requirements/preferences (example: “not being ugly”– which rules out Scrivener), yet Ulysses is looking VERY promising re: fulfilling them (after just 20-30 minutes of poking around). I’ll probably write a long post about this later.

I have a Chase card (Sapphire Preferred) and I used to only redeem the points for travel, but having not needed to book any travel for a long time, I looked to see if there was another way to redeem my points that were building up. Lo and behold, I found “Pay Yourself Back,” which was introduced a few months ago and lets you pay yourself back (in statement credits) for recent purchases in certain categories (most useful to me are groceries, restaurants, delivery, coffee/tea), at a higher value (1.25x for me, same as redeeming through the Travel Portal, so I’m happy with that). They’ve always had the option to redeem points for statement credits, but at the non-optimal value of 1x. This gives you a 25% or 50% boost, depending on which card you have.

It was like finding nearly $500 just lying around. What could be better (and on a Monday no less)! I spent all my points and paid for a significant chunk of my food and boba for the past 3 months. Thanks, Chase!

It works for several types of cards and a few more spending categories, so it’s worth looking into if you have a Chase card.

AOC streamed on Twitch for the first time ever today, playing Among Us with some of the top Twitch streamers, plus Ilhan Omar (a fellow Congresswoman, from MN) and Ilhan’s daughter Isra Hirsi, an activist. Apparently the whole thing came together in just one day; I was lucky enough to find out about it a half hour in advance and I got to watch the whole thing.

Immensely great fun. Plus it put AOC in the top 10 all-time streams with the most viewers on her first stream (!) with about 440k viewers at the peak.

Here’s a 10-minute highlight reel and a 2-minute highlight reel (which, combined, cover most of my favorite moments) and here’s the full broadcast on Twitch.

Fun facts: For all her encouragement to vote, AOC almost never tries to vote someone out; Ilhan is a prolific killer; and Isra is awesome at the game.

Are you creeped out by the idea of random third-party companies downloading all photos of you they can find on the internet and using them to build a facial recognition model by which they can then recognize you in any future photos or in real life wherever you go? Which by the way is already happening?

Check out Fawkes, an algorithm and app developed @ University of Chicago that you can use to cloak your photos before you post them online. It makes tiny pixel-level changes that make your face “look” different to AI, while looking the same to the naked eye. So algorithms building a model of you based on cloaked photos will get it wrong, and won’t be able to recognize you in an uncloaked photo, or in real life. You can find a lot more info and FAQs at that link.

My first impression on playing Star Wars: Squadrons was simply being pleased by the way they handle diversity in what your character can look like, without overthinking it. There are 20 heads/faces you can choose from (for your 2 characters). Only 4-5 of those I would consider Caucasian. There are more Asian-ish faces to choose from than Caucasian! I feel seen.

And there’s a good gender ratio, which I can’t even determine exactly because maybe 4 of the faces are pretty androgynous and could go either way, which is even better! And they’re not labelled male/female or in separate columns etc.. it’s kind of random and they’re all labelled “human.”

Plus you can choose any voice (which are also not labelled male/female, but “A” and “B”).. so nothing stops you from having a more female-looking character with a more male-sounding voice, etc. And the bodies are “unisex” which makes sense ‘cause you’re just gonna be wearing a lumpy pilot suit the entire game, so no need to get all fancy. (So are the character name suggestions.)

PLUS, there is supposedly a non-binary character (non-playable but part of the story) later in the game, who uses “they/them”, and who is voiced by a non-binary actor!

Never thought I’d see the day when I wouldn’t be forced to choose between the strapping hero dude and the busty femme fatale! Now I can just play as a person and focus on pew-pewing targets down and not crashing into space debris.

Got my ballot today! If you’re a CA voter, I recently read an article that provides super helpful explanation on how to think about ballot propositions in general. It changed the way I think about them, and I really wish this stuff was explained to CA voters before just throwing props at us: Why I vote “no” on (almost) all California ballot propositions, even if I agree with them

Additionally, here you can sign up for ballot-related notifs for when it’s mailed, received, counted. Here is a nice guide with video explanations of the props, context on congressional races, etc!

Man, I forgot how mindblowingly good Max Max: Fury Road is, and how much I loved it when it first came out. I remembered it all of a sudden when thinking about movie correlates to the smoke-filled skies, blighted landscape, and water shortages here in California. (See my post on climate migration for more doom.) Blade Runner 2049 was a clear one and Fury Road is another.

If you’re interested in revisiting the movie, may I suggest looking into the Black and Chrome edition, which came out in 2017. Having seen it, I prefer the original, as the color was absolutely one of the things I loved about the movie; but the Black and Chrome is definitely a distinct experience.

Either way, pairs well with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road if you want to stay in the nuclear-winter-desolate-wasteland mood.

🎥

So through an associative thoughtline from We Are Who We Are (see previous post) to Chloë Sevigny to Boys Don’t Cry, I suddenly wondered what happened to Hilary Swank, whom I haven’t seen in a movie in years and years.

I didn’t get a conclusive answer as to why she’s been lower-profile (there are hypotheses), but I did find out that she committed a massive PR boo-boo in 2011, when she accepted cash money to attend (and give a speech at) the birthday party of Ramzan Kadyrov, the tyrant of Chechnya–who is sometimes known as “Putin’s little dragon” and whom the Human Rights Watch accused of “crimes against humanity.” Oops.

Here’s an op-ed that does a 1:1 mapping of progressively-minded movies Hilary Swank has starred in, vs. the corresponding human rights violations that Kadyrov has committed.

Hilary Swank probably was unaware of all this and the moral of the story is that you should not attend every birthday party you’re invited to, especially when being paid to go.

From Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey:

Talk is a privilege and one must deny oneself that privilege.

– Martha Graham

“The very first time I met her I asked her if she would have lunch with me,” the Life photographer Nina Leen once recalled. “She told me she was writing a book and there was no hope of a lunch for several years.”

– on Margaret Bourke-White

From Agnes Martin, “What We Do Not See If We Do Not See”, Writings:

I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone, that you give up having pets and unnecessary companions.

There needs to be a word for that feeling you get after you’ve googled for 45 minutes and convinced yourself that you probably don’t have e.g. lupus.

Relief (that you’re ok) + shame (for wasting time) + pride (that at least you learned something) + shame (…even though it was unnecessary)..