The Coronavirus Tech Handbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The Coronavirus Tech Handbook provides a space for technologists, specialists, civic organisations and public & private institutions to collaborate on a rapid and sophisticated response to the coronavirus outbreak. It is an active and evolving resource with thousands of expert contributors.

In less than two weeks it has grown to cover areas including:

  • Detailed guidance for doctors and nurses,
  • Advice and tools for educators adjusting to remote teaching, 
  • Community of open-source ventilator designers
  • Comprehensive data and models for forecasting the spread of the virus.

Coronavirus Tech Handbook’s goal is to create a rapidly evolving open source technical knowledge base that will help all institutions across civil society and the public sector collaborate to fight the outbreak. 

Coronavirus Tech Handbook is not a place for the public to get advice, but a place for specialists to collaborate and make sure the best solutions are quickly shared and deployed….(More)”.

How scientists are crowdsourcing a coronavirus treatment

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Article by Evan Nicole Brown: “… There’s currently no cure for COVID-19, but scientists are working on drugs that could help slow its spread. Fortunately, citizens can get involved in the process.

Foldit is an online video game that challenges players to fold various proteins into shapes where they are stable. Generally, folding proteins allows scientists (and citizens) to design new proteins from scratch, but in the case of coronavirus, Foldit players are trying to design the drugs to combat it. “Coronavirus has a ‘spike’ protein that it uses to recognize human cells,” says Brian Koepnick, a biochemist and researcher with the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design who has been using Foldit for protein research for six years. “Foldit players are designing new protein drugs that can bind to the COVID spike and block this recognition, [which could] potentially stop the virus from infecting more cells in an individual who has already been exposed to the virus.”

“In Foldit, you change the shape of a protein model to optimize your score. This score is actually a sophisticated calculation of the fold’s potential energy,” says Koepnick, adding that professional researchers use an identical score function in their work. “The coronavirus puzzles are set up such that high-scoring models have a better chance of actually binding to the target spike protein.” Ultimately, high-scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers and considered for real-world use….(More)”.

Like Zika, The Public Is Heading To Wikipedia During The COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Farah Qaiser at Forbes: “A new study out in the PLOS Computational Biology journal shows that public attention in the midst of the Zika virus epidemic was largely driven by media coverage, rather than the epidemic’s magnitude or extent, highlighting the importance of mass media coverage when it comes to public health. This is reflected in the ongoing COVID-19 situation, where to date, the main 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has over ten million page views.

The 2015-2016 Zika virus epidemic began in Northeastern Brazil, and spread across South and North America. The Zika virus was largely spread by infected Aedes mosquitoes, where symptoms included a fever, headache, itching, and muscle pain. It could also be transmitted between pregnant women and their fetuses, causing microcephaly, where a baby’s head was much smaller than expected.

Similar to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the media coverage around the Zika virus epidemic shaped public opinion and awareness.

“We knew that it was relevant, and very important, for public health to understand how the media and news shapes the attention of [the] public during epidemic outbreaks,” says Michele Tizzoni, a principal investigator based at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation. …

Today, the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has around ten million page views. As per Toby Negrin, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Product Officer, this page has been edited over 12K times by nearly 1,900 different editors. The page is currently semi-protected – a common practice for Wikipedia pages that are relevant to current news stories.

In an email, Negrin shared that “the day after the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11th, the main English Wikipedia article about the pandemic had nearly 1.1 million views, an increase of nearly 30% from the day before the WHO’s announcement (on March 10th, it had just over 809,000 views).” This is similar to the peaks in Wikipedia attention observed when official announcements took place during the Zika virus epidemic.

In addition, initial data from Tizzoni’s research group shows that the lockdown in Italy has resulted in a 50% or more decrease in movement between provinces. Similarly, Negrin notes that since the national lockdown in Italy, “total pageviews from Italy to all Wikimedia projects increased by nearly 30% over where they were at the same time last year.”

With increased public awareness during epidemics, tackling misinformation is critical. This remains important at Wikipedia.

“When it comes to documenting current events on Wikipedia, volunteers take even greater care to get the facts right,” stated Negrin, and pointed out that there is a page dedicated to misinformation during this pandemic, which has received over half a million views….(More)”.

World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index®

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Interactive Overview: “The World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index® is the world’s leading source for original, independent data on the rule of law. Now covering 128 countries and jurisdictions, the Index relies on national surveys of more than 130,000 households and 4,000 legal practitioners and experts to measure how the rule of law is experienced and perceived around the world.

Effective rule of law reduces corruption, combats poverty and disease, and protects people from injustices large and small. It is the foundation for communities of justice, opportunity, and peace—underpinning development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights.

Learn more about the rule of law and explore the full WJP Rule of Law Index 2020 report, including PDF report download, data insights, methodology, and more at the Index report resources page….(More)”

The Coronavirus Crisis Is Showing Us How to Live Online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Roose at The New York Times:”…There is no use sugarcoating the virus, which has already had devastating consequences for people all over the world, and may get much worse in the months ahead. There will be more lives lost, businesses closed and communities thrown into financial hardship. Nobody is arguing that what is coming will be fun, easy or anything remotely approaching normal for a very long time.

But if there is a silver lining in this crisis, it may be that the virus is forcing us to use the internet as it was always meant to be used — to connect with one another, share information and resources, and come up with collective solutions to urgent problems. It’s the healthy, humane version of digital culture we usually see only in schmaltzy TV commercials, where everyone is constantly using a smartphone to visit far-flung grandparents and read bedtime stories to kids.

Already, social media seems to have improved, with more reliable information than might have been expected from a global pandemic. And while the ways we’re substituting for in-person interaction aren’t perfect — over the next few months in America, there may be no phrase uttered more than “Can someone mute?” — we are seeing an explosion of creativity as people try to use technology as a bridge across physical distances.

Just look at what’s happening in Italy, where homebound adults are posting mini-manifestos on Facebook, while restless kids flock to multiplayer online games like Fortnite. Or see what’s happening in China, where would-be partyers have invented “cloud clubbing,” a new kind of virtual party in which D.J.s perform live sets on apps like TikTok and Douyin while audience members react in real time on their phones. Or observe how we’re coping in the United States, where groups are experimenting with new kinds of socially distanced gatherings: virtual yoga classes, virtual church services, virtual dinner parties.

These are the kinds of creative digital experiments we need, and they are coming at a time when we need them more than ever….(More)”

The Data Storytelling Workbook

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Book by Anna Feigenbaum and Aria Alamalhodaei: “From tracking down information to symbolising human experiences, this book is your guide to telling more effective, empathetic and evidence-based data stories.

Drawing on cross-disciplinary research and first-hand accounts of projects ranging from public health to housing justice, The Data Storytelling Workbook introduces key concepts, challenges and problem-solving strategies in the emerging field of data storytelling. Filled with practical exercises and activities, the workbook offers interactive training materials that can be used for teaching and professional development. By approaching both ‘data’ and ‘storytelling’ in a broad sense, the book combines theory and practice around real-world data storytelling scenarios, offering critical reflection alongside practical and creative solutions to challenges in the data storytelling process, from tracking down hard to find information, to the ethics of visualising difficult subjects like death and human rights….(More)”.

Building Blocks and New Frontiers for Open Government

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Paper by Aichida Ul-Aflaha, Mary McNeil and Saki Kumagai: “This paper summarizes the World Bank’s knowledge on open, participatory, and responsive governance. It offers a rethinking and broadening of the term “open government” in light of the World Bank Group’s Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations and World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. The building blocks of open government are documented based on experience and growing trends. The paper also tries to identify new frontiers and presents a summary of action steps for advancing the open, participatory, and responsive governance agenda within the World Bank….(More)”.

Coronavirus: seven ways collective intelligence is tackling the pandemic

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Article by Kathy Peach: “Tackling the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. But collective intelligence is now being used around the world by communities and governments to respond.

At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity created when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and insights to solve a problem.

Advances in digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent years – connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data. It is particularly suited to addressing fast-evolving, complex global problems such as disease outbreaks.

Here are seven ways it is tackling the coronavirus pandemic:

1. Predicting and modelling outbreaks

On the December 31, 2019, health monitoring platform Blue Dot alerted its clients to the outbreak of a flu-like virus in Wuhan, China – nine days before the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement about it. It then correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo.

Blue Dot combines existing data sets to create new insights. Natural language processing, the AI methods that understand and translate human-generated text, and machine learning techniques that learn from large volumes of data, sift through reports of disease outbreaks in animals, news reports in 65 languages, and airline passenger information. It supplements the machine-generated model with human intelligence, drawing on diverse expertise from epidemiologists to veterinarians and ecologists to ensure that its conclusions are valid.

2. Citizen science

The BBC carried out a citizen science project in 2018, which involved members of the public in generating new scientific data about how infections spread. People downloaded an app that monitored their GPS position every hour, and asked them to report who they had encountered or had contact with that day….(More).

Global Traffic Scorecard

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Press Release: “…the 2019 INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard… identified, analyzed and ranked congestion and mobility trends in more than 900 cities, across 43 countries. To reflect an increasingly diverse mobility landscape, the 2019 Global Traffic Scorecard includes both public transport and biking metrics for the first time….

At the global level, Bogota topped the list of the cities most impacted by traffic congestion with drivers losing 191 hours a year to congestion, followed by Rio de Janeiro (190 hours), Mexico City (158 hours) and Istanbul (150 hours). Latin American and European cities again dominated the Top 10, highlighting the rapid urbanisation occurring in Latin America and historic European cities that took shape long before the age of automobile….

INRIX fuses anonymous data from diverse datasets – such as phones, cars, trucks and cities – that leads to robust and accurate insights. The data used in the 2019 Global Traffic Scorecard is the congested or uncongested status of every segment of road for every minute of the day, as used by millions of drivers around the world that rely on INRIX-based traffic services….(More)”

Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050

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Paper by Ilona M. Otto et al: “…In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system. Tipping of these subsystems could be triggered by “social tipping interventions” (STIs) that could contribute to rapid transition of the world system into a state of net zero anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The results reported in this study are based on an online expert survey, an expert workshop, and an extensive literature review (SI Appendix).

Our results complement the existing shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) that are used alongside the representative concentration pathways (RCPs) to analyze the feedbacks between climate change and socioeconomic factors, such as world population growth, economic development, and technological progress. Our results could be useful for exploring possible transformative pathways leading to scenarios that reach net zero emissions by 2050.

…Various types of tipping processes can be differentiated in the literature. Many authors refer to critical thresholds , a notion closely related to the metaphor of a “butterfly effect”. Other processes related to tipping dynamics include metamorphosis, where a rapid loss of structures of one sort occurs simultaneously with the development of new structures, as well as cascades driven by positive feedbacks in processes occurring simultaneously at smaller scales.

The social tipping dynamics of interest for this study are typically manifested as spreading processes in complex social networks of behaviors, opinions, knowledge, technologies, and social norms, including spreading processes of structural change and reorganization. These spreading processes resemble contagious dynamics observed in epidemiology that spread through social networks. Once triggered, such processes can be irreversible and difficult to stop. Similar contagious dynamics have been observed in human behavior, for example in assaultive violence, participation in social movements, or health-related behaviors and traits, such as smoking or obesity..(More)”.