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Daily Archives: December 3, 2020

Google Maps gets building numbers, cross walks

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Ars Technica: “Google Maps is getting a bunch of new features this week, so it’s time for a roundup! The first feature is definitely one nobody asked for: the new “Community Feed,” which is clearly trying to turn Google Maps into a social network. Google’s blog post says that “Every day, people submit more than 20 million contributions—including recommendations for their favorite spots, updates to business services, fresh reviews and ratings, photos, answers to other people’s questions, updated addresses and more.” So now Google Maps is getting a News Feed full of all these reviews and updates. Google’s sales pitch reads “The feed shows you the latest reviews, photos and posts added to Google Maps by local experts and people you follow as well as food and drink merchants, and articles from publishers like The Infatuation.” All of these updates are in the style of a social network, with the author at the top, a “follow” link for the author, and the ability to “like” posts. The only thing they’re missing are the comments…

For a less controversial addition, how about building numbers and crosswalks? Android Police has spotted even more detail being added to certain cities in Google Maps. If you zoom all the way in on places like NYC, you’ll see striped crosswalk paint in some roads and tiny-little building numbers letting you know where the exact addresses are. These go great with Google Maps’ other recent detail addition: traffic lights. Android Police says this was first spotted in the Android Google Maps Beta, which you can sign up for here. I’m also seeing it on Google Maps on the Web…”

MIT machine learning models find gaps in coverage by Moderna, Pfizer, other Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccines

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ZDNet – “Vaccines to block COVID-19 that are in development by Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and others, and that are currently in Phase III clinical trials, may not do as well covering people of Black or Asian genetic ancestry as they do for white people, a study released Wednesday by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicated.… Continue Reading

DC Resources and Assistance Fund for Washington, D.C.’s Frontline and Essential Workers

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“With the outbreak and spread of COVID-19, The District of Columbia has undergone a seismic shift in daily life. Residents are resilient, but many across the District and from all walks of life are feeling the impacts of the novel coronavirus physically, emotionally, financially, and otherwise. In order to help meet the critical and dynamic… Continue Reading

The True Costs of Misinformation: Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

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YouTube – Video via The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, December 3, 2020 – “It all feels like a precursor to a bad joke: What do foreign agents, white supremacists, conspiracists, snake oil salesmen, political operatives, white academics, and a disgruntled bunch of zoomers have in common? The groups have collided in a… Continue Reading

43 Books For Everyone On Your Holiday List

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BuzzFeedNews: [Subjects include: food, travel, young adults, quarantine hobbies, pop culture, mysteries, the British monarchy and more] One selection as follows: “…Vegans and vegetarians, rejoice! Vegetable Kingdom, with over 100 recipes of plant-based goodness from the James Beard Award-winning chef Bryant Terry, is about to be their new food bible. And if you know someone… Continue Reading

Here’s how the U.S. can lead the world on climate change innovation

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Bill Gate – It’s time to create the National Institutes of Energy Innovation. “…There is a better way. To reduce duplication, focus the government’s efforts, and get the most innovation out of every dollar of funding, we should create a new organization: the National Institutes of Energy Innovation. This the most important thing the U.S.… Continue Reading

Evidence of Long-Distance Droplet Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by Direct Air Flow in a Restaurant in Korea

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J Korean Med Sci. 2020 Nov 30;35 (46): e415. English. Published online Nov 23, 2020.  https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e415. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background – The transmission… Continue Reading

Doctors Release Their ‘Most Worrying Outlook’ on How Climate Change Is Ruining Our Health

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Gizmodo – “The doctors are here to give the Earth its annual checkup, and they say it’s running a fever which is making people sick. They issued their findings showing all the ways climate change is affecting our health in the annual Lancet Countdown, published on Wednesday. “The indicators included in the 2020 global report… Continue Reading

The Social Life of Forests

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The New York Times Magazine – Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another? “…Now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Suzanne Simard, who is 60, has studied webs of root and fungi in the Arctic, temperate and coastal forests… Continue Reading

Can a Patron Who Gets Sick Sue the Library?

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American Libraries: “In this column, Tomas A. Lipinski, a lawyer who became a librarian, explores copyright for remote learning, exemptions to protected media for education, and exculpatory agreements—which were in the news during election season, when participants at certain rallies waived their right to hold the host liable for any harm or illness contracted…” Continue Reading

Fixing financial data to assess systemic risk

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Economic Studies at Brookings – Fixing financial data to assess systemic risk, Greg Feldberg, Research Scholar, Yale School of Management: “The COVID-19 market disruption again highlighted the flaws in the data that the public and the authorities use to assess risks in the financial system. We don’t have the right data, we can’t analyze the… Continue Reading