Meta's News Block Causing Chaos as Canada Burns

You may have heard that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has blocked posting of links to Canadian news sites after the government passed Bill C-18, which mandates that platforms like Facebook pay Canadian news sites for the privilege of linking to them.

As this article from Wired points out, it's causing lots of problems for people, especially those who need to get news out to people in danger from wildfires and other disasters.

Cabin Radio has been struggling with two major barriers that have gone up between it and its audience. Earlier in the year, Canada’s broadcast regulator denied the outlet a place on the FM dial because it decided there wasn’t enough demand in Yellowknife. Then, Meta’s news ban meant that the station couldn’t reach locals with up-to-the-minute fire and evacuation developments.

The Cabin Radio live blog quickly became a reverse-chronological lifeline for people from the Northwest Territories, and for the hundreds of journalists covering the fires from abroad. And, now that more than half of the population of Northwest Territories is under evacuation orders, Cabin Radio is a reliable tether to home for displaced evacuees. “People can refresh that thing every half-hour or hour and know that they're not going to miss a trick in terms of our efforts to understand what's happening on their behalf,” Williams says.

He is also broadcasting the station’s live morning show through public posts on his personal Facebook account. “If I can undercut the ban and stay on Facebook and give all this information to our audience, I will. Meta can make all the stupid and wrong decisions it likes, but we shouldn't,” he says.

I've noticed the sudden absence of posts about local news in my feed. Personally, I think the government is way off base with this one and in typical Liberal fashion, has fallen victim to a lobbying campaign from big business. 

I'm going to try something here and post this article to Facebook and see what happens. 

Featured Links - August 28, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Tree at the beach

Can Dogs Use Language? 'The “button dogs” of TikTok seem to be learning human words. What’s really going on?' Anyone who has a dog knows that they understand some words. The question is how much and can they create phrases or sentences.

Tech Billionaires Behind Secretive Plan for New California Metropolis. "A firm cloaked in mystery has bought up $800 million worth of land. Now the investors are unmasked."

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality. "For years the writer laughed off being mistaken for fellow author Naomi Wolf. Then her ‘double’ drifted into a world of conspiracy theories and became a favoured guest of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. With the US standing on a political precipice, suddenly the stakes were a lot higher."

Reclaiming Control: The Internet Archive Empowers People. Gatekeepers Keep Suing. "To be clear: what the Internet Archive is doing is traditional library lending in a digital form, and frankly not radical – I can just get access to the materials I want much more quickly through the Archive, but I must also return them much more quickly. There is no situation in which acquiring a recipe from an obsolete edition of Brody’s first cookbook with no ebook equivalent would hurt her royalties. Libraries have traditionally bought one copy of a book and then lent it, much like they do with CDL, which maintains an “owned to loaned” ratio through sequestering materials."

Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website. Tips on how to block bots from AI platforms by Neal Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld magazine.

The new “science of reading” movement, explained. "A huge shift in how kids are taught to read is underway. But the reading wars probably aren’t gone for good."

‘Dangerously Rebellious’ Texas Nuns Ban Bishop From Monastery for ‘Spiritual Safety’. "The Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth called for prayers to stop the “open disobedience.” Good for the nuns.

 

Photo of the Week - August 27, 2023

Here are some phlox in our backyard. I took the picture with my Pixel 4a near sunset facing west so there's a bit of glare from the sun. Processed in Google Photos to bring out detail in the flowers and foliage.

Phlox at sunset

Saturday Sounds - Fairport Convention - Full House For Sale and More

Fairport Convention are one of those bands that have been around for what seems like forever and still keep truckin' on. I discovered them while I was in university and saw them at Convocation Hall in Toronto in the mid-70s. Last year, they celebrated, slightly belatedly, the 50th anniversary of their album, Full House, by performing it in full at the Cropredy Folk Festival. Fortunately for us, the performance was recorded and has been released as the album Full House For Sale.  

It was a treat that had been stuck in the pipeline for three years, blocked by the persistence of that wretched COVID thingy, but, at around 9:30pm on the evening of Saturday 13th August, Fairport’s 1970 lineup of Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks and Richard Thompson, plus Chris Leslie who was standing in (wonderfully, as it turned out…) for the otherwise-occupied Dave Swarbrick reconvened on the Cropredy stage, and it was “Game On.”  And WHAT a performance they delivered.

And, happily, Fairport have had the good sense to preserve that magnificent performance – not in aspic – but the on digital optical information storage format that we know as a Compact Disc.  And, thank heavens they did, because Full House For Sale is destined to become a treasured memory of a landmark Fairport performance.  Already, I have a suspicion that this new album may well be Fairport’s best and most enduring “Live” album ever.

  

This is not the first time a live version of Full House has been released. The excellent album, House Full, recorded live at The Troubador in 1970, has most of the songs from Full House, and captures that version of the group at their best.  

The World's Myopia Epidemic

I've been nearsighted all my life so I tend to take it for granted. But I will agree that it's not a normal condition, in the sense that it's a departure from baseline health. And it is becoming more common, but until I read this article, I hadn't realized just how common. 

The article focuses (sorry, couldn't resist) on Taiwan, where more than half of children were myopic, and the efforts of one doctor to determine the cause and find a way to prevent it. It turns out that it's possible to reduce the incidence of myopia in children by having them spend more time outdoors and this has been determined to work. 

Myopia, or what we commonly call nearsightedness, happens when the eyeball gets too long—it deforms from soccer ball to American football—and then the eye focuses light not on the retina but slightly in front of it, making distant objects appear blurry. The longer the eyeball becomes, the worse vision gets. Ophthalmologists measure this distortion in diopters, which refer to the strength of the lens required to bring someone’s vision back to normal. Anything worse than minus 5 diopters is considered “high myopia”—somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of myopia diagnoses around the world are in this category. In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

If those trends continue, it’s likely that millions more people around the world will go blind much earlier in life than they—or the societies they live in—are prepared for. It’s a “ticking time bomb,” says Nicola Logan, an optometry professor at the UK’s Aston University. She wasn’t the only expert I talked to who used that phrase. Because so much of Taiwan’s population is already living life with myopia, the island nation has already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us. And in a rare confluence, the country may also be the best place to look for solutions.

Are We In the First Stages of Civilization's Collapse?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I am pessimistic about the future of our technological civilization. (See my We're Toast topic for reasons).  

There is a pattern to the collapse of civilizations, even successful ones, as described by Jared Diamond in his seminal book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  In this article by Michael Klare, he looks at the state of our civilization in the light of Diamond's framework. We are not looking good.

The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.

These historical examples of social disintegration spurred lively discussion among my students when, as a professor at Hampshire College, I regularly assigned Collapse as a required text. Even then, a decade ago, many of them suggested that we were beginning to face severe climate challenges akin to those encountered by earlier societies — and that our contemporary civilization also risked collapse if we failed to take adequate measures to slow global warming and adapt to its inescapable consequences.

But in those discussions (which continued until I retired from teaching in 2018), our analyses seemed entirely theoretical: Yes, contemporary civilization might collapse, but if so, not any time soon. Five years later, it’s increasingly difficult to support such a relatively optimistic outlook. Not only does the collapse of modern industrial civilization appear ever more likely, but the process already seems underway.

I'm afraid that I have to agree with him.  

Some Bad News about Long COVID

If you think that getting COVID is no big deal, you may want to read this article from Eric Topol's Ground Truths newsletter. Based on his analysis of some recent studies, the news is not good. 

Today there are 2 new papers published on the 2-year follow up of over 100,000 people with Covid and millions of uninfected controls. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review the salient findings of the 2 studies, and highlight the uncertainties of our knowledge base for Long Covid, which has already compromised the lives of tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, what was seen at 6 months largely continues out to 2 years.

 

Reading on the Fire HD 8 Tablet

A couple of months ago, I bought an Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet to use as an ereader. I had intended to use it for occasional web browsing, mostly to read news sites, but I've found that Amazon's proprietary version of Android limits its use for me. So I'm using it mostly as a replacement for my Kindle Paperwhite. I do use the Paperwhite when reading outdoors because neither my phone or tablet are great for reading in bright sunlight.

There are four apps that I've used for reading.

Amazon's Kindle app

Given that this is an Amazon tablet, you might think that the Kindle app would be the best for reading books. That turned not to be the case for me, primarily due to an annoying feature (or possible a bug) in the app. There are 12 or 13 possible font sizes but there's a significant jump in size between the 6th and 7th. The 6th is too small and the 7th too large. I can read the smaller size if I use my reading glasses, but that's not always convenient and the larger font size drastically slows my reading speed. 

The app has other limitations. It won't expand or collapse subheadings in the table of contents if the book has them, margins are too wide, it doesn't offer control over justification in many books, and I can't add custom fonts. Some of these limitations can be worked around by formatting the book in Calibre, but then the app treats them as documents instead of as books, so it won't sync between the tablet and my phone.

The app is also cluttered and generally not as pleasant to use as the Kindle Paperwhite.

Google Play Books

I now use Google Play Books as my default for reading books. It addresses most of the limitations of the Kindle app mentioned above. I do have to format the book in Calibre if I want to use my preferred font (Atkinson Hyperlegible), but unlike the Kindle app, Play Books will sync between the tablet and my phone. 

The font selections available in Play Books are more limited than those in the Kindle app and it doesn't have the excellent fonts (like Amazon Ember) that Amazon designed for online reading. I haven't found a way of adding the Atkinson Hyperlegible font to Android's font list, either on my phone or on the tablet, which means I still need to format the book in Calibre to use that font. 

Kobo Books

I've purchased quite a few books from the Kobo bookstore. I run them through Calibre and then read them on the Kindle or in Play Books because the Kobo app is very basic and doesn't offer the many of the options available on Kobo's ereaders.

Libby

Libby, produced by Overdrive, is an app that you can use to download magazines and ebooks from your local library. I use it mostly for magazines, although I have read a couple of ebooks with it. (The three-week loan period isn't long enough for me to get through most books). 

I used to use an app called RB Digital for reading magazines, but that was shuttered after it was bought by Overdrive and the magazine collection folded into Libby. That was unfortunate, because Libby's selection interface is cluttered and harder to use than that of RB Digital. Fortunately, the app offers a usable text mode, which means that I can use it on the Fire 8 HD. (The 8" size is too small for comfortable reading when using the full-page view). I would like to have a larger font selection and a higher brightness level in text mode or more control over text contrast.

Conclusion

The Fire HD 8 is hobbled by Amazon's proprietary version of Android, which means that it's not great for general use as a tablet. However, it works well enough as an ereader now that I've found workarounds for some of the limitations of the various apps. I do regret not spending more money and getting an 8" Samsung tablet. 

Featured Links - August 21, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Water lilies at the marina

• Patient advocates warn FDA proposal on salt intake could do fatal harm to people with kidney disease. "Kidney advocacy organizations are warning that the proposal could lead to unnecessary deaths because the regulation would increase the use of one popular salt substitute: potassium chloride. Patients with chronic kidney disease, including end-stage renal disease, can’t properly excrete potassium from their bodies and excess potassium levels in the blood, known as hyperkalemia, can lead to cardiac arrhythmias and sudden heart failure."
• Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity. "Artificial intelligence has turned the brain’s electrical signals into somewhat garbled classic rock." This is rather mind boggling. 
• The Peripheral Canceled After Prime Video Undoes Season 2 Renewal. "Months after getting approved for a second season, the sci-fi series has become a one-and-done as studios try to cut costs during the Hollywood strikes."
• Here’s the Plan to Take Montana’s Massive Climate Win Nationwide. "A Montana court ruled that youth have a right to a livable climate. Now, lawsuits around the country are working to build on that success." Shades of Kim Stanley Robinsons The Ministry for the Future.
• 2023 Aurora Awards and CSFFA Hall of Fame Inductees. "The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) today presented the 2023 Aurora Awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror in a ceremony livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook. This year’s returning hosts were Mark Leslie Lefebvre and Liz May Anderson. The awards recognize works done by Canadians in 2022. CSFFA members submitted a total of 177 ballots. Awards administrator Clifford Samuels says complete voting statistics will be released in the next day or so."
• Babylon 5 Is a Perfect, Terrible Series. "Babylon 5 is one of the best science fiction shows ever made. It also kind of sucks, and that’s okay."
• The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries. "Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry." End stage capitalism will mean the end stage of libraries, and guess what that means for civilization.

Photo of the Week - August 20, 2023

This week's photo is of a couple of hibiscuses in our front yard. I took it with my Pixel 4a and tweaked it in Google Photos to try to get the colour closer to reality. In the original picture they are much more red; the actual colour is closer to burgandy. Neither my phone or my Fujifilm X-S10 seem to be able to reproduce it accurately.

Hibiscuses

Saturday Sounds - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - May 27, 2023, Amsterdam

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are out on a tour that started in February and will bring them to Toronto in November. And I have tickets! So in celebration of that, here's a video of their stop in Amsterdam in May. The video is pieced together from various fan recordings and combined with official audio. Enjoy!

We're Toast 42

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Inexpensive Add-on Spawns a New Era of Machine Guns. (paywall free): "Popular devices known as “switches” are turning ordinary pistols into fully automatic weapons, making them deadlier and a growing threat to bystanders."

Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting 'Liberal' Teachings of Jesus. How they can call themselves Christians is beyond me.

July 2023: Earth’s hottest month on record. "No other month in global recordkeeping has jumped so far ahead of the old record."

Cities Aren’t Supposed to Burn Like This Anymore—Especially Lahaina. "Humans figured out how to prevent huge fires in urban areas over a century ago. Why have they gotten so bad again?"

Bird flu researchers turn to Finland’s mink farms, tracking a virus with pandemic potential. "As it stands now, the H5N1 virus does not infect people easily. But the fear is that uncontrolled spread in animals like mink gives the virus plenty of chances to evolve in ways that could enable it to spill over into people. Already in Finland, a paper from government researchers indicated the virus has spread from mammal to mammal at the farms — and in some cases has picked up mutations indicating an adaptation toward replicating in mammalian cells."

Putin’s Hunger Games: The Ukraine War Is Forcing Millions to Face Starvation and ‘Look Death in the Eyes’. "Russia’s decision to withdraw from a key humanitarian accord puts tens of millions of people at risk of acute food crisis around the world."

Idaho’s Teacher of the Year flees state after being attacked for LGBTQ+ allyship. "Karen Lauritzen said it has been the hardest year in her 20 years of teaching."

More COVID-19 News

It's time to post links to more news about COVID-19. No, the pandemic is not over, the virus keeps mutating in new and unpleasant ways, and cases are increasing after a lull. In my region, cases have tripled in about four weeks.

I'm starting with two posts from Eric Topol's Ground Truths newsletter. 

The Virus is Learning New Tricks and We Humans Keep Falling Behind. "This week the CDC genomic surveillance showed continued rise of the EG.5.1 variant with near doubling over the past couple of weeks, showing significant growth advantage compared to its prevailing XBB variant precursors (such as XBB.1.5, XBB.1.16, XBB.1.9). "

Long Covid: Mitochondria, the Big Miss, and Hope. "This week there was news on Long Covid in two very different directions—emergence of strong data to support mitochondrial dysfunction as the basis for the condition in some people—and learning how the $1.15 billion allocation to the NIH RECOVER initiative has largely been wasted. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review this news and offer a plan to get clinical trials testing treatments into high gear."

SARS-CoV-2 Neutralizing Antibodies Following a Second BA.5 Bivalent Booster. "Our results suggest that a second dose of the BA.5 bivalent booster is not sufficient to broaden antibody responses and to overcome immunological imprinting. A monovalent vaccine targeting only the spike of the recently dominant SARS-CoV-2 may mitigate the back boosting associated with the original antigenic sin."

Multimodal Molecular Imaging Reveals Tissue-Based T Cell Activation and Viral RNA Persistence for Up to 2 Years Following COVID-19. "We identified cellular SARS-CoV-2 RNA in rectosigmoid lamina propria tissue in all these participants, ranging from 158 to 676 days following initial COVID-19 illness, suggesting that tissue viral persistence could be associated with long-term immunological perturbations."

No, Covid can never, ever be 'just a cold.' Here's why. "But if we keep pretending covid is something that it isn't, we're going to end up in ever-deeper trouble as a society." This article makes the best case I've seen for continuing to take precautions against COVID-19. 

Covid Complexities. "The official data on deaths are now lagging by a full year, so while death numbers may look low (about 1500 per year based on the most recent week) the correct numbers will be much higher. Given what we know of the disease, there is no universe in which hospitalizations behave as they have while deaths drop by a factor of ten."

The Last Days of Arecibo

The Arecibo Observatory is no more. It officially closed its doors on August 14. There were plans to turn it into a science education centre, but funding for that has not been approved.

Nature has an article about the last days of the observatory. It's a sad article though it does mention some plans that in the long-term may result in science being done there again.  

The observatory’s main attraction — a 305-metre-wide dish that was responsible for, among other things, studying near-Earth asteroids, discovering exoplanets and observing gravitational waves — was destroyed in 2020 when some support cables snapped following years of delayed maintenance. In 2022, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which runs the facility, announced it would not rebuild the dish, citing community recommendations to put the agency’s limited budget into other, newer astronomical facilities. Instead, the NSF said it would convert the observatory into the Arecibo Center for STEM Education and Research (ACSER).

Under this plan, the agency would award between US$1 million and $3 million per year to an institution to manage the centre on a day-to-day basis. Before the telescope's collapse, the NSF was contributing $7.5 million annually to Arecibo, and management of the site was led by the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

When calling for proposals to manage ACSER, the NSF projected that the centre might open this year. But Monya Ruffin, deputy director of the NSF’s Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings Division, now says that the agency hopes to “make an award in 2023”.

Now the world's largest radio telescope is a 500-metre dish in China. Other even larger telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Arrary, are under construction. 

Some Good Newsletters from Authors

I get a lot (probably too many) email newsletters, most of which are tech related. But a few are from authors, primarily science fiction authors. The ones I'm highlighting here are free, though you can contribute to the authors if you wish to get extra content.

• The Hypothesis by Annalee Newitz: I'm currently reading and enjoying her latest novel, The Terraformers, and have read her other two novels. Her latest newsletter talks about applied science fiction; that is using science fiction to test solutions to problems thar are arising in the present or might arise in the future. As usual with authors' newsletters, she also describes some of her recent publications. 
• Transfer Orbit by Andrew Liptak: Liptak is a "writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2022)" and his writing has appeared in numerous publications. The newsletter is mostly about science fiction and fantasy in various media. 
• Throwingthebearinthecanoe by Elisabeth Bear: She writes about many topics including her books, recovery from cancer surgery and horses. 
• Field Notes by Christopher Brown. I have blogged about this newsletter before but it's worth mentioning again. I should note that it's no longer weekly, unfortunately.

Featured Links - August 14, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A classic Jaguar

AI Is Building Highly Effective Antibodies That Humans Can’t Even Imagine. "Robots, computers, and algorithms are hunting for potential new therapies in ways humans can’t—by processing huge volumes of data and building previously unimagined molecules." AI does have some good uses and this is one them.

How NASA Nearly Lost the Voyager 2 Spacecraft Forever. "The space agency lost touch with the beloved spacecraft following a faulty command signal. Here’s how it happened—and how engineers worked to bring it back."

The Sweep and Force of Section Three. A long, comprehensive, reasoned explanation of why Trump (and possibly many of his associates) is not eligible to run for office. Thanks to Timothy Snyder for pointing this out.

Smoking-gun evidence for modified gravity at low acceleration from Gaia observations of wide binary stars. "A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics." If confirmed, this could be Nobel-prize winning research. 

How Editors Blend Art and Science to Bring NASA’s Space Photos to Life. "Webb’s stunning images are not beamed to Earth from the $10 billion space telescope in full color. In fact, Webb’s detectors capture monochromatic photos that are exceedingly dark. Thanks to expert image processors Joe DePasquale and Alyssa Pagan at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, the dark gray raw images come to life in unbelievable ways."

Good Omens (BBC Radio). "Adaptation of the 1990 fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. An angel and a demon try to save the world from an apocalypse. Starring Peter Serafinowicz and Mark Heap."

Who Needs Meta or Google for News? Use ‘Really Simple Syndication’. "RSS is a universal, open, algorithm-free news feed you can have for free. Silicon Valley giants treat it like a secret." I can't imagine using the internet without a feed reader. 

7 Easy Food Swaps That Help the Planet. "Consider ditching resource-hungry foods for these delicious alternatives that leave a lighter footprint."

Photo of the Week - August 13, 2023

Nancy and I walked down to the lake Thursday night for an ice cream cone and some free live music. Along with that I managed to catch a lovely sunset over the marina. This was taken with my Pixel 4a and enhanced lightly in Google Photos.

Marina at sunset

Time for a Blogging Holiday

Here in the Great White North, it's almost time for another long weekend; this one being known (in Ontario, at least) as Simcoe Day or just the Civic Holiday. I'm going to start a longer hiatus with that and take a week, or possibly more, off from blogging.

We've been busy trying to get my later mother-in-law's house ready for sale. We're almost there, but the next week will be busy. If I'm not over there helping, then I'm going to be busy here keeping this place going. And a week from Saturday we have Bell coming in to switch our internet and TV over from Rogers, which means we have to empty and move two filing cabinets because they're blocking access to where all the external connections come into the house.

So I'm taking some time off from Core Dump. If all goes well, I'll be back here sometime around August 14. In the meantime, here are some flowers.

Backyard flowers

Canada's COVID-19 Response

The worst of the COVID-19 pandemic being behind us (At least I hope so!), it's possible to look back and have a good, hard look at Canada's response to the disease. The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has published an analysis that looks at the high and low points of the Canadian response. It's worth a read, especially if you're Canadian, though I'm sure it would be useful no matter what country you live in.

Here are some of the key points:

Highs

• Public health leadership included women at each level of decision making.20
• Canada became one of the most vaccinated countries with >83% of the population receiving at least one vaccine dose in February 2023.21 After Health Canada approved Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna covid-19 vaccine in December 2020, rollout was prioritised for Indigenous populations and those living and working in long term care homes
• Research collaborations from basic science through to clinical and health services research emerged rapidly to address urgent questions of seroprevalence 22(eg, covid-19 Immunity Task Force), correlates of infection and immunity, and outbreak mitigation factors and engagement of patients in research conduct such as knowledge synthesis

Lows

• Failure to learn from previous reports led to failure to protect older adults and staff in long term care hoes and among the highest proportions of deaths in this sector globally
• Challenges to access and delivery of effective covid-19 medications such as tocilizumab, remdesivir, and ritonavir-nirmatrelvir resulted in provinces and hospitals rationing use
• An exodus of exhausted and distressed healthcare workers, coupled with inadequate training paths for replacements, produced a critical workforce shortage that is ongoing

There are more, but you can read the article. 

Why Google Killed Google Reader

I still miss Google Reader. For a fwe years, it was my primary interface to the internet because it made it possible to quickly scan through a tremendous volume of news and web posts in much less time than it would take to visit individual sites. 

I've always wondered why Google killed it off, and this article from the Verge explains why, or at least provides the gory details of what happened. 

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still look back fondly on the project. It was a small group that built the app not because it was a flashy product or a savvy career move — it was decidedly neither — but because they loved trying to find better ways to curate and share the web. They fought through corporate politics and endless red tape just to make the thing they wanted to use. They found a way to make the web better, and all they wanted to do was keep it alive.

RSS feed readers have not gone away, thank goodness, although with the fragmentation of the web into (sometimes paywalled) niches, the number  of sites that support RSS or Atom feeds has decreased. I use Feedly, which works well on both my desktop PC and phone. There are others. Here are a couple of review articles from Wired and Zapier that are reasonably current. If you aren't using a feed reader, I strongly recommend checking out Feedly or one of the other tools mentioned in the articles. You will wonder how you ever got along without one. 

Movie and TV Reviews - July 2023

 Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in July. 

Movies

• John Wick 4: This was a decent Saturday night popcorn movie with lots of action and not much to think about. The fight scenes were way over the top and would have been more effective had they been shorter. (Amazon Prime)
• Ticket to Paradise: I'm not a big fan of rom coms. This one was pretty standard but at least it was short enough that it didn't get too annoying. I expected a bit more from Clooney and Roberts than what they delivered. (Crave)

TV Shows

• Inspector Lewis (seasons 7 & 8): I think we may have watched this years ago, but only one of the episodes really seemed familiar. It's a sequel to Inspector Morse, set in Oxford, which is apparently a seething den of crime and resentment. (PBS)
• Antiques Road Trip (seasons 21 and 22): We are continually amazed at the number of antique shops in Britain. We like this show more for the tours of the countryside and the interesting bits of local history that they feature than the antiques themselves. (PBS)
• Silo (season 1): A post-apocalyptic SF series based on a series of books by Hugh Howey. It has really stretched my willing suspension of disbelief, but it is compelling drama, and the setting is amazing. (Apple TV+)
• Jack Ryan (season 4): Another seriously implausible thriller. It moves along quickly enough that it's watchable as long as you don't stop to think about it too much. Still, I'm glad this is the final season. (Amazon Prime)