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Daily Archives: June 21, 2020

Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge

Wired – “Services like Google Translate support only 100 languages, give or take. What about the thousands of other languages—spoken by people just as vulnerable to this crisis?…It’s easy to overlook how important language is for health if you’re on the English-speaking internet, where “is this headache actually something to worry about?” is only a quick Wikipedia article or WebMD search away. For over half of the world’s population, people can’t expect to Google their symptoms, nor even necessarily get a pamphlet from their doctor explaining their diagnosis, because it’s not available in a language they can understand. This health-language gap isn’t unique to Covid…”

 

NYC Law Firms Officially Cleared for June 22 Reopening, Cuomo Says

Law.com: “New York City is the last part of the state to enter phase two of the reopening plan, but the move is still a dramatic turnaround for a city once at the epicenter of the nation’s COVID-19 crisis. Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday confirmed that New York City law firms would be able to… Continue Reading

Coronavirus Resource: How your agency is reopening

Federal News Network: “Everything we know so far is collected on this page, which will be updated as additional information, updates and resources become available. We’re also collecting agency reopening plans. Send us updates about what your agency is doing to prepare for the possible reopening of your offices, facilities and workspaces using our website… Continue Reading

OPM will allow certain federal employees to hold on to unused annual leave during pandemic

Federal News Network: “The Office of Personnel Management has a plan to help certain federal employees, whose essential services are needed to respond to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, hold on to the annual leave they’d otherwise have to forfeit at the end of the year. Recent guidance from OPM described the agency’s intent to issue new… Continue Reading

The Covid-19 Vaccine Should Belong to the People

The Nation – The US government has the authority under existing law to break patent monopolies. “…The idea that some people would not receive a vaccine was once unthinkable. In a now legendary story, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in 1955—and then gave it away for free. An interviewer once asked Salk who owned… Continue Reading

2035 Report – Renewable Energy Costs & Our Clean Electricity Future

“The United States can deliver 90 percent clean, carbon free electricity nationwide by 2035, dependably, at no extra cost to consumer bills and without the need for new fossil fuel plants, according to a study released today from the University of California, Berkeley. The study also finds that without robust policy reforms, most of the… Continue Reading

Facebook technology makes 3D models of people from photos

PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization – S. Saito, T. Simon, J. Saragih, H. Joo. CVPR 2020. [Paper] [Video] [Code] [Demo]: “Recent advances in image-based 3D human shape estimation have been driven by the significant improvement in representation power afforded by deep neural networks. Although current approaches have demonstrated the potential… Continue Reading

The Rage Unifying Boomers and Gen Z

The Atlantic – “Enormous differences separate today’s protest movements from those of the 1960s. But they may ultimately prove united by the magnitude of the change they impose… Today’s long wave of protest shares one other quality with its predecessor: It has changed popular culture and the contours of public opinion more quickly than it… Continue Reading