KARACHI: The Pakistan Medical Association expressed its dissatisfaction over the existing lockdown in the country, warning the government against lifting restrictions as it would allow the coronavirus to spread further."A better lockdown should be imposed," said Dr Ikram Tunio, President PMA...

On Thursday, the Professional Beauty Federation of California published a press release to the “Hot Topics” section of their website. It was titled: “Time to Sue Governor Newsom.” 

The release came in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the following morning, California would officially enter “Phase Two” of the “Safer at Home” order. Select businesses, from florists to clothing retailers to toy stores, would be able to resume operations in a limited capacity. But absent from the list of acceptable businesses: beauty salons. Newsom placed businesses like nail salons and barbershops in “Phase Three”—a stage he believes to be “months, not weeks” away. 

“This whole thing spread in the state of California—the first community spread—was in a nail salon,” Newsom said in a press conference last week, without providing details about the date or location of the case. “Many of the practices that you would otherwise expect of a modification were already in play in many of these salons, with people that had procedure masks on, were using gloves, and were advancing higher levels of sanitation.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Those under the age of 40 make up almost 50 per cent of Saskatchewan’s COVID-19 cases, with many cases linked to people drinking together.

England's commuters will need to walk, cycle and even scoot more as ongoing social distancing will force them to seek alternative forms of transport, the Government has announced.

An analysis of fundraising data suggests March 2020 was one of Canada's worst political fundraising months on record.

With nearly 30,000 people in south and central districts of Kerala hospitalised with chikungunya fever, an infection spread by the Aedes mosquito, the

Nearly half the central government funds allocated to fight chikungunya last year remained unused - mostly in southern states that, ironically, were struggling

An unnamed chikungunya-infected tourist from south India is responsible for the spread of the tropical disease in a small north Italian town, according

For the first time chikungunya, the mosquito-borne disease has spread in the western hemisphere confirms the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tuesday,

Chikungunya is mosquito-borne viral disease that causes fever, headache, severe joint pain and rash on the body. A study published in the iNew England

Hotter and humid weather may not stop COVID-19 disease, said experts. "Our study provides important new evidence, using global data from the COVID-19

Researchers have found a weak link between humidity and reduced COVID-19 transmission. Hotter weather had no effect on the COVID-19 pandemic's progression.

Quick: Who has more up-to-date textbooks: students in wealthier schools or students in poorer schools? Actually, it depends where you live. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, not only are some countries better than others in allocating their educational resources more equitably across schools, but students in these countries generally perform better in mathematics.

An imaginative journey into the life and work of an elusive Roman poet

Growth of artificial intelligence software is driving ‘democratisation of propaganda’

Qantas flew three planes carrying passengers from the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak back to Australia. The airline stepped up cleaning efforts to make sure future passengers weren't at risk.

Virgin Australia has complained to the competition regulator about Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce's suggestion it would be unfair for the government to prop up one airline.

In a first, the army's Local Military Authority (LMA) has roped in its quick response team (QRT) to monitor the Covid-19 situation in civil areas of the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB).

Gross spread refers to the difference between the underwriting price received by a stocks-issuing company, and the real price at which the stock is placed on the market.

In a recent report, Andhra Pradesh has confirmed the death of two coronavirus patients who had no travel history. The Andhra Pradesh Police reported that the virus spread through currency notes, where it turned out to be the ‘culprit' carrying the

The coronavirus cases around the globe are at 2,484,301, with 170,501 deaths reported and 652,761 recoveries. The virus outbreak that began in 2019 continues to cause casualties, while health experts around the globe are extensively working on developing a vaccine and

As coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spreads rapidly infecting millions of people, researchers and scientists are continuously studying the new virus and recommending protective measures to combat the spread of the disease further. Many recent studies have shown that coronavirus can live on

Many health organisations like the WHO and CDC are continuously advising people to wash hands and maintain hygiene in their surroundings. This is because coronavirus mainly transfers through fomites, which are objects in which the infected air droplets get settled and

One of the most common questions asked in the event of coronavirus being declared as airborne in places that use aerosols is, 'can the coronavirus spread through farting?.' As weird as it may sound, health experts assert that it is indeed,

The police personnel, who are serving 24X7 on the streets, said that the helmet was proving to be useful in making people aware.

A car museum owner in the city of Hyderabad has made a car, which looks like the coronavirus to spread awareness among the people about the fatal infection.

Tripura seeks NICD’s help to stem COVID-19 spread

There are several hypotheses about how amphibian chytrid has spread around the world, but the trade in amphibians for food, bait, pets and laboratory animals has been identified as the most likely mode of spread

The post Trade in frog legs may spread diseases deadly to amphibians appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Reptiles that live near and feed upon amphibians in the tropics may be spreading the deadly amphibian disease Chytridiomycosis (caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis), holding and transporting reservoirs of the fungus on their skin.

The post Reptiles may be spreading deadly amphibian disease in the tropics appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Microbes that live in rice paddies, northern peat bogs and other previously unexpected environments are among the bacteria that can generate highly toxic methylmercury, researchers […]

The post Toxic methylmercury-producing microbes more widespread than realized appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The bush dog is one of the most enigmatic of the world’s canid species, seldom seen throughout its range in Central and South America. New […]

The post Elusive bush dog widespread in Panama appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Cobia, a promising fish for aquaculture, lives throughout the world’s oceans except in the Central and Eastern Pacific. In August 2015, a large number of […]

The post Invasive Cobia Spreads in Panama appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

WASHINGTON — In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to establish a Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats.

The recently formed National Academies Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats, assembled at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, has been providing rapid expert consultations on several topics, such as social distancing and severe illness in young adults.

A new rapid expert consultation from a standing committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine responds to questions from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) regarding survival of the COVID-19 virus in relation to temperature and humidity and potential for seasonal reduction and resurgence of cases.

A new rapid expert consultation from a standing committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new rapid expert consultation from a standing committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine responds to questions from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) regarding the effectiveness of homemade fabric masks to protect others from the viral spread of COVID-19 from potentially contagious asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals.

"Deepfakes" are digitally altered images that make incidents appear real when they are not. Such altered files could have broad implications for politics.; Credit: /Marcus Marritt for NPR

Sophisticated fake media hasn't emerged as a factor in the disinformation wars in the ways once feared — and two specialists say it may have missed its moment.

Deceptive video and audio recordings, often nicknamed "deepfakes," have been the subject of sustained attention by legislators and technologists, but so far have not been employed to decisive effect, said two panelists at a video conference convened on Wednesday by NATO.

One speaker borrowed Sherlock Holmes' reasoning about the significance of something that didn't happen.

"We've already passed the stage at which they would have been most effective," said Keir Giles, a Russia specialist with the Conflict Studies Research Centre in the United Kingdom. "They're the dog that never barked."

The perils of deepfakes in political interference have been discussed too often and many people have become too familiar with them, Giles said during the online discussion, hosted by NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence.

Following all the reports and revelations about election interference in the West since 2016, citizens know too much to be hoodwinked in the way a fake video might once have fooled large numbers of people, he argued: "They no longer have the power to shock."

Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, agreed that deepfakes haven't proven as dangerous as once feared, although for different reasons.

Hwang argued that users of "active measures" (efforts to sow misinformation and influence public opinion) can be much more effective with cheaper, simpler and just as devious types of fakes — mis-captioning a photo or turning it into a meme, for example.

Influence specialists working for Russia and other governments also imitate Americans on Facebook, for another example, worming their way into real Americans' political activities to amplify disagreements or, in some cases, try to persuade people not to vote.

Other researchers have suggested this work continues on social networks and has become more difficult to detect.

Defense is stronger than attack

Hwang also observed that the more deepfakes are made, the better machine learning becomes at detecting them.

A very sophisticated, real-looking fake video might still be effective in a political context, he acknowledged — and at a cost to create of around $10,000, it would be easily within the means of a government's active measures specialists.

But the risks of attempting a major disruption with such a video may outweigh an adversary's desire to use one. People may be too media literate, as Giles argued, and the technology to detect a fake may mean it can be deflated too swiftly to have an effect, as Hwang said.

"I tend to be skeptical these will have a large-scale impact over time," he said.

One technology boss told NPR in an interview last year that years' worth of work on corporate fraud protection systems has given an edge to detecting fake media.

"This is not a static field. Obviously, on our end we've performed all sorts of great advances over this year in advancing our technology, but these synthetic voices are advancing at a rapid pace," said Brett Beranek, head of security business for the technology firm Nuance. "So we need to keep up."

Beranek described how systems developed to detect telephone fraudsters could be applied to verify the speech in a fake clip of video or audio.

Corporate clients that rely on telephone voice systems must be wary about people attempting to pose as others with artificial or disguised voices. Beranek's company sells a product that helps to detect them and that countermeasure also works well in detecting fake audio or video.

Machines using neural networks can detect known types of synthetic voices. Nuance also says it can analyze a recording of a real known voice — say, that of a politician — and then contrast its characteristics against a suspicious recording.

Although the world of cybersecurity is often described as one in which attackers generally have an edge over defenders, Beranek said he thought the inverse was true in terms of this kind of fraud detection.

"For the technology today, the defense side is significantly ahead of the attack side," he said.

Shaping the battlefield

Hwang and Giles acknowledged in the NATO video conference that deepfakes likely will proliferate and become lower in cost to create, perhaps becoming simple enough to make with a smartphone app.

One prospective response is the creation of more of what Hwang called "radioactive data" — material earmarked in advance so that it might make a fake easier to detect.

If images of a political figure were so tagged beforehand, they could be spotted quickly if they were incorporated by computers into a deceptive video.

Also, the sheer popularity of new fakes, if that is what happens, might make them less valuable as a disinformation weapon. More people could become more familiar with them, as well as being detectable by automated systems — plus they may also have no popular medium on which to spread.

Big social media platforms already have declared affirmatively that they'll take down deceptive fakes, Hwang observed. That might make it more difficult for a scenario in which a politically charged fake video went viral just before Election Day.

"Although it might get easier and easier to create deepfakes, a lot of the places where they might spread most effectively, your Facebooks and Twitters of the world, are getting a lot more aggressive about taking them down," Hwang said.

That won't stop them, but it might mean they'll be relegated to sites with too few users to have a major effect, he said.

"They'll percolate in these more shady areas."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

People using a coworking space.; Credit: Cross Campus

In a sign of increased desire of professionals to work remotely, the successful Santa Monica shared workspace Cross Campus is opening a second location in Pasadena later this month, and the company hopes to open eight others in Southern California and beyond in the next two years. 

Dubbed by one user as  the “nerve center” of the Silicon Beach tech scene, Cross Campus opened its membership-based workspace facility in Santa Monica in 2012.   

But co-founder Ronen Olshansky said the shared workspace phenomenon isn't limited to coders. 

"Fewer and fewer people are making the traditional drive into the corporate office," Olshansky said. "They're working remotely as professionals, going off on their own as freelancers, or they're starting their own companies as entrepreneurs."  

A forecast from Forrester Research says that 43 percent of workers will telecommute by 2016, compared to estimates of about a quarter of the workforce telecommuting last year. 

Olshansky said that, for many people, working from home or in a coffee shop isn't productive. 

That's led shared workspaces to pop up in Los Angeles, Culver City and Santa Monica. Among them: Maker City L.A., WeWork, NextSpace, Coloft and Hub LA.  

Los Angeles-based tech investor David Waxman said these kind of shared spaces are crucial for the early stages of tech ventures.

"When you’re just starting out, and capital is very scarce, having not to commit to an entire office but having part of an office is very important," Waxman said.  “There comes a collective energy when a bunch of entrepreneurs get together in the same space, even if they’re not working on the same project."

And he said Pasadena is a good choice for a shared workspace.

"It is the home of Caltech, the Arts Center, and IdeaLab — probably the world’s first tech incubator — started there," he said.

But he said the need isn't limited to Pasadena.

"In Silver Lake, in South Pasadena, in Glendale, you see a lot of little pockets of  people getting together, and as soon as there’s a critical mass, we’ll see co-working spaces like Cross Campus come into being," said Waxman, who named his investment firm TenOneTen after the two freeways that connect Santa Monica and the Westside to Pasadena. 

Alex Maleki of IdeaLab in Pasadena is happy a well-known company is opening up in his city. 

"Anything that helps attract talent and capital to the region," Maleki said, "is absolutely fantastic."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.