Wired: “It’s True. Everyone is Multitasking in Video Meetings”

The etiquette for remote work meetings is weird. You don’t have to wear pants, but allowing your eyes to dart around your screen can seem rude and disrespectful, a giveaway that you’re distracted by another digital task. And once you turn the camera off, multitasking can mean folding laundry, grocery shopping, or anything else that needs doing.

If you tend to multitask in video meetings, you’re not alone. A new study of Microsoft employees finds that people multitask more frequently in larger and longer meetings, and that multitasking happens far more often in recurring meetings than during ad hoc meetings. Meetings held in the morning have higher rates of multitasking than at other times of day, and multitasking takes place six times as often in video meetings lasting more than 80 minutes compared with meetings that take 20 minutes or less.

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There’s an opportunity with remote meetings to just ‘sort-of’ attend a meeting, says Microsoft chief scientist Jaime Teevan. You can skip a meeting and watch it at double speed if it was recorded. You can have it playing in the background while you do other things and listen for important points.

Khari Johnson

I must admit, I’m doing this myself increasingly often lately (to be perfectly clear, multitaking in remote meetings, not joining without wearing pants). If you must be at your computer for that set length of time, you might as well get less important work out of the way, and free time for more focused tasks later – or for a well-needed break. The more participants in a meeting, the lower the chance you need to intervene; you just need to pay attention when your name gets mentioned, and to politely greet everyone when joining and leaving the call. And when meetings are audio-only, this becomes even easier.

The Pull Request: “We are no longer a serious people”

The reason for this sudden silence is that in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?

If however the situation involving foreign realities can be grafted onto simplistic domestic narratives, in however fantastic a fashion, then that issue becomes a curious side show to the main American stage. That’s what’s happened to Israel, which now features as a talking point in that same progressive wing of the party. And if the situation can’t be mapped, such as Afghanistan or the recent protests in Cuba, it’s utterly ignored for being just completely beyond human comprehension or concern.

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for.

Antonio García Martínez

This is certainly how America looks from the outside for someone like me following events on Twitter: a society so self-absorbed by imaginary conflicts and culture wars that it no longer has the capacity to even acknowledge real, tangible, urgent problems, both internal and external, let alone address them in any sensible manner…

Nature: “Why many countries failed at COVID contact-tracing — but some got it right”

The WHO’s benchmark for a successful COVID-19 contact-tracing operation is to trace and quarantine 80% of close contacts within 3 days of a case being confirmed — a goal few countries achieve.

But even that’s not quick enough, says Christophe Fraser, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, UK. Transmission is too rapid and the virus can spread before symptoms emerge, he points out. Modelling by Fraser and his team suggests that even if all cases isolate and all contacts are found and quarantined within three days, the epidemic will continue to grow. He says that in a single day, 70% of cases need to isolate and 70% of contacts need to be traced and quarantined for the outbreak to slow (defined as each infected person passing the virus to fewer than one other, on average)⁶.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, overstretched contact-tracers in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom faced the extra burden of antiquated health-care systems. In Australia, as well as in US states such as Hawaii and Washington, health departments are often notified of new cases by fax or phone. It’s somewhat embarrassing, says Plescia, but we never invested in the systems to allow them to do it differently. Entering names and other details into a database from faxed notifications causes big delays, he says, so that the window during which contact-tracing might make a difference vanishes.

Dyani Lewis

Interesting analysis that goes through several reasons for the low effectiveness of contact tracing in many countries. Paradoxically, while the lack of modern digital technology can hinder contact tracing efforts, advanced technological solutions, such as the decentralized contact tracing protocol introduced early in the pandemic by Apple and Google, have also failed to live up to expectations. Low adoption aside, a decentralized system relies on individual initiative by entering positive test results in the app and isolating – a high ask for many people, as we have all discovered – but even worse it withholds data from health authorities, who cannot make proper projections and estimations of the extent of infection.

The Verge: “The controversial science behind woolly mammoth de-extinction”

A flashy new biotech startup launched yesterday called Colossal is on a mission to make an elephant-woolly mammoth mashup — with the ultimate goal of promoting biodiversity and combating climate change, it says. The effort has gotten a lot of hype and big-name backers, but scientists who work in conservation are still pretty skeptical.

The science behind Colossal is in very early stages and is mired in ethical quandaries. The company won’t actually bring back a woolly mammoth, which hasn’t roamed the Earth in about 10,000 years. Instead, Colossal’s de-extinction effort aims to create a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and its distant relative (the two share a common ancestor): the Asian elephant, which itself is an endangered species.

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Lamm believes Colossal’s work might benefit the elephants and draw more attention to other conservation efforts. We’re trying to make sure that we do this in the most transparent and ethical way as possible, Lamm tells The Verge. We feel very confident about what we can do to help the elephant lineage… For us it’s about giving the species additional tools to survive. An elephant with mammoth traits would be better able to survive in the Arctic’s cold temperatures, away from urbanization that threatens its species, he says.

But Asian elephants’ home is tropical South and Southeast Asia. They’re also highly intelligent and social animals that form tight-knit groups. They have a culture, Bennett says. All that raises “major” ethical questions for Bennett over whether a mammoth-elephant hybrid would be able to behaviorally manage being transplanted in a new home that’s vastly different from where elephant species currently live.

Justine Calma

A highly ambitious project that I would like to see succeed – but realistically I would give it about as much chance of materializing as Elon Musk’s random wild ideas.

The Wall Street Journal: “Xi Jinping aims to rein in Chinese Capitalism, hew to Mao’s Socialist Vision”

For most of the 40 years after Deng Xiaoping first unleashed economic reforms in China, Communist Party leaders gave market forces wider room to flourish. That opening helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created trillions of dollars in wealth, but also led to rampant corruption and eroded the ideological basis for continued Communist rule.

In Mr. Xi’s opinion, private capital now has been allowed to run amok, menacing the party’s legitimacy, officials familiar with his priorities say. The Wall Street Journal examination shows he is trying forcefully to get China back to the vision of Mao Zedong, who saw capitalism as a transitory phase on the road to socialism.

Mr. Xi isn’t planning to eradicate market forces, the Journal examination indicates. But he appears to want a state in which the party does more to steer flows of money, sets tighter parameters for entrepreneurs and investors and their ability to make profits, and exercises even more control over the economy than now. In essence, this suggests that he aims to rewrite the rules of business in what could someday be the world’s biggest economy.

Lingling Wei

Not entirely surprising, considering recent trends and Mr. Xi’s increasing desire for top-down control and ideological purity. I doubt anyone would have foreseen at the turn of the century that the Cold War divide between capitalism and communism would reemerge, with the Unites States and China as primary actors this time around.

Coronavirus in Romania: tsunami warning

After a quiet summer, in early autumn the coronavirus has returned to Romania with a vengeance. In the first half of July, the case numbers had dropped under 50 daily, and the total for the entire month was just shy of 2400, the lowest case number since the beginning in March 2020. For a good portion of July, Romania was recording daily deaths caused by coronavirus in the lower single digits, and the monthly total was slightly under 500.

Since then, the situation has changed drastically. Beginning with the second week of July, cases have climbed at a remarkably steady pace, on average 57% each week – except for last week, when the percent increase from the previous week was even higher, almost 90% – bringing us back to a daily count of 7000 cases. Compared to the earlier stages of the pandemic, this growth rate is unprecedented, likely attributable to the more contagious Delta variant, coupled with the lack of restrictions over the summer and the low vaccination rate. Between people returning from holidays, from countries like Greece with higher infections rates, recent large festivals with high attendance, and children returning to school in person last week, the outlook for the next months (even weeks!) is grim.

The Verge: “Why the global chip shortage is making it so hard to buy a PS5”

I had somebody from deep within Washington call me up and ask me how much money it would take to catch up with TSMC. I had just been to the GlobalFoundries fab in Malta, New York, and they had spent $15 billion to get 30,000 wafer starts per month at 14 nanometers — so it’s not even leading edge, but it’s a nice fab. They’ve done a good job there. TSMC Fab 12 has a capacity of 250,000 wafer starts per month. TSMC Fab 14 has about 250,000. TSMC Fab 15 has about 250,000. TSMC Fab 18, they’re targeting the same capacity. So I told this person, Oh, I don’t know. You’d probably have to spend 10 times what GlobalFoundries spent up in Malta, New York. I could hear him fall out of his chair.

And when he got back up, he said, What did you say? And I said, I don’t know, 10 times that, $150 billion. Maybe it’s not $150 billion. Maybe it’s $130 or $140 billion. But you have to realize that TSMC is going to spend over $30 billion this year, and that’s one company. And they spent $20-plus billion last year, and they’ve been spending $10 to $20 billion a year for the last decade. And they’d been spending like $5 to $10 billion a year for the decade before that. So they’ve been pouring money into this for 35 years. So $52 billion — and by the way, all the lobbyists are in there trying to make sure that their company gets their share of it. By the time it gets peanut-buttered around, the worry will be, how much difference is it actually going to make?

Dr. Willy Shih

Nice overview of the complexities of chip manufacturing and how the supply was affected by the pandemic. It helps to remember the numerous steps and precision required to produce chips, and why efforts to create domestic production from US companies and the European Union will take a long time and huge investments to materialize.