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Mar. 17th, 2020 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Been enjoying Zoey's Extraordinary Play List - it's fluffy, romantic, brightly colored, with fun song and dance numbers. Just what the doctor ordered.
I don't know about anyone else, but it's going to be a while before I can watch another horror film. Particularly a dystopian sci-fi. I might go Star Trek or The Expanse. Fun space opera. Nothing with any pandemics or epidemics. I have an odd feeling that the new Television series "The Stand" may not happen now.
2. How China's Bat Woman Hunted Down Viruses
Before SARS, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.
newsletter promo
Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.
In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.
But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.
There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.
Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.
The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.
In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.
3. How to Tell if You're Talking to a Bot
In 2015 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ran a contest on Twitter bot detection. Participants trained their systems to identify fake accounts using five key data points. The resulting systems are far from perfect (the best worked about 40 percent of the time), but the efforts reveal how best to spot a bot on Twitter. We may come to rely on these signals much more.
* User profile
The most common way to tell if an account is fake is to check out the profile. The most rudimentary bots lack a photo, a link, or any bio. More sophisticated ones might use a photo stolen from the web, or an automatically generated account name.
* Tweet syntax
Using human language is still incredibly hard for machines. A bot’s tweets may reveal its algorithmic logic: they may be formulaic or repetitive, or use responses common in chatbot programs. Missing an obvious joke and rapidly changing the subject are other telltale traits (unfortunately, they are also quite common among human Twitter users).
*Tweet semantics
Bots are usually created with a particular end in mind, so they may be overly obsessed with a particular topic, perhaps reposting the same link again and again or tweeting about little else.
*Temporal behavior
Looking at tweets over time can also be revealing. If an account tweets at an impossible rate, at unlikely times, or even too regularly, that can be a good sign that it’s fake. Researchers also found that fake accounts often betray an inconsistent attitude toward topics over time.
* Network features
Network dynamics aren’t visible to most users, but they can reveal a lot about an account. Bots may follow only a few accounts or be followed by many other bots. The tone of a bot’s tweets may also be incongruous with those of its connections, suggesting a lack of any real social interaction.
4. Inside Otis Redding's Final Masterpiece - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.
I don't know about anyone else, but it's going to be a while before I can watch another horror film. Particularly a dystopian sci-fi. I might go Star Trek or The Expanse. Fun space opera. Nothing with any pandemics or epidemics. I have an odd feeling that the new Television series "The Stand" may not happen now.
2. How China's Bat Woman Hunted Down Viruses
Before SARS, the world had little inkling of coronaviruses—named because, seen under a microscope, their spiky surface resembles a crown—says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronavirues were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak was a game changer,” says Wang, whose work on bat-borne coronaviruses got a swift mention in the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion. It was the first time a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential emerged. This discovery helped to jump-start a global search for animal viruses that could find their way into humans.
newsletter promo
Shi was an early recruit of that worldwide effort, and both Daszak and Wang have since been her long-term collaborators. But how the civets got the virus remained a mystery. Two previous incidents were telling: Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus infections, in which the contagion jumped from horses to humans, and Malaysia’s 1998 Nipah virus outbreak, in which it moved from pigs to people. Both diseases were found to be caused by pathogens that originated in fruit-eating bats. Horses and pigs were merely the intermediate hosts.
In those first virus-hunting months in 2004, whenever Shi’s team located a bat cave, it would put a net at the opening before dusk—and then wait for the nocturnal creatures to venture out to feed for the night. Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs, often working into the small hours. After catching up on some sleep, they would return to the cave in the morning to collect urine and fecal pellets.
But sample after sample turned up no trace of genetic material from coronaviruses. It was a heavy blow. “Eight months of hard work seemed to have gone down the drain,” Shi says. “We thought coronaviruses probably did not like Chinese bats.” The team was about to give up when a research group in a neighboring lab handed it a diagnostic kit for testing antibodies produced by people with SARS.
There was no guarantee the test would work for bat antibodies, but Shi gave it a go anyway. “What did we have to lose?” she says. The results exceeded her expectations. Samples from three horseshoe bat species contained antibodies against the SARS virus. “It was a turning point for the project,” Shi says. The researchers learned that the presence of the coronavirus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal—but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years. So the diagnostic kit offered a valuable pointer as to how to hunt down viral genomic sequences.
Shi’s team used the antibody test to narrow down locations and bat species to pursue in the quest for these genomic clues. After roaming mountainous terrain in the majority of China’s dozens of provinces, the researchers turned their attention to one spot: Shitou Cave on the outskirts of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan—where they conducted intense sampling during different seasons throughout five consecutive years.
The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi says. But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish, cause SARS-like diseases in mice, and evade vaccines and drugs that work against SARS.
In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain in 2013 that came from horseshoe bats and had a genomic sequence that was 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.
3. How to Tell if You're Talking to a Bot
In 2015 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ran a contest on Twitter bot detection. Participants trained their systems to identify fake accounts using five key data points. The resulting systems are far from perfect (the best worked about 40 percent of the time), but the efforts reveal how best to spot a bot on Twitter. We may come to rely on these signals much more.
* User profile
The most common way to tell if an account is fake is to check out the profile. The most rudimentary bots lack a photo, a link, or any bio. More sophisticated ones might use a photo stolen from the web, or an automatically generated account name.
* Tweet syntax
Using human language is still incredibly hard for machines. A bot’s tweets may reveal its algorithmic logic: they may be formulaic or repetitive, or use responses common in chatbot programs. Missing an obvious joke and rapidly changing the subject are other telltale traits (unfortunately, they are also quite common among human Twitter users).
*Tweet semantics
Bots are usually created with a particular end in mind, so they may be overly obsessed with a particular topic, perhaps reposting the same link again and again or tweeting about little else.
*Temporal behavior
Looking at tweets over time can also be revealing. If an account tweets at an impossible rate, at unlikely times, or even too regularly, that can be a good sign that it’s fake. Researchers also found that fake accounts often betray an inconsistent attitude toward topics over time.
* Network features
Network dynamics aren’t visible to most users, but they can reveal a lot about an account. Bots may follow only a few accounts or be followed by many other bots. The tone of a bot’s tweets may also be incongruous with those of its connections, suggesting a lack of any real social interaction.
4. Inside Otis Redding's Final Masterpiece - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-19 04:34 am (UTC)My sister has Facebook, which she uses to keep in contact with her grandkids (mostly) and her three sons (less so, they all live in the county). It's rather humorous that I'm the science nerd / tech guy in the family, but I'm the only one I'm aware of who actively avoids much of the modern tech 90% of my family uses daily.
One of the problems with repairing machines for a living, and mostly electronic ones for the past few decades, is you become very aware of just how vulnerable some designs are. Add in an internet connection? Be afraid, be very...
I'm glad you're keeping up with some of the old ATPo gang, please be sure to post here on occasion if they're all staying (reasonably) well in the current debacle.
Annnnnd... while it's normally difficult to be amused by Donald The Magnificent(tm), this article I clipped a few weeks back certainly made me laugh-- perhaps it will lighten your day also by virtue of its sheer absurdity.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164