The Coronavirus and Innovation

UK schools closed during the coronavirus pandemic, and parents turned to private, online tutors to help educate their children.Sign-ups to become tutors have rocketed during the COVID-19 crisis, and parents are using online tutors to plug the gaps in home teaching.Business Insider spoke to tutors to find out what it's been like to teach children online — and to discuss whether online tuition will last after lockdown.

Private tuition is booming in the UK during COVID-19. We spoke to leading tutors about why online learning is here to stay.

A pair of YMCA camps in Georgia closed down in late June after a counselor tested positive for the coronavirus, but in the days since they were shut, the number of confirmed infections has climbed into the dozens, media outlets report. YMCA called the summer season off early for High Harbour Camp locations at Lake Burton and Lake Allatoona, but at least 30 or more camp attendees have, or have had, the virus, outlets have reported. But as of Friday, officials said the true number is much higher -- at least 85 kids and counselors have tested positive -- all stemming from their time at Lake Burton, Georgia Department of Public Health officials told McClatchy News

Coronavirus

Behavioural Policy challenge: when does compulsion help?

10.31234/osf.io/g3xw7

Perspectiveswww.thelancet.comVol 396 July 25, 2020229In 2019, the Global Health Security Alliance assessed worldwide adher­ence to the International Health Regulations (2005), which supposedly commit nations to measures that prevent or control the spread of infectious diseases and mitigate their effects. The study found that no nation was fully prepared, and many countries—rich or poor—fell woefully short. This finding is only one of the many indications that we could have been ready, nationally and globally, to deal with a crisis like COVID­19, but were not. It’s far from clear that the pandemic, once started in Wuhan, China, could ever have been contained. But there are good reasons to think it need never have been so catastrophic for both lives and economies

98.6 Degrees Is a Normal Body Temperature, Right? Not Quite

You wake up at 6 am feeling achy and chilled. Unsure if you’re sick or just sleep-deprived, you reach for a thermometer. It beeps at 99°F, so you groan and roll out of bed and get ready for work. Because that’s not a fever. Is it?Yes, it is. Forget everything you know about normal body temperature and fever, starting with 98.6. That’s an antiquated number based on a flawed study from 1868 (yes, 150 years ago). The facts about fever are a lot more complicated.First, there’s no single number for normal. It’s slightly higher for women than men. It’s higher for children than adults. And it is lowest in the morning.

98.6 Degrees Is a Normal Body Temperature, Right? Not Quite

RT @NatureNews: Look beyond gender — if research thrives on collaboration, a book asks, why do we reward individualism? https://t.co/l9ifgN…

<https://www.nber.org/papers/w27451|https://www.nber.org/papers/w27451> <https://www.nber.org/papers/w27427|https://www.nber.org/papers/w27427> <https://www.nber.org/papers/w27392|https://www.nber.o

Facemasks and medical authority.

A smog-free Los Angeles skyline. A pristine view of the Himalayas from northern India, not seen for decades. Clear sight of the Eiffel Tower from Paris suburbs, previously obscured by pollution. And with less travel, less burning of fossil fuels, leading to a projected 8% decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this year—the largest drop ever recorded, according to the International Energy Agency. Such striking and unexpected environmental consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are unlikely to continue once the crisis has subsided and life resumes its former pace. But psychologists are using this moment to examine how lessons from COVID-19 might spark long-term improvements in sustainability habits, inform climate change research and communication, and improve community efforts to address climate change.

Could COVID-19 change our environmental behaviors?

Mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and climate change by creating sustainable solutions using open source technology. Get the details on the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge, understand its two tracks, and start building today.

Accept the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge

RT @MaartenvSmeden: This is a kind reminder that most issues with data (e.g. measurement error, incomplete data, confounding, selection) do

arXiv:2007.06876

Cirillo and Taleb [Nature Phys. 16, 606-613 (2020)] study the size of major epidemics in human history in terms of the number of fatalities. Using the figures from 72 epidemics, from the plague of Athens (429 BC) to the COVID-19 (2019-2020), they claim that the resulting fatality distribution is ``extremely fat-tailed'', i.e., asymptotically a power law. This has important consequences for risk, as the mean value of the fatality distribution becomes infinite. Reanalyzing the same data, we find that, although the data may be compatible with a power-law tail, these results are not conclusive, and other distributions, not fat-tailed, could explain the data equally well. Simulation of a log-normally distributed random variable provides synthetic data whose statistics are undistinguishable from the statistics of the empirical data.

Scientific comment on "Tail risk of contagious diseases"

Claim The Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, plans for the current rate of Covid-19 infections and deaths to continue. Conclusion This is a misunderstanding of what Professor Whitty said. He was talking about hygiene rules continuing, not levels of infection staying the same.

Independent SAGE’s estimated death rate is too high

10.31234/osf.io/b38ym

Virtual Reality (VR) has progressively emerged as an effective tool for wellbeing and health in clinical populations. VR effectiveness has been tested before in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) with full-body illusion. It consists in the embodiment of patients with AN into a different virtual body to modify their long-term memory of the body as a crucial factor for the onset and maintenance of this disorder. We extended this protocol using the autobiographical recall emotion-induction technique, in which patients recall an emotional episode of their life related to their body. In this pilot study, we aimed to test the usability and User Experience (UX) of this VR-based protocol. Five Italian women with AN were embodied in a virtual body resembling their perceived body size from an ego- and an allocentric perspective while remembering episodes of their life related to their body. High levels of embodiment were reported while embodied in a virtual body resembling their real perceived body size for ownership (p<0.0001), agency (p=0.04), and self-location (p=0.023). Negative affective state increase after session 2 (p=0.012), and positive affective state increase after session 4 (p=0.006) (PANAS). However, further iteration of the VR system is needed to improve the user experience and usability of the system.

User Experience and usability of a new virtual reality set-up to treat eating disorders: a pilot study

10.31235/osf.io/xphe9

As Covid-19 spreads across the world, governments turn a hopeful eye towards research and development of a vaccine against this new disease. But it is one thing to make a vaccine available, and it is quite another to convince the public to take the shot, as the precedent of the 2009 H1N1 flu illustrated. In this paper, we present the results of four online surveys conducted in April 2020 in representative samples of the French population 18 years of age and over (N=5,018). These surveys were conducted during a period when the French population was on lockdown and the daily number of deaths attributed to the virus reached its peak. We found that if a vaccine against the new coronavirus became available, almost a quarter of respondents would not use it. We also found that attitudes to this vaccine were correlated significantly with political partisanship and engagement with the political system. Attitudes towards this future vaccine did not follow the traditional mapping of political attitudes along a Left-Right axis but oppose people who feel close to governing parties (Centre, Left and Right) on the one hand, and, on the other, people who feel close to Far-Left and Far-Right parties as well as people who do not feel close to any party. We draw on the French sociological literature on ordinary attitudes to politics to discuss our results as well as the cultural pathways via which political beliefs can affect perceptions of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The French public’s attitudes to a future COVID-19 vaccine: the politicization of a public health issue

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1921417117

Online education is rapidly expanding in response to rising demand for higher and continuing education, but many online students struggle to achieve their educational goals. Several behavioral science interventions have shown promise in raising student persistence and completion rates in a handful of courses, but evidence of their effectiveness across diverse educational contexts is limited. In this study, we test a set of established interventions over 2.5 y, with one-quarter million students, from nearly every country, across 247 online courses offered by Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford. We hypothesized that the interventions would produce medium-to-large effects as in prior studies, but this is not supported by our results. Instead, using an iterative scientific process of cyclically preregistering new hypotheses in between waves of data collection, we identified individual, contextual, and temporal conditions under which the interventions benefit students. Self-regulation interventions raised student engagement in the first few weeks but not final completion rates. Value-relevance interventions raised completion rates in developing countries to close the global achievement gap, but only in courses with a global gap. We found minimal evidence that state-of-the-art machine learning methods can forecast the occurrence of a global gap or learn effective individualized intervention policies. Scaling behavioral science interventions across various online learning contexts can reduce their average effectiveness by an order-of-magnitude. However, iterative scientific investigations can uncover what works where for whom.

Scaling up behavioral science interventions in online education

The world’s tourism sector could lose at least $1.2 trillion, or 1.5% of the global gross domestic product (GDP), having been placed at a standstill for nearly four months due to the coronavirus pandemic, UNCTAD said in a report published on 1 July.

#NewsContainer .row p {font-size:14px} Coronavirus will cost global tourism at least $1.2 trillion

Coronavirus: How will local lockdowns work?

The UK's first local lockdown has been introduced in Leicester, following a spike in coronavirus cases.How will they be enforced and how could they be used elsewhere?Who decides when a local lockdown is needed?It depends whether there is a cluster or an outbreak.A single premises with a coronavirus cluster is likely to be closed temporarily by the local director of public health and the Health and Safety Executive, and must legally remain shut.These powers have been used previously to deal with salmonella or Legionnaires' disease outbreaks. /**/ (function() { if (window.bbcdotcom && bbcdotcom.adverts && bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync) { bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync('mpu', [1,2,3]); } })(); /**/ If there is evidence of a bigger coronavirus outbreak in a town, city or region, several organisations decide the response.

Ljiljana Lazarevic Danka Purić Predrag Teovanovic Goran Knezevic Petar Lukic Zorana Zupan

Doi:10.1145/2500891

arGUmEnT anD DEBaTE are cornerstones of civilized society and intellectual life. As online activity usurps many traditional forms of communication, we would hope to see these processes alive and well on the Web as well. But we do not. Too many mechanisms for online interaction hamper and discourage debate, facilitating poor-quality argument and fuzzy thinking. Needed are new tools, systems, and standards engineered into the heart of the Web to encourage debate, facilitate good argument, and promote a new online critical literacy. This is the Argument Web vision, involving a Web platform combining linked argument data with software tools that make online debate intuitive for its participants, including mediators, students, academics, broadcasters, and bloggers.

implementing the Argument Web

The mental health crisis in academia has been a widely discussed topic over the past few years in academic journals, blogs, as well as on academic Twitter. Although open discussions about mental health finally seem to be coming out of the shadows, several myths and misconceptions prevail about mental health in academia – for example, “Researchers who seem to be doing well at work don’t struggle with mental health issues” or “Once you talk to someone about what you’re going through, your mental health difficulties are permanently resolved.”

Webinar: Managing your mental health is an ongoing journey – Let's embrace the process!

This but for ALL papers, ALL arguments, ALL articles, ALL op-eds. This is the future I want. Author doesn't even need to generate them, though would be better if they did.Quote TweetJasmine Wang@j_asminewang · 29 Aug 2019it'd be excellent if all philosophy papers included a diagram illustrating the paper's argumentation structure in the abstract. it'd be even clearer if there were also credences (%) assigned over the nodes here. diagram by @JohnDanaher

BehavioursWorks is leading the Australian chapter of the Survey of COVID-19 Responses to Understand Behaviour (SCRUB) project, which aims to give policymakers actionable insights into public attitudes and behaviours relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.More than 120 international collaborators are involved in the project and over 6,000 surveys have been completed by people from more than 40 countries (including many repeat respondents).The survey measures behaviour, behavioural drivers, COVID-19 attitudes and beliefs, and demographic variables. Outputs include:An interactive dashboard of survey responses,Open data for research academics to answer urgent behavioural research questions and provide a resource for future pandemic preparedness.The following are a few findings from the fourth wave of Australian data, collected between 01/06/2020 – 12/06/2020 and funded by the Victorian Government.

SCRUB project wave 4: Australians’ views on private gatherings, remote working and getting tested

In an attempt to reduce the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an estimated 4·5 billion people globally have been placed under some form of lockdown restriction. In the UK, non-essential movement constraints and physical distancing have been in place since March 23, 2020. Modelling and early empirical investigations indicate that physical distancing measures are crucial to reduce transmission of the virus, consequent pressure on health systems, and the number of deaths. For these policies to be successful, adequate compliance must be achieved. To help monitor this compliance, we have developed code to enable us to map national mobility data for the UK, which can also be applied to the data available for 131 other countries and 1167 subregions. The code we used is openly available online.Adherence to movement restriction regulations is challenging and a risk of increasing non-compliance (or so-called lockdown fatigue) exists. Observational evidence suggests that rather than fatigue, the practicalities of daily living are leading some people in the UK to increase activity as their supplies decrease.1CPG FMCG & RetailCOVID 19 intelligence round-up. Nielsen, March 3, 2020https://www.nielsen.com/eu/en/insights/video/2020/covid-19-intelligence-roundup/Date accessed: March 30, 2020Google Scholar,  2Rigby C RetailX tracker: how has the way we shop changed, two weeks into coronavirus?. Internet Retailing, March 27, 2020https://internetretailing.net/covid-19/retailx-tracker-how-has-the-way-we-shop-changed-two-weeks-into-coronavirus-21175Date accessed: March 27, 2020Google Scholar These observations are important because a key modelling study of mitigation strategies for reducing transmission in the UK assumed a 75% reduction in contacts as part of a social distancing strategy that was subsequently implemented;3Ferguson NM Laydon D Nedjati-Gilani G et al.Report 9 - impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand. MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Imperial College, London2020: 1-20Google Scholar whether this level of reduction is being achieved remains unclear.

The effects of physical distancing on population mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK

Wharton professors George Day and Gregory Shea explain why investing in forward-thinking talent pools can help prepare businesses for uncertainties. They argue that the pandemic has exposed the need for more organizations to invest in new ways of thinking.

COVID-19: 3 ways businesses can find growth opportunities during the crisis

The effective reproduction number, Rt, is a key time-varying prognostic for the growth rate of any infectious disease epidemic. Significant changes in Rt can forewarn about new transmissions within a population or predict the efficacy of interventions. Inferring Rt reliably and in real-time from observed time-series of infected (demographic) data is an important problem in population dynamics. The renewal or branching process model is a popular solution that has been applied to Ebola and Zika virus disease outbreaks, among others, and is currently being used to investigate the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This model estimates Rt using a heuristically chosen piecewise function. While this facilitates real-time detection of statistically significant Rt changes, inference is highly sensitive to the function choice. Improperly chosen piecewise models might ignore meaningful changes or over-interpret noise-induced ones, yet produce visually reasonable estimates. No principled piecewise selection scheme exists. We develop a practical yet rigorous scheme using the accumulated prediction error (APE) metric from information theory, which deems the model capable of describing the observed data using the fewest bits as most justified. We derive exact posterior prediction distributions for infected population size and integrate these within an APE framework to obtain an exact and reliable method for identifying the piecewise function best supported by available epidemic data. We find that this choice optimises short-term prediction accuracy and can rapidly detect salient fluctuations in Rt, and hence the infected population growth rate, in real-time over the course of an unfolding epidemic. Moreover, we emphasise the need for formal selection by exposing how common heuristic choices, which seem sensible, can be misleading. Our APE-based method is easily computed and broadly applicable to statistically similar models found in phylogenetics and macroevolution, for example. Our results explore the relationships among estimate precision, forecast reliability and model complexity.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007990

Using information theory to optimise epidemic models for real-time prediction and estimation

Simple advice, is of course, easy to follow--- or, at least, at least it is usually easy to know whether we, or other people, are following it successfully or not.But as countries across the world, and particularly those who are coming out of the hard lockdown, make their advice more complex and nuanced, and potentially applying differently across age groups, health conditions, professions, and parts of the country. Government advice is getting substantially more complex.This raises several important issues and probably more:

Issue Radar: Is advice getting too complicated? And what can be done?

The COVID-19 pandemic is set to result in the worst recession since the Great Depression in 1920s. Revisions to the IMF's April forecast now predict global output to fall 4.9% this year. The strength of the recovery is uncertain.

IMF: New predictions suggest a deeper recession and a slower recovery

Popular project-management tools for research teams include Trello and Jira, both from the company Atlassian in Sydney, Australia, as well as Asana and GitHub project boards, both in San Francisco, California. These tools are more than simple to-do lists. They help teams to see the broad view of a project, allowing users to create and complete tasks, meet deadlines, capture detail-rich notes and provide templates for common protocols. The tagging functions of these tools allow managers to assign tasks to team members. If used well, they can make teams more efficient and minimize frustrations such as forgotten tasks and duplicated work.In short, project-management tools and the managers who use them “connect the details with the high-level goals”, says Tracy Teal. As the executive director of Dryad, a non-profit repository for open data in Durham, North Carolina, she uses several such tools.

Four tools that help researchers working in collaborations to see the big picture

arXiv:2006.15453

The effect of heterogeneity on hypergraph contagion models

arXiv:2006.15383v1

Interdisciplinary research has been considered as a solution to today's complex societal challenges. While its relationship with scientific impact has been extensively studied, the technological impact of interdisciplinary research remains unexplored. Here, we examine how interdisciplinarity is associated with technological impact at the paper level. We measure the degree of interdisciplinarity of a paper using three popular indicators, namely variety, balance, and disparity, and track how it gets cited by patented technologies over time. Drawing on a large sample of biomedical papers published in 18 years, we find that papers that cites more fields (variety) and whose distributions over those cited fields are more even (balance) are more likely to receive patent citations, but both effects can be offset if papers draw upon more distant fields (disparity). Those associations are consistent across different citation-window lengths. Additional analysis that focuses on the subset of papers with at least one patent citation reveals that the intensity of their technological impact, as measured as the number of patent citations, increases with balance and disparity. Our work may have policy implications for interdisciplinary research and scientific and technology impact.

Interdisciplinary research and technological impact

RT @PsyArXivBot: Exposure to COVID-19 Pandemic Stress: Associations with Depression and Anxiety in Emerging Adults in the U.S. https://t.c… #3376 · opened 2 hours ago by arc-support   SciBeh twitter via twitter

RT @PsyArXivBot: BECON methodology https://t.co/SYg5LlbKL0

If you're frustrated with giving free labour to large corporations, seeing your library spend millions buying back the results of your work while the public is locked out, or if you want to put research back in the hands of academics, join us in a project to change the status quo in research for the better. We declared independence, and found strong support from the academic community. With the advice in this guide, so can you.

We Declared Independence, and so can you

/doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2001064117

The growing popularity of bibliometric indexes (whose most famous example is the h index by J. E. Hirsch [J. E. Hirsch, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 16569–16572 (2005)]) is opposed by those claiming that one’s scientific impact cannot be reduced to a single number. Some even believe that our complex reality fails to submit to any quantitative description. We argue that neither of the two controversial extremes is true. By assuming that some citations are distributed according to the rich get richer rule (success breeds success, preferential attachment) while some others are assigned totally at random (all in all, a paper needs a bibliography), we have crafted a model that accurately summarizes citation records with merely three easily interpretable parameters: productivity, total impact, and how lucky an author has been so far.

Three dimensions of scientific impact

org/10.1177/1948550620923239

It is commonly claimed that science and religion are logically and psychologically at odds with one another. However, previous studies have mainly examined American samples: therefore, generalisations about antagonism between religion and science may be unwarranted. We examined the correlation between religiosity and attitudes towards science across 11 studies, including representative data from 60 countries (N = 66,438), nine convenience samples from the U.S. (N = 2,160), and a cross-national panel sample from five understudied countries (N = 1,048). Results show that, within the U.S., religiosity is consistently associated with lower interest in science topics and activities, and less positive explicit and implicit attitudes towards science. However, this relationship is inconsistent around the world, with positive, negative, and null correlations being observed in various countries. Our findings are inconsistent with the idea that science and religion are necessarily at odds, undermining common theories of scientific advancement undermining religion.

Religious Americans Have Less Positive Attitudes Toward Science, But This Does Not Extend To Other Cultures

The study aimed to investigate the role of personality, thinking styles, and conspiracy mentality in health-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e., recommended health behaviors according to COVID-19 guidelines and engagement in pseudoscientific practices related to COVID-19. Basic personality space was defined by the HEXACO model complemented by Disintegration, which represents psychotic-like experiences and behaviors reconceptualized as a personality trait. Mediation analyses conducted on a convenient sample from the general population recruited via social media or by snowballing (N=417) showed that engagement in pseudoscientific behaviors was predicted by high Disintegration. However, this relationship was entirely mediated by thinking styles, i.e., high experiential and low rational. Adherence to health practices recommended by COVID-19 guidelines is predicted by low Disintegration and high Honesty traits, but not with thinking styles and conspiracy mentality

More than 150 speakers and 50+ hours of live discussions, panels, presentations and workshops. Be a part of this first ever virtual Global Fact conference between 22-30 June 2020, organized by the International Fact-Checking Network.

Global Fact7 Virtual|

Architects are redesigning cities to help with social distancing

Architects are proposing ways to incorporate social distancing into urban planning. Strengthening local services to cut back on travel would reduce the spread of infectious disease, such as COVID-19. In their plans, cities are also aiming to become cleaner, greener and healthier.

Architects are redesigning cities to help with social distancing

As cities emerge from coronavirus lockdowns, the way people use parks, stores, restaurants, transit, streets and homes is changing in ways both subtle and dramatic.

When a deluge of coronavirus cases threatened to overwhelm the NHS in March, Covid-19 was a brand new and little-understood disease, causing panic as well as deaths. Hospitals under huge pressure did all they could. Next time round, if, as everyone supposes, there is a next time, it will be different. In a second wave, or even localised spikes across the nation, the health service will know more about what it is dealing with – and will be better able to help people recover and send them home, say doctors.

Why doctors say UK is better prepared for a second wave of coronavirus

bla bla bla PEER REVIEW bla bla bla

RT @thehowie: Overnight, https://covidexitstrategy.org updated their map to reflect #Mississippi

RT @thehowie: Overnight, https://covidexitstrategy.org updated their map to reflect #Mississippi deterioration -Southeast now a solid block of re…Quote Tweet(((Howard Forman)))@thehowie · 14 Jun#Mississippi is a small (pop) state with poor testing, increasing positive rate, HIGHEST hospitalizations per capita (and ), and under-resourced. Another state to watch closely. @LeeZurik

Scholarly publishers are working together to maximize efficiency during COVID-19 pandemic

As COVID-19 sweeps the world, the desire for scientific “good news” is stronger than ever. But with that comes the problem of false positive findings and false leads.To address this challenge, the journal Royal Society Open Science is expediting its Registered Report review process specifically for COVID-19 research.

Rapid Registered Reports initiative aims to stop coronavirus researchers following false leads

Psychological research could play a critical role in informing policies during times of crisis and uncertainty. However, as stated in a previous post by Patrick Forscher, Simine Vazire, and Farid Anvari during this digital event, issues with generalisability, replicability, and validity may limit the practical implications of our research. The problems of reliability are compounded by the fact that in times of crisis, the rapid dissemination of evidence is as critical as its quality. Thus, the field finds itself in a challenging situation, where the need for quality and rapid knowledge challenges the utility of psychology research. As Ulrike Hahn put it in a previous post during this digital event; there is a need for proper science without the drag. But researchers have not sat idle. On the contrary, some have started building an infrastructure for crisis knowledge management, described in the earlier post by Stefan Herzog. Others have started posting their findings as “living documents”, as described by Yasmina Okan in her post. And many more have published their findings as preprints as soon as they emerge, without the “drag” introduced by peer review.

From peer review to “science without the drag” via PsyArXiv

COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy