In recent years, disinformation and misinformation have become the dark realities of our increasingly connected and technologically advanced world. During the Covid-19, disinformation reached new heights with an avalanche of false information, distorted facts and crude conspiracy theories about the virus. Today, we increasingly talk of an ‘infodemic’, a term first coined in 2003 during the SARS outbreak to describe the story of both the viral and the information epidemics. Malign disinformation campaigns emanating in particular from Russia, Iran and China have attempted to blame the West for the coronavirus outbreak in recent months and have accused it of being unable to tackle the crisis. Their narratives look increasingly similar, with disinformation stories attempting to instrumentalise the health crisis and undermine public trust in democratic countries.  Thid media expert panel will take stock of the post-Corona media landscape, analyse the impact of Covid-19 infodemics on democracy and try to establish how to combat this phenomenon.

The impact of Covid-19 on media – rise of infodemics?

Student and Early Career Webinar: Online Research Tools and Techniques

Online Research Tools and Techniques

If COVID-19 is the 9/11 moment for global public health, what needs to happen next?   Interviewed by the Financial Times, Science Editor, Clive Cookson, Dr Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet Medical Journal gives a hard-hitting account of what has gone wrong (and right) with the response to the pandemic, while flagging its overlooked or still-to-be appreciated consequences. His premise is that if the 9/11 attacks changed all our lives from the perspective of state security, then COVID-19 must leave a similar legacy for the future of global public health. Dr Horton weighs-up the score cards of countries, regions, and institutions, plus the international scientific community itself. He examines the initial outbreak in China, the WHO and UN responses, developments in Italy, the UK, Germany, the USA, South Africa, New Zealand, Latin America etc.; his overriding conclusion being that history will judge us all very poorly. With the strength of international cooperation tested to the full, he expresses his frustration at no emergency assembly of the WHO yet being called. In a wide-ranging assessment, Dr Horton discusses the immediate cost to scientific journals, the pros and cons of the vaccine race, and future resurgences and lockdowns. Above all, he argues for an end to our health chances being a global postcode lottery and calls upon each of us, as individuals, to take greater responsibility for how we live and act with the virus.

COVID-19: The 9/11 Moment for Global Public Health?

ORWG

The 2nd meeting of the ORWG took place on 08/09/20 and discussed developments in Open Research, including on publishing, training, and the Research Excellence Framework. The meeting was held online, with local organisers Rik Henson, Amy Orben and Alessandro Tomassini, along with the CBU Open Science Committee.

In this first of The BMJ’s covid-19 grand rounds, we focus on the phenomenon of “long covid”. Many patients who have relatively mild symptoms from the infection, continue to experience these long after the usual 12 day duration. For these patients, the post-acute syndrome has a significant impact on their lives, but many questions remain about its diagnosis, management and prognosis.

Long covid: diagnosis, management, prognosis

P-values are frequently misinterpreted. Confidence intervals are too. So are Bayesian statistics. Sometimes this simple equivalence is used as an argument that statistical cognition shouldn’t play a role in deciding which analysis approach to adopt in practice, or to teach to students. But are misinterpretations of these different displays of statistical evidence equally severe? Do they have the same consequences in practice? In this talk I’ll present the limited empirical evidence related to these questions that we have so far, and suggest that, at the very least, we don’t know enough to assume Abelson’s law yet, i.e., “Under the law of the diffusion of idiocy, every foolish application of significance testing is sooner or later going to be translated into a corresponding foolish practice for confidence limits” (Abelson, 1997, p. 130). There may be other sound reasons – technical or philosophical reasons —to reject one approach or another, but we shouldn’t (yet) consider them cognitively equivalent.

Misinterpretations of evidence, and worse misinterpretations of evidence

The present crisis continues to demand an all-out response from behavioural scientists if it is to be mastered with minimal damage. This means we, as the behavioural science community, need to think about how we can adapt to best support evidence-based policy in a rapidly changing, high-stakes environment. Following on from early thoughts on such a restructure in (Hahn et al. 2020), we created a transparent, digital online community for behavioural scientists, in the context of an integrated information environment, scibeh.org. The talk will describe the thinking behind this step, outline some of the features, and discuss what has and has not worked, along with the implications for future digital, online, science.

Building an Online Community for Behavioural Science COVID-19 Response

latest analysis & questions from the press & public.

Independent SAGE's weekly briefing.

The Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship was established in 1983 to stimulate intellectual liaison between MLA and the National Library of Medicine (NLM). This year's speaker is Dr. John Brownstein, who will be speaking on translation impact on the surveillance, control and prevention of disease, the development and application of data mining and citizen science to public health in relation to his work with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship: Digital Epidemiology and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sarah Bowen and Merle van den Akker interview Nurit Nobel on how behavioural science is applied in both academia and industry, and why she decided to go back into academia, doing her PhD, whilst having a very successful career in industry! Nurit has 10+ years experience in marketing and strategy consulting working with top Swedish and international companies. After years of applying her knowledge in human insight to increase demand for brands and services, she became curious in how it can be used for higher level purposes, which lead her to pursuing a PhD at Stockholm School of Economics. Her experience made her aware of how failures to take behavioral factors into account often lead to ineffective results, which she explores in her research and applied work with Impactually, of which she is the co-founder and CEO!

Hybrids: Between Industry and Academia ft. Nurit Nobel

Prof Fiona Fidler | Collaborative assessment for trustworthy science: the repliCATS project

The repliCATS project evaluates published scientific research. As the acronym—Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science—suggests, repliCATS is a group activity, centred around assessing the trustworthiness of research claims. Reviewers first make private individual assessments about a research claim—judging its comprehensibility, the prior plausibility of underlying effect, and its likely replicability. Reviewers then share their judgements and reasoning with group members, providing both new information and the opportunity for feedback and calibration. The group interrogates differences in opinion and explores counterfactuals. After discussion, there is a final opportunity for privately updating individual judgements. Importantly the repliCATS process is not consensus-driven – reviewers can disagree, and their ratings and probability judgements are mathematically aggregated into a final assessment. At the moment, the repliCATS platform exists primarily to predict replicability. Launched in January 2019 as part of the DARPA SCORE program, over 18 months repliCATS elicited group assessments and captured associated reasoning and discussion, for 3,000 published social scientific research claims in 8 disciplines (Business, Criminology, Economics, Education, Political Science, Psychology, Public Administration, and Sociology). The repliCATS team are now working to extend the platform beyond merely predicting replicability, to deliver a more comprehensive peer review protocol. Suspected advantages of a repliCATS process over traditional peer review include: inbuilt training and calibration; feedback that is intrinsically rewarding; an inherently interactive process, but one which does not implicitly rely on ‘consensus by fatigue’; and a process that actively encourages interrogation. This talk will present some preliminary findings, and discuss the future of the platform.

Petrie-Flom Center

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged health systems around the world, displacing attention to other much-needed services and conditions. It has particularly impacted access to sexual and reproductive health goods and services⁠—not only in the U.S., as discussed in Reproductive Rights in 2020: June Medical Services v. Russo and COVID-19, but around the globe. While in some places governments have made concerted efforts to mitigate the displacement of sexual and reproductive health services by telehealth and other means, in many others the pandemic has provided cover for policies that neglect and even undermine reproductive health and rights. Reproductive rights movements and mobilizations (including around abortion) have been interrupted; contraception access has been affected; and sexual and obstetric violence have both increased. Join us for a discussion of the impact that COVID-19 has had on sexual and reproductive health and rights around the world.

COVID-19 and the Politics of Reproductive Health: Global Perspectives

The Conference on Computational Sociology will showcase work that applies computational methods to important sociological problems. Presented research will display creative use of data, whether applying machine learning methods, analyzing text, images, or network structures, or any other form of computational analysis.

2020 Conference on Computational Sociology

Computational Social Science offers tools that can assist both policy makers and the private sector in the design and implementation of measures to address the economic and social challenges posed by COVID-19. How can the growing sources of (alternative) data and data science be used in a meaningful and responsible way, i.e. providing reliable and practical knowledge without compromising privacy and safety of people whose data is collected and analyzed? What are the methodological and regulatory solutions that could be applied to address the challenges and mitigate the risks? Our panelists will share their experience and ideas on these issues. There will also be enough time for questions from the audience.

Computational Social Science to Address the (Post) COVID-19 Reality

Q&A: Health Inequalities and COVID-19

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the science and knowledge enterprise has had its fair share of successes and challenges. These are wide ranging from low funding steams at best to a lack of funding at worst, a lack of basic resources and infrastructure, attracting and retaining qualified educators and others. With the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response to utilising science and evidence-based approaches in their responses in some countries, there may be opportunities to better position the place of science in tackling developmental challenges. We seek to interrogate how and if the current pandemic can create opportunities for better integration of the knowledge enterprise and science-policy nexus.

SAYAS Webinar 2: What Science will look like after COVID-19?

Experience sampling methods (ESM; also known as ecological momentary assessment or EMA) involves sampling participants’ experiences in natural environments, in real-time (or close to it), and on many measurement occasions, often using smartphone technology. These methods allow us insight into participants’ momentary states and the contexts in which these states occur, thus letting researchers “capture life as it is lived” (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003). ESM introduces ecological validity, reduces recall bias, and allows researchers to capture dynamic within-person processes. In this workshop, Dr. Kalokerinos discusses when ESM is useful, when things can go wrong, and how to design and execute a good ESM study. Show less Show more

EWB Hub x GRiPS Student Workshop - Introduction to Experience Sampling Methods

Statistical methods can be viewed through different lenses; as technical tools to detect signals and quantify uncertainty, or as foundations for making epistemic claims. The use of similar technical tools in different sciences can obscure the profoundly different epistemic cultures across the sciences. Elements of these cultures include what constitutes sufficient grounds for making a claim, e.g. that an intervention “works”, and who is qualified to make that judgment. If these differences are not acknowledged, which they rarely are, debates about how to improve the use of statistics in science often miss the mark, never reaching closure. This will be shown with recent empirical work on whet- her specialized statistical review is needed for research papers, efforts of a major science funder (PCORI) to improve statistical practice in its funded research, and controversy about the use of statistical significance in published research. I will discuss what this means for metascience and for improving statistical practice.

Statistical methods as social technologies versus analytic tools: Implications for metascience and research reform

Calls for social justice and police reform have gained momentum as unrest continues across the country in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks. These calls are intersecting with the coronavirus pandemic, which has highlighted long existing health and economic disparities between Black Americans and other groups. Even now, as COVID-19 cases crest more than 2 million in the country, we see disproportionate impacts on black communities, with the overall mortality rate for Black Americans from COVID-19 more than twice as high as those for Whites, Asian and Latino Americans. In this Facebook Live Q&A, David Harris, Managing Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, discussed the drivers of current unrest and issues of police injustice -- and steps to consider to create a more just society.

Racism and COVID-19: Inequities and Policing

The Alan Turing Institute: Causal Inference, Causal Decision Making Under Uncertainty | CogX 2020

The Alan Turing Institute: Causal Inference, Causal decision making under uncertainty Peter Tennant - University Academic Fellow in Health Data Science - University of Leeds Virginia Aglietti - PhD Student - Warwick University Eleanor Murray - Assistant Professor of Epidemiology - Boston University Bringing the world’s most interesting research papers to life. Examining the wider implications, we feature top research published across domains and verticals with exciting interviews with the authors themselves, alongside a curated Q&A session. CogX is hosted by Charlie Muirhead Co-Founder and CEO, and Co-Founder Tabitha Goldstaub. Find out more at: https://cogx.co/ CogX is an award-winning Festival with its roots in artificial intelligence. The fourth edition, June 8th to 10th 2020, adds a Virtual first experience and Global Leadership Summit, and builds on the huge success of the 2019 event, which brought together over 20,000 visitors. 2020 saw over 30,000 participants including 600+ speakers across 18 topic stages and 100+ side events. Our theme this year, “How do we get the next 10 years right?” with aims to: Move the conversation forward with concrete actions Inspire current and future generations of leaders Help reframe the climate emergency as the biggest economic opportunity in the last 200 years Help increase understanding of the current Covid-19 pandemic and champion innovative solutions CogX – Global Leadership Summit and Festival of AI & Breakthrough Technology

Just weeks after the genome sequence of the recently emerged coronavirus was published online, researchers reported the cryogenic electron microscopy structure of the spike protein the virus uses to gain entry to host cells in a 19 February Science paper (https://scim.ag/2WxQ8lY). The insights from their study are already helping to inform vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. On Friday, the coauthors of this study, Jason McLellan and Barney Graham, discussed via Facebook Live how they visualized the spike protein, as well as how their work to improve understanding of SARS-CoV2 viral structure will inform therapeutics against this virus going forward. Show less Show more

Science Facebook Live: Understanding SARS-CoV-2 structure informs vaccine design, clinical trials

Openness in research can lead to greater reproducibility, an accelerated pace of discovery, and decreased redundancy of effort. In addition, open research ensures equitable access to knowledge and the ability for any community to assess, interrogate, and build upon prior work. It also requires open infrastructure and distributed access; but few institutions can provide all of these services alone. Providing a trustworthy network for perpetual availability of research data is critical to ensuring reproducibility, transparency, and ongoing inquiry. Increased attention on the importance of open research and data sharing has led to a proliferation of platforms to store data, materials, etc., with limited technical integration. This can hinder data sharing, but also complicate coordination with local library expertise and services, thus hampering curation and long-term stewardship. For example, the open source OSF enables researchers to directly create and manage research projects and integrates with other tools researchers use (Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, etc.), but lacks the ability to archive that material locally at a researcher’s institution. Long-term stewardship and preservation requires multiple copies of data archived in different locations, and creating archives seamlessly would be ideal. COS and IA are working together to address these preservation and stewardship challenges by providing open, cooperative infrastructure to ensure long-term access and connection to research data, and by supporting and promoting adoption of open science practices to enhance research reproducibility as well as data sharing and reuse. In this webinar, attendees will learn about both the technical and practical aspects of this collaborative project connecting the researcher tool OSF and the preservation system of Internet Archive. We demonstrate how researchers can improve the openness and reproducibility of their research through preregistration, and how those preregistrations are preserved with Internet Archive. We answer questions and explore use cases for how this powerful workflow can support library curation and stewardship of open research.

Supporting Open Science Data Curation, Preservation, and Access by Libraries

Does the digital economy need new regulation to improve citizens’ safety online? When does illegal become harmful? What oversight does regulation involve and what role should social media companies have? How can privacy enhancing technologies help with regards to online harms? Join leading researchers and industry advocates for a discussion on the outlook for online harms and how AI is countering disinformation.

Online Harms & Disinformation Post-COVID

David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers, media and policy-makers. Apart from academic publications, he has written The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), Sex by Numbers, and the recently-published The Art of Statistics. He presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance and the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, and was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018. His greatest achievement came in 2011, when he was 7th in an episode of Winter Wipeout.

Communicating statistics, risks and uncertainty in the age of COVID19

Since the start of the global pandemic and nationwide protests against racial injustices, there has been a flood of information online. As new information hits our newsfeeds daily, there’s still a lot of uncertainty around the virus and response to the protests. How does the unpredictable nature of the current situations make us susceptible to consuming and potentially sharing misinformation?

Finding facts during a crisis / Stand with the Facts / KUOW / CIP

In this webinar, we demonstrate the OSF tools available for contributors, labs, centers, and institutions that support stronger collaborations. The demo includes useful practices like: contributor management, the OSF wiki as an electronic lab notebook, using OSF to manage online courses and syllabi, and more. Finally, we look at how OSF Institutions can provide discovery and intelligence gathering infrastructure so that you can focus on conducting and supporting exceptional research. The Center for Open Science’s ongoing mission is to provide community and technical resources to support your commitments to rigorous, transparent research practices. Visit cos.io/institutions to learn more.

Optimizing Research Collaboration

Networking is the most honorable and valuable endeavor in which you can engage, because it is built on a spirit of generosity. At its core, networking is all about crafting win-win alliances where both parties provide value. You may think that “networking” can only take place in person, but this is a myth! In fact, most networking takes place from afar, and in some cases, the individuals may never even meet in person. In this webinar, our host Alaina G. Levine discussed strategies and tactics for finding new collaborators and building mutually-beneficial partnerships with professionals across the globe (and perhaps on some exoplanets too!). Let’s network!

Webinar: Virtual Networking for Nerds: How to network and find collaborations from afar

Webinars in English

Alan Stein from Oxford's Department of Psychiatry will discuss his team’s work on the psychological implications of COVID-19. In the midst of the devastating death toll and hospitalisations, the effect of this unfolding pandemic on children’s mental health has been unconscionably overlooked. The overwhelming media coverage and barrage of public health messages, especially when families are in lockdown, sustains a high level of threat which is intensely observed by children. Thus, when adults talk to children, the information needs to consider the child's age to ensure they have a coherent narrative and emotional support for their experiences. The team have created a platform of resources to help make impossible conversations possible for healthcare professionals, families, care home staff and teachers.

COVIDConversations: Protecting Children/Adolescents’ Mental Health with Professors Stein & Blakemore

Gina M. Piscitello, MD joins JAMA Network Open Editors to discuss a systematic review that examines US state guidelines for ventilator allocation decision-making during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.

Ventilator Allocation for Covid-19, Mask Sterilization, HIV Life Expectancy, and more #JNOLive

Safety will not be compromised for a Covid-19 vaccine, the US Food and Drug Administration commissioner said Monday.Dr. Stephen Hahn made the declaration in a video briefing with the American Medical Association. More than 5 million Americans have been infected with coronavirus, and more than 163,000 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data.

FDA won't 'cut corners' to approve a Covid-19 vaccine, commissioner says

10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30345-4

The COVID-19 pandemic response is affecting maternal and neonatal health services all over the world. We aimed to assess the number of institutional births, their outcomes (institutional stillbirth and neonatal mortality rate), and quality of intrapartum care before and during the national COVID-19 lockdown in Nepal.

Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic response on intrapartum care, stillbirth, and neonatal mortality outcomes in Nepal: a prospective observational study

10.1126/sciadv.abd3083

Mandates for mask use in public during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, worsened by global shortage of commercial supplies, have led to widespread use of homemade masks and mask alternatives. It is assumed that wearing such masks reduces the likelihood for an infected person to spread the disease, but many of these mask designs have not been tested in practice. We have demonstrated a simple optical measurement method to evaluate the efficacy of masks to reduce the transmission of respiratory droplets during regular speech. In proof-of-principle studies, we compared a variety of commonly available mask types and observed that some mask types approach the performance of standard surgical masks, while some mask alternatives, such as neck fleece or bandanas, offer very little protection. Our measurement setup is inexpensive and can be built and operated by non-experts, allowing for rapid evaluation of mask performance during speech, sneezing, or coughing.

Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech

As US leaders work to control the spread of coronavirus, researchers across the globe are working to answer the mysteries that remain around infections. One of those mysteries: why the experience can be so different from person to person. One expert says the answer may involve looking at previous vaccines individuals have had.

Previous vaccines and masks may hold down Covid-19, some researchers say

10.3386/w27228

We build a minimalist model of the macroeconomics of a pandemic, with two essential components. The first is productivity-related: if the virus forces firms to shed labor beyond a certain threshold, productivity suffers. The second component is a credit market imperfection: because lenders cannot be sure a borrower will repay, they only lend against collateral. Expected productivity determines collateral value; in turn, collateral value can limit borrowing and productivity. As a result, adverse shocks have large magnification effects, in an unemployment and asset price deflation doom loop. There may be multiple equilibria, so that pessimistic expectations can push the economy to a bad equilibrium with limited borrowing and low employment and productivity. The model helps identify policies to fight the effects of the pandemic. Traditional expansionary fiscal policy has no beneficial effects, while cutting interest rates has a limited effect if the initial real interest rate is low. By contrast, several unconventional policies, including wage subsidies, helicopter drops of liquid assets, equity injections, and loan guarantees, can keep the economy in a full-employment, high-productivity equilibrium. Such policies can be fiscally expensive, so their implementation is feasible only with ample fiscal space or emergency financing from abroad.

The Macroeconomics of a Pandemic: A Minimalist Model

10.3386/w27491

We characterize how U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs) supply short-term dollar liquidity in repo and foreign exchange swap markets in the post-Global Financial Crisis regulatory environment and serve as the "lenders-of-second-to-last-resort". Using daily supervisory bank balance sheet information, we find that U.S. GSIBs modestly increase their dollar liquidity provision in response to dollar funding shortages, particularly at period-ends, when the U.S. Treasury General Account balance increases, and during the balance sheet taper of the Federal Reserve. The increase in the dollar liquidity provision is mainly financed by reducing excess reserve balances at the Federal Reserve. Intra-firm transfers between depository institutions and broker-dealer subsidiaries within the same bank holding company are crucial to this type of "reserve-draining" intermediation. Finally, we discuss factors that contributed to the repo spike in September 2019 and the subsequent response of U.S. GSIBs to recent policy interventions by the Federal Reserve.

U.S. Banks and Global Liquidity

10.3386/w27131

Using real-time register data we document the magnitude, dynamics and socio-economic characteristics of the crisis-induced temporary and permanent layoffs in Norway. We find evidence that the effects of social distancing measures quickly spread to industries that were not directly affected by policy. Close to 90% of layoffs are temporary, although this classification may change as the crisis progresses. Still, there is suggestive evidence of immediate stress on a subset of firms that manifests itself in permanent rather than temporary layoffs. We find that the shock had a strong socio-economic gradient, hit a financially vulnerable population, and parents with younger children, and was driven by layoffs in smaller, less productive, and financially weaker firms. Consequently though, the rise in unemployment likely overstates the loss of output associated with the layoffs by about a third.

The First Weeks of the Coronavirus Crisis: Who Got Hit, When and Why? Evidence from Norway

10.3386/w27553

I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather preventive measures can be thought of as insurance, with a certain cost in the present that may or may not pay off in the future. In fact, although most medical preventive measures improve expected health, they do not save money. Various lifestyle and early childhood interventions, however, may both save money and improve health. Second, preventive measures, including medical and lifestyle measures, are heterogeneous in their value, both across measures and, within measure, across individuals. As a result, generalizations in everyday discourse about the value of prevention can be overly broad. Third, health insurance coverage for medical preventive measures should generally be more extensive than coverage for the treatment of a medical condition, though full coverage of preventive services is not necessarily optimal.

An Ounce of Prevention