Category: covid-19

Use of cognitive computing to antibiotic resistance

Well, this article made no sense to me, but I believe it will help future research into pandemics of all sorts.

What does it do? It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to work out possible drug combinations to help address resistance to hard to kill infections.

Why should you care? Well, improving the speed of drug research, as seen by the recent pandemic, is an important development.

Why do I care? Because it was achieved by IBMers as can be seen by the Github link at the end of that article.

There’s more I am sure to come from this and I look forward to more results sharing in due course.

Yet more IBM #cooltech

It’s always good to read when my employer is working on something positive for the world.

And this is pretty impactful – at least we all hope so, I’m sure.

https://www.ukri.org/news/uk-joins-covid-19-high-performance-computing-consortium/

As it says in the release: “Supercomputers in the UK and USA are being used to run a myriad of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling, in a effort to drastically cut the time of discovery of new molecules that could lead to treatments and a vaccine.”

I’ve got my fingers crossed that this brings a positive outcome so that we can go back to normal operation.

Contact tracing must be safe

Yes, contact tracing is an important step for some countries to better manage the impact of coronavirus. However, sacrificing personal privacy at the risk of it bing shared to untrustworthy operators isn’t.

Source code analysis reveals seven security holes in UK contract tracing app

This article highlights the research performed on the source code the UK government share of its contact tracing app.

Both coronavirus and personal privacy are important, neither, regardless of perspective should outweigh the other.

NHSX, fix the app or it won’t be used by the privacy conscious.

Why won’t the UK save more lives?

This article by Ben Lovejoy highlights the bad judgement employed by the UK NHS in choosing to create its own contact tracing app for monitoring CoVid-19.

Comment: It’s no exaggeration to say UK rejection of Apple API will cost lives

Sometimes big business makes really great decisions on behalf of the community it services. Not all decisions are about making money.

The UK approach will not be accepted by all. Certainly not by me for all my usual privacy reasons.

I still don’t fully trust Google, but if they’re working in conjunction with Apple, I am happier that they are both working in our best interests.

The UK government has, like others, made some “interesting” decisions during the pandemic. This one feels like it has been politically motivated.

I will use any app that uses the Apple/Google API. That means I won’t use the NHS one.

An interesting time

Supposedly there is an old Chinese proverb about “may you live in interesting times” and is meant to be used as a sort of insult or curse at someone who has displeased you. The idea being that “interesting times” means bad things.

Many might consider the advent and actions taken as a result of the current coronavirus also known as Covid-19 as “interesting times”.

Instead, I’d suggest what it has done is shown us the “interesting people”. I’ve seen two main types so far, but there are no doubt multiple sub-categories.

The first is the person who panic buys, who continues to do the usual things even though they should self-isolate, who believes that their needs outweigh those of any others.

The second is the antithesis, the one who goes out their way to self-isolate, who will drop off groceries for vulnerable neighbours, the good Samaritans as it were.

Look carefully at your actions and decide who you are, and who you’d rather be.

Be the person who cares, who is considerate, who thinks about others.