Linked List: August 26, 2020

Wednesday, 26 August 2020

Ben Smith: ‘How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right’ 

Speaking of Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times media columnist Ben Smith has a great profile on her this week:

In recent years, many public voices have gotten the big things wrong — election forecasts, the effects of digital media on American politics, the risk of a pandemic. Dr. Tufekci, a 40-something who speaks a mile a minute with a light Turkish accent, has none of the trappings of the celebrity academic or the professional pundit. But long before she became perhaps the only good amateur epidemiologist, she had quietly made a habit of being right on the big things. […]

While many American thinkers were wide-eyed about the revolutionary potential of social media, she developed a more complex view, one she expressed when she found herself sitting to the left of Teddy Goff, the digital director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, at a South by Southwest panel in Austin in 2012.

Mr. Goff was enthusing about the campaign’s ability to send different messages to individual voters based on the digital data it had gathered about them. Dr. Tufekci quickly objected to the practice, saying that microtargeting would more likely be used to sow division.

More than four years later, after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election, Mr. Goff sent Dr. Tufekci a note saying she had been right.

Zeynep Tufekci: ‘Why Aren’t We Talking More About Ventilation?’ 

Zeynep Tufekci, writing a few weeks ago for The Atlantic:

There are also different kinds of “airborne” transmission — the term can sound scarier than reality and can become the basis for unnecessary scaremongering. For example, some airborne diseases, such as measles, will definitely spread to almost every corner of a house and can be expected to infect about 90 percent of susceptible people in the household. In the virus-panic movie Outbreak, when Dustin Hoffman’s character exclaims, “It’s airborne!” about Motaba, the film’s fictional virus, he means that it will spread to every corner of the hospital through the vents. But not all airborne diseases are super-contagious (more on that in a bit), and, for the most part, the coronavirus does not behave like a super-infectious pathogen.

In multiple studies, researchers have found that COVID-19’s secondary attack rate, the proportion of susceptible people that one sick person will infect in a circumscribed setting, such as a household or dormitory, can be as low as 10 to 20 percent. In fact, many experts I spoke with remarked that COVID-19 was less contagious than many other pathogens, except when it seemed to occasionally go wild in super-spreader events, infecting large numbers of people at once, across distances much greater than the droplet range of three to six feet. Those who argue that COVID-19 can spread through aerosol routes point to the prevalence and conditions of these super-spreader events as one of the most important pieces of evidence for airborne transmission.

Tufekci, you will recall, spearheaded efforts to get public health officials and agencies in the U.S. to recommend face masks back in March.

Also at The Atlantic, and also outstanding:

Epic Will Not Update Fortnite for iOS 

Epic:

Apple is blocking Fortnite updates and new installs on the App Store, and has said they will terminate our ability to develop Fortnite for Apple devices. As a result, Fortnite’s newly released Chapter 2 - Season 4 update (v14.00), will not release on iOS and macOS on August 27.

Presumably because of Apple’s threat to revoke Epic’s Apple developer program membership, they’re not even updating the Mac version of Fortnite, which is a direct download from Epic’s website, and thus has always used Epic’s own payment system.

Apple is asking that Epic revert Fortnite to exclusively use Apple payments. Their proposal is an invitation for Epic to collude with Apple to maintain their monopoly over in-app payments on iOS, suppressing free market competition and inflating prices. As a matter of principle, we won’t participate in this scheme.

Epic is putting the ball in Apple’s court. iOS users definitely aren’t getting the new season of Fortnite unless Epic pulls their custom payments, which they’re saying they won’t do on principle. So what happens to the current version of Fortnite that’s already installed on iOS devices and is about to be out-of-date? Does it keep working, despite being out of date (and despite containing Epic’s rule-violating custom payment processing)? Or does Apple revoking Epic’s developer license invoke the kill switch that disables installed copies of Fortnite? What about the ability to re-download the current version if you (or a family-sharing member) previously downloaded it?

Update: A bunch of folks more familiar than me with how multiplayer matchmaking games work suggest that once the new Fortnite season starts (and players on non-Apple platforms have an update to install), clients on the previous season (including all iOS and Mac clients) will stop being able to play. That makes sense when you think about it technically. The apps will launch, but they’ll just tell players they need to update. And presumably, Epic will serve iOS and Mac clients a custom message explaining their “#FreeFortnite” campaign against Apple.

Jose-Luis Jimenez: ‘COVID-19 Is Transmitted Through Aerosols. We Need to Adapt.’ 

Jose-Luis Jimenez, writing in Time:

When it comes to COVID-19, the evidence overwhelmingly supports aerosol transmission, and there are no strong arguments against it. For example, contact tracing has found that much COVID-19 transmission occurs in close proximity, but that many people who share the same home with an infected person do not get the disease. To understand why, it is useful to use cigarette or vaping smoke (which is also an aerosol) as an analog. Imagine sharing a home with a smoker: if you stood close to the smoker while talking, you would inhale a great deal of smoke. Replace the smoke with virus-containing aerosols, which behave very similarly, and the impact is similar: the closer you are to someone releasing virus-carrying aerosols, the more likely you are to breathe in larger amounts of virus. We know from detailed, rigorous studies that when individuals talk in close proximity, aerosols dominate transmission and droplets are nearly negligible.

If you are standing on the other side of the room, you would inhale significantly less smoke. But in a poorly ventilated room, the smoke will accumulate, and people in the room may end up inhaling a lot of smoke over time. Talking, and especially singing and shouting increase aerosol exhalation by factors of 10 and 50, respectively. Indeed, we are finding that outbreaks often occur when people gather in crowded, insufficiently ventilated indoor spaces, such as singing at karaoke parties, cheering at clubs, having conversations in bars, and exercising in gyms. Superspreading events, where one person infects many, occur almost exclusively in indoor locations and are driving the pandemic. These observations are easily explained by aerosols, and are very difficult or impossible to explain by droplets or fomites.

I find this argument incredibly compelling, and the WHO and CDC’s reluctance to embrace it incredibly frustrating. The theory that COVID-19 spreads primarily through aerosols matches everything we know about it.

The upside is that the smoking comparison helps model risk avoidance. Pretend everyone you see is smoking, and try to avoid breathing their exhaled “smoke”. It also goes to show how indoor restaurants and especially bars are just a no-go until COVID-19 is under control. Spacing tables six feet apart wouldn’t keep you from smelling cigarette smoke from fellow patrons at a restaurant, and it won’t keep you from breathing their aerosols.