Could 13,000 smart thermometers keep Nebraska COVID-19-free?

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The vast majority of Nebraska is composed of rural territory: wide swaths of land occupied by pockets of roughly 2,500 people. Despite the state’s diffuse populous, it, like others, has struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19 over the past year. School officials are especially wary, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recently released guidelines that reduce social distancing for students to 3 feet. Towns in rural Nebraska and several other regions around the U.S. are investing in new measures to keep schools safe from COVID-19 and future viral outbreaks. To finance these initiatives, they’re turning to local government organizations as well as corporate sponsors. A health tech company called Kinsa has sent some 21 school districts and six private schools in Nebraska 13,000 of its smart thermometers to help keep better track of sick students. School principles and nurses get a digital dashboard where they can view students’ anonymized symptom and fever data, broken down by grade. Parents are encouraged to take their children’s temperature before coming into school, where students are also required to wear masks. “Nebraska is very independent,” says Burke Harr, a former state senator who now counsels the Nebraska Cooperative Government, a group that ensures 93 small counties and towns in the state have the funding for roadway repairs and other common local infrastructure. “We were trying to find the least intrusive way to help predict where COVID may or may not be and to stop its spread or to at least alert us of where there was an issue.” In May 2020, Nebraska saw a small spike in cases, a significant portion of which were coming from meatpacking plants. Then in November, the state saw a steep incline, reaching a peak of 3,500 new cases per day. Some of the most high-risk areas were also some of the least populated. Boone County, for example, currently has one of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the state and has a population of only 5,200. “It hit rural Nebraska because there were less precautions taken,” says Harr, noting that in some parts of the state you’d be hard-pressed to find someone wearing a mask. “There isn’t the compactness of the cities, but there were spreader events Read More …

The NSFW future of OnlyFans, where celebs, influencers, and sex workers post side by side

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Vex Ashley began working as a cam girl to pay her way through art school. Whatever reservations she had about being a “little weird goth kid” doing porn melted away as she met other performers online who also had a more alternative approach to mainstream adult content. “I thought that to do porn, you had to fit a very rigid stereotype,” Ashley says. “I never was interested in fitting into that mold.” Ashley wanted to infuse porn with a higher level of aesthetics and concepts, using it as a medium to explore ideas rather than purely for viewing pleasure. And if ever there was a tenet of the creator economy, it’s that niche interests can always find an audience. Ashley uploaded experimental videos to Tumblr and quickly gained a following that she took to Patreon in 2014 to better monetize her art and support her production company, Four Chambers . At the height of her success on Patreon, Ashley had more than 3,000 subscribers and was pulling in around $25,000 per month. But after the platform changed its policies in 2018, she effectively lost it all. Vex Ashley [Photo: courtesy of Four Chambers] Like many other adult content creators whose Patreon revenue was decimated, Ashley migrated to OnlyFans in 2018. And like many of her peers, she’s now wary of meeting the same fate on the platform. OnlyFans, which allows creators to charge users a monthly or pay-per-view fee to access content, launched in 2016 with the intention of being for all types of creators but has become a nexus for adult entertainment. Amateur and professionals alike have flocked to OnlyFans as a safe haven to monetize NSFW (not safe for work) content, becoming the key drivers of the platform’s early growth. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that momentum as more creators looked to OnlyFans as a source of income during record rates of unemployment. Between March and April of last year, OnlyFans experienced a 75% spike in new user and creator registrations. To date, OnlyFans has more than 120 million users and 1 million creators who have earned more than $3 billion collectively (the company takes a 20% cut). Read More …

Why Amazon workers in Alabama are trying to unionize

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This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning journalism nonprofit. It is co-published here with permission. The union organizing drive at the mammoth Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama located 20 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, has the feel of both a social and religious movement. There are five days until the mail-in ballots will be counted to determine whether the company’s 5,800 employees will gain union representation. Last week, organizers and workers gathered at the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s scruffy office to go over their final push and to talk to reporters from around the world who have descended upon Birmingham. Jennifer Bates, an African American “learning ambassador” at the Amazon facility—she trains new workers—believes that her courage to fight the corporate giant comes from a spiritual source, “the Almighty, the creator of all things.” She also traces her personal strength to the civil rights movement that rocked Birmingham in the early 1960s. “I really believe that in this organizing drive we are following the foot soldiers who came before us,” she says. Josh Brewer, the union’s lead organizer, is an ordained minister from Michigan who found his way into the labor union movement while trying to ensure his life had purpose, and he was immediately given some of the toughest organizing challenges. Brewer sees the Amazon campaign as a “David vs. Goliath” battle, his biggest career challenge so far. On this day Brewer has one eye on the office television to see if a tornado sweeping through Mississippi and Alabama is going to require moving into the basement, as he reflects on the five-month and 24/7 commitment that he has made to the unionization effort Read More …

AI researchers are creating ‘Minecraft’ structures that build themselves

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When a group of AI researchers started using Minecraft to simulate cellular growth, even they were startled by the sophistication of the structures—such as a jungle temple with a fully-functioning arrow trap—they were able to create. Their goal was to build complex Minecraft structures by having each block learn to communicate with the ones around it, mimicking how the human body develops from a single cell in a process called morphogenesis. That model worked out even better than they anticipated, with one block growing into exactly the kinds of objects it was trained to create. In addition to the jungle temple, the system generated immaculate castles, stylish apartments, and even a caterpillar that regenerates after being cut in half. Sebastian Risi, an AI researcher at IT University Copenhagen, says this work could be a foundation for more ambitious projects to come, including a version of Minecraft that simulates evolution. He conducted the research along with his ITU Copenhagen colleagues Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li, and Elias Najarro; University of York’s Adam Katona; and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Claire Glanois.) “We have the basic components now,” Risi says. “It’s just about figuring out how to connect them all.” From one cell to another The Minecraft project’s underlying concept, called cellular automation, has been around since the 1940s. It’s the idea that cells in a system can live, die, or reproduce according to a set of rules. John Conway’s Game of Life , which dates to 1970, is probably the best-known example. But in those early systems, the researchers had to program the rules themselves, a process that eventually becomes impractical as the systems become more complex. This new Minecraft simulation works differently. Instead of coding the rules by hand, the researchers used neural networks to train each cell on what a set of finished structures should look like. Each cell figures out what type of Minecraft block to become by looking at the cells around it, then passes that information along to its neighboring cells so they in turn can figure out what to become next. “We only told it what it has to grow, but we didn’t tell it exactly how it has to grow it,” Risi says. Excited to share our work on Morphogenesis in Minecraft! We show that neural cellular automata can learn to grow not only complex 3D artifacts with over 3,000 blocks but also functional Minecraft machines that can regenerate when cut in half ????????=???????? PDF: https://t.co/hi573xzWIG pic.twitter.com/m19572pcIe — Sebastian Risi (@risi1979) March 17, 2021 This type of intercellular communication roughly approximates the way in which human cells work together toward a common goal, which Risi says is part of what makes the research exciting. The exact language our cells communicate is still somewhat of a mystery ; Risi hopes that by visualizing the messages that each cell sends—something the researchers hope to do in the future—they can help biologists understand more about how the body works. “It’s difficult to study those things in nature because it’s hard to extract those exact messages that cells pass,” he says Read More …

The clothes we wear are about to undergo a wild digital revolution

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Imagine an article of clothing that could tell your washing machine how to keep its colors from fading. Imagine a piece of clothing that could warm your body in the winter and cool it down in the summer. Imagine wearing clothes that weren’t designed last year, or last season, but yesterday, in response to that day’s buying patterns. Imagine being able to fully customize every article of clothing in your wardrobe for the same cost as mass-produced items. And imagine a clothing industry that could do all of this while significantly reducing emissions and retaining most of its workforce. Thanks to new advancements in manufacturing, you won’t have to imagine forever. While the clothing we wear today is largely designed, manufactured, and sold in the same way it was 100 years ago, what we wear is expected to change dramatically in the not-so-distant future, thanks to advancements in manufacturing technology. Read More …