NSW is unable to use Covidsafe app's data for contact tracing | Australia news | The Guardian: Guardian Australia understands NSW Health has tested the data but has had issues integrating it into the existing contact-tracing methods, and the Digital Transformation Agency was contacted by the department to fix technical problems. The Digital Transformation Agency referred questions on the matter to the federal health department. The federal health department initially declined to answer specific questions on the issue, instead providing a general statement that states now have access to the app data.
Bushfire royal commission hears that Black Summer smoke killed nearly 450 people - ABC News: The commission heard modelling done by health researchers found 80 per cent of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point over the 2019/2020 season. Associate Professor Fay Johnston, from the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, said her team estimated around 445 people died as a result of the smoke, over 3,000 people were admitted to hospital for respiratory problems and 1,700 people presented for asthma.
Robodebt: government to refund 470,000 unlawful Centrelink debts worth $721m | Australia news | The Guardian: Stuart Robert, the government services minister, said the refunds would be received by 373,000 people, cost a total $721m and would include recovery fee charges. The debt refunds would begin from July, he said. ... Robert's statement did not say whether the government would agree to pay interest on the debts, a key demand from the class action led by Gordon Legal.
Robodebt was base politics, flawed policy and bad government: But those baying for the blood of the Government Services Minister, Stuart Robert, are looking at the wrong suspect. Robert was not even in the ministry when the Coalition devised the debacle. One of the chief proponents was Morrison himself. He announced the biggest part of the welfare crackdown as treasurer in the Turnbull government in the closing days of the 2016 election campaign.
Parasocial Relationships Are Changing the Way Women Use Social Media | Bitch Media: There's a more formal term for this: “Parasocial relationships,” a term coined by sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956, are one-sided connections that people form with public figures that give them a false sense of a friendship or even of romantic connection.
Death of the office | 1843: It's too early to say whether the office is done for. As with any sudden loss, many of us find our judgment blurred by conflicting emotions. Relief at freedom from the daily commute and pleasure at turning one's back on what Philip Larkin called “the toad work” are tinged with regret and nostalgia, as we prepare for another shapeless day of WFH in jogging bottoms.
Covid-19 will change the standards of professionalism — Quartz at Work: Any illusion we used to propagate about “balance,” telling both our work and our families that they are the top priority and acting like the two are entirely separate forces in our lives, has ended abruptly. The affair we were having from our life with our work and vice versa has just been exposed.
The glimmer of hope I am clinging to in trying times is that the pretending ends for good, that this global crisis liberates us from our post-industrial hangover of humans as resources, as pieces of the organizational machine, without families or feelings.
Can an AI be an inventor? Not yet. | MIT Technology Review: Instead of listing a human author on the applications, the inventor was listed as Dabus AI, an AI system that Thaler spent over a decade building. Dabus AI came up with the innovations after being fed general data about many subjects. Thaler may have built Dabus, but he has no expertise in creating lights or food containers, and wouldn’t have been able to generate the ideas on his own. And so, the AIP team argues, Dabus itself is the rightful inventor.
Coronavirus pandemic exposes fatal flaws of the 'just-in-time' economy - ABC News: Official estimates showing that nearly 800,000 Australians lost their jobs in the space of a week or so as the crisis hit were a stark illustration of how quickly the "flexible" workforce can become collateral damage, with their loss of earnings threatening to unravel the economy and financial system. The lack of a buffer for many businesses in the just-in-time economy has also been brought into stark relief, with so many enterprises utterly reliant on short-term cash flow, with few resources to fall back on.
Empty sets - BBC Archive: Give your video calls a makeover, with this selection of over 100 empty sets from the BBC Archive.
Sydney inventor David Soo can grow $600,000 worth of vanilla from his smartphone - ABC News: The solution Mr Soo is developing is a custom-designed, 350-cubic-metre greenhouse, with controlled growing conditions that can be adjusted by mobile device.
Now three years into a pilot project on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Mr Soo is growing about 200 vanilla vines in a patented geodesic dome greenhouse.
He claims the vines are growing three times faster than in a plantation environment. The mobile is really incidental, bit of a crappy headline choice.