[FRIAM] COVID tracking

Tue Dec 15 18:26:23 EST 2020

Hi Steve,

You probably have read more on this already than I have, but I believe the reason for using sound rather than bluetooth is that RF can see through walls, and very high-frequency sound can’t.  They wanted a signal that would be positive for people in the same interior space, but not for people who were on opposite sides of a wall through which there wouldn’t be air connection.  

I forget where I got that, possibly from the company’s site, though several months ago.

Or did I misunderstand the subject you meant?

Thx,

E

> On Dec 15, 2020, at 5:43 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> 
> Eric -
> 
> Great story/shout-out to those who create/maintained a "pocket of sanity" for you.  I feel similarly with the Los Alamos County swimming pool which manages to be hyper-welcoming whilst managing things in a convincingly safe manner (w/o seeming arbitrary?).   It helps that there is chlorinated water everywhere, though I don't know the relevant concentrations in this case...   
> 
> Also fascinating that it uses hypersonic audio (mic and speaker) to exchange "public keys".  I have a camera/app that does this but in the audible spectrum which is vaguely annoying.   In the camera case it works a bit like a two-factor authentication, or an ID-free bootstrapping.   I think the camera starts by chattering gibberish that the app hears and recognizes as "one of it's own" which then triggers the app or camera to reach out over wifi and make a connection there.   I have a few tone generator apps and an oscilliscope app which samples the headphone/mic input... I'm guessing I could kludge a simple NOVID detector and even do some kind of reverse engineering of it?   I don't see any particular reason that an audio "detection" is better than a BT one excepting maybe that the latter can be power hungry (compared to a frequent ultrasonic chirp? or that the BT apps use BT:MAC addresses at some level (implying less privacy)?
> 
> I'm mildly disturbed by the implications of a hypersonic "dogwhistle" app, though current low-tech modes of signaling one's proclivities and loyalties is plenty effective (Mason's rings, secret handshakes, code words, etc.)
> 
> Next thing we'll all be putting bandaids over our microphones on our devices?
> 
> - Steve
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/15/20 12:14 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> Yes, seems to be a good app.
>> 
>> Georgia Tech has set up a group account that one can log into, and it is part of their campus surveillance system.
>> 
>> I do have to stop, and do something probably nobody on the list has any reason to care about, to give a shout-out to them.  The current GT monitoring system was designed, I think mostly if not entirely, by a young biophysics faculty (Josh Weitz) working with the department head (Greg Gibson).  Since early in the year, maybe April or May, they have had a streamlined testing pipeline, and their target (which I think they mostly approach) is to test the entire on-campus community weekly.  Their positivity return rate during the summer was around 0.3% for a couple of months; in the autumn it climbed back up through 0.7% and toward a percent, and the messages and exhortations started to come in fast and thick.  All that went together with refitting many buildings, including the old biology building where my office is, built in the middle Stone Age, with HEPA filters and UV irradiators in the HVAC ducts, occupancy protocols, and various else.  Certainly the effort involved was enormous work from a large number of people, and the two main guys were mainly designers and participants in the choreography.  But overall it has had the feeling of a pocket of sanity and good practice that would have been in place in any number of civilized countries in the Eastern hemisphere.  With the expected results of providing mostly excellent protection for a community of people.  And that, for a state school.
>> 
>> I do not know (have asked a CDC epidemiologist friend, who also doesn’t know) how much efficacy data has been compiled for NOVID-using communities: that is; what fraction of cases that would have escaped to potentially transmit, did they catch and get safely into a quarantine before anybody else was exposed?  Iceland did a great job of that with manual contact tracing back in the earliest days.  The real figure of merit for         NOVID will be how much of that effect it can contribute through a decentralized computer app, which at least offers better scaling cost than manual contact tracing once the distribution is wide.  If somebody on the list finds good data on that, I would be interested to know.
>> 
>> Eric
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Dec 15, 2020, at 1:12 PM, Tom Johnson <tom at jtjohnson.com <mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> NOVID is the first pre-exposure notification app to fight COVID-19. It’s free, anonymous, and shows you cases close in your network before you’re exposed. It only takes one minute to download. Please visit novid.org <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fnovid.org&c=E,1,VwlMJTw8gqSVqbo2jJiXmT5NM5NAq_5yttP-l2lMZNpp2VMc6PbSqDKtDArm04wXuOsKAwniiJ1YmGYvBupyCA7hDVU8uZl6NwnstOOkPcPVwTSWJKXWKZ6Q6A,,&typo=1> 
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