[FRIAM] COVID tracking

Tue Dec 15 17:43:31 EST 2020

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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