Capt Wardrobe - May 2021
Country after country announced more & more draconian Lockdowns in reaction to what many have seen as the need to flatten a curve on a graph drawn by Data analytics & behavioural Scientists in the pay of Industrial Pharmaceuticals cartels. This in turn has enabled several key figures on the world stage to announce a Global economic reset, seemingly taking advantage of the Pandemic to present a New Economic World order.
The Planet has seen Riots & unrest, with real life seemingly mirroring that of The Rockefeller Foundation Lockstep portion of their 2010 "Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development" report.
The USA Election has been & passed, not without incident. - Touchy Feely Creepy Uncle Joe Biden - ousting Braggard fascist & Populist WWF wrestler & SuperGammon, Donald Trump - to take the throne of the fake leaders Clownshow.
Yet another mask is drawn over the face of lady Liberty - this is one designed by the Houte Cauture of the American Elite Dynasty, Deep state Military Intelligence - The fawning Post Industrial entertainment complex, and the untouchables. The Fed Reserve money printers, fortune 500, & Wall St. & The City of London. [Rothschilds, Royalty, East India trading dynasty...Israel...sshhhh!]
The world awaits in trepidation for the next wave of Pavlovian behavior control techniques rolled out from the vapid meatheads - The gaping collective maw that resembles the drooling mouths of fully paid up, compliant, supposedly democratically elected representatives & officials via faceless technocrats.
It's 2021 - The world has cowered & capitulated in fear of the Covid 19 Pandemic.
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I'm getting a lot of Samsung adverts in my face nowadays; a Public relations exercise to establish the new 'synthetic reality'.
What better way of pushing people into it than locking them up and making them miserable...
We are witnessing how the Nazi party of the 30s would create consumers.
The Commodification of all humanity. A "Planet wide" authoritarianism is a useful force multiplier, via the behavioral economics of emotional trauma & pain herding...
It is a Cult which seeks to Dehumanize Humanity from the 'old' 'legacy' led society, into a 'New Normal' with Neo-Consumer Netizens gaining access to goods & services, via economically driven coerced compliance.
Humanity is being 'NUDGED' into the fast growing synthetic digital new normal of the 4th Industrial Revolution. It is an enforced digital prison system, 'masked' as a virtual shopping mall. It is yet another symptom of their proposed neo liberal world order, framed as slick marketing of a global reset, greenwashed as a repeated mantra of "build back better."
"The combined health and economic shocks of 2020 have impacted the livelihoods of millions of households, disrupted business activities, and exposed the fault lines in todays social protection and healthcare systems,"
"The crisis has also further accelerated the effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on trade, skills, digitisation, competition and employment, and highlighted the disconnect between our economic systems and societal resilience. In this moment, it is crucial to not only reflect on how best to return to growth, but also, how to build back better economies that improve outcomes for people and the planet,"
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF in the report "How Countries are Performing on the Road to Recovery".
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The Age of Weaponized Narrative
"Weaponized narrative is the use of information and communication technologies, services, and tools to create and spread stories intended to subvert and undermine an adversarys institutions, identity, and civilization, and it operates by sowing and exacerbating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It is an emerging domain of asymmetric warfare that attacks the shared beliefs and values that support an adversarys culture and resiliency. It builds on previous practices, including disinformation, information warfare, psychological operations (psyops), fake news, social media, software bots, propaganda, and other practices and tools, and it draws on advances in fields such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive science, and modern marketing and media studies, as well as on technological advances in domains such as social media and artificial intelligence."
Braden R. Allenby
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Weaponized narrative is an attack that seeks to undermine an opponents civilization, identity, and will. By generating confusion, complexity, and political and social schisms, it confounds response on the part of the defender.
icon - how does weaponized narrative work
How Does Weaponized Narrative Work?
A fast-moving information deluge is the ideal battleground for this kind of warfare for guerrillas and terrorists as well as adversary states. A firehose of narrative attacks gives the targeted populace little time to process and evaluate. It is cognitively disorienting and confusing especially if the opponents barely realize whats hitting them. Opportunities abound for emotional manipulation undermining the opponents will to resist.
Arizona state University
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 UP link will be important later
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UPLINK : CROWDSOURCING INNOVATION TO ADDRESS THE WORLDS MOST PRESSING CHALLENGES
UPLINK - OUR VISION
By helping source and elevate innovations from across the world, UpLink is becoming the open digital platform for mass participation to accelerate progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). UpLink enables the next generation of mission-driven entrepreneurs and young innovators to join forces with a trusted community of leading organisations, experts, investors and changemakers to deliver impact at scale. |
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[her post in it's entirity needs to be seen, i could not have said it any better!]
Both psychologically and physically, in every hidden crevice, across every imaginable realm, children and youth have been the most impacted, and the most damaged by the global lockdowns.
Behind the lockdowns, the fourth industrial architecture is being implemented - an era to which Deloitte posits the question "who will survive, who will perish?" Each passing day, children and youth are being conditioned to adapt and endure the transition to a virtual existence.
As human bonds are slowly yet deliberately being eroded and severed, children are encouraged to bond with technology. We bear witness to the psychological damage inflicted to the most vulnerable of our society, under the guise of saving lives (willful blindness does not make it less true). Today I would like to call attention to the experiment on the physical bodies of children that is about to commence.
Within this single year, 2021, Salesforce et al. intend to vaccinate two billion people. Over the coming years, the world's most powerful corporations and institutions intend to vaccinate every person on Earth. This includes children and infants. This is a permanent program ushering in digital passports, surveillance, global at scale.
This global experiment also serves the bedrock of fourth industrial revolution biotechnology going forward. Most governments in the world now fully function as an arm of corporate power. In this way, ruling class aspirations and emerging markets are now able to advance in ways like never before.
With the median infection survival rate from COVID-19 infection at an impressive 99.77%. Children, from the onset, have proven to be largely impervious to the virus. In fact, babies and children are far more at risk from the seasonal flu (which we do not blink an eye at). This presents a major problem for vaccine uptake.
Why would parents choose to inject their babies and children with experimental vaccines " for protection against a virus that does not pose a risk to their health. A virus, which their immune systems protect them from. Of course, a rational parent would not. Here, the question becomes, how to create vaccine uptake for a demographic that is not at risk.
The answer is media manipulation. Emotive based " coupled with fear of variants, newly discovered syndromes, and the leveraging of regret. Media flooding our collective psyches with fear, confusion and panic. Outside of physical force, there is no other way for the desired uptake to be achieved.
Let's take another look at the high-level vaccination communication manuals.
"Three messages that have been used effectively by vaccine-hesitant communities are choice, regret and control. Scholars suggest these might be flipped to reduce vaccine hesitancy.
Paul Slovic, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and founder and president of Decision Research, suggested the potential effectiveness of regret: "Wouldn't you regret if you did not get the vaccine and you or your loved ones got ill and you had decided not to get it...
Heidi Larson pointed out how the regret angle is really important to leverage, because it's something that parents really struggle with."
[Emphasis in original. p. 26, UN [Share] Verified Guide to COVID-19 Vaccine Communications, Released November 18, 2020]
"Judging events or situations to be risky can also lead to fear, worry and anticipated regret, all of which have been shown to be associated with the intention to accept the offer of vaccination. Among these, anticipated regret " when people expect that an unpleasant future outcome would lead them to wish they had made a different decision " shows promise as predictor of intentions and behaviour."
"If people perceive that they are at low risk of contracting COVID-19, or that the consequences of becoming infected will not be severe, they will be less willing to get vaccinated."
[p. 6, On 15 Oct 2020, the WHO Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Behavioural Insights & Sciences for Health held a special meeting w/ the WHO Department of Immunization, Vaccines & Biologicals to discuss behavioural considerations in relation to COVID-19 vaccine acceptance & uptake.]
In the coming weeks, as events continue to unfold, we must resist media and ruling class manipulation. We must be cautious and retain our capacity for sound judgment and critical analysis.
Gaining speed:
"A recent study, published in The Lancet, suggests that multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) is a newly identified and serious health condition associated with Covid-19... Despite overwhelming evidence based on data that Covid-19 rarely turns fatal for children, around 1,300 babies have died from coronavirus, according to a BBC report."
Most know full well that BBC serves as an efficient propaganda machine. One needs to look no further than the White Helmets propaganda outfit (incubated by Purpose, financed by UK Government, etc.) " to observe how children are used to exploit/manipulate emotions to achieve acquiescence (and even demand) from the citizenry to bomb/kill whole populations. To gain support for imperial conquest or corporate objectives. Such marketing is egregious and depraved, yet often also the most effective in cutting through fierce resistance (expected or existing). Veteran journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger describes the White Helmets as a "a complete propaganda construct".
Articles of covid and new variants now impacting the health of children and youth have begun to roll out. Language is key, and here the emotive headlines incite anxiety, empathy, and fear. Such headlines include "massacre of children", "babies dying", "covid carnage", and 'humanitarian catastrophe'.
Sample list:
April 11, 2021: "Pfizer to seek Health Canada approval for COVID-19 vaccine use in kids 12-15 within weeks" [Global News]
Many of these articles quote Dr. Fatima Marinho. Who is Marinho? "In 2008, she moved to Washington, DC, to work at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), coordinating the Information and Health Analysis Project. Since 2012, she has served as an advisor for the Regional Health Observatory at PAHO. In 2014, she returned to work at the Ministry of Health in Brazil." PAHO is the Latin American arm of WHO, a division of the United Nations, (which partnered with the World Economic Forum on June 13, 2019) now partnered located in Washington DC.
Here, amongst the sensationalist, alarming and emotive headlines, it is important to recognize what they hope you will overlook. Massacres of children, babies dying, humanitarian catastrophe, have been happening in countries facing imperial aggression/war/occupation for decades and centuries " including the present. Look at Yemen for example. Haiti an another. The Congo. There is zero outcry from media " unless it is framed as an act of the targeted/demonized leader or government.
It is also important to note that both Brazil and India are in partnership with the World Economic Forum, at the helm of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (emerging markets). Fourth Industrial Revolution Centers are now operational in both countries.
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
There is one more important aspect of this I wish to recall and touch base on. In 2020 it was reported that the World Health Organization (WHO) had hired Hill+Knowlton Strategies "to help it develop a baseline measurement of public awareness and perceptions, and create messaging strategies to build trust." [PR WEEK, July 17, 2020] Recall that the WHO partnered with the World Economic Forum to create the Covid Business Taksforce. The taskforce was launched in partnership with over 200 corporations on March 11, 2020, the same day the WHO declared a pandemic.
In 1992 an emotive marketing campaign would garner the approval rating required to launch war on Iraq. The story, manufactured and deployed by Hill & Knowlton, was this: Iraqi soldiers were removing babies from incubators, placing them on the cold floor to die. It was a lie to ignite the global war on terror, which today, after decades of fear-induced indoctrination, has completely vanished - having been replaced with the global war on virus.
Hill & Knowlton Kuwaiti baby incubator lies explained by Barry Zwicker
In depth:
To Sell A War - Gulf War Propaganda - Aired in December 1992 as part of CBC programme the fifth estate
The media is an instrument of the ruling class, wielded at their leisure to serve their agendas and aspirations while conditioning the populace and normalizing the obscene. If we lack (or reject) this understanding, it is most certain that our chains will remain intact.
April 12, 2021: Harvard's " Coronavirus outbreak and kids" is quickly followed by "When will children be able to get the COVID-19 vaccine?"
April 12, 2021: "Potential 4th wave of COVID-19 could hit Canadaâ„¢s youth: expert" [Global News]
April 12, 2021: "More young people are getting hospitalized as a 'stickier,' more infectious coronavirus strain becomes dominant" [CNN]
April 13, 2021: "Michigan at 'record high' for COVID-19 hospitalizations of children" [Detroit Free Press]
April 15, 2021: "Covid, massacre of children in Brazil: over 850 deaths in one year" [Italy24 News English]
April 15, 2021: "Rare post-COVID disease sending children to hospitals [Montreal Gazette]
April 15, 2021: "New medical concern for children related to COVID-19" [Fox News]
April 15, 2021: "Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?" [BBC]
April 15, 2021: "In Brazil, an alarmingly high number of babies and children are dying of Covid-19" [NBC]
April 16, 2021: "Is Indiaâ„¢s second Covid-19 wave impacting more youth and kids than the first?" [Quartz India]
April 16, 2021: "Babies dying from Covid in Brazil as 'humanitarian catastrophe' hits country" [Independent, Yahoo]
April 17, 2021: "Kids not immune to COVID carnage" [The News]
April 17, 2021: " Covid-19: In Brazil, young people have become the variant's prime targets" [France 24]
Data Suggests...
Is A.I controlling the narrative?
A.I for marketing strategy = Brainwashing by bots.
Using data to predict and optimize performance
The IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator uses past campaign performance to continually optimize the distribution of creative assets, as well as informing what combination of assets is shown to what audience. The technology doesn't use third-party cookies and is context-based, making the campaign an important case study for the "cookie-less" future.
"When we learned that 40% of Americans still haven't made up their mind, we knew that AI technology could help the educational message resonate," said Randi Stipes, CMO of Watson Advertising and Weather; Developer Marketing at IBM. "The IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator is predictive and makes sense of the data input in order to serve relevant content."
[snip]
We spoke with Chris Paquette, founder and CEO of DeepIntent, and formerly a data scientist at Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center, to gain a perspective from his experience in pharmaceutical marketing. (He's been tracking this effort, as well as those by the DHHS.)
Paquette credits the Ad Council with assembling a large group of roughly 400 partners, including tech vendors like Adobe, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Twitter and Twitch, among others.
The key goal of such an effort, as he sees it, is getting what all parties are calling the "moveable middle" off the fence and on the side of getting vaccinated.
"The strategy is similar to other sorts of marketing," said Paquette. "The people who are on the fence are moved by how empathetically the campaign can connect with individuals. To really have empathetic marketing, you need to know their concerns. And the only way to do that at scale is to reach individual pockets of the population using tools that allow you to do that."
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE;
IS IT MAKING IT WORSE? OR PLAIN MAKING IT UP?
As a second wave of COVID-19 causes further economic and social disruption, smart data-driven cities, powered by smart infrastructure and solutions, are using data analytics and predictive modelling to help shape their pandemic response to limit the loss of human life and minimize economic disruption. This report presents the ways in which significant investments made in implementing smart solutions have enabled data-driven cities to provide robust responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This project assesses the initiatives undertaken by select cities and identifies common threads underlying their efficiency and effectiveness. The findings highlight how these cities used digital platforms and analytics to contact citizens and ensure coordinated data-driven decision-making.
This project was carried out jointly by the World Economic Forum, Deloitte India, and India’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA).
Artificial intelligence for COVID-19: saviour or saboteur?
January 01, 2021
The pandemic has forced health-care providers and governments around the world to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and scale up their use in medicine, even before they are proven to work. An untested AI algorithm has even received emergency authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration. But will the use of untested AI systems help or hinder patients with COVID-19?
The lax regulatory landscape for COVID-19 AI algorithms has raised substantial concern among medical researchers. A living systematic review published in the BMJ highlights that COVID-19 AI models are poorly reported and trained on small or low quality datasets with high risk of bias. Gary Collins, Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Oxford and co-author of the BMJ review told The Lancet Digital Health, “full and transparent reporting of all key details of the development and evaluation of prediction models for COVID-19 is vital. Failure to report important details not only contributes to research waste, but more importantly can lead to a poorly developed and evaluated model being used that could cause more harm than benefit in clinical decision making.
Images: Arizona State University
Survey: Will employees be required to get the COVID-19 vaccination?
Almost nine in every 10 companies will require or encourage their employees to get a COVID-19 vaccination or face consequences, according to a new report.
All employees are required to be vaccinated by 40% of companies surveyed in a report from Arizona State University (ASU), the World Economic Forum and the Rockefeller Foundation. Employees will be encouraged but not required by 32% and 16% will require some, but not all, employees to have the jab.
While vaccination programmes are well underway in many of the world's wealthiest countries, other regions lag far behind, with India and Latin America in the crosshairs. The ASU report assessed responses from 24 industry sectors and 1,339 facilities at 1,168 companies. Most came from companies in the US and UK, which are among the most advanced in terms of vaccination plans.
88% of employers will require of encourage vaccinations from employees.
People who choose not to comply with their company's policies are likely to face consequences, including having their work responsibilities changed, disciplinary action or being excluded from the physical work environment, the data showed.
coronavirus, health, COVID19, pandemic
What is the World Economic Forum doing to manage emerging risks from COVID-19?
The first global pandemic in more than 100 years, COVID-19 has spread throughout the world at an unprecedented speed. At the time of writing, 4.5 million cases have been confirmed and more than 300,000 people have died due to the virus.
As countries seek to recover, some of the more long-term economic, business, environmental, societal and technological challenges and opportunities are just beginning to become visible.
To help all stakeholders – communities, governments, businesses and individuals understand the emerging risks and follow-on effects generated by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Marsh and McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group, has launched its COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications - a companion for decision-makers, building on the Forum's annual Global Risks Report.
The report reveals that the economic impact of COVID-19 is dominating companies' risks perceptions.
Companies are invited to join the Forum's work to help manage the identified emerging risks of COVID-19 across industries to shape a better future. Read the full COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications report here, and our impact story with further information.
Companies' “responses indicate that vaccination is perceived as significantly important for keeping the workplace and their employees safe,” the authors of the report, Nathaniel L Wade and Mara G Aspinall from Arizona State University's College of Health Solutions, wrote.
44% of people will not be allowed to return to the physical work environment without vaccine compliance
Image: Arizona State University
Nearly 60% plan to incentivize employees to be vaccinated, 84% would allow vaccinations to be administered to employees at their facility and 60% will require employees to demonstrate proof of vaccination.
Future workplace
Vaccination will play a key role in what the future of work looks like.
Employees are facing a ‘double-disruption' scenario, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report, as automation and the COVID-19 pandemic redefine work.
“In addition to the current disruption from the pandemic-induced lockdowns and economic contraction, technological adoption by companies will transform tasks, jobs and skills by 2025,” the report says. “By 2025, the time spent on current tasks at work by humans and machines will be equal.”
The ASU report shows companies are still dealing with the fall-out from the pandemic.
Companies said 57% of their employees are still remote and are likely to remain so for much of the year. But the report indicated most employers want people to come together to work, at least some of the time. More than two-thirds of employers believe that employees should be in the office at least 20 hours per week, citing their top reason as social connections among colleagues, the report said.
statistics showing the reasons why companies think employees should be in the office at least 20 hours a week
The most popular reason why companies think employees should be in the office at least 20 hours a week is social contact.
Mental health was also a key feature of the report, with 50% of employers saying they've seen an uptick in the use of resources relating to this area.
charts showing how employee wellbeing changed during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic
Many companies introduced more mental health measures to help employees through the struggles of the pandemic.
Employee mental health is now a top priority for more than 75% of those surveyed, the report showed. Even so, engagement and morale had increased.
Jobs
What is the World Economic Forum's Jobs Reset Summit?
The World Economic Forum's Jobs Reset Summit brings together leaders from business, government, civil society, media and the broader public to shape a new agenda for growth, jobs, skills and equity.
The four-day virtual event, being held on 20-23 October 2020, comes as the world seeks a way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus crisis has further disrupted the world of work after years of growing income inequality, concerns about tech-driven job displacement, and rising societal discord.
The Summit will develop new frameworks, shape innovative solutions and accelerate action on four thematic pillars: Economic Growth, Revival and Transformation; Work, Wages and Job Creation; Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning; and Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice.
“The bottom line for us is that so many are working so hard to keep it all together – to balance work, family, friends and even some fun,” the report authors wrote. “For the most part, it has worked, but we are not sure how much longer that balancing act can last.”
images for WEF article credited to ASU
Weaponized narrative
is an attack that seeks to undermine an opponent's civilization, identity, and will. By generating confusion, complexity, and political and social schisms, it confounds response on the part of the defender.
How Does Weaponized Narrative Work?
A fast-moving information deluge is the ideal battleground for this kind of warfare – for guerrillas and terrorists as well as adversary states. A firehose of narrative attacks gives the targeted populace little time to process and evaluate. It is cognitively disorienting and confusing – especially if the opponents barely realize what's hitting them. Opportunities abound.
WEF - Smart Pandemic response
Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools will provide propagandists radically enhanced capabilities to manipulate human minds. Human cognition is a complex system, and AI tools are very good at decoding complex systems.
Interactions on social media, browsing the Internet, and even grocery shopping provide thousands of data points from which technologists can build psychological profiles on nearly every citizen.
When provided rich databases of information about us, machines will know our personalities, wants, needs, annoyances, and fears better than we know them ourselves. Over the next few years, MADCOMs—the integration of AI systems into machine-driven communications tools for use in computational propaganda—will gain enhanced ability to influence people, tailoring persuasive, distracting, or intimidating messaging toward individuals based on their unique personalities and backgrounds, a form of highly personalized propaganda.
The difficult truth is humans simply cannot compete with MADCOMs, at least not alone. On the digital networks of the next decade, only humans teamed with AI machines can compete with AI machines. Much like the cybersecurity struggle that dominates the early twenty-first century, the Internet will be the battleground for a continual cycle of one-upmanship as technologists improve adversary-MADCOM detection tools, and as propagandists improve MADCOMs to avoid detection.
An ideal future, in which MADCOMs are used for the benefit of humanity and not to its detriment, requires the effort of all levels of society, from the international system down to individuals.
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A.I Deepmind computing the future strains of Covid 19?
The scientific community has galvanised in response to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, building on decades of basic research characterising this virus family. Labs at the forefront of the outbreak response shared genomes of the virus in open access databases, which enabled researchers to rapidly develop tests for this novel pathogen. Other labs have shared experimentally-determined and computationally-predicted structures of some of the viral proteins, and still others have shared epidemiological data. We hope to contribute to the scientific effort using the latest version of our AlphaFold system by releasing structure predictions of several under-studied proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. We emphasise that these structure predictions have not been experimentally verified, but hope they may contribute to the scientific community's interrogation of how the virus functions, and serve as a hypothesis generation platform for future experimental work in developing therapeutics. We're indebted to the work of many other labs: this work wouldn't be possible without the efforts of researchers across the globe who have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak with incredible agility.
Knowing a protein's structure provides an important resource for understanding how it functions, but experiments to determine the structure can take months or longer, and some prove to be intractable. For this reason, researchers have been developing computational methods to predict protein structure from the amino acid sequence. In cases where the structure of a similar protein has already been experimentally determined, algorithms based on “template modelling” are able to provide accurate predictions of the protein structure. AlphaFold, our recently published deep learning system, focuses on predicting protein structure accurately when no structures of similar proteins are available, called “free modelling”. We've continued to improve these methods since that publication and want to provide the most useful predictions, so we're sharing predicted structures for some of the proteins in SARS-CoV-2 generated using our newly-developed methods.
It's important to note that our structure prediction system is still in development and we can't be certain of the accuracy of the structures we are providing, although we are confident that the system is more accurate than our earlier CASP13 system.
We confirmed that our system provided an accurate prediction for the experimentally determined SARS-CoV-2 spike protein structure shared in the Protein Data Bank, and this gave us confidence that our model predictions on other proteins may be useful. We recently shared our results with several colleagues at the Francis Crick Institute in the UK, including structural biologists and virologists, who encouraged us to release our structures to the general scientific community now. Our models include per-residue confidence scores to help indicate which parts of the structure are more likely to be correct. We have only provided predictions for proteins which lack suitable templates or are otherwise difficult for template modeling. While these understudied proteins are not the main focus of current therapeutic efforts, they may add to researchers' understanding of SARS-CoV-2.
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A new machine learning approach to COVID-19 testing has produced encouraging results in Greece. The technology, named Eva, dynamically used recent testing results collected at the Greek border to detect and limit the importation of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases among arriving international passengers between August and November 2020, which helped contain the number of cases and deaths in the country.
The findings of the project are explained in a paper titled “Deploying an Artificial Intelligence System for COVID-19 Testing at the Greek Border, authored by Hamsa Bastani, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions and affiliated faculty at Analytics at Wharton; Kimon Drakopoulos and Vishal Gupta from the University of Southern California; Jon Vlachogiannis from investment advisory firm Agent Risk; Christos Hadjicristodoulou from the University of Thessaly; and Pagona Lagiou, Gkikas Magiorkinis, Dimitrios Paraskevis and Sotirios Tsiodras from the University of Athens.
The analysis showed that Eva on average identified 1.85 times more asymptomatic, infected travelers than what conventional, random surveillance testing would have achieved. During the peak travel season of August and September, the detection of infection rates was up to two to four times higher than random testing.
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We introduce a novel modeling framework for studying epidemics that is specifically designed to make use of fine-grained spatiotemporal data. Motivated by the current COVID-19 outbreak and the availability of data from contact or location tracing technologies, our model uses marked temporal point processes to represent individual mobility patterns and the course of the disease for each individual in a population. We design an efficient sampling algorithm for our model that can be used to predict the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 under different testing and tracing strategies, social distancing measures, and business restrictions, given location or contact histories of individuals. Building on this algorithm, we use Bayesian optimization to estimate the risk of exposure of each individual at the sites they visit, the percentage of symptomatic individuals, and the difference in transmission rate between asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals from historical longitudinal testing data. |
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Smart Dubai and Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU) have developed a Covid-19 epidemiological model to predict the future course of the pandemic more accurately.
The model, an extension of the widely used SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered) which mathematically models the spread of infectious diseases with incubation periods, is used by Dubai's Covid-19 command and control centre to make timely measures at tackling the impact of the coronavirus.
Customised model
The SEIR model prototype is generally considered generic and unable to capture the unique nature of a novel viral pandemic, such as Covid-19. With that in mind, researchers at Smart Dubai and MBRU developed and tested a specialised version of the SEIR model, called SEAHIR (susceptible-exposed-asymptomatic-hospitalised-isolated-removed) model, which was better able to capture the unique dynamics of the Covid-19 outbreak.
The team working on the project used a publicly available dataset from the United Arab Emirates as a case study to optimise the main parameters of the model and benchmark it against the historical number of cases.
The SEAHIR model enabled the command and control centre to make timely measures on developing testing strategies, increasing healthcare capacity, and implementing interventions to contain the spread of the virus.
The newly developed model can forecast healthcare requirements through a detailed framework. It also takes into consideration the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as physical distancing, and different testing strategies on the number of confirmed cases.
Smart Dubai had first used the model in its Smart Control Dashboard Covid-19, developed in partnership with Dubai's Covid-19 command and control centre to monitor and predict the spread of the novel coronavirus.
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“This paper is a significant accomplishment as it outlines our data-driven approach to addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, with a special focus on the UAE and Dubai,” said Younus Al Nasser, assistant director general of Smart Dubai, and CEO of the Dubai Data Establishment.
"We, at Smart Dubai, have always believed data to be an exceptionally effective instrument for calculated decision-making. Our approach to handling the pandemic and its repercussions echoed our tactics to drive Dubai's digital transformation and sustainable development, where we consistently rely on accurate data when planning Dubai's transformation into the happiest smart city of the future."
The work was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in a special issue called Infectious Disease Modelling in the Era of Complex Data in March 2021.
Smart Dubai said six-compartment SEAHIR model could be utilised and extended by decision-makers and researchers in other countries for current or future pandemics.
"Collaboration and sharing of knowledge, is key to ending the global pandemic,” added Dr Amer Sharif, vice chancellor, MBRU, and head of the Dubai Covid-19 command and control centre. “MBRU is committed to leading the way and it is a matter of immense pride that our university has made a notable contribution in shaping Dubai's response to the pandemic, one that is governed by science and driven by data."
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