Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle shares an article from IEEE Spectrum: Many associate XPrize with a $10-million award offered in 1996 to motivate a breakthrough in private space flight. But the organization has since held other competitions related to exploration, ecology, and education. And in November, they launched the Pandemic Response Challenge, which will culminate in a $500,000 award to be split between two teams that not only best predict the continuing global spread of COVID-19, but also prescribe policies to curtail it... For Phase 1, teams had to submit prediction models by 22 December... Up to 50 teams will make it to Phase 2, where they must submit a prescription model... The top two teams will split half a million dollars. The competition may not end there. Amir Banifatemi, XPrize's chief innovation and growth officer, says a third phase might test models on vaccine deployment prescriptions. And beyond the contest, some cities or countries might put some of the Phase 2 or 3 models into practice, if Banifatemi can find adventurous takers. The organizers expect a wide variety of solutions. Banifatemi says the field includes teams from AI strongholds such as Stanford, Microsoft, MIT, Oxford, and Quebec's Mila, but one team consists of three women in Tunisia. In all, 104 teams from 28 countries have registered. "We're hoping that this competition can be a springboard for developing solutions for other really big problems as well," Miikkulainen says. Those problems include pandemics, global warming, and challenges in business, education, and healthcare. In this scenario, "humans are still in charge," he emphasizes. "They still decide what they want, and AI gives them the best alternatives from which the decision-makers choose." But Miikkulainen hopes that data science can help humanity find its way. "Maybe in the future, it's considered irresponsible not to use AI for making these policies," he says. For the Covid-19 competition, Banifatemi emphasized that one goal was "to make the resulting insights available freely to everyone, in an open-source manner — especially for all those communities that may not have access to data and epidemiology divisions, statisticians, or data scientists."

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Mashable reports: We're all judged by the company we keep. With that adage seemingly in mind, Discord moved Friday to ban a pro-Donald Trump server from its platform. TheDonald, as the server was titled, allowed likeminded individuals to digitally gather and was directly linked to the recently banned r/DonaldTrump subreddit and a separate discussion forum... "While there is no evidence of that server being used to organize the Jan 6 riots, Discord decided to ban the server called TheDonald yesterday due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence, plan an armed insurrection in the United States, and spread harmful misinformation related to 2020 U.S. election fraud," a Discord spokesperson confirmed over email. Mashable even notes one comment they'd spotted about shooting politicians. And the forum's reaction to Discord's ban included "calling Discord 'pedos' and saying 'these CEOs need to be dragged out into the street.'"

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A friend writes on Facebook: "Apple, Google, AT&T and Verizon know who was inside the Capitol. The FBI has names and warrants already."

Today's song: The Beat Goes On.

"As COVID-19 relentlessly infects more and more of us, scientists are getting a close look at the strange and frightening damage it can inflict on our bodies," writes Science Alert (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): We've known since early in the pandemic this disease wreaks havoc on more than just the respiratory system, also causing gastrointestinal conditions, heart damage and blood clotting disorders. Now, a year into the pandemic, in-depth autopsies of COVID-19 patients have revealed greater details of widespread inflammation and damage in brain tissues. This may help explain the deluge of neurological symptoms that have manifested in some patients, from headaches, memory loss, dizziness, weakness and hallucinations to more severe seizures and strokes. Some estimate that up to 50 percent of those hospitalised with COVID-19 could have neurological symptoms that can leave people struggling to do even common daily tasks like preparing a meal. "We were completely surprised. Originally, we expected to see damage that is caused by a lack of oxygen," said physician and clinical director at National Institute of Health (NIH), Avindra Nath. "Instead, we saw multifocal areas of damage that is usually associated with strokes and neuroinflammatory diseases...." Their report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article also remembers a September remark by a University of Liverpool neurologist to Nature magazine back in September who had also suggested possible neurological symptoms from COVID-19. "We've seen this group of younger people without conventional risk factors who are having strokes, and patients having acute changes in mental status that are not otherwise explained."

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Writing in the Atlantic, programmer/economics commentator Steve Randy Waldman explains "Why I changed my mind" about the Communication Decency Act's Section 230: In the United States, you are free to speak, but you are not free of responsibility for what you say. If your speech is defamatory, you can be sued. If you are a publisher, you can be sued for the speech you pass along. But online services such as Facebook and Twitter can pass along almost anything, with almost no legal accountability, thanks to a law known as Section 230. President Donald Trump has been pressuring Congress to repeal the law, which he blames for allowing Twitter to put warning labels on his tweets. But the real problem with Section 230, which I used to strongly support, is the kind of internet it has enabled. The law lets large sites benefit from network effects (I'm on Facebook because my friends are on Facebook) while shifting the costs of scale, like shoddy moderation and homogenized communities, to users and society at large. That's a bad deal. Congress should revise Section 230 — just not for the reasons the president and his supporters have identified. When the law was enacted in 1996, the possibility that monopolies could emerge on the internet seemed ludicrous. But the facts have changed, and now so must our minds... By creating the conditions under which we are all herded into the same virtual space, Section 230 helped turn the internet into a conformity machine. We regulate one another's speech through shame or abuse, but we have nowhere to go where our own expression might be more tolerable. And while Section 230 immunizes providers from legal liability, it turns those providers into agents of such concentrated influence that they are objects of constant political concern. When the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey are routinely (and justifiably!) browbeaten before Congress, it's hard to claim that Section 230 has insulated the public sphere from government interference... If made liable for posts flagged as defamatory or unlawful, mass-market platforms including Facebook and Twitter would likely switch to a policy of taking down those posts automatically.... Vigorous argument and provocative content would migrate to sites where people take responsibility for their own speech, or to forums whose operators devote attention and judgment to the conversations they host. The result would be a higher-quality, less consolidated, and ultimately freer public square.

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A Sriwijaya Air flight with 62 aboard is missing after losing contact with Indonesia's aviation authorities shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. From a report: Flight SJ182, a 26-year-old Boeing 737-500, was scheduled to depart from the nation's capital to Pontianak on the island of Borneo at 1:40 p.m. local time, according to FlightRadar24 data. It had 56 passengers on board, along with two pilots and four cabin crew, MetroTV reported. Indonesian authorities said they have sent a search vessel from Jakarta to plane's last known location in the Java Sea. First responders were also deployed to the site to aid potential survivors, local TV reported. Sriwijaya Air said it's working to obtain more detailed information about the flight, and will release an official statement later. Updated at 14:53 GMT: The plane crashed, the Indonesian authorities said moments ago.

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Assume Trump's devs are scrambling to get up a new social net. I'm sure they'll find something. I heard it said they won't get thru the App Store and Google Play. This is true. So guess what -- they'll have to use the open web. Politics and tech make strange bedfellows. ;-)

We'll look back on this week as the moment everything changed.

"Both local police and the FBI are seeking information about individuals who were 'actively instigating violence' in Washington, DC, on January 6," writes Ars Technica. Then they speculate on which tools will be used to find them: While media organizations took thousands of photos police can use, they also have more advanced technologies at their disposal to identify participants, following what several other agencies have done in recent months... In November, The Washington Post reported that investigators from 14 local and federal agencies in the DC area have used a powerful facial recognition system more than 12,000 times since 2019. Neither would an agency need actual photos or footage to track down any mob participant who was carrying a mobile phone. Law enforcement agencies have also developed a habit in recent years of using so-called geofence warrants to compel companies such as Google to provide lists of all mobile devices that appeared within a certain geographic area during a given time frame... With all of that said, however, the DC Metropolitan Police and the FBI will probably need to look no further than a cursory Google search to identify many of the leaders of Wednesday's insurrection, as many of them took to social media both before and after the event to brag about it in detail. In short: you don't need fancy facial recognition tools to identify people who livestream their crimes. Friday the Washington Post also cited "the countless hours of video — much of it taken by the rioters themselves and uploaded to social media" as a useful input for facial recognition software. But in addition, they note that "The Capitol, more than most buildings, has a vast cellular and wireless data infrastructure of its own to make communications efficient in a building made largely of stone and that extends deep underground and has pockets of shielded areas. Such infrastructure, such as individual cell towers, can turn any connected phone into its own tracking device. "Phone records make determining the owners of these devices trivially easy..."

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Also, having the employees of Twitter and Facebook influening the censorship decisions the companies make is not good ethically. The employees should do their jobs, they should not personally have any say in who gets to use the network. We need ethical rules for professionals in tech. Here's an example from the medical profession. If you were a doctor in a hospital, and they wheeled in someone whose political opinions you abhor, you have to treat them no matter what. We insist that bakeries in Indiana bake cakes for gay couples as they would for heterosexual couples. It's easy to see when people you disagree with overstep professional ethical boundaries, much harder to see it when you do it yourself.

These kinds of decisions have a lot of impact. For example, I was blacklisted from speaking at a few tech conferences probably because their sponsors didn't like the affect my work was having on their closed networks. As a result, I'm perceived to having left tech, when in fact, a couple of powerful and/or rich people pressured conference promoters to not allow me a public presence. When I complained about it on my blog, or in person to friends, they shrugged it off, kind of the way Repubs shrug off ethical failures in their work. There are consequences to this kind of back-room deal-making. By this time very few people have any sympathy for Trump, but this act sets a precedent. You may not like it when someone you support is cut off this way.

The arguments about how you don't have free speech on private platforms don't reflect the reality of Twitter and Facebook, which have monopolistic power in the worlds they define. Those worlds are huge, powerful, growing, and most important here -- exclusive. We call them silos in tech, but they behave like monopolies in other contexts. They don't imho have the rights of truly private companies because they wield government-like power that can have the effect of restricting speech. Because they are silos, there's no way to route around them. This is dangerous stuff. Suppose for example the Republican Party owned Twitter. You can see how that would damage free discourse in our political system. And it's not impossible for a political entity to take control of Twitter they're not very highly valued in the stock market. That's why the government must be involved in decisions that cut off political leaders. What made this situation so difficult is that it was the president who needed to be silenced, before he could do more damage. A tough call, and a very difficult precedent. BTW, I do advocate for political parties becoming social networks. I think they already are that.

I would love to see Al Franken get a role in the new administration.

The Weather Channel reports: One main reason humans need to get a flu vaccine annually: flu strains mutate regularly so vaccines need to be slightly altered every year. During past flu seasons, the CDC has noted a vaccine effectiveness range between 40-60%, and a reduced the risk of flu-related illness by 40-60% within the overall population. There are, however, several "universal" flu vaccines currently being studied that aim to make annual flu vaccinations a thing of the past. In fact, according to the American Society for Microbiology, some of these vaccine candidates are in phase 2 and phase 3 trials right now. Now UPI reports: Researchers believe they are one step closer to a "universal" flu vaccine, even as concerns over the seasonal virus move to the back burner during the COVID-19 pandemic. T cells found in the lungs may hold the key to long-lasting immunity against influenza A, the more common and often more severe form of the virus, according to the researchers behind a study published Friday by Science Immunology. These cells, which the researchers call resident helper T cells, help the body initiate antiviral responses against new influenza strains even after experience with only one type of the virus, the researchers said. This type of "generalized" immune response, against all virus strains, is not possible with the currently available yearly vaccine formulations, they said.

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