Month: April 2020

Enlarge / The reports are all public, but the nifty magnifying glass effect is not actually included. (credit: Google)

The entire world is scrambling to mitigate the novel coronavirus pandemic. By now, a majority of US states are under some kind of stay-at-home order, with governors nationwide asking or requiring non-essential businesses to close and everyone to plant their butts at home as much as possible.

As the disease continues to march its way across the country and the globe, though—as of this writing, there have been more than 250,000 US diagnosed cases—officials, regulators, and we the work-from-home masses are all wondering: are we all actually complying with these new rules, or is it still chaos on the streets out there somewhere?

Google has unfathomable reams of data from billions of individuals worldwide, and it has pulled some of that location information together into community mobility reports to try to answer that question. Here's the good news: by and large, trips to virtually everywhere that isn't "home" have dropped a whole lot.

Enlarge / Self-sewn protective face masks in a fabric store on April 3, 2020 in Jena, Germany. (credit: Getty | Jens Schlueter)

As COVID-19 cases increase sharply nationwide, some health experts are now recommending that healthy members of the public wear cloth masks when they’re out and about. The White House is reportedly expected to support that recommendation.

If they do, it would be an about-face from previous guidance on mask usage. Until now, officials at the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies worldwide have discouraged the public from wearing masks unless they are sick or caring for someone who is sick. They noted that there is little evidence to support mass masking and that the limited data we do have suggests it may reduce disease transmission only marginally at best.

With evidence of benefits in short supply, experts also raised concerns about potential harms. Mask wearing may give people a false sense of security, some experts said. This may lead some members of the public to be lax about other, far more critical precautions, such as staying two meters apart from others, limiting outings, and washing their hands frequently and thoroughly.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump speaks as Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser, listens during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House on Thursday, April 2, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Trump administration changed the Strategic National Stockpile website's description of the program yesterday after White House adviser Jared Kushner falsely claimed that the medical-supply stockpile is not meant to be used to help states. The description was changed to minimize the stockpile's role in helping states through crises like the current pandemic, but other portions of the official website still make it clear that Kushner was wrong.

After Jared Kushner's comment about how the Strategic National Stockpile is not supposed to be for states, lots of people pointed to the fact that its own website says it is.

The language on the website has now been changed.

My screenshot from last night vs. one from today: pic.twitter.com/UwJFAr7uoV

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 3, 2020

Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, claimed in a news conference Thursday that "the notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile, it's not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use." Kushner made the remark while discussing ventilators and masks. (See transcript.)

Kushner acknowledged that the federal government is giving ventilators and other equipment to states, even though he argued that the stockpile isn't meant to be used by states. But the Strategic National Stockpile website homepage, maintained by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), previously made it clear that the stockpile is for the entire country. Before Kushner's remarks, the page said:

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  The immediate takeaway on 10th-gen Comet Lake H-series: 45W TDP, four/six/eight cores with hyperthreading, very high turbo clockrates. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

Yesterday, Intel announced the launch of its newest laptop CPUs, the tenth generation Comet Lake H-series. If you're not up on all the minutiae of CPU naming schemes, H-series parts (for both Intel and AMD) are specialty high-performance parts with much higher thermal design power than the standard U-series, and without on-die integrated graphics.

Pay careful attention to the word "fastest"

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  When Intel says "fastest" here, it's still referring to turbo clock speed. We highly recommend reading the fine print. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

The big news Intel is pushing on the tenth series Comet Lake H-series is their high turbo clockrate. All of the i7 SKUs, as well as the lone i9, are capable of breaking 5GHz on the high end of their turbo clock rate.

Most consumers would define the "fastest" processor in terms of real performance—time to complete benchmarks, frames per second achieved in AAA gaming titles, and so forth. Intel talks a lot about the "fastest" processor but seems careful to hide its definitions away in the fine print.

The last time the iPhone SE appeared in an Apple presentation was in this 2018 slide showing it being scrapped for materials. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

An apparent leak on the Apple Store suggests that a new phone carrying the iPhone SE name is coming soon.

A product title for a Belkin screen protector in Apple's online store listed the supported devices as iPhone 7, 8, and SE. This seems to indicate that a new SE would be the same size as an iPhone 7 or 8, making the new SE bigger than its 4-inch predecessor from 2016. The product page has since been updated to remove the iPhone SE name; it just says 7 and 8 now.

This leak corroborates a vaguely sourced rumor from 9to5Mac published only a short time earlier, which cited a “tip from a highly trusted reader” that Apple is days away from announcing a new low-cost iPhone and that the phone would be called the iPhone SE, not the iPhone 9 or iPhone SE 2. Like so many other Apple products, it would be distinguished from its predecessors by its year of release (2020).

Residents of a rural town find themselves grappling with strange occurrences thanks to the presence of an underground particle accelerator in the new series Tales from the Loop, inspired by the stunningly surreal neofuturistic art of Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag. The eight-episode series was originally slated for a limited premiere at SXSW last month; the coronavirus pandemic scuttled those plans, along with our collective social lives. But now everyone can watch the series on Amazon Prime, and I highly recommend that you do so. It's visually arresting, with powerful performances from a very talented cast, and brings out the underlying humanity and hope of all great science fiction.

(Mild spoilers below.)

Tales from the Loop has its roots in Stålenhag's 2014 narrative art book of the same name. That book, and 2016's Things from the Flood, centered on the construction of a fictional particle accelerator dubbed "the Loop" and its impact on the surrounding people and environment. (A third book, The Electric State, focused on a young girl and her robot companion traveling across the western US, which in that reality is known as Pacifica.) A child of the 1980s, Stålenhag grew up on the rural outskirts of Stockholm, a witness to the decline of the Swedish welfare state. That sense of decline infuses his Loop-based work, which sets rural settings and easily recognizable common objects like Volvo cars alongside mysterious structures and mechanical robots.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jozef Polc | 500px)

TracFone Wireless is facing a potential $6 million fine for allegedly defrauding a government program that provides discount telecom service to poor people.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed the fine against TracFone yesterday, saying the prepaid wireless provider obtained FCC Lifeline funding by "enroll[ing] fictitious subscriber accounts." TracFone improperly sought and received more than $1 million from Lifeline, the FCC said.

The FCC press release said: