Month: April 2020

Enlarge (credit: Purism)

Right now, with huge numbers of infected individuals and a limited testing capacity, the US has no way of knowing who's at risk for a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The ultimate goal of socially isolating, however, is to reduce the levels of infection so that we can do what's called contact tracing: figuring out everyone an infected individual has been in contact with and isolating and testing them. If implemented effectively, this will catch newly infected people before they become contagious, keeping the virus from spreading.

That process, however, relies on contact tracing being efficient and accurate enough to identify anyone at risk before they move on and infect multiple new people. A new study by a group of Oxford researchers suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is simply too infectious for this to work well. The team isn't without a solution, though: a smartphone app that caches contact information and alerts all contacts as soon as a positive test result happens.

Without a trace

Contact tracing is, in principle, really simple. Once an infected individual is identified, they're interviewed to ask where they've come into contact with other people for a while. In reality, it's a nightmare. People's memories are faulty, and it can be difficult to reconstruct everywhere they've been. And it's one thing if they know they visited a few friends or family members; it's something else if they rode a bus or stopped by a large store. Identifying who was even in the same place at that time can take days if not weeks.

Enlarge / Chris Smalls. (credit: CNBC)

Amazon was eager to make warehouse manager Chris Smalls the face of worker activism at the company, an internal memo shows. The memo was leaked to Vice, which published excerpts of the document on Thursday.

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” wrote David Zapolsky, Amazon's general counsel. Zapolsky was summarizing discussions at a daily meeting of senior Amazon executives focused on the coronavirus crisis. Vice reports that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos attended the meeting.

Smalls was a manager at an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York. It's one of Amazon's largest facilities, with around 5,000 workers. On Monday, Smalls was one of a number of workers—Amazon says 15, organizers say 60—who walked off the job to protest what they saw as inadequate precautions for worker health.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

After eight and a half years working full-time for Ars Technica, it's time for me to write something totally unlike anything that previously appeared under my name: a sales pitch. I'm a journalist for good reason, as I'm too gruff and unfriendly to be in sales, so please temper your expectations.

As you probably gathered by now, we're doing a subscription drive this week. Every person who buys a subscription will help us get through a difficult financial time, as the pandemic and oncoming recession cause a predictable decline in advertising revenue throughout the media industry.

In addition to giving you some nice perks like ad-free articles and a YubiKey 2FA device, your subscription dollars help make sure that people like me get to keep writing for Ars. I've written more than 3,000 articles for Ars Technica, and I don't intend to stop any time soon.

If you're a geek of, shall we say, a certain age, odds are you've experienced the first-hand joy of plopping yourself down cross-legged on the carpet in front of a blurry television—set to channel 3 or channel 4, of course—and whiling away an entire day playing the original Super Mario Bros. on the NES. (You also know for a fact that all deaths are the stupid controller's fault.)

Indeed, Super Mario Bros. is probably one of the pop-culture pillars of the GenX/Millennial collective unconscious (and maybe for GenZ, too, though going by common cohort dates, the GenZ folks were more likely to have grown up with much more advanced consoles than the poor old Nintendo Entertainment System). But how pervasive is it, really? How universal is the experience of settling in to play SMB in its original NES format, without emulators on an actual CRT television, and having those levels (and that music!) tattooed directly onto your brain?

To try to find out, we grabbed 30 randos from the New York area (back in January, in the Long-Long-Ago when people still walked the streets freely) and challenged them to slip on their plumbers' overalls and see how long they could survive on a journey through World 1-1 of the Mushroom Kingdom. We also brought in SMB speedrunners Authorblues and Kosmic to break down the iconic level design of World 1-1 and to walk us through some of the esoteric tricks speedrunners use to blast through the level as fast as humanly possible.