Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, flanked by US President Donald Trump, speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on April 22, 2020, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Mandel Ngan)

Update 5/12/2020, 4:15pm ET: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Department of Homeland Security released a statement Tuesday saying that they have determined that Drs. Redfield, Hahn, and Fauci are "providing essential services" in the government's COVID-19 response efforts. As such, they can continue their work without being in quarantine and "will participate in meetings on the White House complex when their attendance is needed." This is contingent upon them remaining asymptomatic, and they will be screened and monitored for fever and other symptoms, wear a face covering, and maintain a distance of at least six feet from others.

Original story from 5/11/2020 11:57am ET:
The country's top health officials battling the COVID-19 pandemic are now in self-quarantine or a "modified" quarantine following coronavirus exposure at the White House.

In the past week, many White House staffers, secret service members, and aides have tested positive for the virus, which generally spreads by respiratory droplets. Those infected include a military valet to President Trump; Ivanka Trump's personal assistant; Vice President Mike Pence's spokesperson, Katie Miller; and at least 11 members of the US Secret Service.

Enlarge / Microsoft Outlook for the Web. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft Outlook for the Web has the unenviable task of competing with a dominant Gmail—and much of Gmail's competitive advantage is thanks to ML-driven features like text prediction. But Microsoft is taking a step to face off directly with one of the features most strongly associated with modern Gmail—text prediction and completion.

In the past week, the company updated its publicly visible roadmap for Microsoft 365 features to include "Outlook on the Web - text predictions." The feature's description reads: "Using smart technology, Outlook will predict text while you type. Just use the Tab key to accept the text prediction." This suggests the feature would work very similarly to the way it does in Gmail.

Microsoft also plans to introduce a "send later" feature for scheduling outgoing emails, the "ability to view and assign categories to tasks," support for personal calendars that can affect work calendar availability, the ability to RSVP to meetings from the messages list, a mobile Web redesign, an overall redesign of the tasks interface, and a new editor with "capabilities powered by Microsoft 365," among many other things.

Enlarge / Will this toddler be a pre-teen, teenager, or an adult before humans go back to the Moon? (credit: NASA)

Jim Bridenstine really wanted to become NASA's administrator. As a pilot and congressman from Oklahoma, he sought out opportunities to influence space policy and met with experts whenever he had a chance to do so. He was the rare congressman who engaged in space policy not because he had a NASA facility in his state, but because he had genuine interest.

After President Trump nominated Bridenstine for the administrator position in September 2017, Bridenstine had a long wait. There were fears the conservative Republican would prove an overtly political chief of NASA, driving the space agency hard to the right. The US Senate finally approved Bridenstine's nomination in April 2018, with a party-line vote. Over the next year Bridenstine showed himself to be a leader for all of NASA. He eschewed partisanship for inclusiveness. He genuinely sought to push NASA forward.

But then, at the end of March 2019, Bridenstine was handed an almost insurmountable task. During a speech at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Vice President Pence instructed NASA to land humans on the Moon by the end of 2024. "I call on NASA to adopt new policies and embrace a new mindset," Pence said. "If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we'll find ones that will."