#the cocktail of being traditionally attractive to a degree

[agonycrossbow]

I'm pretty confident in saying that anyone in my generation who slaps "siblings" on Leon and Ashley are probably people who have another ship and have had it for a while and don't want Ashley getting in the way of it, tbh LMAO

Like.... my generation has co-opted the current generation's vernacular, but make no mistake about the kind of bitches we are. We're ship war bitches. That's all we've ever been AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE OUR WAYS NOW fjdskfh

But if we're talking about the current generation...

Media illiteracy is a big factor in this. It's no secret to anyone that the US education system took a massive shit starting in the late aughts/early 2010s, and things like critical reading skills aren't being taught in schools anymore.

I graduated high school in 2007. Two years later, I went back to visit an old English teacher to get a letter of recommendation, and he was lamenting to me that he'd just given up. It wasn't worth trying to explain the deeper themes of Beowulf to kids who didn't care, because the only thing that mattered was getting them to pass standardized tests.

So, now, without an overt, explicit declaration of love or something visually concrete like a kiss, kids literally do not have the skills to parse through a text and pick out themes and tropes and use of symbolism and imagery. They were never taught how to do it.

But there's a more culture-based thing happening here, I think. It's this fucking mess of a cocktail of internalized misogyny paired with learned helplessness, social anxiety, intense sheltering possibly exacerbated by the pandemic shutdowns, peer pressure, and internet purity culture.

I think it's pretty safe to say that fandom is predominantly made up of women and teenage girls. That was true in the 60s in Star Trek fandom, it was true in my generation, and it's still true today. And what I've seen happening today is that young women are absolutely terrified of their own sexual agency -- because the internet keeps telling them that, if you're under 18, it is wrong and bad and unacceptable for you to engage with anything even remotely sexual and how dare you express your sexuality -- and you'd better not do it not just because it's wrong and bad, but also because you are GUARANTEED TO BE PREYED UPON IF YOU DO. SEX IS DANGEROUS ALL OF THE TIME AND YOU'RE LITERALLY TOO YOUNG AND TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND ANYTHING SO DON'T TRY TO EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. Because if you're 17 and he's 18, he's a pedophile!!!!!!!!

I just.

So, we've now basically turned an entire generation of young women into the same type of young women who created the BL genre in Japan. These are women who were too afraid to explore their sexuality on their own, and it felt safer to do it with two male characters, because it was always more "okay" for men to be sexual. This is happening here in the West, now.

Slash ships have always been a thing in the West, but not to the degree that they are today. In today's fandom, if you have an M/F ship at all, you are outnumbered by at least 3:1 -- because M/M just "feels" safer for a lot of the current generation.

So, I think young women look at the Remake portrayal of Ashley Graham, and they identify with her. A lot. They're probably around her age, and her personality is very relatable to the kind of girls who play video games. Ashley's clearly introverted, but she's a fast learner who just wants to help, and she's got a good heart and a weird, kind of awkward sense of humor.

And, not only do these girls identify with Ashley, they're probably thirsty as fuck for Leon.

But that's terrifying to them.

Because they have been taught to fear their own sexual agency. The idea that an attractive, traditionally masculine, older man would be romantically or sexually interested in them is immediately categorized in their brains as wrong and bad -- and they don't want to think of Leon in that way.

So... for them, it can't be romantic. It can't be sexual. But there's clearly something there, but Leon would never abuse or prey on anyone so... that bond must be a perfectly innocent familial affection. That's what it is. That's what it has to be, because anything else forces them to face the uncomfortable reality even young women like them go on dates and have sex -- and sometimes, it's with men like Leon.

So, they thirst over Leon at a safe distance through Luis, primarily. Or they self-indulge on reader fic, because that's so much easier to write off as "just a fantasy" and not a statement on who Leon actually is as a character.

And it's just kind of sad, man. It sucks to see this happen to an entire generation of young women.

That's why I don't really get mad when I see the "siblings" shit out in the wild. I just feel sad for those people -- because they can't just say "I don't like the ship." They're so insecure and neurotic that they have to think of a reason why the ship is literally impossible to ever happen so that they don't have to be worried about it.

One day, they'll finally suck a dick for themselves and learn that it's not that serious. It's really fuckin not. Dicks are stupid, and the boys that are attached to them are even dumber.

[lilgynt]

autistic social exclusion let’s talk about autistic social inclusion (but bad)

[youwontlikethisblog]

Aura Maria and Freddy/ Betty and Armando An Introduction.

From the start Aura Maria is pretty cold towards Freddy, constantly annoyed at his advances and flirtatious nature and only returns it when she wants or needs something from him.

This parallels with Armando and the way he is with Betty. Betty doesn't flirt or make any advances towards him but Armando dismisses her fidelity and loyalty from the start. He gets annoyed, yells at her over anything, constantly mocks her, treats her pretty crappy.

As they both have to spend more time with each other Aura Maria begins to show some affection to Freddy, enough to feed his crush on her and she knows that.

When things start to change for them is the day after Freddy went to pick them up at the tavern where they all got drunk. Aura Maria calls Freddy her work husband.

Freddy takes on the role of Betty in the parallel.

While Freddy always prioritizes Aura Maria and tells her that he is serious about her, wants to be responsible of her son and take care of her he doesn't have anybody else to flirt with as often the models, who some do seem to like Freddy's nature, ignore him and don't pay him mind and his biggest drawback is that Freddy isn't rich and he might as well be an ugly woman if he doesn't have money.

See socially women are always told that what matters isn't the physical of a person but who they are as a person. We're told this as children so much that we don't really care about what a person looks like when we're interested in them. What we really care about is the substance of the person so though to some degree the physical attractiveness of a man is important it's not the most important thing.

The yang to this is that traditionally in most cultures women are taught that men are meant to be the breadwinner, therefore marry a man who is financially stable and makes good money.

Due to this Freddy doesn't have much luck with the models who are known to go to cocktails to pick up a rich boyfriend(Hugo said so in one of the first episodes) therefore Aura Maria has no competition.

Much like Betty Freddy shows loyalty and unconditionality to Aura Maria like she does to Armando.

Betty's biggest flaw is that she's ugly. Freddy's that he's broke. They are both kind, sweet, unconditional, supportive, and loving people. Aside from Betty, Freddy is one of my favorite characters.

Freddy is a good and supportive friend to all the girls in the cuartel and often does things for them, even if he can get in trouble for it.

When things start to change between Freddy and Aura Maria in a more noticeable way is when Jasmine starts working in Eco Moda. Freddy tells Aura Maria that if she won't love him that he can't miss out on the opportunity for somebody else to love him so he will play part in Sofia's plan but that he will use it as an excuse to get close to her because he does like Jasmine.

Aura Maria has to face the reality that she no longer is Freddy's center of the universe, that she has competition and that somebody else can take Freddy away from her.

She often throws fits because of this, gets mad at him, throws in his face all of the things he had told her.

The same way Armando behaves this way, before he found out about Betty's love life.

He questions her fidelity and unconditionality because he takes it as a person attack if Betty doesn't help him because he himself blurs the lines of work related qualities to personal related qualities. When things for them started to change was when Betty was offered the 10% commission.

However Aura Maria has had days or weeks of facing the reality that Freddy cares for someone so she has time to understand her feelings and understand why she feels like that, no longer denying it, to weight out the pros and cons. Armando doesn't get that. He gets a day in a half of being forced to face these feelings. A day in a half to digest it all.

While we get to see the parallel of Aura Maria and Freddy front and center of how their work relationship dynamic changes, we get a very subtle parallel of Armando and Betty's work related relationship dynamic change and while we get a long period of Aura Maria digesting her feelings, we don't get that for Armando. One is forced, rushed to face them while the other is given their sweet time to face it.

Yet both of these couples are forced to face the cold truth the day of the launch.

Aura Maria sees that Freddy is a man of word, a man of substance who for the woman he is with will do anything to make them happy and their dreams come true as Freddy, despite the fact that his friends we upset with him(when he crashed Armando's car for checking Jasmine out) he got Jasmine to walk the runway for the new fashion collection. She has to face that if something does happen between Jasmine and Freddy that she's lost him for good.

Armando in the same lane now has to face that if he doesn't do anything that he'll lose Betty, the woman who has been so special to him and when Nicolas goes to pick her up and openly calls himself her boyfriend, Mario tells him that a man that eager to be with a woman as ugly as Betty and openly talk about it, had to mean the attraction was mutual and that Nicolas did care about Betty.

Now these two are forced to face this "reality", while Aura Maria makes a move on Freddy, Armando agrees that in order to secure Betty he must make her fall in love, in turn Nicolas won't take her and the company.

Aura Maria makes Freddy choose between her and Jasmine and he chooses her. He tells her that though he was attracted to Jasmine that Aura Maria was more to him "Con ella lego al abismo pero contigo al cielo." While in one he touches rock bottom with the other he experiences heaven.

Aura Maria melts and they spend their first night together.

In the same vain, the next day Armando finalizes that he will make Betty fall in love and that exact night he is forced to face some of his feelings(Locura Mia post).

Obviously these two have different behaviors and their story is told at different paces but they still have the same core behavior and their relationships intertwin with conflict and resolution.

Aura Maria is cold towards love, desperate for physical affection, only focuses on men who have money, and doesn't care about the consequences they bring later on.

Armando is cold towards love, desperate for physical affection, only focuses on women who are the standard of beauty and doesn't care about the consequences they bring later on.

Freddy is unconditional, loving, faithful, and kind. He is ignored and dispatched as a potential love interested because he is broke.

Betty is unconditional, loving, faithful, and kind. She is ignored and dispatched as a potential love interest because she is ugly.

I will make separate post about them.

As both of these relationships grow I will be making post about them both, separately so that the post aren't so long. Sorry of this one isn't so in depth, I haven't had the chance to watch YSBLF so this is all by memory but I wanted to make an introduction to the parallel posts :)

[linskywords]

Why Hockey RPF?

Hey friends! This is a question I've been thinking about for a while, and I finally put together a list of my answers. Caveat that this is me attempting to analyze my own psychology and so may be very incomplete and/or wrong. :)

First, the general "why slash?" bits. These apply across fandoms (though I think some are extra strong in hockey, as I'll get to below).

One. Going against the script. I cannot stress enough how important this is to me in a romance. You know that thing where a man and a woman are in the same room together in a movie, so you know they're the love interests and they will kiss at the end? I hate that. It makes me feel like their love is probably fake. If they feel like they're supposed to be attracted to each other, and then they are attracted to each other, it probably isn't real attraction at all. Says my brain, anyway. If they feel like this person is not at all someone they could EVER be attracted to, and they're attracted anyway...it is instantly, like, fifty thousand times hotter to me. Works way better with gender for me than with other stuff that's traditionally been used in romance, like social class.

Two. Freedom from typical romantic gender roles. This has been said a lot, but: gender roles in romance SUCK. (They suck in most places. But romance really has a lot of them.) It's hard to grow up in a Western culture and not have an extremely conflicted relationship with them: you've been trained to find certain behaviors romantic, but you've also learned enough about feminism to question whether all of them are healthy or smart, and it's hard to write a satisfying romance when you're caught in the tangle of being drawn to the thing but also wondering if maybe you shouldn't be. It's so much easier for me to indulge my idtastic desires when I don't even have to think about whether I should be having the woman be the one taken care of, or if that makes her weak, so I should swap their roles, but then if she takes care of the guy does that mean she's doing all the work in the relationship and he's a giant man-baby...you see how that would bog you down. If both characters are men -- or women, or nonbinary -- it's easier to give them whatever roles I want without having to think about whether I'm furthering my own oppression.

Three. Getting to live in bodies that aren't our own. The previous point about gender roles can apply to femslash, too, and as a bi woman, I can get into that -- but sometimes it's better not to have to think about my own gender in the equation at all. There's so much crap associated with being a woman in our world, especially when it comes to sexuality. It can be liberating to write sex scenes when no bodies like mine are part of it even a little and you just don't have to negotiate the crap at all. This isn't an absolute for me -- I do write and enjoy femslash -- but I write way more slash than femslash, and I think this is part of it.

Four. Humanizing men. This is a big thing in a society (such as mine) where the best men are supposedly the ones who most embody a toxic masculinity where they don't experience normal human vulnerability or feelings. We're supposed to admire these men, and fall in love with them, and raise children with them (some of us), and it's so easy to resent and fear them instead. It is both satisfying and healing to portray men who are full of need and hurt and longing and love. Like, you know, humans are.

Five. Giving our desires power. In my culture, and in many others, men are the ones whose desires have power. A man wants a woman who doesn't want him back? He just needs to pursue her harder; she'll come around in the end, and if she doesn't, she's a heartless bitch. A woman wants a man who doesn't want her back? She's pathetic. Her desire makes her ridiculous. If you're a women who desires men, or who desires anyone at all, it's so humiliating to see your own desires minimalized and stripped of power like that. So if we want to write about our desires -- our desires for men, in particular -- it can be very satisfying to give those desires to another man. Those desires have POWER, then. They're legitimized. They have agency. We can revel in them without doubting our own right to have them.

So that's slash in general. Wow, there was a lot in there about cutting through the tangle of internalized patriarchy, wasn't there? Funny, that.

Hockey, though. Why hockey, amidst the many possible slash fandoms? Why did I start reading hockey RPF without ever having seen a game and fall for it so hard?

Six. The heteronormativity. And to take it a step further: the pressure in general to present yourself to the world as a certain type of person. I've written before about how a huge part of the appeal of the hockey world to me is the immense pressure it puts on its players -- which plays into the thing above about going against scripts, because the heteronormative script is extra in effect when it comes to professional sports, but it's not just that. These guys are under such a spotlight, and in exchange for their privilege and wealth they not only have to keep performing at an elite level that's hard to maintain, but they also have to force themselves into such a narrow, publicly acceptable mold. I'm not an athlete, so I can't relate to that specific set of pressures, but that makes them even more satisfying to write about. I can write about my feelings about the pressures that are on me -- the unwritten societal expectation to be important, successful, happy in easily recognized ways -- without having to think about those specific pressures, because I can substitute these ones instead.

Seven. Validation. I wrote above about giving our desires to men so that the desires have more power. In this case, it's giving the desires to successful, competent, famous people so that the desires have validity -- because the people who hold them have validity. Hockey players have the kind of prestigious, easily-recognized-at-cocktail-parties-and-high-school-reunions type of success that so many of us feel on one level or another than we should have, and they have it so unquestionably. When someone like that experiences a type of neediness I might feel -- the desperate longing for another person to notice them, the extreme obsession that comes with a crush, the miserable sureness that the person they want won't want them back -- that feeling is automatically valid, because THEY are valid. As someone who has felt a lot of longing in my life, I really enjoy exploring it in characters who have an automatic get-out-of-worthlessness free card.

So those are the navel-gazing ones, where hockey does the same kind of thing your average slash fandom does, but sometimes to a greater degree. Then there are the amazing storytelling benefits of the setting:

Eight. Team. Oh, team. Friends to lovers is my jam. I love writing characters who've spent so much time with someone, they don't even realize when their feelings for the other person cross the line from friendship to something else. This must be what friendship is, because it's what I feel for X person, who is my friend! And then the joy, of course, of having to see that person every day once you realize it isn't just friendship, and you're being tortured by knowing they'll never want you back (or so you think). Add in the thing where you and this person are fighting for something together every other day, where your successes bolster each other's, where your chemistry can mean the success of the team, and if you have a falling out (say, over someone's inappropriate crush) it could ruin your careers and the team's success...I mean, how do you resist a setup like that?

Nine. The flexibility of the setting. One of the wonderful things about hockey is that there's so much of it. If you want to set a story during a homestand, you can. If you want a road trip, you can find one. The season is seven months long, plus playoffs, and during those months you can set a story anytime and know that your characters will be seeing each other every day, creating lots of opportunities for interactions and relationship progress. And the hockey games themselves can feature -- but they don't have to. They can be just as important or unimportant as you need them to be for story purposes. Need your character to be down about something? Throw in a loss. Anxious about something? Mention a point drought. Sharing a happy moment with their person? Give them a win. If you're strictly following game schedules -- which I try to for the most part -- you might not be able to put those things exactly where you want them, but you can usually find a way to make your timeline match up with actual events. Unlike so many canons where there are specific, exciting adventures that have to be accounted for or worked around, hockey is years and years of fertile ground for whatever you want to put there.

(Corollary to the last one: this is a big part of why I find it so much easier and more fun to write fic than original fiction. When you write a novel, you usually need to create an actual plot, where external events impact each other and build to a conclusion. You can include a romance, but it has to be woven into these other events, and that gets complicated. Need a bonding moment? You'd better hope you designed your external plot to give them one. On the other hand, when you write fic, especially hockey fic, the hockey season can just march on merrily in the background, impacting your story only as much as you want it to, and you can pick and choose the parts of it that most strongly shape your romance. SO much easier to build and maintain a line of romantic tension that way.)

So those are my reasons. Put them all together, and they go a long way toward explaining why I write so much hockey -- and not just stories that borrow hockey players as characters, but stories set in the actual hockey world, with maybe an AU element, but hockey definitely present. There's just so much that the setting does for me and for my ability to write the stories that matter to me.

How about all of you?

[wsmith215]

The technologies the world is using to track coronavirus — and people

This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series: AI and Surveillance.

Now that the world is in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, governments are quickly deploying their own cocktails of tracking methods. These include device-based contact tracing, wearables, thermal scanning, drones, and facial recognition technology. It’s important to understand how those tools and technologies work and how governments are using them to track not just the spread of the coronavirus, but the movements of their citizens.

Contact tracing and smartphone data

Contact tracing is one of the fastest-growing means of viral tracking. Although the term entered the common lexicon with the novel coronavirus, it’s not a new practice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says contact tracing is “a core disease control measure employed by local and state health department personnel for decades.”

Traditionally, contact tracing involves a trained public health professional interviewing an ill patient about everyone they’ve been in contact with and then contacting those people to provide education and support, all without revealing the identity of the original patient. But in a global pandemic, that careful manual method cannot keep pace, so a more automated system is needed.

That’s where device-based contact tracing (usually via smartphone) comes into play. This involves using an app and data from people’s smartphones to figure out who has been in contact with whom — even if it’s just a casual passing in the street — and alerting everyone who has been exposed to an infected individual.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

But the devil is in the details. There are obvious concerns about data privacy and abuse if that data is exposed or misused by those who hold it. And the tradeoffs between privacy and measures needed to curb the spread of COVID-19 are a matter of extensive debate.

The core of that debate is whether to take a centralized or decentralized approach to data collection and analysis. To oversimplify: In either approach, data is generated when people’s phones come into contact with one another. In a centralized approach, data from the phones gets uploaded into a database, and the database matches a user’s records with others and subsequently sends out alerts. In a decentralized approach, a user’s phone uploads only an anonymized identifier, other users download the list of anonymous IDs, and the matching is done on-device.

The advantage of decentralization is that data stays private and essentially unexploitable, and users remain anonymous. Centralization offers richer data, which could help public health officials better understand the disease and its spread and allow government officials to more effectively plan, execute, and enforce quarantines and other measures designed to protect the public.

But the potential disadvantages of centralized data are downright dystopian. Governments can exploit the data. Private tech companies may be able to buy or sell it en masse. Hackers could steal it.

And even though centralized systems anonymize data, that data can be re-identified in some cases. In South Korea, for example, a failure to keep contact tracing data sufficiently anonymous led to incidents of public shaming. An Israel-based company called the NSO Group provides spyware that could be put to such a task. According to Bloomberg, the company has contracts with a dozen countries and is embroiled in a lawsuit with WhatsApp, accused of delivering spyware via the popular messaging platform.

That’s not to mention various technical challenges — notably that Apple doesn’t allow the tracking apps to run in the background, as well as some Android bugs that contact tracing app developers have encountered. To obviate some of these issues, Apple and Google forged a historic partnership to create a shared API. But the debate between centralized and decentralized approaches remains riddled with nuance.

A deep dive into the situation in France provides a microcosm of the whole issue, from the push/pull between governments and private companies to technical limitations to issues of public trust and the need for mass adoption before contact tracing can be effective. But even with these growing pains, the urgent need to ease lockdowns means various forms of contact tracing have already been employed in countries around the world, and in the U.S. from state to state.

Examples include:

In the U.S., absent a clear federal contact tracing plan (for now), states have moved forward on their own. A multi-state group that includes New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut is creating its own tracing program. South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety developed a GPS-tracking app that requires citizens who have been ordered to quarantine to stay in touch with a case worker. In China, citizens are required to use an app that color-codes people based on their health level (green, yellow, or red) to dictate where they’re allowed to be. A New York Times report said the app shares data with law enforcement. India’s government mandated that all workers use its Aarogya Setu app (which uses Bluetooth and GPS for contact tracing), ostensibly to maintain social distancing measures as the nation lifts restrictions and sends people back to work. Singapore was early to contact tracing with its TraceTogether app, but low adoption has spurred a push to merge it with a tool called SafeEntry that would force people to check in electronically at businesses and other places. Both Australia and New Zealand have employed contact tracing apps based on Singapore’s TraceTogether. MIT Technology Review is building a database tracker of all the government-backed automated contact tracing apps. Iceland’s Rakning C-19 contact tracing app uses GPS and has achieved 38% adoption, but a government official said it hasn’t made a significant impact on contact tracing efforts. Michigan has chosen to rely on traditional manual contact tracing in lieu of an app. The U.K.’s NHS contact tracing app is rolling out for testing and will be used along with traditional manual contact tracing methods, but the app’s centralized approach has privacy advocates concerned. Wearables and apps

One method cribbed from law enforcement and the medical field is the use of wristbands or GPS ankle monitors to track specific individuals. In some cases, these monitors are paired with smartphone apps that differ from traditional contact tracing apps in that they’re meant to specifically identify a person and track their movements.

In health care, patients who are discharged may be given a wristband or other wearable that’s equipped with smart technology to track their vitals. This is ideal for elderly people, especially those who live alone. If they experience a health crisis, an app connected to the wristband can alert their caregivers. In theory, this could help medical professionals keep an eye on the ongoing health of a recovered and discharged COVID-19 patient, monitoring them for any secondary health issues. Ostensibly, this sort of tracking would be kept between the patient and their health care provider.

Law enforcement has long used ankle monitors to ensure that people under house arrest abide by court orders. In recent years, mobile apps have seen similar use. It’s not a big jump to apply these same technologies to tracking people under quarantine.

A judge in West Virginia allowed law enforcement to put ankle monitors on people who have tested positive for COVID-19 but have refused to quarantine, and a judge in Louisville, Kentucky did the same. According to a Reuters report, Hawaii — which needs to ensure that arriving airline passengers quarantine for 14 days after entering the state — was considering using similar GPS-enabled ankle monitors or smartphone tracking apps but shelved that idea after pushback from the state’s attorney general.

Remote monitoring via AI offers a potentially more attractive solution. A group of Stanford researchers proposed a home monitoring system designed for the elderly that would use AI to noninvasively (and with a layer of privacy) track a person’s overall health and well-being. Its potential value during quarantine, when caregivers need to avoid unnecessary contact with vulnerable populations, is obvious.

Apps can also be used to create a crowdsourced citizen surveillance network. For example, the county of Riverside, California launched an app called RivCoMobile that allows people to anonymously report others they suspect are violating quarantine, hosting a large gathering, or flouting other rules, like not wearing facemasks inside essential businesses.

As an opt-in choice for medical purposes, a wearable device and app could allow patients to maintain a lifeline to their care providers while also contributing data that helps medical professionals better understand the disease and its effects. But as an extension of law enforcement, wearables raise a far more ominous specter. Even so, it’s a tradeoff, as people with COVID-19 who willfully ignore stay-at-home orders are putting lives at risk.

Examples include:

Thermal scanning

Thermal scanning has been used as a simple check at points of entry, like airports, military bases, and businesses of various kinds. The idea is that a thermal scan will catch anyone who is feverish — defined by the CDC as having a temperature of at least 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit — in an effort to flag those potentially stricken with COVID-19.

But thermal scanning is not in itself diagnostic. It’s merely a way to spot one of the common symptoms of COVID-19, although anyone flagged by a thermal scan could, of course, be referred to an actual testing facility.

Thermal scanners range from small handheld devices to larger and more expensive multi-camera systems. They can and have been installed on drones that fly around an area to hunt for feverish individuals who may need to be hospitalized or quarantined.

Unlike facial recognition, thermal scanning is inherently private. Scanner technology doesn’t identify who anyone is or collect other identifying information. But some thermal imaging systems add — or claim to add — AI to the mix, like Kogniz and Feevr.

And thermal scanners are highly problematic, mainly because there’s little evidence of their efficacy. Even thermal camera maker Flir, which could cash in on pandemic fears, has a prominent disclaimer on its site about using its technology to screen for COVID-19. But that hasn’t stopped some people from using Flir’s cameras for this purpose anyway.

Thermal scanning can only spot people who have COVID-19 and are also symptomatic with a fever. Many people who end up testing positive for the disease are asymptomatic, meaning a thermal scan would show nothing out of the ordinary. And a fever is present in some but by no means all symptomatic cases. Even those who contract COVID-19 and do experience a fever may be infected for days before any symptoms actually appear, and they remain contagious for days after.

Thermal scans are also vulnerable to false positives. Because it merely looks at a person’s body temperature, a thermal scan can’t tell if someone has a fever from a different illness or is perhaps overheated from exertion or experiencing a hot flash.

That doesn’t even take into account whether a given thermal scanner is precise enough to be reliable. If its accuracy is, say, +/- 2 degrees, a 100-degree temperature could register as 98 degrees or 102 degrees.

Although false negatives are dangerous because they could let a sick person through a checkpoint, false positives could result in people being unfairly detained. That could mean they’re sent home from work, forced into quarantine, or penalized for not abiding by an ordered quarantine, even though they aren’t sick.

Tech journalists’ inboxes have been inundated with pitches for various smart thermometers and thermal cameras for weeks. But it’s reasonable to wonder how many of these companies are the equivalent of snake oil peddlers. Allegations have already been made against Athena Security, a company that touted an AI-powered thermal detection system.

Facial recognition and other AI

The most invasive type of tracking involves facial recognition and other forms of AI. There’s an obvious use case there. You can track many, many people all at once and continue tracking their movements as they are scanned again and again, yielding massive amounts of data on who is sick, where they are, where they’ve been, and who they’ve been in contact with. Enforcing a quarantine order becomes a great deal easier, more accurate, and more effective.

However, facial recognition is also the technology that’s most ripe for dystopian abuse. Much ink has been spilled over the relative inaccuracy of facial recognition systems on all but white males, the ways governments have already used it to persecute people, and the real and potential dangers of its use within policing. That’s not to mention the sometimes deeply alarming figures behind the private companies making and selling this technology and concerns about its use by government agencies like ICE or U.S Customs and Border Protection.

None of these problems will disappear just because of a pandemic. In fact, rhetoric about the urgency of the fight against the coronavirus may provide narrative cover for accelerating the development or deployment of facial recognition systems that may never be dismantled — unless stringent legal guardrails are put in place now.

Russia, Poland, and China are all using facial recognition to enforce quarantines. Companies like CrowdVision and Shapes AI use computer vision, often along with Bluetooth, IR, Wi-Fi, and lidar, to track social distancing in public places like airports, stadiums, and shopping malls. CrowdVision says it has customers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. In an emailed press release, U.K.-based Shapes AI said its camera-based computer vision system “can be utilized by authorities to help monitor and enforce the behaviors in streets and public spaces.”

There will also be increased use of AI within workplaces as companies try to figure out how to safely restart operations in a post-quarantine world. Amazon, for example, is currently using AI to track employees’ social distancing compliance and potentially flag ill workers for quarantine.

But deploying facial recognition systems during the pandemic raises another issue, which is that they tend to struggle with masked faces (at least for now), significantly reducing their efficacy.

The drone problem

Drones fall within a Venn diagram of tracking technology and present their own regulatory problems during the coronavirus pandemic. They’re a useful delivery system for things like medical supplies or other goods, and they may be used to spray disinfectants — but they’re also deployed for thermal scanning and facial recognition.

Indeed, policing measures — whether they’re called surveillance, quarantine enforcement, or something else — are an obvious and natural use case for drones. And this is deeply problematic, particularly when it involves AI casting an eye from the sky, exacerbating existing problems like overpolicing in communities that are predominately home to people of color.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is emphatic that there must be guardrails around the use of drones for any kind of coronavirus-related surveillance or tracking, and it wrote about the dangers they pose. The EFF isn’t alone in its concern, and the ACLU has recently gone so far as to take the issue of aerial surveillance to court.

Drone applications include the following examples:

In some roles, drones can help save lives, or at least reduce the spread of the coronavirus by limiting person-to-person contact. As surveillance mechanisms, they could become part of an oppressive police state.

They may even edge close to both at the same time. In an in-depth look at what happened with Draganfly, VentureBeat’s Emil Protalinski unpacked how the drone company went from trying to provide social distancing and health monitoring services from the air to licensing computer vision tech from a company called the Vital Intelligence and launching a pilot project in Westport, Connecticut aimed at flattening the curve. Local officials abruptly ended the pilot after blowback from residents, who objected to the surveillance drones and their ties to policing.

This article includes reporting by Kyle Wiggers.

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More Funds are Assembled for Biotech Startups in the Field of Longevity Science

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A number of entities are energetically raising funds to invest in biotech startups that aim to treat aging in some way. Beyond the more traditionally structured venture funds, such as the Longevity Fund, and technology funds like Kizoo Technology Ventures and Felicis Ventures that are turning their attention to biotech investment, there are also private equity / business development companies such as Juvenescence and Life Biosciences. Today I'll point out recent news for those two regarding their success in raising funding. This sort of thing is one of the signs of a building initial hype cycle for the first meaningful ways to intervene in aging, of which the most important is clearance of senescent cells via senolytic therapies of various types.

Highly promising new technologies always arrive with a great burst of investment, a period in which it is easy to raise funding for startup companies, a great deal of development takes place, and there is a much greater degree of enthusiasm for near term results than the reality merits. In addition to the useful projects that take place, emerging from those who know the ground well, there are also unsophisticated investors who will put funds into unwise projects. This always happens when there is a rush of this nature. Sooner or later those unwise projects come unraveled, the crash comes, and then there is some period in which everyone outside the industry is scornful, and investors who invested poorly shy away from the entire field, licking their wounds.

Once that is done and cooler heads prevail, a more tempered enthusiasm for progress will start to pick up again in a reasonable manner. The hype and the crash tends to obscure the fact that meaningful progress actually did occur as a result of at least some of the investment in the field, but humans being human we don't seem to have figured out a way to embark upon the creation of new industries without this initial excess and overreaction. It happened for railways, it happened for the internet, it will happen for rejuvenation.

So as a necessary step on the way towards the realization of the first of a future suite of rejuvenation therapies based on the SENS programs, those of use who have spent the past fifteen years or more trying to attract attention to this area of the life sciences should be pleased that matters have now reached the opening stages of the hype stage. Our efforts have successfully pushed the field forward. When the...

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