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Masks pose additional challenges for deaf individuals, be sensitive

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All of us are more challenged to understand one another in a masked world, but the hearing have a clear advantage. Have you ever thought about how difficult it is for our deaf citizens to communicate in this climate? Of course, the American Speech-Language Hearing Association unequivocally advocates for mask-wearing. In a statement issued today, they simply want to stress the need for heightened awareness and tactful, sensitive changes in our communication methods with the deaf: “When messages aren’t received correctly, this can result not only in frustration, but also put people at risk for serious harm--especially in medical or emergency situations, ” said Dr. A. Lynn Williams, 2021 ASHA President. The association has advocated for the wearing of clear masks in order to aid in communication with deaf persons, successfully petitioning the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to include this in their June 2020 guidance. Tips for communicating with deaf individuals while we...
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WHO does not recommend switching vaccine brands, provides guidance on Moderna jab

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The World Health Organization put out a statement Jan. 25 detailing recommendations for first and second dosage protocol of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. They state that at this time, the benefits of taking what is the mRNA-1273 vaccine outweigh the risks. They further write: - The (Moderna) mRNA-1273 vaccine against COVID-19 developed by Moderna (Moderna COVID-19 vaccine) has been shown to have an efficacy of 94.1% based on a median follow-up of two months. - High efficacy was maintained across all age groups (above 18 years), and was not affected by sex or ethnicity. Addionally, with much talk about switching vaccine brands mid-stream, WHO states that this is not recommended. Yet, if this occurs accidentally, one should not re-take a second vaccine dose, i.e. don't start with Moderna, switch to Pfizer, then take an additional "second" dosage. WHO further write that efficacy after just the first dose of the Moderna vaccine is 91.9%, starting 14 days after the first dos...
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Breakthrough theory suggests emotions and mood underpin animal behaviour, much like in humans

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Years ago, I reported for Slate on animal relationships across species - not only are humans fond of their cats, but it turns out, it is not uncommon for dogs and cats to bond, as any Youtube search will prove. Less common is the cheetah and the dog, but even that relationship is part of the animal experience. "Animals can forge bonds across species boundaries if the need for social contact pre-empts their normal biological imperatives. A cat raised with dogs doesn’t know it’s a cat, the logic goes," my piece started. So I found it very interesting that a new study out of the UK talks about an aspect of this topic, animal emotions. The new theory from researchers at the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast suggests that animals experience emotions like we do - showing positive moods when they “win” and sour moods when they “lose”. Their findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . Using animal contests as a ca...
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MIT Consortium looks at race for a vaccine and how fast is too fast?

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In their fourth consortium regarding the pandemic, called "Catalyst Conversations" , researchers and scientists today spoke from their respective Zoom locations - including a cool ocean backdrop in England - to weigh in on the future of vaccines. Balancing the need for speed with safety is on everyone's minds these days, and definitely here in the States where President Trump even coined his team's efforts "Operation Warp Speed." While globally, effective vaccines and therapies to control the Covid-19 pandemic are weighing on everyone's minds, the reality is that every race has its cost. Today one of the panelists cited the comparison to an airplane, that "we are trying to build the airplane while flying it" and only later said darkly that there is a reason that of course, no one flies an airplane while it's being buit. Removing competitive barriers to encourage open science around antiviral and vaccine candidates, conjoining data standard...
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Researchers find way to use 'deep learning' to identify birds

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So-called "deep learning techniques", such as what are called convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been exciting ecologists lately. In a paper published this week in Methods in Ecology and Evolution with the British Ecological Society, researchers show how such tools can automatize the analysis of various types of bird data, ranging from species abundance to behaviors, and from sources such as pictures or audio recordings (reviewed in Christin, Hervet, & Lecomte, 2019). Such identification, the authors contend, is crucial when trying to answer questions related to evolutionary biology and is mostly performed by marking animals with tags. "Such methods are well-established, but often make data collection and analyses time-consuming, or limit the contexts in which data can be collected," the researchers write. Computational advances, in particular regarding deep learning -- part of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks -- can help r...
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Albert Einstein: Still A Revolutionary is Timely in Black Lives Matter Era

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"Many people don't realize that Albert Einstein was at the forefront of racial equality in the United States. It pained him to see the plight of African Americans." -Michio Kaku, Prof of Physics, City College NY Theoretical physicist and Nobelist Albert Einstein, famous for the equation E = mc2 and developing the theory of relativity, was greeted like a rock star when he appeared in public. He was a modest, unassuming celebrity and yet clearly the limelight suited him. In a new docudrama available for purchase on DVD, producer-director Julia Newman paints an elegant if at times frustrating portrait of the enigma scientist from Germany. He was Jewish and to hear her narrators tell it, gradually more fascinated with his own Jewishness. He had two wives (his physics student Mileva and then his cousin, the more matronly Elsa) but was a notorious womanizer, more or less sugarcoated in the film. He is shown to be a jerk in his treatment of wife one with a list of rules r...
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U.S. Travel Restrictions from China Did Not Significantly Slow Spread of Covid-19

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A new paper published as part of the Cato Working Papers (www.cato.org/workingpapers) posits that travel restrictions imposed from China did not halt transmission of the novel Coronavirus into the United States. The authors write that, "Historically, travel restrictions to prevent the spread of pandemic influenzas have been ineffective at halting or significantly delaying the spread (WHO Writing Group, 2006)." They use what is called the synthetic control method (SCM) to estimate a "counterfactual" (meaning, something has not happened or is not the case) number of COVID-19 cases for the U.S. in the absence of the February 2, 2020 travel restriction (Abadie, 2019; Abadie et al., 2010, 2015; Abadie et al., 2003; McClelland et al., 2017). "We use four different outcome variables to measure [the] number of COVID-19 cases: the cumulative number of new COVID-19 cases, the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per million, the number of new cases, and the number of n...
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