Reporting, recording, and communication of COVID-19 cases in workplace : data protection as a moving target

In response to concerns related to privacy in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), recently European and national Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) issued guidelines and recommendations addressing a variety of issues related to the processing of personal data for preventive purposes. One of the recurring questions in these guidelines is related to the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees in reporting, recording, and communicating COVID-19 cases in workplace. National DPAs in some cases adopted different approaches regarding duties in reporting and communicating the COVID-19 cases; however, they unanimously stressed the importance of adopting privacy-preserving approaches to avoid raising concerns about surveillance and stigmatization. We stress that in view of the increasing use of new data collection and sharing tools such as ‘tracing and warning’ apps, the associated privacy-related risks should be evaluated on an ongoing manner. In addition, the intricacies of different settings where such apps may be used should be taken into consideration when assessing the associated risks and benefits

Ion implantation of 226Ra for a primary 222Rn emanation standard

Laser resonance ionization at the RISIKO 30 kV mass separator has been used to produce isotopically and isobarically pure and well quantified 222Rn emanation standards. Based upon laser-spectroscopic preparation studies, ion implantation into aluminum and tungsten targets has been carried out, providing overall implantation efficiencies of 40% up to 60%. The absolute implanted activity of 226Ra was determined by the technique of defined solid-angle α-particle spectrometry, where excellent energy resolution was observed. The 222Rn emanation coefficient of the produced targets was studied using α-particle and γ-ray spectrometry, and yielded results between 0.23 and 0.34, with relative uncertainty on the order of 1%. No dependence exceeding a 1% change of the emanation on humidity could be identified in the range of 15 %rH to 75 %rH, whereas there were hints of a slight correlation between the emanation and temperature. Additionally, and as expected, the emanation coefficient was found to be dependent on the target material as well as the implanted dose. © 202

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

James Grant. Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992, 442 pp. + notes.

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James Grant. Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending in America from the Civil War to Michael Milken. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992, 442 pp. + notes.

[No abstract

Ron Chernow. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) 812 pp. paperback.

[No abstract

Towards detection of chewing motion in the elderly using a glasses mounted accelerometer

In this work, we propose the use of a glasses mounted accelerometer to detect chewing motion in the elderly. Data from 13 elderly was collected during their daily meals. This data is used to evaluate a k-Nearest Neighbor classifier.status: publishe

Detection of chewing motion in the elderly using a glasses mounted accelerometer in a real-life environment

This paper describes a method of detecting an elderly person's chewing motion using a glasses mounted accelerometer. A real-life dataset was collected from 13 elderly adults, aged 65 or older, during meal times in a care facility. A supervised classifier is used to automatically distinguish between epochs of chewing and non-chewing activity. Results are compared to a lab dataset of 5 young to middle-aged adults captured in previous work. K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine classifiers are evaluated. All are able to achieve similar performance, with the Support Vector Machine performing the best with an F1-score of 0.73.status: publishe

Detection of chewing motion using a glasses mounted accelerometer towards monitoring of food intake events in the elderly

A novel way to detect food intake events using a wearable accelerometer is presented in this paper. The accelerometer is mounted on wearable glasses and used to capture the movements of the head. During meals, a person's chewing motion is clearly visible in the time domain of the captured accelerometer signal. Features are extracted from this signal and a forward feature selection algorithm is used to determine the optimal set of features. Support Vector Machine and Random Forest classifiers are then used to automatically classify between epochs of chewing and non-chewing. Data was collected from 5 volunteers. The Support Vector Machine approach with linear kernel performs best with a detection accuracy of 73.98% ± 3.99.status: publishe