'After COVID, WHO defines disease spread 'through air''

 The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.

The Geneva-based U.N. health agency released a technical document on the topic on Thursday. It said it was the first step towards working out how to better prevent this kind of transmission, both for existing diseases like measles and for future pandemic threats.

The document concludes that the descriptor "through the air" can be used for infectious diseases where the main type of transmission involves the pathogen travelling through the air or being suspended in the air, in line with other terms such as "waterborne" diseases, which are understood across disciplines and by the public.

Almost 500 experts contributed to the definition, including physicists, public health professionals and engineers, many of whom disagreed bitterly over the topic in the past.

Agencies have historically required high levels of proof before calling diseases airborne, which required very stringent containment measures; the new definition says the risk of exposure and severity of disease should also be considered.

Past disagreements also centred around whether infectious particles were "droplets" or "aerosols" based on size, which the new definition moves away from.

During the early days of COVID in 2020, around 200 aerosol scientists publicly complained that the WHO had failed to warn people of the risk that the virus could spread through the air. This led to an overemphasis on measures like handwashing to stop the virus, rather than focusing on ventilation, they said.

By July 2020, the agency said there was "evidence emerging" of airborne spread, but its then chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan – who began the process to get a definition – later said the WHO should have been more forceful "much earlier".

Her successor, Jeremy Farrar, said in an interview that the new definition was about more than COVID, but he added that at the beginning of the pandemic there was a lack of evidence available and experts including the WHO acted in "good faith". At that time, he was head of the Wellcome Trust charity and advised the British government on the pandemic.

Farrar said getting the definition agreed among experts from all disciplines would allow discussions to begin about issues such as ventilation in many different settings, from hospitals to schools.

He compared it to the realization that blood-borne viruses like HIV or hepatitis B could be spread by medics not wearing gloves during procedures.

"When I started out, medical students, nurses, doctors, none of us wore gloves to take blood," he told Reuters. "Now it is unthinkable that you wouldn’t wear gloves. But that came because everyone agreed on what the issue was, they agreed on the terminology… [The change in practice] came later."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/covid-defines-disease-spread-air-101738633.html

US 911 emergency call line outage in 4 states

 Law enforcement agencies in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota and Texas reported temporary outages to 911 services before saying hours later that services had been restored. It was not immediately clear what caused the outages or whether they were related.

Also unclear was whether any emergency situations were impacted. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which houses the National 911 Program, said in a statement that its Office of Emergency Medical Services “is monitoring this issue.” A spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for additional information. A message also was left Thursday with the Federal Communications Commission.

The South Dakota Department of Public Safety said in statement posted on social media Wednesday night that it was aware of a 911 service interruption throughout the state. The agency noted that texting to 911 was working in most locations and people could still reach local law enforcement through non-emergency lines. Less than two hours later, the agency said service was restored to the state’s 911 system.

The same evening, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department 911 Communications warned of an outage affecting 911 and non-emergency calls in a social media post. Calls from landlines were not working, but officials said they could see the numbers of those who called from cellphones.

“Dial on a mobile device, and we will be able to see your number and will call you back right away,” the department posted.

About two hours later, the department posted that service was restored, and everyone who called during the outage had been called back and provided assistance.

In Nebraska, the sheriff’s offices in several counties, including Dundy, Kearney, and Howard, warned Wednesday night that 911 services were down, but advised a few hours later that services had been restored.

Cut fiber lines and other problems have caused 911 outages in recent years in Nebraska. The issue was worrisome enough that the Nebraska Public Service Commission hosted a hearing on the topic in December.

The police department in Del Rio, Texas, a city of 35,000 residents along the U.S.-Mexico border, posted that “an outage with a major cellular carrier” was to blame. It didn’t say which carrier. Del Rio had the opposite problem of Las Vegas — 911 calls from cellphones didn’t work, so those needing help were urged to use a landline or another cell carrier.

The outages, ironically, occurred in the midst of National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/law-enforcement-officials-4-states-130802387.html

Meta releases early versions of its Llama 3 AI model

  Meta Platforms on Thursday released early versions of its latest large language model, Llama 3, and an image generator that updates pictures in real time while users type prompts, as it races to catch up to generative AI market leader OpenAI.

The models will be integrated into virtual assistant Meta AI, which the company is pitching as the most sophisticated of its free-to-use peers. The assistant will be given more prominent billing within Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps as well as a new standalone website that positions it to compete more directly with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's breakout hit ChatGPT.

The announcement comes as Meta has been scrambling to push generative AI products out to its billions of users to challenge OpenAI's leading position on the technology, involving an overhaul of computing infrastructure and the consolidation of previously distinct research and product teams.

The social media giant equipped Llama 3 with new computer coding capabilities and fed it images as well as text this time, though for now the model will output only text, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said in an interview.

More advanced reasoning, like the ability to craft longer multi-step plans, will follow in subsequent versions, he added. Versions planned for release in the coming months will also be capable of "multimodality," meaning they can generate both text and images, Meta said in blog posts.

"The goal eventually is to help take things off your plate, just help make your life easier, whether it's interacting with businesses, whether it's writing something, whether it's planning a trip," Cox said.

Cox said the inclusion of images in the training of Llama 3 would enhance an update rolling out this year to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, a partnership with glasses maker Essilor Luxoticca, enabling Meta AI to identify objects seen by the wearer and answer questions about them.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-releases-early-versions-llama-160228478.html

'Smart gun will put fingerprint, facial recognition technology to work'

 A smart gun developed by Biofire will soon start shipping to customers that pre-ordered the firearm.

The Biofire Smart Gun features built-in fingerprint and infrared facial recognition technology that only permits use by "authorized" individuals, according to the company.

Biofire has called it the "first and only biometric firearm on the market."

The gun is a full-sized 9mm, striker-fired semiautomatic pistol. It features magazine sizes of 10 and a double-stacked 15-round magazine. It has a 4.7-inch barrel and a total of 8.7 inches in length. The total weight of the gun, unloaded, is 2.4 pounds. 

"We’re actually going to be shipping the first smart guns here within the next few weeks to early customers, and that’s a huge milestone for us," CEO Kai Kloepfer told host Maria Bartiromo on "Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street" late last week. "We’re excited to get to work at fulfilling this full backlog now that we’re fully into production."

Biofire developed a smart gun with fingerprint and facial recognition technology. (Biofire)

Biofire told FOX Business on Tuesday "wider shipments will be fulfilled throughout the remainder of the year with volume expected to continue to ramp as Biofire continues to build up production capabilities."

The company first revealed its 9mm Biofire Smart Gun about a year ago.

Kloepfer told Bartiromo last week that Biofire has "found that many gun owners are struggling with the challenges of wanting to make sure they appropriately and safely secure their firearm, ensuring their children don’t get access to it, but also have access to that in the very, very few short seconds that they might need to get access to it in some sort of home defense emergency." With its smart gun geared toward home defense, Biofire is looking to help solve that, he said.

Biofire’s smart gun only unlocks and becomes usable when it recognizes the biometric data of an "authorized" user holding it, according to the company’s website. At all other times, it automatically stays locked.

The gun also features electronic fire-control technology.

Biofire started fielding pre-orders for it in April of last year and, according to Kloepfer, has racked up "thousands" since then. It and its smart dock currently have a $1,499 price tag.

The company website on Wednesday afternoon listed the "launch edition" of the Biofire Smart Gun as sold out. Meanwhile, orders for Batch 4 will get filled and sent to customers in early 2025, according to the site.

The Biofire smart gun and its technology have been in the works for quite some time.

Kloepfer told Bartiromo his smart gun efforts started as a high school science fair project over a dozen years ago. Biofire itself was formed in 2016.

Biofire's smart gun in someone's hands. (Biofire)

Past smart gun initiatives by companies like Colt and Armatix did not pan out as intended, per the Wall Street Journal. That was reportedly due to skepticism, opposition and other factors.

During his "Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street" appearance, Kloepfer said Biofire has "many, many patents that have been filed and issued and fundamentally approaches this in a very different way that allows us to actually produce a reliable high quality product that gun owners like myself can trust with the safety of themselves and their families."

In 2023, the share of U.S. adults who reported owning a gun themselves or residing with someone else who did was 42%, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/smart-gun-fingerprint-facial-recognition-technology-work-biofire

New Study Calls Into Question Whether DEI Programs Really Boost Corporate Earnings

 by Jonathan Miltmore via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It’s safe to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is one of the more controversial ideas of our time (and a multibillion-dollar industry).

Some, such as Elon Musk, argue that DEI—which, definitionally speaking, means addressing structural inequalities in society—constitutes blatant racism. Others contend that DEI is simply about creating more equitable and harmonious workplaces and offers clear financial benefits to companies as well.

“Study after study has proved that diverse companies perform better than their more homogeneous counterparts,” Inc. reported in 2023. “Companies that don’t foster an inclusive environment or prioritize diversity initiatives do so at their own peril.”

“Proved” is a heavy (and inaccurate) word here, but Inc. isn’t wrong about the abundance of evidence showing that DEI initiatives make companies more profitable. Between 2015 and 2023, McKinsey & Co., a multinational strategy and management consulting firm, released four separate studies showing that DEI initiatives boost corporate earnings. Unfortunately for DEI advocates, the research appears to be bunk.

A new study published in Econ Journal Watch, a semiannual peer-reviewed academic journal, shows that researchers were unable to replicate the results of all four McKinsey studies.

“Our results indicate that despite the imprimatur often given to McKinsey’s 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2023 studies, McKinsey’s studies neither conceptually ... nor empirically ... support the argument that large US public firms can expect on average to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives,” professors John R.M. Hand and Jeremiah Green found.

This is not the only research that shows that DEI initiatives are not the panacea for corporate earnings that supporters claim them to be. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Robin J. Ely, a professor of business administration at Harvard, and David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse College, pointed out that “the rallying cries for more diversity in companies” are not supported “by robust research findings.”

Ms. Ely and Mr. Thomas said, “We say this as scholars who were among the first to demonstrate the potential benefits of more race and gender heterogeneity in organizations.”

The idea that all these studies showing clear financial benefits to DEI are rubbish might be shocking to some readers, but it’s a familiar academic pattern. For more than a decade, scholars and media have publicly worried about the “replication crisis” in science. It turns out that an astonishing number of findings in various fields—from psychology and economics to sociology, medicine, and beyond—fail to hold up when other researchers attempt to replicate the findings, as Vox has explained.

None of this is to say that diversity and inclusion are inherently bad, of course.

I value diversity and am an inclusive person, and I encourage others to be the same. It’s the means that we choose to achieve diversity and inclusion that is the problem, as well as that word wedged in between them: equity. To many, advancing social equity is a paramount value. Because of this, many support illiberal means (in the classical sense) to achieve this end—including supporting policies that actively discriminate on the basis of race.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The End of Race Politics,” recently appeared on “The View” and offered a better approach.

“My argument is that we should try our very best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and our public policy,” Mr. Hughes told the hosts (who accused him of being “co-opted” by the right).

He is right to say that this is the North Star that we should be aiming for: the equal treatment of all people regardless of race or class.

The great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass saw that such a view is the true path to progress.

“In a composite nation like ours, as before the law, there should be no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights, and a common destiny,” Mr. Douglass noted in a speech in 1867.

The ethos of DEI runs counter to this, which is precisely why both the concept and the industry should be scrapped. A good place to start would be to dispense with the fiction that DEI programs are a rainbow leading to a pot of gold in corporate profits.

Originally published by the Washington Examiner

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-study-calls-question-whether-dei-programs-really-boost-corporate-earnings

Stocks Face Resistance While Liquidity Backdrop Is Weak

 Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The impulse from central-bank reserves in the US, or the change in their change on a monthly basis, points to further short-term resistance for stocks.

The Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening program is ongoing, but bank reserves still remain almost $400 billion higher than when the Fed began QT in June 2022, even as the total size of the Fed’s balance sheet steadily contracts.

The “Treasury pivot,” its decision to pivot issuance towards bills, was instrumental in allowing risk assets to rally in the face of tight monetary policy, by allowing money market funds to finance the government using reserves it had parked at the Fed’s reverse repo facility.

But for risk assets such as stocks, their shorter-term performance is not just related to by how much reserves are rising, it’s by how much they are accelerating. The chart below shows the impulse in reserves - the one-month change of their one-month change - tracks the one-month change of the S&P. The impulse has been weakening, consistent with the headwinds stocks have been encountering.

The headwinds are likely to continue. In the short term, reserves have fallen due to tax payments. The Treasury’s account at the Fed has risen over $240 billion to $906 billion since last week as taxes came in, with increases in the account removing reserves from the system. The Treasury aims to keep the account around $750 billion, so it should fall again as the Treasury spends the money, re-injecting reserves back into the system.

Nonetheless, reserves are likely to be increasingly challenged as the RRP falls. The facility this week hit its lowest levels in almost two years, to a low of $327 billion. Some of that is tax related, but key is that bill yields, e.g. six and 12-month maturities, are rising again as the amount of interest rate cuts expected from the Fed diminishes. This makes bills more attractive for MMFs, who then pull money out of the RRP to buy them.

Not only will that incrementally make the liquidity backdrop for stocks less friendly this year, it also means funding risks are rising again. In this changing environment, it is prudent for investors to heighten their vigilance.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stocks-will-face-resistance-while-liquidity-backdrop-weak

Benitec Positive Interim Data in Phase 1b/2a Muscular Dystrophy Trial

 -First efficacy signals demonstrated for a gene therapy under development for Oculopharyngeal Muscular Dystrophy (OPMD) which affects ~15,000 patients worldwide-

- BB-301 facilitated improvements across multiple measures of swallowing function in the first Phase 1b/2a clinical study subject as compared to pretreatment assessments conducted during the observational natural history portion of the study-

-Virtual R&D Day being held today at 9:00 am EDT, details below-

Virtual R&D Event Information:
This live virtual R&D Event, featuring two OPMD key opinion leaders, will be held at 9:00 AM EDT today, April 18th, 2024 and can be accessed here. The event replay will be placed on the News & Events tab on the Investor page of the Benitec website.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/04/18/2865286/0/en/Benitec-Biopharma-Reports-Positive-Interim-Clinical-Trial-Data-for-First-OPMD-Subject-Treated-with-BB-301-in-Phase-1b-2a-Study.html