Some HVAC companies are offering UV-C lights that go inside the air recirculation system to help kill the virus. They used to be sold mostly to hospitals, but are now being promoted more generally. Apparently, they're effective, but also dangerous to technicians' eyesight. Since there's no way to tell if any given building has such a system, nor if it's operating correctly, masks are an excellent idea. https://www.lincolntech.edu/ne...

I think that's changed with the times. For the last few years, when I went out to bars and restaurants, most of the other people were looking at their phones, and ignoring the surroundings. You couldn't meet new people, because they got irritated that you were interrupting whatever was on their phone.

High speed internet is now almost ubiquitous in suburbs. It brings sporting events from all over the world, music, movies, arts, social media for group and personal friends (from a much larger possible community), video group chat, and all the other things we used to have to go out to find. All of those things are instantly accessable without commuting to work or play. Why spend an hour getting to and from a decent restaurant, and waiting for a table, when you can sit at home, talk to your friends immediately, and have whatever kind of food you want delivered?

Why would I want to walk anywhere, when Amazon will deliver anything I want, and Netflix will stream me entertainment? There are a few stores I might want to occasionally visit, but they're many miles away. It would make far more sense to drive to them. Once I arrive there, I'll want to park, which is difficult inside a city. I would rather drive further to visit a store outside the city, but with parking.

They are a corporation. Like all corporations, their highest priority is to make money.

You seem to have misread that study. It compares cloth masks, hospital grade masks, and "standard practice". It explicitly states, on the first page, that there is not a "no mask" control group. Standard practice was an unpredictable mixture of medical grade masks, cloth masks, and possibly no mask. However, the study was of health care workers working in high risk wards. Every hospital I've heard of mandates masks, especially for it's own workers, and especially in high risk areas. So the "standard practice" group was potentially similar to the medical mask group.

"The control arm was 'standard practice', which comprised mask use in a high proportion of participants. As such (without a no-mask control), the finding of a much higher rate of infection in the cloth mask arm could be interpreted as harm caused by cloth masks, efficacy of medical masks, or most likely a combination of both."

Have you ever tried to study in a dorm? They're loud. Serious students go to the library, regardless of if they live at home or in a dorm.

You don't have to travel. So you don't have to deal with airport security.

You don't have to stay in a hotel.

You can hear the presenttation, not people around you talking through it, coughing, and sneezing.

You can eat your own food, and stacks, possibly during the conferences.

You don't have to smell your fellow nerds (and vice versa).

The apps I've heard of use bluetooth to detect nearby phones. However, bluetooth range is variable depending on the conditions. How would they deal with false positives from other phones in next door apartments, or cars driving by on the street? It also seems like this could be easily poisoned by spoofed bluetooth ids.

Unfortunately, Walmart and dollar stores demonstrate a large number of end consumers are willing to buy imported crap to get a lower price.

Many kids duck out of real-world school. If you watch the local high school, you can see lots of kids entering in the morning. A few minutes later, you can watch many of them leave out the side doors. They check into homeroom, then leave. Most of the teachers don't have the time, or interest, to check attendance in every class period. So the kids are just assumed to be present.

In contrast, the online classes track logons (attendance), and give reports.

A web page would be better. There is no reason to have an app that requires installation and has compatibility issues. The applicant brings up an email from the testing company with their personal QR code. The employer scans it, it contains a url with a long code to that person's name, photo, and results. All handled with existing apps. Of course, any such system, web or app, would be easily spoofable. Just present a QR code for someone else that looks sort of like you. As we've seen with other large, hastily constructed systems (ie healthcare.gov), this would have massive problems, and leak like a sieve.

If all the information workers stay home, food delivery drivers will become the new major infection vector.

mac addresses, fiber patch panels, wire labels, part numbers, etc. WTF would I want this?

I've tried several e-ink dedicated readers, several android apps, and a few laptop apps. All of them work well for reflowable text. All of them fail at embedded images, graphs, and formula. The best of them render images unreadably small, sometimes a full page graph is shown as 1x1 inch, but let you zoom. Even a simple "automatically zoom to width" would help immensely. Most e-readers don't even let you zoom the images. Improving the display of embedded images would hugely improve sales of non-fiction ebooks, and help a lot with fiction that uses maps.

It's an unfortunate name. "Ervebo" sounds too much like "placebo". That will cause people to doubt it.