Category: Technology

Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2018

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer-internet-use.html

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Excerpt:

Among all households in 2018, 92% had at least one type of computer and 85% had a broadband internet subscription. The ACS considers desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones as computers, along with selected computing technologies such as smart home devices and single-board computers.

Smartphone ownership surpassed ownership of all other computing devices. Smartphones were present in 84% of households, while 78% of households owned a desktop or laptop. Tablet ownership fell behind at 63%.

Urban residents were more likely than rural residents to use computing devices (93% of urban households compared to 89% of rural households) and were more likely to have any sort of internet subscription (86% of urban households compared to 81% of rural households).

Author(s):

Publication Date: 21 April 2021

Publication Site: U.S. Census Bureau

Cell Maps – Critical Comments

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://logiccomppeople.blogspot.com/2021/04/cell-maps-critical-comments.html

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Excerpt:

Cell maps are intended as tools for reviewing spreadsheets. If you spot an error or an inconsistency in the cell map this should be recorded and, if practicable, corrected.

The cell mapping software provides a method for recording a reviewer’s comments. All comments are linked to a specific map (or data table), The comments for a workbook under review are collated in a single worksheet.

Publication Date: 18 April 2021

Publication Site: Logic, Computing, and People

Is the Great Stagnation Over?

Mary Pat Campbell
Is the Great Stagnation Over?

Excerpt:

Cowen cautioned that many technological advances would doubtlessly improve human welfare but still might not show up in U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and productivity statistics. For example, the new plug-and-play vaccine platforms may well result in highly effective vaccines for malaria and HIV, and that would be a huge boon for millions of people living in poor countries, but those benefits would be unlikely to show up U.S. GDP per capita statistics. He also pointed out that the recent significant advances in green energy production are occurring chiefly as a way to avoid the possible catastrophe of man-made climate change. Because climate change is a hidden counterfactual, replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind, and batteries would not necessarily lead people to feel as though their standard of living had risen.

Strain countered that the toll that infectious disease takes on the stunting of talents and skills in poor countries would be greatly ameliorated by rolling out cheap effective vaccines now made possible by messenger RNA technology. Over a longer time horizon, the U.S. and the rest of the world would significantly benefit from efflorescence of invention and entrepreneurship arising in regions whose development is held back by prevalent plagues.

Author(s): Ronald Bailey

Publication Date: 7 April 2021

Publication Site: Reason

14th Actuarial Speculative Fiction Submissions

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.soa.org/sections/2020-speculative-fiction-contest/

Excerpt:

The 14th Speculative Fiction Contest is over, and we now get to find out which story is the readers’ favorite!

Read each of the stories submitted by our creative and imaginative actuaries. Pick up to three of your favorite stories and vote for no more than three, so that we have a true Readers’ Choice Award. We will award the author of the story getting the most votes a specially designed Speculative Fiction Zoom background and an SOA branded gift. Be sure to tell your friends about this contest. Get them to read the stories and pick their favorites too!

Voting online must occur from March 8 – April 15. On May 1 this award, as well as all the other awards will be announced on the SOA website.

Publication Date: March 2021

Publication Site: Society of Actuaries

Huge vaccine error: 9,000 patients were forgotten

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://stiften.dk/artikel/k%C3%A6mpe-vaccinefejl-9-000-patienter-blev-glemt

Excerpt (via Google Translate):

Jørgen Schøler Kristensen, Medical Director at Aarhus University Hospital, explains the error as follows:

– When patients with a civil registration number beginning with 0 had to be entered, the civil registration number was declared invalid if a hyphen was missing. So 26 percent of the civil registration numbers we have reported have not been entered correctly, so they have not received the invitation in their e-box to be vaccinated as they should have had, says Jørgen Schøler Kristensen.

Patients born the first nine days of any month and having been unlucky with a hyphen were forgotten.

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Author(s): Jens Christian Thaysen

Publication Date: 19 March 2021

Publication Site: Århus Stiftstidende

Amazon jumps into health care with telemedicine initiative

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/amazon-jumps-health-care-telemedicine-initiative-76508970

Excerpt:

Amazon is making its first foray into providing health care services, announcing Wednesday that it will be offering its Amazon Care telemedicine program to employers nationwide.

Currently available to the company’s employees in Washington state, Amazon Care is an app that connects users virtually with doctors, nurse practitioners and nurses who can provide services and treatment over the phone 24 hours a day. In the Seattle area, it’s supplemented with in-person services such as pharmacy delivery and house-call services from nurses who can take blood work and provide similar services.

On Wednesday, the tech giant announced it will immediately expand the service to interested employers in Washington who want to purchase the service for their employees. By the summer, Amazon Care will expand nationally to all Amazon workers, and to private employers across the country who want to join.

Author(s): MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press

Publication Date: 17 March 2021

Publication Site: ABC News

Ethics and use of Data Sources for Underwriting ft. Neil Raden and Kevin Pledge -NSNA(Ep.4)

Mary Pat Campbell

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Description:

The video features Neil Raden who is the author of ethical use of AI for Actuaries. Alongside him , it features Kevin Pledge who is CEO of Acceptiv , FSA,FIA and chair of Innovation and Research Committee of SOA. We discuss about the issue of ethics and about the use of new data sources in the recent Emerging issues in Underwriting Survey Report by IfOA.

Authors: Harsh Jaitak, Kevin Pledge, Neil Raden

Publication Date: 17 March 2021

Publication Site: TBD Actuarial at YouTube

Excel Never Dies: The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies

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Excerpt:

Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form. 

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today. Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone.

Author(s): Packy McCormick

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: Not Boring

Recovering from the SolarWinds hack could take 18 months

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/02/1020166/solarwinds-brandon-wales-hack-recovery-18-months/

Excerpt:

Brandon Wales, the acting director of CISA, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, says that it will be well into 2022 before officials have fully secured the government networks compromised by Russian hackers. The list includes at least nine federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. Even fully understanding the extent of the damage will take months.

“I wouldn’t call this simple,” Wales says. “There are two phases for response to this incident. There is the short-term remediation effort, where we look to remove the adversary from the network, shutting down accounts they control, and shutting down entry points the adversary used to access networks. But given the amount of time they were inside these networks—months—strategic recovery will take time.”

Author(s): Patrick Howell O’Neill

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

A Letter Sealed for Centuries Has Been Read—Without Even Opening It

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-letter-sealed-for-centuries-has-been-readwithout-even-opening-it-11614679203?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

The “virtual unfolding” of the letter—the culmination of a four-year project described in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications—points to a new line of historical research into the centuries-old practice of letterlocking. That’s the term used to describe the use of origami-like folds to hide the content of letters before envelopes came into wide use in the mid-1800s.

“This is a dream come true in the field of conservation,” said Jana Dambrogio, the conservator at the research library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of 11 authors of the paper.

Experts say the technique used to reveal the text of the letter, which includes a type of imaging called X-ray microtomography, could also have applications in healthcare and engineering.

Author(s): Sara Castellanos

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Former SolarWinds CEO blames intern for ‘solarwinds123’ password leak

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/26/politics/solarwinds123-password-intern/index.html

Excerpt:

Current and former top executives at SolarWinds are blaming a company intern for a critical lapse in password security that apparently went undiagnosed for years.

The password in question, “solarwinds123,” was discovered in 2019 on the public internet by an independent security researcher who warned the company that the leak had exposed a SolarWinds file server.

Several US lawmakers ripped into SolarWinds for the password issue Friday, in a joint hearing by the House Oversight and Homeland Security committees.

“I’ve got a stronger password than ‘solarwinds123’ to stop my kids from watching too much YouTube on their iPad,” said Rep. Katie Porter. “You and your company were supposed to be preventing the Russians from reading Defense Department emails!”

Author(s): Brian Fung and Geneva Sands

Publication Date: 26 February 2021

Publication Site: CNN