How will self-driving cars affect public health?
The researchers created a conceptual model to systematically identify the
pathways through which AVs can affect public health. The proposed model
summarizes the potential changes in transportation after AV implementation
into seven points of impact: transportation infrastructure; land use and the
built environment; traffic flow; transportation mode choice; transportation
equity; and jobs related to transportation and traffic safety. The changes in
transportation are then attributed to potential health impacts. In optimistic
views, AVs are expected to prevent 94% of traffic crashes by eliminating
driver error, but AVs’ operation introduces new safety issues such as the
potential of malfunctioning sensors in detecting objects, misinterpretation of
data, and poorly executed responses, which can jeopardize the reliability of
AVs and cause serious safety consequences in an automated environment. Another
possible safety consideration is the riskier behavior of users because of
their overreliance on AVs—for example, neglecting the use of seatbelts due to
an increased false sense of safety. AVs have the potential to shift people
from public transportation and active transportation such as walking and
biking to private vehicles in urban areas, which can result in more air
pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and create the potential loss of
driving jobs for those in the public transit or freight transport industries.
Now’s The Time For Long-Term Thinking
For most financial institutions, the strategic planning process for 2021 is
far different than any in the past. As opposed to an iterative adjustment to
plans from the previous year, this year’s planning must take into account a
level of change in technology, competition, consumer behaviors, society and
many other areas that is far less defined than before. The uncertainty about
the future requires a combination of a solid strategic foundation with sensing
capabilities and the ability to respond to threats and opportunities as
quickly as possible. For many banks and credit unions, this will require
organizational restructuring, the reallocation of resources, revamping
processes, finding new outside partners and a culture that will support
flexibility in plans that never was required before. There is also the need to
build a marketplace sensing capability across the entire organization and from
a broader array of sources. This includes customers, internal staff
(especially customer-facing employees), suppliers, strategic partners,
research organizations, boards of directors and even competition. Gathering
the insights is only half the battle. There must also be a centralized
location to gather and analyze the insights collected.
Rapid Threat Evolution Spurs Crucial Healthcare Cybersecurity Needs
Cybercriminals have been actively taking advantage of the global pandemic,
with an increase in cyberattacks, phishing, spear-phishing, and business email
compromise (BEC) attempts. And on the healthcare side of things, NSCA
Executive Director, Kelvin Coleman, said it’s not a huge surprise. Even
in the early 1900s during the Spanish flu pandemic, folks would put articles
in newspapers to take advantage of the crisis with hoaxes and scams, Coleman
explained. “Bad actors take advantage of crises,” he said. “Hackers are
being aggressive, leveraging targeted emails and phishing attempts. Josh
Corman, cofounder of IAmTheCalvary.org and DHS CISA Visiting Researcher,
stressed that when a provider is forced into EHR downtime and to divert
patient care, it’s even more nightmarish during a pandemic. In Germany, a
patient died earlier this month after a ransomware attack shut down operations
at a hospital, and she was diverted to another hospital. These are
criminals without scruples, Corman explained. The attacks were happening
before the pandemic, but there’s been no cease- fire amid the crisis. In
healthcare, hackers continue to rely on previously successful attack methods –
especially phishing. It continues to be a successful attack method.
FBI, CISA: Russian hackers breached US government networks, exfiltrated data
US officials identified the Russian hacker group as Energetic Bear, a codename
used by the cybersecurity industry. Other names for the same group also
include TEMP.Isotope, Berserk Bear, TeamSpy, Dragonfly, Havex, Crouching Yeti,
and Koala. Officials said the group has been targeting dozens of US state,
local, territorial, and tribal (SLTT) government networks since at least
February 2020. Companies in the aviation industry were also targeted, CISA and
FBI said. The two agencies said Energetic Bear "successfully compromised
network infrastructure, and as of October 1, 2020, exfiltrated data from at
least two victim servers." The intrusions detailed in today's CISA and FBI
advisory are a continuation of attacks detailed in a previous CISA and FBI
joint alert, dated October 9. The previous advisory described how hackers had
breached US government networks by combining VPN appliances and Windows bugs.
Today's advisory attributes those intrusions to the Russian hacker group but
also provides additional details about Energetic Bear's tactics. According to
the technical advisory, Russian hackers used publicly known vulnerabilities to
breach networking gear, pivot to internal networks, elevate privileges, and
steal sensitive data.
Secure NTP with NTS
NTP can be secured well with symmetric keys. Unfortunately, the server has to
have a different key for each client and the keys have to be securely
distributed. That might be practical with a private server on a local network,
but it does not scale to a public server with millions of clients. NTS
includes a Key Establishment (NTS-KE) protocol that automatically creates the
encryption keys used between the server and its clients. It uses Transport
Layer Security (TLS) on TCP port 4460. It is designed to scale to very large
numbers of clients with a minimal impact on accuracy. The server does not need
to keep any client-specific state. It provides clients with cookies, which are
encrypted and contain the keys needed to authenticate the NTP packets. Privacy
is one of the goals of NTS. The client gets a new cookie with each server
response, so it doesn’t have to reuse cookies. This prevents passive observers
from tracking clients migrating between networks. The default NTP client in
Fedora is chrony. Chrony added NTS support in version 4.0. The default
configuration hasn’t changed. Chrony still uses public servers from the
pool.ntp.org project and NTS is not enabled by default. Currently, there are
very few public NTP servers that support NTS. The two major providers are
Cloudflare and Netnod.
Non-Intimidating Ways To Introduce AI/ML To Children
The brainchild of IBM, Machine Learning for Kids is a free, web-based tool to
introduce children to machine learning systems and applications of AI in the
real world. Machine Learning for Kids is built by Dale Lane using APIs from
IBM Watson. It provides hands-on experiments to train ML systems that
recognise texts, images, sounds, and numbers. It leverages platforms such as
Scratch and App Inventor to create interesting projects and games. It is also
being used in schools as a significant resource to teach AI and ML to
students. Teachers can also form their own admin page to manage their access
to students. A product from the MIT Media Lab, Cognimates is an open-source AI
learning platform for young children starting from age 7. Children can learn
how to build games, robots, and train their own AI modes. Like Machine
Learning for Kids, Cognimates is also based on Scratch programming language.
It provides a library of tools and activities for learning AI. This platform
even allows children to program intelligent devices such as Alexa. Another
offering from Google in order to make learning AI fun and engaging is AIY. The
name is an intelligent wordplay with AI and do-it-yourself (DIY).
How RPA differs from conversational AI, and the benefits of both
Enterprises are working to digitally transform core business processes to
enable greater automation of backend processes and to encourage more seamless
customer experiences and self-service at the frontend. We are seeing banks,
insurers, retailers, energy providers and telcos working to develop their own
digital assistants with a growing number of skills, while still providing a
consistent brand experience. Developing bots doesn’t have to be complex. It is
more important to carefully identify the right use cases where these
technologies will deliver clear ROI with the least amount of effort. Whether
an enterprise is applying RPA or conversational AI, or both, it’s important to
first understand the business problem that needs to be solved, and then
identify where bots will make an immediate difference. Then consider the
investment required, barriers to successful implementation, and the expected
business outcomes. It’s better to start small with a narrowly focused use case
and achievable KPIs, rather than trying to do too much at once. Conversational
AI and RPA are very powerful automation technologies. When designed well, a
chatbot can automate up to 80% of routine queries that come into a customer
service centre or IT helpdesk, saving an organisation time and money and
enabling it to scale its operations.
Things to consider when running visual tests in CI/CD pipelines: Getting Started
Testing – it’s an important part of a developer’s day-to-day, but it’s also
crucial to the operations engineer. In a world where DevOps is more than just
a buzzword, where it’s become accepted as a mindset shift and culture change,
we all need to consider running quality tests. Traditional testing may include
UI testing, integration testing, code coverage checks, and so forth, but at
some point, we still need eyeballs on a physical page. How many times have we
seen a funny looking page because of CSS errors? Or worse yet, an important
button like say, “Buy now” “missing” because someone changed the CSS and now
the button blends in with the background? Logically, the page still works, and
even from a traditional test perspective, the button can be clicked, and the
DOM (used in UI Test verification) is perfect. Visually, however, the page is
broken; this is where visual testing comes into play. Visual testing allows us
to use automated UI testing with the power of AI to help us determine if a
page “looks right” aside from just “functions right.” Earlier this year, I
partnered with Angie Jones from Applitools in a joint webinar where we talked
about best practices as it pertains to both Visual Testing and also CI/CD.
This blog post is a summary of that webinar and how to handle visual testing
in CI/CD.
Design patterns – for faster, more reliable programming
Every design has a pattern and everything has a template, whether it be a cup,
house, or dress. No one would consider attaching a cup’s handle to the inside
– apart from novelty item manufacturers. It has simply been proven that these
components should be attached to the outside for practical purposes. If you
are taking a pottery class and want to make a pot with handles, you already
know what the basic shape should be. It is stored in your head as a design
pattern, in a manner of speaking. The same general idea applies to computer
programming. Certain procedures are repeated frequently, so it was no great
leap to think of creating something like pattern templates. In our guide, we
will show you how these design patterns can simplify programming. The term
“design pattern” was originally coined by the American architect Christopher
Alexander who created a collection of reusable patterns. His plan was to
involve future users of the structures in the design process. This idea was
then adopted by a number of computer scientists. Erich Gamma, Richard Helm,
Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (sometimes referred to as the Gang of Four
or GoF) helped software patterns break through and gain acceptance with their
book “Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” in
1994.
Public and Private Blockchain: How to Differentiate Them and Their Use Cases
Public blockchain is the model of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin and is
essentially considered to be the original distributed ledger structure. This
type of blockchain is completely open and anyone can join and participate in
the network. It can receive and send transactions from anybody in the world,
and can also be audited by anyone who is in the system. Each node (a computer
connected to the network) has as much transmission and power as any other,
making public blockchains not only decentralized, but fully distributed, as
well. ... Private blockchains, on the other hand, are essentially forks of the
originator but are deployed in what is called a permissioned manner. In order
to gain access to a private blockchain network, one must be invited and then
validated by either the network starter or by specific rules that were put
into place by the network starter. Once the invitation is accepted, the new
entity can contribute to the maintenance of the blockchain in the customary
manner. Due to the fact that the blockchain is on a closed network, it offers
the benefits of the technology but not necessarily the distributed
characteristics of the public blockchain.
Quote for the day:
"Every moment is a golden one for those who have the vision to recognize it as such." -- Henry Miller
