Many internet companies posted record performance during the pandemic as consumers turned to apps and other cloud software to work, study, socialize and shop from home. But as vaccines roll out and restrictions relax, some of this unprecedented digital demand is fading. From a report: Data from research firm Apptopia reveal how the superstar apps of the Covid-19 era are faring now in the U.S. Plus, stats from New Zealand, a country that reopened earlier, show what the future might hold for these services. Here's the main takeaway: Many well-known apps are losing ground, or usage has stabilized. Some behaviors are sticking, though, suggesting the pandemic will provide a more-permanent boost for a few internet companies.

Zoom Video Communications's app has been so ubiquitous during the pandemic that it's now a verb. Lately, though, workers complain of "Zoom fatigue," and data from New Zealand are ominous. Usage has dropped in that country as employees and students return to offices and schools. Even in the U.S., where most offices remain virtual, Zoom use peaked in September. The company said recently it's well positioned for strong growth. Microsoft's Teams communication software was another work-from-home hit last year. That service has seen mobile app usage decline, too, especially in New Zealand. Other staples of the virtual workplace are here to stay, according to Apptopia data. DocuSign's app, which lets you sign contracts and other documents digitally, has seen consistently high usage lately. The app has become a popular way to close real-estate transactions, so it is likely getting an extra boost from the housing boom.

A company that makes an email app that helps users encrypt their emails paid for fake reviews in an attempt to get more people to download its products, according to leaked emails obtained by Motherboard. An anonymous reader shares a report: The CEO of pEp, a Luxembourg-based company that makes the pEp email encryption apps for Android and iOS, commissioned a marketing company to write fake reviews that he himself wrote in the summer of last year. Leon Schumacher asked the marketing company Mobiaso to post 40 five-star reviews in English, French, and German to the Google Play Store. Schumacher included an Excel spreadsheet that contained the specific text that he wanted Mobiaso to use. "Super easy privacy," one fake review said. "One of the best mail applications. I have never had problems and I suggest it all the time to friends," another said.

"Can we speed up today and do 12 ratings per day do 7 reviews per day (Please use the Texts below for the right countries (that I forwarded already per earlier e-mail)," Schumacher wrote in an email to Mobiaso. pEp, short for Pretty Easy Privacy, develops email encryption apps for both iOS and Android, where it has more than 10,000 installs, according to the stats on the Google Play Store. The company, through its foundation, also funded a new library to encrypt emails using PGP, the decades old technology that allows users to encrypt emails and other files. Mobiaso advertises "iOS reviews" and "Android installs" on its website. One of the services the company offers is App Store Optimization, or ASO, which includes fake reviews. The service has several price tiers, ranging from $160 to $450. Only the two most expensive tiers include fake reviews. "Each app developer/advertiser should remember that without a good ASO search optimization, your target audience wouldn't even find or open your app page," Mobiaso says.

The BBC reports: The number of daily Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the UK has hit a record high for a third consecutive day. A combined total of 844,285 first or second doses were given on Saturday, up from 711,157 on Friday. On Twitter, Prime Minister Boris Johnson thanked "everyone involved".

More than 27.6 million people in the UK — more than half the adult population — have now received at least one dose of a vaccine... Of the vaccinations administered on Saturday, 752,308 were first doses and 91,977 were second, meaning 2,228,772 people in the UK have now been fully vaccinated.
How does that compare to other regions? In the USA — which has roughly five times the UK's population — 81.4 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine, representating about 24.5% of the eligible population. But 41.9 million Americans have been fully vaccinated (according to figures compiled by the Washington Post).

And here's some more figures from the Los Angeles Times, including vaccination stats for the state of California — roughly 60% of the UK's population: The last six days have seen the six highest single-day totals of shots given out statewide, according to data compiled by the Los Angeles Times. During that stretch, roughly 2.35 million doses were administered statewide — including 344,489 on Thursday and 387,015 on Friday... To date, nearly 13.8 million shots have been administered statewide [and] 23.5% of Californians have received at least one vaccine dose — a proportion that ranks 33rd out of all states and U.S. territories, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By comparison, 31.4% of New Mexico's population has gotten at least one shot, as have 29.6% of Alaskans and 29% of those living in South Dakota. California measures up better compared with more populous states. As of Friday, 24.3% of residents had received one shot in Pennsylvania, 24.2% in New York, 22.2% in Florida and 20.9% in Texas, CDC data show.. Roughly 11.8% of all Californians have been fully vaccinated. California is somewhat ahead of the national curve when it comes to vaccinating its older residents. Roughly 71.9% of residents ages 65 and older have received at least one dose, according to the CDC, compared with the nationwide figure of 67.1%.

In its ongoing attempt to gauge the popularity of programming languages, "C is at the top of the list of TIOBE'S Index for February 2021 with Java in second place," reports TechRepublic: Those two languages swapped positions on the list as compared to 2020, but the rest of the list is almost exactly the same as a year ago. Python is in the No. 3 spot followed by C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL.

Assembly Language rounds out the top 10 list, up from spot 12 in 2020. R moved up two spots over the last year from 13 to 11. Groovy jumped to the 12h spot, up from 26 a year ago. Classic Visual Basic is on the rise also moving up four spots to 18.
For what it's worth, in the last year Go has dropped to #13 on the list — overtaken by assembly language, R, and Groovy.

And Swift dropped from #10 to #15, also being overtaken in the last year by Ruby.

The BBC reports on "the computers rejecting your job application," noting that applicants are now being screened with AI-scored tests that involve counting dots in boxes and matching emotions to facial expressions: The questions, and your answers to them, are designed to evaluate several aspects of a jobseeker's personality and intelligence, such as your risk tolerance and how quickly you respond to situations. Or as Pymetrics puts it, "to fairly and accurately measure cognitive and emotional attributes in only 25 minutes".

Its AI software is now used in the initial recruitment processes of a number of multinational companies, such as McDonald's, bank JP Morgan, accountancy firm PWC, and food group Kraft Heinz. An interview with a human recruiter then follows if you pass. "It's about helping firms process a much wider pool [of applicants], and getting signals that someone will be successful in a job," says Pymetrics founder Frida Polli...

Another provider of AI recruitment software is Utah-based HireVue. Its AI system records videos of job applicants answering interview questions via their laptop's webcam and microphone. The audio of this is then converted into text, and an AI algorithm analyses it for key words, such as the use of "I" instead of "we" in response to questions about teamwork. The recruiting company can then choose to let HireVue's system reject candidates without having a human double-check, or have the candidate moved on for a video interview with an actual recruiter.

HireVue says that by September 2019 it had conducted a total of 12 million interviews, of which 20% were via the AI software. The remaining 80% were with a human interviewer on the other end of a video screen. The overall figure has now risen to 19 million, with the same percentage split. HireVue first started offering the AI interviews in 2016. Its users include travel services firm Sabre.

Meanwhile, a report from 2019 said that such is the growth in the use of AI that it will replace 16% of recruitment sector jobs before 2029.

Nvidia is now requiring, not just encouraging, companies selling laptops with its new RTX 30-series graphics chips to be more transparent about the kind of power people can expect. From a report: Nvidia tells The Verge these companies will have to disclose specific clock speed stats and total graphics power on online product pages -- all of which tells people everything they need to know about a laptop's graphics potential, for better or worse. However, companies won't have to mention that these chips are Max-Q variants because, according to an Nvidia spokesperson, "Max-Q is no longer part of the GPU name." Rather, Max-Q is now solely used to communicate that a laptop with an RTX 30-series graphics chip ships with efficiency features like Whisper Mode 2, Dynamic Boost 2, and Advanced Optimus. Previously, seeing Max-Q branding made it easy to determine a laptop's general performance without having to know its specific clock speeds. It's encouraging to see Nvidia no longer allows companies to hide this vital information from marketing materials. It should go far enough in helping buyers make an educated purchase without having to wait on reviewers and early adopters to report on the specs.

In December, Ars reported that as many as 3 million people had been infected by Chrome and Edge browser extensions that stole personal data and redirected users to ad or phishing sites. Now, the researchers who discovered the scam have revealed the lengths the extension developers took to hide their nefarious deeds. Ars Technica reports: Researchers from Prague-based Avast said on Wednesday that the extension developers employed a novel way to hide malicious traffic sent between infected devices and the command and control servers they connected to. Specifically, the extensions funneled commands into the cache-control headers of traffic that was camouflaged to appear as data related to Google analytics, which websites use to measure visitor interactions. Referring to the campaign as CacheFlow, Avast researchers wrote: "CacheFlow was notable in particular for the way that the malicious extensions would try to hide their command and control traffic in a covert channel using the Cache-Control HTTP header of their analytics requests. We believe this is a new technique. In addition, it appears to us that the Google Analytics-style traffic was added not just to hide the malicious commands, but that the extension authors were also interested in the analytics requests themselves. We believe they tried to solve two problems, command and control and getting analytics information, with one solution."

The extensions, Avast explained, sent what appeared to be standard Google analytics requests to https://stats.script-protection[.]com/__utm.gif. The attacker server would then respond with a specially formed Cache-Control header, which the client would then decrypt, parse, and execute. Avoiding infecting users who were likely to be Web developers or researchers. The developers did this by examining the extensions the users already had installed and checking if the user accessed locally hosted websites. Additionally, in the event that an extension detected that the browser developer tools were opened, it would quickly deactivate its malicious functionality. Waiting three days after infection to activate malicious functionality. Checking every Google search query a user made. In the event a query inquired about a server the extensions used for command and control, the extensions would immediately cease their malicious activity.

An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com published an article, according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times... [T]his number is still to be found in the marketing of most COBOL service providers, compiler vendors (IBM, Micro-Focus and others) and countless articles about how relevant COBOL supposedly still was. The article originally reported 30 billion "CICS transactions", but within 2 years it had already been turned into "COBOL transactions"...

The "30 billion" likely originates from a DataPro survey in 1997, in which they still reported 20 billion transactions per day. Only 421 companies participated in that survey. They actually scaled the results from such a small survey up to the IT-market of the entire world!

That same survey is also the source of many other numbers that are still to be found in the marketing of COBOL compiler vendors and articles:

- There are 200 billion lines of COBOL Code

- That's 60-80% of all the source codes in the world [sic]

- 5 billion lines of COBOL code are newly written each year

- There are 2 million COBOL developers in the world

- COBOL processes 95% of all "in person transactions", "ATM swipes" or similar

DataPro was bought by Gartner Inc. in 1997. Since then, all the numbers are reported to come "from Gartner". Only very early sources quote DataPro as their source.

Some of these numbers are obvious nonsense. The explanation for this is that DataPro had only surveyed mainframe owners. So it only says that 60-80% of all the source codes on mainframes are written in COBOL (which is plausible at least for 1997). And only 95% of all credit companies that have mainframes use their mainframes for processing credit card transactions. Considering the low participation, we are probably talking about 19 of 20 credit companies here.

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire.

The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences.

Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).

Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn't much else to do. From a report: Buchanan had an idea for a social media site about movies. At the time, he reflected, he used Flickr to share photos and Last.fm to share his taste in music. IMDb was a database; it wasn't, in essence, social. That left a gap in the field. The result was an app and social media network called Letterboxd, which its website describes, aptly, as "Goodreads for film." After it was introduced at the web conference Brooklyn Beta in the fall of 2011, Letterboxd steadily developed a modest but passionate following of film fans eager to track their movie-watching habits, create lists of favorites, and write and publish reviews. In 2020, however, the site's growth was explosive. Letterboxd has seen its user base nearly double since the beginning of the pandemic: They now have more than 3 million member accounts, according to the company, up from 1.7 million at this time last year.

The pandemic has ravaged the movie industry, as theaters have remained mostly shuttered and high-profile would-be blockbusters like "Tenet" have drastically underperformed. But for Letterboxd, all that time at home has been a boon. "We love talking about movies," said Gemma Gracewood, Letterboxd's editor in chief. "And we're talking even more about what we love lately because we're all stuck indoors." In the beginning, Letterboxd mainly attracted film obsessives: hard-core cinephiles, stats fanatics and professional critics looking to house their published work under one roof. Mike D'Angelo, a longtime contributor to Entertainment Weekly and Esquire, used Letterboxd to retroactively log every movie he has seen, by date, since January 1992. In addition to uploading his old reviews to the platform, he uses the site as a kind of diary for more off-the-cuff musings.

Spotify's $100 million-plus Anchor acquisition is seemingly paying off. From a report: In data released today as part of its annual Wrapped look-back on the year, the company says Anchor, which makes podcast creation software, powered 80 percent of new podcasts on Spotify this year, meaning the software contributed more than 1 million shows to Spotify's catalog in 2020 alone. Overall, Anchor powers 70 percent of Spotify's total podcast catalog, or around 1.3 million out of over 1.9 million shows. People also seem to be listening to that content. Spotify says Anchor shows account for more consumption, in terms of time spent listening, than any other third-party podcast hosting or distribution provider on its platform. (Not counting shows owned or operated by Spotify.) This sounds surprising, at least to me, especially given that big networks like NPR, The New York Times, and Wondery all put their shows on Spotify. But Mike Mignano, head of podcast mission at Spotify, says the data point speaks to the large global podcasting ecosystem that people might not know exists. With more than a million Anchor shows on the platform, listening time adds up fast, even if some shows only have a small group of dedicated fans.

New submitter LeeLynx shares a report from The Register: A new group called the "Inclusive Naming Initiative" has revealed its existence and mission "to help companies and projects remove all harmful and unclear language of any kind and replace it with an agreed-upon set of neutral terms." Akamai, Cisco, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, IBM, the Linux Foundation, Red Hat, and VMware are all participants. The group has already offered a Word replacement list that suggests alternatives to the terms whitelist, blacklist, slave, and master. There's also a framework for evaluating harmful language that offers guidance on how to make changes.

Red Hat's post announcing its participation in the Initiative links to a dashboard listing all instances of terms it wants changed and reports over 330,000 uses of "Master" and 105,000 uses of "Slave," plus tens of thousands and whitelists and blacklists. Changing them all will be a big job, wrote Red Hat's senior veep and CTO Chris Wright. "On a technical level, change has to be made in hundreds of discrete communities, representing thousands of different projects across as many code repositories," Wright wrote. "Care has to be taken to prevent application or API breakage, maintain backward compatibility, and communicate the changes to users and customers." The Initiative nonetheless hopes to move quickly, with its roadmap calling for best practices to be defined during Q1 2021, case studies to be available in Q3 2021 and a certification program delivered in Q4 2021.

Joe Morrison: The first time I spoke with Jennings Anderson, I couldn't believe what he was telling me. I mean that genuinely -- I did not believe him. He was a little incredulous about it himself. I felt like he was sharing an important secret with me that the world didn't yet know. The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world's largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written. The four companies in the inner circle -- Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft -- have a combined market capitalization of over six trillion dollars. In almost every other setting, they are mortal enemies fighting expensive digital wars of attrition. Yet they now find themselves eagerly investing in and collaborating on OSM at an unprecedented scale (more on the scale later). What likely started as a conversation in a British pub between grad students in 2004 has spiraled out of control into an invaluable, strategic, voluntarily-maintained data asset the wealthiest companies in the world can't afford to replicate.

I will admit that I used to think of OSM as little more than a virtuous hobby for over-educated Europeans living abroad -- a cutesy internet collectivist experiment somewhere on the spectrum between eBird and Linux. It's most commonly summarized with a variant of this analogy: OSM is to an atlas as Wikipedia is to an encyclopedia. OSM acolytes hate this comparison in the much same way baseball players resent when people describe the sport as "cricket for fat people." While vaguely truthful, it doesn't quite get to the spirit of the thing. OSM is incomparable. Over 1.5M individuals have contributed data to it. It averages 4.5M changes per day. The stats page on the OSM Wiki is a collection of hockey sticks. [...]

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares an article from Live Science asking a thought-provoking question: How long do most species last before going extinct? The majestic blue whale has plied the seas for about 4.5 million years, while the Neanderthals winked out of existence in a few hundred thousand years. But are those creatures representative of species overall? How long do species usually last before they go extinct? It turns out the answer we find now could be very different than it usually is. Because of habitat destruction, climate change, and a range of other factors, plants and animals are disappearing from the planet faster than all but maybe five other points in history. Some experts say we're in the sixth mass extinction event...

Experts don't agree on the average amount of time that species in any category last before going extinct. The fossil record documents when a species shows up and when it disappears, but it leaves a wide margin of error because conditions must be perfect for fossils to form, and those conditions aren't always present when a species shows up and blinks out. And these longevity stats aren't that useful anyway. Stuart Pimm, a leading extinction expert and a conservation ecologist at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, said he prefers to think about extinction in terms of how many species die out every day, or month, or year...

The current extinction rate is much higher than any of these predictions about the past — about 1,000 times more than Pimm's background extinction rate estimate, he said. However, not everyone agrees on how accelerated species extinction is now, said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity in Oregon. Some experts estimate that the current extinction rate is only 100 times faster or, at the other extreme, 10,000 times faster...

One thing the experts do agree on is that the modern extinction rate is far too high. "Species are adapting as fast as they can," Pimm said. "But eventually the luck runs out and they don't adapt fast enough. And they go."

Backblaze's Q3 2020 hard drive stats: As of September 30, 2020, Backblaze had 153,727 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,780 boot drives and 150,947 data drives. This review looks at the Q3 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. [...] There are several models with zero drive failures in the quarter. That's great, but when we dig in a little we get different stories for each of the drives.

The 18TB Seagate model (ST18000NM000J) has 300 drive days and they've been in service for about 12 days. There were no out of the box failures which is a good start, but that's all you can say.
The 16TB Seagate model (ST16000NM001G) has 5,428 drive days which is low, but they've been around for nearly 10 months on average. Still, I wouldn't try to draw any conclusions yet, but a quarter or two more like this and we might have something to say.
The 4TB Toshiba model (MD04ABA400V) has only 9,108 drive days, but they have been putting up zeros for seven quarters straight. That has to count for something.
The 14TB Seagate model (ST14000NM001G) has 21,120 drive days with 2,400 drives, but they have only been operational for less than one month. Next quarter will give us a better picture.
The 4TB HGST (model: HMS5C4040ALE640) has 274,923 drive days with no failures this quarter.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in code complexity and management. Its general findings are probably no surprise to most Ars readers — software has gotten bigger, more complex, and much more important in the past ten years — but the sheer scope can be surprising... When asked how the size of the codebase across their entire company, measured in megabytes and the number of repositories, has changed in the past decade, over half (51%) of software development stakeholders reported they have more than 100 times the volume of code they had 10 years ago. And a staggering 18% say they have 500 times more code.
Ars also reports another surprising finding: 91% of the surveyed developers said their non-technology company "functions more like a technology company than it did ten years ago.

"This won't surprise anyone who has noticed firms like Walmart Labs sponsoring open source technology conferences and delivering presentations."

"To celebrate Java's 25th anniversary this year and the latest release of Java 15, JetBrains has compiled data from multiple sources to look at what the current state of the language," reports SD Times: The largest concentration of Java developers is in Asia, where 2.5 million developers use it as their primary language. JetBrains believes this may be due to the fact that it is common to hire offshore developers in countries like China and India to build Android apps. "We might have expected the USA to have a high percentage of Java users, but it also makes a lot of sense that they don't. There is a big technology stack to choose from and often a lot of the tech companies are at the forefront of that stack, so it could be that developers there don't need the power or stability of Java and are using languages that allow them to build and test quickly," JetBrains wrote in a post.
The post on JetBrains notes that the six countries with the highest percentage of developers using Java as their primary language are: China, South Korea, India, Germany, Spain, and Brazil: The reasons Java is most likely so popular in the first 6 countries include the free use of Java, governmental support, and open-source... Germany is also very high which could be attributed to Java being the most popular language in Germany for software engineers as it is used to build highly scalable applications for a multitude of industries. Most enterprise services rely on Java to power the applications that enable the day-to-day running of businesses, such as payroll, inventory management, reporting, and so on. Germany also has a big financial sector that uses Java heavily for their homegrown tech, such as trading bots, retail banking systems, and other applications that the finance industry requires in order to remain competitive...

According to the State of the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2020, more than a third of professional developers use Java as a primary language and Java remains the second primary language among professional developers after JavaScript. Expert analysis: It is not surprising to see JavaScript and Java taking the leading positions as they are kind of paired together; developers who work with Java often write their frontend and any quick scripts in JavaScript. Python is probably third place due to the spread of machine learning. In general, we expect the web to be a big part of the developer ecosystem and so JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and PHP will always have solid standing. SQL is also always going to be around as there isn't much that doesn't require databases in some capacity. C++ is also kind of a solid language in that it is used for a lot of embedded applications, so it won't be disappearing off the charts any time soon. C# though seems to be losing ground, and I guess if Java is high then C# will be low, as they are both very similar in terms of capabilities.

As to why I think Java is so high in the sphere of professional development — it's similar to what was mentioned about Germany. Most enterprise business services rely on Java to make them tick along. It's not just the IT sector either — almost every company, be it in distribution, manufacturing, or banking, has IT services as part of their infrastructure, and these services, such as payroll or inventory management, are generally built with Java in the backend. So Java is used a lot by professional developers who work for these companies.

An anonymous reader shares a report: San Francisco residents awoke on Wednesday to an orange sky, like something out of the apocalypse. People shared images on social media of a sky turned hazy orange by smoke coming in from major wildfires throughout the region. Aclima, which measures air on a "hyperlocal" level with pollution sensors on cars, had an explanation for the phenomenon. The orange sky over the Bay Area didn't appear to match the hourly recommendations about pollution levels on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's website, which generally showed healthy or moderate air pollution levels, except in the morning over Oakland and San Francisco, where air levels were shown to be unhealthy.

But the mismatch between the smoky haze and the stats from sensors made sense to Aclima chief scientist Melissa Lunden, who spoke with VentureBeat in an interview. She said an inversion layer suspends the polluted, smoky air at least a couple of thousand feet in the air and keeps it from descending to the ground level where we breathe. "It's like a layer cake where the air doesn't mix," Lunden said. "The smoke that is here today has been transported from a long way away, as far as Oregon." Drone footage of San Francisco from yesterday, set to Blade Runner track.

Either Rotten Tomatoes was destroying the film industry, or it didn't matter much at all, writes The Ringer, noting competing storylines about the influence of the film review-aggregating web site.

But they've now performed a statistical deep dive to try to answer the question, and concluded that "The truth likely lies in the middle: Rotten Tomatoes wasn't tanking the industry or single-handedly exposing that Baywatch was bad, but it wasn't irrelevant, either." In fact, our analysis reveals that Rotten Tomatoes scores are reliably correlated with box office performance, especially for certain genres. But the aggregator's influence may have been on the wane before the coronavirus struck, and it may matter less than ever in the present uncertain circumstances...

Our first finding is that the average Rotten Tomatoes critic score has increased over time. Maybe movies have improved — or at least grown closer to critics' liking — or maybe the rise reflects changes in the makeup of Rotten Tomatoes' pool of reviewers... Whatever the reason(s) for the increasing scores, there's no evidence of greater negativity that could be turning off ticket buyers (which probably doesn't displease Fandango). The site bestows a "Fresh" rating on any movie with a 60 percent score or higher, and the average movie now clears that threshold....

Action movie earnings are the least closely associated with review scores, maybe because when people just want to see stuff blow up, they're willing to lower their standards in certain respects. Comedies and horror movies — particularly the latter — are far more consistent with the critical consensus. A perfectly scored action movie's earnings might double its budget, but a perfectly scored comedy can quadruple its budget, while a perfectly scored horror flick can beat its budget by 10 or 20 times...

The mystery of most interest to studio execs is whether Rotten Tomatoes has strengthened the relationship between the critical consensus and box office performance, which also existed in the pre-internet age. The evidence suggests that the studios were a tad too intimidated in 2017... However, there are some signs that increased attention to the critical consensus may have affected whether movies' earnings got out to fast or slow starts, even if it didn't dramatically lower or raise their final ticket tallies.

Confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hit 5 million on Sunday, reports the Associated Press, "by far the highest of any country..."

"The failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe." Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America's bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy, which was ground zero of Europe's epidemic. Italians were unprepared when the outbreak exploded in February, and the country still has one of the world's highest official death tolls at 35,000. But after a strict nationwide, 10-week lockdown, vigilant tracing of new clusters and general acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing, Italy has become a model of virus containment. "Don't they care about their health?" a mask-clad Patrizia Antonini asked about people in the United States as she walked with friends along the banks of Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. "They need to take our precautions. ... They need a real lockdown."

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn't have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units. Yet, more than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5 million mark, according to the running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms....

With America's world's-highest death toll of more than 160,000, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred American tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc. France and Germany are now imposing tests on arrival for travelers from "at risk" countries, the U.S. included.
America has just 44% of the population of Europe — but 77% of its confirmed virus deaths, according to stats in the article from John Hopkins University. (It cites "America's world's-highest death toll of more than 160,000," while noting that the entire continent of Europe has over 207,000 confirmed virus deaths.) "In the U.S., new cases are running at about 54,000 a day — an immensely high number even when taking into account the country's larger population."

1 out of every 67 Americans has now had a confirmed infection.