News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
If much of the interest of high-quality papers lies between the lines—in the metaphorical fire that a paper lights in…
I would also recommend that potential grad students make inquiries into how far the compensation package actually goes towards cost…
It’s a mix. I’m still in the UAE with my family, and we feel safe. But some students and faculty…
In the above comment, Michel wrote: “As an aside, every once in a while I check out how the chatbots…
I could imagine LLMs having saved me a *ton* of time in graduate school–e.g., by having supplied reasonable answers to…
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…
This is interesting, although I do wonder whether by the time the "cough" is detectable, a person has not already been infecting lots of others.
(Thanks to Robert Condlin for the pointer.)
Based on the abstract, they say there is a 94% specificity for detection of a covid cough, and 83% specificity for detection of an asymptomatic covid cough. I haven't read the article to see precisely how the latter figure managed to be lower. (Does it mean that 17% of people without covid were identified as having an "asymptomatic covid cough" while only 6% were identified as having a "covid cough", or does it mean that 17% of symptomatic people were identified as having an "asymptomatic covid cough"?)
That means that this mechanism would have quite a high false positive rate. I don't believe there are many settings outside of ships and meatpacking plants that have been confirmed to have more than 6% of the population actually infected at the same time, so a specificity of 94% suggests that in any use a majority of detected positives will be false positives.
But it still seems potentially more useful than fever checks, and perhaps more significantly might help us understand the different mechanisms that produce coughs. (I recall in March, when I started paying much more attention to coughs, I became convinced that I got better at identifying phenomenological differences between coughs produced by dry food particles, coughs produced by allergies, and coughs produced by the viral infections I had had in January or February – I'm definitely not *certain* I was reliable at telling the difference, but it does seem potentially useful for general public health if we can train people to recognize these differences in themselves.)
—–
KEYWORDS:
Primary Blog
Leave a Reply