Human Behavior

What Is Needed to Fix Californias Coronavirus Testing? – Governing

(TNS) The ability to get tested for the coronavirus, and get test results quickly, has been one of the most unpredictable and frustrating parts of the nations pandemic response.

While some people are getting test results back within a day, others as recently as last week were waiting two weeks or more way past the window of time when a positive test result can be used to find a sick individuals contacts to trace and contain spread.

Theres been some improvement in recent days, with times tightening in some areas. But the fact is that testing availability has fluctuated dramatically during the pandemic, and it may again.

The situation went from being nearly impossible to get tested at the start of the pandemic, because hospitals and medical clinics did not have had enough tests, to much-improved by late April through early June, when testing supply stabilized and the Bay Area flattened the curve. During that period, demand for testing was relatively low, and the medical and lab system could collect specimens and process tests in relatively short order.

But by late June, as the summer surge began to take hold in the Bay Area, testing in many parts of the region faltered. As more and more people sought testing, turnaround times for test results stretched to nearly three weeks for some patients though the most seriously ill patients were typically able to get results within a day.

Last week, turnaround times began improving. Quest Diagnostics, the largest lab provider in many regions, says it is now reporting test results in two to three days. Napa County, which earlier this month was seeing wait times of up to 19 days, is now seeing wait times of two to three days, health officials said.

So what needs to be done to prevent future testing backlogs in the event of another surge? The Chronicle sought input from local health officials and laboratory directors on what it would take to improve testing for the long haul. They zeroed in on a mix of policy, technology and human behavior.

National strategy to distribute testing supplies to labs with fastest turnaround times. Labs across the country are competing for the same limited supplies of reagents, plastic pipette tips and other parts and chemicals needed to perform coronavirus tests. And there is little transparency for why some labs are getting more supplies, or supplies more quickly than others, said several health officers and lab directors. Its become a little bit of a Wild West, said Dr. Ori Tzvieli, deputy health officer for Contra Costa County. Theres not a coordinated strategy. Thats been frustrating.

Many academic labs have the ability to turn tests around faster than commercial labs, but they appear to be lower down on the priority list to receive supplies from manufacturers, said Dr. David Lubarsky, CEO of UC Davis Health. Those supplies should be going to labs that can do tests in 24 or 48 hours, he said. It seems commercial labs are getting the lions share of supplies, which is like throwing them into the ocean, he said.

Californias testing task force is working to build out the supply chain for swabs, collection kits and other supplies, and has issued a survey to local public health departments and academic labs to assess supply limitations to ensure all labs are being used at full capacity, according to the California Department of Public Health.

Reduce reliance on large commercial labs, instead using labs that can get results faster: Health care providers and publicly funded testing sites should be sending specimens to labs that have faster turnaround times, experts said. Because large labs like Quest and Labcorp have long been the standard lab services providers for hospitals and clinics, they were among the first that states, counties and health care providers turned to for coronavirus testing. But they became overwhelmed by the demand.

The state has worked with its testing contractors Optum and Verily, which operate dozens of state-funded testing sites to identify additional labs, said a spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health. Verily, which sends tests to Quest, plans to bring on two additional large labs this month, a company spokeswoman said. Experts stress the need to continue spreading tests around to other labs run by academic institutions or private companies. Some of this is already underway.

In the Bay Area, for instance, labs at San Franciscos Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and UC Berkeleys Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) are processing tests within 24 to 48 hours for county public health departments and vulnerable populations in the East Bay. San Franciscos city testing program found early success in securing fast turnaround times by contracting with Color Genomics, the Burlingame firm whose lab is turning tests around in 24 to 48 hours. Other counties, like Alameda and Marin, later began contracting with Color as well to get faster results. And Contra Costa County recently approved contracts with additional private labs that have promised turnaround times of two to three days. Having multiple contracts with multiple labs will allow us to be nimble and flexible regarding which labs we send tests to, and not reliant on a single or a couple labs if they experience testing delays, Contra Costa County Health Officer Dr. Chris Farnitano said during a Tuesday update to the Board of Supervisors.

Develop faster tests for surveillance, and deploy them widely: Antigen tests are gaining traction among researchers as one potential way to test large numbers of people quickly, without gumming up the lab system. The vast majority of coronavirus testing is currently done through PCR testing at labs. This type of test detects the presence of the virus genetic material (RNA) and has long been considered the standard for testing for respiratory viruses. Antigen tests detect viral proteins through a less involved, faster and cheaper process that can report results on the spot within minutes, rather than sending the specimen to a lab, which can take days. But they are less sensitive than PCR tests. Some epidemiologists say the tradeoff may be worth it because antigen tests would enable far more people to get tested frequently, get results back fast, and likely still catch most cases. Some envision a day when people can get an at-home test, and then test themselves every morning so they know if they are negative and can go to work or school, or positive and should stay home.

I dont see another solution at the moment, Dr. Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist and proponent of rapid antigen testing said last week during UCSF Medical Grand Rounds, a weekly meeting of medical experts. This is simple technology. ... This is the kind of thing we shouldnt be asking: Do companies have them ready to build at the point? We should be saying, How do we get the federal government to use all their might and resources to start making these? And for a fraction of the cost of the most recent stimulus bill passed for coronavirus response, we can have every American using one of these every single day for a year.

Antigen tests are not yet widely used. In July, federal health officials began shipping millions of the tests to nursing homes across the United States, including more than a dozen in the Bay Area. There are two antigen tests that have received FDA Emergency Use Authorization, made by Becton Dickinson and Quidel, and both can only be done for symptomatic people. If the data on antigen testing turns out to be good and the FDA authorizes their use for asymptomatic people as well opening the door for daily at-home testing that could be a game changer, said Nam Tran, who oversees coronavirus testing at UC Davis Medical Center.

Experts also say saliva tests which similarly are not yet widely used, except by some professional sports teams to test players and staff also hold promise. UC Berkeleys IGI in late July began a research study on saliva tests, administering them to thousands of UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff to see if the test is sensitive and specific enough to use in a clinical setting. If it is, it could greatly increase access to testing since saliva is easier to collect than having a health care professional do a nasal swab. And it could potentially be done in peoples homes, making testing more frequent and accessible.

Rethink who needs to get tested: The early narrative around testing was to test everyone, regardless of the severity of symptoms and even if they did not have symptoms, since many people with the coronavirus are asymptomatic. But thats part of the reason testing demand is overwhelming supply, said Solano County Health Officer Dr. Bela Matyas. Testing should be limited to people when knowing the result will affect their treatment plan, such as hospitalized patients, and for surveillance in nursing homes and prisons where the risk of spread is highest, Matyas said. The so-called worried well shouldnt bother getting tested, at least not when the testing system is overwhelmed, and neither should mildly symptomatic people they should simply assume they have it and self-quarantine for 10 days, he said. That would help clear up the backlog.

Adjust human behavior: Local health officials have identified social gatherings of friends and family, where households mix, to be one of the most common ways the coronavirus is spreading. If people practiced social distancing and mask-wearing more consistently in these settings, it would drive down demand for testing by driving down the disease rate in the population. All of the control is in our own hands if we exercise control, said Matyas. If we practiced some level of social distancing in our social interactions with family and friends, wed control the outbreak and thereby control the testing problem. But thats not an easy thing for people to connect the dots on. ... Its a low-tech, cheap solution.

2020 the San Francisco Chronicle.Distributed byTribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Human Behavior

When Several Lines Are Better Than One – Knowledge@Wharton – Knowledge@Wharton

Everyone knows the existential dread that comes along with standing in line for what seems like an eternity. But new research by Wharton operations, information and decisions professor Hummy Song, Guillaume Roels from INSEAD and Mor Armony from New York Universitys Stern School of Business suggests that knowledge-based industries should rethink how they approach this aspect of customer service. In this article, originally published in INSEAD Knowledge, the researchers write about their findings and how operational design can change organizational culture and improve performance.

Weve all been in lines that seem to last forever, especially if we choose our queue at the checkout and the one next to ours is moving faster. You know the existential dread that comes along with standing in a dedicated queue and waiting interminably. To make service of all kinds more efficient, the predominant thinking in operations management is to form a single serpentine queue that feeds different servers a pooled queue.

Traditional operations management theory has determined that pooling is more efficient. And it may be, if tasks or widgets are the items in the queue and its machines, not human beings, that are processing them. In a system with dedicated queues, its possible to have one thats empty and another queue thats full but no way to rebalance this. If the queue contains customers, naturally they can switch to the empty queue. But when we consider job assignments, for example, these cant just move across queues. So the dedicated queue is viewed as less efficient than a pooled one in terms of throughput and waiting time.

An impactful paper by Hummy Song and her co-authors focused on waiting rooms in emergency departments and found that when a part of the emergency department (ED) at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in California changed from a pooled queue to dedicated queues, patients had shorter wait times and a shorter length of stay. In the pooled setup, patients in the waiting room were assigned to a physician only when one became available. The switch to a dedicated system meant that as soon as patients were triaged, they were assigned to a particular physician and that physicians queue. Interestingly the researchers found the opposite of traditional efficiency in queueing theory; patients had a shorter stay in the ED when they were in dedicated queues. Physicians anecdotally described how they felt more responsible in the dedicated setup for the people assigned to them in the waiting room before they actually saw them as a patient.

Its unusual in operations management to consider people in all their humanity, with their own idiosyncratic biases and behaviors.

Its unusual in operations management to consider people in all their humanity, with their own idiosyncratic biases and behaviors. In Pooling Queues with Strategic Servers: The Effects of Customer Ownership, forthcoming in Operations Research, we show that efficiency is improved across the system if organizations consider a concept that may be unfamiliar to scholars in this area: customer ownership. Service providers may develop a greater sense of obligation and accountability when they see all the customers in their queue as belonging to them rather than as an indiscriminate pool of demand.

We modelled this upending of queueing theory using customer ownership as the motivator. We described the split in servers sense of customer ownership between when the customers enter the system and when they are right in front of the server. Our theory is human servers have human reactions that impact operational effectiveness like how long someone spends in an ED.

When Does a Person Become a Customer?

When we talk about customer ownership, its like a sense of responsibility that ED doctors had for people in the waiting room when they were triaged. Other doctors may feel customer ownership when the patient is in front of them. In our model, we stripped out financial incentive notions imagine call center workers who get a bonus dependent on short wait times, for instance to consider customer ownership on its own. (In fact, doctors at Kaiser are paid a fixed wage, so they have no financial incentive to see more patients.) Organizational behavior has documented a sense of organizational ownership, but customer ownership had not been previously analytically modelled nor had its consequences on process performance been considered.

In the model, we broke down customers who are already in the room versus the entire scope of the system. System-wide customer ownership is a combination of the people who are currently being served plus those still in the queue.

Servers either care about the customer they are currently serving or not only about that person, but also future customers as well. Incorporated in customer ownership is an interesting time dimension, whether servers focus on the present or the future and how they behave.

The Type of Task Matters

With a combination of game theory and queueing theory, one of the innovations of this paper is how we model the discretion that servers have in terms of their choice of the pace of work, which seems endogenous in practice.

In some cases, servers have very limited discretion. For instance, if you have to administer a survey of ten yes/no questions, you might have limited flexibility for taking much more or much less than the five minutes the survey was designed to last. But if the task is more knowledge-intensive, like physicians seeing a variety of cases in the ED, its up to the server to decide how much time is needed. There is a clear distinction between the routine tasks where servers have some discretion and those that are typically more knowledge-intensive where servers may have more discretion about how much time they need to complete it effectively.

The type of service matters when choosing an efficient queueing system.

The type of service matters when choosing an efficient queueing system. With a standard type of task, the traditional theory that pooling queues are the most effective mechanism holds. But if the service provided is knowledge-intensive, its important to understand that the effect can be flipped.

We modelled the utility of servers and how their notion of customer ownership maximizes it. This paper formalizes what was observed in Songs earlier work and demonstrates that the phenomenon can be justified on rational grounds. Our work is grounded in practice, and we built a theory to explain how it is transferrable to other contexts.

Our paper highlights the importance of accounting for human behavior on the part of the server, shifting attention away from the customers and the human impact on process performance.

Broader Implications of Customer Ownership

Queues arent only at the grocers or the airport. Managers in certain domains may need to consider redesigning their queueing systems not only when it comes to assigning customers to servers but also assigning work to team members. Another aspect to consider is the attention that individual contributors in knowledge-intensive services have on their own task queues. Think emails, assignments and other deliverables. Our paper suggests that in knowledge-intensive services where workers have a lot of discretion about the amount of time spent on a project, queues need to be managed a little bit differently. We find dedicating assignments to certain servers rather than pooling them to be more efficient.

Customer ownership is a concept that reflects organizational culture. As such, it can modified, like other aspects of culture. Operations management often takes organizational culture for granted; our paper shows that operational design can shape it and thus impact performance. In particular, no one had previously pointed to queue configuration, which is an important operational lever, as a way to shape organizational culture. Yet switching to dedicated queues can lead to greater customer ownership.

When we think about queues, we usually think about them from the customers point of view. But we need to look at the human on the other end of the queue. Including a servers customer ownership in consideration when planning queues will shorten the time for everyone.

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Human Behavior

How China surveils the world – MIT Technology Review

The CCP doesnt only collect data through invasive surveillance technologies like cameras that employ facial recognition. It also relies on technologies that provide everyday services, like devices associated with smart cities. Long before AI or big data became buzzwords, the Partys intent was to co-optnot simply coercesociety to participate in its own control.

A: The CCP collects data in bulk and worries about what to do with it later. Even if its not all immediately usable, the Party anticipates better technical ability to exploit the data later on.

Large data sets can reveal patterns and trends in human behavior, which help the CCP with intelligence and propaganda as well as surveillance. Some of that data is fed into tools such as the social credit system. Bulk data, like images and voice data, can also be used to train algorithms for facial and voice recognition.

The CCPs methods are not that different from what we see in the global advertising industry. But instead of trying to sell a product, the CCP is trying to exert authoritarian control. Its using capitalism as a vehicle to access data that can help it disrupt democratic processes and create a more favorable global environment for its power.

A: Citizens of liberal democracies are rightly concerned with how tech companies abuse their data, but at least in liberal democracies there are growing restraints on how data is used. In China, where the party-state literally says that the purpose of the law is to strengthen and improve the Partys leadership, technology is deployed to extend the political power of the party-state and developed according to that standard. The Party talks about its intent to shape global public opinion in order to protect and expand its own political power. At the same time, Chinese tech companies collect data in support of such efforts. Anyone living in a liberal democracy should be concerned about the ramifications this has for freedoms and privacy.

A: I will not put it on mine. TikTok is a good example of a seemingly benign app that can give the CCP a lot of useful data. You wouldnt think of a social-media app that is used by a lot of children around the world as being inherently problematic for political reasons. But the sentiment data from an app like TikTok can be used to understand how people are influenced and how they think. A lawsuit recently filed against the company in California alleges that face data collected from the app was connected to PRC [Peoples Republic of China]based servers, raising significant privacy concerns.

TikTok has said that it stores user data in servers located in the US and Singapore, but this is a way of evading questions about the Partys potential political control over the company. Additionally, the app has been found censoring or suppressing Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ content, among other subjects. To me this has happened frequently enough around the world to look like a pattern rather than a mistake, and this is a wrong that I cannot overlook.

A: GTCOM is a big-data and AI company that is controlled by Chinas Central Propaganda Department, which is deeply involved in Party attempts to shift the global narrative around Chinas power. One of their products claims to collect 10 terabytes of data a day, or two to three petabytes per year, from web pages, forums, Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, and other sources. In terms of size, thats the equivalent of 20 billion Facebook photos. The company describes its work as contributing directly to Chinas national security, including military intelligence and propaganda.

GTCOMs research and development arm has developed algorithms that look for military keywords in the information it collects, which could for instance come from CVs or patents. The company has specifically stated that its work assists with state security. In 2017, a senior executive said that GTCOM had established an information security system that relies on image, text, and voice recognition to prevent security risks and provide technical support and assistance for state security.

A: GTCOM has strong relationships with Chinese tech companies that have a large global presence. For instance, it has a strategic agreement with Alibaba Cloud to embed its translation services in the companys technology. GTCOMs service-providing business model allows it to collect any data that GTCOM translation services generate. At face value, it might look like its services are used to improve translation quality, but in reality they are also used to build other products, including products connected to national security work.

GTCOM has established partnerships with linguistics researchers worldwide. These partnerships give GTCOM access to a broad variety of data. What GTCOM is doing is not dissimilar to [American analytics company] Palantir in terms of big-data analytics. The difference is that the intent driving GTCOMs work is framed by the CCP, whose interests run counter to those of a liberal democracy.

A: Ideal solutions dont exist yet, partly because research on these issues hasnt been in-depth or forward-looking. But we can start with greater investment in data literacy and data transparency programs. Liberal democracies must improve due diligence around security in the digital supply chain, invest in research and development, and become more competitive in the smart technologies market. They cannot go at this alone; alliances must be strengthened. Finally, liberal democratic governments must bolster data privacy laws and rethink how to manage propaganda from both foreign and domestic sources in the digital agebut without compromising democratic values along the way. To do that, they must be clear about what their values are and why they differ from those of authoritarian regimes.

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How China surveils the world - MIT Technology Review

Human Behavior

Life as we know it has changed, possibly forever – Chinadaily.com.cn – Chinadaily USA

SONG CHEN/CHINA DAILY

Pandemic halts handshakes, hugging and high-fives

The steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases worldwide has had a far-reaching effect on how we live and interact with one another, producing many changes that are likely to be long-lasting or even permanent.

For example, to reduce contact during the pandemic, shaking hands, a standard style of greeting used by officials and businesspeople, among others, has been replaced by fist or elbow bumps.

In the United States, the country hardest-hit by the outbreak, with some 5.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 170,000 deaths, the top health official said such social niceties should end, even when the pandemic is over.

Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Wall Street Journal in April, "I don't think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you."

Neel Gandhi, a professor of infectious diseases, epidemiology and global health at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told ESPN, a US sports broadcaster, "When we talk about maximum transmission (of the coronavirus), the hands are the place where I focus on the most.

"When we talk about the high-five and also the handshake, this is almost the perfect pathogen to spread it," he said, suggesting that people should permanently avoid shaking hands.

If such advice from health experts is followed on a mass scale, it will produce a profound shift in human behavior.

However, some people are finding alternative ways to greet one another at a time when direct contact is frowned on.

In South Korea, bowing deeply and using fist bumps have become popular. In Australia, officials have suggested that people pat each other on the back instead of shaking hands, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken to greeting people namaste-stylepalms together and bowing slightly.

Handshakes are just one form of contact that has largely ended during the pandemic, along with hugging, high-fives and squeezing shoulders, all of which are done when standing less than 1 meter apart.

As many people worldwide emerge from lockdowns and rebuild their social lives, experts are predicting that some degree of social contact will disappear for good.

Tiziana Casciaro, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto in Canada, said shaking hands taps into "a fundamental drive" humans have to establish trust with each other, and the call by Fauci for the practice to end "flies in the face" of this.

But Casciaro said Fauci is motivated by the desire to keep people safe. She thinks that after the pandemic many people could be deterred from shaking hands in the short term. "They are going to be shell-shocked for a while," she said.

If such contact disappears completely, the way in which it is replaced is open to question. However, what is certain is that social interactions will be different.

Xu Tongwu, a professor of public policy at the Research Center for Social Organization and Public Governance at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said, "There's going to be a lot of awkwardness as people try to figure out how to greet someone, how to professionally welcome someone, or even how to greet their daughter's boyfriend for the first time."

Such uncertainty can affect relationships, Xu said, adding that people might reserve handshakes and hugs for those closest to them who they trust the most. For those outside their immediate social circle, they could develop new-style greetings that don't involve touching the skin.

"We're going to start seeing a lot more interpersonal and family-based sorts of conflict," he said. If a business colleague attempts a handshake or a friend tries a hug, and the intended recipient pulls away, "there's going to be a pretty big ripple effect in terms of the relational dynamics that we see," Xu said.

According to research by Ipsos MORI in May, many people believe that life will never return to normal after the pandemic.

Only 7 percent of Britons want businesses that have closed to reopen if the virus is not fully contained, while 70 percent strongly oppose life returning to normal.

About 60 percent of Australians and US citizens, 70 percent of Canadians and 50 percent of people from France and Brazil don't want society to return to normal, as they believe the virus will never die out completely.

Xu said: "The pandemic has changed everything we know, particularly how we remain socially connected. People have risen to the challenge and have tried to maintain social connections in creative ways, but at the same time life has been different and it can be hard to adjust to the new changes."

Long lines vanish

In China, where the pandemic has been successfully brought under control, with only a small number of new COVID-19 cases now being reported, many containment measures look set to remain for a long time.

For example, in Beijing, Gui Jie, or Ghost Street, a long, bustling thoroughfare, is lined on both sides by a string of brightly lit restaurants. Many of them used to be so popular that diners waiting for a table often sat patiently outside on stools placed on the sidewalk.

However, the lines of customers have disappeared during the pandemic, with restaurants introducing separated seating areas for customers, to prevent cross-contamination.

The lines are unlikely to return anytime soon, as many establishments nationwide have placed 1-meter markers on the ground to separate people as they wait to be admitted. Lines outside grocery stores in cities have snaked around blocks as shoppers try to maintain social distancing.

Crowded concerts and mosh pits will not be allowed at entertainment venues while the coronavirus remains a risk to public health. Many singers have turned to online concerts during the outbreak, unexpectedly attracting a large number of fans and views.

In the US, a report in Rolling Stone magazine in May on a performance in Arkansas by the blues-rock band Bishop Gunn appeared under the headline "US' first pandemic concert".

Only about 200 fans were admitted to the 1,100-seat venue, and they had to wear face masks, sit in assigned seats and maintain social distancing. They also had their temperature checked before being admitted, and use of the restrooms was limited to 10 people at a time.

Quarantine measures have resulted in much of the global workforce operating from home, and a report by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications suggests that many of them like being away from the office.

The report said 42 percent of survey participants said the experience has made them want to work from home more. Over 60 percent working away from the office said they enjoyed being able to dress casually, the increased flexibility and lack of commuting.

Some 78 percent said they were just as effective working from home as in the office, or even more so, according to the report, which surveyed more than 50,000 people from 86 countries.

Debra Dinnocenzo, president of the consultancy VirtualWorks, which advises companies in the US and Europe on transitioning to working from home, said: "I think there will be some upside to this disruption that workers will want to preserve. People and families are going to be spending more time together.

"I think people will be increasingly adamant that they want more time to work at home and not return to all the crazy commuting they were doing before."

In Silicon Valley, California, many companies have permanently adopted working from home.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said up to 50 percent of the company's employees could be working remotely in the next five to 10 years, while Twitter has said it will allow some of its staff members to continue working from home permanently if they want to.

Nearly 75 percent of corporate finance officials surveyed in late March by Gartner, the business research and consulting organization, said their companies plan to switch at least 5 percent of onsite workers to operating from home permanently as part of their cost-cutting efforts after the pandemic.

Unenviable position

Zach Emmanuel, an analyst at global market research company Mintel, said pandemics have always been the enemy of crowded urban living, and increased working from home means fewer people are using public transportation.

The virus has placed public transit systems in the unenviable position of urging people not to use them unless absolutely necessary. Turning such a situation around will be difficult and involve changes in how such agencies operate, especially when it comes to convincing people to return to crowded buses and subway cars, Emmanuel said.

He added that a range of technologies are being developed to enhance safety, including the use of ultraviolet light. Seating arrangements on buses are being reconfigured and travelers' temperatures are checked before they board.

But Emmanuel also said many transportation companies have slashed services due to a severe reduction in the number of travelers during the pandemic.

The worst-case scenario would be for these reductions to be made permanent, as cash-strapped transit agencies did during the Great Recession, he said, adding, "Once you do that, riders change their plans, and they don't really come back."

Chen Xuefeng, deputy director of the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "In the post-pandemic era, people are likely to behave more conservatively for a while. They will pay more attention to themselves, such as caring for their health, spending more time alone, moving offline activities online, socializing less and saving more."

This new way of life means that some industries where old habits are engrained will face challenges in transforming and upgrading, Chen added.

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Life as we know it has changed, possibly forever - Chinadaily.com.cn - Chinadaily USA

Human Behavior

10 things you need to know before the opening bell on August 21 – CNBCTV18

Market

Updated : 2020-08-21 07:55:53

The Indian market is likely to open higher on Friday following a rally in global markets. At 7:40 am, the SGX Nifty was trading 79.00 points or 0.70 percent higher at 11,378.00, indicating a positive start for the Sensex and Nifty50.

1. Asian Stocks | Asia Pacific stocks edged higher in Friday morning trade following the release of mixed US economic data overnight. Overall, the MSCI Asia ex-Japan index traded 0.35 percent higher. (Image: Reuters)

2. Wall Street | Nasdaq ended at a record high on Thursday, with the S&P 500 and Dow also rising, as gains in heavyweight tech stocks outweighed downbeat data that affirmed the Federal Reserve's view of a difficult road to economic recovery. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up 46.85 points, or 0.17 percent, to 27,739.73, the S&P 500 gained 10.66 points, or 0.32 percent, to 3,385.51 and the Nasdaq Composite added 118.49 points, or 1.06 percent, to 11,264.95. (Image: Reuters)

3. Market at Close | Indian shares tracked global equity markets lower to end lower on Thursday, snapping 3 sessions of gains. The sentiment was cautious amid rising concerns about the economic recovery from the coronavirus outbreak. The domestic indices were dragged by banking stocks and index heavyweight Reliance Industries. The Sensex ended 394 points lower at 38,220 while the Nifty fell 96 points to end at 11,312.

4. Crude Oil | Oil fell 1 percent on Thursday after Reuters reported OPEC+ needed to address daily oversupply of more than 2 million barrels, and the number of U.S. unemployment benefit claims rose unexpectedly, signaling a slow economic recovery. Brent crude fell 47 cents, or 1 percent, to settle at $44.90 a barrel while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for September delivery ended the session 35 cents, or 0.8 percent lower, at $42.58 a barrel on the last day of trading. The more active October WTI contract ended down 29 cents, or 0.7 percent, at $42.82 a barrel. (Image: Reuters)

5. Rupee | The Indian rupee slid 20 paise to settle at 75.02 to the US dollar on Thursday, tracking weaker Asian currencies amid concerns over global economic recovery due to rising coronavirus cases. At the interbank forex market, the domestic unit hit an intra-day high of 74.93 and low of 75.05 against the US dollar. It finally ended at 75.02, down 20 paise over its previous close of 74.82.

6. Nifty Changes | SBI Life Insurance and Divi's Laboratories will enter benchmark index Nifty 50 from September 25, NSE Indices, a subsidiary of the National Stock Exchange, said on Thursday. Bharti Infratel and Zee Entertainment Enterprises will be dropped from the Nifty 50. Besides SBI Life Insurance Company and Divi's Laboratories, NHPC, Page Industries and Shriram Transport Finance Company will be excluded from Nifty Next 50. In their places, Adani Green Energy, Alkem Laboratories, Bharti Infratel, Larsen & Toubro Infotech and Tata Consumer Products will be added in the index (Image: Reuters)

7. RBI MPC Minutes | Members of the Reserve Bank of Indias Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) deliberated at length about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on growth, inflation and human behavior in general at the meeting held on August 4-6 even as the committee decided to hold the benchmark interest rate. Minutes of the meeting showed that MPC unanimously agreed that to stand pat on interest rates but also said the RBI should be ready to act to further help the economy when needed.

8. US Jobless Claims | Data showed that the US jobless claims rose unexpectedly back above the 1 million mark last week after slipping below that level for the first time since the start of the pandemic. (Image: Reuters)

9. US-China Trade Deal | The Trump administration on Thursday declined to acknowledge any plans to meet with China over the Phase 1 trade deal after the commerce ministry in Beijing said bilateral talks would be held "in the coming days" to evaluate the agreement's progress. Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng made the comments about the forthcoming discussions at a weekly briefing held online, but did not elaborate. (Image: Reuters)

10. COVID-19 Vaccine | Russia is looking for a partnership with India for producing the Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V. Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) is likely to do phase 3 clinical trials in Russia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Philippines. Russia is capable of producing 500 million doses in the next 12 months and the mass production of the vaccine is expected to start in September 2020.

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10 things you need to know before the opening bell on August 21 - CNBCTV18

Human Behavior

Thousands of students return to campus for move-in day at Kent State – News 5 Cleveland

KENT, Ohio A five-day move-in period kicked off at Kent State University Wednesday ahead of the first day of class on August 27.

Its nice being back, Savannah Matthews said. Having some structure again.

Assigned move-in time slots are staggered based on last name and dorm assignment in order to reduce large crowds and each student is gifted a welcome kit with two KSU masks and sanitizer upon arrival.

We are not testing all students who are coming back but we are testing students who are symptomatic, Manfred Van Dulmen said.

Housing facilities are operating at a smaller capacity with approximately 3,800 students spread among 23 residence halls.

Students are allowed to have one visitor in their room at a time, Van Dulmen said. If they have a roommate, their roommate also at the beginning of the semester has to agree.

The drastic changes are visible - with more than 90,000 printed flyers reminding students and staff to practice social distancing.

Administrators have implemented smaller class sizes, limited campus activities, and fewer students living in dorms.

On average, were somewhere between 20 and 25% of our pre-COVID utilization of classroom capacities, Jay Graham said.

Graham said classrooms will be professionally disinfected frequently and sanitization stations have been installed in classrooms and lecture halls.

They will be cleaned on a heightened schedule through the university, Graham said. The students will clean up their spaces. It gives them peace of mind that they have some control over making sure that the spaces are sanitized for them and then the faculty as well up at the teaching stations.

However, students and faculty will not be screened for fever or other symptoms at the door.

A lot depends on human behavior and were seeing whats happening in the national headlines, but at Kent, we feel that weve prepared our facilities, Graham said. So we are not taking temperatures at classroom entrances, but its up to them to self-assess and they can call our task force at the health center to report any symptoms.

Van Dulmen said positive cases among students and staff members are inevitable.

We know there will be positive cases on campus, Van Dulmen said. As you also see at other institutes of higher education, thats the reality.

However, administrators believe the creation of isolated living facilities for students who have tested positive and those waiting on test results will help to slow the spread of the virus.

You just have to worry about what your other roommates are doing, Matthews said. Who theyve been seeing and all that.

Ultimately, contact tracing will be up to Portage County health officials.

The contact tracing I think for many institutions is one of the areas that is a challenge, Van Dulmen said. Contact tracing is the responsibility of the local health departments but were assisting with this team on campus to make sure that they have the information they need.

Van Dulmen said health precautions will be loosely enforced per the student code of conduct.

Were referring to our classroom disruption policy and were asking instructors, when a student shows up without a face covering to first offer a face covering, Van Dulmen said. If a student is not willing to take a face covering the instructor will ask the student to leave. If the student is not willing to leave, the instructor will dismiss the class and follow up with communication to the student.

And what about students whose letter grades depend on class attendance? Van Dulmen said instructors have been asked to be lenient.

Let our students have a note if theyre sick. We dont want anybody who feels kind of achy to come to campus, Van Dulmen said. So weve not changed the formal policy but we have a temporary policy in place where were asking instructors to be flexible.

Savannah Matthews is returning to campus for her sophomore year after abruptly being instructed to return home to Illinois in March.

Its surreal. Its pretty bizarre, Matthews said. I left for spring break and just didnt end up coming back at all.

She said a collective effort of responsible decision making is the only way for higher education institutions to carry on.

Im going to be in my dorm the whole time except for when Im at practice, so Ill be good hopefully, Matthews said. All of my classes are remote. I think they have a mix of remote and hybrid for other students as well, so I think theyre doing okay for right now, but I guess well see in a couple weeks.

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Thousands of students return to campus for move-in day at Kent State - News 5 Cleveland

Human Behavior

Youre loving high-flying growth stocks now, but your money should be in these companies, this market pro says – MarketWatch

Historically, the stocks of smaller companies have outperformed those of larger companies. And relatively inexpensive stocks have outperformed more expensive stocks.

If studying financial markets for 50 years teaches you anything, its tokeep things in perspective.

During times of great uncertainty, like were experiencing now, investors may feel tempted to project todays headlines forward or forget the useful lessons weve learned from the past.

Ive been thinking about this a lot lately in the context of the growth vs. value stock debate.

Too often, news headlines distract us from taking the long view. They create a sense of urgency around whats happening in the marketright now. But we have nearlya centurys worth of data, and decades of financial science, to look to for guidance. That evidence reveals many investment lessons. For example, over long periods of time, stocks have generally outperformed bonds. This makes sense when you think about it. Stocks are riskier than bonds, so you expect to earn a premium return.

Most investors are probably familiar with this so-called equity premium, but they may be less familiar with the markets size- and value premiums. The same basic logic applies, andthe same record backs them up. Historically, the stocks of smaller companies have outperformed those of larger companies. And relatively inexpensive stocks have outperformed more expensive stocks.

Theres solid theory behind thinking about investments in this way, but the premiums dont necessarily show up every day. In fact, there can be long stretches when they dont stretches that can test the faith of investors.

Read: CNBCs Jim Cramer urges investors not to be fooled by new highs in the stock market

Plus: Warren Buffett said this metric signaled the 2001 crash now its sounding the alarm on global markets

I havent met many people who expect stocks to return less than U.S. Treasury bills. And yet back when we started Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), in the early 1980s, we found ourselves at the end of a 14-year period where T-bills actually outperformed the stock market. I remember a cover ofBusiness Week magazineproclaiming The Death of Equities. People then were saying the stock market would never be positive again. Of course, investors have since experienced one of the longest bull market runs in history.

Were experiencing a similar historical variance right now with value stocks. Over the past decade, growth stocks have largely outperformed value stocks. But its important to keep things in perspective. According to Dimensionals research, while values performance in the U.S. from 2009-2019 was in line with its historical average (12.9% vs. 12.7%), growth significantly exceeded its historical average (16.3% vs. 9.7%). In other words,value has performed similarly to how it has behaved historically its growth thats been the outlier, performing better than expected. Financial science suggests you should enjoy these unexpectedly good returns, but dont count on them repeating.

In my view, the rationale for investing in value stocks is as strong as ever: The less you pay for a stock, the higher your expected return. This is simple algebra. Still, some people are questioning whether the value premium has somehow disappeared. If value investing no longer worked, wed have to throw out our economic textbooks and develop a new algebra.

Im often asked what investors can do during times like these. The key to capturing any premium is to maintain consistent exposure to it. While we understand that the value premium may not show up every day, every year, or even every decade, sticking with value stocks can help you capture that premium over time.

Value stocks are crouching lower now so they can spring up higher later.

No one can predict when premiums will show up, but we know they can show up quickly. In fact, some of the weakest periods for value stocks compared with growth stocks have been followed by some of the strongest. On March 31, 2000, growth stocks had outperformed value stocks in the U.S. over the prior year, prior five years, prior 10 years, and prior 15 years, according to research conducted by our firm. As of March 31, 2001 one year and one market swing later value stocks had regained the advantage in each of those time periods.

Why such a dramatic swing? Its human behavior to stick with whats working, and during periods when growth stocks are outperforming, many investors keep piling into those stocks. But many long-term investors think of it another way: The expected return on relatively cheap stocks is getting higher, which means more opportunity. As I like to say, value stocks are crouching lower now so they can spring up higher later.

Over half a century of observing markets, time and again Ive seen that returns come in spurts. Thats why getting into and out of the market repeatedly is such a bad idea youre too likely to get caught on the wrong side of your decision. You cant time returns. And you cant predict them. To capture the historical premiumsyou have to stay disciplined.

My long career in finance has taught me that theres great value in keeping perspective, which includes keeping perspective on value. As my friend Robert Novy-Marx says, I wake up every day expecting to see the value premium. I, too, wake up every day expecting value stocks to deliver higher returns for investors. Time has only strengthened that conviction.

DavidBoothis founder and executive chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors.

More:Value stocks, which trade lowest to growth stocks since 2001, look like a smart play as the economy rebounds

Also read:Should I still use the 60/40 investing rule for retirement?

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Youre loving high-flying growth stocks now, but your money should be in these companies, this market pro says - MarketWatch

Human Behavior

What if a powerful hurricane hits during the pandemic? Here’s how to prevent a double disaster. – Live Science

With the peak of hurricane season fast approaching, possible evacuations must be planned to help people dodge the storms and avoid causing uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID-19.

Now, a new mathematical model offers guidance on how to minimize COVID-19 spread during large-scale evacuations: People evacuating from hard-hit counties should be directed to counties with relatively lower rates of viral spread. The burden then falls to these "destination counties" to enforce social distancing and mask wearing, among other countermeasures to reduce COVID-19 transmission. If all counties adequately prepare, additional coronavirus spread can be minimized, according to the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

In the worst-case scenario modeled by the team, more than two million evacuees from high-transmission counties retreated to areas with similarly high viral transmission, and their travel and interactions with others resulted in about 66,000 extra COVID-19 cases. In the best-case scenario, evacuees were systematically divided among low-transmission counties, resulting in only about 9,000 new cases.

Related: Hurricane preparation: What to do

"Those are just hypothetical scenarios," but the overall trends revealed by the model could help local officials plan for large-scale evacuations to come, study author Sen Pei, an associate research scientist in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York, told Live Science. In their report, posted Aug. 11 to the preprint database medRxiv, Pei and his co-authors noted that the ability to minimize viral spread largely lies with the destination counties namely, "the degree to which counties are prepared to host, isolate and meet the needs of evacuees while also minimizing virus exposure."

"The major factor here is just to limit the contact of evacuees with local populations," Pei said. "But it's challenging when you have to provide accommodation for those people."

The researchers built their model using data from the formidable Hurricane Irma, which made landfall in Florida in September 2017. They found that evacuees from the storm dispersed to 165 different destinations across 26 states; these locations served as the "destination counties" in their hypothetical model. Based on additional historical data from four southeast Florida counties Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe the team estimated that about 2.3 million evacuees would leave the counties in response to a Category 3 hurricane. The researchers then assigned these evacuees to different destination counties to devise four hypothetical scenarios.

In the "baseline" scenario, evacuees retreated to the same counties they would have for Hurricane Irma, in terms of overall proportions. In two additional scenarios, 90% of the evacuees were either directed to the 82 counties with the highest rates of COVID-19 transmission or the 82 counties with the lowest rates. After noting that movement to low-transmission counties minimized spread, the team designed a fourth scenario that assigned evacuees to low-transmission counties more systematically, to determine precisely how many should be sent where to limit overall case counts.

Related: 20 of the worst epidemics and pandemics in history

In addition, the model assumed that the rate of COVID-19 spread would increase by 20% in each origin county as the refugees prepare to leave and again when they finally return home, given that coming back requires travel, restocking on supplies, and potentially cleanup from the storm or sheltering with others if homes have been destroyed.

"Essentially, the model simulates what would happen if we move people from one location to the other and then move them back," Pei said. "We wanted to see how this movement of infections across the country would impact the course of the pandemic."

The model does not account for the behavior of individual evacuees once they reach their destination, Pei noted. For example, rates of COVID-19 spread may change depending on how many evacuees stay with family or friends, rather than in public shelters, and the supplies they have on hand may determine how much they interact with the local community. To capture different degrees of mingling between the hosts and refugees, the team adjusted the rate of transmission in the destination counties, increasing it by either 0%, 10% or 20% when the refugees arrived.

"Those [percentages] are all abstractions of those people's individual behaviors," Pei said. COVID-19 cases go up in the 20% scenario, where refugees mingle with their hosts a fair amount, and especially in counties with already high rates of viral spread. "That makes sense intuitively because you're moving people around more," said Pamela Murray-Tuite, a professor of civil engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina, who was not involved in the study.

However, to fine-tune the model and make it more realistic, the researchers would have to incorporate data about real human behavior, Murray-Tuite said.

Related: Name that hurricane: Famous examples of the 5 hurricane categories

"What we don't know yet is whether the evacuees will behave the same as the people living in that destination [county]," in terms of their compliance with mask wearing, how often they frequent local businesses and whether they stick to social distancing, for instance, Murray-Tuite said. In addition, the amount of time people remain in the destination county would depend on the path of the storm, whether the roads home remain safe to travel on and whether a given evacuee stays in a shelter or with friends, among other factors.

What's more, "I would be surprised if 90% of people would allow you to direct them to a given location if they don't have friends or family there," she noted. The mathematical model rests on the assumption that the vast majority of evacuees will accept their destination county assignment, but that would likely be an unrealistic expectation, she said.

Murray-Tuite and her research team plan to survey people seeking refuge from natural disasters during the pandemic to see how they behave. The survey data will be combined with information from Tweets, mobility data and traffic data to fit individual behaviors into their greater context. Murray-Tuite said that she expects the individuals' perceptions of risks will drive their behavior and determine how they interact with communities they encounter.

Given the risk of catching COVID-19, a person's "age and medical conditions may play a greater role than they even have in the past," in terms of whether people are willing to evacuate their homes, she added.

"It's one thing to have COVID, but COVID in a hurricane? Now you're dealing with multiplicative risk," said Robert Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University, who was not involved in the study. Evacuees must weigh the relative risks of leaving their homes and potentially exposing themselves to COVID-19, versus staying home and weathering a dangerous storm. To help people resolve these tough decisions, public officials must clearly communicate who should evacuate and who should stay home, Stein said.

Related: A history of destruction: 8 great hurricanes

So-called shadow evacuees, or people who evacuate when there is no recommendation to do so, can clog the roads during typical evacuations, but during a pandemic, they also amplify the risk of viral spread, Stein noted. Communicating the risk that shadow evacuees pose to others and getting people to comply with official guidance "requires a level of public trust," he said.

Stein and his research team are studying who should deliver messages about risk and disaster responses to reach the public most effectively. He noted that county-level elected officials and governors, as well as local celebrities and athletes, all hold sway in public discourse and can help communicate clear, trustworthy guidance in times of uncertainty.

"The key thing here is to stay away from partisanship," Stein noted. "The argument that we've used is that we try to communicate to people that we're all in this together." To get people to not only evacuate but to go to an approved destination, counties need adequate supplies and funding to care for evacuees once they arrive, he said.

Beyond providing food, transportation, accommodations and medical care, ideally, destination counties should be able to test evacuees for COVID-19, isolate those who test positive and perform thorough contact tracing, Stein said. Evacuees should also be reminded to pack their own food, water, medical supplies and masks so they can avoid relying on stores in their destination county to stock up, Murray-Tuite added. (The American Red Cross has further guidance on what to pack in your evacuation kit.)

In short, while Pei's model provides helpful hints for planning this year's hurricane evacuations, the hard work will be in applying those lessons in real life.

"I think what they're raising is the obvious: If we have the COVID virus running around and a hurricane, it's going to be a problem," Stein said. The model hints at one solution, that is, sending evacuees to counties with low COVID-19 transmission rates. Now comes the work of figuring out how that can be done, in practicality, Stein said.

"You've identified a solution, now tell us how we're going to implement this."

Originally published on Live Science.

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What if a powerful hurricane hits during the pandemic? Here's how to prevent a double disaster. - Live Science

Human Behavior

Why We Should Build Astronaut Cities In Moon And Mars Lava Tubes – Forbes

This lava tube on Earth may look big, but the ones on the moon and Mars may be large enough to fit ... [+] bases or cities.

Lava tubes on the moon and Mars may be large enough to fit city center-sized groups of astronauts living on these other worlds, a new study finds.

Lava tubes are an underground tunnel that happens due to the flow of molten rock during a volcanic explosion. We get lava tubes on Earth as well, but the ones on the moon and Mars are likely much larger allowing huge communities of people to work, live and explore on other worlds.

A typical tube on Earth will be roughly 30 feet to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters) in diameter. But one on Mars could be the height of the Empire State Building, with a diameter 10 times that of Earth. If that sounds big, consider the moon, where its even lower gravity produces a tube up to 1000 times larger than Earths much taller than the massive Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.

Its an exciting find because these small, cramped spaces on Earth would instead open up into vast caverns of space on other worlds. Rather than imagining future astronauts working shoulder to shoulder all the time, these space explorers could easily stroll through otherworldly boulevards, all sheltered from deadly outside radiation (and in the case of Mars, fierce dust storms).

"These [lava tubes] represent ideal gateways or windows for subsurface exploration, said study lead author Francesco Sauro in a statement. While weve known about these lava tubes for a while, the new study shows just how large they are able to contain the same space as the city center of Padua, Italy in at least one case, Sauro said.

Sauro is well-versed in cave exploration, as he is head of the European Space Agencys Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behavior and performance Skills (CAVES) program that regularly sends astronauts underground in caves to practice for space missions using an isolated, extreme environment. He is also a speleologist at the University of Bologna.

Japan's Kaguya (SELENE) spacecraft was the first to spot these tubes on the moon, according to NASA. Many follow-up studies were performed using NASAs Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which takes high-definition images of the moons surface from pole to pole. The orbiter has spotted dozens of intriguing holes and NASA is considering ways in which future missions could delve inside. It might be too steep for a rover, so the agency is imagining using swarms of flying or climbing vehicles for exploration.

The researchers used data from moon and Mars imagery and compared that with the literature available on Earth from spelunking (cave exploring) and aerial studies of our own lava tubes. The team also created digital terrain models to get an idea of what these lava tubes on Mars and the moon look like inside, and saw vast possibilities for future exploration.

Astronauts practice for space using an analog cave environment in Sardinia. The European Space ... [+] Agency program is called Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills (CAVES) and has sent dozens of astronauts underground.

"What is most important is that, despite the impressive dimension of the lunar tubes, they remain well within the roof stability threshold, stated Matteo Massironi, a planetary geologist at the University of Padua who co-authored the study. The models indicate, he added, that most of the lava tubes remain intact and very stable, meaning there is little chance of an underground collapse. (Besides which, we can assume future moon engineers would be happy to provide some support structure for extra safety.)

So how soon can we climb into one of these tubes to check things out? NASA is planning to land humans on the moon in 2024, accompanied by a suite of private vehicles under the Commercial Lunar Services Program (CLPS). At first these landers and rovers will be focused on supporting human missions, but there is the possibility of adding science payloads for exploring the lava tubes.

The earliest missions to Mars would happen no earlier than the mid-2030s, of course assuming that the funding and the will persist long enough to make an international coalition possible. We can only send spacecraft there every two years, so a feasibility study for lava tube living would likely be very far in the future given the complication of even getting a vehicle in the tube in the first place.

But perhaps we can be encouraged that the newly launched NASA Perseverance rover mission may be carrying a vehicle that would take the first tentative steps to lunar tube exploration on Mars. The Ingenuity helicopter should be the first flying vehicle on the Red Planet, taking flight sometime in 2021. If the test mission goes to plan, Ingenuitys design could be used for many other future Martian flying vehicles, perhaps including some that could explore the lunar tubes from up close.

A study based on the research was published in Earth-Science Reviews.

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Why We Should Build Astronaut Cities In Moon And Mars Lava Tubes - Forbes

Human Behavior

Communication and Control Are Inextricably Linked: Artist Cao Fei on How Technology Both Serves and Suppresses Humanity – artnet News

Beijing-based artist Cao Fei is easily one of the most influential Chinese artists working today. Her multimedia and sculpture-based workwhich explores the chaotic, liminal space of the real world as it meets the technological onehas been exhibited in major shows the world over, from MoMA PS1 to the Tate Modern.

Recently, her exhibition Blueprints at Serpentine Galleries in London was put on pauseand has just reopened, giving the work, which is all about future plans and projections, new relevance and meaning.

Just in time for the reopening, Cao spoke to Artnet News about the show, how shes been faring in her life and career over the past few months, and what she thinks the art world of the future will look like.

Tell me about how Blueprints came to be. What are you exploring in these multimedia works and how do they relate to each other?

A blueprint can be both a plan and a projection. It points to the past as well as the future. The artists blueprint guides the virtual and the real.

The works in this exhibition all contain the impulse to deconstruct these worlds (the new, the old, the future, and the fictional), which may provide some enlightenment for people, in the sense of time and space and how to live, as well as how to understand the intimate relationship formed between themselves and all these stories.

Cao Fei, Blueprints, installation view, Serpentine Gallery, 2020. Photo: Gautier Deblonde.

Youve long been interested in where virtual reality and reality meet, especially as it concerns young members of Chinese society today. How did you become interested in this subject?

Virtual reality doesnt just center on young people in todays society. When I first started using Second Life [an online world] more than a decade ago, I met many people in their 50s and 70s who were deeply immersed in virtual communities. People of different generations are actually interested in it, and sometimes the older generation is more open to the rapid transformation of this medium than even the younger generation. My interest in virtual reality stems from my concern about people and societyin particular how the transformation of media determines the transformation of human survival, in many respects.

In todays world, the boundary between virtual reality and reality is increasingly blurred, so the creative practice of virtual reality is to study ourselves and intervene when necessary.

How do you feel our relationship to life IRL and to technology has changed over time?

Today, technology and life are deeply interwoven. The roots of online and offline are tied together, and that makes todays reality complex. Its a structure that has never been seen or experienced before in our human society, and, a lot of the time, we can no longer distinguish [the bounds of] real reality. But no matter how optimistic we are about the future of technology, it is rooted in cybernetics, the interaction between technology and human beings. On one hand, technology serves human beings; on the other, it controls human behavior. Communication and control are inextricably linked, and thats essentially political.

Some of my works, to varying degrees, relate to the relationship between technology and the development of human society today. They are strategic technologies developed by nationalism, unmanned technologies that accelerate the era, technological progressalso, the loss of love, and contradictions between technology and human nature. Technology brings order, progress and equal rights; it also fosters new chaos and restrictions. It has the power to destroy us.

Norbert Wieneronce, a cybernetics pioneer, said we must find a way to begin assigning code of values to our relationships with machines. Technology should be used to benefit human life, increase our leisure time and enrich our spiritual lifeit shouldnt exist just for the sake of profit and machine worship.

A sense of apocalyptic doom runs through a lot of your work, though it also seemingly underscores humor and the strength of the individual. How does humor play into your narrative?

Humor may be the only optimistic spirit that can face the end of the world. Even if you know about a lot of bad things coming down the line that you are unable to change, besides being optimistic, what else is left or worth paying attention to? The ancient Chinese Taoist thought wuwei points out that everything follows its own rules and complies with the changes of nature, and the spiritual realm of wuwei is that Tao follows nature. The characters in my works are looking for a self-sufficient relationship with the world, and try to face it calmly, no matter in the depressed production environment or the doomsday time and space.

Cao Fei, Nova, 2019, video, 109. Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprth Magers.

What do you want people to take away from the show?

A friend has said that he sees Maitri in my writingsthe Buddhist word for compassion, and the Sanskrit word for love, or friend. Compassion means extinguishing anger and namelessnessits the will to get past melancholy and anxiety, to transform pain and alleviate grief. I hope that people can get out of their own perspectives through these works and engage with some of these things and try to assess their relationship with the world with more compassion.

How do you feel about all thats happening in the current moment, and how it has interrupted the timeline of the show?

Ive had different feelings in different phases. I started out panicked, sort of pessimistic and skeptical. Then I felt lost, like I was waiting in the dark, anxious. Then I tried to adapt. Now its about reflection and continued action. I think these are probably feelings shared by a lot of people.

It was fortunate that the Serpentine exhibition opened on schedule in March this year, even though it was only on for two weeks. Many institutions still havent recovered. And I feel grateful that Serpentine has been able to reopen. I think Blueprints is the most memorable exhibition of mine. Its on during a historic moment of shared destiny, of shared disaster, and its revelatory.

What, to you, makes good art? What makes great art? Whats the difference? And who, to you, is making great art today?

Art is subjective, unable to be defined as good and bad or right and wrong. Everyone can create their own art. The important thing is that you are willing to express it.

What are you working on now?

Over the past few years, Ive spent most of my time and energy on my job, and raising two young children. Ive been ignoring my own health. Ive recently begun to adjust to a new healthy lifestyle, and I think its time to get rid of both physical and mental impurities. We should also use the present moment as a time of precipitation, recuperation, and introspection, to repair ourselves and our relationships to our families and the world.

I never set any goal for whats next. Time will push you forward and things will run and develop according to their own rules. In fact, you cant help making plans, just like reality cant help but interrupt those original plans. An artist is not a company, and we dont have to run all the time. A pause is good, in fact.

Cao Fei, Blueprints, installation view, Serpentine Gallery, 2020. Photo: Gautier Deblonde.

What do you think the art world will look like in five years?

Some physical galleries and institutions may begin to close, one after anotheronline will become an indispensable structure in the art world. For example, institutions will strengthen online exhibitions and public churches and galleries will also strengthen their roles online. Perhaps there will be more artists with the internet as the medium and aesthetic research. They no longer rely only on galleries, and collectors have reduced their enthusiasm for contemporary art collecting. However, there will be more scholars and authors, and academic discussions in ideology will become more active. There are fewer works that touch interactive media in institutional exhibitions, and the exhibition viewing has become a very modernist aesthetic style. The audience keeps a certain distance from paintings and sculptures, and the exhibition viewing has become a very ritual behavior, like going to the cinema, a theater, or concert.

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Communication and Control Are Inextricably Linked: Artist Cao Fei on How Technology Both Serves and Suppresses Humanity - artnet News