Science & Technology

Many are looking to digital contact tracing to assist reopening efforts, especially in light of reports that the U.S. could expect as many as 100,000 more deaths due to the virus by this Fall. This report focuses on how the U.S. might consider various proposed solutions.

We believe there are real benefits, challenges, and even potential harms in using digital solutions in the fight against COVID-19, but we must also acknowledge that the promise of any technology and associated systems to assist manual contact tracing efforts is largely hypothetical in the United States. There is not one catch-all answer; the truth is that technology is not a panacea, but it may be able to assist official efforts at an unprecedented time. However, no technological solution can succeed without two specific factors: public trust and buy-in, and rapid, widespread testing for everyone living in the U.S. To achieve the first, a number of factors must be addressed by officials in the states looking to implement digital solutions, and by technology developers.
 

100 days working on COVID-19 and lessons learned to prepare us for the next spike and future pandemics.

The authors argue that more determined efforts to globalize renewable energy transmission can confer significantly higher economic and environmental benefits from renewables on billions of people. This can be done by exploiting spatial differences between electricity loads and net renewable generation across time zones (temporal arbitrage) and latitude (seasonal arbitrage). Using very long distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure, temporal and spatial arbitrage can move low-cost clean electricity from areas with excess capacity to high demand zones in other countries and even continents.

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast into stark relief a harsh reality that health and biosecurity experts have been worrying about for many years: our extreme vulnerability to naturally occurring pandemics and man-made bioweapons.

Stephen Walt writes that political institutions are not permanent phenomena: they are artificial human creations and only as enduring, adaptive, and effective as people make them. He hopes for a serious and sustained process of democratic change, one that respects the nobler features of the U.S. constitutional order yet addresses all the ways in which The United States has failed to live up to its own professed ideals. The alternative, he fears, will be something much more dangerous. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the increasing convergence of the physical and digital worlds and it affects us all. Hundreds of "things" are being connected to the Internet and each other, with more than fifty billion devices expected to be connected by 2030. Many IoT devices are manufactured abroad at low cost with little consideration for security. How can we secure these devices, especially those manufactured outside the United States?

Tuesday was primary day in West Virginia, and the Republican-led state government there did something sensible that other states should embrace: They made it easier to cast absentee ballots.

Joel Clement, a Mainer by birth, offers some words of advice before Donald Trump's proposed visit to Guilford, located in Maine's 2nd Congressional District, on June 5, 2020: Don't get played by out-of-state money that is pouring into Maine to politicize mask wearing and organize protests.

This article provides an overview of intimate threats: a class of privacy threats that can arise within families, romantic partnerships, close friendships, and caregiving relationships. The authors survey a range of intimate relationships and describe their common features. Based on these features, they explore implications for both technical privacy design and policy, and offer design recommendations for ameliorating intimate privacy risks.

The peer-reviewed update of ENRP's ongoing research on renewable hydrogen is featured in the June volume of Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, an academic journal of which Dr. Nicola de Blasio is now also an editor.