Coronavirus lockdown, lack of broadband could lead to 'education breakdown'

Larissa Rosa, an English-as-a-second-language teacher at Public School 7 Samuel Stern in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York, has for the last five weeks taught remote classes from her apartment in Manhattan. But she's increasingly worried that too many of her students are being left behind as they're unable to connect to the online sessions.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a lockdown of millions of people around the world, and New York, where schools have been shut down since March 16, has been one of the major epicenters of COVID-19 cases, with more than 145,000 confirmed cases as of Thursday afternoon. As a result, teachers and students have resorted to distance learning with online classes. 

But Rosa said at least 45 of the roughly 400 students at her school haven't logged on once. There are many reasons why students may not be showing up, such as parents working or families that are dealing with the virus, but one of the biggest issues she hears from families is a lack of broadband access. 

"These are already students who were not at grade level," Rosa said. "I just worry that they're falling further behind. And it doesn't look like anyone is trying to fix this."

Since March, when governors across the country began declaring public health emergencies and issuing shelter-in-place orders, 47 states and the District of Columbia have closed schools due to the coronavirus, according to Education Week. All told, at least 124,000 US public and private schools across the country have closed their doors, affecting 55 million students. And as many as 38.6 million students won't be going back to school until at least the fall.

Districts have scrambled to replace their in-person instruction with some form of online learning. Some schools are offering live video streams, while others post assignments online and expect students to access content and assignments. 

But as the weeks drag on, it's become clear that not all students have access to broadband, exacerbating an existing equity problem in American education. The result is that millions of students throughout the country aren't getting the same educational opportunity as their peers. 

https://www.cnet.com/

Coding together apart: Software development after COVID-19

Pandemics are not the “new normal” for the human race. As with practically every other type of disaster, we’ve survived them countless times in the past.

But there’s no doubt we’re living and working through an emergency situation right now. As we try to avoid exposing ourselves to the novel coronavirus, we must also prevent our working lives from stalling out completely. For most professionals, remote collaboration will be our primary fallback method until normality returns.

Tech marketing is in crisis

Working remotely can be awkward when your productivity depends on being able to share a physical space with others for at least a few hours per day or week. Tech marketers have been hit particularly hard because a large part of their annual cycles are aligned with conferences and other industry events, most of which have been canceled, postponed, or made entirely virtual.

Indeed, I’ve noticed far fewer tech product releases in the past few months than in a normal spring season. This goes against the pattern I’ve seen practically every year since I entered the IT field in the mid-1980s. Typically, a burst of launches grabs everyone’s attention from late February through early June, until an equal or larger batch of vendor announcements in the fall takes the spotlight.

Right now in the midst of the global COVID-19 emergency, it’s difficult to get any new product launch noticed unless your new product has a clear role in helping humanity cope with the pandemic. However, those sorts of offerings pretty much by definition have a short shelf life and will almost certainly be forgotten or discarded when the emergency wanes in the next few months.

Software developers have embraced distance coding

Though tech marketing seems to have ground to a halt, software developers aren’t letting sheltering in place crimp their productivity. Many software vendors I’ve spoken to during the past few months say that their locked-down coders are working as hard as ever. If anything, this current crisis may be the tipping point in the advent of a new normal for software development practices.

Physical distancing spares coders from wasting their time in pointless meetings and can make them ever more effective multitaskers. If work-from-home coders prove themselves to be just as effective as they were in shared offices, their employers may let them continue when the crisis subsides. After all, office space is expensive, and needing less of it is a great way to keep overhead low.

In a practical sense, programming teams rarely need to occupy the same physical office as long as they can hammer out code, test it thoroughly, and deploy it in a devops pipeline. But programming is a creative human endeavor, and there are often more face-to-face meetings and conversations in coding projects than people realize.

While they fend off cabin fever, programmers will have to find the right set of collaboration tools to suit their needs. They’ll need to look beyond Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, which have received more than their fair share of attention in the trade and popular press in the past month. Suddenly back in vogue, these collaborative software tools were not designed to facilitate structured interactions among coders working on common projects.

Live code collaboration comes to devops

The opportunity for live, real-time collaboration is an obvious advantage of in-person team arrangements, though its importance is debatable in the modern world of virtual collaboration.

If today’s work-from-home coders need strong code collaboration tools, there are many on the market. However, only a handful provide the strong, real-time collaboration one would enjoy in a shared brick-and-mortar office. For a good roundup on the live collaboration features in today’s leading coding tools, check out Serdar Yegulalp’s recent InfoWorld article in which he dissects such offerings as AWS Cloud9, Codeanywhere, CodeSandbox, Codeshare, Floobits, Teletype, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Live Share.

Available as web-based services or add-ons to existing editors, these tools enable real-time sharing and collaboration on cloud-hosted coding projects. Typically, users can share project environments with multiple team members. Users can edit files together in real time, invite others to join them in active tabs, and follow them between tabs as they switch files.

Typically, coders can watch each other’s typing, as the tools often provide visual cues that indicate who wrote which lines of code. Many also offer a text chat and/or video chat pane within the development environment. Users can often share running cloud-hosted web application servers with each other.

Just as important, users can often share out both workspaces that use various repositories for source control and project governance. This is an absolutely essential feature for development teams who need their live code collaboration tooling to plug into their enterprise devops pipelines. More often than not, remote coding teams will rely on public and private Git repositories as the pivot points in the collaborative workflows.

In the post-pandemic days to come, we’ll probably recognize that this work-from-home crisis tipped enterprise development practices more firmly toward the new paradigm being called “Gitops.” Under Gitops, devops teams store and manage every application artifact in a Git repository, such as GitHub. This generally includes all policies, code, configuration, and events that are integral to an application’s design, as well as machine learning models that are vital to deployed artificial intelligence applications.

Coding’s brick-and-mortar days are coming to a close

As we return to post-pandemic normality, I also expect that live code collaboration will become the norm. In our new socially distanced world, code-collaboration tools will make it possible to build and deploy any type of application without the need for two or more humans to physically co-locate.

Abetted by no-code tools, this new hermetic world of software development will enable coders to retreat to their homes or another safe place to do their work, should pandemics or other disasters make it too dangerous to venture outside.

https://www.infoworld.com/

What is power over Ethernet (PoE)?

Power over Ethernet has become one of those checklist items many enterprises rely on to bring electricity over existing data cables to Wi-Fi access points, firewalls, IP phones and other infrastructure throughout their networks.

PoE’s use has grown substantially since the IEEE standardized it in 2003, and its use will only increase in the coming years as new applications develop. In fact, the Dell’Oro group says that PoE port shipments will total over 624 million over the next five years.

“There are a number of drivers for the current PoE technology. For example, if you look at WLAN [wireless LAN] access points, you have increased number of [wireless-spectrum] bands and higher speeds which require higher power,” said  Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Research Director for Ethernet Switch market research at Dell’Oro. “The new generation of IP phones is adding telepresence features. If you look at surveillance cameras, you have zooming features, you have added analytics. All these new features require higher power.”

What is Power over Ethernet?

PoE is the delivery of electrical power to networked devices over the same data cabling that connects them to the LAN. This simplifies the devices themselves by eliminating the need for an electric plug  and power converter, and makes it unnecessary to have separate AC electric wiring and sockets installed near each device.

In the case replacing legacy phone systems with of IP phones, the need for separate dedicated DC power cables is eliminated. When networks are expanded or reconfigured, so long as data cable is pulled to the devices, they will have power.

The original IEEE PoE standard (802.3af-2003) specifies how to deliver up to 15.4W of DC power per switch port to each device at up to 33 feet over Category 3, 5,  5e and 6 Ethernet cables. The standard sets 15.4W as the maximum but provides for only 12.95W to reach the devices because power is dissipated within the cable over distance. That loss doesn’t affect network performance of 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet links to the devices.

Over time newer devices required more power, so a new standard, PoE+ (IEEE 802.3at), was created in 2009, bumping the maximum power to 30W with 25.5W reaching devices.

The latest standard, 802.3bt, pushes the maximum power from the source switch to 90W, with 71.3W available to devices. It is expected to be the last PoE standard, according to David Tremblay, Ethernet Alliance PoE Subcommittee chair and system architect, at Aruba Networks an HPE company.

Benefits

The driving ideas behind PoE were to eliminate the need for electrical outlet installation, especially in remote or hard to reach locations. PoE also promised to:

• Reduce deployment costs up to $1,000 per device.
• Reduce the need for AC power adaptors.
• Simplify installation by letting customers employ a single Cat5/5e/6 cable for both data and power.
• Offer customers centralized power backup and management.
• Make it possible to repurpose copper from legacy phone networks.
• Enable moving PoE devices without the network seeing any down time.

“Energy saving is a big part of PoE in particular, but the standard is really focused on energy efficiency as it uses all 4 pairs of [wires in] Ethernet Cat 5 cabling whereas previous versions of the standard used two,” Tremblay said.

The latest standard maintains a power-signature level that supports lighting or IoT applications to be powered with PoE and have acceptable standby performance when needed.

Another benefit, Tremblay said, is that PoE in combination with analytics software can let facilities-management teams determine what areas of buildings are unoccupied and save electricity by remotely turning off lights and HVAC devices.

An important and growing benefit of PoE is in deploying Wi-Fi access points. These devices are often placed in locations where it would be difficult to extend traditional electric lines, such as behind ceiling panels, Boujelbene said. 

The growth of wireless in buildings, offices and places like sports arenas fuels the need for PoE, Tremblay said. “PoE makes wireless rollouts so much more tangible.”

PoE and IoT

Using PoE in wireless rollouts may be the technology’s primary application but many think it will find a home in the internet of things where wired IoT devices can receive power from their network connection.

Versa technology wrote a blog about the use of PoE and IoT by the city of San Diego, Calif., which is using Ethernet cabling to deliver power to thousands of interconnected LED streetlights, which are integrated into the city’s IoT network. Power to the smart lamps can be turned up and down to optimize illumination for each space.

Such lighting systems have low power requirements, making them cheaper to use. The PoE streetlights are integrated with the city’s IoT network, which makes it possible to monitor and control them remotely. The smart lamps are fitted with motion sensors to conserve energy by optimizing lighting based on the needs of each space. The system saves the city $250,000 or more per year, Versa stated.

IP security cameras, which are often placed in difficult-to-access locations, are another key PoE application target.

The big challenge: Interoperability

The single greatest challenge for PoE is assuring interoperability.

The Ethernet Alliance’s Power over Ethernet (PoE) Certification Program can help enable faster PoE installations and avoid interoperability issues, Tremblay said. Ethernet vendors including Analog Devices, Cisco, HPE, Huawei, Microsemi, and Texas Instruments are part of the certification program.

But as new classes of devices are developed, industry players need to forge new partnerships with companies offering certified equipment, the Dell’Oro group said. “With the diversity of application, come interoperability problems which dictate the need for testing and certification,” Boujelbene said.

Certified products range from component-level evaluation boards, to power-sourcing enterprise switches, to midspan PoE power sources. Details of certified products are available via the program’s public registry.

https://www.networkworld.com/

How Data Science Is Being Used to Understand COVID-19

The rapid spread and global impacts of COVID-19 can make people feel helpless and scared as the novel coronavirus escalates and forces them to change many aspects of their everyday lives.

However, people can feel glimmers of hope in these uncertain times by understanding more about how data scientists are working hard to learn as much about COVID-19 as they can. 

Data Science Can Give Accurate Pictures of Coronavirus Outcomes

 

Medical professionals and others must get correct and up-to-date information about how the coronavirus situation changes day by day. Several organizations, including Johns Hopkins University, IBM and Tableau, have released interactive databases that offer real-time views of what's happening with the virus.

Many of these sources pull from data provided by trusted bodies such as the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). They also include direct links to those places so that people have quick, easy access to reliable information. 

Using these databases can inform people of the number of confirmed cases, fatalities and recoveries. Then, whether a person is on the front lines of the coronavirus fight or a concerned citizen trying to stay informed, they can get all or most of the information they need in one place. 

Data Scientists Devise a Speedier Way to Handle Contact Tracing

 

Contact tracing is an effective way to slow COVID-19. It involves getting in touch with a person's close contacts after that individual tests positive for the virus and telling them to self-isolate. Contact tracing is time-consuming, although it's getting easier as more people take social distancing seriously. 

Data scientists and medical experts teamed up at Oxford University to make contact tracing even more efficient. The experts working on the project asserted that mathematical models showed them how traditional methods of contact tracing used in public health are not fast enough to thoroughly slow the spread of COVID-19. 

They created a mobile phone-based solution to eliminate the need for people to call the contacts manually. Instead, those parties get text messages confirming the need for self-isolation. The researchers clarify that their approach would be most effective if it gets support from national leaders and is not an effort primarily spearheaded by independent app developers. 

No nations are using this method yet. Given the market penetration of mobile phones and the familiarity people have with receiving texts, however, it's easy to see why this approach makes sense. 

Everyone Can Play a Part in Helping Scientists Fight the Coronavirus

 

Many people with COVID-19 have only mild symptoms or none at all. Plus, the classic symptoms include a fever and a cough — two issues not restricted to the coronavirus. These things could make it easier for people to unknowingly spread the disease. But, developers created an app that uses data-sharing to help medical experts learn more about the virus. 

It's called the Covid Symptom Tracker and already has at least 200,000 users. People can and should interact with the app even if they are asymptomatic or do not think their symptoms are COVID-19-related. The more researchers know about the coronavirus, the better equipped they are to tackle it. 

People interact with the app to do a short daily symptom check-in. They also give their age and postal code, plus disclose any preexisting conditions. That information helps scientists determine the groups that are most affected or at risk. The app does not take user data for commercial purposes, but it gives it to people who are working to stop the coronavirus, including some at health organizations. 

 Data Scientists Use Machine Learning to Find Possible Cures Faster

 

Besides the race to restrict the COVID-19 spread, scientists are working as quickly as possible to uncover effective treatments. Two graduates of the data science program at Columbia University have turned to machine learning to help. The typical process of antibody discovery in a lab takes years. This approach, however, takes only a week to screen for therapeutic antibodies with a high likelihood of success. 

The team taking this approach says this method is less costly than traditional ones, too. Humans are still part of the process because they have to test the gene sequences identified as most promising by the machine learning algorithm. However, using this expedited method could be crucial in efficiently finding interventions that work for coronavirus patients.

Data Science Can Help Track the Spread

 

Data science specialists have also concluded that graph databases are instrumental in showing them how COVID-19 spreads. A graph database shows links between people, places or things. Scientists refer to each of those entities as a node, and the connections between them are the "edges." The results give a visual representation of the relationship between things, if any.

In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese data scientists built a graph database tool called Epidemic Spread. It allowed people to type in identifying information associated with the journeys they took, such as a flight number or even a car's license plate. The database would then tell those users whether anyone with a confirmed coronavirus case took those same trips and may have spread it to fellow passengers. 

 Making Progress Against COVID-19

 

Knowing as much about the coronavirus as possible will save lives. These are only some of the fascinating ways that data scientists are using their skills to help.

https://www.kdnuggets.com/

VMware Boosts Hybrid-Cloud Visibility, Management

VMware pushed its operations management tool to the cloud with a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) form factor and newly added hybrid cloud support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and vSphere Kubernetes deployments in addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

vRealize Operations is VMware’s on-premises software product that provides operations management across applications, infrastructure, and clouds. The new vRealize Operations Cloud, which is generally available today, has the same user interface and features as the on-premises version. “It offers everything you can do with vRealize operations on prem,” said Taruna Gandhi, VP of product marketing for cloud management at VMware. This includes “performance optimization, which includes fully automated workload balancing and placement” based on business and operational intent, she added.

The product also helps enterprises better manage costs and improve efficiency by making recommendations about procurement and rightsizing workloads. Both versions use artificial intelligence (AI) for troubleshooting — predicting and preventing issues across customers’ hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Gandhi said. And it continually scans these environments to enforce IT and regulatory standards around configuration and compliance, and automatically remediates any problems.

‘Major In Hybrid Cloud’

Some of the new features in both the SaaS and on-premises versions include better public cloud cost comparisons via integration with VMware’s CloudHealth and improved VMware Cloud on AWS migration.

CloudHealth is VMware’s public cloud management platform. To explain the relationship between CloudHealth and vRealize Operations, “think of vROps as the defacto solution for VMware hybrid cloud, VMware SDDC and VMware Cloud on AWS, whereas CloudHealth is heavily focused on the public-cloud side,” Gandhi said. “While vROps has a major in hybrid cloud, it has a minor in public cloud.”

The updated software also supports the newly released vSphere 7.0 with Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform, which VMware formed a hybrid-cloud partnership with last summer.

And while vRealize Operations Cloud became generally available today, 33 customers have been beta testing the SaaS product since February, accounting for 132,585 total virtual machines (VMs). This included 124 different vCenter accounts, and 11 VMware cloud on AWS accounts. Beta customers include German stock exchange Börse Stuttgart, Australian gambling and entertainment group Tabcorp, and Israel-based enterprise software and IT services firm Trilogy.

VMware Customer Traction

Börse Stuttgart, an existing vRealize Operations on-premises customer, has been working with VMware to migrate administrative data to public cloud since 2019. While some highly regulated trading data must remain on-premises, “they are trying to get out of the business of maintaining and managing as much of their on-premises software as they can, Gandhi said. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has amplified this move to the cloud because while stock traders still work the trading floor, “everyone else is working from home. So anything they can do remote, any troubleshooting, really helps them out.”

In a statement, Stephan Wiechert, IT system specialist at Börse Stuttgart, said vRealize Operations Cloud has improved services monitoring for faster troubleshooting. “VMware vRealize Operations Cloud works smoothly,” he said. “I get a message before an upgrade, then it happens automatically. A few minutes later, I get another message saying everything is finished. I’m saving up to 10 hours a month on upgrades and troubleshooting. That’s success to me.”

Meanwhile, Trilogy wasn’t an existing vRealize Operations customer. “They have no physical real estate. They are all in the cloud, mostly on VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS native,” Gandhi said.

Trilogy reduced costs and improved and improved efficiency across its hybrid-cloud environment with vRealize Operations Cloud, said Fuat Ulugay, SaaS operations manager at Trilogy, in a statement.

“With VMware vRealize Operations Cloud we were able to gain full visibility across our environment — which we didn’t have previously,” Ulugay said. “The insight delivered by the service led us to immediately reduce our hosts by 20%, saving us thousands of dollars in the process. In less than a week, we were able to right-size our environment, optimize our performance, and see what we needed for capacity planning.”

https://www.sdxcentral.com/

IoT roundup: Tech companies step up to help fight against COVID-19

We’ve seen few efforts as monumental as the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. While the tech sector as a whole has suffered less than many other industries, individual companies and organizations are stepping up to help battle the virus’ spread, and IoT in particular offers numerous methods to help keep people healthy.

In the healthcare sector, a San Antonio-based startup has developed an autonomous robot that can sanitize hospital rooms on its own, obviating the need for human workers to be exposed to the virus. XENEX’s LightStrike robots use powerful UV lights to kill off pathogens lingering on surfaces, and they’re coordinated and monitored in near-real-time via AT&T’s cellular network. The mobile operator also says that it’s partnering with a second company, Brain Corp, to connect a similar type of robot worker, this one designed to clean stores, restock items and even provide automated delivery services.

“The health crisis is a clear example of how advanced technology and IoT solutions can radically improve the way we approach and solve societal challenges,” said AT&T senior vice president Chris Penrose, in a statement.

https://www.idginsiderpro.com/