Biosafety laboratory accidents are a normal part of laboratory science, but the frequency of such accidents is unclear due to current reporting standards and processes. To better understand accident ...reporting, a survey was created, with input from ABSA International, which included a series of questions about standards, requirements, and likely motivations for reporting or nonreporting. A total of 60 biosafety officers completed the survey. Respondents reported working with more than 5,000 people in laboratories, including more than 40 biosafety level 3 or animal biosafety level 3 laboratories, which work with higher-risk pathogens. Most of the respondents were located in the United States, Canada, or New Zealand, or did not identify their location. Notable results included that 97% of surveyed biosafety officers oversee laboratories that require reporting exposure to at least some pathogens. However, 63% relayed that the reports are not usually sent outside of the institution where they occurred. A slight majority (55%) stated that paper reports were used, with the rest reporting they used a variety of computer systems. Even in laboratories that used paper-based reporting systems, 67% relayed that these reports were used alongside, or entered into, a digital system. While 82% of these biosafety officers agreed that workers understood the importance of reporting for their own safety, 82% also agreed that a variety of disincentives prevent laboratory workers from reporting incidents, including concerns about job loss and loss of funding.
Existing compartmental mathematical modelling methods for epidemics, such as SEIR models, cannot accurately represent effects of contact tracing. This makes them inappropriate for evaluating testing ...and contact tracing strategies to contain an outbreak. An alternative used in practice is the application of agent- or individual-based models (ABM). However ABMs are complex, less well-understood and much more computationally expensive. This paper presents a new method for accurately including the effects of Testing, contact-Tracing and Isolation (TTI) strategies in standard compartmental models. We derive our method using a careful probabilistic argument to show how contact tracing at the individual level is reflected in aggregate on the population level. We show that the resultant SEIR-TTI model accurately approximates the behaviour of a mechanistic agent-based model at far less computational cost. The computational efficiency is such that it can be easily and cheaply used for exploratory modelling to quantify the required levels of testing and tracing, alone and with other interventions, to assist adaptive planning for managing disease outbreaks.
Accelerating the availability of COVID-19 vaccines is critical to preventing further waves and mitigating the impact on society. However, preparations for large-scale manufacturing, such as building ...production facilities, are typically delayed until a vaccine is proven safe and effective. This makes sense from a commercial perspective, but incurs great costs in terms of lives lost and damage to the economy. Several policy options are available to reduce this delay, all of which involve incentives or subsidies to invest in production facilities. We review existing approaches, then propose a novel alternative using "option-based guarantees" in which the government commits to paying a proportion of the manufacturer's preparation costs should the product turn out not to be viable. Counterintuitively, this "payment for failure" is appropriate because in the case of success, a company makes a profit from the product itself, and does not need additional money from the government. While other approaches have critical roles, we argue that option-based guarantees are the most promising approach to ensuring a rapid vaccine for COVID-19. Compared to the alternative approaches, they reduce both costs to the government and risk to the companies, while maintaining an incentive to produce a high-quality product quickly and at scale.
•Complex systems are often fragile, and interrelationships make collapses and cascading failures, increasingly dangerous.•There is a possible class of existential risk from systemic fragility, ...related to Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis.•A new “inevitable technological fragility” hypothesis is proposed, specifying how collapse could be unavoidable.•The hypothesis is a speculation, rather than an expectation, and the conditions under which it is true are explored.
The possibility of social and technological collapse has been the focus of science fiction tropes for decades, but more recent focus has been on specific sources of existential and global catastrophic risk. Because these scenarios are simple to understand and envision, they receive more attention than risks due to complex interplay of failures, or risks that cannot be clearly specified. In this paper, we discuss the possibility that complexity of a certain type leads to fragility which can function as a source of catastrophic or even existential risk. The paper first reviews a hypothesis by Bostrom about inevitable technological risks, named the vulnerable world hypothesis. This paper next hypothesizes that fragility may not only be a possible risk, but could be inevitable, and would therefore be a subclass or example of Bostrom's vulnerable worlds. After introducing the titular fragile world hypothesis, the paper details the conditions under which it would be correct, and presents arguments for why the conditions may in fact may apply. Finally, the assumptions and potential mitigations of the new hypothesis are contrasted with those Bostrom suggests.
Biological agents and infectious pathogens have the potential to cause very significant harm, as the natural occurrence of disease and pandemics makes clear. As a way to better understand the risk of ...Global Catastrophic Biological Risks due to human activities, rather than natural sources, this paper reports on a dataset of 71 incidents involving either accidental or purposeful exposure to, or infection by, a highly infectious pathogenic agent.
There has been significant effort put into both reducing the risk of purposeful spread of biological weapons, and biosafety intended to prevent the exposure to, or release of, dangerous pathogens in the course of research. Despite these efforts, there are incidents of various types that could potentially be controlled or eliminated by different lab and/or bioweapon research choices and safety procedures.
The dataset of events presented here was compiled during a project conducted in 2019 to better understand biological risks from anthropic sources. The events which are listed are unrelated to clinical treatment of naturally occurring outbreaks, and are instead entirely the result of human decisions and mistakes. While the events cover a wide range of cases, the criteria used covers a variety of events previously scattered across academic, policy, and other unpublished or not generally available sources.
Metrics are useful for measuring systems and motivating behaviors in academia as well as in public policy, medicine, business, and other systems. Unfortunately, naive application of metrics to a ...system can distort the system and even undermine the original goal. There are two interrelated problems to overcome in building better metrics in academia and elsewhere. The first, specifying evaluable metrics that correspond to the goals, is well recognized but still often ignored. The second, minimizing perverse effects that undermine the metric or that enable people to game the rewards, is less recognized but is critical. This perspective discusses designing metrics, beginning with design considerations and processes; the presentation of specific strategies for mitigating perverse impacts, including secrecy, randomization, diversification, and post hoc specification; and continuing with important desiderata and tradeoffs involved with examples of how they can complement each other or differ. Finally, this perspective presents a comprehensive process integrating these ideas.
Metrics are a near-universal feature of the modern world, but they are often poorly suited to the tasks for which they are used. Perhaps most critically, systems are distorted by the metrics used so that people work toward the poorly designed metric in ways that contribute to neither their own goals nor the goals of the system designers. This perspective asserts that these problems can often be avoided and illustrates the considerations and key issues encountered when designing metrics.
Within academia, prominent scientific metrics exhibit many of these issues. In place of well-designed multidimensional measures, there is widespread reliance on one-size-fits-all metrics like the H-index or journal impact factors for hiring, tenure, and promotion. This collapses important multifaceted issues into metrics that undermine the features they intend to measure. For example, datasets and software are less citable, and less rewarded, than their importance deserves.
Design methods and consideration of desiderata for metrics have been proven useful when used, which is, at present, sporadically and inconsistently across a variety of fields. This perspective presents those methods and considerations in a single article. It then provides a clear methodology for designing metrics to avoid key problems, including insufficient connection between goals and metrics, and the perverse incentives metrics can create.
This report examines the feasibility for non-state actors, including terrorist and insurgent groups, to increase their political and/or economic power by deploying a virtual currency (VC) for use in ...regular economic transactions. This report should be of interest to policymakers interested in technology, counterterrorism, and intelligence and law enforcement issues, as well as for VC and cybersecurity researchers.
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