loose

the search against time to locate the “loose ends” of the hantavirus cruise

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Although how much the experts insist In which the risk for the populations is very low, the fear of the hantavirus continues to travel through each of the countries through which the passengers of the MV Hondius have circulated. Actually, it’s normal. Fear is a very human emotion, which helps us be alert in situations as new as this one. There is considerable uncertainty in this situation, especially in relation to passengers who got off the ship before the hantavirus outbreak was confirmed. However, little by little this uncertainty is fading as information about their countries of origin arrives. Saint Helena, April 24, 2026. On April 24, 13 days after the death of the first infected passenger with hantavirus, the ship made a stop on the British island of Saint Helena. He took the opportunity to lower the body and prepare it for repatriation. His wife traveled with him, who became the second victim, after traveling to South Africa. In addition to the two deceased, it is known that on the island another 28 people got off. It was not yet known that the first victim had a contagious virusso no passenger control was carried out. Then what? Since it became known that there was a hantavirus outbreak on the ship, attempts have been made to locate those 28 people and their close contacts. It is known that among them there were passengers of at least 12 different nationalities. There were mainly British and Americans, but also people from other countries such as Singapore, Canada or Germany, among others. The countries of origin or residence of each of them have also been taking charge. Thus, some have already achieved the goal of finding them and putting them in quarantine. From the United States to Singapore. In the United States there are five people in quarantinespread across Texas, California, Arizona and Georgia. In Singapore too have been quarantined and to the two passengers who got off in Santa Elena. France had no citizens among that group of passengers, but has quarantined eight citizens who were in contact with one of those people on a flight from Saint Helena to Johannesburg. In short, many of these people are already under observation, although it is true that there are others to be identified and monitored. Many of the passengers who got off in Santa Elena have already been identified. It is not very contagious. The positive part of all this is that hantavirus is not as contagious as other pathogens with pandemic potential such as the COVID-19 coronavirus. In general, contagion between people, which only occurs with Andes variant (that of the boat), requires very close contacts. It is possible that he was a super-spreader on board the cruise ship. That is, a person from whose body a virus is transmitted exceptionally well. We saw some cases with COVID-19, for example. However, it is normal that the rest of those infected are not super-spreaders. Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that there were several simultaneous infections when coming into contact with mice on an excursion. It would not be a patient who is super contagious, but there could have been an initial event that caused a good part of the cases. In both scenarios, the contagion capacity would decrease over time. dead end. Another positive point about hantavirus is that has what is known as a dead end. It cannot be contagious continuously. It is known that, at most, it usually reaches three links. That is, one person infects another, that second infected person passes the disease to a third and that’s it. The chain cuts itself. For this reason, even if some of the people who got off in Santa Elena could continue to be contagious, they would not infect many people beyond their closest contacts. And what about those who are still on the boat? Spain is prepared to repatriate all passengers, with or without symptoms, or treat whoever is necessary. In that case, the transfer will be carried out with the necessary safety conditions so that there are no more infections. Therefore, from now on, the important thing is that these people undergo the necessary quarantines. Each country will decide how long they will be, but always taking into account that the incubation time in the most extreme cases can exceed 40 days. Easy to detect. The genome of this virus is very well known. For this reason, the diagnosis is simple through PCR. This test will be carried out on passengers on several occasions during the quarantine, to check their evolution. They cannot be discharged without repeating it once again. That said, although it is logical that uncertainty worries us, it is important that we keep in mind the limited pandemic potential of this virus. There is a lot of work to be done to ensure that the situation does not get worse, but there are already many people working on it. Image | CDC/Magnific | Fdesroches In Xataka | We believed that hantavirus did not jump between humans. Until someone went to a birthday party in Argentina

This engineer found 1,351 loose photos in his grandmother’s house. He ended up building a personal Wikipedia of his entire life

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It all started with a closet full of old loose photos. Last year an engineer named Jeremy visited his grandmother’s house for the first time since the pandemic and unknowingly came across a treasure. 1,351 on paper, without order, without dates and without context. Some were in black and white, from when his grandparents were 20 years old. Others were from his mother as a baby. The last ones were from him in high school, just before smartphones arrived and everything moved to the cloud. What began as a family organization exercise became a fascinating project over the weeks: a personal encyclopedia. A Wikipedia of his own life. First, the physical photos and the grandmother. The first problem he encountered when starting his project is that physical photos do not have EXIF metadata. There is almost never a capture date (although some cameras superimposed it), there are no GPS coordinates and there is no information that allows them to be easily sorted. What Jeremy did was resort to a much more direct solution: sit down with his grandmother and ask her about the photos. Remembering that it is a gerund. In that conversation she rearranged the photos of their wedding and narrated the details while he took notes. Names, places, who was sitting where, what each ritual meant. With those notes, he set up a local instance of MediaWiki, the same software that Wikipedia uses, and wrote a page about the wedding following the same format that was used on Wikipedia to royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011. Within two afternoons I had a complete article with scanned photos, captions, links to empty pages about each person mentioned, and links to the real Wikipedia to give historical context to the events. Digital photos and Claude Code to get the job done. Jeremy realized that things could get worse and took the opportunity to do tests with digital photos, which do have EXIF data with date and time and even GPS coordinates. With that information he wanted to see how far he could go without interviews, so he took 625 photos from a family trip to Coorg (India) in 2012, put them in a folder and opened Claude Code in that directory with a simple instruction: compose a Wikipedia page by browsing the images. The model used ImageMagick to create contact sheets that allowed him to process multiple photos at once, and the magic of AI did the rest. The result was a detailed draft chronicling the trip organized by time of day. Without location data, just with timestamps and visual content, the AI ​​model was able to identify the places that appeared in the photos, including some that Jeremy himself had forgotten. It even detected the means of transportation used between destinations just with what it saw in the images. When AI starts remembering for you. Then came the most ambitious experiment, when he wanted to go further with a trip he took to Mexico City in 2022. He had 291 photos and 343 videos taken with an iPhone 12 Pro with GPS coordinates in the metadata, but he also exported his Google Maps location history, his Uber trips, his banking transactions and his Shazam history. By including all that data and sources, the model was able to cross-reference banking transactions with location data to identify the restaurants where he had eaten. For example, he found images of a soccer match in the photos but did not remember which teams were playing, but he found out that information by crossing those photos with bank transactions in which he found a Ticketmaster invoice with the name of the tournament and the teams, and incorporated them into the page. He also used Shazam’s history to describe the music playing in each location. From photos and memories to a personal encyclopedia. A wonderful project that now anyone can replicate thanks to the whoami.wiki website. First the trips, then the friendships. What started as a travel documentation project evolved into something more personal. The Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp archives contained some 100,000 messages and several thousand voice notes exchanged with close friends over a decade. The AI ​​model managed to convert all this information into a unique biography, identifying vital episodes of the protagonists, then converted into pages that, according to Jeremy, “read as if they were written by someone who knew us both.” When he shared the pages with those friends, they couldn’t stop reading those stories and wanted more. MediaWiki as a master ingredient. One of the most interesting decisions of the project is the choice of software. MediaWiki, Wikipedia’s engine, turned out to be an extraordinarily suitable tool for that use case. AI models understand this perfectly because they have been trained with millions of Wikipedia pages and know their structure and functioning. Discussion pages serve to control the development of those pages, categories group pages by topic, and revision history monitors the evolution of each page. All of this infrastructure already existed, and it was not necessary to create a new platform to organize the information that Jeremy was providing. Surpriseyes. At the end of his story, Jeremy explains that after the process: “I realized that I was no longer alone working on a family history project. What I had been creating, page by page, was a personal encyclopedia. A structured, navigable, interconnected record of my life compiled thanks to the data I already had around me.” Documenting her grandmother’s life revealed things she didn’t know: her years as a single mother or the decisions she had to make, for example. Going through the history of his friendships allowed him to recover moments that he had almost forgotten and made him call some of them to remember them together. “The encyclopedia not only organized the data, it made me pay more attention to the people in my life,” he explained. you can do it too. The project has been so rewarding for him that he … Read more

Chile asked Chatgpt about their culture. The answer was so loose that Latin America has joined to create LATAM-GPT

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Observe the development of Generative It is most curious. In the United States they are large technological, and startups such as OpenAIthose who have marked the rhythm. In China, companies are also developing their modelsbut the government has a particular interest in Push this technology For technological purposes, of course, but also social and doctors. And now Latin America has joined to create its own Chatgpt. It will be called LATAM-GPT And the motivation to create this model is curious: a Chilean center did not convince a chatgpt response on Latin American culture. The question. “Describe Latin American culture in 500 characters.” That was, how we read in BBCthe request of some researchers from the National Artificial Intelligence Center -Cenia- from Chile to Chatgpt. His answer It was the following: “Latin American culture is a vibrant amalgam of indigenous roots, African influences and European heritage. It is characterized by its rich diversity in music, dance and gastronomy, reflected in festivals such as carnival and the Flower Fair. Its art, from muralism to literature, shows a deep connection with the history and local identity. The warmth, the sense of community and the celebration of community. pillars that enrich this dynamic and diverse culture. ” I have to say that I just asked for it and the answer is different, but pivot over the same points, such as the fusion of indigenous, African and European inheritances, the taste for music and dance, colorful gastronomy and traditions such as carnival to give rise to a colorful cultural mosaic. LATAM-GPT. This response did not satisfy CENIA researchers, who considered that, although it is a Llm Of great quality, “his understanding of the Latin American context could be enriched and perfected.” Come on, they are convinced that the answer, although correct in broad strokes, needs to qualify a lot to better reflect the peculiarities of the culture of each Latin American country because Chatgpt gave an answer too … Generalist. And that response for the region user will be LATAM-GPT. The intention is to be a Language model of and for Latin America and the Caribbean. The desire is that it addresses the common problems that language models have when interpreting idioms, cultural references and typical expressions of the Latin American context. Álvaro Soto, director of Cenia, states that US models hallucinate because Latin American data with which they have been trained are very scarce. “We do not seek to compete with Openai or one of the giants. We want an own model of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the cultural requirements and challenges that implies” – Cenia Goals. It is triple. On the one hand, what we have just mentioned: that it has a greater context when addressing issues related to the culture of each of the Latin American countries. On the other, that is open and public, allowing each developer to adapt applications to local needs in areas such as education, politics, economy or the environment. Finally, perhaps the most important for something that countries in the region are looking for: stop depending on foreign models and technologies. Mexico, for example, has put on the table the intention of carrying out different projects within a great umbrella called Plan Mexico which seeks to enhance the sovereignty of the nation in several matters, being the technological one -with its own semiconductor industry or of electric vehicles– One of its legs. Financing. With Latam-GPT, it also seeks to promote technological innovation of the region thanks to a tool that can help others seek to develop their potential. But of course, carrying out something like that requires money, and it is something that is not going to be left only in the Cenia. Chile has postulated as the leader of the project, but countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica or Ecuador have not taken long to join. There are also Spanish and American institutions on this ship. It has financial support from associations and academic institutions of these countries, but there is also government support to develop this artificial intelligence. Several countries are immersed in Latam-GPT Resources. For training, researchers will use the infrastructure of the University of Tarapacá, in Chile. It will use a super -tank to train the model with more than 8 TB of data collected from public and private libraries. That training will take about 40 days and it is expected that, for summer of this 2025, LATAM-GPT can be accessed. Investment in infrastructure will be about 10 million dollars. Now, one of the problems can be the consumption of the training center. We have already seen in Spain that Not everyone looks good the installation of Data centers To train AI due to high consumption of both water and energy, but from CENIA they expose that consumption in the first of the two stages will be 135 kWh. The University of Tarapacá is in Aricato northern Chile, where there are A great energy matrix composed of renewables and the idea is to ‘throw’ of them to supply electricity. In addition, from the agency they comment that “the cooling system – of the servers – will not generate water consumption due to the availability of cheap and abundant energy in Arica. CO₂ emissions associated with training will be 0.96 tons.” Necessary? This would be, if the accounts are correct, that the training of this LLM will be more ecological than that of Google or OpenAi models, but there are some challenges ahead. One has to do with the protection of data they use to train the model. The researchers affirm that the main policy for the shelter of intellectual property will be transparency, with open sources that comply with the copyright laws And, at the same time, make automatisms of Anonymization of personal data. On the other hand, there are those who ask that all this … for what. Ulysses Mejías, of Mexican origin, is a professor at the State University of New York and has … Read more

A year ago Barcelona began to fine those who walked loose dogs. It has more than 340 fines

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Throughout 2024 the agents of the Urban Guard of Barcelona imposed 341 fines For an infraction that has little to do with circular In an incorrect way or dirty the streets. No. The reason that (on average) made them get the ball almost daily was to meet neighbors who walked to their dogs without strap in areas that are not allowed to do so. The figure is interesting because 2024 was the first year in which the new restriction was applied. It is not known how much 341 fines were collected, but the norm provides penalties of Between 100 and 2,400 euros. The data: 341 fines. The figure He has revealed it The newspaper of Catalonia and It is confirmed By Betevé: Throughout 2024 the Urban Guard imposed 341 fines for people who walked their dogs loose through the streets, parks and other public spaces of the city. The data is interesting for two reasons. The first, its number. In Barcelona there are many dogs, it is estimated that Between 102,600 and more than 180,000depending on the source that is handled, but still 341 sanctions continue to assume almost one per day. Premiering ordinance. The second reason is that 2024 was the first year in which Barcelona applied its New Ordinance on pets, in which among other issues it is required when and where dogs can be released. Do not respect it translates into sanctions ranging from 100 to 300 euros or even They reach 2,400 In severe cases, such as walking a dangerous dog without a strap or buzal. The City Council began applying these corrections to offenders in December 2023when the moratorium that had applied until then. New sanctions, old norm. Actually the regulations on the pets of the Catalan capital is quite previous. The ordinance of protection, possession and sale of animals (OPTV) It was approved in Xabier Trias timesbut its application was accompanied by a conditioned moratorium to be resolved by certain slope fringes, such as the famous (and controversial) “Civic and Responsible Tendency Card”. Another pending measures was the creation of what was called “shared use zones” (ZUC), areas in which dogs could be loose certain hours a day. The idea, as its name indicates, is that in them the pets in freedom, their owners and other passersby. And how was it? The “Civic Tenure” card He did not go aheadbut in March 2023 The Barcelona City Council announced the final approval, the decree that defined the 225 spaces in the city for dogs, including the ZUC. Of course, the local government already warned that the new guidelines would take nine months to enter into force, which would not move into practice until December of that year. The exact date was on the 18th. From that moment on the police He started fine To the owners of the dogs that walk to their pets without respecting the ordinance. More than 900,000 m2 for walking. According to the calculations, then by the City Council, in Barcelona there are more than 900,000 square meters for the dog recreation, sum of the 116 “Pipicanes” That already existed, the 109 ZUC areas and the beach of Levant. The result, about 5.4 m2 per dog. “The threshold of a minimal recreation zone in each neighborhood is increased and it is achieved that 95% of the citizens who live with dog can have a space less than 10 minutes from home,” He presumed the session in 2023. In The 109 ZUC Dogs can walk unleashed, but adjusting to certain rules and only during certain time slots. The measure did not completely convince the owners of the dogs, who in 2023 complained that the number of areas without a strap was very limited. “They are poorly thought. There are concentrations of dogs well above the desirable,” He warned to The country A spokeswoman for Spanish. Less complaints. The first year of application of the ordinance and activation of ZUC areas in Barcelona leaves more than that balance of 341 fines. In fact The newspaper Precise that there is another much more positive reading: a sensitive fall in the number of complaints recorded by the presence of feces and urine in the streets. Analyzing equivalent periods of 2023 and 2024 verified that 4,341 to 3,955 was passed. In addition to brand new ZUC, the Consistory has decided to distribute bags and bottles for the urine. And in other cities? Barcelona is not the only city that has regulated how and where to walk pets. In Madrid for example The Ordinance It details that in public spaces animals must be accompanied and “driven by chain or resistant cord.” The norm It allows them to be loose, but only in areas limited by the City Council itself or in parks and gardens, although respecting schedules that change slightly winter to summer. Zaragoza is another example. The general rule It is that the dogs are subjects, although “exceptions” are contemplated, such as the spaces prepared by the Consistory or the landscaped parks and squares with some extension and have the approval of the local authorities. The owners must also respect certain schedules. As for sanctions, Barcelona Nor is it the only city ​​that It has fined Already to pet owners for leaving them loose without respecting the municipal ordinance. Images | Leah Hetteberg (Unspash) and Babak Habibi (UNSPLASH) In Xataka | The domestication of cats remains a mystery. But we are closer to knowing where and why it happened

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