Study reveals how masks disrupt facial perception

Beer-Sheva [Israel]: A new study suggests that it may be difficult to recognize familiar faces when people wear surgical masks to help them protect against COVID-19.

According to the findings published in the journal Scientific Reports, during the pandemic, the identification of people wearing masks has often presented a unique challenge. This new study led by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel and York University in Canada reveals the impact of this predicament and its potentially significant repercussions.

"For those of you who don't always recognize a friend or acquaintance wearing a mask, you are not alone," according to the researchers Prof. Tzvi Ganel, head of the Laboratory for Visual Perception and Action at the BGU Department of Psychology, and Prof. Erez Freud, who earned his Ph.D. at BGU and is now a faculty member at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

"Faces are among the most informative and significant visual stimuli in human perception and play a unique role in communicative, social daily interactions," the researchers note. "The unprecedented effort to minimize COVID-19 transmission has created a new dimension in facial recognition due to mask-wearing."

To examine the effects of wearing masks, Prof. Ganel and Prof. Freud used a modified version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test, the standard for assessing facial perception, which included masked and unmasked faces. The study was conducted online with a large group of nearly 500 people.

The researchers found that the success rate of identifying someone wearing a mask was reduced by 15%. "This could lead to many errors in correctly recognizing people we know, or alternatively, accidentally recognizing faces of unfamiliar people as people we know," says Prof. Galia Avidan who is a member of the BGU Department of Psychology and the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and an expert on facial recognition and perception. "Face masks could be even more challenging to people whose face recognition skills are not ideal to begin with and cause greater impairment."

The research team also found that masks specifically interfered with extracting a holistic impression of faces and led to feature-by-feature processing which is a less accurate and more time-consuming strategy.

"Instead of looking at the entire face, we're now forced to look at eyes, nose, cheeks, and other visible elements separately to construct an entire facial face percept - which we used to do instantly," the researchers say.

These changes in performance, with the alteration along with the processing style of faces, could have significant effects on activities of daily living, including social interactions, as well as other situations involving personal interactions, such as education.

"Given that mask-wearing has rapidly become an important norm in countries around the globe, future research should explore the social and psychological implications of wearing masks on human behavior," Ganel says. "The magnitude of the effect of masks that we report in the current study is probably an underestimation of the actual degree in performance dropdown for masked faces."

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British tourists sneak out of Swiss ski resort to avoid COVID-19 quarantine

Geneva: Hundreds of British tourists forced into quarantine in the Swiss ski resort of Verbier fled in the night rather than seeing their holidays go downhill, the local municipality said Sunday.

Around 200 of the 420 or so affected British tourists in the luxury Alpine ski station quit under the cover of darkness, the SonntagsZeitung newspaper reported.

Switzerland’s ski resorts were set to boom with snow-seeking British tourists - but a flight ban due to the new COVID-19 variant raging in England put those plans on ice.

The drastic ruling by the Swiss government also included a 10-day retroactive quarantine for anyone who arrived from Britain since December 14, following the discovery of a new variant of the coronavirus which experts fear spreads more quickly.

Some of the British tourists affected in Verbier left immediately, while others stuck it out for a bit before quitting.

“Many of them stayed in quarantine for a day before they set off unnoticed under the cover of darkness,” Jean-Marc Sandoz, spokesman for the wider Bagnes municipality, told SZ.

He called the whole situation “the worst week our community has ever experienced”.

British tourists normally make up 21 per cent of the Verbier clientele, and most start pouring in just after Christmas.

Voted Switzerland’s best ski resort for the past two years, Verbier markets itself as offering “adrenaline-packed thrills, simple pleasures and a chic lifestyle”.

The Verbier Tourist Office has been holding daily crisis cell meetings to try to deal with the ever-changing coronavirus picture.

Breakfast untouched

“It was when they saw the meal trays remained untouched that the hoteliers noticed that the customers had gone,” Sandoz told ATS news agency.

He said that according to a Saturday survey of the ski resort’s hotels, fewer than 10 people would still be in quarantine.

The rest would either have left or their quarantine time would have expired.

“We can’t blame them. In most cases, quarantine was untenable. Imagine four people staying in a hotel room of 20 square metres,” Sandoz said.

He said the tourists left feeling “a little angry with Switzerland” and with the sense of having been “trapped”.

Flights between Switzerland and the two countries were halted on Monday, but the first outbound flights from Zurich to Britain resumed on Thursday.

Two cases of the new British coronavirus variant have been detected in Switzerland and one in neighbouring Liechtenstein, the Swiss health ministry said Sunday.

Two cases of the new South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, have also been detected, the ministry said.

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New wearable device detects hand gesture you intend to make

New York: Imagine typing on a computer without a keyboard, playing a video game without a controller or driving a car without a wheel. A team of scientists has developed a new device that can recognise hand gestures based on electrical signals detected in the forearm.

The system, which couples wearable biosensors with artificial intelligence (AI), could one day be used to control prosthetics or to interact with almost any type of electronic device, said engineers from University of California, Berkeley.

"Prosthetics are one important application of this technology, but besides that, it also offers a very intuitive way of communicating with computers." said Ali Moin, who helped design the device as a doctoral student in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Reading hand gestures is one way of improving human-computer interaction.

"And, while there are other ways of doing that, by, for instance, using cameras and computer vision, this is a good solution that also maintains an individual's privacy," Moin said in a new paper appeared in the journal Nature Electronics.

To create the hand gesture recognition system, the team collaborated with Ana Arias, a professor of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, to design a flexible armband that can read the electrical signals at 64 different points on the forearm.

The electrical signals are then fed into an electrical chip, which is programmed with an AI algorithm capable of associating these signal patterns in the forearm with specific hand gestures.

The team succeeded in teaching the algorithm to recognise 21 individual hand gestures, including a thumbs-up, a fist, a flat hand, holding up individual fingers and counting numbers.

Like other AI software, the algorithm has to first "learn" how electrical signals in the arm correspond with individual hand gestures.

To do this, each user has to wear the cuff while making the hand gestures one by one.

"In gesture recognition, your signals are going to change over time, and that can affect the performance of your model," Moin said.

"We were able to greatly improve the classification accuracy by updating the model on the device."

Another advantage of the new device is that all of the computing occurs locally on the chip: No personal data are transmitted to a nearby computer or device.

Not only does this speed up the computing time, but it also ensures that personal biological data remain private.

While the device is not ready to be a commercial product yet, it could likely get there with a few tweaks, said Jan Rabaey, senior author of the paper.

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COVID-19 vaccinations begin in Latin America

Mexico City: Mexico inoculated its first person against COVID-19 to kick off a fightback from a pandemic that has killed 120,000 people in the country and battered the economy, celebrating a Christmas roll-out that also began elsewhere in Latin America.

In a ceremony broadcast on national media and watched by the president, officials directed the administration of the Pfizer vaccine to 59-year-old nurse Maria Irene Ramirez, head nurse at the intensive care unit of Mexico City’s Ruben Lenero hospital.

“This is the best gift that I could have received in 2020,” said Ramirez, adding that it would give her strength to continue the “war” against the pandemic.

Afterwards, the government broadcast the vaccine being given to medical personnel in other parts of Mexico.

Pfizer’s is the first COVID-19 vaccine to reach Mexico, which has also signed deals for vaccines from other firms.

Chile received the first 10,000 doses of a 10-million order of Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine on Thursday, with inoculations of health workers due to begin immediately.

300,000 doses

In Costa Rica, health workers administered the first doses of Pfizer vaccine to a pair of senior citizens in a home near the capital San Jose, while some 300,000 doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine arrived in Argentina.

“My message is that everyone should be vaccinated,” said Jorge De Ford, a 72-year-old former university professor who was one of the first two in Costa Rica to get the injection.

No COVID-19 vaccine has been approved yet for use in Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country.

In Mexico, the first Pfizer shipment arrived on Wednesday containing only 3,000 doses of the vaccine. The next one will contain 50,000 doses, with Mexico slated to receive 1.4 million units of the two-shot Pfizer vaccine by Jan. 31.

“And thus begins the road to the end of the pandemic,” Martha Delgado, a deputy foreign minister tasked with securing vaccine supplies for Mexico, said on Twitter.

The vaccine roll-out is expected to last months and will initially prioritize Mexican medical staff. A September report by Amnesty International found Mexico had lost more healthcare workers to the virus than any other country.

Mexican infections and deaths are surging, putting hospitals under immense strain, and prompting fresh lockdowns in Mexico City and its urban sprawl last week.

A Stanford University-Mexico CIDE research group study found Mexico City could breach its hospital capacity in late December and peak in late January.

Over 1.35 million cases and 120,300 coronavirus deaths have been reported in Mexico, which has the fourth-highest official death toll from COVID-19 worldwide. The government acknowledges that the real figures are likely significantly higher.

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Sindh CM highlights free healthcare by major hospitals

Karachi: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah has said that three of the major hospitals being managed by his government have been providing modern health care treatment facilities free of charge to the people from all over the country.

Shah highlighted these services while meeting a batch of under-training police officers at the Chief Minister’s House on Tuesday.

The three hospitals providing these facilities are: Pir Abdul Qadir Shah Jeelani Institute of Medical Sciences Gambat providing free liver transplant; Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre in Karachi providing free cancer treatment services; and National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases in Karachi and its branches in the province providing free cardiac care and surgical services.

Shah told the officers that his government had been utilising public-private partnership (PPP) for mega development projects in the province. One such project is the recently launched 38km-long Malir Expressway in Karachi. He also said that his government was reconstructing road networks and drainage systems in Karachi.

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Kamala Harris receives COVID-19 vaccine

Washington: US Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine against the novel coronavirus.

According to the Biden-Harris transition team, Harris was vaccinated on Tuesday by Patricia Cummings, a clinical nurse manager at the United Medical Center.

In a tweet late Tuesday, Harris said: "Today I got the COVID-19 vaccine. I am incredibly grateful to our frontline healthcare workers, scientists, and researchers who made this moment possible.

"When you're able to take the vaccine, get it. This is about saving lives."

Harris' vaccination, which was also broadcast live on TV, came almost a week after President-elect Joe Biden received his.

After receiving the shot, Harris said she wants to "encourage everyone to get the vaccine. It is relatively painless. It happens really quickly. It is safe".

The Vice President-elect also confirmed that her husband, Doug Emhoff, would be receiving the first dose of the Moderna vaccine on Tuesday, CNN reported.

"I want to remind people that right in your community is where you can take the vaccine, where you will receive the vaccine, by folks you may know, folks who are otherwise working in the same hospital where your children were born.

"Folks who are working in the same hospital where an elderly relative received the kind of care that they needed," CNN quoted Harris as saying.

The US Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for two Covid-19 vaccines: one from Pfizer/BioNTech and one from Moderna.

The two vaccines have shown similar efficacy levels of near 95 per cent, and both require two doses administered several weeks apart.

On December 18, Vice President Mike Pence, Second Lady Karen Pence, Surgeon General Jerome Adams,House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccination all on live TV, in a bid to instill confidence among Americans.

President Donald Trump, who had tested positive for the virus in October, is yet to get vaccinated.

As of Wednesday morning, the US, currently the hardest-hit country in the world by the pandemic, has registered a total of 19,299,960 confirmed coronavirus cases and 334,830 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

Both tallies are the highest in the world.

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Knife attack in China: At Least 7 killed in Northeastern China, suspect arrested

BEIJING : At least seven people were killed and another seven injured in a knife attack in northeastern China, state media reported Sunday.

The attack in the city of Kaiyuan in Liaoning province was carried out outside a sauna and bathhouse. The suspect, identified by the media by his surname Yang, was arrested while the motive for the attack remains unknown.

Chinese law restricts the sale and possession of firearms, and mass attacks are generally carried out with knives or homemade explosives.

Perpetrators of similar attacks in the past have been described as mentally ill or bearing grudges against society.

In earlier attacks, a school security guard wielding a knife injured at least 39 people at a kindergarten in the southern region of Guangxi in June this year. The culprit was sentenced to death.

In 2018, a man killed one and injured 12 in a knife attack at a shopping mall in Beijing.

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