Inside Amazon’s race to hire 175, 000 workers during a pandemic

A teenager's guide to building the world's biggest pandemic and protest trackers

Sponsored by MIT Sloan The Download Your daily dose of what’s up in emerging technology 06.12.20 Good morning! Today: inside Amazon's race to hire 175,000 new workers during a pandemic, and the 17-year-old who built the world's biggest pandemic and protest trackers explains how he did it. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. Rumors, death, and a tech overhaul: Inside Amazon’s race to hire 175,000 workers during a pandemic All hands on deck: Amazon’s sales went up by 26% over the same period a year earlier in the first quarter of 2020, thanks to panic-buying on a grand scale. It decided it needed to hire 175,000 people to keep up. But in order to do it, it would need to switch almost completely to virtual hiring and training, a process that had been expected to take a couple of years. Herculean task: There was no time for the extensive testing or user feedback the company usually employs before a rollout—the overhaul had to happen on the fly. One big change was getting new hires to essentially train themselves, walking through a redesigned course on their own devices.  The real worry: New hires’ concerns typically had less to do with their hiring experience than what happened when they showed up. They report no mask provision, an “insane” workload, worrying rumors of sick or even deceased colleagues, a lack of cleaning measures, and issues with pay and sick leave. Read the full story.  —Hayden Field A 17-year-old’s guide to building the world’s biggest pandemic and protest trackers The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site. The trackers have garnered a lot of praise for providing concise, instantly updated information. Schiffmann’s coronavirus tracker is so thorough, in fact, that epidemiologists have used it to predict the disease’s spread. Schiffmann has earned the Webby Person of the Year award along with praise from Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who called the teen’s site “essential.” Schiffmann could have rested on his laurels, but the murder of George Floyd prompted another project. This new site is simple and serves one primary purpose: find local protests. So how did Schiffmann do it? We spoke to him to find out how he got involved—and what advice he could give anyone else who fancies doing something similar. Read the full interview.  —Tanya Basu We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + A sheep-herding racoon. Called “Governor.”   + Bath time for pandas. As my colleague James Temple put it, I’m in the wrong job.   + Cannot deal with the cuteness of these cats.   + Octopus moms are amazing. Learn how in this podcast episode. Sponsor Message How to Build a Data Analytics Dream Team Having a single data analyst on staff isn't going to cut it anymore. You need the right team to harness the power of data analytics. MIT Sloan shows you where to start. Digital roles, defined. The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Covid-19 cases are soaring in India It now has the fifth-highest number of confirmed cases in the world. (The Guardian)   + America is losing its will to fight coronavirus. (FT $)   + Vietnam has recorded zero covid deaths. (Axios) 2 Microsoft will temporarily stop selling facial recognition tech to the police  It’s pledged to cease sales until laws are passed regulating it. (WSJ $)   + 30,000 unsuspecting college football fans were scooped up in a facial recognition test. (OneZero)   + The European Union’s privacy watchdog thinks Clearview AI is illegal. (The Next Web)   + A new app uses AI to quickly anonymize photos and videos. (The Verge) 3 A covid-19 patient got a double lung transplant This won’t be the answer for most people, but it could offer hope to some. (NYT $)   + At least a dozen treatments are being tested to help calm the “cytokine storm” covid can sometimes provoke. (NYT $) 4 Twitter has removed over 170,000 pro-China accounts It said the whole network was engaged in “a range of manipulative and coordinated activities.” (BBC) 5 OpenAI’s “too dangerous to release” text generator is, um, being released Hmmm. (Wired $)   + The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world. (TR) 6 The ethical way to get a covid vaccine 💉 Infecting healthy volunteers will speed the process, but it is fraught with moral peril. (London Review of Books) 7 Working on robots, from home 🤖🔧 Boston Dynamics engineers are upgrading the company’s four-legged Spot robot from their basements and backyards. (The Verge) 8 DARPA wants to turn the planet’s atmosphere into one huge sensor It could help track storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, and missile launches. (The Economist) 9 Apple has pulled two podcast apps in China after government pressure Officials didn’t specify what was illegal about them. (Buzzfeed)   + Zoom will let China censor individual users. (FT $) 10 NASA is sending a rover to the moon to hunt for water 🚀💧 It’s awarded a $200 million contract to a private company to get there in 2023. (WP $)   + Why NASA will set a price for lunar ice. (Quartz) Are you intellectually curious? Tech obsessed?  We are too. Subscribe to MIT Technology Review today for an insightful and discerning look into the technology for the future without getting bogged down by the jargon.  Quote of the day “Maybe leadership will pay more attention when there’s no one left to conduct interviews.” —A Facebook worker says increasing numbers of staff are refusing to recommend working there in the light of the company’s policies towards Trump, Mother Jones reports. Top image credit: AP PHOTO | LM OTERO Please send any pandas who need bathing to hi@technologyreview.com Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up for free Don't settle for half the story. 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