Pregnant in the pandemic? It helps to have good Wi-Fi.

Kids are sick of Zoom too—so their teachers are getting creative

Sponsored by Quantic The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology Pandemic pregnancies 12.14.20 Good morning! Today: a shift to telehealth seems to be benefiting pregnant women—but could exacerbate existing inequalities, and how teachers are breaking out of Zoom for remote lessons. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. Pregnant in the pandemic? It helps to have good Wi-Fi.   Pandemic pregnancies: Medical providers want to keep people home and out of hospitals—without compromising care. That means millions of women and babies have become subjects in a hasty experiment. The hypothesis: Would it be better if more prenatal and postpartum care happened at home? The conclusion: Access to prenatal and postpartum care is incredibly unequal in the United States, and experts have long argued that telehealth can help fill in the gaps. For example, rather than visiting a doctor for blood pressure checks, some companies are providing blood pressure cuffs equipped with remote monitoring technology so that women can get checked from home instead. It’s not just prenatal too—doula services, postpartum support, and screenings for depression are increasingly going virtual as well. Some caveats: Inevitably, there are trade-offs, and telehealth can’t replace efforts to expand access to in-person care. Deciding which visits to make virtual and which to keep in person has been a controversial topic. Read the full story. —Cat Ferguson Kids are sick of Zoom too—so their teachers are getting creative A few times a week, Vincent Buyssens’s students in Antwerp, Belgium's Thomas More University College get on Instagram while he’s lecturing about creative strategy. They swipe through stories, add posts to their profile, and get lost in rabbit holes. But they’re not being surreptitious about it; in fact, Buyssens requires those taking his college course to use the app. The more they scroll during his lecture, the better. “I teach social media storytelling,” he says. “There’s no way I was going to teach Instagram via Zoom, because it didn’t feel right.” Buyssens is not the only teacher now moving beyond Zoom to reach out to students during this very strange school year.  Zoom fatigue, after all, is real. Staring at boxes of yourself and others on a screen has been shown to induce not only eye strain but the flight-or-fight response; it’s not natural to have someone staring at you just a few inches from your face. After nine months online, the novelty has worn off. So it’s no wonder that teachers across the world are trying to spice up their virtual lesson plans by meeting their students where they spend their free time and attention: on social media platforms and games. Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Roblox, and games like Among Us are all being drawn on by teachers seeking to re-engage their students in lessons. Read the full story. —Tanya Basu More story 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 couple has been receiving letters addressed to Santa for a decade. But the thing that makes it really adorable? They write back.    + This New Yorker cover is… ooof.   + Earth’s chances of a successful application to join the Galactic Federation look… shaky at best.   + Someone (sorry, I mean the luckiest researcher alive) was allowed to do a study into how dogs know that others dogs are dogs.   + Why squirrels pose like superheroes.    + An ode to the dining table.   + How spiders build webs in zero-gravity environments. Sponsor Message Quantic School of Business and Technology Executive MBA The #ModernMBA is here. Quantic is the world's only accredited, mobile-first graduate school that's educating the next generation of business leaders. Join a global network of entrepreneurial professionals in science, tech, and business — including over 300 managers from Google, Apple, and Amazon. Sign up to apply and sample over 40 complimentary courses at quantic.edu. The application deadline is November 5.  Sign up now. 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 vaccinations are set to start in the US today The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has cleared its final authorization hurdle. (CNN)   + The next six months will be vaccine purgatory. (The Atlantic)   + India’s bull semen industry could help with vaccine distribution. (Quartz)   + Researchers say “autoantibodies” may cause long covid. (The Guardian)  2 Suspected Russian hackers have been spying on US federal agencies And the breaches at the Treasury and Commerce departments are just the “tip of the iceberg.” (Reuters)   + It seems to be part of a global espionage campaign that stretches back months. (WP $)   + Homeland Security has told all federal agencies to disconnect from a widely-used software platform. (FT $)   + An American hacker claims to have gained access to the US and Canada’s emergency alert systems. (Input)  3 Tiny four-bit computers are now all you need to train AI This could increase the speed and cut the energy needed to train deep learning. (TR)   4 How to build a coronavirus app in one week That’s exactly what happened in Uruguay as cases started mounting. (FT $)  + Why haven’t contact tracing apps met expectations? (The Verge)  + While mainland America struggles with covid apps, tiny Guam has made them work. (TR)   5 How the pandemic is rewiring our brains 🧠 A lot of trauma, undoubtedly. But perhaps we’ll also emerge with a renewed appreciation of life’s joys. (The Guardian)   6 Facebook fears efforts to tame hate speech in India will hurt its staff And how did that hate speech get so prevalent in the first place, I wonder. (WSJ $)   7 A shotgun Zoom wedding? Sure, why not 💑 It’s a comforting thought to realize people are still finding love amid all this. (Wired $)   8 The NYPD has a robot dog that can open doors Hellishly dystopian technology. Just what policing in America needs. (Gizmodo)   9 Productivity apps may be doing more harm than good Sometimes you just need pen and paper. (Debugger)   10 All the cool kids are getting into pandemic cosplay Not this one though. The one in the 17th century. (The Atlantic) AI implementation is hard. Be one of the few who get it right. Join us at EmTech Digital, our annual event entirely focused on artificial intelligence, to learn how to make AI work for your business. Learn more. Quote of the day “AI will not save us. The implicit vision guiding most of our integrity work today is one where all human discourse is overseen by perfect, fair, omniscient robots owned by Mark Zuckerberg. This is clearly a dystopia, but one so deeply ingrained we hardly notice it any more.” —Nick Inzucchi, a civic integrity product designer who quit Facebook last week, offers some words of warning to his former employer, Buzzfeed reports. Top image credit: Getty Please send applications to join the Galactic Federation 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 Intelligent computing Join us virtually | February 10-11, 2021 Follow us: MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142 Want to change how you receive these emails? 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