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The Morning Download: From Remote Work to Remote Life
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Good morning, CIOs. As the coronavirus pandemic triggers greater government intervention and mounting changes to daily life, talk of remote work and remote classrooms has given way to something much larger and completely unforeseen: Remote life. "America has begun to shut itself down," The Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Valerie Bauerlein report.
How did we get here so fast? An increasing number of business leaders and government leaders are beginning to come to grips with what epidemic experts (and statisticians) have been saying all along: That the number of known cases and actual cases are different things. If actual cases are what statisticians think they are, well, we really need to clamp down.
Consider the last 24 hours. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday, urged people to 'hunker down.' In an attempt to unclog markets, the Federal Reserve slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero and made plans to buy $700 billion in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. The NYC school system—the largest in the country with some 1 million kids—announced it will close Monday.
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A student in Bangalore looks at the education app, Jan. 10, 2019. PHOTO: MANJUNATH KIRAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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The long-term future of work and education: Three potential scenarios. Every past technological transformation ultimately led to more jobs, higher living standards and economic growth. To ensure that this will continue to be the case, the emerging knowledge economy should be accompanied by the expansion of educational opportunities for everyone. CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger has more.
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Commuters were scarce Thursday morning at San Francisco’s Embarcadero. PHOTO: ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Silicon Valley, pioneer of the future workplace, struggles with remote work. Big tech companies have built-in advantages over other industries now shifting to remote work because they literally built the cloud(s) and tools everyone needs to access to stay productive today. But as The Wall Street Journal's Rob Copeland and Tripp Mickle report, the recent exodus of almost one million Silicon Valley-ites to their have not been without hiccups.
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Apple. Some workers can’t access crucial internal systems from home due to strict security policies meant to fend off outsiders.
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Google. Facing remote supply challenges, many San Francisco employees came in over the weekend and hauled home desktop equipment. Employees called the resulting scene akin to visiting the site of a robbery.
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Facebook. The social network required large blocks of staffers to remain at the office to press on with certain work—such as the policing of videos or images related to child abuse or pornography.
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China’s internet users foil censors. Efforts by censors in China to scrub the internet of an interview with a Wuhan doctor who was silenced after she alerted others to coronavirus in December have sparked an outpouring of creativity among China’s internet users and artists, The WSJ's Shan Li reports.
Humans > algorithms. To fool the human and digital censors, one user rendered the interview in a handwriting style of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong. It has also been turned into a song and a comic-book strip. The original Mandarin script has been translated into Italian, Hebrew, Elvish and Klingon. Users have also posted versions written in Braille, Morse code, emojis and one in sign language.
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XtalPi researchers created this 3-D image of a part of the new coronavirus, in pink, attaching to human receptors.
PHOTO: XTALPI INC.
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In race to treat coronavirus, AI seen as key. The WSJ's Steve Rosenbush profiles pharma-tech company XtalPi Inc., which is using AI, quantum physics, computational chemistry and cloud computing to help search for potential treatments and a vaccine.
Pharma hack. The quickest way to find a treatment for Covid-19 is to search among drugs already approved for other purposes. Using AI and computational chemistry, it has screened about 2,900 approved drugs for repurposing candidates, eventually narrowing the list to 38. It is now investigating those 38 drugs with biochemical experiments.
Power of AI. Lipeng Lai, co-founder and head of AI research at the company, which has offices in Shenzhen and Cambridge, Mass., estimates that the use of AI makes research anywhere from “tens to hundreds” times more efficient
Silicon Valley joins the fight. Companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, on Sunday conducted a meeting with White House officials, including CTO Michael Kratsios, the WSJ's Kirsten Grind and Rolfe Winkler report. Among the topics: how citizens could be diagnosed without visiting a doctor, and how the companies could work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pitching for a cure. Angel investor Ron Conway is raising money for research and community efforts, particularly those by the University of California, San Francisco. Sam Altman, who headed up Silicon Valley’s famed Y-Combinator startup accelerator, posted on Twitter and his blog Sunday saying he wants to fund more startups helping to fight the virus
Google-sister company rolls out first offering. The Alphabet unit Verily is working on a pilot project in conjunction with California authorities to help establish testing sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and build an online tool to increase risk screening and testing for people at high risk. It is aiming for a later nationwide release. (Reuters)
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Bill Gates in 2019. PHOTO: JEFF PACHOUD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Bill Gates to Leave Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway. The Microsoft co-founder intends to focus more on his philanthropic work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Tilley reports. He will continue to serve as a technical adviser to Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, the software company said late Friday. Former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault will replace Mr. Gates on the conglomerate’s board.
Chenault leaves Facebook board after disagreements with Zuckerberg. Kenneth Chenault and other independent board members have in recent months clashed with management over both political advertising and Facebook’s policies related to discourse on its platform, said the people familiar with the matter. Mr. Chenault joined Facebook's board in January 2018. (WSJ)
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The coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. comes as food-delivery companies are in an intense battle for customers and restaurant partnerships. PHOTO: DENIS BALIBOUSE/REUTERS
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Food delivery’s big coronavirus test: Can it deliver? Coronavirus could boost customer demand but batter the restaurants that supply the food and threaten the health of workers who deliver it. The Wall Street Journal's Heather Haddon and Preetika Rana track the movements made last week by the young industry.
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Grubhub will defer the collection of marketing commissions charged to independent restaurants it delivers for.
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Postmates said it will temporarily waive all commissions for San Francisco-based businesses that want to join its platform to take advantage of consumers avoiding in-restaurant dining.
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Chipotle said it will waive delivery fees for the month and shipping to-go orders in tamper-proof bags.
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Starbucks sent a notice to U.S. customers about potential disruptions to its stores and highlighting delivery through Uber Eats division as a workaround.
And what about the workers? Uber and DoorDash have said they would compensate drivers infected or quarantined by a public-health agency with up to 14 days of missed pay.
The future? Look to China. Delivery companies experienced a drop of business a month into the pandemic as restaurants shut, consumers worried about food contamination and the quarantining of drivers challenged operations, according to a Credit Suisse report.
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An Amazon employee demonstrates how to scan a code and enter a cashierless grocery store. The company faces an uphill battle in winning over retailers, which for years have viewed it as a threat.
PHOTO: TED S. WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Amazon pitches cashier-less tech to rivals. Amazon has made open source some of the technology that underpins its “Go” cashier-less stores in an effort to court retailers, The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Tilley and Sarah Nassauer report.
An uphill battle. But for retailers who view Amazon.com as a threat, going so far to shun the company's cloud services, the open source pitch may not be enough. Both Walmart and Target tell the WSJ that they are not interested.
Potential successor to lithium-ion batteries emerges. Solid-state batteries—smaller and more powerful than lithium-ion batteries—are being churned out by the manufacturers in Japan. Although they cost too much now the goal is to get the new batteries into smartphones and electric vehicles. (WSJ)
Apple closes all stores outside China until March 27. Hourly workers will continue to be paid, and workers across the company will be allowed to work remotely if their jobs permit it, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in a note on the company’s website. Microsoft announced that it would be reducing operations at its nearly 100 retail locations, said David Porter, corporate vice president for the store division.(WSJ)
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Everything Else You Need to Know
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U.S. equity futures and global stocks tumbled after the Fed slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero, a sign that investors remain worried that the coronavirus will fuel a recession even with borrowing costs dropping. (WSJ)
Coronavirus deaths outside China surpassed those inside for the first time, as the center of the pandemic shifted toward the U.S. and Europe and forced more countries to limit travel and gatherings to contain the spread. (WSJ)
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders laid out divergent plans for responding to the novel coronavirus and sparred over their lengthy records as a global pandemic upends the lives of most Americans. (WSJ)
The domestic box office posted its worst weekend in nearly two decades amid calls to practice social distancing to slow the coronavirus pandemic, though the public has yet to abandon going to the movies altogether. (WSJ)
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