By Sophie Quinton
Mar 11, 2021
The mammoth COVID-19 relief bill headed to President Joe Biden’s desk includes $195 billion in direct aid to states and the District of Columbia and $130 billion in direct aid for cities and counties. States with more unemployed residents will get a greater share of the money.
Under the final bill, states and localities would have to use the funds to respond to the COVID-19 crisis and economic downturn through measures such as assisting small businesses, boosting essential worker pay, funding government services affected by a revenue shortfall or making infrastructure investments.
Governments can’t use the money to pay for tax cuts or to shore up pension funds.
Using a robot to automate the sewage concentration in samples collected from community wastewater surveillance programs dramatically reduces the time it takes to get results.
The House Armed Services Committee has launched a task force to investigate defense supply chain vulnerabilities, foreign manufacturing concerns and other issues raised by the pandemic.
By Stephanie Kanowitz
Mar 10, 2021
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is testing a tool that could make it easier for the public-safety community to prototype cutting-edge analytics on streaming video.
The Analytics Container Environment (ACE), being developed to support NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division, provides a modular framework for running containerized analytics on streaming video. Essentially, it could be used to detect footage of erupting fires, fights or other emergencies that demand swift public-safety response.
“If there’s a crowd suddenly gathering or a fight breaking out, or a person falls down for no apparent reason, those are important things you would want somebody to notice,” said James Horan, the ACE project lead. “Everybody says they have tons of cameras and nobody to watch them, so [this is] the idea of a detector being able to flag a camera and say, ‘Hey, there’s a fight starting on Camera 27. You may
By Denis Boudreau
Mar 10, 2021
COVID-19 has changed how we do just about everything, from banking to shopping to schooling to working even personal communications. One silver lining is the increased attention to the importance of digital channels, as well as the
accessibility of those channels. That’s because an estimated 26% of the U.S. population has some form of disability – vision, hearing, cognitive or limited motor mobility.
Many organizations have made progress updating their websites and apps to be digitally accessible to people with disabilities. The same can’t be said, however, for other forms of electronic content such as PDFs, which are increasingly used by services like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local governments to convey vital information and updates to the general public.