Information/Technology - 34. page

Hangzhou, a Chinese city 100 miles southwest of Shanghai, plans to launch a permanent “health barcode,” a system that monitors people’s health real-time and establishes a personalized index based on a number of indicators. Local media report that a score between zero and 100 will be given after reading personal medical records, physical examination results, and lifestyle management data. The program is considered an expansion of the current nationwide health code program, launched in February, to track potential infections and close contacts of the new coronavirus. An official infographic shows individual scores that are presented in different colors. A low score is displayed in purple or red, and the higher scores are in green.

Factors that affect the score include exercises, alcoholic drinking, smoking and sleep. For example, drinking 200 ml of alcohol resulted in a drop of 1.5 points, and smoking 5 cigarettes led to a drop of 3 points. In contrast, walking 15,000 steps earned 5 points.

The city’s health department said it planned to complete the project in May or June, but did not disclose how the personal information would be collected.

The ambitious program, however, did not win public opinion. The news has caused an uproar on social media. A large number of netizens consider the collection of health data a violation of privacy and may also lead to discrimination. Someone commented, “What should I do if I am asked to show the health code when I look for a job?” In a poll on Weibo, 6,020 out of the 7,000 who were questioned chose not to support it.

After the outbreak of the corona virus, every Chinese province began to implement its own health code system. This system is mainly based on China’s two main applications: Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay. In May this year, the authorities announced a nationwide unified health code system. Chinese media report that the health code requires the users to declare information including their real name, gender, mobile phone number, and address. It also integrates air, railway, highway, and public transportation data, as well as telecom operators and payment data with banks and financial institutions.

Today, in most parts of China, entering and leaving communities and buildings requires that each person show a green-colored health code, an indication of no infection. The system is believed to play an important role in tracking the chain of transmission of the virus. At the same time, the massive collection of personal data has caused widespread concerns about the infringement on privacy.

Source: BBC Chinese, May 26, 2020
https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-52805052

In April, a journal under the international academic publisher Springer retracted 33 papers from China all at once. With eight papers withdrawn earlier in the past two years, the total number arrived at 41. The authors of 39 papers came from China.

The mainland Chinese media The Paper, Multimedia Tools and Applications is the journal that issued the decision. The incident involved dozens of Chinese universities, state entities and companies, including Zhejiang University, the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and China Jiliang University. Many papers had received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The top three institutions in terms of the number of papers retracted were Zhejiang Electric Power Company under the State Grid, the School of Electrical and Optoelectronic Engineering at the Changzhou Institute of Technology, and Hefei University of Technology. One corresponding author from the Changzhou Institute of Technology had seven papers retracted. State Grid and Hefei University of Technology each had a corresponding author with four papers retracted.

Reasons for withdrawal included plagiarism of unpublished manuscripts, attempts to subvert the peer review process, content plagiarism, and improper copying of images without permission. More than half of the authors agreed to withdraw.

This is not the first incident of collective withdrawals involving Chinese scholars. In August 2015, Springer withdrew 64 papers published in its 10 academic journals, most of which were from China. In April 2017, Springer’s Tumor Biology journal withdrew 107 papers that were from Chinese scholars, all at one time, because of peer review fraud. It was hailed as a major earthquake in Chinese academic circles.

Source: Central News Agency, May 7, 2020
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202005070283.aspx