That is after an intense, prolonged and controversial lockdown (still ongoing in Melbourne)
We all know you can crush R down below 1 if you cease all human interaction. That’s accepted. The question then becomes: is this victory worth the economic pain? Especially if, after lockdown ends, the virus just bounces back anyhow
And it is spring going into summer there
There isn't much evidence for seasonality of this virus tbh. Admittedly we haven't been through a year yet, but it managed to rage in Summer in Arizona.
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
That is after an intense, prolonged and controversial lockdown (still ongoing in Melbourne)
We all know you can crush R down below 1 if you cease all human interaction. That’s accepted. The question then becomes: is this victory worth the economic pain? Especially if, after lockdown ends, the virus just bounces back anyhow
And it is spring going into summer there
There isn't much evidence for seasonality of this virus tbh. Admittedly we haven't been through a year yet, but it managed to rage in Summer in Arizona.
The one thing about the weather is it is easier to be outside in spring and summer
The UK prime minister and the home secretary are accused of endangering the personal safety of lawyers through their abusive attacks on the profession and should apologise, more than 800 former judges and senior legal figures have said in a letter sent to the Guardian.
Boris Johnson and Priti Patel are additionally accused in the letter of displaying “hostility” towards lawyers, undermining the rule of law and effectively risking the lives of those working in the justice system.
The signatories include three former justices of the UK supreme court, five retired appeal court judges, three former high court judges, the lawyer heads of four Oxford University colleges, more than 80 QCs, 69 law professors from leading English universities, the directors of Liberty and Justice, as well as hundreds of law firm partners, barristers and solicitors.
That is after an intense, prolonged and controversial lockdown (still ongoing in Melbourne)
We all know you can crush R down below 1 if you cease all human interaction. That’s accepted. The question then becomes: is this victory worth the economic pain? Especially if, after lockdown ends, the virus just bounces back anyhow
And it is spring going into summer there
There isn't much evidence for seasonality of this virus tbh. Admittedly we haven't been through a year yet, but it managed to rage in Summer in Arizona.
Summer in Arizona doesn’t exactly conjure up images of the population all eating and drinking outdoors in the square, though, does it? Extremely hot weather that drives people indoors in search of air conditioning is just as dangerous as cold and rain.
It would be ironic if Europe’s better weathering of the summer than the US came down to lack of air conditioning.
Trafalgar have just slapped a NC poll up on their site.
And you are never going to believe it, it has exactly the same demographics as the one from September.
Outstanding consistency
Likely they've got some techie who takes txt & robo push-button responses to push-polling questions (where the REAL point is message NOT the response) then re-configures results based on demographics obtained from source OTHER than the actual texts & calls.
Then Cahaly pumps it out as another Trafalgar Group "poll".
This is all supposition - but it DOES fit the known facts (including TG's own vague "explanation" re: methodology) AND is certainly right in the Lee Atwater - Karl Rove (remember him?) wheelhouse.
Nah, the polls appear g on their website are just made up. The 3 that appeared today and caused a stir are genuine-but-crap. Notice
It is seriously worrying right across Europe just now
Tbf, this is us in two weeks unless the government gets a grip on self isolation and testing failures.
An honest question
Is anyone testing in Europe any better than the UK or Germany
Not particularly, I'd say that France, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium testing is worse than our system, Germany and Italy probably marginally better.
Ultimately every country suffers from the same issue of people not isolating after testing positive. Nations who have effectively defeated the virus have very good isolation measures (Australia, NZ) or people who are responsible and isolate properly without needing special measures (SK, Japan).
We seem to delight in attacking our own system which I understand is near a 400,000 a day capacity and is not far off Germany.
And of course the countries who have best dealt with this are all in the Southern Hemisphere and in New Zealand case 1500 miles from nearest land in Australia and comprises two islands with wide open spaces
The British response to Corona has much to be proud of, with only the government letting the side down.
Not really, it's been very disorganised and people have been proved to be irresponsible and not isolating after testing positive and the state has been left wanting in many areas. Any thoughts of exceptionalism should have been washed away by the virus response both from the state and the people.
The NHS, academic and pharmaceutical contribution is world class.
Lots of questions over the academic response over this, especially early on. Many so called experts not leveraging standard modern tools. Much that everybody laughed at the use of Excel for of the testing data, we saw with the likes of Ferguson model is was a similar shit show of coding / obselete programming language and paradigms.
We are still seeing it now with the model for how effective a circuit breaker might be providing nonsensical results.
The obsolete programming language was C, used for linux and android and therefore probably the most important and most commonly deployed language. (Obscure namedrop: I was once stuck in a lift with that there Dennis Ritchie.) I've not been following modelgate but gather some Microsofties had a go at porting Ferguson's code to C++ for no readily apparent reason except that is what programmers like to do: reimplement the wheel in a new language.
When all this is over, we might reflect that Dominic Cummings and pb's own @SeanT were right about one thing. Britain does need to invest more in research.
C is most definitely not an obsolete language it is still widely used for good reasons. That is however not to say its necessarily the best to use for those models. I can't comment on that because I haven't seen the models but C is I believe still one of the top ten languages and is still the best to choose often for embedded purposes. Like everything it is the right tool for the right purpose.
I would have more concern if the models were done in something live javascript than c.
John Carmack looked at the code and said it looked fine.
That is more than good enough for me.
Me too. The point I was making was merely that C is an old language but that doesn't make it obsolete. I wasn't arguing it was the right choice for this however I said I didn't know as hadn't seen the model.
Half the computer world still runs on C, apache web servers, linux, most embedded stuff etc.
Half of the computing world isn't trying to predict a viral replication model within a modelled real world scenario. It is what ML is made to do, using Python which has a whole host of ML libraries and can use GPU acceleration would be the correct way of doing it. I couldn't imagine anyone in my industry creating a predictive model in C and banking is at the forefront of ML, C is just old fashioned and unsuitable for using Tensorflow or PyTorch either of which are extensively used for deep learning which is what a problem like this needs.
Sigh does no one read what you write here anymore. I didn't argue c was the correct tool I merely asserted it wasn't an obsolete language. I said the right tool for the right job. I suspect in the case of covid however the model itself is the flaw rather than the language it is written in.
Further as to machine learning personally that is over hyped and unproven. We have a huge amount of examples of machine learning where what the machine learnt isn't what people thought they had taught it. Facial recognition, predictive crime etc being the two most egregious but lots of others out there.
I think the point being made is that him using C shows how outdated his approach is.
ML is great for these kinds of problems because people are predictably unpredictable. Predicting a person's behaviour is impossible, predicting population behaviour isn't and it's one of the major uses of it.
Agree that facial recognition and crime models are a pile of dogshit, but that doesn't invalidate the approach to other more suitable problems. Viral replication is probably one of the most suitable problems for ML as it's a multivariate analysis and we have a huge amount of data available now. Another good area is medical outcome modelling, a friend of mine works for Babylon and they've been doing some incredible work on it.
Don't mistake me I am not saying machine learning doesnt have a place. Sadly like much in the it world it almost feels like its becoming the silver bullet.....whatever the problem machine learning is the answer or block chain
I'm not so sure, I've implemented ML in a few areas of my work and it's been very helpful, but I agree that it isn't a silver bullet for every scenario. It's definitely well ahead of Blockchain in real world use, I mean in gaming DLSS is about to make native resolution obsolete and that's built on ML. Blockchain is vaporware, ML definitely isn't.
By machine learning, are you talking about neural networks, or genetic algorithms? The former require tons of historical data, so are not so useful if you're dealing with inherently unknowable systems or situations where you either have no data or you only have low confidence in what you have. I think, for example, they will axiomatically fail to predict black swans or emergent properties that are not in the historical data used to train them.
For genetic algorithms, I am not sure how evolved solutions in silico will necessarily be better than those evolved through acquisition of genuine expertise.
I am not an expert in this area, and so would welcome correction and enlightenment if I am wrong.
PS These comments relate to machine learning in complex adaptive systems - I realize that it can be very effective in better defined, deterministic systems
Neither a Deep Neural Net or a genetic algorithm is really the best approach. Something like Gaussian Processes based model is (and no that doesn't mean just fit a gaussian curve though some data).
What ever was the best language to build the 'sim' virus model (which incidentally was written for an influenza type virus rather than a SARs-type) the key issue, imho, is the it has failed repeatedly to be anywhere near the turned out reality.
And as far as I am aware no changes have been made to the model based on what has actually happened in the real world (happy to be corrected on this).
Well this was part of the criticism. His model was made using outdated set of tools, which makes it clear he hasn't updated it and adapted to both flaws of it when it previously hit the real world (i.e. the swing flu), but neither has he kept up with the state of the art mathematical modelling techniques.
I do hope the public inquiry covers this area, because personally I think it has been utterly woeful and an entire political class has been driven by a prediction engine that basically doesn't predict.
That is after an intense, prolonged and controversial lockdown (still ongoing in Melbourne)
We all know you can crush R down below 1 if you cease all human interaction. That’s accepted. The question then becomes: is this victory worth the economic pain? Especially if, after lockdown ends, the virus just bounces back anyhow
And it is spring going into summer there
There isn't much evidence for seasonality of this virus tbh. Admittedly we haven't been through a year yet, but it managed to rage in Summer in Arizona.
The one thing about the weather is it is easier to be outside in spring and summer
True. And I suppose the opposite is true in Arizona. It's easier to do almost anything there outside in Winter. Edit. I see @IanB2 has also spotted my failure to think the point through. Although Taiwan is an AC heavy, hot, sweaty, crowded, indoor in Summer environment, so who knows?
Trafalgar have just slapped a NC poll up on their site.
And you are never going to believe it, it has exactly the same demographics as the one from September.
Outstanding consistency
Likely they've got some techie who takes txt & robo push-button responses to push-polling questions (where the REAL point is message NOT the response) then re-configures results based on demographics obtained from source OTHER than the actual texts & calls.
Then Cahaly pumps it out as another Trafalgar Group "poll".
This is all supposition - but it DOES fit the known facts (including TG's own vague "explanation" re: methodology) AND is certainly right in the Lee Atwater - Karl Rove (remember him?) wheelhouse.
Nah, the polls appear g on their website are just made up. The 3 that appeared today and caused a stir are genuine-but-crap. Notice
It is seriously worrying right across Europe just now
Tbf, this is us in two weeks unless the government gets a grip on self isolation and testing failures.
An honest question
Is anyone testing in Europe any better than the UK or Germany
Not particularly, I'd say that France, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium testing is worse than our system, Germany and Italy probably marginally better.
Ultimately every country suffers from the same issue of people not isolating after testing positive. Nations who have effectively defeated the virus have very good isolation measures (Australia, NZ) or people who are responsible and isolate properly without needing special measures (SK, Japan).
We seem to delight in attacking our own system which I understand is near a 400,000 a day capacity and is not far off Germany.
And of course the countries who have best dealt with this are all in the Southern Hemisphere and in New Zealand case 1500 miles from nearest land in Australia and comprises two islands with wide open spaces
The British response to Corona has much to be proud of, with only the government letting the side down.
Not really, it's been very disorganised and people have been proved to be irresponsible and not isolating after testing positive and the state has been left wanting in many areas. Any thoughts of exceptionalism should have been washed away by the virus response both from the state and the people.
The NHS, academic and pharmaceutical contribution is world class.
Lots of questions over the academic response over this, especially early on. Many so called experts not leveraging standard modern tools. Much that everybody laughed at the use of Excel for of the testing data, we saw with the likes of Ferguson model is was a similar shit show of coding / obselete programming language and paradigms.
We are still seeing it now with the model for how effective a circuit breaker might be providing nonsensical results.
The obsolete programming language was C, used for linux and android and therefore probably the most important and most commonly deployed language. (Obscure namedrop: I was once stuck in a lift with that there Dennis Ritchie.) I've not been following modelgate but gather some Microsofties had a go at porting Ferguson's code to C++ for no readily apparent reason except that is what programmers like to do: reimplement the wheel in a new language.
When all this is over, we might reflect that Dominic Cummings and pb's own @SeanT were right about one thing. Britain does need to invest more in research.
C is most definitely not an obsolete language it is still widely used for good reasons. That is however not to say its necessarily the best to use for those models. I can't comment on that because I haven't seen the models but C is I believe still one of the top ten languages and is still the best to choose often for embedded purposes. Like everything it is the right tool for the right purpose.
I would have more concern if the models were done in something live javascript than c.
John Carmack looked at the code and said it looked fine.
That is more than good enough for me.
Me too. The point I was making was merely that C is an old language but that doesn't make it obsolete. I wasn't arguing it was the right choice for this however I said I didn't know as hadn't seen the model.
Half the computer world still runs on C, apache web servers, linux, most embedded stuff etc.
Half of the computing world isn't trying to predict a viral replication model within a modelled real world scenario. It is what ML is made to do, using Python which has a whole host of ML libraries and can use GPU acceleration would be the correct way of doing it. I couldn't imagine anyone in my industry creating a predictive model in C and banking is at the forefront of ML, C is just old fashioned and unsuitable for using Tensorflow or PyTorch either of which are extensively used for deep learning which is what a problem like this needs.
Sigh does no one read what you write here anymore. I didn't argue c was the correct tool I merely asserted it wasn't an obsolete language. I said the right tool for the right job. I suspect in the case of covid however the model itself is the flaw rather than the language it is written in.
Further as to machine learning personally that is over hyped and unproven. We have a huge amount of examples of machine learning where what the machine learnt isn't what people thought they had taught it. Facial recognition, predictive crime etc being the two most egregious but lots of others out there.
I think the point being made is that him using C shows how outdated his approach is.
ML is great for these kinds of problems because people are predictably unpredictable. Predicting a person's behaviour is impossible, predicting population behaviour isn't and it's one of the major uses of it.
Agree that facial recognition and crime models are a pile of dogshit, but that doesn't invalidate the approach to other more suitable problems. Viral replication is probably one of the most suitable problems for ML as it's a multivariate analysis and we have a huge amount of data available now. Another good area is medical outcome modelling, a friend of mine works for Babylon and they've been doing some incredible work on it.
Don't mistake me I am not saying machine learning doesnt have a place. Sadly like much in the it world it almost feels like its becoming the silver bullet.....whatever the problem machine learning is the answer or block chain
I'm not so sure, I've implemented ML in a few areas of my work and it's been very helpful, but I agree that it isn't a silver bullet for every scenario. It's definitely well ahead of Blockchain in real world use, I mean in gaming DLSS is about to make native resolution obsolete and that's built on ML. Blockchain is vaporware, ML definitely isn't.
By machine learning, are you talking about neural networks, or genetic algorithms? The former require tons of historical data, so are not so useful if you're dealing with inherently unknowable systems or situations where you either have no data or you only have low confidence in what you have. I think, for example, they will axiomatically fail to predict black swans or emergent properties that are not in the historical data used to train them.
For genetic algorithms, I am not sure how evolved solutions in silico will necessarily be better than those evolved through acquisition of genuine expertise.
I am not an expert in this area, and so would welcome correction and enlightenment if I am wrong.
PS These comments relate to machine learning in complex adaptive systems - I realize that it can be very effective in better defined, deterministic systems
Neither a Deep Neural Net or a genetic algorithm is really the best approach. Something like Gaussian Processes based model is (and no that doesn't mean just fit a gaussian curve though some data).
What ever was the best language to build the 'sim' virus model (which incidentally was written for an influenza type virus rather than a SARs-type) the key issue, imho, is the it has failed repeatedly to be anywhere near the turned out reality.
And as far as I am aware no changes have been made to the model based on what has actually happened in the real world (happy to be corrected on this).
Well this was part of the criticism. His model was made using outdated set of tools, which makes it clear he hasn't updated it and adapted to both flaws of it when it previously hit the real world (i.e. the swing flu), but neither has he kept up with the state of the art mathematical modelling techniques.
I do hope the public inquiry covers this area, because personally I think it has been utterly woeful and an entire political class has been driven by a prediction engine that basically doesn't predict.
Unfortunately, I doubt those conducting such an inquiry will have the expert knowledge to really understand what the likes of myself and MaxPB are talking about. I can foresee instead it all just becoming political and bogged down in who said what when, which email didn't get answered, what Big Dom shouted as the tea lady etc etc etc.
During phone hacking, it became solely about the characters, the celebs, the politicians, not as only the Indy really looked at, some quite technical stuff, how many companies were exploited, how there was some proper serious hacking and was it justified, etc.
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
That is after an intense, prolonged and controversial lockdown (still ongoing in Melbourne)
We all know you can crush R down below 1 if you cease all human interaction. That’s accepted. The question then becomes: is this victory worth the economic pain? Especially if, after lockdown ends, the virus just bounces back anyhow
And it is spring going into summer there
There isn't much evidence for seasonality of this virus tbh. Admittedly we haven't been through a year yet, but it managed to rage in Summer in Arizona.
The one thing about the weather is it is easier to be outside in spring and summer
True. And I suppose the opposite is true in Arizona. It's easier to do almost anything there outside in Winter.
We were in Melbourne in February 2009 and boy was it hot
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
Why do I think of SeanT whenever I listen to this song
BOYS FROM THE COUNTY HELL Shane Macgowan
On the first day of March it was raining It was raining worse than anything that I have ever seen I drank ten pints of beer and I cursed all the people there And I wish that all this raining would stop falling down on me
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
At the time I was working for a landlord And he was the meanest bastard that you have ever seen And to lose a single penny would grieve him awful sore And he was a miserable bollocks and a bitch's bastard's whore
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
I recall that we took care of him one Sunday We got him out the back and we broke his fucking balls And maybe that was dreaming and maybe that was real But all I know is I left that place without a penny or fuck all
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
But now I've the most charming of verandas I sit and watch the junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores Five green bottles sitting on the floor I wish to Christ, I wish to Christ that I had fifteen more
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
The boys and me are drunk and looking for you We'll eat your frigging entrails and we won't give a damn Me daddy was a Blue Shirt and my mother a madam My brother earned his medals at Mai Lai in Vietnam
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
On the first day of March it was raining It was raining worse than anything that I have ever seen Stay on the other side of the road 'Cause you can never tell We've a thirst like a gang of devils We're the boys from the County Hell
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
And it's lend me ten pounds and I'll buy you a drink And mother wake me early in the morning
Trafalgar have just slapped a NC poll up on their site.
And you are never going to believe it, it has exactly the same demographics as the one from September.
Outstanding consistency
Likely they've got some techie who takes txt & robo push-button responses to push-polling questions (where the REAL point is message NOT the response) then re-configures results based on demographics obtained from source OTHER than the actual texts & calls.
Then Cahaly pumps it out as another Trafalgar Group "poll".
This is all supposition - but it DOES fit the known facts (including TG's own vague "explanation" re: methodology) AND is certainly right in the Lee Atwater - Karl Rove (remember him?) wheelhouse.
Nah, the polls appear g on their website are just made up. The 3 that appeared today and caused a stir are genuine-but-crap. Notice
It is seriously worrying right across Europe just now
Tbf, this is us in two weeks unless the government gets a grip on self isolation and testing failures.
An honest question
Is anyone testing in Europe any better than the UK or Germany
Not particularly, I'd say that France, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium testing is worse than our system, Germany and Italy probably marginally better.
Ultimately every country suffers from the same issue of people not isolating after testing positive. Nations who have effectively defeated the virus have very good isolation measures (Australia, NZ) or people who are responsible and isolate properly without needing special measures (SK, Japan).
We seem to delight in attacking our own system which I understand is near a 400,000 a day capacity and is not far off Germany.
And of course the countries who have best dealt with this are all in the Southern Hemisphere and in New Zealand case 1500 miles from nearest land in Australia and comprises two islands with wide open spaces
The British response to Corona has much to be proud of, with only the government letting the side down.
Not really, it's been very disorganised and people have been proved to be irresponsible and not isolating after testing positive and the state has been left wanting in many areas. Any thoughts of exceptionalism should have been washed away by the virus response both from the state and the people.
The NHS, academic and pharmaceutical contribution is world class.
Lots of questions over the academic response over this, especially early on. Many so called experts not leveraging standard modern tools. Much that everybody laughed at the use of Excel for of the testing data, we saw with the likes of Ferguson model is was a similar shit show of coding / obselete programming language and paradigms.
We are still seeing it now with the model for how effective a circuit breaker might be providing nonsensical results.
The obsolete programming language was C, used for linux and android and therefore probably the most important and most commonly deployed language. (Obscure namedrop: I was once stuck in a lift with that there Dennis Ritchie.) I've not been following modelgate but gather some Microsofties had a go at porting Ferguson's code to C++ for no readily apparent reason except that is what programmers like to do: reimplement the wheel in a new language.
When all this is over, we might reflect that Dominic Cummings and pb's own @SeanT were right about one thing. Britain does need to invest more in research.
C is most definitely not an obsolete language it is still widely used for good reasons. That is however not to say its necessarily the best to use for those models. I can't comment on that because I haven't seen the models but C is I believe still one of the top ten languages and is still the best to choose often for embedded purposes. Like everything it is the right tool for the right purpose.
I would have more concern if the models were done in something live javascript than c.
John Carmack looked at the code and said it looked fine.
That is more than good enough for me.
Me too. The point I was making was merely that C is an old language but that doesn't make it obsolete. I wasn't arguing it was the right choice for this however I said I didn't know as hadn't seen the model.
Half the computer world still runs on C, apache web servers, linux, most embedded stuff etc.
Half of the computing world isn't trying to predict a viral replication model within a modelled real world scenario. It is what ML is made to do, using Python which has a whole host of ML libraries and can use GPU acceleration would be the correct way of doing it. I couldn't imagine anyone in my industry creating a predictive model in C and banking is at the forefront of ML, C is just old fashioned and unsuitable for using Tensorflow or PyTorch either of which are extensively used for deep learning which is what a problem like this needs.
Sigh does no one read what you write here anymore. I didn't argue c was the correct tool I merely asserted it wasn't an obsolete language. I said the right tool for the right job. I suspect in the case of covid however the model itself is the flaw rather than the language it is written in.
Further as to machine learning personally that is over hyped and unproven. We have a huge amount of examples of machine learning where what the machine learnt isn't what people thought they had taught it. Facial recognition, predictive crime etc being the two most egregious but lots of others out there.
I think the point being made is that him using C shows how outdated his approach is.
ML is great for these kinds of problems because people are predictably unpredictable. Predicting a person's behaviour is impossible, predicting population behaviour isn't and it's one of the major uses of it.
Agree that facial recognition and crime models are a pile of dogshit, but that doesn't invalidate the approach to other more suitable problems. Viral replication is probably one of the most suitable problems for ML as it's a multivariate analysis and we have a huge amount of data available now. Another good area is medical outcome modelling, a friend of mine works for Babylon and they've been doing some incredible work on it.
Don't mistake me I am not saying machine learning doesnt have a place. Sadly like much in the it world it almost feels like its becoming the silver bullet.....whatever the problem machine learning is the answer or block chain
I'm not so sure, I've implemented ML in a few areas of my work and it's been very helpful, but I agree that it isn't a silver bullet for every scenario. It's definitely well ahead of Blockchain in real world use, I mean in gaming DLSS is about to make native resolution obsolete and that's built on ML. Blockchain is vaporware, ML definitely isn't.
By machine learning, are you talking about neural networks, or genetic algorithms? The former require tons of historical data, so are not so useful if you're dealing with inherently unknowable systems or situations where you either have no data or you only have low confidence in what you have. I think, for example, they will axiomatically fail to predict black swans or emergent properties that are not in the historical data used to train them.
For genetic algorithms, I am not sure how evolved solutions in silico will necessarily be better than those evolved through acquisition of genuine expertise.
I am not an expert in this area, and so would welcome correction and enlightenment if I am wrong.
PS These comments relate to machine learning in complex adaptive systems - I realize that it can be very effective in better defined, deterministic systems
Neither a Deep Neural Net or a genetic algorithm is really the best approach. Something like Gaussian Processes based model is (and no that doesn't mean just fit a gaussian curve though some data).
What ever was the best language to build the 'sim' virus model (which incidentally was written for an influenza type virus rather than a SARs-type) the key issue, imho, is the it has failed repeatedly to be anywhere near the turned out reality.
And as far as I am aware no changes have been made to the model based on what has actually happened in the real world (happy to be corrected on this).
Well this was part of the criticism. His model was made using outdated set of tools, which makes it clear he hasn't updated it and adapted to both flaws of it when it previously hit the real world (i.e. the swing flu), but neither has he kept up with the state of the art mathematical modelling techniques.
I do hope the public inquiry covers this area, because personally I think it has been utterly woeful and an entire political class has been driven by a prediction engine that basically doesn't predict.
Unfortunately, I doubt those conducting such an inquiry will have the expert knowledge to really understand what the likes of myself and MaxPB are talking about. I can foresee instead it all just becoming political and bogged down in who said what when, which email didn't get answered, what Big Dom shouted as the tea lady etc etc etc.
During phone hacking, it became solely about the characters, the celebs, the politicians, not as only the Indy really looked at, some quite technical stuff, how many companies were exploited, how there was some proper serious hacking and was it justified, etc.
I'm so angry about this that I might write to the chair of the inquiry when it is launched. That's how I feel now. Whether I still will in 2025 when the next PM finally launches the inquiry I don't know.
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
Not only wouldn't it be acceptable in the West, they spent 5 years putting together this tech together in response to being hit hard by SARs.
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
Not only wouldn't it be acceptable in the West, they spent 5 years putting together this tech together in response to being hit hard by SARs.
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
I happen to agree that they are not palatable .... yet.
But that is beside the point.
I am just try to explain why I think the problem is not one of just using tensorflow or deep learning.
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
The PVI (Cook Partisan Voting Index) for Montana is R+11. So if Biden were 11 ahead nationally you'd expect Montana to be level
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
Montana has had Democrat governors since 2005. Yes. I was surprised too.
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
In 2018 it was only won by 4 and a half points.
This is why I am banging on about the utter landslide Congressional District polling is showing.
If it is at all reliable this Presidential election is more done than a pizza left in the oven of a student flat over night because it was put in by someone returning late from the club who was hungry but then they were so long they forgot about it and then their flatmate discovered it then next day completely black shrunk to a third its size.
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
Montana is a big state size-wise but small in population; the US House seat is At-Large, meaning they've only got the one (though MT is projected to gain, or rather re-gain a 2nd seat after 2020 census).
This means that voters are MUCH closer to statewide electeds than in most of the Union. Throw in traditional Western US political independent streak, and you have plenty of potential for ticket-splitting. Sometimes is very creative ways!
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
I happen to agree that they are not palatable .... yet.
But that is beside the point.
I am just try to explain why I think the problem is not one of just using tensorflow or deep learning.
Part of the problem there is the fault of western governments not just ours but all of them.
I would be fine if this was something they had and could turn on in extreme circumstances such as covid if I trusted them to a) turn it off again, b) not then go on to sell all the data to their cronies, c) not allow every officious little git in your local council, ngo, private company performing a government contract access to it, d) leave it on an unecryted cd on the train
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
Excellent point. There are many factors here, not just economy v uncontrolled epidemic. Privacy, education, trust, individual economic security, infrastructure, cohabitation profiles, communication, global awareness, individual/collective balance, culture, diversity, prevalence of risk factors, and probably several more I'm missing. All of these things guide that ball up and down slopes and valleys. It's much more complex than most people seem to realise, and one of the weaknesses we have in this country is the binary nature of politics these days. Too many people seem happy to dismiss something just because Johnson said it, or because Sturgeon supports it, or whatever.
What was second episode of the big BBC "Tories are all evil scumbags" drama like tonight?
I thought it was pretty clunky. You can virtually hear the gears changing. The scenes with the PM are just awful. Bit disappointed in the first two episodes to be honest.
But Birgitte Nyborg is in it briefly, to remind those in the know what a top political TV show is like.
From the linked Axios report: Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order "is a really big deal" that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials. https://www.axios.com/trump-firing-wray-haspel-esper-088cbd70-3524-4625-91f1-dbc985767c71.html
We can't defeat Covid. We just have to manage it as best we can.
Yes, the idea that it can be beaten is insidious nonsense. It can be mitigated, those at most risk can be protected, we can get better at treating it, but it won’t ever be vanquished. This needs to be said more often.
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
In 2018 it was only won by 4 and a half points.
This is why I am banging on about the utter landslide Congressional District polling is showing.
If it is at all reliable this Presidential election is more done than a pizza left in the oven of a student flat over night because it was put in by someone returning late from the club who was hungry but then they were so long they forgot about it and then their flatmate discovered it then next day completely black shrunk to a third its size.
We can't defeat Covid. We just have to manage it as best we can.
Yes, the idea that it can be beaten is insidious nonsense. It can be mitigated, those at most risk can be protected, we can get better at treating it, but it won’t ever be vanquished. This needs to be said more often.
Not easy to protect the vulnerable in reality until there is a vaccine.
It's won't kill of the problem, but will make it a lot easier to manage.
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
Montana has had Democrat governors since 2005. Yes. I was surprised too.
Until a few years ago it was common for Western States that were reliably Republican voting for President and (usually) US Senate & House to vote in Democrats as Governor.
On reason Montana has kept on doing so, is because unlike it's neighbors Idaho and Wyoming is is less dominated by Republicans, thus giving more scope to swing voters & ticket-splitters.
We can't defeat Covid. We just have to manage it as best we can.
Yes, the idea that it can be beaten is insidious nonsense. It can be mitigated, those at most risk can be protected, we can get better at treating it, but it won’t ever be vanquished. This needs to be said more often.
It was said at the beginning of this by the likes of Witty, then we got into all this nonsense of be sorted by summer, by September, by the end of the year.
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
Excellent point. There are many factors here, not just economy v uncontrolled epidemic. Privacy, education, trust, individual economic security, infrastructure, cohabitation profiles, communication, global awareness, individual/collective balance, culture, diversity, prevalence of risk factors, and probably several more I'm missing. All of these things guide that ball up and down slopes and valleys. It's much more complex than most people seem to realise, and one of the weaknesses we have in this country is the binary nature of politics these days. Too many people seem happy to dismiss something just because Johnson said it, or because Sturgeon supports it, or whatever.
The argument over free school meals is such an example. Sadly in this country while I as a voter would like politicians to expound policies they believe will help solve a problem then produce evidence it worked or abandon if they find it doesnt and use results to garner votes, instead they propose policies that they think will get votes and dont give a damn if they work or not as no one can actually find out for sure if they had an effect or not.
Earlier tonight I asked Nick Palmer an ex mp for evidence that the extra 20£ a week on uc had reduced malnourished children as his party was proposing another 15£ a week as a cure to the problem. Not because I was singling him out but because I figured he probably had access to people that could get that answer.
If there is evidence it made good inroads on the problem I would change my mind on the extra 15£ a week. I suspect there isn't however else the tories would be trumpeting it.
For me as a non partisan in as much as I call both tory and labour posters up when I think they are talking bs the "Not does it sound good but does it work and is it value for money" is important
From the linked Axios report: Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order "is a really big deal" that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials. https://www.axios.com/trump-firing-wray-haspel-esper-088cbd70-3524-4625-91f1-dbc985767c71.html
Sound familiar? Trump is America's Boris Johnson.
Does it never occur to these people that when the other side take power they will have the same tools available to them if you do this kind of change?
Erm, how so? It has had an oppressive lockdown which reduced the great city of Melbourne to the daily excitement levels of Leicester. Anyone can stop Covid temporarily by hiding under the bed.
Trafalgar have just slapped a NC poll up on their site.
And you are never going to believe it, it has exactly the same demographics as the one from September.
Outstanding consistency
Likely they've got some techie who takes txt & robo push-button responses to push-polling questions (where the REAL point is message NOT the response) then re-configures results based on demographics obtained from source OTHER than the actual texts & calls.
Then Cahaly pumps it out as another Trafalgar Group "poll".
This is all supposition - but it DOES fit the known facts (including TG's own vague "explanation" re: methodology) AND is certainly right in the Lee Atwater - Karl Rove (remember him?) wheelhouse.
Nah, the polls appear g on their website are just made up. The 3 that appeared today and caused a stir are genuine-but-crap. Notice
It is seriously worrying right across Europe just now
Tbf, this is us in two weeks unless the government gets a grip on self isolation and testing failures.
An honest question
Is anyone testing in Europe any better than the UK or Germany
Not particularly, I'd say that France, Spain, Netherlands and Belgium testing is worse than our system, Germany and Italy probably marginally better.
Ultimately every country suffers from the same issue of people not isolating after testing positive. Nations who have effectively defeated the virus have very good isolation measures (Australia, NZ) or people who are responsible and isolate properly without needing special measures (SK, Japan).
We seem to delight in attacking our own system which I understand is near a 400,000 a day capacity and is not far off Germany.
And of course the countries who have best dealt with this are all in the Southern Hemisphere and in New Zealand case 1500 miles from nearest land in Australia and comprises two islands with wide open spaces
The British response to Corona has much to be proud of, with only the government letting the side down.
Not really, it's been very disorganised and people have been proved to be irresponsible and not isolating after testing positive and the state has been left wanting in many areas. Any thoughts of exceptionalism should have been washed away by the virus response both from the state and the people.
The NHS, academic and pharmaceutical contribution is world class.
Lots of questions over the academic response over this, especially early on. Many so called experts not leveraging standard modern tools. Much that everybody laughed at the use of Excel for of the testing data, we saw with the likes of Ferguson model is was a similar shit show of coding / obselete programming language and paradigms.
We are still seeing it now with the model for how effective a circuit breaker might be providing nonsensical results.
The obsolete programming language was C, used for linux and android and therefore probably the most important and most commonly deployed language. (Obscure namedrop: I was once stuck in a lift with that there Dennis Ritchie.) I've not been following modelgate but gather some Microsofties had a go at porting Ferguson's code to C++ for no readily apparent reason except that is what programmers like to do: reimplement the wheel in a new language.
When all this is over, we might reflect that Dominic Cummings and pb's own @SeanT were right about one thing. Britain does need to invest more in research.
C is most definitely not an obsolete language it is still widely used for good reasons. That is however not to say its necessarily the best to use for those models. I can't comment on that because I haven't seen the models but C is I believe still one of the top ten languages and is still the best to choose often for embedded purposes. Like everything it is the right tool for the right purpose.
I would have more concern if the models were done in something live javascript than c.
John Carmack looked at the code and said it looked fine.
That is more than good enough for me.
Me too. The point I was making was merely that C is an old language but that doesn't make it obsolete. I wasn't arguing it was the right choice for this however I said I didn't know as hadn't seen the model.
Half the computer world still runs on C, apache web servers, linux, most embedded stuff etc.
Half of the computing world isn't trying to predict a viral replication model within a modelled real world scenario. It is what ML is made to do, using Python which has a whole host of ML libraries and can use GPU acceleration would be the correct way of doing it. I couldn't imagine anyone in my industry creating a predictive model in C and banking is at the forefront of ML, C is just old fashioned and unsuitable for using Tensorflow or PyTorch either of which are extensively used for deep learning which is what a problem like this needs.
Sigh does no one read what you write here anymore. I didn't argue c was the correct tool I merely asserted it wasn't an obsolete language. I said the right tool for the right job. I suspect in the case of covid however the model itself is the flaw rather than the language it is written in.
Further as to machine learning personally that is over hyped and unproven. We have a huge amount of examples of machine learning where what the machine learnt isn't what people thought they had taught it. Facial recognition, predictive crime etc being the two most egregious but lots of others out there.
I think the point being made is that him using C shows how outdated his approach is.
ML is great for these kinds of problems because people are predictably unpredictable. Predicting a person's behaviour is impossible, predicting population behaviour isn't and it's one of the major uses of it.
Agree that facial recognition and crime models are a pile of dogshit, but that doesn't invalidate the approach to other more suitable problems. Viral replication is probably one of the most suitable problems for ML as it's a multivariate analysis and we have a huge amount of data available now. Another good area is medical outcome modelling, a friend of mine works for Babylon and they've been doing some incredible work on it.
Don't mistake me I am not saying machine learning doesnt have a place. Sadly like much in the it world it almost feels like its becoming the silver bullet.....whatever the problem machine learning is the answer or block chain
I'm not so sure, I've implemented ML in a few areas of my work and it's been very helpful, but I agree that it isn't a silver bullet for every scenario. It's definitely well ahead of Blockchain in real world use, I mean in gaming DLSS is about to make native resolution obsolete and that's built on ML. Blockchain is vaporware, ML definitely isn't.
By machine learning, are you talking about neural networks, or genetic algorithms? The former require tons of historical data, so are not so useful if you're dealing with inherently unknowable systems or situations where you either have no data or you only have low confidence in what you have. I think, for example, they will axiomatically fail to predict black swans or emergent properties that are not in the historical data used to train them.
For genetic algorithms, I am not sure how evolved solutions in silico will necessarily be better than those evolved through acquisition of genuine expertise.
I am not an expert in this area, and so would welcome correction and enlightenment if I am wrong.
PS These comments relate to machine learning in complex adaptive systems - I realize that it can be very effective in better defined, deterministic systems
Neither a Deep Neural Net or a genetic algorithm is really the best approach. Something like Gaussian Processes based model is (and no that doesn't mean just fit a gaussian curve though some data).
What ever was the best language to build the 'sim' virus model (which incidentally was written for an influenza type virus rather than a SARs-type) the key issue, imho, is the it has failed repeatedly to be anywhere near the turned out reality.
And as far as I am aware no changes have been made to the model based on what has actually happened in the real world (happy to be corrected on this).
Well this was part of the criticism. His model was made using outdated set of tools, which makes it clear he hasn't updated it and adapted to both flaws of it when it previously hit the real world (i.e. the swing flu), but neither has he kept up with the state of the art mathematical modelling techniques.
I do hope the public inquiry covers this area, because personally I think it has been utterly woeful and an entire political class has been driven by a prediction engine that basically doesn't predict.
Unfortunately, I doubt those conducting such an inquiry will have the expert knowledge to really understand what the likes of myself and MaxPB are talking about. I can foresee instead it all just becoming political and bogged down in who said what when, which email didn't get answered, what Big Dom shouted as the tea lady etc etc etc.
During phone hacking, it became solely about the characters, the celebs, the politicians, not as only the Indy really looked at, some quite technical stuff, how many companies were exploited, how there was some proper serious hacking and was it justified, etc.
I'm so angry about this that I might write to the chair of the inquiry when it is launched. That's how I feel now. Whether I still will in 2025 when the next PM finally launches the inquiry I don't know.
And if it happens in 2025 the report will likely be released in 2030 plus
RMG Research are showing the Montana House race as a dead heat. Seems odd when its been won by the GOP since 1997 and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.
Montana has had Democrat governors since 2005. Yes. I was surprised too.
Democratic governors of reliably red states and Republican governors of reliably blue states are not as uncommon as one would think. Americans are often leery about handing all the keys to one party, especially at state level. If one party has a lock or near lock on the state legislature, then it can allow the other party’s candidate for the executive mansion to run as a brake on their opponents’ absolute power.
Is there a possible (not probable) scenario whereby Biden wins NC and TX but fails to flip FL and the rustbelt states? I dunno, I know it’s unlikely, but could it happen?
"Bough was born in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. He was educated at Oswestry Boys' High School (a Shropshire County Council secular grammar school after passing his eleven-plus exam), Oswestry, Shropshire, and at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied Shipping Management."
An Honours degree in Shipping Management at Merton College, Oxford ...
On topic: I can't remember how long I was on free school meals in the 1980s, maybe 2-3 years. As another_richard said yesterday, it certainly isn't something that is spoken about at the school gate, but not because it isn't there.
My folks bobbled along reasonably through most of their working life, white collar and factory jobs, owner occupation, never that much money, but OK. The tricky years came with what was then termed a nervous breakdown, now perhaps would be termed PTSD, as my father had been caught up in two major incidents in his working lunch hours, in the latter of which there had been numerous deaths, something I only fully knew about in the last couple of years.
Money dried up. Mum did restart work during the period when she could, but free school meals was one of the results. In fact, we had a budget of £60 per week max at that stage for weekly shopping, including toiletries and detergents, for a family of 6. I was taken to the shop for mental calculator services and cash was used. It did affect meals, eggs were the protein some days, beans were the veg others - mixed in with some fresher veg and meat meals. I don't remember going hungry, let alone starving (and there is a difference between those two things), but that said I arrived at university nearly 6ft tall and a smidge under 9st.
Now, we were poorer for my Dad's habits (a steady few pints every night, a steady 20 a day), and any abatement during his illness was temporary. These things were not ideal but affordable in normal times, they were certainly regarded as feckless within the house at that point. The difference between what would be seen as not atypical behaviour and fecklessness was simply a change of circumstance - but ultimately we got what we got from the state without prejudice and managed how we managed.
And in that, I'd make this point - in most circumstances in which you might like to separate deserving from undeserving, those efforts are likely to be so difficult and invasive to (not) get right, so counterproductive to many that, why bother? Save it for those who really need the undeserving treatment - those in the social care system who are genuinely harming their kids, save it for insisting on best expectation in schools. Keep deservingness at the very edge when it's comes to welfare, a hard life for sure, but reliably there when needed and light on arbitrary judgement.
Today, we have UC's whims, from a cost led deserving vs undeserving drive which is a blind alley (and let's not let off the Blair government in getting here). In widespread bad times, extra feeding will be a boon to many, not life and death, but it still might be fitting shoes or jumpers or the heating bill. The government may not wish to take this on themselves but they could put into the community schemes ad-hoc, many big society efforts get government backing. The attempted demonisation of MR has been plain ugly, politically imbecilic and, yes, scummy.
Erm, how so? It has had an oppressive lockdown which reduced the great city of Melbourne to the daily excitement levels of Leicester. Anyone can stop Covid temporarily by hiding under the bed.
It hasn’t ‘cracked’ anything.
Well, Leicester has had restrictions per Tier2 or worse, for 7 months now, and is in a significantly worse place for Covid-19
The Covid Modelling Problem is like a ball rolling down a knife-edge ridge, between two deep, deep valleys.
The ball might roll down the the ridge the whole way, but way more likely, it will end up in the valley on on one side of the ridge, or the other. Small differences in starting position, velocity and angle make a huge difference as to which valley you drop into.
In one of the valleys, you have suppressed the virus, but destroyed your economy. In the other valley, you have lost complete control of the virus & the pandemic is raging.
There is only a tiny bit of middle ground on the ridge, so it looks impossible to get the ball down the ridge without it dropping in the valley.
Can we do it?
What we have to do is use human behaviour to get the ball safely down the ridge. When the epidemic gets out of control, humans must do better social distancing, so the ball can stay on track & not drop into one valley.
When the epidemic starts to fade, humans must loosen up to keep the ball on the ridge & not drop into the other valley.
It is is almost impossible to model this because it needs maths+psychology+economics. There are just huge feedback loops, as the system changes, so does peoples' behaviour.
You are assuming here there is a ridge and the choice isnt merely which valley. The ridge also may be just be another valley only in this one we have both destroyed the economy and the pandemic is raging.
I suspect that there is a course of action in which you get a moderately good outcome in terms of both deaths and the economy.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
South Korea did it by methods which wouldn't be tolerated here. Tools not available to us as they would never be politically palatable to people in europe. Hell we have resistance to the measures the government is proposing let alone the very invasive south korean methods
Japan has similar results to Korea with a surveillance system consisting of a version of the gapple app downloaded by nobody except me, and the techology to send faxes in colour.
Beyond taking contact details at venues I'm not sure the initial idea of using payment records and mobile data and to trace people's movements ever really worked out, since it turns out the virus mainly transmits in close contact settings, and you generally know who you were in contact with better than your phone or your credit card does.
On topic: I can't remember how long I was on free school meals in the 1980s, maybe 2-3 years. As another_richard said yesterday, it certainly isn't something that is spoken about at the school gate, but not because it isn't there.
My folks bobbled along reasonably through most of their working life, white collar and factory jobs, owner occupation, never that much money, but OK. The tricky years came with what was then termed a nervous breakdown, now perhaps would be termed PTSD, as my father had been caught up in two major incidents in his working lunch hours, in the latter of which there had been numerous deaths, something I only fully knew about in the last couple of years.
Money dried up. Mum did restart work during the period when she could, but free school meals was one of the results. In fact, we had a budget of £60 per week max at that stage for weekly shopping, including toiletries and detergents, for a family of 6. I was taken to the shop for mental calculator services and cash was used. It did affect meals, eggs were the protein some days, beans were the veg others - mixed in with some fresher veg and meat meals. I don't remember going hungry, let alone starving (and there is a difference between those two things), but that said I arrived at university nearly 6ft tall and a smidge under 9st.
Now, we were poorer for my Dad's habits (a steady few pints every night, a steady 20 a day), and any abatement during his illness was temporary. These things were not ideal but affordable in normal times, they were certainly regarded as feckless within the house at that point. The difference between what would be seen as not atypical behaviour and fecklessness was simply a change of circumstance - but ultimately we got what we got from the state without prejudice and managed how we managed.
And in that, I'd make this point - in most circumstances in which you might like to separate deserving from undeserving, those efforts are likely to be so difficult and invasive to (not) get right, so counterproductive to many that, why bother? Save it for those who really need the undeserving treatment - those in the social care system who are genuinely harming their kids, save it for insisting on best expectation in schools. Keep deservingness at the very edge when it's comes to welfare, a hard life for sure, but reliably there when needed and light on arbitrary judgement.
Today, we have UC's whims, from a cost led deserving vs undeserving drive which is a blind alley (and let's not let off the Blair government in getting here). In widespread bad times, extra feeding will be a boon to many, not life and death, but it still might be fitting shoes or jumpers or the heating bill. The government may not wish to take this on themselves but they could put into the community schemes ad-hoc, many big society efforts get government backing. The attempted demonisation of MR has been plain ugly, politically imbecilic and, yes, scummy.
Sounds similar to my childhood however to point out to you while you specify the 1980's you dont specify the year. Taking 1985 as the midpoint therefore 60 a week equates to 183£ today source https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1985?amount=60
Your family of 6 however would now be elegible for
488.89+ 281.25+(3x235.83) = 1477.63 a month or 340£ a week
On topic: I can't remember how long I was on free school meals in the 1980s, maybe 2-3 years. As another_richard said yesterday, it certainly isn't something that is spoken about at the school gate, but not because it isn't there.
My folks bobbled along reasonably through most of their working life, white collar and factory jobs, owner occupation, never that much money, but OK. The tricky years came with what was then termed a nervous breakdown, now perhaps would be termed PTSD, as my father had been caught up in two major incidents in his working lunch hours, in the latter of which there had been numerous deaths, something I only fully knew about in the last couple of years.
Money dried up. Mum did restart work during the period when she could, but free school meals was one of the results. In fact, we had a budget of £60 per week max at that stage for weekly shopping, including toiletries and detergents, for a family of 6. I was taken to the shop for mental calculator services and cash was used. It did affect meals, eggs were the protein some days, beans were the veg others - mixed in with some fresher veg and meat meals. I don't remember going hungry, let alone starving (and there is a difference between those two things), but that said I arrived at university nearly 6ft tall and a smidge under 9st.
Now, we were poorer for my Dad's habits (a steady few pints every night, a steady 20 a day), and any abatement during his illness was temporary. These things were not ideal but affordable in normal times, they were certainly regarded as feckless within the house at that point. The difference between what would be seen as not atypical behaviour and fecklessness was simply a change of circumstance - but ultimately we got what we got from the state without prejudice and managed how we managed.
And in that, I'd make this point - in most circumstances in which you might like to separate deserving from undeserving, those efforts are likely to be so difficult and invasive to (not) get right, so counterproductive to many that, why bother? Save it for those who really need the undeserving treatment - those in the social care system who are genuinely harming their kids, save it for insisting on best expectation in schools. Keep deservingness at the very edge when it's comes to welfare, a hard life for sure, but reliably there when needed and light on arbitrary judgement.
Today, we have UC's whims, from a cost led deserving vs undeserving drive which is a blind alley (and let's not let off the Blair government in getting here). In widespread bad times, extra feeding will be a boon to many, not life and death, but it still might be fitting shoes or jumpers or the heating bill. The government may not wish to take this on themselves but they could put into the community schemes ad-hoc, many big society efforts get government backing. The attempted demonisation of MR has been plain ugly, politically imbecilic and, yes, scummy.
Thank you for this, one of the best reasoned arguments for free school meals and similar programs aimed at helping poor children and families Indeed, a 21st century update of classic British argument against means testing.
In thinking about recent episode where Labour MP hurled "scum" across the floor of the House of Common in response to government decision re: school meals, was reminded by similar scenes in H o C almost a century ago.
This was when Conservative government of that day made similar cuts to school meals. Which prompted the new Independent Labour Party MP James Maxon and other ILPers, mostly from Glasgow, to rise up in very vocal opposition.
So much so that Maxton caused an uproar in the House, and garnered prominent headlines, by calling the Tory front bench a pack of "murderers".
And when he refused to withdraw - despite urging from Labour leader Ramsey Macdonald, whom he was (at that time) supporting - Maxton refused, and was suspended for a period from parliament.
He never did withdraw that remark, or apologize for it. Thus it is interesting to note that a quarter-century later when he died, still a Glasgow ILP MP, after opposing declaration of war against both the Germans AND the Japanese, Winston Churchill called James Maxton "the greatest gentleman in the House of Commons".
If anyone needs something scary and diverting, I recommend The Haunting of Hill House, a very clever Netflix series, which is a reworking of the famous Shirley Jackson novel from the 1950s (one of the few truly unsettling ghost stories)
It is cheesy in parts but it gets significantly better. The Bent Neck Lady episode is whoah
The easiest way to get a 100% record in killing the virus is to kill the host. Perhaps they're treating it with cyanide.
Well that will get the greens up in arms, an iron bar to the back of the head is both eco friendly and reuseable. Who knew the khmer rouge were closet greens
The craziest of craziest. A cure a week before the election...but Trump has sanctions on them... Don't believe it for a second, but that would really put the top hat on it all. And wrap a big bow round it.
If anyone needs something scary and diverting, I recommend The Haunting of Hill House, a very clever Netflix series, which is a reworking of the famous Shirley Jackson novel from the 1950s (one of the few truly unsettling ghost stories)
It is cheesy in parts but it gets significantly better. The Bent Neck Lady episode is whoah
It won't end. The argument will be why not in the first place, probably arguments over the amount, and disputes over what to do next. But it will dampen it down for a time if he does that, though perhaps piss off those who had to go out and defend it.
It won't end. The argument will be why not in the first place, probably arguments over the amount, and disputes over what to do next. But it will dampen it down for a time if he does that, though perhaps piss off those who had to go out and defend it.
Well and once you start U-Turning (after initially digging in), everybody knows they can keep pushing you. If you have messed up, you need to get on top of it quickly, say we made a mistake, thanks for alerting us to it and sort it....digging in, then u-turning, is the worst of both worlds.
If anyone needs something scary and diverting, I recommend The Haunting of Hill House, a very clever Netflix series, which is a reworking of the famous Shirley Jackson novel from the 1950s (one of the few truly unsettling ghost stories)
It is cheesy in parts but it gets significantly better. The Bent Neck Lady episode is whoah
I'll confess to being a big pansy and say I find it hard to handle creepy and scary things. I put it down to seeing IT when I was 5. I was hugely uncomfortable when I saw Hereditary, apart from a scene where I burst out laughing at what was probably meant to be a horrifying moment.
The craziest of craziest. A cure a week before the election...but Trump has sanctions on them... Don't believe it for a second, but that would really put the top hat on it all. And wrap a big bow round it.
Maduro is the Putinist left hand that the Trumpsky right hand knows (or is supposed to know) nothing about.
When Trump loses I wonder becomes of the MAGA army?
I think we should be very worried personally. I have heard a lot mock the americans for their right to bear arms. They say stuff like how will they stand up to the us army with their tanks and sophisticated weapons.
One word for that Afghanistan
tribesmen armed mostly ak47's and what other ordinance they could scrounge gave the russians first then the americans and allies a run for their money
Comments
Admittedly we haven't been through a year yet, but it managed to rage in Summer in Arizona.
One can hope.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8877425/Tampax-slammed-tweet-celebrating-diversity-people-bleed-amid-calls-boycott.html
It would be ironic if Europe’s better weathering of the summer than the US came down to lack of air conditioning.
"BEING HELD BY MANIAC. PLEASE SEND HELP. SUITE 1A, MAR-A-LAGO."
Edit. I see @IanB2 has also spotted my failure to think the point through.
Although Taiwan is an AC heavy, hot, sweaty, crowded, indoor in Summer environment, so who knows?
During phone hacking, it became solely about the characters, the celebs, the politicians, not as only the Indy really looked at, some quite technical stuff, how many companies were exploited, how there was some proper serious hacking and was it justified, etc.
E.g., Hasn't South Korea done pretty well so far in getting the ball down the ridge?
Maybe there really is a valley in which you have destroyed your economy AND have a raging pandemic? But it looks like it is way easier to get the ball into one of the other two valleys.
BOYS FROM THE COUNTY HELL
Shane Macgowan
On the first day of March it was raining
It was raining worse than anything that I have ever seen
I drank ten pints of beer and I cursed all the people there
And I wish that all this raining would stop falling down on me
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
At the time I was working for a landlord
And he was the meanest bastard that you have ever seen
And to lose a single penny would grieve him awful sore
And he was a miserable bollocks and a bitch's bastard's whore
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
I recall that we took care of him one Sunday
We got him out the back and we broke his fucking balls
And maybe that was dreaming and maybe that was real
But all I know is I left that place without a penny or fuck all
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
But now I've the most charming of verandas
I sit and watch the junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores
Five green bottles sitting on the floor
I wish to Christ, I wish to Christ that I had fifteen more
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
The boys and me are drunk and looking for you
We'll eat your frigging entrails and we won't give a damn
Me daddy was a Blue Shirt and my mother a madam
My brother earned his medals at Mai Lai in Vietnam
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
On the first day of March it was raining
It was raining worse than anything that I have ever seen
Stay on the other side of the road
'Cause you can never tell
We've a thirst like a gang of devils
We're the boys from the County Hell
And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
And it's lend me ten pounds and I'll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
But that is beside the point.
I am just try to explain why I think the problem is not one of just using tensorflow or deep learning.
Standby for Johnson world beating vaccine bluster speech this week to hide the 'are there no workhouses?' u-turn.
Just saying.
Yes. I was surprised too.
This is why I am banging on about the utter landslide Congressional District polling is showing.
If it is at all reliable this Presidential election is more done than a pizza left in the oven of a student flat over night because it was put in by someone returning late from the club who was hungry but then they were so long they forgot about it and then their flatmate discovered it then next day completely black shrunk to a third its size.
That level of done.
This means that voters are MUCH closer to statewide electeds than in most of the Union. Throw in traditional Western US political independent streak, and you have plenty of potential for ticket-splitting. Sometimes is very creative ways!
I would be fine if this was something they had and could turn on in extreme circumstances such as covid if I trusted them to a) turn it off again, b) not then go on to sell all the data to their cronies, c) not allow every officious little git in your local council, ngo, private company performing a government contract access to it, d) leave it on an unecryted cd on the train
It's much more complex than most people seem to realise, and one of the weaknesses we have in this country is the binary nature of politics these days. Too many people seem happy to dismiss something just because Johnson said it, or because Sturgeon supports it, or whatever.
But Birgitte Nyborg is in it briefly, to remind those in the know what a top political TV show is like.
Except it already is.
From the linked Axios report: Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order "is a really big deal" that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials.
https://www.axios.com/trump-firing-wray-haspel-esper-088cbd70-3524-4625-91f1-dbc985767c71.html
Sound familiar? Trump is America's Boris Johnson.
It's won't kill of the problem, but will make it a lot easier to manage.
General Election
Biden 52%
Trump 46%
Arizona
Biden 53%
Trump 45%
Florida
Trump 49%
Biden 48%
North Carolina
Biden 52%
Trump 46%
Nevada
Biden 50%
Trump 49%
Ohio
Trump 51%
Biden 48%
Pennsylvania
Biden 52%
Trump 46%
Georgia
Biden 50%
Trump 49%
Michigan
Biden 53%
Trump 45%
Texas
Trump 51%
Biden 48%
Wisconsin
Biden 55%
Trump 43%
On reason Montana has kept on doing so, is because unlike it's neighbors Idaho and Wyoming is is less dominated by Republicans, thus giving more scope to swing voters & ticket-splitters.
Earlier tonight I asked Nick Palmer an ex mp for evidence that the extra 20£ a week on uc had reduced malnourished children as his party was proposing another 15£ a week as a cure to the problem. Not because I was singling him out but because I figured he probably had access to people that could get that answer.
If there is evidence it made good inroads on the problem I would change my mind on the extra 15£ a week. I suspect there isn't however else the tories would be trumpeting it.
For me as a non partisan in as much as I call both tory and labour posters up when I think they are talking bs the "Not does it sound good but does it work and is it value for money" is important
It hasn’t ‘cracked’ anything.
"Bough was born in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. He was educated at Oswestry Boys' High School (a Shropshire County Council secular grammar school after passing his eleven-plus exam), Oswestry, Shropshire, and at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied Shipping Management."
An Honours degree in Shipping Management at Merton College, Oxford ...
My folks bobbled along reasonably through most of their working life, white collar and factory jobs, owner occupation, never that much money, but OK. The tricky years came with what was then termed a nervous breakdown, now perhaps would be termed PTSD, as my father had been caught up in two major incidents in his working lunch hours, in the latter of which there had been numerous deaths, something I only fully knew about in the last couple of years.
Money dried up. Mum did restart work during the period when she could, but free school meals was one of the results. In fact, we had a budget of £60 per week max at that stage for weekly shopping, including toiletries and detergents, for a family of 6. I was taken to the shop for mental calculator services and cash was used. It did affect meals, eggs were the protein some days, beans were the veg others - mixed in with some fresher veg and meat meals. I don't remember going hungry, let alone starving (and there is a difference between those two things), but that said I arrived at university nearly 6ft tall and a smidge under 9st.
Now, we were poorer for my Dad's habits (a steady few pints every night, a steady 20 a day), and any abatement during his illness was temporary. These things were not ideal but affordable in normal times, they were certainly regarded as feckless within the house at that point. The difference between what would be seen as not atypical behaviour and fecklessness was simply a change of circumstance - but ultimately we got what we got from the state without prejudice and managed how we managed.
And in that, I'd make this point - in most circumstances in which you might like to separate deserving from undeserving, those efforts are likely to be so difficult and invasive to (not) get right, so counterproductive to many that, why bother? Save it for those who really need the undeserving treatment - those in the social care system who are genuinely harming their kids, save it for insisting on best expectation in schools. Keep deservingness at the very edge when it's comes to welfare, a hard life for sure, but reliably there when needed and light on arbitrary judgement.
Today, we have UC's whims, from a cost led deserving vs undeserving drive which is a blind alley (and let's not let off the Blair government in getting here). In widespread bad times, extra feeding will be a boon to many, not life and death, but it still might be fitting shoes or jumpers or the heating bill. The government may not wish to take this on themselves but they could put into the community schemes ad-hoc, many big society efforts get government backing. The attempted demonisation of MR has been plain ugly, politically imbecilic and, yes, scummy.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/the-early-voting-blog-3
https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1320503067004047360?s=20
Beyond taking contact details at venues I'm not sure the initial idea of using payment records and mobile data and to trace people's movements ever really worked out, since it turns out the virus mainly transmits in close contact settings, and you generally know who you were in contact with better than your phone or your credit card does.
https://twitter.com/conflictsw/status/1320499325760397312?s=21
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/maine-2/
source https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1985?amount=60
Your family of 6 however would now be elegible for
488.89+ 281.25+(3x235.83) = 1477.63 a month or 340£ a week
source
https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit/what-youll-get
That is on top of your council tax rebate housing costs and child benefit payments
(Probably not, as they’ve already been taken down.)
https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1320446999821508609
In thinking about recent episode where Labour MP hurled "scum" across the floor of the House of Common in response to government decision re: school meals, was reminded by similar scenes in H o C almost a century ago.
This was when Conservative government of that day made similar cuts to school meals. Which prompted the new Independent Labour Party MP James Maxon and other ILPers, mostly from Glasgow, to rise up in very vocal opposition.
So much so that Maxton caused an uproar in the House, and garnered prominent headlines, by calling the Tory front bench a pack of "murderers".
And when he refused to withdraw - despite urging from Labour leader Ramsey Macdonald, whom he was (at that time) supporting - Maxton refused, and was suspended for a period from parliament.
He never did withdraw that remark, or apologize for it. Thus it is interesting to note that a quarter-century later when he died, still a Glasgow ILP MP, after opposing declaration of war against both the Germans AND the Japanese, Winston Churchill called James Maxton "the greatest gentleman in the House of Commons".
https://twitter.com/duncanda51/status/1320306508744314881?s=20
https://twitter.com/JeremySWallace/status/1320463786885763073
It was 100% at killing coronavirus, based on 0 tested coronavirus cases.....
The easiest way to get a 100% record in killing the virus is to kill the host. Perhaps they're treating it with cyanide.
It is cheesy in parts but it gets significantly better. The Bent Neck Lady episode is whoah
Don't believe it for a second, but that would really put the top hat on it all.
And wrap a big bow round it.
https://twitter.com/hvgoenka/status/1320382730308235266?s=20
I thought they’d merely introduced a curfew.
One word for that Afghanistan
tribesmen armed mostly ak47's and what other ordinance they could scrounge gave the russians first then the americans and allies a run for their money