"Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections.
It is the first time that party figures have shown Labour’s membership falling below half a million since 2016, when Mr Corbyn’s leadership prompted a surge of new members."
Given Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 last year we can probably safely say that an increase in Labour membership is inversely correlated to its appeal to swing voters, so that might actually be good news for Starmer
One day hopefully the Tories might find a way to get rid of their own swiveleyed entryists from the BNP/UKIP/Brexit parties and we might see a return to a choice between two parties that are actually serious about competent government.
We've had two gargantuan recessions in the space of not much more than a decade. 2008 and 2020. In both cases both mainstream parties more or less agreed with the policies that led to these, completely free of entryism.
Entryism is thriving because of the regular giant pile-ups so called 'competent government' is creating. As Trump himself said, I am here because you guys messed up so badly.
And now he's gone because he messed up so badly. This was a thoroughly winnable election for him, but he committed one unforced error after another this year.
Not to mention that his pro-Wall Street staff and policies are indistinguishable from those that led to the 2008 crash, so I'm not sure how things would have been different under him.
Our economy will shrink ten per cent plus this year and our debt will soar. We will bear the scars for decades.
America are looking at a three per cent contraction.
That's not true. America measures its GDP differently to how we do but actually the data available so far appears to indicate the real economic data is quite comparable.
Our debt hasn't soared either. Our QE has soared but we don't pay interest on that. If you want to talk about soaring debt you might want to look at how debt levels have changed in the USA under Trump's whole term.
I'm with Heneghan. The epidemic ended in June and what we have seen since is nothing more than a giant exercise to vindicate the government's policies and those of its utterly discredited sage team.
An exercise that has seen massive and unnecessary damage to our economy.
Of course there was always a big economic hit. But its far, far larger than it needed to be.
Some mind blowing false equivalence from @MrEd here today. The long and the short of it is there is no senate supermajority to impeach Biden with. The same as for Trump. Half of the USA believes the GOP are bad faith actors anyway, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to hold back on anything Trump related based off of some vague notion of the GOP striking back somehow, they'd do it anyway. Trump is currently losing support within the GOP too - it's already a senate majority that believes Biden is rightfully president elect. The situation with GOP governors is even worse for Trump than that.
I've heard a few people say a majority of the Senate recognises Biden as President Elect, I heard someone else mention 5 GOP Senators doing so, but the only one I've explicitly heard confirm it is Romney. Has anyone else who is a GOP Senator explicitly recognised Biden as POTUS elect?
Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, crucially Pat Toomey a PA senator.
Some mind blowing false equivalence from @MrEd here today. The long and the short of it is there is no senate supermajority to impeach Biden with. The same as for Trump. Half of the USA believes the GOP are bad faith actors anyway, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to hold back on anything Trump related based off of some vague notion of the GOP striking back somehow, they'd do it anyway. Trump is currently losing support within the GOP too - it's already a senate majority that believes Biden is rightfully president elect. The situation with GOP governors is even worse for Trump than that.
I've heard a few people say a majority of the Senate recognises Biden as President Elect, I heard someone else mention 5 GOP Senators doing so, but the only one I've explicitly heard confirm it is Romney. Has anyone else who is a GOP Senator explicitly recognised Biden as POTUS elect?
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
Some mind blowing false equivalence from @MrEd here today. The long and the short of it is there is no senate supermajority to impeach Biden with. The same as for Trump. Half of the USA believes the GOP are bad faith actors anyway, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to hold back on anything Trump related based off of some vague notion of the GOP striking back somehow, they'd do it anyway. Trump is currently losing support within the GOP too - it's already a senate majority that believes Biden is rightfully president elect. The situation with GOP governors is even worse for Trump than that.
I've heard a few people say a majority of the Senate recognises Biden as President Elect, I heard someone else mention 5 GOP Senators doing so, but the only one I've explicitly heard confirm it is Romney. Has anyone else who is a GOP Senator explicitly recognised Biden as POTUS elect?
As mentioned, also Ben Sasse. There are others, including Joni Ernst and Lamar Alexander (although he's only a Senator until January) who have done everything but - publicly calling on Biden to be treated as President-Elect for transition purposes and saying that, while Trump has the right to exhaust his legal options, they have personally seen no evidence put forward that would call into question the legitimacy of the result.
"Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections.
It is the first time that party figures have shown Labour’s membership falling below half a million since 2016, when Mr Corbyn’s leadership prompted a surge of new members."
Given Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 last year we can probably safely say that an increase in Labour membership is inversely correlated to its appeal to swing voters, so that might actually be good news for Starmer
One day hopefully the Tories might find a way to get rid of their own swiveleyed entryists from the BNP/UKIP/Brexit parties and we might see a return to a choice between two parties that are actually serious about competent government.
We've had two gargantuan recessions in the space of not much more than a decade. 2008 and 2020. In both cases both mainstream parties more or less agreed with the policies that led to these, completely free of entryism.
Entryism is thriving because of the regular giant pile-ups so called 'competent government' is creating. As Trump himself said, I am here because you guys messed up so badly.
And now he's gone because he messed up so badly. This was a thoroughly winnable election for him, but he committed one unforced error after another this year.
Not to mention that his pro-Wall Street staff and policies are indistinguishable from those that led to the 2008 crash, so I'm not sure how things would have been different under him.
Our economy will shrink ten per cent plus this year and our debt will soar. We will bear the scars for decades.
America are looking at a three per cent contraction.
That's not true. America measures its GDP differently to how we do but actually the data available so far appears to indicate the real economic data is quite comparable.
Our debt hasn't soared either. Our QE has soared but we don't pay interest on that. If you want to talk about soaring debt you might want to look at how debt levels have changed in the USA under Trump's whole term.
I'm with Heneghan. The epidemic ended in June and what we have seen since is nothing more than a giant exercise to vindicate the government's policies and those of its utterly discredited sage team.
An exercise that has seen massive and unnecessary damage to our economy.
Of course there was always a big economic hit. But its far, far larger than it needed to be.
Out of curiosity, what do you think killed the 15,000-odd people who have died since the start of July within 28 days of a positive result?
In the absence of a reply (to be fair, I haven't given him long), I'll run some numbers. Nothing clever, just arithmetic.
The default hypothesis would be "Those particular people just happened to die in that timeframe; there are many causes of death and, sadly, people die every day in the UK. These just happened to die in that timeframe and either the positive report was inaccurate, or they died 'with covid' rather than 'of covid'."
We can check that to see if it's reasonable or absurd without even needing to look up the ONS average death rates and just using the number on the coronavirus dashboard and knowledge that the UK population is 66.65 million:
14,386 deaths recorded within 4 weeks of a positive test between 1st July and 19th July (so far; we know that will increase as more lagged data comes in).
1,227,339 positive tests in that time.
The UK population is 54.3 times that latter number. If that was a normal rate of death of individuals in a given 4 week period, we would expect 781,224 deaths in the UK every 28 days.
That's a rate of 10.15 million deaths per year. To put it another way, we would expect any randomly chosen individual to have just over a 15% chance of dying in any given year, and for 15% of the population to die each year.
This is obviously an absurd outcome, so we can conclude that the death rate of people given positive results over the following four weeks (since June) is hugely higher than normal.
That is: something or someone is causing a massively elevated death rate in people who happen to have received positive test results for covid compared to the norm. The simplest explanation would be that the overwhelming majority of such deaths have something to do with covid after all.
Some mind blowing false equivalence from @MrEd here today. The long and the short of it is there is no senate supermajority to impeach Biden with. The same as for Trump. Half of the USA believes the GOP are bad faith actors anyway, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to hold back on anything Trump related based off of some vague notion of the GOP striking back somehow, they'd do it anyway. Trump is currently losing support within the GOP too - it's already a senate majority that believes Biden is rightfully president elect. The situation with GOP governors is even worse for Trump than that.
I've heard a few people say a majority of the Senate recognises Biden as President Elect, I heard someone else mention 5 GOP Senators doing so, but the only one I've explicitly heard confirm it is Romney. Has anyone else who is a GOP Senator explicitly recognised Biden as POTUS elect?
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
"Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections.
It is the first time that party figures have shown Labour’s membership falling below half a million since 2016, when Mr Corbyn’s leadership prompted a surge of new members."
Given Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 last year we can probably safely say that an increase in Labour membership is inversely correlated to its appeal to swing voters, so that might actually be good news for Starmer
One day hopefully the Tories might find a way to get rid of their own swiveleyed entryists from the BNP/UKIP/Brexit parties and we might see a return to a choice between two parties that are actually serious about competent government.
We've had two gargantuan recessions in the space of not much more than a decade. 2008 and 2020. In both cases both mainstream parties more or less agreed with the policies that led to these, completely free of entryism.
Entryism is thriving because of the regular giant pile-ups so called 'competent government' is creating. As Trump himself said, I am here because you guys messed up so badly.
And now he's gone because he messed up so badly. This was a thoroughly winnable election for him, but he committed one unforced error after another this year.
Not to mention that his pro-Wall Street staff and policies are indistinguishable from those that led to the 2008 crash, so I'm not sure how things would have been different under him.
Our economy will shrink ten per cent plus this year and our debt will soar. We will bear the scars for decades.
America are looking at a three per cent contraction.
That's not true. America measures its GDP differently to how we do but actually the data available so far appears to indicate the real economic data is quite comparable.
Our debt hasn't soared either. Our QE has soared but we don't pay interest on that. If you want to talk about soaring debt you might want to look at how debt levels have changed in the USA under Trump's whole term.
I'm with Heneghan. The epidemic ended in June and what we have seen since is nothing more than a giant exercise to vindicate the government's policies and those of its utterly discredited sage team.
An exercise that has seen massive and unnecessary damage to our economy.
Of course there was always a big economic hit. But its far, far larger than it needed to be.
Out of curiosity, what do you think killed the 15,000-odd people who have died since the start of July within 28 days of a positive result?
In the absence of a reply (to be fair, I haven't given him long), I'll run some numbers. Nothing clever, just arithmetic.
The default hypothesis would be "Those particular people just happened to die in that timeframe; there are many causes of death and, sadly, people die every day in the UK. These just happened to die in that timeframe and either the positive report was inaccurate, or they died 'with covid' rather than 'of covid'."
We can check that to see if it's reasonable or absurd without even needing to look up the ONS average death rates and just using the number on the coronavirus dashboard and knowledge that the UK population is 66.65 million:
14,386 deaths recorded within 4 weeks of a positive test between 1st July and 19th July (so far; we know that will increase as more lagged data comes in).
1,227,339 positive tests in that time.
The UK population is 54.3 times that latter number. If that was a normal rate of death of individuals in a given 4 week period, we would expect 781,224 deaths in the UK every 28 days.
That's a rate of 10.15 million deaths per year. To put it another way, we would expect any randomly chosen individual to have just over a 15% chance of dying in any given year, and for 15% of the population to die each year.
This is obviously an absurd outcome, so we can conclude that the death rate of people given positive results over the following four weeks (since June) is hugely higher than normal.
That is: something or someone is causing a massively elevated death rate in people who happen to have received positive test results for covid compared to the norm. The simplest explanation would be that the overwhelming majority of such deaths have something to do with covid after all.
P.S. this isn't me going sarcastic or dismissive - I always like to run the numbers and this is a proof by reductio ad absurdum. The reason it may come across as sarcastic is that the outcome (the difference between the normal death rate and that from covid) really is that dramatic.
The BBC article on it is absolutely terrible, this in particular is factually incorrect:
"Are the results disappointing? After Pfizer and Moderna both produced vaccines delivering 95% protection from Covid-19, a figure of 70% is still highly effective, but will be seen by some as relatively disappointing.
But this is still a vaccine that can save lives from Covid-19 and is more effective than a seasonal flu jab."
It's not 70%, its 62% and 90% for the two dosage variations and as we've discussed here the 90% variation includes testing for asymptomatic cases where neither of the other two trials did that.
But to be fair to the BBC, this is what Astrazeneca's own press release says, so it's not unreasonable to cite the average efficacy. It's not 'fake news' as you previously said.
One dosing regimen (n=2,741) showed vaccine efficacy of 90% when AZD1222 was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart, and another dosing regimen (n=8,895) showed 62% efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart. The combined analysis from both dosing regimens (n=11,636) resulted in an average efficacy of 70%.
It's fake news because we're not going to have the full/full dose available. The half/full dose method will be used and it's 90% effective. AZ are registering full trial results scientifically, that's what they have to do. It's up to the media to provide proper context and the Guardian, Sky, the Mail and others all got it right this morning with the numbers and yet the BBC used hugely irresponsible wording in their headline.
This vaccine prevents 90% of symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines prevent 95% of symptomatic COVID. Those are the facts.
I think you do need to give a confidence interval rather than just the observed efficacy. The confidence interval is a lot wider for the 90% group than for Pfizer or Moderna.
But it's wider still for the 62% group, because the observed efficacy was so much lower, despite the larger number of participants.
It would be interesting to see what the CI is for each of those dosages trialled, but yes I agree. We don't have the full data to calculate them yet and I'm very interested to see what they are.
I am only a mathematician, not a statistician, so don't take this as gospel, but the figures I get (assuming the splits were 3-30 and 27-71) are: Half-full: expected efficacy: 87%, confidence interval (95%): 69-97% Full-full: expected efficacy: 61%, confidence interval (95%): 41-76%
On those figures the choice of regimen looks like a "no-brainer".
No, no, I want more. Full-full has more so its got to better. I will not be cheated with half doses. Do they not have enough? etc etc.
Some mind blowing false equivalence from @MrEd here today. The long and the short of it is there is no senate supermajority to impeach Biden with. The same as for Trump. Half of the USA believes the GOP are bad faith actors anyway, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to hold back on anything Trump related based off of some vague notion of the GOP striking back somehow, they'd do it anyway. Trump is currently losing support within the GOP too - it's already a senate majority that believes Biden is rightfully president elect. The situation with GOP governors is even worse for Trump than that.
I've heard a few people say a majority of the Senate recognises Biden as President Elect, I heard someone else mention 5 GOP Senators doing so, but the only one I've explicitly heard confirm it is Romney. Has anyone else who is a GOP Senator explicitly recognised Biden as POTUS elect?
I think the figure of five is wrong - or they are counting it in quite a narrow way as those who have congratulated Biden and said Trump should now withdraw challenges (which I think would be Romney, Collins, Murkowski, Sasse and Toomey).
There are several others who have said Trump has the right to exhaust his legal options... but who have added the transition process should begin, and that they've seen no evidence themselves produced by the Trump camp that would lead them to doubt the legitimacy of the election (including Cramer, Rubio, Alexander and Ernst - and there may be more). There are still more who haven't said it publicly but have let it be know that is their view.
"Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections.
It is the first time that party figures have shown Labour’s membership falling below half a million since 2016, when Mr Corbyn’s leadership prompted a surge of new members."
Given Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 last year we can probably safely say that an increase in Labour membership is inversely correlated to its appeal to swing voters, so that might actually be good news for Starmer
One day hopefully the Tories might find a way to get rid of their own swiveleyed entryists from the BNP/UKIP/Brexit parties and we might see a return to a choice between two parties that are actually serious about competent government.
We've had two gargantuan recessions in the space of not much more than a decade. 2008 and 2020. In both cases both mainstream parties more or less agreed with the policies that led to these, completely free of entryism.
Entryism is thriving because of the regular giant pile-ups so called 'competent government' is creating. As Trump himself said, I am here because you guys messed up so badly.
And now he's gone because he messed up so badly. This was a thoroughly winnable election for him, but he committed one unforced error after another this year.
Not to mention that his pro-Wall Street staff and policies are indistinguishable from those that led to the 2008 crash, so I'm not sure how things would have been different under him.
Our economy will shrink ten per cent plus this year and our debt will soar. We will bear the scars for decades.
America are looking at a three per cent contraction.
That's not true. America measures its GDP differently to how we do but actually the data available so far appears to indicate the real economic data is quite comparable.
Our debt hasn't soared either. Our QE has soared but we don't pay interest on that. If you want to talk about soaring debt you might want to look at how debt levels have changed in the USA under Trump's whole term.
I'm with Heneghan. The epidemic ended in June and what we have seen since is nothing more than a giant exercise to vindicate the government's policies and those of its utterly discredited sage team.
An exercise that has seen massive and unnecessary damage to our economy.
Of course there was always a big economic hit. But its far, far larger than it needed to be.
Out of curiosity, what do you think killed the 15,000-odd people who have died since the start of July within 28 days of a positive result?
In the absence of a reply (to be fair, I haven't given him long), I'll run some numbers. Nothing clever, just arithmetic.
The default hypothesis would be "Those particular people just happened to die in that timeframe; there are many causes of death and, sadly, people die every day in the UK. These just happened to die in that timeframe and either the positive report was inaccurate, or they died 'with covid' rather than 'of covid'."
We can check that to see if it's reasonable or absurd without even needing to look up the ONS average death rates and just using the number on the coronavirus dashboard and knowledge that the UK population is 66.65 million:
14,386 deaths recorded within 4 weeks of a positive test between 1st July and 19th July (so far; we know that will increase as more lagged data comes in).
1,227,339 positive tests in that time.
The UK population is 54.3 times that latter number. If that was a normal rate of death of individuals in a given 4 week period, we would expect 781,224 deaths in the UK every 28 days.
That's a rate of 10.15 million deaths per year. To put it another way, we would expect any randomly chosen individual to have just over a 15% chance of dying in any given year, and for 15% of the population to die each year.
This is obviously an absurd outcome, so we can conclude that the death rate of people given positive results over the following four weeks (since June) is hugely higher than normal.
That is: something or someone is causing a massively elevated death rate in people who happen to have received positive test results for covid compared to the norm. The simplest explanation would be that the overwhelming majority of such deaths have something to do with covid after all.
As Contrarian stated the epidemic ended in June he presumably accepts people died of it prior to June (as he hasn't stated the whole thing is a fabrication). Therefore these people either didn't die of the Covid they had and something else has killed them (what?) or it is some huge conspiracy and nobody had Covid at all and the deaths were all made up or they died of something else and it was blamed on Covid.
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
"Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections.
It is the first time that party figures have shown Labour’s membership falling below half a million since 2016, when Mr Corbyn’s leadership prompted a surge of new members."
Given Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 last year we can probably safely say that an increase in Labour membership is inversely correlated to its appeal to swing voters, so that might actually be good news for Starmer
One day hopefully the Tories might find a way to get rid of their own swiveleyed entryists from the BNP/UKIP/Brexit parties and we might see a return to a choice between two parties that are actually serious about competent government.
We've had two gargantuan recessions in the space of not much more than a decade. 2008 and 2020. In both cases both mainstream parties more or less agreed with the policies that led to these, completely free of entryism.
Entryism is thriving because of the regular giant pile-ups so called 'competent government' is creating. As Trump himself said, I am here because you guys messed up so badly.
And now he's gone because he messed up so badly. This was a thoroughly winnable election for him, but he committed one unforced error after another this year.
Not to mention that his pro-Wall Street staff and policies are indistinguishable from those that led to the 2008 crash, so I'm not sure how things would have been different under him.
Our economy will shrink ten per cent plus this year and our debt will soar. We will bear the scars for decades.
America are looking at a three per cent contraction.
That's not true. America measures its GDP differently to how we do but actually the data available so far appears to indicate the real economic data is quite comparable.
Our debt hasn't soared either. Our QE has soared but we don't pay interest on that. If you want to talk about soaring debt you might want to look at how debt levels have changed in the USA under Trump's whole term.
I'm with Heneghan. The epidemic ended in June and what we have seen since is nothing more than a giant exercise to vindicate the government's policies and those of its utterly discredited sage team.
An exercise that has seen massive and unnecessary damage to our economy.
Of course there was always a big economic hit. But its far, far larger than it needed to be.
Out of curiosity, what do you think killed the 15,000-odd people who have died since the start of July within 28 days of a positive result?
In the absence of a reply (to be fair, I haven't given him long), I'll run some numbers. Nothing clever, just arithmetic.
The default hypothesis would be "Those particular people just happened to die in that timeframe; there are many causes of death and, sadly, people die every day in the UK. These just happened to die in that timeframe and either the positive report was inaccurate, or they died 'with covid' rather than 'of covid'."
We can check that to see if it's reasonable or absurd without even needing to look up the ONS average death rates and just using the number on the coronavirus dashboard and knowledge that the UK population is 66.65 million:
14,386 deaths recorded within 4 weeks of a positive test between 1st July and 19th July (so far; we know that will increase as more lagged data comes in).
1,227,339 positive tests in that time.
The UK population is 54.3 times that latter number. If that was a normal rate of death of individuals in a given 4 week period, we would expect 781,224 deaths in the UK every 28 days.
That's a rate of 10.15 million deaths per year. To put it another way, we would expect any randomly chosen individual to have just over a 15% chance of dying in any given year, and for 15% of the population to die each year.
This is obviously an absurd outcome, so we can conclude that the death rate of people given positive results over the following four weeks (since June) is hugely higher than normal.
That is: something or someone is causing a massively elevated death rate in people who happen to have received positive test results for covid compared to the norm. The simplest explanation would be that the overwhelming majority of such deaths have something to do with covid after all.
"Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections.
It is the first time that party figures have shown Labour’s membership falling below half a million since 2016, when Mr Corbyn’s leadership prompted a surge of new members."
Given Corbyn led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 last year we can probably safely say that an increase in Labour membership is inversely correlated to its appeal to swing voters, so that might actually be good news for Starmer
One day hopefully the Tories might find a way to get rid of their own swiveleyed entryists from the BNP/UKIP/Brexit parties and we might see a return to a choice between two parties that are actually serious about competent government.
We've had two gargantuan recessions in the space of not much more than a decade. 2008 and 2020. In both cases both mainstream parties more or less agreed with the policies that led to these, completely free of entryism.
Entryism is thriving because of the regular giant pile-ups so called 'competent government' is creating. As Trump himself said, I am here because you guys messed up so badly.
And now he's gone because he messed up so badly. This was a thoroughly winnable election for him, but he committed one unforced error after another this year.
Not to mention that his pro-Wall Street staff and policies are indistinguishable from those that led to the 2008 crash, so I'm not sure how things would have been different under him.
Our economy will shrink ten per cent plus this year and our debt will soar. We will bear the scars for decades.
America are looking at a three per cent contraction.
That's not true. America measures its GDP differently to how we do but actually the data available so far appears to indicate the real economic data is quite comparable.
Our debt hasn't soared either. Our QE has soared but we don't pay interest on that. If you want to talk about soaring debt you might want to look at how debt levels have changed in the USA under Trump's whole term.
I'm with Heneghan. The epidemic ended in June and what we have seen since is nothing more than a giant exercise to vindicate the government's policies and those of its utterly discredited sage team.
An exercise that has seen massive and unnecessary damage to our economy.
Of course there was always a big economic hit. But its far, far larger than it needed to be.
Out of curiosity, what do you think killed the 15,000-odd people who have died since the start of July within 28 days of a positive result?
In the absence of a reply (to be fair, I haven't given him long), I'll run some numbers. Nothing clever, just arithmetic.
The default hypothesis would be "Those particular people just happened to die in that timeframe; there are many causes of death and, sadly, people die every day in the UK. These just happened to die in that timeframe and either the positive report was inaccurate, or they died 'with covid' rather than 'of covid'."
We can check that to see if it's reasonable or absurd without even needing to look up the ONS average death rates and just using the number on the coronavirus dashboard and knowledge that the UK population is 66.65 million:
14,386 deaths recorded within 4 weeks of a positive test between 1st July and 19th July (so far; we know that will increase as more lagged data comes in).
1,227,339 positive tests in that time.
The UK population is 54.3 times that latter number. If that was a normal rate of death of individuals in a given 4 week period, we would expect 781,224 deaths in the UK every 28 days.
That's a rate of 10.15 million deaths per year. To put it another way, we would expect any randomly chosen individual to have just over a 15% chance of dying in any given year, and for 15% of the population to die each year.
This is obviously an absurd outcome, so we can conclude that the death rate of people given positive results over the following four weeks (since June) is hugely higher than normal.
That is: something or someone is causing a massively elevated death rate in people who happen to have received positive test results for covid compared to the norm. The simplest explanation would be that the overwhelming majority of such deaths have something to do with covid after all.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
After a wee dig aroond, it appears to be a variation of jabby which makes sense.
j'ab [dʒab] also job [dʒob] n. A prick, the act of pricking, a prickle. A sharp blow, a cutting remark (but an adjective not a noun). v. To prick sharply. To stab, pierce lightly.
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
Just reading through some of the other media in the country, it really does seem the BBC are alone in pushing the 70% narrative. Almost every other major outlet is quoting te 90% figure and quite a few of them talk about some of the vaccine group infections being asymptomatic vs Pfizer/Moderna only recording symptomatic infections in their trials.
The public service broadcaster is screwing up big time.
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
On topic: They must not give Trump a deal. It is the easy option, but it is wrong. It is not only morally wrong it is strategically wrong for the long term.
Any would be dictator needs to know that if they fail the consequences will be harsh (and that goes for people who knowingly facilitated him/her).
Trump has come perilously close to succeeding.
If you prosecute him, all that will happen is that he will be seen as a martyr and reinforce his support.
It will also guarantee that the Republicans will seek to prosecute Biden on whatever grounds when he finishes being President, especially as Trump didn't seek to prosecute Clinton.
GOP lawyers attempting to 'prosecute' Biden should be a good laugh if the quality of their current shenanigans is anything to go by.
If they take control of the House in 2022 and keep the Senate, expect payback for the impeachment hearings.
Do you think Putin's Russia interferes with foreign elections or not? I think they do, and even if they didn't that Trump winning in 2016 was an optimum result for them. I believe Trump winning again would have been optimum for them, the current imbroglio is second best and a Biden landslide would definitely not have turned Vlad's frown upside down. Whether they expended any resources on making stuff happen is a separate issue.
No doubt he is no focussing his attention on the next Scottish Independence referendum. He just loves you Nats and your divisive agendas! How useful are you feeling?
Salmond's plea to Putin "Gi's a job!" And he duly obliged.
That's Scouser, not Scots.
I have my own views on the matter, as fanmously does Ms Sturgeon, but in fairness that was after he had left government and elected office. And also he did not get a job. His firm provided the show to RT to broadcast. Not the same thing.
Gi' us a wee jobbie? Or does that mean something different?
Jaggie might also as @Roy_G_Biv suggests - does it sound right?
Indeed very topical in any case: DSL says
JAG, n.1, v.1 I. 2. Add quots.: Sc. 1998 Daily Record 4 Mar 2: Britain's Gulf forces are to be given anthrax jags. The injections begin today for more than 3500 troops. Sc. 2003 Mirror 9 Apr : McLeish said: "Barry trained yesterday and today and is fine for the match although he will need a jag. The injection is not so bad for his stomach as the pills are. ..."
If he wants more time to scrutinise he should be calling on his own side to make concessions. You don't just get to demand the other side do.
I love the delusion that anyone gives a [deleted] what the EP thinks about anything. So delighted we are no longer a part of that Institution and no longer have to be embarrassed by the likes of Farage supposedly representing our country. (Anyone not annoyed by one part or the other of this post, apologies. Catch you next time).
If he wants more time to scrutinise he should be calling on his own side to make concessions. You don't just get to demand the other side do.
I love the delusion that anyone gives a [deleted] what the EP thinks about anything. So delighted we are no longer a part of that Institution and no longer have to be embarrassed by the likes of Farage supposedly representing our country. (Anyone not annoyed by one part or the other of this post, apologies. Catch you next time).
I can wholeheartedly agree with 100% of what you wrote. So apology accepted.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
To be fair to him, that is a fairly common opinion, and not unreasonable. I guess I was always more optimistic about vaccines.
Indeed. I was expecting the vaccine news in November and said that a few times. Given the PIII trials ongoing due in November it was always likely we'd get some good news this month ... But all three being 90% plus effectiveness is even better than hoped for.
Do... do other people spell "plow" "plough"? Or is that just me?
The school hymn at Ledbury Grammar School was by Poet Laureate John Masefield. This is his interpretation of the "plow" or "plough" debate.
"O Christ, who holds the open gate, O Christ who drives the furrow straight, O Christ, the plow, O Christ, the laughter of holy white birds flying after."
Although "plough" gets the nod on spellchecker. Also the hymn was a dreadful dirge!
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
It sounds to me a little bit like the following set up: Experiment 1: You roll a die 100 times, and take the average. Experiment 2: You roll a pair of dice 100 times, and take the average of the higher value.
The experiments will yield very different "success" rates, and they should be reported separately. Averaging them probably makes no sense.
This might be horribly misleading, so don't pull me to pieces if I'm dead wrong, but that my current mental model for these studies.
According to R4, mid north Kent now has the worst virus infection rate in the country, overtaking parts of the North West that have previously been worst.
Looking at the Oxford vaccine data, I have the following estimates: 131 infections, of which 101 were in the control group and 30 were in the vaccinated groups. I assume that 50% of the volunteers received the dummy injections and then calculate that 35% received the full/full doses and 15% received the half/full doses.
I calculate that of the vaccinated people with infections, 27 were in the full/full group and 3 were in the half/full group. I would prefer that the actual numbers are published. These results may show a statistically significant difference between the infection rates in the half/full group compared to the full/full group. Again, I would like to see this analysis published.
Why is a Luxembourg MEP worth listening to for what the PM supposedly wants?
If a deal is agreed it will be implemented. Those MEPs claiming they have relevance in this matter and bigging themselves up are engaging in a charade.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
The only problem with the 90% result is that it's from the smaller of the two experiments, so there's more uncertainty about the reliability of the result.
That will improve with more data - some of which they'll get over the next few weeks from the existing cohort.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
It sounds to me a little bit like the following set up: Experiment 1: You roll a die 100 times, and take the average. Experiment 2: You roll a pair of dice 100 times, and take the average of the higher value.
The experiments will yield very different "success" rates, and they should be reported separately. Averaging them probably makes no sense.
This might be horribly misleading, so don't pull me to pieces if I'm dead wrong, but that my current mental model for these studies.
Experiment 2 doesn't describe it right since the higher dice might sometimes be dice one and sometimes be dice two. Whereas if you're recording the higher of the two there is no control.
It's more like surely having a red dice and a blue dice and rolling them and recording the data for each.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
The only problem with the 90% result is that it's from the smaller of the two experiments, so there's more uncertainty about the reliability of the result.
That will improve with more data - some of which they'll get over the next few weeks from the existing cohort.
How many cases were there in the lower dosage regime? I see in the press release 131 overall, but the full dose regime was 3 times the size.
Just reading through some of the other media in the country, it really does seem the BBC are alone in pushing the 70% narrative. Almost every other major outlet is quoting te 90% figure and quite a few of them talk about some of the vaccine group infections being asymptomatic vs Pfizer/Moderna only recording symptomatic infections in their trials. The public service broadcaster is screwing up big time.
It has been taken over by the UKIP-Tory chumocracy, so what would you expect?
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
Now, I’ve seen people speculating this morning that these numbers may be better than they look, because they believe that these trials monitored patients by PCR tests rather than by symptoms. If that were the case, then yes, that’s a finer net than the Pfizer and Moderna trials used and it would certainly affect the efficacy readouts. But I don’t think it is: looking at the published trial protocol, the cases are defined as “SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive symptomatic illness”, and the patients have to show symptoms of the disease (see Table 13). So I don’t think we can explain the lower efficacy by saying that they were finding asymptomatic people as well: the trial excludes asymptomatic people from its endpoint definition. The rate of asymptomatic cases in the treatments and controls will be determined in these trials (see section 8.5.2.1 of the protocol) but those aren’t the numbers we’re seeing today...
It will be interesting to see the full analysis of the results, which simply isn't yet available.
I remember my late father in law telling me that when he was doing mountain training for the Hydro Board in the 1960s they were on a slightly tricky slope with pitons, ropes, crampons etc feeling a bit sorry for themselves when Hamish MacInnes came wandering by to give them some encouragement with an Arran jumper on and his hands in his pockets. A remarkable man.
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
Which side has the biggest problem in January if we haven't got a deal?
Hint - it's not the EU who can continue as normal although missing a few UK exports.
Do... do other people spell "plow" "plough"? Or is that just me?
The school hymn at Ledbury Grammar School was by Poet Laureate John Masefield. This is his interpretation of the "plow" or "plough" debate.
"O Christ, who holds the open gate, O Christ who drives the furrow straight, O Christ, the plow, O Christ, the laughter of holy white birds flying after."
Although "plough" gets the nod on spellchecker. Also the hymn was a dreadful dirge!
Yet didn't Piers Plowman [in that spelling] dwell on the Malvern Hills?
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
That's not true. The UK wants a Canada style deal with the EU. The EU is prepared to agree Canada style deals with the rest of the world, you know how we know this? They agreed it already. With Canada.
The EU has no reason they can't give the UK what the UK wants. It is already prepared to do so with the rest of the world.
As for why EU politicians aren't undermining their negotiators, why should they?
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
They do not normally negotiate with a bunch of fools who like going back on their word, who want to have their cake whilst eating it and who have split their country down the middle and polarised their politics for the worse.
Do... do other people spell "plow" "plough"? Or is that just me?
The school hymn at Ledbury Grammar School was by Poet Laureate John Masefield. This is his interpretation of the "plow" or "plough" debate.
"O Christ, who holds the open gate, O Christ who drives the furrow straight, O Christ, the plow, O Christ, the laughter of holy white birds flying after."
Although "plough" gets the nod on spellchecker. Also the hymn was a dreadful dirge!
There's also a verb/noun distinction along with the US/UK one.
The spelling plough became common in England in the 18th century; earlier (16th–17th centuries) the noun was normally spelled plough, the verb plow...
Why bugger around with all the costs both of getting your parts / components / vehicles across the border several times AND the cost of having to adopt an alien production plan where just in time no longer works when you have factories elsewhere that suffer zero cost or disruption?
Honda came to the Brexit committee a while back and tried to explain this. Yes, on paper they could drop just in time and build and stock large warehouses of components. Yes on paper they could manage all of the costs of slower tariffed exports. But why bother when the result would be that Swindon would be the most expensive place in the world to build a Civic?
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
That's not true. The UK wants a Canada style deal with the EU. The EU is prepared to agree Canada style deals with the rest of the world, you know how we know this? They agreed it already. With Canada.
The EU has no reason they can't give the UK what the UK wants. It is already prepared to do so with the rest of the world.
As for why EU politicians aren't undermining their negotiators, why should they?
Do... do other people spell "plow" "plough"? Or is that just me?
The school hymn at Ledbury Grammar School was by Poet Laureate John Masefield. This is his interpretation of the "plow" or "plough" debate.
"O Christ, who holds the open gate, O Christ who drives the furrow straight, O Christ, the plow, O Christ, the laughter of holy white birds flying after."
Although "plough" gets the nod on spellchecker. Also the hymn was a dreadful dirge!
Yet didn't Piers Plowman [in that spelling] dwell on the Malvern Hills?
The Piers Plowman story starts in the Malvern Hills. There is some debate as to whether William Langland hailed from Malvern, Ledbury or further afield at Cleobury Mortimer (between Kidderminster and Tenbury Wells). I grew up in a village in Herefordshire called Cradley, the adjoining village Mathon laid claim to both William Langland and Piers Plowman. I suspect Cleobury Mortimer disagrees.
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
Which side has the biggest problem in January if we haven't got a deal?
Hint - it's not the EU who can continue as normal although missing a few UK exports.
Unsurprisingly the UK has both the most to gain AND the most to lose.
Why bugger around with all the costs both of getting your parts / components / vehicles across the border several times AND the cost of having to adopt an alien production plan where just in time no longer works when you have factories elsewhere that suffer zero cost or disruption?
Honda came to the Brexit committee a while back and tried to explain this. Yes, on paper they could drop just in time and build and stock large warehouses of components. Yes on paper they could manage all of the costs of slower tariffed exports. But why bother when the result would be that Swindon would be the most expensive place in the world to build a Civic?
And have you seen the size of the car transport ships? Noticed their massive size the other day when rteading Ships Monthly, but this will do: 8K at a time.
Why bugger around with all the costs both of getting your parts / components / vehicles across the border several times AND the cost of having to adopt an alien production plan where just in time no longer works when you have factories elsewhere that suffer zero cost or disruption?
Honda came to the Brexit committee a while back and tried to explain this. Yes, on paper they could drop just in time and build and stock large warehouses of components. Yes on paper they could manage all of the costs of slower tariffed exports. But why bother when the result would be that Swindon would be the most expensive place in the world to build a Civic?
I don't know, but before @HYUFD comes along to tell me this will only affect "Sunderland", who vote Labour anyway, Nissan closing would be devastating for the North East economy as a whole.
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
That's not true. The UK wants a Canada style deal with the EU. The EU is prepared to agree Canada style deals with the rest of the world, you know how we know this? They agreed it already. With Canada.
The EU has no reason they can't give the UK what the UK wants. It is already prepared to do so with the rest of the world.
As for why EU politicians aren't undermining their negotiators, why should they?
The UK wants a UK-style deal which, for propaganda purposes, it prefers to call a Canada-style deal.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
It sounds to me a little bit like the following set up: Experiment 1: You roll a die 100 times, and take the average. Experiment 2: You roll a pair of dice 100 times, and take the average of the higher value.
The experiments will yield very different "success" rates, and they should be reported separately. Averaging them probably makes no sense.
This might be horribly misleading, so don't pull me to pieces if I'm dead wrong, but that my current mental model for these studies.
I don't want to pull you to pieces over it, but that certainly doesn't work as an analogy. In experiment 2, you by definition get a higher value - indeed, you can predict how much higher (1.5 possibly but haven't done the maths). So if you're testing whether these are fair dice, the expected figure representing the null result in experiment 2 would differ from that in experiment 2, so the average you'd need to get to say the dice aren't fair (to a 95% confidence level) is different.
If you were using different dice, you could indeed use statistics to compare the results to see if the dice in experiment 1 are significantly fairer than those in experiment 2 BUT this would NOT be based on assuming the same average from each experiment.
With the two dosing strategies, you don't have an a priori reason to expect a different value from the two experiments, so actually statistically checking whether strategy 2 is significantly better than strategy 1 is more straightforward... although is also possible in the dice case.
Now, I’ve seen people speculating this morning that these numbers may be better than they look, because they believe that these trials monitored patients by PCR tests rather than by symptoms. If that were the case, then yes, that’s a finer net than the Pfizer and Moderna trials used and it would certainly affect the efficacy readouts. But I don’t think it is: looking at the published trial protocol, the cases are defined as “SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive symptomatic illness”, and the patients have to show symptoms of the disease (see Table 13). So I don’t think we can explain the lower efficacy by saying that they were finding asymptomatic people as well: the trial excludes asymptomatic people from its endpoint definition. The rate of asymptomatic cases in the treatments and controls will be determined in these trials (see section 8.5.2.1 of the protocol) but those aren’t the numbers we’re seeing today...
It will be interesting to see the full analysis of the results, which simply isn't yet available.
That's interesting because we wouldn't then know what the preventative effect is in terms of asymptomatic spread, at least not from the published results which is not what Prof Pollard was saying this morning.
The EU's credibility is important here. They have a reputation, built up over decades, of being tough but effective negotiators- they have a lot of deals in the bag after all. They have a good ideal of how much a trade deal with them is worth.
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
That's not true. The UK wants a Canada style deal with the EU. The EU is prepared to agree Canada style deals with the rest of the world, you know how we know this? They agreed it already. With Canada.
The EU has no reason they can't give the UK what the UK wants. It is already prepared to do so with the rest of the world.
As for why EU politicians aren't undermining their negotiators, why should they?
But the EU have judged that giving zero tariffs-zero quotas access is worth more to the UK than it is to Canada. So they want more alignment in return. Which is fair enough, we're physically closer to the EU than to Canada, so expect to sell more to them than Canada does.
You may feel that they're greedy fools for doing this, but that's their decision. Sovereignty and all that.
And as for the second point; in a continent of 500 million people, are you telling me that they're all behind M. Barnier? That nobody significant is prepared to go public and say "this strategy is an obvious mistake and it will all end in tears"? Either that's a degree of unity behind a bad idea that not even President Trump can manage, or maybe they think his continuing approach is right?
Looking at the Oxford vaccine data, I have the following estimates: 131 infections, of which 101 were in the control group and 30 were in the vaccinated groups. I assume that 50% of the volunteers received the dummy injections and then calculate that 35% received the full/full doses and 15% received the half/full doses.
I calculate that of the vaccinated people with infections, 27 were in the full/full group and 3 were in the half/full group. I would prefer that the actual numbers are published. These results may show a statistically significant difference between the infection rates in the half/full group compared to the full/full group. Again, I would like to see this analysis published.
I have calculated the Z score for this difference of two population proportions based on the above figures as being 2.25. I also used the calculator at https://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/ztest/, and I got the same result. Using a two-tailed test the difference between the results in the different vaccine group is significant at the 5% confidence level, but not at the 1% confidence level. Note that getting 3 in the smallest subgroup suggests a small sample size. All subgroups would ideally have 5 or more.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Whereby the better one is cherry-picked after the results are in. That's where bias is introduced that needs to be compensated for. Doesn't really matter whether they're considered separate experiments or subsamples of a single one.
Anyway, 90% vs 62% does look very likely to be a genuine difference, and there is a decent hypothesis to explain it, so hopefully the 90% does stand up to further scrutiny.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
It sounds to me a little bit like the following set up: Experiment 1: You roll a die 100 times, and take the average. Experiment 2: You roll a pair of dice 100 times, and take the average of the higher value.
The experiments will yield very different "success" rates, and they should be reported separately. Averaging them probably makes no sense.
This might be horribly misleading, so don't pull me to pieces if I'm dead wrong, but that my current mental model for these studies.
I don't want to pull you to pieces over it, but that certainly doesn't work as an analogy. In experiment 2, you by definition get a higher value - indeed, you can predict how much higher (1.5 possibly but haven't done the maths). So if you're testing whether these are fair dice, the expected figure representing the null result in experiment 2 would differ from that in experiment 2, so the average you'd need to get to say the dice aren't fair (to a 95% confidence level) is different.
If you were using different dice, you could indeed use statistics to compare the results to see if the dice in experiment 1 are significantly fairer than those in experiment 2 BUT this would NOT be based on assuming the same average from each experiment.
With the two dosing strategies, you don't have an a priori reason to expect a different value from the two experiments, so actually statistically checking whether strategy 2 is significantly better than strategy 1 is more straightforward... although is also possible in the dice case.
Ok, good point about the a priori expectation, thanks. What I was trying to get at was the fact that these seem like fundamentally different experiments and not natural variation in the tossing of a coin. I think perhaps we're all better off moving away from coins and dice in describing this.
Why bugger around with all the costs both of getting your parts / components / vehicles across the border several times AND the cost of having to adopt an alien production plan where just in time no longer works when you have factories elsewhere that suffer zero cost or disruption?
Honda came to the Brexit committee a while back and tried to explain this. Yes, on paper they could drop just in time and build and stock large warehouses of components. Yes on paper they could manage all of the costs of slower tariffed exports. But why bother when the result would be that Swindon would be the most expensive place in the world to build a Civic?
And have you seen the size of the car transport ships? Noticed their massive size the other day when rteading Ships Monthly, but this will do: 8K at a time.
No 1 daughter is coming back from Calais today after nearly 3 weeks as a volunteer with the refugees there. Been an amazing experience for her but the French have not exactly endeared themselves. I have mentioned before how the riot police destroy peoples' tents and sleeping bags and seize their stuff before forcing them onto buses and dropping them in random places without food, shelter or care.
Even the French were getting embarrassed by publicity about this but they have found a solution. It is now illegal to film the police doing this.
I have to say that these people are going to be a challenge to the next Home Secretary. They all want to come here.
Oh dear, I hadn't heard that. Off to the Greater Ranges...
I still use a "Glencoe Mountain Technology" ice axe made by the company set up by his mate Hugh McNicoll (who also died a few years back). It was Hamish that started everyone off using all metal axes, though, after he'd seen the results of the wooden ones snapping. It might be heavier than current designs but it still works...
I hope never to have to use a MacInnes stretcher - but many have and were no doubt grateful for it.
Oxford just held a press briefing where Prof Pollard said he’s happy that the 90% sub sample is large and robust enough to take to the regulators. That’s good news and allays some of the confusion earlier about hints of this and that.
Sub samples, on PB??
*Statistically significant* sub samples.
It's not just a subsample though, but a cherry-picked subsample. Hopefully they are adjusting the significance thresholds accordingly.
I don't understand why you say it's "cherry picked".
They used two different regimens, and have reported separate results for each. What would have been the point of using two different regimens, if they weren't planning to analyse them separately? If it had been an _unplanned_ analysis, you could obviously describe it as "cherry picked". But if they weren't planning to analyse the results of this regimen, why would they have used it?
It's cherry-picked because we're picking the 90% subsample over the 62% one, without knowing why they should be different. The statistical analysis has to account for the possibility that the 90% subsample is only better by luck. (No I don't know how to do it.)
As an analogy, let's say you do a hundred coin tosses, 50 before sunset and 50 after. Before sunset you happen to get 30 heads and 20 tails, and the other way round after, so 50/50 overall. You might conclude that you can increase your chances to get heads to 60% by tossing your coin before sunset, but that's obviously nonsense.
I'm afraid that still makes no sense to me. There are two regimens, and results have been given for both of them. It's possible the difference is owing to chance, but it doesn't look very likely to me, because there's a relatively small overlap between the confidence intervals.
Certainly you can't say "the vaccine has 90%" efficacy, any more than you can say it has 62% efficacy. But you can say that about the two regimens separately - though as I already said, they should give confidence intervals to reflect the statistical uncertainty.
Okay, let me try a slightly different tack.
Two coins, hundred throws each. For each one, the expected heads is 50. But due to random variation, when doing hundred throws each and then picking out the one with more heads, the expected value actually is a bit higher. Not sure about the exact number, but maybe 55.
In other words, by running two experiments in parallel and picking out the better one, you introduce a bit of bias compared to just running one.
I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do. I am saying it needs to be taken into account in the statistical analysis of the picked-out subsample.
It’s not a picked out sub sample - it’s two predefined different experiments.
Yes, that's really important. You could, of course, segment data in all sorts of ways to show the vaccine was 98% successful on blondes born on a Thursday, but that would be meaningless. However, different dosing strategies is quite obviously something the scientists deliberately set up.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
The only problem with the 90% result is that it's from the smaller of the two experiments, so there's more uncertainty about the reliability of the result.
That will improve with more data - some of which they'll get over the next few weeks from the existing cohort.
How many cases were there in the lower dosage regime? I see in the press release 131 overall, but the full dose regime was 3 times the size.
This can be calculated from the published data: full dose vs half dose is 62% effective vs 90% effective. Out of every 7 people vaccinated 5 got the full doses and 2 got half/full. There were 24000 - 26000 volunteers in total, so you need to know how many were given the dummy injections to know how many were vaccinated, but you could assume that it was 50:50 if this information is not available.
One downside of the AZ/Ox approach is that it is definitely looking like a one time jab (well one and half). Clearly vector immunity is going to be a long term issue so any mutations in the virus may require a new vector as well as a new anti-viral approach while the mRNA vaccines would only need the latter.
Looking at the Oxford vaccine data, I have the following estimates: 131 infections, of which 101 were in the control group and 30 were in the vaccinated groups. I assume that 50% of the volunteers received the dummy injections and then calculate that 35% received the full/full doses and 15% received the half/full doses.
I calculate that of the vaccinated people with infections, 27 were in the full/full group and 3 were in the half/full group. I would prefer that the actual numbers are published. These results may show a statistically significant difference between the infection rates in the half/full group compared to the full/full group. Again, I would like to see this analysis published.
I have calculated the Z score for this difference of two population proportions based on the above figures as being 2.25. I also used the calculator at https://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/ztest/, and I got the same result. Using a two-tailed test the difference between the results in the different vaccine group is significant at the 5% confidence level, but not at the 1% confidence level. Note that getting 3 in the smallest subgroup suggests a small sample size. All subgroups would ideally have 5 or more.
Thanks. Quite small numbers when only 3 in the low dose active treatment group.
Since the Brexit referendum four years ago, car manufacturers on the island have been warning of a "no deal". But Prime Minister Boris Johnson apparently still believes he can dictate the terms of the EU. This denial of reality takes its toll. According to reports, Nissan is planning to shut down its Sunderland plant. "A decision has been made and it is not favorable for Great Britain," said a Nissan manager familiar with the matter. 7,000 jobs are at stake in Sunderland. It is the largest automobile plant in the kingdom. Europe boss Gianluca de Ficchy wants to make the difficult decision public in a few days. Chief Operating Officer Ashwani Gupta recently said, "If Brexit comes without a viable business model being identified, then it's no longer about Sunderland or not Sunderland. Then our entire business in Great Britain would no longer be sustainable."
Comments
https://twitter.com/TurdHotel
(and it would be Gies a joab anyway ... no elision or apostrophe).
The default hypothesis would be "Those particular people just happened to die in that timeframe; there are many causes of death and, sadly, people die every day in the UK. These just happened to die in that timeframe and either the positive report was inaccurate, or they died 'with covid' rather than 'of covid'."
We can check that to see if it's reasonable or absurd without even needing to look up the ONS average death rates and just using the number on the coronavirus dashboard and knowledge that the UK population is 66.65 million:
14,386 deaths recorded within 4 weeks of a positive test between 1st July and 19th July (so far; we know that will increase as more lagged data comes in).
1,227,339 positive tests in that time.
The UK population is 54.3 times that latter number. If that was a normal rate of death of individuals in a given 4 week period, we would expect 781,224 deaths in the UK every 28 days.
That's a rate of 10.15 million deaths per year. To put it another way, we would expect any randomly chosen individual to have just over a 15% chance of dying in any given year, and for 15% of the population to die each year.
This is obviously an absurd outcome, so we can conclude that the death rate of people given positive results over the following four weeks (since June) is hugely higher than normal.
That is: something or someone is causing a massively elevated death rate in people who happen to have received positive test results for covid compared to the norm. The simplest explanation would be that the overwhelming majority of such deaths have something to do with covid after all.
https://www.axios.com/kevin-cramer-donald-trump-biden-transition-039f7e8c-e526-44cb-9130-65f59462653b.html
There are a lot!
"I could accept the idea of another lockdown if a vaccine was just around the corner," said Prof Heneghan.
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54712917 )
Hopefully he has now been reassured.
There are several others who have said Trump has the right to exhaust his legal options... but who have added the transition process should begin, and that they've seen no evidence themselves produced by the Trump camp that would lead them to doubt the legitimacy of the election (including Cramer, Rubio, Alexander and Ernst - and there may be more). There are still more who haven't said it publicly but have let it be know that is their view.
Sounds convincing to me.
https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/4757
If he wants more time to scrutinise he should be calling on his own side to make concessions. You don't just get to demand the other side do.
j'ab [dʒab]
also job [dʒob]
n. A prick, the act of pricking, a prickle. A sharp blow, a cutting remark (but an adjective not a noun).
v. To prick sharply. To stab, pierce lightly.
jabby, jobby
adj. Prickly.'
https://www.scots-online.org/dictionary/read_dictionary.php?letter=J
The public service broadcaster is screwing up big time.
Indeed very topical in any case: DSL says
JAG, n.1, v.1 I. 2. Add quots.: Sc. 1998 Daily Record 4 Mar 2:
Britain's Gulf forces are to be given anthrax jags. The injections begin today for more than 3500 troops. Sc. 2003 Mirror 9 Apr :
McLeish said: "Barry trained yesterday and today and is fine for the match although he will need a jag. The injection is not so bad for his stomach as the pills are. ..."
I guess I was always more optimistic about vaccines.
Also, whilst it's true that, if you set up two experiments, it could be that one would have stronger results than another, there are in fact statistical tests you can do that tell you the probability that the true efficacy rate significantly differs between the two, and the range of efficacy rates associated with each dosing regime (with a probability level of 99% or whatever the requirement is from the relevant agencies). So in the coin tossing example, yes you may get 48 heads with coin one and 55 with coin two, but you can quite easily statistically test whether or not that's significant and whether one can conclude there is a meaningful difference between the coins (to whatever the degree of probability you need is).
"O Christ, who holds the open gate,
O Christ who drives the furrow straight,
O Christ, the plow, O Christ, the laughter
of holy white birds flying after."
Although "plough" gets the nod on spellchecker. Also the hymn was a dreadful dirge!
Experiment 1: You roll a die 100 times, and take the average.
Experiment 2: You roll a pair of dice 100 times, and take the average of the higher value.
The experiments will yield very different "success" rates, and they should be reported separately. Averaging them probably makes no sense.
This might be horribly misleading, so don't pull me to pieces if I'm dead wrong, but that my current mental model for these studies.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/11/23/national/science-health/japan-coronavirus-clusters/
It will be interesting to see what further measures they think sensible, given the near term availability of vaccines.
I calculate that of the vaccinated people with infections, 27 were in the full/full group and 3 were in the half/full group. I would prefer that the actual numbers are published. These results may show a statistically significant difference between the infection rates in the half/full group compared to the full/full group. Again, I would like to see this analysis published.
If a deal is agreed it will be implemented. Those MEPs claiming they have relevance in this matter and bigging themselves up are engaging in a charade.
That will improve with more data - some of which they'll get over the next few weeks from the existing cohort.
https://twitter.com/CameronMcNeish/status/1330876361955807232?s=20
Edit: still available
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hp3m
https://twitter.com/BadCOVID19Takes/status/1330666281348030467
It's more like surely having a red dice and a blue dice and rolling them and recording the data for each.
https://twitter.com/rtnarch/status/1330879056691204099
To give the UK what the UK seems to want would blow that reputation and value chart out of the water. Not having a deal with the UK won't be pleasant, but is probably preferable to a deal which offers too much access with too few conditions.
One might almost say that no deal is better than a bad deal.
If that isn't the case, where are the politicians, even fringe opposition politicians, giving interviews and publishing articles saying "Stop you fools! We must be more generous to the UK!"
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/11/23/oxford-az-vaccine-efficacy-data
...there’s always the outside nasty chance that the smaller N in the 90% group is giving a number that won’t hold up. I would hope this isn’t the case, but without a better look at the statistics, it’s not possible to rule that out.
Now, I’ve seen people speculating this morning that these numbers may be better than they look, because they believe that these trials monitored patients by PCR tests rather than by symptoms. If that were the case, then yes, that’s a finer net than the Pfizer and Moderna trials used and it would certainly affect the efficacy readouts. But I don’t think it is: looking at the published trial protocol, the cases are defined as “SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive symptomatic illness”, and the patients have to show symptoms of the disease (see Table 13). So I don’t think we can explain the lower efficacy by saying that they were finding asymptomatic people as well: the trial excludes asymptomatic people from its endpoint definition. The rate of asymptomatic cases in the treatments and controls will be determined in these trials (see section 8.5.2.1 of the protocol) but those aren’t the numbers we’re seeing today...
It will be interesting to see the full analysis of the results, which simply isn't yet available.
Hint - it's not the EU who can continue as normal although missing a few UK exports.
The EU has no reason they can't give the UK what the UK wants. It is already prepared to do so with the rest of the world.
As for why EU politicians aren't undermining their negotiators, why should they?
https://blog.oup.com/2008/04/1st_dictionary/
The spelling plough became common in England in the 18th century; earlier (16th–17th centuries) the noun was normally spelled plough, the verb plow...
Honda came to the Brexit committee a while back and tried to explain this. Yes, on paper they could drop just in time and build and stock large warehouses of components. Yes on paper they could manage all of the costs of slower tariffed exports. But why bother when the result would be that Swindon would be the most expensive place in the world to build a Civic?
https://www.wartsila.com/encyclopedia/term/car-carriers
If you were using different dice, you could indeed use statistics to compare the results to see if the dice in experiment 1 are significantly fairer than those in experiment 2 BUT this would NOT be based on assuming the same average from each experiment.
With the two dosing strategies, you don't have an a priori reason to expect a different value from the two experiments, so actually statistically checking whether strategy 2 is significantly better than strategy 1 is more straightforward... although is also possible in the dice case.
https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/1330872919447265280?s=09
You may feel that they're greedy fools for doing this, but that's their decision. Sovereignty and all that.
And as for the second point; in a continent of 500 million people, are you telling me that they're all behind M. Barnier? That nobody significant is prepared to go public and say "this strategy is an obvious mistake and it will all end in tears"? Either that's a degree of unity behind a bad idea that not even President Trump can manage, or maybe they think his continuing approach is right?
Anyway, 90% vs 62% does look very likely to be a genuine difference, and there is a decent hypothesis to explain it, so hopefully the 90% does stand up to further scrutiny.
Even the French were getting embarrassed by publicity about this but they have found a solution. It is now illegal to film the police doing this.
I have to say that these people are going to be a challenge to the next Home Secretary. They all want to come here.
I still use a "Glencoe Mountain Technology" ice axe made by the company set up by his mate Hugh McNicoll (who also died a few years back). It was Hamish that started everyone off using all metal axes, though, after he'd seen the results of the wooden ones snapping. It might be heavier than current designs but it still works...
I hope never to have to use a MacInnes stretcher - but many have and were no doubt grateful for it.
Nissan casts its own Brexit vote
Since the Brexit referendum four years ago, car manufacturers on the island have been warning of a "no deal". But Prime Minister Boris Johnson apparently still believes he can dictate the terms of the EU. This denial of reality takes its toll. According to reports, Nissan is planning to shut down its Sunderland plant. "A decision has been made and it is not favorable for Great Britain," said a Nissan manager familiar with the matter. 7,000 jobs are at stake in Sunderland. It is the largest automobile plant in the kingdom. Europe boss Gianluca de Ficchy wants to make the difficult decision public in a few days. Chief Operating Officer Ashwani Gupta recently said, "If Brexit comes without a viable business model being identified, then it's no longer about Sunderland or not Sunderland. Then our entire business in Great Britain would no longer be sustainable."