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Friday, May 22, 2020

WHEN THE SCIENCE ISN’T SETTLED

“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.”
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks

"The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.” 
– Tony Blair


.@JoshFrydenberg tells @PatsKarvelas “I’m not blaming Treasury and I’m not blaming the ATO”.

ABC Science Online
The number of people on JobKeeper has been revised down by 3 million, with Treasury and the Australian Tax Office (ATO) blaming businesses for making "significant errors" in their application

The Federal Treasury has admitted a "significant error" in the Morrison government's JobKeeper application form has greatly inflated the number of people using the scheme and its total cost.
In a statement released on its website, the department revealed the $130 billion program - the centrepiece of the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic - was likely to cost $70 billion and cover 3.5 million workers, rather than more than 6 million.
For example, over 500 businesses with ‘1’ eligible employee reported a figure of ‘1,500’ (which is the amount of JobKeeper payment they would expect to receive for each fortnight for that employee).



$60bn forecast miss is huge positive, not negative, surprise (for some)...

The AFR reveals today that the Treasury's gargantuan $60bn forecast miss on the JobKeeper wage subsidy was entirely attributable to the government's reliance on the flawed epidemiological projections and medical advice that alleged the economy would need to be shut down for an unprecedented six months. At the time, this motivated the prime minister's repeated messaging that Australian businesses would have to go into a "six month hibernation". 

Put differently, the forecasting failure here was an artefact of the equally immense success Australia has had in containing COVID-19 much more effectively than the epidemiologists (but not all analysts) expected, which in turn means we are not having to shell out as much money as had been originally planned. That's a good, not bad, thing.


Mysterious new coronavirus outbreak hits China – 108 MILLION now back into lockdown



Related: “Around the country, citizens are fighting back against extreme and likely illegal shutdown orders. An inspiring example comes from Minnesota, where today all of the state’s Catholic bishops signed a letter to their congregants saying that they will not obey Governor Walz’s current order. Walz modified his shutdown order again today, but it still prohibits churches from gathering in groups of more than ten. A local newscaster commented: ‘Churches can only have 10 people or less outdoors while bars and restaurants can have up to 50. No, I don’t know why either.'”

These underhanded tricks aren't unique to Doordash though. In recent weeks there has been some great work coming out around a Yelp - Grubhub phone scam. This one is just priceless (seriously, read this Buzzfeed piece). Grubhub for their own sites generates a phone number for each restaurant that goes to a centralized, Grubhub owned call center. If someone calls in and orders via this number, the restaurant gets charged a fee. Apparently, some enterprising BD folks came up with the idea that Yelp could put the Grubhub phone numbers in place of the real restaurant phone number on the Yelp listing. Customers who think they’re “helping” their local restaurants by calling in the order are still creating a fee for Grubhub. Pizza Arbitrage. "If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You'd net a clean $8 profit per pizza."

 Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place by Robert B. Talisse, reviewed by Daniel Sutton at The Oxonian Review
 The growing evidence on vitamin D and Covid | The Spectator

Facebook AI Blog: “…In order for AI to become a more effective tool for detecting hate speech, it must be able to understand content the way people do: holistically. When viewing a meme, for example, we don’t think about the words and photo independently of each other; we understand the combined meaning together. This is extremely challenging for machines, however, because it means they can’t just analyze the text and the image separately. They must combine these different modalities and understand how the meaning changes when they are presented together. To catalyze research in this area, Facebook AI has created a data set to help build systems that better understand multimodal hate speech. Today, we are releasing this Hateful Memes data set to the broader research community and launching an associated competition, hosted by DrivenData with a $100,000 prize pool. The challenges of harmful content affect the entire tech industry and society at large. As with our work on initiatives like the Deepfake Detection Challenge and the Reproducibility Challenge, Facebook AI believes the best solutions will come from open collaboration by experts across the AI community…”
Get the data

Make Use Of: “Which book should you read next? These websites will find the best book for your tastes and recommend titles by experts and famous people.  
No matter how cooped up or bogged down you feel, books can be your escape. You can dive into a world that takes you away from harsh reality. And if fiction isn’t what you seek, you can learn more through engaged reading than any other media. After all, successful and intelligent people don’t talk about the TV series they’re binge-watching, they talk about the books they are reading. These websites take different routes to suggest books to read. Some work like multiple-choice apps, while others take the effort to ask experts what they think you should be reading. But whichever path you take, at the end of it, you’ll have a new book to enjoy…”

 WELL, GOOD: Good News, We Can Activate The Cells That Keep Our Muscles From Wasting Away After 30
What I Want the Woman Behind the Counter to Know NYT. “I hope when we can take off our masks, I get to tell you how much I need you.” Consider doing what you can to improve her material conditions?

 Designer Jim Malloy has reimagined the books of Dr. Seuss for the coronavirus age by altering the titles & cover illustrations and changing the author to “Dr. Fauci”. You can check out the results on Instagram and in this Instagram Story. 

 Donald Trump says that ‘I tested positively toward negative…meaning I tested negative’ for coronavirus after taking hydroxychloroquine despite FDA warning of its dangers Daily Mail

  • Here’s another media squabble: New York Times food columnist Alison Roman is on “temporary leave” after she gave an interview that criticized certain celebrities, including model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen. The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani has more.
  • CNN and MSNBC are teaming up with Fox News in a lawsuit that involves the First Amendment and coronavirus coverage. For more, check out Brian Steinberg’s story in Variety and Ted Johnson’s story on Deadline.
  • On the heels of its highly successful and critically acclaimed 10-part documentary “The Last Dance” about Michael Jordan, ESPN will air tonight a never-before-seen cinematic production of Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals — Jordan’s last game with the Bulls. The two-and-a-half-hour film starts at 9 p.m. Eastern. 



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