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Tuesday, February 02, 2021

NYU Professor Creates COVID-19 Dashboard to Compare Country and State Data

 Shocking: 11-Year-Old Boy Learns Hacking Tips From YouTube, Demands Rs 10 Crore Ransom From Father India Today 


NYU Professor Creates COVID-19 Dashboard to Compare Country and State Data

“A new online dashboard, created by NYU Professor Alexej Jerschow, brings together COVID-19 data from U.S. states and countries around the world to compare cases, deaths, vaccines, and testing in a visual, user-friendly format.  The tool also integrates a range of policies governments have implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19—including school closings, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates—in an effort to compare policy responses with COVID-19 outcomes.Jerschow, who is a professor of chemistry and typically works in the field of magnetic resonance imaging and battery research, was looking for a convenient way to compare COVID-19 data from different countries and states. While the data were available from different sources, there was not a single tool that allowed him to easily analyze how different geographic areas were faring and responding to the pandemic—so, he created one…The dashboard combines data from a series of publicly available sources. Country-wide information is downloaded from Our World in Data, which sources its data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering dashboard. U.S. state and territory data are obtained from covidtracking.com. The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT)provides policy data…”


Takedown artist Lauren Oyler is unapologetic: “I’m not afraid of being disliked by people that I already dislike.” How will critics receive her novel?   ... more »



Anti-money laundering laws are hugely expensive and largely ineffective at their stated purpose.

Necessarily applying a broad brush, the current anti-money laundering policy prescription helps authorities intercept about $3 billion of an estimated $3 trillion in criminal funds generated annually (0.1 percent success rate), and costs banks and other businesses more than $300 billion in compliance costs, more than a hundred times the amounts recovered from criminals.

… If authorities recover around $3 billion per annum from criminals, whilst imposing compliance costs of $300 billion and penalizing businesses another $8 billion a year, it is reasonable to ask if the real target of anti-money laundering laws is legitimate enterprises rather than criminal enterprises.

That’s Ronald Pol from a new paper, Anti-money laundering: The world’s least effective policy experiment? Together, we can fix it.

I would add two elements. The anti-money laundering laws are also injurious to innovation in areas like cryptocurrency where privacy is a goal and there is no bank to fine or from which to demand paperwork. These laws are also a injurious to liberty as they essentially require banks to spy on their customers and report to the government and they are inconsistent with constitutional principles. The key AML laws really only date from the 1990s and should be scrapped rather than “fixed “(which I think is Pol being sly as he never suggests any real solutions.)


Lobster shell patterns make concrete stronger: Australian researcher Reuters


US stock rally drives ‘ludicrous index’ towards dotcom era heights FT


Microsoft smashes Wall Street’s expectations with $43bn sales bonanza The Register


Michael Burry Calls GameStop Rally ‘Unnatural, Insane’ Bloomberg. I don’t play the ponies, so all I can say is that this thread seems plausible