*How to Make the World Add Up* By Tim Harford
... the subtitle is Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
This Chinese cockroach farm houses a billion roaches, kept contained by a moat filled with hungry fish
Chinese drones swarming Australian skies raises security concerns
From the beach you can hear the buzz. It’s the middle of summer and a drone is hovering over the water in Byron Bay. There’s a shark in the water being tracked remotely by four blades spinning furiously around a hovering camera.
In Paris, the small unmanned helicopters are monitoring the rebuild of the Notre Dame cathedral. In Melbourne, they are making sure people are staying at home during the coronavirus lockdown, while delivering COVID-19 medical supplies to remote communities in Rwanda.
One company, China’s Da-Jiang Innovations, more commonly known as DJI, controls 70 per cent of the world’s supply of drones. The market worldwide is forecast to expand by 380 per cent over the next four years.
BleepingComputer: “DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. DuckDuckGo saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations, and the company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo could shatter its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues. Even though DuckDuckGo is growing rapidly, it still controls less than 2 percent of all search volume in the United States. However, DuckDuckGo’s growth trend has continued throughout the year, mainly due to Google and other companies’ privacy scandal…”
China urged to flex long-arm jurisdiction to protect its companies from foreign hostilitySouth China Morning Post
China’s ‘hybrid war’: Beijing’s mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal ABC Australia
A Chinese pharmaceutical company has injected hundreds of thousands of people with experimental Covid-19 vaccines, as its Western counterparts warn against administering mass vaccinations before rigorous scientific studies are complete.
China National Biotec Group Co., a subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm, has given two experimental vaccine candidates to hundreds of thousands of people under an emergency-use condition approved by Beijing in July, the company said this week. Separately, Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech Ltd. said it has inoculated around 3,000 of its employees and their family members, including the firm’s chief executive, with its experimental coronavirus vaccine.
The three vaccine candidates are still undergoing Phase 3 clinical trials, which involve testing a vaccine’s safety and effectiveness on thousands of people. Six other leading Covid-19 vaccine candidates are also in this final phase, according to the World Health Organization.
I am agnostic on this! Of course we will see how it goes, and you should note that if the Chinese vaccines turn out to be “good enough,” they will spread to poorer countries rather quickly.
I see so much not so high quality moralizing from public health figures on Twitter, backed only by adjectives or appeals to authority. Until they “show their work” with actual numbers and probabilities, my current view is to think this Chinese policy stands a reasonable (but by no means certain) chance of passing the Benthamite test.
Please note: this does not mean America should do the same! In fact, China rushing may well lower the benefits from an American rush, because the major gains at stake here are the easing of non-Covid deaths and deprivations in South Asia and other poor parts of the world. Maybe the optimal portfolio is indeed a “China + Russia rush,” followed by some good’ ol American patience. (Is that what we do? Who said that!?)
Here is the underlying WSJ piece.
This marine biologist wants to use the world’s toughest corals to save dying reefs CNN
Scientists find world’s oldest sperm in Myanmar amber Channel News Asia
Private equity owners pile on leverage to pay themselves divis FT
Almost 60 percent of business closures are now permanent, new Yelp data shows NBC
Does the WTO Matter Anymore? Bloomberg
Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation. When I see all you “pro-science” types getting mad at the wrongdoers, mostly I get sad and think you are turning your back on your cause
Speculative thread on seroprevalence
What kind of euro-based arbitrage scheme is this!? Sorry W.S. Jevons!
Antibody treatments seem to be working.
I wonder how China thinks they can push my buttons
Ten years later we now need rapid antigen tests but the issue, as Michael Mina points out in an excellent interview with Malcolm Gladwell, is that we have medicalized all tests and readouts. Instead of thinking about the individual as having a right to know about their own body, we treated every test or readout as if the only user were a physician. Thus, instead of thinking about the value of these tests for individuals and for public health, the FDA failed to approve rapid antigen tests because it regarded them as inferior to PCR tests, for a physician diagnosing disease.
Here’s Mina (roughly transcribed and lightly edited)
The only pathway that we have to evaluate tests like this are medical diagnostic pathways, pathways designed specifically to ensure that a physician like a detective is getting all the information they need to diagnose a sick person… We have so devalued and defunded public health…that we don’t have a regulatory pathway to approve a test whose primary objective is stopping an epidemic versus diagnosing a sick person. And that has held everything up. All the companies that could be producing these rapid tests in the millions and millions, they have been sitting on these tests trying to hone them so they can pass FDA standards as a medical diagnostic.
This Chinese cockroach farm houses a billion roaches, kept contained by a moat filled with hungry fish
Chinese drones swarming Australian skies raises security concerns
From the beach you can hear the buzz. It’s the middle of summer and a drone is hovering over the water in Byron Bay. There’s a shark in the water being tracked remotely by four blades spinning furiously around a hovering camera.
In Paris, the small unmanned helicopters are monitoring the rebuild of the Notre Dame cathedral. In Melbourne, they are making sure people are staying at home during the coronavirus lockdown, while delivering COVID-19 medical supplies to remote communities in Rwanda.
One company, China’s Da-Jiang Innovations, more commonly known as DJI, controls 70 per cent of the world’s supply of drones. The market worldwide is forecast to expand by 380 per cent over the next four years.
BleepingComputer: “DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. DuckDuckGo saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations, and the company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo could shatter its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues. Even though DuckDuckGo is growing rapidly, it still controls less than 2 percent of all search volume in the United States. However, DuckDuckGo’s growth trend has continued throughout the year, mainly due to Google and other companies’ privacy scandal…”
China urged to flex long-arm jurisdiction to protect its companies from foreign hostilitySouth China Morning Post
China’s ‘hybrid war’: Beijing’s mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal ABC Australia
This marine biologist wants to use the world’s toughest corals to save dying reefs CNN
Scientists find world’s oldest sperm in Myanmar amber Channel News Asia
Private equity owners pile on leverage to pay themselves divis FT
Almost 60 percent of business closures are now permanent, new Yelp data shows NBC
Does the WTO Matter Anymore? Bloomberg
Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation. When I see all you “pro-science” types getting mad at the wrongdoers, mostly I get sad and think you are turning your back on your cause
Speculative thread on seroprevalence
What kind of euro-based arbitrage scheme is this!? Sorry W.S. Jevons!
Antibody treatments seem to be working.
I wonder how China thinks they can push my buttons
Ten years later we now need rapid antigen tests but the issue, as Michael Mina points out in an excellent interview with Malcolm Gladwell, is that we have medicalized all tests and readouts. Instead of thinking about the individual as having a right to know about their own body, we treated every test or readout as if the only user were a physician. Thus, instead of thinking about the value of these tests for individuals and for public health, the FDA failed to approve rapid antigen tests because it regarded them as inferior to PCR tests, for a physician diagnosing disease.
Here’s Mina (roughly transcribed and lightly edited)
The only pathway that we have to evaluate tests like this are medical diagnostic pathways, pathways designed specifically to ensure that a physician like a detective is getting all the information they need to diagnose a sick person… We have so devalued and defunded public health…that we don’t have a regulatory pathway to approve a test whose primary objective is stopping an epidemic versus diagnosing a sick person. And that has held everything up. All the companies that could be producing these rapid tests in the millions and millions, they have been sitting on these tests trying to hone them so they can pass FDA standards as a medical diagnostic.
This Chinese cockroach farm houses a billion roaches, kept contained by a moat filled with hungry fish
Chinese drones swarming Australian skies raises security concerns
From the beach you can hear the buzz. It’s the middle of summer and a drone is hovering over the water in Byron Bay. There’s a shark in the water being tracked remotely by four blades spinning furiously around a hovering camera.
In Paris, the small unmanned helicopters are monitoring the rebuild of the Notre Dame cathedral. In Melbourne, they are making sure people are staying at home during the coronavirus lockdown, while delivering COVID-19 medical supplies to remote communities in Rwanda.
One company, China’s Da-Jiang Innovations, more commonly known as DJI, controls 70 per cent of the world’s supply of drones. The market worldwide is forecast to expand by 380 per cent over the next four years.
BleepingComputer: “DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. DuckDuckGo saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations, and the company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo could shatter its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues. Even though DuckDuckGo is growing rapidly, it still controls less than 2 percent of all search volume in the United States. However, DuckDuckGo’s growth trend has continued throughout the year, mainly due to Google and other companies’ privacy scandal…”
China urged to flex long-arm jurisdiction to protect its companies from foreign hostilitySouth China Morning Post
China’s ‘hybrid war’: Beijing’s mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal ABC Australia
This marine biologist wants to use the world’s toughest corals to save dying reefs CNN
Scientists find world’s oldest sperm in Myanmar amber Channel News Asia
Private equity owners pile on leverage to pay themselves divis FT
Almost 60 percent of business closures are now permanent, new Yelp data shows NBC
Does the WTO Matter Anymore? Bloomberg
Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation. When I see all you “pro-science” types getting mad at the wrongdoers, mostly I get sad and think you are turning your back on your cause
Speculative thread on seroprevalence
What kind of euro-based arbitrage scheme is this!? Sorry W.S. Jevons!
Antibody treatments seem to be working.
I wonder how China thinks they can push my buttons
Ten years later we now need rapid antigen tests but the issue, as Michael Mina points out in an excellent interview with Malcolm Gladwell, is that we have medicalized all tests and readouts. Instead of thinking about the individual as having a right to know about their own body, we treated every test or readout as if the only user were a physician. Thus, instead of thinking about the value of these tests for individuals and for public health, the FDA failed to approve rapid antigen tests because it regarded them as inferior to PCR tests, for a physician diagnosing disease.
Here’s Mina (roughly transcribed and lightly edited)
The only pathway that we have to evaluate tests like this are medical diagnostic pathways, pathways designed specifically to ensure that a physician like a detective is getting all the information they need to diagnose a sick person… We have so devalued and defunded public health…that we don’t have a regulatory pathway to approve a test whose primary objective is stopping an epidemic versus diagnosing a sick person. And that has held everything up. All the companies that could be producing these rapid tests in the millions and millions, they have been sitting on these tests trying to hone them so they can pass FDA standards as a medical diagnostic.
