All about risk
Graphic:
Methodology: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/13/how-we-estimated-the-true-death-toll-of-the-pandemic
Publication Date: 15 May 2021
Publication Site: The Economist
Graphic:
Excerpt:
Births in China plunged 18% in 2020, though Covid-19 may have played a part, and, if so, fewer newborns might arrive in 2021 as well.
China will remain enormous, but the figures signal a waning of the demographic trends that came to define its modern era, with its huge working-age population spurring 40-plus straight years of economic expansion. A drop in household size, for example, to 2.6 last year from 3.1 a decade earlier, highlights the effects of the birth restrictions since about 1980.
The challenge for China now is its shrinking working-age population versus its growing elderly one, represented by only 12 million annual births, a fractional number for such a populous country.
In the latest census, 63% of Chinese were ages 15 to 59, compared with 70% in 2010, while nearly 19% in 2020 were 60 years old or above, versus 13% a decade earlier.
Author(s): James T. Areddy, Liyan Qi
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: Wall Street Journal
Excerpt:
It’s a stunning real-world example of how many types of infrastructure remain vulnerable to hackers.
The Atlantic Council’s Cynthia Quarterman, a top Transportation Department official in the Obama era, said it “exposes the soft underbelly of the nation’s critical energy infrastructure.”
Quarterman, in comments on the council’s site, notes that if a company like Colonial can be breached, smaller companies are even more vulnerable to attack.
Author(s): Ben Geman
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: Axios
Excerpt:
Colonial has acknowledged that its computer networks were hit by a ransomware attack — in essence, an attack in which a hacker or criminal group breaks in and encrypts the contents of a victim’s computers until a ransom is paid. And while the company has declined to say whether it has offered a ransom, the attack is focusing new attention on a potentially radical proposal to stem the growing threat posed by ransomware: making it illegal for targets to pay their attackers.
….
Callow says a ban is just part of the answer, and in its report, the ransomware task force said governments would need to ease the transition before moving to a world where ransom payments are prohibited. Changes would need to be phased in, it said, and allow time for governments to set up protection and support programs for victims. A bipartisan bill introduced last year in the Senate, for example, called for study into the creation of a federal fund to help support the recovery and response to significant cyber-incidents.
The clock may already be ticking — at least for some. In what is likely a first, the global insurance company Axa announced last week that it would stop offering policies in France that reimburse customers for extortion payments made to cybercriminals.
Author(s): Jason Breslow
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: NPR
Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/13/1024874/ai-ayanna-howard-trust-robots/
Excerpt:
Since that experiment, have you seen this phenomenon replicated in the real world?
Every time I see a Tesla accident. Especially the earlier ones. I was like, “Yep, there it is.” People are trusting these systems too much. And I remember after the very first one, what did they do? They were like, now you’re required to hold the steering wheel for something like five-second increments. If you don’t have your hand on the wheel, the system will deactivate.
But, you know, they never came and talked to me or my group, because that’s not going to work. And why that doesn’t work is because it’s very easy to game the system. If you’re looking at your cell phone and then you hear the beep, you just put your hand up, right? It’s subconscious. You’re still not paying attention. And it’s because you think the system’s okay and that you can still do whatever it was you were doing—reading a book, watching TV, or looking at your phone. So it doesn’t work because they did not increase the level of risk or uncertainty, or disbelief, or mistrust. They didn’t increase that enough for someone to re-engage.
Author(s): Karen Hao
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: MIT Tech Review
Link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
Excerpt:
As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.
Author(s): Jesse D. Bloom, Yujia Alina Chan, Ralph S. Baric, Pamela J. Bjorkman, Sarah Cobey, Benjamin E. Deverman, David N. Fisman, Ravindra Gupta, Akiko Iwasaki, Marc Lipsitch, Ruslan Medzhitov, Richard A. Neher, Rasmus Nielsen, Nick Patterson, Tim Stearns, Erik van Nimwegen, Michael Worobey, David A. Relman
Publication Date: 14 May 2021
Publication Site: Science
Excerpt:
Now, in a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists—including the world’s foremost coronavirus researcher—are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China’s laboratories and agencies to “open their records” to independent analysis.
“We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the scientists write.
The letter, which was organized by the Stanford University microbiologist David Relman and the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, takes aim at a recent joint study of covid origins undertaken by the World Health Organization and China, which concluded that a bat virus likely reached humans via an intermediate animal and that a lab accident was “extremely unlikely.”
Author(s): Rowan Jacobsen
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: MIT Tech Review
Link: https://www.netinterest.co/p/mortgage-mayhem
Excerpt:
Studying successful entrepreneurs is great; I am looking forward to reading Brad Stone’s new book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. But studying unsuccessful ones can be more enlightening. As Charlie Munger says, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” The trouble is that there are few books written about unsuccessful entrepreneurs. The next best thing is a parliamentary hearing. This week, Lex Greensill, founder of Greensill Capital, appeared in front of the UK House of Commons Treasury Committee to help lawmakers understand what went wrong.
The Chair of the Committee cited the piece Steve Clapham and I wrote back in July last year warning of problems at Greensill. Lex Greensill didn’t confirm if he’d read it but replied that he didn’t become concerned about the position of his business until December. His view is that the failure of his firm rests with the insurance company that denied him cover. He even used the opportunity to give the Committee a recommendation: “…one of the real lessons from the failure of my firm… is that a heavy reliance on trade credit insurance is dangerous. I urge you and the Committee to consider the manner in which that is regulated, because it is fundamentally counter cyclical in its behaviour.”
No surprise that he would deflect. The firm failed because it was riddled with conflicts of interest, carried heavy customer concentrations and grew too fast. The problem with unsuccessful entrepreneurs is that they may be less than honest.
Author(s): Marc Rubinstein
Publication Date: 14 May 2021
Publication Site: Net Interest at substack
Link: https://polimath.substack.com/p/never-trust-a-clean-partisan-story
Graphic:
Before [wrong]:
After [correct]:
Excerpt:
The biggest problem with this study is the fact that they made what is an elementary statistics error and it went all the way to publication and no one caught it.
The authors took the per capita COVID case and death numbers among the “red states” and “blue states” and ran an analysis on them. In doing this, they gave North Dakota the same weight as Texas and Hawaii the same weight as New York despite the obvious population differences. Their chart is tiny and unreadable, so I’ve roughly duplicated their work here.
At first glance, this looks like the authors at least have their data correct. It looks like, after the initial wave, states with red governors had consistently higher patterns of cases and deaths from the summer all the way through the winter surge.
However, what we’re seeing here is due to the fact that the authors weighted the death rates for small and rural states with the same weight that they applied to high population states. This is a statistics error that is so common it has its own name: Simpson’s Paradox. It is when you take the average of the averages instead of calculating the overall average based on the properly weighted data.
Author(s): PoliMath
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: Marginally Compelling at substack
Link: https://www.thecentersquare.com/illinois/new-report-has-bleak-economic-outlook-for-illinois/
Excerpt:
A ranking of each state’s competitiveness and economic outlook places Illinois near the bottom.
The American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Rich States, Poor States” report ranked Illinois 47th in the country based on 15 factors, such as income tax rates, property tax burden and debt service as a share of tax revenue.
“Generally speaking, states that spend less, especially on income transfer programs, and states that tax less experience higher growth rates than states that tax and spend more,” according to the report.
Author(s): Kevin Bessler
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: The Center Square
Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-covid-whistleblower-who-wasnt/
Excerpt:
There is an extremely good reason that nobody in the Florida Department of Health has sided with Jones. It’s the same reason that there has been no devastating New York Times exposé about Florida’s “real” numbers. That reason? There is simply no story here. By all accounts, Rebekah Jones is a talented developer of GIS dashboards. But that’s all she is. She’s not a data scientist. She’s not an epidemiologist. She’s not a doctor. She didn’t “build” the “data system,” as she now claims, nor is she a “data manager.” Her role at the FDOH was to serve as one of the people who export other people’s work—from sets over which she had no control—and to present it nicely on the state’s dashboard. To understand just how far removed Jones really is from the actual data, consider that even now—even as she rakes in cash from the gullible to support her own independent dashboard—she is using precisely the same FDOH data used by everyone else in the world. Yes, you read that right: Jones’s “rebel” dashboard is hooked up directly to the same FDOH that she pretends daily is engaged in a conspiracy. As Jones herself confirmed on Twitter: “I use DOH’s data. If you access the data from both sources, you’ll see that it is identical.” She just displays them differently.
Or, to put it more bluntly, she displays them badly. When you get past all of the nonsense, what Jones is ultimately saying is that the State of Florida—and, by extension, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has not processed its data in the same way that she would if she were in charge. But, frankly, why would it? Again, Jones isn’t an epidemiologist, and her objections, while compelling to the sort of low-information political obsessive she is so good at attracting, betray a considerable ignorance of the material issues. In order to increase the numbers in Florida’s case count, Jones counts positive antibody tests as cases. But that’s unsound, given that (a) those positives include people who have already had COVID-19 or who have had the vaccine, and (b) Jones is unable to avoid double-counting people who have taken both an antibody test and a COVID test that came back positive, because the state correctly refuses to publish the names of the people who have taken those tests. Likewise, Jones claims that Florida is hiding deaths because it does not include nonresidents in its headline numbers. But Florida does report nonresident deaths; it just reports them separately, as every state does, and as the CDC’s guidelines demand. Jones’s most recent claim is that Florida’s “excess death” number is suspicious. But that, too, has been rigorously debunked by pretty much everyone who understands what “excess deaths” means in an epidemiological context—including by the CDC; by Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health; by Lauren Rossen, a statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics; and, most notably, by Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, who, having gone to the trouble of making a video explaining calmly why the talking point was false, was then bullied off Twitter by Jones and her followers.
Author(s): Charles C. W. Cooke
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: National Review
Excerpt:
The New York State Common Retirement Fund (Fund) will restrict investments in oil sands companies that have not demonstrated that they are prepared for the transition to a low-carbon economy, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, trustee of the third largest public pension plan in the country, announced today.
This action is tied to DiNapoli’s comprehensive Climate Action Plan to lower investment risks from climate change and transition the Fund’s investment portfolio to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.
“As nations around the world become increasingly serious about addressing the threat of climate change and as market forces drive a low-carbon economic transition, we need to make sure our investments line up with this reality,” said DiNapoli. “We have carefully reviewed companies in the oil sands industry and are restricting investments in those that do not have viable plans to adapt to the low-carbon future. Companies responsible for large greenhouse gas emissions like those in this industry, pose significant risks for investors.”
Publication Date: 12 April 2021
Publication Site: Office of the NY State Comptroller