Faye Flam:

“The issue with data is one can manipulate it to show anything you want if you have an agenda,” says YouYang Gu, an independent data scientist. Cherry picking is easy — prediction is much harder, and Gu is getting some attention for the fact that models he’s been creating since April actually forecast what’s happened with the spread of the disease in the U.S.

He recently took to Twitter to urge public health officials to apply scientific thinking. He pointed to data on Louisiana, where cases were rising earlier in the summer and seemed to level off after various counties issued mask mandates.

But breaking the data down by county, he says, revealed a different story. Mask mandates varied in their timing, but places that implemented them late saw no more cases or deaths than those that did so early. “I don’t think there’s currently enough evidence to support the fact that recent policy interventions (mask mandates, bar closures) were the main drivers behind the recent decrease in cases,” he wrote.

That’s not to say that individual behavior doesn’t matter a lot — and the cancellation of big gatherings and other potential super-spreading events is more important than ever — but there may be more factors than we know driving the bigger picture.

A few scientists are examining the possibility that previously hard-hit areas are now being affected by a buildup of immunity, even if it flies in the face of the widespread understanding that the disease has to run through at least 60% of the population to achieve so-called herd immunity. (So far, antibody tests show only some 10-20% of the U.S. population has had the disease.)

The term herd immunity is a little vague in this context. It was created to characterize the impact of immunization. It refers to the percentage of the population that must get immunized in order for a pathogen to die out — a quantity that depends on the nature of the virus, the efficacy of the vaccine and the behavior of the hosts. If natural immunity is starting to help in some places, that would suggest herd immunity is a reasonable and worthy goal of an immunization program.

Cliff Maas:

Update2:  There is a major error in the Seattle Times story.  My original blog never criticized the protesters or BLM activists.  My criticisms were limited to VIOLENT individuals who destroy property and hurt people.  Please read my original blog if you want to confirm this.  Some folks are choosing to misinterpret my words.

Update3:  There are two types of mobs.  First, mobs the hurt people and destroy property.  Second, there are social media mobs that attempt to destroy those they disagree with or attack different viewpoints.  We have seen both types of mobs here in Seattle during the past months.  Neither is good.

Take a walk around downtown Seattle.  You will be shocked by a shuttered, dystopian city and made angry by the inaction and ineptness of its political leadership.   It is simply beyond words.

Malcolm Gladwell:

I wanted to know where the Derksens found the strength to say those things. A sexual predator had kidnapped and murdered their daughter, and Cliff Derksen could talk about sharing his love with the killer and Wilma could stand up and say, “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.” Where do two people find the power to forgive in a moment like that?

That seemed like a relevant question to ask in a book called David and Goliath. The moral of the biblical account of the duel between David and Goliath, after all, is that our preconceptions about where power and strength reside are false.

Goliath seemed formidable. But there are all kinds of hints in the biblical text that he was, in fact, not everything he seemed. Why did he need to be escorted to the valley floor by an attendant? Why did it take him so long to clue into the fact that David was clearly not intending to fight him with swords? There is even speculation among medical experts that Goliath had been suffering from a condition called acromegaly – a disease that causes abnormal growth but also often has the side effect of restricted sight.

What if Goliath had to be led to the valley floor and took so long to respond to David because he could only see a few feet in-front of him? What if the very thing that made him appear so large and formidable, in other words, was also the cause of his greatest vulnerability?

For the first year of my research, I collected examples of these kinds of paradoxes – where our intuitions about what an advantage or a disadvantage are turn out to be upside down. Why are so many successful entrepreneurs dyslexic? Why did so many American presidents and British prime ministers lose a parent in childhood? Is it possible that some of the things we hold dear in education – like small classes and prestigious schools wh0 can do as much harm as good? I read studies and talked to social scientists and buried myself in the library and thought I knew the kind of book I wanted to write. Then I met Wilma Derksen.

Weapons of the Spirit

Kathryn Whitenton:

23 years ago, the internet was quite different from the one we use today. Google didn’t exist yet, fewer than 20% of U.S. households had internet access, and those who did were using a dial-up connection.

It’s no wonder that people complained about slow speeds on every website we tested back then, because the internet and the computers used to access it were painfully slow.

What is surprising is that, despite today’s much faster network speeds and computer processors, people using the internet today are still plagued by the exact same frustration: slow websites.

The Internet Is Faster, but Websites Aren’t

You might be wondering whether people simply don’t notice how much faster today’s sites are because their expectations have increased over time. While it’s true that people’s estimates of wait times are sometimes exaggerated, in this case it’s not just a matter of distorted perceptions.

For the past 10 years, Httparchive.org has recorded page load times for 6 million popular websites. (Httparchive.org is a part of the InternetArchive.org, whom you may know as the folks behind the WayBack Machine). The results are not encouraging: for webpages visited from a desktop computer, the median load time hasn’t improved. Today’s websites aren’t that much faster than they were 10 years ago.

Harvey Rosenfield and Laura Antonini:

Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you’ve likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret “surveillance scores” – digital mug shots of millions of Americans – that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy.

People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences.

CoreLogic and TransUnion say that scores they peddle to landlords can predict whether a potential tenant will pay the rent on time, be able to “absorb rent increases,” or break a lease. Large employers use HireVue, a firm that generates an “employability” score about candidates by analyzing “tens of thousands of factors,” including a person’s facial expressions and voice intonations. Other employers use Cornerstone’s score, which considers where a job prospect lives and which web browser they use to judge how successful they will be at a job.

Brand-name retailers purchase “risk scores” from Retail Equation to help make judgments about whether consumers commit fraud when they return goods for refunds. Players in the gig economy use outside firms such as Sift to score consumers’ “overall trustworthiness.” Wireless customers predicted to be less profitable are sometimes forced to endure longer customer service hold times.

Auto insurers raise premiums based on scores calculated using information from smartphone apps that track driving styles. Large analytics firms monitor whether we are likely to take our medication based on our propensity to refill our prescriptions; pharmaceutical companies, health-care providers and insurance companies can use those scores to, among other things, “match the right patient investment level to the right patients.”

Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin

In Google’s early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 “blue links” that led to different websites. “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2004.

Today, Google often considers that “right place” to be Google, an investigation by The Markup has found.

We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.

41%

of the first page of Google search results is taken up by Google products.

Source: The Markup analysis

When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all.

A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

Brett Scott:

After much consideration, I’ve decided to break one of my key rules when talking about money, which is:

‘Never use substance metaphors to talk about money’

I have this rule because, while it may be printed upon physical objects (‘cash’), money is not a substance: it’s not ‘blood flowing through the veins of the economy’, or whatever other substance metaphor you may wish to use.

But, in this instance, I’m going to break the rule and use the metaphor of water to show you that bank deposits are never deposited into banks.

Depositing water deposits

The glass pictured above stores liquids. If I take a jug of water and pour water into this glass, I’m depositing water into it. After I’ve done that, I might say there is a ‘water deposit’ in the glass.

Admittedly we don’t often use that phrase to talk about water, but think for example of a geological metal deposit: in the beginning of the earth asteroids crashed and ‘deposited’ debris all over the planet, while volcanos ‘deposited’ lava, which nowadays leads us to discover ‘cobalt deposits’, ‘gold deposits’ or ‘iron ore deposits’.

Notice that the verb ‘deposit’ creates a noun of the same name: the exploding volcano ‘deposits iron deposits’, or the jug ‘deposits a water deposit’ into the glass.