The work-from-home phenomenon has triggered a fresh frustration for US corporations: Americans are blowing the whistle on their employers 31% more. The isolation that comes with being separated from a communal workplace has made many employees question how dedicated they are to their employers. What’s more, people feel emboldened to speak out when managers and co-workers aren’t peering over their shoulders.
Month: January 2021
Vastly faster vaccine rollout
Why is New York 50 times slower at delivering covid vaccines in 2021 than it was at delivering smallpox vaccines in 1947?
useless paper pushers kill.
Parler self-own
as always, as we saw in the darknet marketplace days, the most fervent are also the most incompetent. the result is that parler was basically a honeypot for idiots.
Parler lacked the most basic security measures that would have prevented the automated scraping of the site’s data. It even ordered its posts by number in the site’s URLs, so that anyone could have easily, programmatically downloaded the site’s millions of posts. Parler also doesn’t require authentication to view public posts and doesn’t use any sort of “rate limiting” that would cut off anyone accessing too many posts too quickly.
Can open access work?
The biggest problem for an open-access regime is how to ensure good refereeing, which if done correctly raises the quality of academic papers. Under the current system, editors decide which papers get refereed, and they choose the identities of the referees. Those same referees are underpaid and underincentivized, and often do a poor or indifferent job.
Many of the original papers on mRNA vaccines, for example, were rejected numerous times by academic journals, hardly a ringing endorsement of the status quo. More generally, since publication is currently a yes/no decision, the refereeing system creates incentives to avoid criticism and play it safe, rather than to strike out with bold new ideas and risk rejection.
Under my alternative vision, research scientists would be told to publish one-third less and devote the extra time to volunteer refereeing of what they consider to be the most important online postings. That refereeing, which would not be anonymous, would be considered as a significant part of their research contribution for tenure and promotion. Professional associations, foundations and universities could set up prizes for the top referees, who might be able to get tenure just by being great at adding value to other people’s work. If the lack of anonymity bothers you, keep in mind that book reviews are already a key determinant for tenure in many fields, such as the humanities, and they are not typically anonymous.
2020 -98% flu
In 2019, during the third week of December, the CDC reported that 16% of samples were positive for influenza A. During the same week in 2020, the rate was 0.3%.The question, of course, is why SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread like wildfire when so many other viruses have been crushed. Viruses that have circulated for years are endemic. Because many of us have previously been exposed and therefore have developed immunity to them, social distancing can more easily cut the chain of transmission. Social distancing is probably not the only factor suppressing endemic pathogens. Walgreens, for instance, has seen “unprecedented demand” for flu vaccine shots this season
2021-06-03: Flu clade extinction?
With Covid suppression measures like mask wearing, school closures, and travel restrictions driving flu transmission rates to historically low levels around the world, it appears that 1 of the H3N2 clades may have gone extinct. The same phenomenon may also have occurred with 1 of the 2 lineages of influenza B viruses, known as B/Yamagata. “Without doubt this is definitely going to change something in terms of the diversity of flu viruses out there. The extent to which it changes and how long it stays changed are the big question marks. But we have never seen this before. I do think we’re likely to lose a little bit of the H3N2 diversity. That’s a great thing. Currently when we make recommendations for vaccine strains, it’s always the headache virus.”
Towards hybrid events
“It’s hard to imagine to going back to 200 shows a year on the road, which is what I’ve done for my whole adult life” Instead, he pictures a combination of in-person and virtual concerts. While a show at home is obviously different than onstage, “We’re sharing a moment, and that’s at the heart of any live musical performance.”
They are in talks with venues to partner on integrations, which would allow them to put cameras in bars and clubs across the country to stream shows even when touring resumes — along with clear restrictions, such as not offering a streaming option until the in-person show sells out.
many events in the future will be hybrid, and the more seamless the interfaces are, the more impactful.
Insurrection
But they did get inside. The cops seemed to divide into segments that were genuinely overwhelmed and unable to hold the line, and segments that just let the invaders in—either because they were fellow-travelers, or because they were more like Mall Cops unused to mass action literally at the doors of the building, and who just couldn’t quite believe what was happening. (In the footage these ones often look genuinely confused.) While it matters a great deal for their culpability in the long run, in terms of immediate events their motives are irrelevant. Once the doors were opened to the insurrectionists, things moved quickly. One group of goobers found themselves wandering in to the atrium and, much like the cops, seemed almost unable to believe they were inside. Initially they even stayed in between the velvet guide-ropes. Another group, or category, of entrants—like the Shaman guy and his ilk—were off and streaming and lulzing as fast as they could. And a third group—like the Ziptie guys and the woman who was eventually shot—were really and truly prepped and making a beeline for where they thought people they wanted to capture and harm would be. The violence that happened seems to have been mixed between this third group and the goobers. The latter ended up in a sort of Forward Panic, barreling along reactively, chasing anyone who ran away, descending on journalists to harass, and so on.
As the chambers were being evacuated, Trump was on the phone with Tuberville. Most likely, the President wasn’t grasping the enormity of what was actually happening. There seems to have been a period of general confusion and near panic as resistance to activating the National Guard continued. I assume we’ll learn more about that in detail soon, both how those conditions were created and who ended up authorizing their deployment. Again, while extremely important in itself, this is less relevant here. Given that the Senators and Representatives ended up being successfully secured, very quickly there wasn’t really anyone official for the Ziptie contingent to harm. Meanwhile, the regular MAGAs also had little to do. And so they degenerated into small clumps of invaders, wandered about vandalizing stuff, shitting on the floor, and accidentally tasering themselves to death while trying to steal things.
Flu, HIV, Nipah vaccines
Even as we have shown that our mRNA-based vaccine can prevent COVID-19, this has encouraged us to pursue more-ambitious development programs within our prophylactic vaccines modality. Today we are announcing 3 new vaccine programs addressing seasonal flu, HIV and the Nipah virus, some of which have eluded traditional vaccine efforts, and all of which we believe can be addressed with our mRNA technology. Beyond vaccines, we are extending our mRNA development work to a total of 24 programs across 5 therapeutic areas
Fresh machinima
“Lang began as a joke, and in many ways, it still is – at its core, it is a parody of the ‘original series’ we all like to binge on Netflix or HBO. The idea was always that Herman Lang believes he is the star of one of these highbrow TV shows, and acts accordingly. Sadie King, the show’s true protagonist, keeps things grounded. In short, Lang is a comedy series about 2 private investigators, one that’s competent, and one named Lang.”
2021-08-13: The show is getting better every season, check out
Health Trends
For too long, we’ve confused the status quo for stasis in healthcare. We’ve accepted certain things as true, things we believed to be immutable, intractable, or at the very least, extremely hard to change—like that it takes years to develop a vaccine, or that virtual medicine will never scale for doctors or patients, or that the regulatory system can’t adapt to innovation quickly enough to support lasting change. But then came 2020.
- Patient data moves beyond the EHR.
- Health insurance gets unbundled.
- Virtual care becomes a first-class citizen…
- …with its own operating system.
- The home becomes a primary site of care (again).
- Mental health gets engineered.
- Value-based care comes for Rx.
- Illumina for X.
- Infectious diseases attract investment again.
- Clinical trials (finally) go digital
- Personal genomics finally goes clinical.
- Working on rare diseases gets more common.
- Biotech reaches the industrial age.
- Targeted delivery of complex therapies.
- Biotech R&D goes more virtual.
- The bright line between life sciences and care delivery blurs.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 