That Russian Report, in full, in brief

We hear no evidence of Russian interference. We discuss no evidence of Russian interference. We see no evidence of Russian interference.

Oops

There I was, thinking I was typing into the void...and it turns out the comment notification had got turned off so I hadn't seen them. As well as lots of unread comments, there were quite a few stuck in moderation (it's off by default, but I think that goes on automatically after a period of time).

I am having a look back but if I've missed anything specific please copy and post again so I notice. For the most part it looks like you've answered each other which is helpful :-)

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings is a stupid person's clever person.

That's it. That's the tweet.

The long version is, he's a stupid person's clever person because he has read some popular science and juvenile edgy libertarian blogs and can regurgitate great soundbites that impress people who have no clue what he is talking about, nor how science or technology works. 

Unfortunately, such people are in positions of power, meaning that they listen to him and think he's really great. Your average senior civil servant is also probably quite clever, but a history or PPE degree doesn't equip them to deal with him. I know he's a history graduate himself, and that makes his interests unusual. But there's no evidence that he understands enough about what he speaks (and blogs, at length) to really make use of it. His wish for more technical ability in government is quite possibly correct, but weirdos and misfits aren't the best choices here. These people would need the ability to interface with politicians and the real world beyond the wild imagination of their (typically wrong or impractical) theories. There are very many talented scientist with great technical skills, creativity, originality of thought and social skills to inform, explain, and persuade. I think that most of them would run a mile from the prospect of working in a policy unit in Whitehall. Though there are of course channels for scientific advice to inform on policy.

Actually, I really can't be bothered writing any more about this. Tedious, tedious, tedious. But I wanted to get it out there. If Cummings is the answer, then someone asked the wrong question.

I know I haven't backed up any of this with references. So sue me.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Coronavirus

This is mostly an excuse to publish a blogpost using Rmarkdown. This is a system for combining R code in a "markdown" text document which can be readily compiled into html or pdf etc and also automatically published on WordPress which hosts the Blueskiesresearch blog. One slight problem I've not been able to solve is how to handle graphs: while I can automatically generate them as separate files (eg png format) I can't automatically upload them to WordPress and so have to manually edit the post and fix the figures after compiling and uploading the post. If any readers know how to automate this, I'd like to hear about it. Anyway, on with the show.

Before I start I should point out that I have no particular authority to speak on this topic. I'm writing about coronavirus COVID-19 from a position of no more knowledge than anyone else who has followed the media. I hope I'm being pessimistic but I do think it's likely to be a major problem. The 1%(ish) mortality rate is not the reason. A bit more than 1% of the population dies in any given year and if a substantial additional chunk of people, the vast majority of who are already suffering from health challenges, were to die a little quicker than expected then it would be sad for them and their families but the broader impact would be modest.

The real problem appears to me to be the combination of (a) roughly 10-20% needing hospital treatment ranging up to the level of intensive care and (b) the rapidity of the spread of the virus when unchecked by social distancing. To put it simply, if we all get ill at the same time there is not the capacity to treat a significant population in hospital. England has enough hospital beds for 0.04% of the population — the lowest in the developed world, for which we can all thank the Tories, but there's no point banging on about that as it's not going to change in the next 3 months. Less than a tenth of these are intensive care beds – enough for about 0.0035% of the population at any one time. Say 2000 beds. If people (optimistically) need only 5 days in hospital then we can treat 400 new people each day, meaning 4000 cases per day (at a 10% hospitalisation rate) is the limit of our capacity. More than that, and people with serious breathing difficulties simply won't be treated. Which will put the death rate up, perhaps substantially.

I've seen graphics representing the impact of social distancing and other ways of slowing the spread, but they seem mostly rather schematic. I thought it would be nice to have some actual calculations. So here are a few simple logistic simulations based on different doubling times and total penetration of the epidemic. All of them start out with a total of 300 cases on the 9th March. Recent data in the UK and also Italy, Germany has suggested a rather rapid doubling time of around 3 days but I am hoping that's a bit of a blip due to catching up on cases and/or that it could be easily stretched out a bit by people behaving a bit more cautiously. Taking a look at Japan, they are taking significant but not draconian action and their doubling time is more like a week. As well as different doubling times, the red, blue and orange curves also have a different total penetration of 80%, 60% and 40% respectively of the UK population. These are largely guesses on my part but slower spread does also generally mean more people manage to avoid it. There is also the effect of summer with warmer/drier weather, which we may hope to help reduce spread. I haven't explicitly accounted for this.
”
The green line is the most fictional of the lot, it is my presentation of what capacity we might currently have and what the effect could be of ramping this up. As described above, I've assumed as a starting point that we can currently cope with 4000 new cases per day — probably optimistic in itself, but hopelessly inadequate in the face of an uncontrolled epidemic. The area that lies under each epidemic curve but above the green line represents the number of cases that will exceed the capacity to treat them (well actually it's 10 times that number, under my assumption of a 10% hospitalisation rate). My additional assumption is that we can ramp this up with a doubling time of 14 days. I should emphasise this is just make-believe for the sake of plotting pretty graphs and is in no way an informed estimate. Ramping up capacity has almost no effect for the red curve, but it would mean a far higher proportion of cases being properly treated for the blue curve and would keep us ahead of the orange curve — even though the epidemic growth rate in that case is initially more rapid than the capacity growth rate. If capacity is not increased, however, even the orange case would be very challenging for our health care system. While I don't want these simple calculations to be taken too seriously, they do suggest that working out how to treat people adequately and efficiently with limited resources might be an important part of the solution. But we certainly have to do what we can to stretch out the doubling time beyond a week at least.

Let's hope I'm wrong and that these graphs are shown to be hopelessly pessimistic. Here are a few ways that things could turn out better:
* There may be a much higher proportion of mild cases (often undetected and non-infectious) meaning less hospital treatment required as a proportion of total cases.
* Warming weather may slow the spread substantially from May onwards.
* We may actually be able to slow the doubling time down substantially with a bit more attention to hygiene and social distancing without completely killing the economy.

For some perspective, the "Spanish" flu pandemic of 1918 infected about 1/3rd of the global population and killed 2–3% of these (Wikipedia numbers). The numbers I've presented are worse in some ways but not wholly incomparable. We do have much stronger connectivity these days and COVID-19 seems to be quite challenging in various ways.

If people have ideas for more credible calculations I can easily test them out. But I don't want anyone to suffer under the misapprehension that this is in any way authoritative or believable. It's just lines on a screen.

Predictions

Tim Harford says that the act of making predictions makes for better people (based on this paper). I've always enjoyed making predictions so I suppose I should be pretty wonderful by now. Hmmm...well in fairness he was only suggesting an association not a guarantee. In the hope of improving myself a little further, I offer the following:

1. Brexit won't happen (p=0.95).
2. I will run a time (just!) under 2:45 at Manchester marathon (p=0.6).
3. Jules and I will finish off the rather delayed work with Thorsten and Bjorn (p=0.95).
4. We will also submit a highly impactful paper in collaboration with many others (p=0.85).
5. 2019 will be warmer than most years this century so far (p=0.75 - not the result of any real analysis).
6. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase (p=0.999).

Social Nonscience again

So, prompted by Doug McNeall's tweet, I went and read that much tweeted (and praised) paper by Iyengar and Massey: "Scientific communication in a post-truth society". My expectations weren't high and it was just as bad as I'd feared.

It starts off with a encouraging abstract:

"Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. [...] We suggest that, in addition to attending to the clarity of their communications, scientists must also develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that will inevitably follow the release of findings threatening to partisans on either end of the political spectrum."

Great. They realise that the problem is not because scientists communicate badly. It's long been obvious to many of us that there are lots of excellent public communicators in science, certainly within climate change. Some are excellent at both research and communication, some make more of a career out of the communication than the science, and that's fine too. Blaming scientists has long been a lazy excuse by those who should know better.

And even better, these social scientists have a recommendation! They actually have a proposal for how to break the policy logjam. Us scientists should "develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation". Yes! Let's do that! Though my spidey senses are tingling a bit, is this really the scientists' job? We do research and communicate it, I'm not really sure our expertise is in developing communication strategies in an adversarial environment. Sounds to me like that might be a whole new area of research in itself. Well never mind, let's see what they are actually recommending.

[...reads on through several pages of history and analysis relating to scientific communication in a post-truth society, which is interesting but hardly news...]

On to the section entitled "Communicating Science Today". At last, they are going to explain and expand on their recommendation. Aren't they?

Here is the last paragraph in full

"At this point, probably the best that can be done is for scientists and their scientific associations to anticipate campaigns of misinformation and disinformation and to proactively develop online strategies and internet platforms to counteract them when they occur. For example, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine could form a consortium of professional scientific organizations to fund the creation of a media and internet operation that monitors networks, channels, and web platforms known to spread false and misleading scientific information so as to be able to respond quickly with a countervailing campaign of rebuttal based on accurate information through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media. Of course, this is much easier said than done, and — given what research tells us about how the tribalization of US society has closed American minds — it might not be very effective."

Oh congratulations. The authors have invented groups like Sceptical Science and RealClimate. Sadly, they don't seem to realise that the scientists are more than a decade ahead of them. Granted, they do seem to be talking about something a bit more grandiose than those sites but it would be nice if they'd had some awareness of what was already going on, and perhaps offered some sort of useful critique.  They seem to be moving from a position of blaming scientists for not communicating adequately, to blaming them for not inventing some sort of magical unicorn for which they have no roadmap and which, they admit, probably wouldn't work even if it could be created. This is progress?

To Boulderly Go (and come back again)

As I think was probably guessed, we were in Boulder recently. It was just a holiday this time, we didn't get closer to NCAR than the cafes in the mall at the bottom of the hill. There may be photos to follow.

As well as discovering that a local parkrun had recently been set up literally minutes from our apartment (what are the odds of that, with only a dozen events across the entire USA?) our trip coincided with the Bolder Boulder 10k race again. I have by now improved to the extent of qualifying for the first “A” wave for runners with a sub-38 min time (and also for sub-2:55 marathoners, which for me was rather easier to achieve). Though these results were not achieved on an uphill course at altitude so I didn't expect to go that fast in the BB!

I had vague ambitions to break 40 mins but without much proper training and on such a difficult course that was always going to be a tough challenge for me. I was just about in touch with that pace most of the way round but there's a bit of a climb to the finish which killed any plans for a fast finish so I didn't quite manage it. Just past the finish line there were people handing out vouchers for t-shirts for anyone who broke the 40 min threshold. If I'd known about them I might have tried a bit harder! On looking up last time I see they were advertising the sub-40 t-shirts back then too so I think they are probably a regular feature. Still, a 3 min PB is not to be sniffed at I suppose. Jules also took about 3 mins off her previous result.

A nice solid heel strike there...I must have been going downhill :-)

Maybe next time I'll manage to whittle off another 30 secs for the t-shirt. If there is another time. The whole trip was lots of fun so I'm sure we'll be back.

After the race (and a short breather) we cycled up into the mountains for lunch with our friends Rob and Elizabeth. They had thoughtfully moved a bit closer to town so it was only an hour up hill. And rather less back home.

No Comment

"On Saturday 8th October Cartmel Quakers held a silent prayer vigil in Grange-over-Sands as part of the national Climate Coalition ‘Speak Up’ Week of Action"

Where in Google Map?

Think I've done this before a few times. The pic is perhaps a bit less obvious than it might have been, but still there are no prizes for guessing where we are (again), preparing to do a bit of Blue Skies Research:

The more important question, for which a prize is definitely appropriate is...where is our luggage? At Leeds Airport the sheep powering the treadmill had gone on strike so all computers were down and our baggage tags were written down by hand. That added to the delay on the flight down to Heathrow topped off with terminal change there left us not too surprised when nothing came off the carousel at Denver. Of course this had to be the one trip where we didn't get round to putting a bit of emergency clothing in our carry-on bags...but luckily our friend Rob managed to score some free Googlewear for us. One bag containing most of a bicycle has appeared so far (via a disgruntled courier hammering on our door at 4:30 am) but no signs of the other two bags with another bicycle and all our clothes...

Location location location

Barely two week after we put a sign on the gate, we have sold Sea Neuk. At least, the sale is agreed in principle and it's in the hands of the lawyers. The Scottish system (which I've never been involved in before) doesn't seem quite as different from the English one as it is sometimes said, and there is no legally binding contract at this point so I'm not going to say too much about it in case it falls though. But at the time of writing both sides seem very keen to see things through to completion fairly speedily. Having the survey and valuation done in advance does mean there is less to go wrong at this point.

It turned out to be remarkably easy at least in some respects: all we really had to do was to hang a sign on the gate and wait for the crowds to flood in. We also had a short list of people who had said over the years "if you are ever thinking of selling..." and several of them were still seriously interested. We originally set out intending to use an agent, but that didn't work out for various reasons. Of course it was hard work doing the viewings (my sister did the bulk of this), but the whole process only took 2 weeks from start to finish. A standard way of arranging a sale in Scotland is to ask for sealed bids by a specific closing date, but since we were there and able to talk to the hopeful buyers directly we ended up just accepting a verbal (actually emailed) offer which was then repeated formally through the solicitors. I wouldn't necessarily recommend our course of action to everyone trying to sell a house, but it seems to have worked out reasonably well given the circumstances.

Still got the house clearance to think about, but perhaps life will return to normal soon after that...

Boing

Just in case you needed another reason for buying Sea Neuk, it comes with a limitless supply of tasty wild rabbit, like this one which has just had a few hours in the slow cooker with some red wine and a large bunch of rosemary.

My bloodthirsty hungry sister tells me that she's bagged one since I was last there. Actually, before I get savaged by the bunny-huggers, I should let on that I didn't shoot this one either.

One for the penguin lovers

I'm not sure if either of my readers is interested in spending a(nother!) season in a primitive hut with only penguins for company (slight exaggeration, reports indicate it's more Shinjuku station than Scott of the Antarctic), but if not you can always play “guess the relative” with the photos in the job advert instead :-)

Elitism

As possibly the worst member of the most heavily-beaten Isis (reserve) crew a couple of decades ago, I feel strangely motivated to comment on recent events, though obviously all the good jokes have already been taken - perhaps the best being Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 invoking the ghost of the Mumbai attacks in a desperate attempt to talk up the significance of the occasion. It must surely be the first time that one of the crews has proved themselves to be fastest on the day not just once, but twice, and still lost. However, the fault for that must be placed squarely at the hands of the cox who seemed to take the concept of rowing through the opposition a little too literally. Breaking a blade was bad luck of course - I was once in a boat that managed to achieve this, but it took a head-on collision at full speed, so I'm not really sure how it could have happened with a simple clash.

As for that middle-aged colonial with a degree in "contemporary urbanism" and dodgy taste in facial hair, it seems like he already has most of the attributes that are required for a place in one of the boats. Apart from the ability, intelligence, and determination, that is.

The Oxbridge Myth

Methinks the lady doth protest a little too much...

In our collective cultural imagination, however, Oxbridge means the dreaming spires - a kind of massive Bullingdon Club where rich undergraduates still flaunt their boaters and blazers, and dotty dons get sozzled every night on the college port (while hoping to avoid the Inspector Morse-style murders in the quad). Of course, for most of us, this isn't remotely how it is (I've not tasted port for 30 years...

Not tasted port for 30 years? Well, it can only be because she doesn't actually like the stuff, there is hardly a shortage last time we checked.

As for the tradition of allowing despots to buy places for their offspring, I'm pleased to see that this is still going strong.

New leak?

Some people might be surprised to hear me say it, but I think this new leak provides damning evidence of shoddy behaviour. There is clearly inept leadership at the heart of the organisation, plenty of back-biting, and the way in which junior and more conscientious colleagues who refused to toe the party line were bullied and ridiculed is shameful. Many of these people who I had trusted to do their honest best are clearly motivated far more by money than the desire to do their jobs properly. There certainly isn't much evidence of the sort of ethos that we are entitled to expect from people in their position.

I find the whole thing truly shameful, and call upon all those involved to resign. It's time for a new broom.

More details can be found here.

Parmesan cheese

There's a lovely fusion of mad scientists and bonkers bureaucrats in the Torygraph today:

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration: A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.

I wonder if it's actually true?

You only lose once

Prompted by RC's post on some oil development thingy...

I'm sure it's been said before, but it seems to me that there is an obvious inevitability about these things, which is basically structural and independent of the specific details at hand. The development will happen, the oil will get burnt, and the details of the local, national and even international politics don't matter much overall. The underlying reason for this is that in order to prevent development, the opponents have to keep on winning, for as long as anyone tries to develop the area. In contrast, the developers only have to win once, and then it is (as RC puts it) "game over".

The same dynamic plays out all over the place, for example when Tesco wants to build a new supermarket (or expand an existing one). They can keep trying for as long as it takes, and they only have to win once. This happened in our home town, where strong local opposition to an edge-of-town development was worn down, and the new supermarket was soon one of the most profitable in the country. Last I heard, they were hoping to expand it into an adjoining greenfield site, against more local opposition...in fact I'd be surprised if they haven't by now (there you go).

IMO the only way the Athabascan oil development won't happen is if it becomes uneconomic for some reason, and the most plausible reason for this would be the development of some alternative energy sources (of any type). So delay may be worth pushing for, to allow time for this to happen. But other than that, it's simply a case of when, not if.

Optimists may point to a few reserves such as Yellowstone, where development really has been (almost) prevented. But although it's very beautiful and interesting, it is also desolate and economically low-value land in a region that has an abundance of space. If someone found a Saudi-sized oil field under it, they'd be in with the drills before you could say "it's not a buffalo, it's a bison".

Sourdough revisited

(This post more for my benefit than yours, really, to save my recipe.)

I'm back on the sourdough habit again. After a bit of a break, I tried to start it up over the summer, but it kept on falling over after a few days. This pineapple juice recipe seems reliable for kicking things off, but when I tried weaning onto water, it went flat and then mouldy shortly thereafter. Summer temps are pushing 30C in our house (though surely a bit lower downstairs), which may be a bit high.

After our typhoon trip, things had cooled down so I had another go and it worked much better:




My sourdough banana bread (above left) is probably closest to this recipe, in that I used oil rather than butter, and not too many fancy ingredients. I chose to make it on the plain and bready side, as it is intended for a trip to the mountains where I want a solid mouthful and nothing too friable or sickly-sweet. This is actually the second attempt, the first (made on Friday night) didn't make it through the weekend which must be a good sign. Since the interweb is full of ridiculous American-style instructions (who seriously measures things in cups?) I will note down what I did:

2 bananas, well mashed
1 egg, lightly beaten
about 1/2 cup sourdough starter (that's ok since it lives in a cup, but you could also use 4floz)
2floz oil
several drops vanilla essence
16floz flour (yes I know, but it's easy to roughly measure in a jug).
2-3floz sugar
1tsp baking powder

Mix dry and wet ingredients separately, then fold together and pour into greased loaf tin. Cook for 1h at 180C.

The bread (right) is following the no-knead recipe presented here. I haven't got this quite sorted yet, I think I made the dough too wet and it is rather damp and heavy. This one also sat in the fridge for 12h (out of a 30h first rise) because we were out all day, which might not have helped...

Research linking autism to Susan Greenfield is criticised

Controversy has erupted over comments made by the leading nonentity James Annan suggesting links between the increase in Susan Greenfield's public prominence and the rise in autism.

"I'm just sitting here staring out of my window and making something up to talk about," he said.

"It could be the case that this different environment is changing the brain in an unprecedented way. It's such an important issue and I'm just putting it before people to discuss."

"I point to the increase in autism and I point to Susan Greenfield. That's all. Establishing a causal relationship is very hard but there are trends out there that we must think about. I have not said that Susan Greenfield use causes autism and I would apologise to any family who is upset by anything I have said."

He added:

"I have never, ever said that Susan Greenfield is bad for the brain. But if the environment is changing, then the brain will change to adapt. All I have ever said is, let's talk about this. Susan Greenfield has become the central iconic feature of young people's lives and to say our brains will not be affected by that is to deny our evolutionary heritage."

[That's quite enough of that - ed]

To Bo(u)ld(er)ly go...

I don't really like running much - I tolerate 20-minute jogs as a way of staying active when unable to do anything more interesting, like cycling (or in a previous era, rowing) but that's about as enthusiastic as I can get about it. Jules and I tend to take our running shoes with us when we go to conferences, but the reality doesn't often live up to the good intentions. One problem is that running only very infrequently has the inevitable result of making our legs incredibly stiff and sore, so in an attempt to prevent this, recently we started running in the hills behind our house about once every week or two. This seemed to have paid off on the recent EGU trip to Vienna when we managed several early morning jogs along the canal without crippling ourselves.

Anyway, we found ourselves in Boulder over the recent Memorial Day weekend, and on Monday there was nothing much to do...except the Bolder Boulder 10k road race. This is a huge event with over 50,000 people (many more than the London marathon) starting in waves of a few hundred at a time every minute or so for a couple of hours, followed by a professional race over the same course. And somehow we found ourselves signing up for it.

Our goals were basically limited to hoping that we would make it round without too much pain, and with no previous experience over this distance or much idea how fast we could run, we entered in the middle of the joggers category. I was lucky to soon find someone heading off at what seemed like a nice pace, so I followed her all the way round the course:

and was dragged to a time of something under 51 minutes, which was quite a surprise. I hope she wasn't too annoyed off by my wheezing along behind her. Jules went at a more leisurely pace, as per our original plan, and took a few pictures on the way round. Despite this she was only just outside an hour herself.

Not sure if I'll be giving old Stoaty much of a run for his money any time soon. And I certainly don't plan on any marathons! But it was surprisingly fun to take part in a big event with huge crowds cheering all the way round.