“Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.”
Absolutely. Spot. On.
But, why listen to me – please, let’s let Glenn continue.
Tim Knight (Slope of Hope) on sine wave correlations:
“Since cryptos have been on an absolute tear lately, I was curious how Bitcoin correlated with equities. Here, below, is the SPY with its correlation to $BTC beneath. As you can see, right now they’re about as correlated as they can be, with equities and cryptos cheerfully lurching up together. The curious thing is how the correlation is a relatively smooth sine wave, suggestion that these two are going to part ways again and work their way toward being inversely correlated.”
…
“Going up 100% in just six weeks is a bit much to swallow.”
Beginning with AstraZeneca/Oxford Uni’s discussion of vaccine effectiveness earlier this week (70% average/90% effectiveness), his chart of the day outlines a strategy: “Japan and the UK would be first, shortly followed by the US with Australia and the EU lagging a bit but there by around the end of H1.”
Although logistics may slow things down, remember other vaccines could come on stream and accelerate the process.
Reid’s personal view: “we’ll be getting back very close to normal life in Q2 2021.”
Perhaps.
But there are other factors in play here which might actually accelerate the process.
For example, Lipsitch et al, 2020 reports SARS- CoV-2 cross-reactive memory T cells, very largely CD4+ T-cells arising from previous exposure to circulating common cold coronaviruses, are detectable in ~28–50% of individuals not exposed to SARS- CoV-2. The tissue-resident memory T cells (TRM cells) can mount a fast response, with recirculating TCM and TEM T cells taking several days to start fighting an infection. CD4+ T-cells generally limit disease severity, reduce the viral burden and/or limit the duration of the disease rather than preventing an initial infection. Their Figure 1 is reproduced below
Writing in judithcurry.com (https://judithcurry.com/2020/10/14/t-cell-cross-reactivity-and-the-herd-immunity-threshold/#more-26655), Nic Lewis further argues that two Lipsitch scenarios may be more consistent with other evidence, with implications for herd immunity of model scenario 3 (possibly involving also model scenario 2). Taking account of variation in viral dose and innate immune system strength, those implications are very likely not already taken into account in simple epidemiological models based on transmission dynamics data.
Lewis goes on to argue that ” … where the viral dose is sufficiently low, a person with cross reactive CD4+ T cells might either be infected so little that – whether or not a PCR test would be positive, at a sufficiently large cycle threshold (high sensitivity) – they not only remain asymptomatic but also have negligible infectivity. In effect, given a sufficiently low viral dose, Lipsitch et al.’s model scenario 3 might produce rather similar effects to what their model scenario 4 would do for a high viral dose”.
Lipsitch, M., Grad, Y.H., Sette, A. et al. Cross-reactive memory T cells and herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Nat Rev Immunol20, 709–713 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-020-00460-4
“Margin Call” is a 2011 film that follows the key people at an investment bank, over a 24-hour period, during the early stages of the financial crisis.
Written and directed by J.C. Chandor, we learn from the firm’s CEO, “John Tuld” (played by Jeremy Irons) that successfully running a banking business can come down to three principles: “Be first. Be smarter. Or cheat.”
Obviously, being first is preferred.
In Papp and Wattenhofer (2020) (“Sequential Defaulting in Financial Networks”, https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.10485) we quickly learn from default dynamics there exists a system where a bank “A” only obtains its highest possible recovery rate in the final state of the system if bank “A” is the first bank to report a default.
More generally, default strategies matter, for debts or credit default swaps. Stabilization time in a curable model can heavily depend on the ordering of announcements.
Also more generally, the ordering with the smallest (or largest) number of banks ending up in default is an NP-hard problem. Simply put, not easy to demonstrate.
An interesting paper for “Margin Call” fans everywhere.
“With Joe Biden’s ‘irregularity-filled’ election win all but assured (unless the Trump campaign can pull off several upset legal victories), we now turn our attention back to the Biden family’s ties to Russia and China – a narrative which the MSM will attempt to suffocate out of existence – particularly if Republicans (and their investigative committees) lose the Senate after January’s runoff in Georgia.
“In a supplemental release to a late September Senate report into Hunter Biden’s international business dealings, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) outlined additional information regarding troubling connections between Hunter Biden’s business associates and the Russian government, as well as ‘millions of dollars’ transferred from a CCP-linked Chinese entity to a Biden business associate who allegedly leveraged his relationship with the former Vice President’s family, according to the Washington Examiner.”
Frank Bosse is a guy who gets around. Retired Senior Scientist of Molecular Neurobiology at Heinrich-Heine Unversity in Duesseldorf, he’s also a man who knows his statistics.
Now, anybody with a bit of stats background might look at the graph above, note the r-statistic along with the limited data stet and scatter, and have more than a few, uhm, err, ahh, “concerns” regarding conclusions.
Any conclusions beyond saying “seriously?”
Frank took issue with this graph and its related paper in Nature by Li & Chakraborty (L&C 2020, hereinafter). Among other things, L&C 2000 reports a statistically significant increase of the decay time when a North Atlantic hurricane makes a landfall, all due to warmer SST in a warming environment.
Small datasets are bad enough. Data pre-conditioning by L&C is borderline criminal. Or fraudulent. Do you prefer “incompetent?”
Certainly, “fake news,” as they say.
Here is what Frank comes up with when he backs out time series data smoothing.
Which, of course, has a trivial slope with a high error term. And some wild behavior in the tails.
Frank has some great lines regarding the sophomoric (literally) stats analysis:
“The peer review process of “Nature” for L&C 2020 lasted more than 8 months, it makes wonder if there was no reviewer with some fundamental skills in statistics involved.
“However, this must be the case unfortunately: In the ‘methods-statistical significance’ section the authors mention a test for autocorrelation and there is written: ‘(which we test using the Dublin–Watson test)”’ This must be a typo, the name of the test is ‘Durbin– Watson‘.
“One should hope that the peer review process of ‘Nature’ would be improved soon to avoid overconfident, obviously flawed papers like L&C 2020.”
“Last week’s Sunday Night Football Patriots vs. Ravens game – featuring two of the best quarterbacks in the league and arguably the best coach in NFL history – saw its ratings collapse 31% over last year’s Week 10 game.”
Progressive “values” bad for business? Sure seems that way.
In the world of social media, the opinions of “fact checkers” with a bachelors degree in journalism trump those of board-certified medical professionals.
Such is truth and what happens when it is confronted by a raging mob and ruthless authority.
A timeless story.
In the Book of John, we see Pontius Pilate as the state confronted by the crowd claiming Jesus to be a criminal, and demanding his “cancellation”.
Literally.
Chapter 18 records what happens.
Note how Pilate employs the Socratic process questioning “truth” as symbolized by Jesus:
“Pilate answered, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?’
“Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants [would] be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.’
“So Pilate said to him, ‘Then you are a king?’
“Jesus answered, ‘You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
“Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’
“When he had said this, he again went out to the Jews and said to them, ‘I find no guilt in him.’
Well, we know what happens to “truth” when confronted by a raging mob and ruthless authority. We know how this story ends.
That truth parable is some 2000 years old. Yet remains relevant today.
So here is a modern day parable involving truth. A renowned pathologist shares his view of truth in the face of a raging mob and authority?
How fast do you think this one will go down a 1984 “memory hole?”
Econophysics2020 
