public health

In Ontario, where I'm currently staying, a "vaccine passport" program went into effect two days ago. I just ate at a restaurant which didn't check for one but in principle they all have to. In Alberta, which has been much less careful, business can choose whether to check for vaccine passports or operate at a lower capacity. And in the United States, the recent executive order is forcing vaccine hesitant employees to take a rapid test once per week or finally get the vaccine.

Critics of these measures have tried to make them look more extreme by pointing out that there are European countries with no vaccine mandates whatsoever. What they forget to mention is that vaccine passports were only proposed out of necessity. If a country doesn't use them, this is more than likely because citizens welcomed the vaccine with open arms.

I have tried to find fault with vaccine passports many times but I keep coming up short. The billionaires most guilty of hoarding wealth are hoping that the appalling gains they've made off this pandemic will continue afterwards. The e-learning companies, which also saw a boom, are hoping that their newest exploitative practices enjoy a similar longevity. Could it be that discrimination based on immunization status is also part of a creeping erosion of civil liberties? I just can't get there. Every vaccine administered raises a vulnerable person's chances of survival. Letting members of our communities know that we've extended this courtesy is something we should be doing anyway. Overcoming the logistical hurdles in doing so is why we have elected officials.

All this is to say that I support the principle of vaccine mandates. But an implementation which thinks it's a good idea to use barcodes like this one risks doing more harm than good.

Do we know what's going to happen during the 2020 American Election? I can tell you what's going to happen after. If Trump wins, streets with fill up with protesters in close to 100 countries. If Biden wins there will be protests as well, but largely confined to the US. How many other American elections have made this a near certainty? While not always for the right reasons, frequent voters have spent Trump's entire first term being heavily invested in the question of whether or not he will get a second. Here is why I think he won't.

1. Biden is way ahead in the majority of swing states. To be sceptical of these pollsters, you would have to not only dismiss the claims that they improved their methodology in response to 2016 but also believe that they have accumulated several additional errors since then.
2. Biden has displayed an almost Trump-like ability to make all criticism go away simply by saying "come on, man". While Biden's gaffes are very different from Trump's deliberate lies, both have a willingness to go off-script which a certain type of voter finds endearing.
3. Institutional support has turned Trump into a standard-issue Republican devoid of any economically populist streak he may have once had.
4. A sudden improvement in Trump's messaging would not do him much good since the number of people who have already voted is possibly half of what the eventual turnout will be.
5. There's also a little thing called the coronavirus. Voters who have taken it upon themselves to analyse Biden's platform or compare the US to other countries probably don't need much convincing. But for everyone else, there is a stark difference between this politicized pandemic and past war-like crises which have usually served to bring the population together.

I tried to act on these suspicions by signing up for PredictIt but I cannot get them to accept my account. It looks like I will have to forego hopes of monetary gain and be satisfied with the modicum of relief that Biden's election brings.

Plenty of high school discussions are easily forgotten, but I was just reminded of one from 2007. A bunch of us knew we would soon be taking science courses in university, but we were asking whether it was best to stay in the field or move onto something more applied. One thing I said was "I will keep doing research as long as I can put all my articles online for free." A friend of mine who has always been very well informed replied with "don't count on that." At the time, it was not clear whether a scientific career could reasonably follow that philosophy. But now I am thankful to say that it can. The friend I mentioned and I are both contributing papers to Open Access repositories and millions of people have joined this movement in recent years.

Last month, my campus had a symposium on some of the Open Access efforts happening in the surrounding area. I signed up as soon as I saw that it was kicking off with a documentary on Aaron Swartz. When people there heard that I was one of the school's physicists, they applauded us for being early adopters. This is a clear reference to the arXiv — the primary source for everyone in my field, which has turned publication into a pure formality. I cannot really imagine only learning what an author has been up to after peer review has finished. Another physics success story (ranked surprisingly highly for something I only learned about two years ago) is Living Reviews in Relativity.

But of course the talks did more than just suck up to these projects and bash Republicans. They taught me a few things about the journal ecosystem including areas where physics is no longer in the lead.

As those of you who read my third most recent post will know, I recently became excited about methods for predicting the spread of diseases mathematically. When I learned about compartmental models, I began searching for tips on how they could best be applied to real data. I stumbled upon a solution on Abraham Flaxman's blog, Healthy Algorithms.

In Abraham's post, he presents some code that will estimate the parameters in a dynamical system using Bayesian Inference - the most elegant thing to come out of statistics since the Central Limit Theorem. Also present is an exercise challenging the reader to estimate the parameters of a 1967 smallpox outbreak in Nigeria.

If you want to do this exercise without a spoiler then stop! Otherwise, keep reading and I will tell you how I approached the problem while making some random remarks on the strengths and weaknesses of this particular fitting routine.

Two and a half years ago, when I read the research interests of my statistics prof, I noticed that he had become interested in analyzing epidemiological models. Now, I might finally understand what he was talking about.

If we let S be the population of individuals who are susceptible to the disease, I be the population infected with it and R the population that has recovered, it is not too big a stretch to say that this plot appears to follow the progression of a non-lethal disease. Only a small number of people have the disease at the beginning, but this number grows because the disease is contagious. People who have recovered are immune to further infection meaning that the epidemic eventually dies out.