Researchers at Cardiff University have discovered a new type of killer T-cell

May 20th, 2020

Researchers at Cardiff University have discovered a new type of killer T-cell that offers hope of a “one-size-fits-all” cancer therapy:

T-cell therapies for cancer — where immune cells are removed, modified and returned to the patient’s blood to seek and destroy cancer cells — are the latest paradigm in cancer treatments.

The most widely-used therapy, known as CAR-T, is personalised to each patient but targets only a few types of cancers and has not been successful for solid tumours, which make up the vast majority of cancers.

Cardiff researchers have now discovered T-cells equipped with a new type of T-cell receptor (TCR) which recognises and kills most human cancer types, while ignoring healthy cells.

[...]

Conventional T-cells scan the surface of other cells to find anomalies and eliminate cancerous cells — which express abnormal proteins — but ignore cells that contain only “normal” proteins.

The scanning system recognises small parts of cellular proteins that are bound to cell-surface molecules called human leukocyte antigen (HLA), allowing killer T-cells to see what’s occurring inside cells by scanning their surface.

HLA varies widely between individuals, which has previously prevented scientists from creating a single T-cell-based treatment that targets most cancers in all people.

But the Cardiff study, published today in Nature Immunology, describes a unique TCR that can recognise many types of cancer via a single HLA-like molecule called MR1.

Unlike HLA, MR1 does not vary in the human population — meaning it is a hugely attractive new target for immunotherapies.

T-cells equipped with the new TCR were shown, in the lab, to kill lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells, while ignoring healthy cells.

To test the therapeutic potential of these cells in vivo, the researchers injected T-cells able to recognise MR1 into mice bearing human cancer and with a human immune system.

This showed “encouraging” cancer-clearing results which the researchers said was comparable to the now NHS-approved CAR-T therapy in a similar animal model.

The Cardiff group were further able to show that T-cells of melanoma patients modified to express this new TCR could destroy not only the patient’s own cancer cells, but also other patients’ cancer cells in the laboratory, regardless of the patient’s HLA type.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Some innovation is speeding up, but some is slowing down

May 19th, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic reveals that far from living in an age of incessant technological change, we have been neglecting innovation, Matt Ridley says, in exactly the areas where we most need it:

Faced with a 17th-century plague, we are left to fall back mainly on the 17th-century response of quarantine and closing the theaters.

It is commonplace today to say that innovation is speeding up, but like much conventional wisdom, it is wrong. Some innovation is speeding up, certainly, but some is slowing down. Take speed itself. In my lifetime of more than sixty years, I have seen little or no improvement in the average speed of travel. Congestion on the roads and at airports has in many cases increased the scheduled travel time between two points. A modern airliner, with its high-bypass engines and less-swept wings, is designed to save fuel by going more slowly than a Boeing 707 did in the 1960s. The record for the fastest manned plane, 4,520 miles an hour, was set by the X-15 rocket plane in 1967 and remains unbroken. Boeing 747s are still flying half a century after they were launched. Concorde, the only supersonic passenger plane, is history.

Moreover, recent decades have seen innovation stalled or rejected in a number of technologies. Nuclear power has been unable to roll out plans for new reactor designs. Genetic modification of crops was effectively rejected by Europe. The flow of new pharmaceutical drugs has slowed to a trickle. Ride-sharing apps have been banned in many cities. As the investor Peter Thiel has pointed out, innovation is now largely a digital phenomenon, because bits are lightly regulated and atoms heavily regulated. On all sides we hear arguments that innovation threatens jobs, the environment, privacy and democracy.

Of immediate relevance to the current emergency, the development of vaccines has languished in the 21st century as an orphan technology, insufficiently encouraged by governments and ignored by the private sector. New vaccines are rarely profitable. By the time a company develops one for a new epidemic, the worst may be over. Last year Wayne Koff, president of the Human Vaccines Project, warned that the world was poorly prepared for a pandemic because vaccine development “is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10% rate of success.”

It is not just vaccines. Throughout the economy, with the exception of the digital industry, the West is experiencing an innovation famine. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction” has been replaced by the gentle breezes of rent-seeking. Two recent books argue that big companies in cozy cahoots with big government increasingly shy away from change, sheltered against competition by regulation and intellectual property rights. In “The Captured Economy” (2017), Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles make the case that to the extent that incomes have been stagnating and opportunities for social mobility drying up, the cause is not too much innovation but too little. In “The Innovation Illusion” (2016), Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel argue that Western economies have “developed a near obsession with precautions that simply cannot be married to a culture of experimentation.”

Innovation relies upon freedom to experiment and try new things, which requires sensible regulation that is permissive, encouraging and quick to give decisions. By far the surest way to rediscover rapid economic growth when the pandemic is over will be to study the regulatory delays and hurdles that have now been hastily swept aside to help innovators in medical devices and therapies, and to see whether such reforms could be applied to other parts of the economy too.

[...]

Surprisingly, there is no good evidence that patents are helpful, let alone necessary, in encouraging innovation. A 2002 study by Josh Lerner, an economist at Harvard Business School, looked at 177 cases of strengthened patent policy in 60 countries over more than a century, finding that “these policy changes did not spur innovation.” James Watt, Samuel Morse, Guglielmo Marconi, the Wright brothers and many others wasted the best years of their lives in court defending their intellectual property, when they might have been busy developing new devices.

The expiration of patents often results in a burst of innovation, as with 3-D printing, where the recent lapse of three key patents has resulted in notable improvements in quality and a drop in price. The historian Anton Howes, of the Royal Society of Arts in London, points out that the French government bought out Louis Daguerre’s patent for photography in 1839 and made the technology freely available, unleashing a burst of creative innovation. Dr. Howes argues, “As we look to fight coronavirus and any future pandemics, we should perhaps consider which patents—for antivirals, vaccines, ventilators and other hygienic equipment—might be bought out in order to remove…innovation bottlenecks.”

Execution matters as much as the creative idea:

Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for the physics behind the laser in 1964, was fond of telling the story of a beaver and a rabbit looking up at the Hoover Dam. “No, I didn’t build it myself,” says the beaver. “But it’s based on an idea of mine.”

That’s adapted from Ridley’s new book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. I have some catching up to do on his previous books, but I’ve been a fan since I read The Red Queen.

Posted in Policy, Science, Technology | 22 Comments »

There will be other engagements in other places, sometimes littoral, sometimes not

May 18th, 2020

There is no greater danger in military strategy than shaping a nation’s force structure to respond to one specific set of contingencies, giving an adversary the ability to adjust and adapt beforehand, Jim Webb says:

If authorized, appropriated and put into place, [General Berger's] plan would eliminate many of the Marine Corps’ key capabilities. It could permanently reduce the long-standing mission of global readiness that for more than a century has been the essential reason for its existence as a separate service. Its long-term impact would undo the value of the Marine Corps as the one-stop guarantor of a homogeneous tactical readiness that can “go anywhere, fight anybody, and win.” And after the centuries it took to establish the Marine Corps as a fully separate military service, it could reduce its present role by making it again subordinate to the funding and operational requirements of the Navy.

General Berger bases his proposal on guidance in the 2018 National Defense Strategy which “redirected the Marine Corps’ mission focus from countering violent extremists in the Middle East to great power / peer-level competition with special emphasis on the Indo-Pacific . . . Such a profound shift from inland to littoral . . . will also demand greater integration with the Navy and a reaffirmation of that strategic partnership.” He then concludes that “Our current force design, optimized for large scale amphibious forcible entry and sustained operations ashore . . . are no longer what the nation requires of the Marine Corps.”

In making his conclusions, Berger emphasizes two principles. The first is that the future force should be formulated based on “approved naval concepts.” The second is that its operational practices should heavily emphasize a “hider versus finder competition” that exists in many of the highly structured DOD “war games” that he has experienced, calling the “reconnaissance / counter-reconnaissance mission an imperative for success.”

Based on a 2018 Department of Defense framework that is always subject to change, General Berger has thus decided to dramatically alter the entire force structure of the Marine Corps to a posture whose overriding emphasis would be short-term, high-tech raids against Chinese military outposts on small, fortified islands in the South China Sea. While it is certainly useful to develop contingency plans should Marines be called upon to conduct such limited tactical interventions, building a force around this concept is not a bold leap into the future. Rather, it reflects a misunderstanding of the past, as well as ignoring the unpredictability of war itself. Such scenarios are hardly a full reflection of “what the Nation requires of the Marine Corps.” The General seems to acknowledge that when he states in his proposal, “We need better answers to the question, “what does the Navy need from the Marine Corps?”

[...]

In forwarding his conclusions, the General noted that he had already decided that the Marine Corps should divest (his word) its combat structure by three full infantry battalions, a 14 percent reduction of its most important combat elements, and all of the correlative support units that would be involved. Marine Corps analytical teams were also ordered to “avoid” criteria related to the possibility of “sustained land operations,” thereby removing future considerations of the type of operational challenges the Marine Corps has predominantly faced over the past one hundred years.

[...]

Depending on how limited one views the future responsibilities of the Marine Corps, this plan is erected on a fragile house of cards: that future Marine Corps operational commitments should be shaped by the reduction of front-line infantry battalions, whose casualties in any sustained engagement would quickly require replacements that may not be available if the battlespace expands; by subjecting Marine Corps commitments to the needs of the Navy; and by an unproved reliance on the augmentation of combat units such as aviation assets and tanks from other services that may not be available and who will not have trained with the Marine Corps.

The proposal was based on extensive wargaming, in which the new Commandant has great confidence. But it is axiomatic that experimental war games (like staff studies) can be biased through subtle control of the methodology decided upon by those who design the war game. There is no greater danger in military strategy than shaping a nation’s force structure to respond to one specific set of contingencies, giving an adversary the ability to adjust and adapt beforehand. Nor would it serve the country’s long-term interests for the Marine Corps to careen from two decades of overemphasis in the Middle East to a fixation with narrow naval scenarios in places like the South China Sea.

If history teaches us anything in combat it is that the war you get is rarely the war that you game. As former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson once put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In World War I the Germans were convinced they would defeat France in exactly forty-two days. Prior to World War II the French matched this folly by building a string of fortresses along the Maginot Line, leaving open the thickly forested Ardennes, which their war planners decided was impenetrable by a large-scale German attack. In 1941 the British were convinced that no military assault could overcome its shoreline defenses against an attack on their naval base in Singapore, then known as the unassailable “Gibraltar of Asia.” The Japanese army landed far to the north, then bicycled and marched its way down the Malayan Peninsula, attacking Singapore from behind and quickly smashing the stunned British and Australian defenders. Except for General Tomoyuki Yamashita the Japanese high command was not usually that brilliant. Its pre-war plan of fixed defenses on island redoubts throughout Pacific Asia backfired spectacularly, and their inability to adapt after their unexpectedly quick victories at the beginning of the war allowed American resilience and control over the sea and the air to destroy their gains.

None of these debacles were the result of a failure in new technologies. All were the failure of faulty planning and especially of the miscalculations of those at the highest levels of command.

Our present-day Marine Corps serves as the nation’s pre-eminent expeditionary force, deployable immediately in any scenario short of nuclear war. But before World War I the role of the Marine Corps was narrowly defined to shipboard duties, small “landing party” operations, and the protection of diplomatic legations ashore. Despite its well-earned reputation in those roles, from its founding in 1775 until World War I, total Marine Corps casualties in all of our country’s wars amounted to only 332 Marines killed in action. Marines were truly “soldiers of the sea,” an important but surrogate element of the Navy itself.

World War I changed that. The Marines quickly stood up two hardened and undefeatable regiments. During six months of heavy fighting they endured 2,457 killed in action and 12,379 total casualties, earning the revered title of “Devil Dogs” from their German opponents. Their discipline, unmatchable marksmanship and ability to adapt and innovate on the battlefield also earned them a larger role among America’s combat arms, from which has come a remarkable series of forward-looking contributions to our military and to our national security. But this evolution was not an easy one. The mid-twentieth century was marked with repeated efforts by competing services and politicians to either do away with the Marine Corps or to put it back inside the Navy box.

The Marine Corps first broke out of that box through its development of amphibious warfare doctrine during the 1930s after an intricate study of the ill-fated 1915 British landings and ground campaign at Gallipoli. The leaders of that period tested, trained and wrote the book on large-scale amphibious landings. During the island campaigns of World War II they demonstrated the Corps’ historic combination of leadership, discipline, and command accountability. But although the Marine Corps perfected the techniques of modern-day amphibious warfare, they did not own the concept. In fact, the largest U.S. amphibious operations in history, in Sicily and on D-Day at Normandy, were not conducted by the Marine Corps at all.

The most important evolution of the Marine Corps in our national security posture has been as an immediately deployable, fully capable expeditionary force, with an included mission of amphibious assault. And this has usually required “sustained land operations.”

When North Korea suddenly attacked South Korea in June 25, 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur asked immediately for the Marines, not simply because they had amphibious capabilities but because he knew that whatever it took, they would be ready. By September 15 the Marines had called up thousands of World War II veterans, formed an invasion force, deployed aboard ship, crossed the Pacific and landed at Inchon. The Inchon landing was one of the most technically difficult maneuvers in American history, subject to fluctuating sea tides and well behind enemy lines. Inchon was followed by more than two years of sustained land operations, including the most memorable engagement of the Korean War, the First Marine Division’s breakout from the Chosin Reservoir against vastly superior odds after the Chinese army crossed the Yalu River and surrounded them.

During and after the Korean War, Marine Corps innovation developed and perfected techniques of close air support and helicopter doctrine. During the late 1950s its leadership overcame intense opposition in order to retain fixed-wing aircraft so that the Corps could continue to field a fully capable, homogeneous force that could deploy immediately whenever called upon to do so, with every necessary combat component intact. This effort paid off in Vietnam with the quality of Marine Corps close-air support, a skill perfected only by continuous air-ground training.

In Vietnam the Corps fielded two full divisions and part of a third in sustained land operations, engaging a determined enemy for six years of hard combat that took the lives of fourteen thousand Marines and brought more than one hundred thousand total casualties. In the 1980’s they operated for more than a year in Beirut, Lebanon. They were among the first on the ground during Desert Storm, and again in Afghanistan and then again in Iraq. Such sustained operations as a highly integrated combat force, available to the country’s leadership on demand, has become an inseparable part of the modern Marine Corps tradition.

History tells us that in the future there will be other engagements in other places, sometimes littoral, sometimes not. If so, the Marine Corps that will be called upon to respond will be bringing with them only the weapon systems, logistics, technologies and people that our top leaders are now deciding to fund and to build and to train.

What will such a commitment look like? Where will it be? Will it involve “sustained land operations” rather than a “one and done” smack-down launched and quickly recovered by Navy ships? What kind of notice will our Marines have before being sent into harm’s way? What will be the size of that commitment?—a company, a battalion, a regiment, perhaps a division?—and over what expanse? Will it be urban or rural, or maybe in the mountains? How long will it last? Will there be adequate helicopter and other assets to insert, relocate, provide fire support, resupply and sustain the Marines, weapons systems, and logistical necessities required even to begin such an unanticipated call to duty? With such drastic “divestments” as those now proposed, will there be enough infantry Marines in the pipeline to replace and sustain the casualty flow and weapons replacements from battalions that are committed, not simply on the first day or the first week but over a much longer period, perhaps under conditions where our aviation assets and other mechanical systems are shot down, or crash, or wear out from such environmental erosions as heat, ice, sand, clay dust, monsoon rains, or the simple wear-and-tear of constant operations?

(Hat tip to T. Greer.)

Posted in War | 19 Comments »

Scientists have discovered a microbe that completely protects mosquitoes from being infected with malaria

May 17th, 2020

Scientists have discovered a microbe that completely protects mosquitoes from being infected with malaria:

The malaria-blocking bug, Microsporidia MB, was discovered by studying mosquitoes on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. It lives in the gut and genitals of the insects.

The researchers could not find a single mosquito carrying the Microsporidia that was harbouring the malaria parasite. And lab experiments, published in Nature Communications, confirmed the microbe gave the mosquitoes protection.

Microsporidias are fungi, or at least closely related to them, and most are parasites.

However, this new species may be beneficial to the mosquito and was naturally found in around 5% of the insects studied.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

These book sales are not getting equally distributed

May 16th, 2020

Wired reports that the coronavirus pandemic is changing how people buy books:

When Andy Hunter launched his ecommerce startup Bookshop in January, he hoped it might carve out a small, cheerful corner of a market dominated by Amazon. Hunter’s pitch was appealing. He offered an easy way to buy books online without further enriching Jeff Bezos, after all. But Bookshop’s success was not guaranteed. In fact, it looked unlikely. Hunter was running Bookshop on a shoestring, working with four staffers out of leftist magazine The Baffler’s Manhattan office, hustling to convince publishers to join its affiliate program and independent bookshops to become partners and receive a portion of the proceeds. It was an optimistic operation. Too optimistic, if anything.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Bookshop’s business boomed.

“It has been a wild ride,” Hunter says. Bookshop went from a well-intentioned startup facing an uphill battle to one of the most popular ways to buy books online in a matter of weeks. The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vox, and The New Republic are all affiliate partners now. Its headcount has doubled in size. Hunter expects to hit $6 million in sales by May, eons ahead of its loftiest projections from January. If the company’s performance holds steady, it could do $60 million in sales a year, although Hunter is assuming post-quarantine life will be different. “I’m sure that when things open back up, our sales will drop, maybe even cut in half,” he says. “But even then, we’re still one of the top 10 bookstores in the US.”

It sounds like Bookshop’s major selling point is that it’s not Amazon?

The online retailer is the most dominant force in American bookselling today, accounting for over 90 percent of ebooks and audiobooks, and around 42 to 45 percent of print sales, according to BookStat. Into this fray jumps a new online retailer, Bookshop, which is betting that people will see the value in choosing to buy somewhere else—at a business meant to give independent booksellers a chance to grab back some of the market share. “It’s not really about disrupting an industry,” CEO Andy Hunter says. “It’s about reinforcing an industry. Bookshop is about pulling back from the disruptive influence of Amazon.”

Anti-disrupting (reverse-disrupting?) will prove challenging. For starters, there’s Amazon’s grip on consumer habits. Despite recent movements advocating pushback against Amazon, most people in the United States maintain a favorable view of Jeff Bezos’ “everything store.” Peter Hildick-Smith, president of book audience research firm Codex, says that this includes most people who frequent independent shops; just over three-quarters of that cohort also use Amazon, at an average of five times a month, according to a 2019 survey. Even among bibliophiles, Hildick-Smith says, “It’s not as if everybody’s saying, ‘Gosh, I really don’t like Amazon. I don’t shop there.’” The result? “A very skewed market.”

There’s a bit more to it:

These sellers can also sign up for the company’s affiliate program, which offers a 25 percent commission to stores. If, say, a bookseller doesn’t want to deal with ecommerce, they can sign up for this program and essentially outsource their online sales to Bookshop, which uses the major book wholesaler Ingram to fulfill orders.

The affiliate program is also available to media large and small, from major magazines to micro-famous book bloggers, with a 10 percent commission. When it’s time to publish seasonal roundups, gift guides, reviews, or other books coverage, these media companies will be able to hyperlink to Bookshop and get paid if readers buy something they click on.

Anyway, back to how the coronavirus pandemic is changing how people buy books:

Books about travel, foreign languages, and business are on a downward trend—it’s a terrible time to release a guidebook, for instance. But some speciality publishers have been particularly well-positioned to succeed right now. “Sales are up 15 percent over last year today,” says Margo Baldwin, founder of Vermont-based independent publisher Chelsea Green. “Direct-to-consumer web sales have skyrocketed.” With a focus on nonfiction covering sustainability, increased general interest in gardening and eco-friendly domestic activities has been a boon for the indie. “Our gardening books are doing extremely well, including one that hit a regional best-seller list out West, Gaia’s Garden. That was published over 25 years ago,” she says. “People are really turning towards how to make themselves more self-sufficient.”

The NPD Group highlighted this trend too. “We’re watching a solid increase in the cooking category,” McLean wrote. “It’s clear that everyone really is making bread.”

In addition to homemaking books, children’s educational books are in high demand, as parents have moved en masse to homeschooling. NPD found that “juvenile” book sales have been up 80 percent since the beginning of March. Barnes & Noble has seen this large increase in educational and children’s books. CEO James Daunt says that people are also gravitating toward well-regarded novels, both contemporary favorites and canonical books. “Fat ones are selling more than thin ones,” Daunt says. “Those books that everybody is supposed to have read but perhaps hasn’t.”

“Ebooks are up, audiobooks are up, hardcover was up through the Easter holidays, books for children, books for gifts. The sense is that it might just have been a holiday blip,” Hildrick-Smith says; he says he expects the data for after Easter to become available soon, but until then it’s hard to make a strong assertion about the state of the marketplace.

It’s not all rosy—in fact, it’s a dire time for a large portion of treasured indie shops, as these book sales are not getting equally distributed. While the pandemic caused a spike in interest in Bookshop, buyers have also been flocking to Amazon, which was already the dominant force in bookselling. While Amazon designated books as “non-essential” items, thus elongating shipping times, its vast selection and reputation for consistency have kept its position strong.

“Amazon’s market share by default, we estimate, will grow to at least 70 percent of the market on the basis of the month of April, up from just over 50 percent in the pre-Covid period,” Hildick-Smith says.

Posted in Business | 2 Comments »

There is no reason for concern

May 15th, 2020

Governments aggravated the horrors of the 1918 flu:

For instance, the U.S. military took roughly half of all physicians under 45—and most of the best ones.

What proved even more deadly was the government policy toward the truth. When the United States entered the war, Woodrow Wilson demanded that “the spirit of ruthless brutality…enter into the very fibre of national life.” So he created the Committee on Public Information, which was inspired by an adviser who wrote, “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms….The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.”

At Wilson’s urging, Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it punishable with 20 years in prison to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United State…or to urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things…necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war.” Government posters and advertisements urged people to report to the Justice Department anyone “who spreads pessimistic stories…cries for peace, or belittles our effort to win the war.”

Against this background, while influenza bled into American life, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie.

Early in September, a Navy ship from Boston carried influenza to Philadelphia, where the disease erupted in the Navy Yard. The city’s public health director, Wilmer Krusen, declared that he would “confine this disease to its present limits, and in this we are sure to be successful. No fatalities have been recorded. No concern whatever is felt.”

The next day two sailors died of influenza. Krusen stated they died of “old-fashioned influenza or grip,” not Spanish flu. Another health official declared, “From now on the disease will decrease.”

The next day 14 sailors died—and the first civilian. Each day the disease accelerated. Each day newspapers assured readers that influenza posed no danger. Krusen assured the city he would “nip the epidemic in the bud.”

By September 26, influenza had spread across the country, and so many military training camps were beginning to look like Devens that the Army canceled its nationwide draft call.

Philadelphia had scheduled a big Liberty Loan parade for September 28. Doctors urged Krusen to cancel it, fearful that hundreds of thousands jamming the route, crushing against each other for a better view, would spread disease. They convinced reporters to write stories about the danger. But editors refused to run them, and refused to print letters from doctors. The largest parade in Philadelphia’s history proceeded on schedule.

The incubation period of influenza is two to three days. Two days after the parade, Krusen conceded that the epidemic “now present in the civilian population was…assuming the type found in” Army camps. Still, he cautioned not to be “panic stricken over exaggerated reports.”

He needn’t have worried about exaggeration; the newspapers were on his side. “Scientific Nursing Halting Epidemic,” an Inquirer headline blared. In truth, nurses had no impact because none were available: Out of 3,100 urgent requests for nurses submitted to one dispatcher, only 193 were provided. Krusen finally and belatedly ordered all schools closed and banned all public gatherings—yet a newspaper nonsensically said the order was not “a public health measure” and “there is no cause for panic or alarm.”

There was plenty of cause. At its worst, the epidemic in Philadelphia would kill 759 people…in one day. Priests drove horse-drawn carts down city streets, calling upon residents to bring out their dead; many were buried in mass graves. More than 12,000 Philadelphians died—nearly all of them in six weeks.

Across the country, public officials were lying. U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said, “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.” New York City’s public health director declared “other bronchial diseases and not the so-called Spanish influenza…[caused] the illness of the majority of persons who were reported ill with influenza.” The Los Angeles public health chief said, “If ordinary precautions are observed there is no cause for alarm.”

For an example of the press’s failure, consider Arkansas. Over a four-day period in October, the hospital at Camp Pike admitted 8,000 soldiers. Francis Blake, a member of the Army’s special pneumonia unit, described the scene: “Every corridor and there are miles of them with double rows of cots …with influenza patients…There is only death and destruction.” Yet seven miles away in Little Rock, a headline in the Gazette pretended yawns: “Spanish influenza is plain la grippe—same old fever and chills.”

People knew this was not the same old thing, though. They knew because the numbers were staggering—in San Antonio, 53 percent of the population got sick with influenza. They knew because victims could die within hours of the first symptoms—horrific symptoms, not just aches and cyanosis but also a foamy blood coughed up from the lungs, and bleeding from the nose, ears and even eyes. And people knew because towns and cities ran out of coffins.

People could believe nothing they were being told, so they feared everything, particularly the unknown. How long would it last? How many would it kill? Who would it kill? With the truth buried, morale collapsed. Society itself began to disintegrate.

In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves.

In Philadelphia, the head of Emergency Aid pleaded, “All who are free from the care of the sick at home… report as early as possible…on emergency work.” But volunteers did not come. The Bureau of Child Hygiene begged people to take in—just temporarily—children whose parents were dying or dead; few replied. Emergency Aid again pleaded, “We simply must have more volunteer helpers….These people are almost all at the point of death. Won’t you…come to our help?” Still nothing. Finally, Emergency Aid’s director turned bitter and contemptuous: “Hundreds of women…had delightful dreams of themselves in the roles of angels of mercy…Nothing seems to rouse them now…There are families in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high and they still hold back.”

Philadelphia’s misery was not unique. In Luce County, Michigan, a couple and three children were all sick together, but, a Red Cross worker reported, “Not one of the neighbors would come in and help. I …telephoned the woman’s sister. She came and tapped on the window, but refused to talk to me until she had gotten a safe distance away.” In New Haven, Connecticut, John Delano recalled, “Normally when someone was sick in those days [people] would bring food over to other families but…Nobody was coming in, nobody would bring food in, nobody came to visit.” In Perry County, Kentucky, the Red Cross chapter chairman begged for help, pleaded that there were “hundreds of cases…[of] people starving to death not from lack of food but because the well were panic stricken and would not go near the sick.”

[...]

Prompted by the re-emergence of avian influenza, governments, NGOs and major businesses around the world have poured resources into preparing for a pandemic. Because of my history of the 1918 pandemic, The Great Influenza, I was asked to participate in some of those efforts.

[...]

Then there are the less glamorous measures, known as nonpharmaceutical interventions: hand-washing, telecommuting, covering coughs, staying home when sick instead of going to work and, if the pandemic is severe enough, widespread school closings and possibly more extreme controls. The hope is that “layering” such actions one atop another will reduce the impact of an outbreak on public health and on resources in today’s just-in-time economy. But the effectiveness of such interventions will depend on public compliance, and the public will have to trust what it is being told.

That is why, in my view, the most important lesson from 1918 is to tell the truth. Though that idea is incorporated into every preparedness plan I know of, its actual implementation will depend on the character and leadership of the people in charge when a crisis erupts.

I recall participating in a pandemic “war game” in Los Angeles involving area public health officials. Before the exercise began, I gave a talk about what happened in 1918, how society broke down, and emphasized that to retain the public’s trust, authorities had to be candid. “You don’t manage the truth,” I said. “You tell the truth.” Everyone shook their heads in agreement.

Next, the people running the game revealed the day’s challenge to the participants: A severe pandemic influenza virus was spreading around the world. It had not officially reached California, but a suspected case—the severity of the symptoms made it seem so—had just surfaced in Los Angeles. The news media had learned of it and were demanding a press conference.

The participant with the first move was a top-ranking public health official. What did he do? He declined to hold a press conference, and instead just released a statement: More tests are required. The patient might not have pandemic influenza. There is no reason for concern.

I was stunned. This official had not actually told a lie, but he had deliberately minimized the danger; whether or not this particular patient had the disease, a pandemic was coming. The official’s unwillingness to answer questions from the press or even acknowledge the pandemic’s inevitability meant that citizens would look elsewhere for answers, and probably find a lot of bad ones. Instead of taking the lead in providing credible information he instantly fell behind the pace of events. He would find it almost impossible to get ahead of them again. He had, in short, shirked his duty to the public, risking countless lives.

And that was only a game.

Posted in Policy, Science | 10 Comments »

Similar to the dark months after Pearl Harbor

May 14th, 2020

World War II offers valuable lessons for the current moment, but when many people picture the World War II economy, they’re thinking about how it operated by 1944 and 1945, when early problems had been solved and war production was at its peak:

By then, industries large and small had joined the war effort: Washing machine manufacturers made artillery shells. Vacuum cleaner companies made bomb fuses. Tanks, airplanes, and anti-aircraft guns rolled off assembly lines that had once produced automobiles. American industry produced more than 96,000 planes in 1940 alone — a 26-fold increase over the 3,611 airplanes produced in 1940. An official military history credits American war production in its heyday with “virtually determining the outcome of the war.”

The current state of the coronavirus pandemic, though, is far more similar to the dark months after Pearl Harbor, when US leaders faced the daunting task of transforming the US economy virtually overnight, than it is to those triumphant final years.

Then as now, every day mattered. In the first months of 1942, top US officials feared that due to lack of equipment, America might lose the war before it got a chance to start fighting it. Their primary goal was transforming the economy as fast as possible.

[...]

Their experience still has lessons for policymakers today. Here are five of them.

1) Centralize and coordinate the government’s purchases of medical equipment, including personal protective gear

Without effective coordination, states and the federal government have entered bidding wars for desperately needed medical equipment. Shipments to states have been confiscated, prompting elaborate schemes like Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s efforts to get 1 million N95 masks delivered to Massachusetts. Chaos reigns as hospitals try to sort through the confusion of disrupted supply chains. President Trump insists that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk,” but in fact such coordination is precisely the federal government’s role.

The US faced a similar problem during World War I, when purchasing was decentralized. Different branches of the military, including numerous departments within the Army, competed with each other in bidding for contracts. This led to production delays and increased prices for critical supplies.

In World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the War Production Board. Decisions about what equipment was needed were made by the military, but the board oversaw and coordinated all war production. Its initial role was to get production going in sufficient, previously unthinkable, quantities and to arrange new supply chains to ensure materials ended up in the right hands.

For relatively simple production orders, the board publicized production requirements for the goods it needed and facilitated matching products with interested firms. The more complex and difficult orders were sent to the large, established firms with the greatest expertise in relevant production processes.

But the board’s role did not diminish once production got going. Rather, its focus changed to ensuring that scarce resources were being allocated optimally. Since it takes time for suppliers to expand production to meet demand, ramping up war production so quickly led to short-run scarcity.

The War Production Board was subject to both extensive public scrutiny and congressional oversight from the Truman Committee. Its appeals board heard complaints from business and labor leaders, members of Congress, and state and local politicians. Because requirements were determined by the military, procurement decisions were largely apolitical. Researchers Paul Rhode, James Snyder Jr., and Koleman Strumpf found no evidence that World War II contract placement was systematically biased by political factors.

[...]

2) Repurpose existing institutions and take advantage of existing expertise

After Pearl Harbor, policymakers faced the need to transform the economy at a rapid pace. American policymakers feared the war could be lost before it had fully begun, so speed was paramount. One key element of the transition to a wartime economy was policymakers’ decision to transform existing institutions rather than create entirely new ones.

War Production Board Chair Donald Nelson left purchasing and procurement decisions in the hands of the armed forces, using the board to manage and coordinate. This was one of his most controversial decisions, but it was the right choice — at least for the initial phase of the war — for two reasons.

First, in 1942 as in 2020, every day mattered. Keeping purchasing and procurement in the hands of the agencies that had previously made these decisions saved precious time and allowed production to ramp up faster.

Second, only trained military officers had the expertise needed to evaluate whether specialized products such as airplanes, tanks, and radar met quality standards and fulfilled military needs. Nelson recognized that a civilian agency could not match the military’s expertise in determining such technical details.

Depression-era unemployment offices were also repurposed for the war. As unemployment fell sharply in the early 1940s, the US Employment Service pivoted from coordinating services for the unemployed to matching workers to war production jobs, helping employers find replacements for workers entering the military.

[...]

3) Availability of materials is a key constraint

During World War II, strategic materials, not labor or manufacturing capacity, proved to be the binding constraint on US wartime production.

That is likely to be just as true today. Constraints on manufacturing capacity are orders of magnitude less severe now than in WWII. More than $100 billion of military contracts were placed in the first six months of 1942, compared to $20 billion in defense contracts over all of 1941 and a 1941 GDP of $129 billion. Production capacity initially fell far short of what was needed for the war effort, even with extensive conversion of civilian manufacturing capacity. Today the US needs vast increases in the production of medical equipment, particularly ventilators, personal protective equipment, and test kits, but the total volume of equipment needed is significantly less than a full year’s GDP.

[...]

4) The crisis itself creates strong incentives for manufacturing firms to produce critical equipment

The US did not nationalize major industries to achieve its World War II production miracle. US war production relied primarily on manufacturing by private firms, as the war aligned manufacturing firms’ incentives with those of the nation.

The Defense Production Act is a good mechanism for mobilizing industry — indeed, it was written when the experience of WWII was recent memory — and should be used aggressively as needed.

But with clear and effective federal leadership, its necessary application may be narrow. There are other ways to push industry to produce needed supplies. A government guarantee to buy all medical equipment meeting stated specifications and produced by specified dates at a set price, combined with the incentives provided by the crisis itself, would provide enough incentive for most firms. Voluntary agreements authorized under the DPA would allow firms to cooperate effectively and scale production faster, mimicking the inter-firm cooperation that defined the home front during World War II.

A number of private firms are already converting their production lines to key equipment, from small distilleries making hand sanitizer to Ford Motor Company’s production of ventilators, even in the absence of clear leadership and communication from the federal government.

In WWII, most US firms faced a choice between sitting idle —a home appliance producer cannot produce appliances if it cannot acquire the metal needed to make its products — and participating in war work. The government’s control of raw materials created the incentives for firms to convert voluntarily: Firms that volunteered for war production were able to acquire inputs, while other firms were not.

There was also an overarching incentive for war production: The sooner firms produced the needed materials, the faster the war could be won, and the sooner everyone could get back to real life. That same overarching incentive exists today, and it is powerful.

[...]

5) The evidence supports a strategy of relief now and stimulus after the pandemic

[...]

My research found that the fiscal multiplier in WWII was much smaller than the typical multiplier because the savings rate was so high during the war. Many products, particularly durable goods, were not available for purchase during WWII because they were not produced at all. Consumer spending rebounded strongly after the war ended, particularly on goods, such as cars and appliances, that were not available during the war.

The experience of WWII suggests that when consumption options are significantly restricted, people may spend a smaller share of income than in other times. Specifically, the closest substitute for buying a particular good now is buying that good in the future, when it is available again, rather than buying another good. The extreme uncertainty of the current situation may also depress the multiplier, since people will delay making decisions and larger purchases.

Today, significant sectors of the US economy have ground to a halt, particularly the travel, arts, and restaurant industries. As in WWII, the ordinary lives of millions of Americans have been abruptly transformed. Significant portions of people’s regular consumption baskets are unavailable, even though no formal rationing has been enacted. So, as in WWII, the multiplier on relief spending may be lower than in a “normal” recession.

The evidence from World War II strongly backs up the paradigm that policy should focus on relief now and stimulus later. Targeting relief funds may help increase the multiplier to the extent that most relief funds are used to buy basic necessities. People who lose all or most of their income in this pandemic recession will be more likely to spend on necessities rather than saving, which would increase the fiscal multiplier. However, perfect targeting may be difficult to achieve quickly.

Further evidence from late in the Great Depression suggests that fiscal stimulus may be particularly effective after a long period of downturn, as it can support pent-up demand. This suggests that policymakers should focus on relief for as long as the pandemic continues, including with further rounds of such relief as needed, but then be sure to follow relief with broad-based stimulus to help the economy rebound.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 8 Comments »

We can now estimate the effect of blood doping

May 13th, 2020

Endure by Alex HutchinsonWe can now estimate the effect of blood doping, Alex Hutchinson notes, following the introduction of the Athlete Biological Passport in 2012:

The design of the study was straightforward. Iljukov and his colleagues looked at the top eight times from the Russian National Championships between 2008 and 2017 in the women’s 800, 1,500, 3,000 steeplechase, 5,000, and 10,000-meters. Anti-doping authorities started collecting longitudinal data to assemble biological passports in 2009, and began formally using the technique and applying sanctions sometime around 2011. Figuring that the deterrent effect of the ABP program started after the first bans were handed out, the researchers divided the results into two categories: 2008 to 2012, and 2013 to 2017.

There are a few different ways you can slice and dice the data, and the researchers also looked at other metrics like the number of athletes caught doping in these events and the number of Russian women hitting the Olympic qualifying standard. But the simplest outcome is the average of those top-eight times before and after the ABP. Here’s what that looks like for each of the five events analyzed:

doping-test-blood_h_0

For four of the five events, there’s a significant slowdown, ranging between 1.9 percent in the 800 and 3.4 percent in the 5,000. The only exception is the steeplechase, which was still a relatively new event for women in 2008, when it made its first appearance at the Olympics. The steeplechase also involves hurdling over barriers, which introduces an additional performance variable beyond pure endurance capacity.

One way of interpreting these findings, Iljukov says, is to conclude that for elite athletes, “a significant amount of blood transfusion could improve running times by 1 to 4 percent, depending on the distance, but on average 2 to 3 percent.” The paper compares this estimate with early studies of blood doping in elite athletes, including some old Soviet studies that don’t show up in the usual PubMed searches, which support the idea of a 1 to 4 percent range of improvement from a transfusion of 750 to 1,200 milliliters of blood.

These days, the ABP program makes it difficult to get away with adding that much blood to your system. Instead, would-be cheaters are limited to microdosing with small amounts of blood. Iljukov guesses that this might still give a one-second edge to an elite 800-meter runner—far from fair, but much better than the previous situation. Of course, this deterrent only works if the athletes in question are being regularly tested to generate sufficient data for a biological passport.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

White manual workers once expected that the American Dream would come true for them

May 12th, 2020

In 2015 life expectancy began falling for the first time since the height of the AIDS crisis in 1993:

The causes — mainly suicides, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses — claim roughly 190,000 lives each year.

The casualties are concentrated in the rusted-out factory towns and depressed rural areas left behind by globalization, automation, and downsizing, but as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton demonstrate in their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, they are also rampant in large cities. Those most vulnerable are distinguished not by where they live but by their race and level of education. Virtually the entire increase in mortality has been among white adults without bachelor’s degrees — some 70 percent of all whites. Blacks, Hispanics, college-educated whites, and Europeans also succumb to suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths, but at much lower rates that have risen little, if at all, over time.

The disparity is most stark in middle age. Since the early 1990s, the death rate for forty-five-to-fifty-four-year-old white Americans with a BA has fallen by 40 percent, but has risen by 25 percent for those without a BA. Although middle-aged blacks are still more likely to die than middle-aged whites, their mortality has also fallen by more than 30 percent since the early 1990s. Similar declines occurred among middle-aged French, Swedish, and British people over the same period.

[...]

White manual workers once expected that the American Dream would come true for them. In Kathryn Newman’s remarkably prescient study of downsizing, Falling from Grace (1988), older people recalled that Elizabeth, New Jersey — where 18 percent of residents now live in poverty — was once a “place of grandeur, where ladies and gentlemen in fine dress promenaded down the main avenue on Sunday.” The Singer Sewing Machine company employed over 10,000 workers, roughly a tenth of the city’s population. The company awarded scholarships to children, sponsored baseball games, and hosted dances and bar mitzvahs in its recreation hall. Each sewing machine had a label, and if returned with a defect, the man who’d made it would fix it himself.

The last American Singer plant closed decades ago, along with thousands of other factories. There were 19.5 million decently paying US manufacturing jobs in 1979, compared to around 12 million today, when the population is almost 50 percent larger.

Posted in Economics | 9 Comments »

Serious endurance training makes sitting sort of OK

May 11th, 2020

Endure by Alex HutchinsonThere are a bunch of different theories about what makes prolonged sitting so bad, Alex Hutchinson notes, but one of them relates to the associated reduction in blood flow in your legs:

Your blood vessels sense the frictional drag of blood rushing past the vessel walls, and respond by producing molecules such as nitric oxide that help keep the vessels supple and responsive. If you spend too much time sitting, this signal is reduced, and you end up with blood vessels that are stiffer and less capable of dilating and contracting in response to changes in blood flow. Over time, that leaves you more likely to develop atherosclerosis, a hardening and narrowing of the arteries, and ultimately heart disease.

You can test how responsive your blood vessels are with a technique called flow-mediated dilation. Basically, you temporarily restrict blood flow with an inflatable cuff like the ones doctors use to measure your blood pressure, then release the cuff and see how much the vessels dilate in response. If you take this measurement before and after a three-hour bout of sitting, you find that the amount of dilation is dramatically reduced after sitting—a bad sign for the health of your arteries.

That’s the protocol used in the new study, which compared 10 male cyclists from the university’s racing team with matched controls who didn’t do any regular endurance training. The graph below shows the percentage increase in blood flow through the lower leg’s popliteal artery when the cuff is released. On the left, you can see that even before sitting, the trained cyclists (black) have a somewhat bigger response than the control group (white), which is expected since endurance training enhances baseline levels of nitric oxide. But the starkest difference, on the right, emerges after three hours of sitting.

sitting-arteries-health_h

The bout of sitting almost wipes out the flow-mediated dilation response in the control group, but it barely changes in the cyclists. Hooray! I can leave my desk in the sitting position for another hour!

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Bryan Caplan’s emergency homeschooling how-to guide

May 10th, 2020

Bryan Caplan offers his emergency homeschooling how-to guide:

The foremost question for any homeschooler is: What are you trying to accomplish? My answer is twofold:

1. Teach kids what they need to know to become self-supporting adults, even if it isn’t fun.

2. Give kids a happy childhood.

In pursuit of goal #1, I focus heavily on mathematics. Why? Because most good jobs in the modern world require strong math skills, and very few kids like math enough to learn it on their own. I also mandate reading and writing — but I don’t especially care what they read or what they write about. Indeed, the best route is if they read and write whatever excites them most.

In pursuit of goal #2, I give kids ample breaks, a long lunch (at cheap restaurants in healthy conditions), and plenty of outdoor time. If there’s any academic subject outside math, reading, and writing that they enjoy, I energetically support them. But I don’t burden them with any additional mandatory work — not even economics. I naturally encourage kids to consider the possibility that they might change their minds, but I don’t push.

My other goal, frankly, is to do my own job while my kids learn. Most emergency homeschoolers are probably in the same position. How are you supposed juggle your kids’ education and your job simultaneously? The answer: With calm but strict discipline. Specifically:

1. Create a tentative schedule and share it with your kids — then enforce it like clockwork. This means more initial effort for you, but will quickly pay for itself in both time and frustration.

2. On day one, run diagnostic tests to find out what your students already know. Assign tasks with a wide range of difficulties. Once you find the easiest thing they don’t know well, have them practice until they can do it well. Especially for young kids, don’t worry about completing a curriculum by a specific date. Just know your final destination and start marching. Tell your kids they’ll learn new tasks as soon as they master the material they’re doing. Drill, drill, drill.

3. If your kids have short attention spans, build more breaks into the schedule — but then enforce that schedule. If your kids need to run around, build that into the schedule too.

4. Build parental feedback time into your schedule, then require kids to hold their questions until the scheduled time. This is crucial if you want to get your own work done.

5. Start the day with the most boring material. For 95% of kids, that means math.

6. Reliably respond to misbehavior with calm but firm enforcement. Don’t express anger — but don’t feel sorry for them. There is great wisdom in the tautology that, “The rules are the rules.”

7. Don’t judge case-by-case; except in extreme circumstances (e.g. vomiting), remind off-task kids of the schedule and tell them to keep working. Don’t be afraid to use mild punishments to address misbehavior — but scrupulously enforce all the punishments you announce. It is better to turn a blind eye than to make idle threats.

8. Remember: The main cause of unhappiness is the disparity between what you expect and what happens. Similarly, the main cause of parent-child conflict is the disparity between what you expect and what your kids expect. Once your kids take their schedule for granted, they will feel better about the situation. Once everyone knows what to expect, conflict fades away… usually. Remember: If your own parental weakness makes you miserable, you will be unpleasant company for your kids. So think of the children — ultimately they too will suffer if you let them push your around!

9. Be open to constructive student feedback outside of learning time. During learning time, though, stick to the schedule.

10. Don’t tell kids that something is “fun” if they resent it. Just be honest and remind them that some boring work has a big long-run payoff. Before you tell them so, though, critically assess whether the boring task does in fact have a big long-run payoff. Sorry, mandatory musical instruction is absurd. If kids have to suffer, they should suffer for their own benefit — not your pride.

[...]

I bought almost all of the Humble Math workbooks, found out my kids’ current level, and set them to work. I can’t say they’re delighted, but at least they’re making good progress and look forward to the breaks. The reading and writing are easier sells. And at the end of the day during Activity period, we exercise outside, then learn about whatever’s on their minds. So far, contagious disease is a hot topic – we’ve studied smallpox, Spanish flu, and more – complete with graphic medical photos from the internet. Personally, I’d like to teach more economics, but I’ll wait until they’re more curious.

I haven’t looked at Humble Math, but I’ve been impressed by Beast Academy.

Posted in Education | 5 Comments »

The data you get when you go out and test people without symptoms is different from the data you get when you only test those who show up in a hospital

May 9th, 2020

Testing residents of San Francisco’s Mission District for Covid-19 revealed that the data you get when you go out and test people without symptoms is different from the data you get when you only test those who show up in a hospital:

Slightly more than 2% of the people tested in the four square blocks currently have the coronavirus, for instance. Only 1 in 10 of them has a fever and most have no symptoms at all — which is to say that, absent the testing, they’d probably still be walking around and infecting people without knowing it.

There was more. Of the 981 white people tested, zero have the virus. Latinos are only 44% of the study but 95% of the positives. Men are a bit more than half of the sample but 75% of the positives. Just over half of the people tested say they’re unable to work from home — but that group registers 90% positive. Being in a crowded house appears to be a problem: nearly 30% of the positives come from households of more than five people, though those households make up only 15% of the population. Being poor is a bigger problem: people earning less than $50,000 a year are 89% of the positives, though only 39% of the group studied. Only a quarter of the people with the virus have a primary care doctor. Six of the people with the virus still haven’t been located by the researchers, and informed that they’re ill.

Posted in Science | 5 Comments »

Do you understand what a “95% confidence interval” means?

May 8th, 2020

Do you understand what a “95% confidence interval” means?, Peter Attia asks:

  1. Distance from earth to nearest star (excluding sun), in light-years
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  2. GDP of Mongolia, in USD
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  3. Height of tallest man in recorded history, in inches
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  4. Depth of deepest part of Pacific Ocean, in meters
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  5. Average distance from earth to moon, in miles
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  6. Population of Russia in 2019
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  7. Maximum number of passengers carried on Emirates A380 aircraft (two-class layout)
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  8. Number of passengers who died on the Titanic
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  9. Market capitalization of Apple on the day Steve Jobs died, in USD
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  10. Fastest lap time in an F1 car around the Monaco circuit, in min:sec
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  11. Number of regular season goals scored by Wayne Gretzky in his NHL career
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  12. NASAs budget for the year 2019, in USD
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  13. Number of Big Macs sold globally in a year (on average) by McDonalds
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  14. Number of students from China attending U.S. colleges in the 2018-2019 academic year
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  15. Total number of passengers flying domestically on U.S. airlines in 2019
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  16. Amount of coal produced by U.S. mines in 2019, in pounds
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  17. Breeds eligible to compete at the 144th Westminster Kennel Dog Show
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  18. Number of total worldwide searches processed by Google each day
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  19. Full weight (including planes, ammunition, people) of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, in pounds
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]
  20. Number of times that the name “Jesus” appears in the King James bible
    95% confidence interval: [ _________ , _________ ]

(Answers.)

This is one of the key concepts in How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, by Douglas W. Hubbard.

Posted in Science | 5 Comments »

It will be an interesting autumn

May 6th, 2020

Walter Russell Mead explores what Trump has in common with Napoleon:

Early on, Napoleon had such advantages that nobody could beat him. The strong nationalism of revolutionary France meant that his conscript armies could march farther and faster than other armies—following routes and tactics that were impossible for others, and thereby difficult for opposing generals to anticipate and counteract.

Mr. Trump’s secret weapon in 2016 was similar: a base so engaged and committed that it would stand in line for hours to get a ticket to his rallies. His voters turned out in droves and could be summoned against elected Republicans who tried to defy him. U.S. politics had never seen a force quite like this, and Mr. Trump’s opponents had no idea how to counter it.

Napoleon had other advantages. Thanks to long study, he knew the terrain of his marches in ways that others didn’t, and he combined that with an intuitive grasp of tactics that enabled him to quickly read the key to a battle. At the siege of Toulon, the 24-year-old Napoleon observed that a hill overlooking the harbor could, if occupied by French artillery, pour down such devastating fire on the British fleet that it would have no choice but to withdraw, and without the fleet’s support, the antirevolutionary rebels couldn’t defend the town. That was the stroke that launched his career; he would have many more.

The combination of intense preparation and strategic intuition was critical to Mr. Trump’s rise as well. He studied his battle terrain—public opinion—through long careers as a casino developer and a reality-television host. And his intuitive grasp of the power of issues like trade and immigration to upend U.S. politics left his Republican and Democratic opponents sputtering with rage and surprise.

Napoleon’s sheer cynicism and audacity repeatedly flabbergasted opponents who were accustomed to the slower and more honorable way in which both war and diplomacy had previously been conducted. Mr. Trump’s vitriolic personal attacks, detachment from conventional standards of truthfulness, and disregard for every convention of normal political life often have had the same effect on his opponents.

But by the time of the Russian campaign, Napoleon’s magic was beginning to fade. First in Spain, then in Russia and Germany, French arrogance and Napoleonic tyranny turned not only elite but mass opinion against him. By the 1813 Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, Napoleon faced troops at least as motivated as his own. Millions of Democrats are now as angry and energized as Mr. Trump’s base was in 2016; it will be an interesting autumn.

In Russia, Napoleon’s greatest skills were largely useless. He couldn’t destroy enemy forces in a decisive battle, as the enemy kept retreating. His ability to execute brilliant tactical maneuvers using intricate road networks wasn’t useful in a country with few maps and fewer roads. And the survival of his army would ultimately depend on something he could not provide: an adequate supply line with hay for the horses, and food and winter clothing for the men.

The pandemic puts Mr. Trump at a similar disadvantage. He can’t hold mass rallies in a time of social distancing. He can’t find a cure. He can’t cast the blame on his opponents. And personal protective equipment and tests remain obstinately scarce.

Posted in Policy | 7 Comments »

South Korea has a rule for everything

May 4th, 2020

After two months of intensive social distancing, South Korea is about to open up, and it has a rule for everything:

When meeting in an office, people will wear masks. At meals, diners will sit next to each other or in a zigzag pattern, not directly across. Hotel rooms will be ventilated for 15 minutes after travelers check out. Visitors at zoos and aquariums must stand 6 feet apart. Shouting and hugging will be discouraged at sporting events. So will high-fives.

[...]

When Korean tourists descend on the resort island of Jeju during public holidays this week, the strictures say they should be wearing masks. Hotels and restaurants will take their temperature before letting them in, and people will be required to sanitize their hands before shopping at stores.

[...]

All churches must take attendance of worshipers, to ease contact tracing later, and everyone must wear masks indoors.

[...]

Cashiers are out. The guidelines say shoppers should use unmanned payment kiosks or widely available mobile payments instead of exchanging cash. The country is one of the world’s least cash-dependent, but authorities want the elderly to take up the habit as well. Tickets to concerts and amusement parks should be reserved online.

The VIPS steakhouse chain rearranged tables to put them 3 feet apart and provided disposable silverware and gloves at the salad bar this month. To minimize contact, waiters let customers leave before collecting their plates.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

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