Michael Minna raises an intriguing possibility in an opinion piece in the New York Times: Instead of giving people two shots of a vaccine, we…
Society, Politics and History
Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan
Interesting article about the geopolitical importance of Taiwan to Japan. Taiwan is a chokepoint of great utility for blockading Japan. The Taiwan Strait, it notes,…
Crowd-Forecasting the Covid-19 Pandemic
Some time ago I started working on a crowd-forecasting app for my PhD (code). The app allows experts and non-experts to make predictions for the…
Who Should Get a Vaccine and When?
Announcements of early coronavirus vaccine breakthroughs have inspired new hope this may be the beginning of the end of Covid-19. Developing a vaccine is one…
Replication Markets for Covid-19 Preprints
ReplicationMarkets is launching another project – this time users are asked to predict and bet on the success of preprint papers on Covid-19. The process…
How the Virus Spreads
El País published an article with very nice visualizations of how the coronavirus spreads via aerosols. It’s a light and informative read. Main takeaways: The…
Using Facial Recognition to Identify Police Officers
In many instances, police have used facial recognition technology to identify protesters and suspects. Clearview AI, a private company, has collected billions of photos from…
Ten Years of Retraction Watch
Retraction Watch is a watchdog organization that monitors scientific misconduct and, well, watches the retraction of scientific articles. Not only is their work very thorough…
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
NPR’s Planet Money recently released an episode where they tell the story of how big plastic companies convinced the public to recycle more. At that…
Gender Differences Among Top Performers in Chess
Chess is (unfortunately) a man’s world, and gender differences in chess are large. While the gap in average play is not large between men and…