Elected officials offer a flood of facts and spin in daily coronavirus briefings. On this week’s On the Media, hear how the press could do a better job separating vital information from messaging. Plus, a look at the unintended consequences of armchair epidemiology. And, how one watchdog journalist has won paid sick leave for thousands of workers during the pandemic.
1. Bob [@bobosphere] on the challenges of covering the pandemic amidst a swirl of political messaging. Listen.
2. Ivan Oransky [@ivanoransky], professor of medical journalism at New York University, on the rapidly-changing ways that medical scientists are communicating with each other. Listen.
3. Ryan Broderick [@broderick], senior reporter at Buzzfeed News, on "coronavirus influencers." Listen.
4. Judd Legum [@JuddLegum], author of the Popular Information newsletter, on pressing large corporations to offer paid sick leave. Listen.
5. Brooke [@OTMBrooke] on the cost-benefit analysis being performed with human lives. Listen.
Tag: coronavirus
No doubt many have already seen that Springer has released about 500 books for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Springer, these textbooks will be available free of charge until at least the end of July.
A bit of Googling will reveal people who’ve already written some code to quickly download them all in bulk as well. I’m happy with doing things manually as there’s only a handful of the 8GB of textbooks I’m interested in.
Browsing through, I’ll note a few that look interesting and which foodies like my friend Jeremy Cherfas may enjoy. (Though I suspect he’s likely read them already, but just in case…)
- Food Analysis, ed. S. Suzanne Nielsen
- Food Analysis Laboratory Manual by S. Suzanne Nielsen
- Brewing Science: A Multidisciplinary Approach by Michael Mosher and Kenneth Trantham
- Food Fraud Prevention: Introduction, Implementation, and Management by John W. Spink
John Oliver discusses how Coronavirus is impacting the US workforce, from mass unemployment to the problems faced by essential workers.
As COVID-19 continues to dominate the news cycle, John Oliver looks at the various sources of misinformation about the disease - from televangelists and the right wing media, to President Trump himself.
Dr. Anthony Fauci (Brad Pitt) addresses the public to decipher the coronavirus misinformation President Trump has been spreading.
Based on an original parody by Eliza Rubenstein of "The Major General's Song" from The Pirates of Penzance, performed with permission of the author.
Music by Arthur Sullivan
Lyrics Eliza Rubenstein; Additional Lyrics by James Mills
Directed by James Mills; Edited by Danny Bristoll
Experts inside and outside the government identified the threat early on and sought to raise alarms even as President Trump was moving slowly. Read some of what they had to say among themselves at critical moments.
Small firms have been flooding banks with loan applications
Congress is debating allocating an additional $250 billion
Took a drive down to San Marino and back primarily through more well-to-do neighborhoods, though it did include a commercial section of Colorado Boulevard. Most people were out on evening walks or with dogs, though there were some in the commercial district on their way home or doing shopping.
I counted the number of people wearing masks versus those who weren’t.
- 76 were wearing masks
- 145 were not wearing masks
- approximately 25 people who were walking away or at angles such that I couldn’t discern whether they were wearing masks or not.
While physical distancing, instead of my daily commute, and like many others, I’ve been spending the time to make bread. I’ve come up with some great loaves so far. I’m contemplating doing some matzo today.
For those who are new to the bread world, I highly recommend you listen to Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent podcast series on Bread from 2018. It’s 31 episodes of about five minutes a piece, which makes it a pleasant way to time your kneading process. You’ll learn a lot more about bread while you’re making it!
The president of Liberty University, which he partially reopened to students during the pandemic, accuses a NYT photographer and ProPublica reporter of trespassing.
Even for people who have lost jobs or income during the coronavirus epidemic, there are books and reading material available online for free.
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.
April 9, 2020 at 01:00PM- April 9, 2020 at 02:30PM
Part I: Spatial Analytics, Presented by Mo Chen
Spatial analysis plays an important role not only in our everyday life and business, but also in the fight against the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. In this webinar we will see how the concept of spatial analysis was sparked due to an epidemic event in history. We will give an overview of spatiotemporal datasets, which serve as the foundation of almost all spatial analysis including RMDS’ Project Coronavirus. Attendees will also have a chance to see how mapping acts as a powerful tool in visualizing and informing the trend of coronavirus worldwide. Lastly, some examples will be shown to illustrate how some further spatial analysis can be done, on top of spatiotemporal datasets and mapping, to give us more confidence in winning this battle.
Part II: Epidemiological Modeling, Presented by Suyeon Ryu
In this webinar, we will discuss how we have built data-driven models upon coronavirus-related data collected from multiple sources in order to track and predict the spreading trend of the virus. Specifically, we will focus on the epidemiological SIR model to simulate the development of the coronavirus in different cities. The stochastic SIR model can estimate the termination date, infection rate, recovery rate, and R0 of the coronavirus. We will discuss how we used MCMC to estimate the distribution of epidemiological parameters, and once we have the distribution of parameters the future predictions come from simulations using the Monte Carlo method.
How much protection do different masks offer, and what are their limits?