We will find a permanent solution to coronviruses

 An enthralling article about coronaviruses and how certain viruses share a large percentage of the same code and thus decoding future ones as we put funding towards fighting bioweapons like we did after 9/11 is going to be something that we need to renew. Whether it was George Bush's Administration or Obamas or Trumps or Bidens that cut the funding is irrelevant now. Whats important is that we move forward with finding permanent solutions.

Richart Ruddie quoting from the article below:

"We know there are numerous viruses in animal reservoirs throughout the entire globe, and we know some of these viruses can potentially spread into humans and cause vast outbreaks. So there is a renewed interest to develop medical countermeasures against these pandemic viruses, and other infectious diseases with pandemic potential,” Richner says. “There was a big push for this after September 11, to create countermeasures against bioterrorism and against any emerging viruses. But a lot of that funding wasn't renewed.”

The question will be whether politicians and a public exhausted by the current pandemic will be willing to take the risk of confronting—or even make the effort of imagining—the next emergent threat."

Courtesy of Wired.com: https://www.wired.com/story/the-race-is-on-to-develop-a-vaccine-against-every-coronavirus/

What the Future of Death looks like

A quote thats interesting from the Wall Street Journals piece about how the world will be affected when we can reverse aging and accidents become the only cause of death which will also be so nimble by that time. Think of the technology in cars and safety features to prevent road accidents and deaths. Will we eventually have hardware in us that stops cardiac arrest and overdoses from drugs? Heart Attacks no longer become a thing and we don't die of old age, kidney & Liver failures?

It's an interesting topic to think about and what industries benefit and those that suffer. What new jobs are created when we no longer age and what about our brains can we stop deterioration?

Fom the WSJ piece I share this quote from Scott D. Smith from Kentucky:
"If we remain physically young, then accidents become the only real cause of death. Think about a new generation of people who have to get used to the idea of the generation before them NOT dying. We rely upon death and 'aging out' to drive the handoff from one generation to the next. Then there's the huge economic impact on health care as an industry, insurance and government with Social Security and Medicare. Also, consider a kinda, sort of technology where it works but not for everyone. How will our society deal with that perceived 'inequality'?"

For those who've been asking how you rank in Google

 After being asked about how you rank in Google there is a document you can send to those who are versed in mathematics. This documentation went beyond the traditional pointwise scoring functions and introduced a novel setting of group wise scoring functions (GSFs) in the learning-to-rank framework. 

The documentation implements GSFs using a deep neural network (DNN) that can efficiently handle large input spaces. If you read the link below you will see that GSFs can include several existing learning-to-rank models as special cases. They compared both  GSF models and tree-based models based on a standard learning-to-rank data set. Experimental results show that GSFs significantly benefit several state-of-the-art DNN and tree-based models, due to their ability to combine list wise loss and groupwise scoring functions. 

 The work compiled now opens up a few interesting future research directions: how to do inference with GSFs in a more principled way using techniques as well as helping readers, to define GSFs using more sophisticated DNN like CNN, rather than simple concatenation, and how to leverage the more advanced DNN matching techniques proposed in. 

Read more to understand:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/a995c37352b4b7d13923ca945cdcd03227c9023f.pdf

Why We're So Bad At Predictions

This piece from Nassim Taleb explains why we're so bad at predicting the pandemic and the outcomes of total deaths.

Source: https://forecasters.org/wp-content/uploads/Talebetal_25062020.pdf

MAIN STATEMENTS from the piece:

(i)– Forecasting single variables in fat-tailed domains is in violation of both common sense and probability theory. 

(ii)– Pandemics are extremely fat-tailed events, with potentially destructive tail risk. Any model ignoring this is necessarily flawed.

(iii)– Science is not about making single points predictions but about understanding properties (which can sometimesbe tested by single point estimates and predictions). 

(iv)– Sound risk management is concerned with extremes, tails and their full properties, and not with averages, the bulk of a distribution or naive estimates. 

(v)– Naive fortune-cookie evidentiary methods fail to work under both risk management and fat tails,because the absence of evidence can play a large role in the properties. 

(vi)– There are feedback mechanisms between forecast and reaction that cancels the invalidity of some predictions. 

(vii)– Exponential dynamics automatically satisfies the mathematical condition for chaos and its unpredictability

Other great data and information to help educate us and make us smarter while being more accountable you can read: https://forecasters.org/wp-content/uploads/Ioannidisetal25062020-1.pdf

Richart Ruddie of Fort Lauderdale Florida Says this is 17.5x More Deadly than COVID-19

 

Cardiovascular diseases will be approximately 17.5 times more deadly than COVID-19. The big difference is that the ease in which you can catch COVID-19 and how rapidly it affects you and has the potential to activate other immunocompromised issues and kill you.

So it's not that COVID-19 is even nearly as deadly as other issues but it's more rapid. Only car accidents according to the chart above states that it's more deadly with little to no notice. So what do we do? Once COVID-19 is erradticated we should focus on curing cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and other lifestyle activities that cause these issues.

So don't be afraid because if you looked at the chart above you would think you're odds of dying are severly increased. Sometimes ignorance is bliss but make health conscious decisions to improve your lifestyle and logevity.