Les priorités
F.D.A. Wants to Stop Regulating French Dressing
The federal agency said it was seeking to revoke its definition for the carrot-colored dressing, effectively erasing a government-required list of ingredients at the request of an industry group…the federal government has shown great interest in the humble dressing, painstakingly regulating since 1950 the ingredients that it must contain and revising the rules at least five times since then…
The lengthy and legalistic regulations for French dressing require that it contain vegetable oil and an acid, like vinegar or lemon or lime juice. It also lists other ingredients that are acceptable but not required, such as salt, spices and tomato paste.
Ahem. Here is the full NYT story.
p.s. It is disgusting, and it is not even French.
Sunday assorted links
1. Ross D. on when you can’t just trust the science (NYT).
2. Markets in everything: Covid-19 Christmas sweater that ensures social distancing – it flashes and sounds alarm when people get too close.
3. “Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump’s policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus’s death toll and rate the president’s performance even more highly.” (TC: not unexpected to me…and a lesson in risk communication for the Twitter yappers…you’ve made the problem worse.)
4. Microsoft analysis of the recent hacking developments.
The new Covid strain and its policy implications
Here is one account, please note this investigation is in its early days:
“An increase in R of 0.4 or greater is extremely bad news. During the national lockdown in November the best we could achieve was an R value of somewhere between 0.8 and 1.0 around the UK,” said Prof Hunter. “What this means is that even if we went back to the lockdown it would still not be enough to bring the R value down to less than 1.0.”
Note also it is very likely the new mutation already has spread well beyond the UK. And with compounding, an R increase of 0.4 is really bad as time passes.
If this all is true, what are the policy implications? First, a lockdown with no pending vaccine will only postpone problems, a’ la the herd immunity theorists.
Second, we do have vaccines and so in any plausible model faster viral spread implies a faster timetable for vaccine approval and distribution. And it implies we should have been faster to begin with.
If you used to say “we were just slow enough,” you now have to revise that opinion and believe that greater speed is called for, both prospectively and looking backwards.
In any plausible model.
If Godzilla is faster than you had thought, you need to start running away sooner. And you needed to have started running away sooner. In any plausible model.
In any plausible model.
Yet somehow I do not expect the rooftops to be so crowded over the next few days.
What should I ask Patricia Fara?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, here is part of her Wikipedia page:
Patricia Fara is a historian of science at the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford and did her PhD at the University of London…
Her areas of particular academic interest include the role of portraiture and art in the history of science, science in the 18th century England during the Enlightenment and the role of women in science. She has written about numerous women in science, mathematics, engineering, and medicine including: Hertha Ayrton, Lady Helen Gleichen, Mona Chalmers Watson, Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, Isabel Emslie Hutton, Flora Murray, Ida Maclean, Marie Stopes, and Martha Annie Whiteley. She has argued for expanded access to childcare as a means of increasing the retention of women in science. She has written and co-authored a number of books for children on science. Fara is also a reviewer of books on history of science. She has written the award-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009) [and Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity (2012). Her most recent book is A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War” (2017). In 2013, Fara published an article in Nature (journal), stressing the fact that biographies of female scientists perpetuate stereotypes.
And she has a new book coming out on Isaac Newton. So what should I ask her?
Paul McCartney as management study
I am listening to McCartney III, the new Paul album, recorded at age 78 with Paul playing all of the instruments and doing all of the production at home. There is no “Hey Jude” on here, but it is pretty good and given the broader context it is remarkable. I recently linked to an Ian Leslie post on 64 reasons why Paul is underrated, but I don’t think he comes close to the reality.
Paul has been writing songs and performing since 1956, with no real breaks. Perhaps he has written more hit songs than anyone else. He brought the innovations of Cage and Stockhausen into popular music, despite having no musical education and growing up in the Liverpool dumps. His second act, Wings, sold more records in its time than the Beatles did. On a lark he decided to learn techno/EDM and put out five perfectly credible albums in that area. He decided to learn how to compose classical music, and after some initial missteps his Ecce Cor Meum is perhaps the finest British choral work in a generation, worthy of say Britten or Nicholas Maw. And that is from a guy who can’t really read music. He has learned how to play most of the major musical instruments, typically well. He can compose and play and perform in virtually every musical genre, including heavy metal, blues, music hall, show tunes, ballads, rockers, Latin music, pastiche, psychedelia, electronic music, Devo-style robot-pop, drone, lounge, reggae, and more and more and more.
His vocal range once spanned over four octaves, he is sometimes considered the greatest bass player in the history of rock and roll, and he was the first popular musician to truly master the recording studio, again with zero initial technical or musical education of any sort.
He is perhaps the quickest learner the music world ever has seen.
He has collaborated with John Lennon, George Harrison, George Martin, Ravi Shankar, Jimmy McCullough, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Carl Perkins, Kiri Te Kanawa, David Gilmour, Kanye West, Rihanna, and numerous others. He wrote the best theme song for any James Bond movie. He was the workaholic of the Beatles. He was one of the most influential individuals worldwide, including behind the Iron Curtain, in the 1960s and sometimes beyond.
He was a very keen businessman in buying up the rights to music IP at just the right time, making him a billionaire.
He is OK enough as a painter, has been an effective propagandist for vegetarianism, active in numerous charities, and has put out two (?) children’s books, which I strongly doubt are ghostwritten. He has been very active as a father in raising five children, while touring regularly, often intensely. He had planned to be touring this summer at age 78, with a world class show spanning two and a half hours with Paul taking no break or even letting up (I saw the previous tour).
There is no backward-bending supply curve for this one.
If you are looking to study careers, Paul McCartney’s career is one of the very best and most instructive.
Rapid Antigen Tests in Canada
Josh Gans announces a program of Rapid Antigen Tests in Canada backed by a consortium of major Canadian companies.
Big News! Today I am very pleased to be able to reveal to the world something that I have been very proud to have been working on with a hundred or so other people: The CDL Rapid Screening Consortium. Led by our Creative Destruction Lab, this consortium is a group of 12 companies who are partnering with Health Canada to begin the roll-out of rapid antigen screens to be a part of daily life for the next 12-18 months and deliver a safer path to normality. We have been working since September intensively to put the consortium together, explore screening options that were available globally and come up with protocols and an evolving standard operating procedure (SOP) to bring rapid antigen screens at scale to economies all around the world. The goal is to solve the pandemic information gap and ensure that we can quickly identify and isolate infectious people and protect others.
The initial sites will be run by RSC members. Those members are Air Canada, Rogers, Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart, Magna, Nutrien, Suncor, Genpact, Scotiabank, MDA, CPPIB and MLSE.
Read Josh’s announcement for more details and here is the website for the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium.
Saturday assorted links
1. Computer science rejects computer science (link corrected).
2. A substantive management/corporate culture piece on the L.A. Clippers.
3. A new paper from Treasury suggesting the job effects of PPP loans were significant, WSJ Op-Ed version here.
4. New strain in South Africa? Probably a red herring, but not entirely reassuring to read that it affects young people more. Boris Johnson is saying that the new strain in the UK is 70% more contagious (whatever that means). That too may be speculative, more information here. The general point is you wish to minimize the “reservoir” for such mutations, and that is another reason to want to keep cases low.
6. “1947: 5,000,000 NYC residents were vaccinated for small pox IN TWO WEEKS”
Walmart and autonomous trucks
Walmart will use fully autonomous box trucks to make deliveries in Arkansas starting in 2021. The big-box retailer has been working with a startup called Gatik on a delivery pilot for 18 months. Next year, the two companies plan on taking their partnership to the next level by removing the safety driver from their autonomous box trucks.
Gatik, which is based in Palo Alto and Toronto, outfitted several multitemperature box trucks with sensors and software to enable autonomous driving. Since last year, those trucks have been operating on a two-mile route between a “dark store” (a store that stocks items for fulfillment but isn’t open to the public) and a nearby Neighborhood Market in Bentonville, Arkansas. Since then, the vehicles have racked up 70,000 miles in autonomous mode with a safety driver.
Next year, the companies intend to start incorporating fully autonomous trucks into those deliveries. And they plan on expanding to a second location in Louisiana, where trucks with safety drivers will begin delivering items from a “live” Walmart Supercenter to a designated pickup location where customers can retrieve their orders. Those routes, which will begin next year, will be longer than the Arkansas operation — 20-miles between New Orleans and Metairie, Louisiana.
Here is the article.
Down Syndrome and Covid
Among groups at higher risk of dying from COVID-19, such as people with diabetes, people with DS stand out: If infected, they are five times more likely to be hospitalized and 10 times more likely to die than the general population, according to a large U.K. study published in October. Other recent studies back up the high risk.
Researchers suspect background immune abnormalities, combined with extra copies of key genes in people with DS—who have three copies of chromosome 21 rather than the usual two—make them more vulnerable to severe COVID-19. “This is a vulnerable population that may need protective policies put in place,” says Julia Hippisley-Cox, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford’s medical school and senior author on the U.K. study.
On 2 December, the United Kingdom’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended prioritizing people with DS for speedy vaccination. But the more than 200,000 Americans with DS so far are not slated for early vaccination. Nor has the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) included DS in its list of conditions it says boost the risk for severe COVID-19.
Here is the article, surely this merits further discussion as we allocate vaccines? And note this higher mortality risk holds even after controlling for other factors, such as living in group homes. And here you will find the original study.
That was then, this is now
Many professors at universities routinely quizzed their students too, although not as commonly as faculty at smaller colleges did. [In 1910]…a questionnaire of University of Chicago faculty revealed that 25 of 122 replying professors gave some kind of quiz each day; 31 gave them each week, and 10 others did so every other week. The following year, in 1911, a survey of 188 economics professors around the country showed that 171 of them employed “oral quizzes” in class; only 60 of them used written tests. Surveying undergraduates alongside faculty, the 1910 University of Chicago survey found that four of five students favored written tests over oral ones.
That is from Jonathan Zimmerman’s quite interesting The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.
Friday assorted links
2. Don Boudreaux open letter to me. Here is my original post, and here is AIER being useful. If the GBD had been this second link here, I would be wrong. But it wasn’t.
3. Chinese to vaccinate 50 million for lunar new year.
4. Model and evidence for the IPO market being efficient.
5. Why Iger is a bad pick for ambassador to China.
6. Whether you agree or not, the method and approach of the government/CDC here on vaccine allocation are so low quality as to almost defy belief. Again, whether or not you are convinced by Matt Yglesias, his simple Substack on this same question did a better job (and at a profit, presumably!). A useful reminder for those of you who “blame the CDC problems on Trump.” Here is related NYT coverage. And never forget Glazer. Why do we not prioritize men, who are at higher risk? And from “an expert in ethics.”
8. “Atlantic City has launched an auction in which the winner will get to virtually push the button that starts the long-anticipated implosion of the former Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino building.” Link here.
Double the Inoculated Population with One Dose
I’ve been arguing that we should delay the second dose (or at least not hold back first doses) in order to hit the virus hard and inoculate more people on the first dose. I wrote:
We should vaccinate 6 million people with first dose NOW. It is deadly cautious to hold second dose in *reserve*. Supply chain will be ok and the exact timing of the second dose is not magical and likely not critical. In the accidental low-dose, standard-dose regime for the AZ vaccine, people got the second dose 7 to 8 weeks after the first dose and that was the 90% efficacious regime. [A different vaccine obviously but ] Exact timing of the second-dose does not seem critical, although everyone should get a second dose.
Today epidemiologist Michael Mina and writer Zeynep Tufekci, who has been ahead of the curve on much of the discussion, make the case even more strongly in the NYTimes:
First, the science. While the vaccine trials were designed to evaluate a two-dose regimen, some immunity might be acquired before a second dose is administered. We know, for instance, that a Covid-19 infection appears to yield protection for at least six months. While infections are not vaccinations, and while we need more data on this, it’s plausible that the immunity gained from a vaccination may turn out to be even stronger than what comes from an infection. The reason we do a second — booster — vaccination is that these later doses help to solidify immune memory, in part by giving extra training to the cells that produce antibodies, a process called affinity maturation. But this process begins with the single dose, and the evidence collected between the time of the first and second doses in tens of thousands of people in the Phase 3 trials suggests that the level of affinity maturation may provide enough protection to meet the standards we have set for vaccine approval during this pandemic even without the second dose.
While we know that the single dose can protect against disease, we don’t yet know how long this immune protection will last, and at what level. However, there is no rule that says that vaccines must be boosted within weeks of each other. For measles, the booster dose is given years after the first dose. If the booster dose could be given six months or a year after the first dose, while maintaining high efficacy before the second dose, that would allow twice as many people to get vaccinated between now and later next year, accelerating herd immunity — greatly helping end the crisis phase of the pandemic in the United States.
… we should begin immediate single-dose trials, recruiting volunteers from low-risk populations who are first in line for the vaccinations. For example, among health care workers protective equipment works, rates of infection among this group have fallen sharply and severe disease is much more rare.Younger essential workers without risk factors are less likely to be severely affected if they are exposed since this disease’s impact rises steeply with age. Just as tens of thousands of people volunteered for the earlier vaccine trials, many may well volunteer to test a placebo against a second dose, allowing us to quickly ascertain questions of durability and effectiveness of the single dose.
Two additional points. First, mix and match, as I argued earlier, may be beneficial:
…we could mix and match vaccines. The UK will run a trial on this question. Mix and matching has two potentially good properties. First, mix and matching could make the immune system response stronger than either vaccine alone because different vaccines stimulate the immune system in different ways. Second, it could help with distribution. It’s going to be easier to scale up the AZ vaccine than the mRNA vaccines, so if we can use both widely we can get more bang for our shot.
Second, an economics issue. If we want Pfizer and Moderna on board we need to pay them not just to run the clinical trials but to be happy with potentially selling half as many doses. Incentives matter.
That was then, this is now, Malthus and Ireland edition
In the present wreck of empires, and under the extinction of all international law, no small state can hope to maintain its independence. Great Britain and Ireland, from their situation, their language, and their mutual necessities, seem naturally destined to support each other’s strength, and supply each other’s wants; and we are quite convinced, that nothing but extreme misgovernment can separate them. Heavy indeed, then, will be the responsibility of those men, under who administration, or by whose previous unconciliatory measures such a separation is effected — whether the immediate cause of it be foreign conquest, or internal commotion.
That is Thomas Robert Malthus, “On the State of Ireland (II), published in the Edinburgh Review in 1809. It made perfect sense back then — and today — and yet for entirely different and indeed almost opposite reasons.
The very very best books of 2020
You may recall I already posted my best non-fiction books and best fiction books of 2020. But, unlike on previous lists, I didn’t pick a very best book of the year because in my gut I felt it had not yet arrived. Now I have a top three, all of which came after I posted my original list. Here are my top three picks for the year:
David S. Reynolds. Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times. At some point I vowed never to read another Lincoln biography, but this one won me over with its readability and also grasp of the broader cultural and political context. You may know Reynolds from his excellent Walt Whitman book — could there be a better background to write on Lincoln? Conceptual throughout. At 932 pp. every page of this one is instructive, even if you feel sated in Lincoln as I did.
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. This is like the Lincoln biography — I was convinced I didn’t want to read a thousand pages about her (though I am a fan). And yet I keep on reading, now at about the halfway mark and I will finish with joy. This is one of the best and most gripping biographies I have read, covering growing up as a brilliant young woman in the 1950s, poetry back then, dating and gender relations amongst the elite at that time, how mental health problems were dealt with, and much more.
Jan Swafford, Mozart: the Reign of Love. Self-recommending. A wonderful biographer covers one of the most important humans, to produce the best Mozart biography of all time. You may recall I also had high praise for Swafford’s Beethoven biography from 2014.
Those are my top three books of the year. I think you can make a good case for Joe Henrich’s WEIRD book having the most important ideas of the year in it, but, perhaps because I already had read much of the material in article form, I didn’t love it as a book the way I do these.
Finally, I will note that the “best books lists” of other institutions have grown much worse, even over the last year. A good list has never been more valuable, and please note my recommendations are never done to fill a quota, “achieve balance,” right previous wrongs, or whatever. They are what I think are the best books. Scary how rare that has become.
Covid-19 is also not so great for young people
Young adults are dying at historic rates. In research published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, we found that among U.S. adults ages 25 to 44, from March through the end of July, there were almost 12,000 more deaths than were expected based on historical norms.
In fact, July appears to have been the deadliest month among this age group in modern American history. Over the past 20 years, an average of 11,000 young American adults died each July. This year that number swelled to over 16,000.
The trends continued this fall. Based on prior trends, around 154,000 in this demographic had been projected to die in 2020. We surpassed that total in mid-November. Even if death rates suddenly return to normal in December — and we know they have not — we would anticipate well over 170,000 deaths among U.S. adults in this demographic by the end of 2020.
That is from Jeremy Samuel Faust, Harlan M. Krumholz and at the NYT. To be clear, this is not the main problem, but it is not a nothingburger either. 3,656 deaths per day right now, no matter what the ages how many other American catastrophes can rival that? #1 cause of death in the country right now, bar none.