The new clinical trial data shows a single shot of the vaccine “gives sustainable antibodies,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, J&J chief scientific officer, told CNBC.
Source: J&J’s one-shot Covid vaccine is safe, generates promising immune response
This vaccine may be shipping by April, and if the U.S. has an order for this vaccine, this might provide sufficient doses to vaccinate a large number and ensure that vaccinations are open to the general public before summer.
“Travel broadens us because we learn by our successes. When you’re in a new place you are having all kinds of new and exciting experiences: communicating in a different language, ordering a meal, visiting museums – all stimulate intellectual interests and increases our confidence and sense of self-worth.
”Travel is believed to play an important role in creativity and problem solving, too. When researchers at the University of Indiana asked two groups of people to solve a series of practical and logistical puzzles, those who were told the task had been set by students from Greece – as opposed to students closer to home – found more creative solutions on account of the “psychological distance” introduced.
It’s one of the reasons why the co-author of the study, Lile Jia, who is now a professor at the National University of Singapore, believes Covid-19 could be responsible for a drop in our creativity levels. “Travelling can create psychological distance between the person and the problems he or she faces at work or in daily life. This allows them to view the same problems from a different perspective that is conducive to creating unusual creative associations,” he explains.
Exposure to diverse experiences and cultures can have a lasting effect, increasing creativity in the long run, he adds. “Hence, prolonged travel restriction limits people’s opportunity to sample novel life experiences and, subsequently, reduces potential to become a more creative person in general.”
Source: ‘Travel is good for the soul’ — how limitations on our movement affects us psychologically
Because I grew up with “Depression Era Values” (save, save, save, do not take on debt, repair, reuse, recycle), travel was never part of my life. I eventually realized this lack of travel experience hindered me on the job – literally, at one job, 7 of my 9 immediate team co-workers came from other countries (Sweden, several from Canada, Lebanon, China, UK, India). In the extended work group, if my coworkers did not grow up in another country, all had done extensive international travel or study abroad programs.
There’s a lesson in there for another post – how travel influences our ability to think globally.
2020 was to be the year I learned to travel. Of course, that has now been postponed by 18-24 months, at least.
Continue reading Some researchers say Yes: Is travel important to creativity?Model-land is a hypothetical world in which our simulations are perfect, an attractive fairy-tale state of mind in which optimising a simulation invariably reflects desirable pathways in the real world. Decision-support in model-land implies taking the output of model simulations at face value (perhaps using some form of statistical post-processing to account for blatant inconsistencies), and then interpreting frequencies in model-land to represent probabilities in the real-world.
The following is something I see nearly every day in the media – where the model output is presented as the real world (even when the real world is different):
As a trivial example, when writing about forecasts of household consumption, energy prices, or global average surface temperature, many authors will use the same name and the same phrasing to refer to effects seen in the simulation as those used for the real world. It may not be the case that these authors are actually confused about which is which, the point is that readers of conclusions would benefit from a clear distinction being made, especially where such results are presented as if they have relevance to real-world phenomena and decision-making.
…
For what we term “climate-like” models, the realms of sophisticated statistical processing which variously “identify the best model”, “calibrate the parameters of the model”, “form a probability distribution from the ensemble”, “calculate the size of the discrepancy” etc., are castles in the air built on a single assumption which is known to be incorrect: that the model is perfect.
….
It is not clear why multi-model ensembles are taken to represent a probability distribution at all; the distributions from each imperfect model in the ensemble will differ from the desired perfect model probability distribution (if such a thing exists); it is not clear how combining them might lead to a relevant, much less precise, distribution for the real-world target of interest.
Source: 1662970102.pdf
The last paragraph quoted above is something that has long bothered me about model ensembles.
This paper is a good read. Click on the link above to read the full paper.
Thompson, Erica L.; Smith, Leonard A. (2019) : Escape from model-land, Economics Discussion Papers, No. 2019-23, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), Kiel. Retrieved from: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/194875/1/1662970102.pdf
Some of the best inventors I know didn’t have a deep knowledge of any particular technology. They had a deep understanding of what the need is and what we would today call intuition — because we don’t know at the granular level what intuition is — they’d have an intuition about how to solve the problem and then they might go to PhDs for help in implementation.
I think invention is maybe like love. Everybody wants to have it. Nobody knows what it is. It’s an amorphic process. The public has an overly simplistic view of inventors. They suddenly have this brilliant vision and they go running down the street saying,“eureka I’ve got it!” Invention is an iterative, frustrating process in which you keep finding all the wrong ways to get to where you wanted to go. You back up, try a new route, hit another stumbling block, fall down. Eventually you integrate enough of the ideas that might have should have could have would have worked into something that actually does work. Then the world sees it and think it was a straight line from your idea to that solution. That there was instant clarity. As opposed to this iterative, long struggle.
Source: A conversation with Dean Kamen on the myth of “Eureka!” | TechCrunch
I find people like Dean Kamen, Elon Musk, etc to be incredibly inspiring in their tenacity in pursuing and find solutions to real world problems – as compared to those creating endless social media thingies in Silicon Valley 🙂
If you enjoy the process of discovery, invention and engineering solutions, this is a great and enjoyable article to read – highly recommended!
Spotted at a National Park. Cell phone WiFi signals are being used, optionally, to determine movement and locations of people within the park, for use in future planning.
I need to finish my hovercraft (really):
His resume includes crab fisherman and maker of a hovercraft that looks like the car from the movie “Back to the Future.”
via Fisherman Builds DeLorean-Style Hovercraft, Aims for Google Job – Bloomberg.
Attention Google (or Microsoft!) Recruiters – he’s finishing an MA in political science and says he wants a tech job, so he’s building a hovercraft to attract attention.
On the other hand, I have a degree in computer science, an MBA and in another few weeks will finish my M.S. in software engineering (and my thesis has to do with smart phones). I’ve worked in Silicon Valley and for Microsoft and other places too, plus written seven technical books. And I’m ready to relocate.
Did I mention I’m building a hovercraft? The project is further along than what is shown in this old photo. But heck, if this is what it takes, I’m on track! Or “on the bubble” as they say in hovering.
Update: I need all the self promotion I can get. I also have a pilot’s license, an amateur radio license, and I am an amateur astronomer and author. Hello Google? 🙂
This past Saturday I attended an IEEE Computer Society-Seattle sponsored seminar on future trends in information systems and technology. Speakers covered a very wide range of topics. Here is a bullet point list of some key thoughts from the seminar:
