Year: 2020
First 2020 Debate Review: Alternative Scenarios
I was thinking of reviewing tonight’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but Michael Siegel has saved me the trouble by posting an anticipatory draft of his debate reaction piece ahead of time: Overall, neither candidate scored big nor did either candidate damage himself irreparably. Biden was competent in his answers and Trump was… Read more
Trump campaign déjà vu
I haven’t been writing much about Trump lately, in part for reasons I detailed in an earlier post, but I figure now that we’re in the final runup to the election, I should say something about why I believe it would be a bad idea to give him another four years in office. I started… Read more
The difference between data and a model
I saw that Donald Trump retweeted this and — after getting over the fact that the President of the United States was retweeting pandemic analysis from an anonymous dude calling himself “bad cat” — I wanted to respond to some of the things in the thread: In general, he’s talking about charts of confirmed U.S.… Read more
Building the Model is the Easy Part
Apparently when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made their plans to return to live classes this fall, they based some of their planning on epidemiological models constructed especially for the purpose. This included a test, trace, and isolation plan which the models indicated would be effective at preventing community spread of Covid-19 on campus.… Read more
Illinois needs another lockdown [Updated]
I’m no expert, but I’ve been poring over statistics on the Covid-19 pandemic since it began, and regularly tweeting out the numbers for the local Chicago area, and I’m starting to feel like I might have an understanding of some of the basics. And what I’m seeing right now has me worried that Illinois is… Read more