The Baltimore County executive was on with C4.

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison spoke Thursday to C4.

The state labor secretary says her department has made great strides in ironing out problems with the unemployment website and is trouble shooting errors.

Trainer Ray Handal experienced the highs and lows of horse racing with shippers Kansas Kis and Timely Tradition on closing weekend at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark. The duo were the first starters for Handal since March 15, the last day of live racing in New York, when he saddled Timely Tradition for a victory in a […]

The post Handal Says Fantasy Flop Won’t Define Kansas Kis’ Season appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Multiple graded stakes winner Call Paul, formerly trained by Jason Servis, had to be euthanized on Wednesday morning at Belmont Park. The Daily Racing Form reports that the colt suffered catastrophic injuries to his left hind leg during a workout over the training track. The 4-year-old Pennsylvania-bred son of Friesan Fire was breezing for the fourth […]

The post Former Jason Servis Trainee Call Paul Fatally Injured During Belmont Workout appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

The Maryland Department of Health on Sunday announced five new deaths as a result of COVID-19.

Steo is taking steps to ensure the safety of buyers and sellers in an uncertain time.

WBAL NewsRadio, 98 Rock, WBAL-TV 11 and our partners at Howard Bank are proud to launch ‘Operation: Shop Local’ a community initiative to benefit small businesses in the Baltimore region.

There were no arrests during Saturday's protest in Annapolis, where organizers were calling on Gov. Larry Hogan to lift his executive order shutting down many businesses by the end of the month.

Baltimore City's non-fatal shootings have gone down from 232 this time last year to 195 now, but homicides have gone up from 102 in 2019 to 103 so far this year.

Baltimore City's annual ceasefire weekend goes virtual for the first time ever amid coronavirus concerns.

The Minnesota National Guard conducted flyovers across the state to recognize the frontline health care workers of the COVID-19 pandemic response. A pair of F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft from the 148th Fighter Wing out of Duluth flanked a C-130 Hercules aircraft from the 133rd Air Wing out of Fort Snelling floew over downtown Minneapolis Wednesday morning, May 6, 2020.

Stephen Cole, Jennifer Hill, Luke Keele, Ilya Shpitser, and Dylan Small write: We wanted to provide an update on our efforts to build the Society for Causal Inference (SCI). As you may recall, we are creating the SCI as a home for causal inference research that will increase support and knowledge sharing both within the […]

Will Marble writes: I’m a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford. Along with colleagues from the Stanford medical school, law school, and elsewhere, we recently completed a white paper evaluating the evidence for and tradeoffs involved with shelter-in-place policies. To our knowledge, our paper contains the widest review of the relevant covid-19 research. It […]

Josh Rushton writes: I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the […]

Uros Seljak writes: You may be interested in our Gaussian Process counterfactual analysis of Italy mortality data that we just posted. Our results are in a strong disagreement with the Stanford seropositive paper that appeared on Friday. Their work was all over the news, but is completely misleading and needs to be countered: they claim […]

So, there’s this new study doing the rounds. Some economists decided to study the twitter followers of prominent coronavirus skeptics and fearmongers, and it seems that followers of Nassim Taleb were more likely to shelter in place, and less like to die of coronavirus, than followers of Richard Epstein or Cass Sunstein. And the differences […]

I understand the above quote completely. Life would be so much simpler if my work was just reviewed by my personal friends and by people whose careers are tied to mine. Sure, they’d point out problems, but they’d do it in a nice way, quietly. They’d understand that any mistakes I made would never have […]

Back in the early days of this blog, we had frequent posts about the differences between Republican or Democratic voters and Republican or Democratic areas. This was something that confused lots of political journalists, most notably Michael Barone (see, for example, here) and Tucker Carlson (here), also academics such as psychologist Jonathan Haidt (here) and […]

The OHDSI study-a-thon group has a pre-print An international characterisation of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 and a comparison with those previously hospitalised with influenza. What is encouraging with this one over yesterday’s study, is multiple data sources and almost too many co-authors to count (take that Nature’s editors). So an opportunity to see the variation […]

Simas Kucinskas writes: I would like to share some recent research (pdf here). In this paper, I develop a new method for estimating R in real time, and apply it to track the dynamics of COVID-19. The method is based on standard epidemiological theory, but the approach itself is heavily inspired by time-series statistics. I […]

Raghu Parthasarathy writes: I’ve been frustrated by Covid-19 pandemic models, for the opposite reason that I’m usually frustrated by models in science—they seem too simple, when the usual problem with models is over-complexity. Instead of doing more useful things, I wrote this up here. In his post, Parthasarathy writes: Perhaps the models we’re seeing are […]

The talk will be sometime the morning of Wed 6 May in this seminar. Title: Some statistical issues in the fight against coronavirus. Abstract: To be a good citizen, you sometimes have to be a bit of a scientist. To be a good scientist, you sometimes have to be a bit of a statistician. And […]

The other day I wrote about the challenge in addressing the pandemic—a worldwide science/engineering problem—using our existing science and engineering infrastructure, which is some mix of government labs and regulatory agencies, private mega-companies, smaller companies, university researchers, and media entities and rich people who can direct attention and resources. The current system might be the […]

Seth Flaxman et al. have an updated version of their model of coronavirus progression. Flaxman writes: Countries with successful control strategies (for example, Greece) never got above small numbers thanks to early, drastic action. Or put another way: if we did China and showed % of population infected (or death rate), we’d erroneously conclude that […]

tl;dr: Their 95% interval for the infection rate, given the data available, is [0.7%, 1.8%]. My Bayesian interval is [0.3%, 2.4%]. Most of what makes my interval wider is the possibility that the specificity and sensitivity of the tests can vary across labs. To get a narrower interval, you’d need additional assumptions regarding the specificity […]

We’ve had lots of discussions here and elsewhere online about fundamental flaws in statistics culture: the whole p-value thing, statistics used for confirmation rather than falsification, corruption of the pizzagate variety, soft corruption in which statistics is used in the service of country-club-style backslapping, junk science routinely getting the imprimatur of the National Academy of […]

1. The news! Zad’s cat, pictured above, is not impressed by this bit of cargo-cult science that two people sent to me: No vaccine or effective treatment has yet been found for people suffering from COVID-19. Under the circumstances, a physician in Kansas City wonders whether prayer might make a difference, and he has launched […]

Anthony Fowler wrote a wonderful op-ed. You have to read the whole thing, but let me start with his most important point, about “the temptation to overclaim” in social science: One study estimated the economic value of the people spared through social-distancing efforts. Essentially, the authors took estimates from epidemiologists about the number of lives […]

The other day we posted some Stan models of coronavirus infection rate from the Stanford study in Santa Clara county. The Bayesian setup worked well because it allowed us to directly incorporate uncertainty in the specificity, sensitivity, and underlying infection rate. Mitzi Morris put all this in a Google Collab notebook so you can run […]

See here. Please share your reactions and suggestions in comments. I’ll be talking with Seth Flaxman tomorrow, and we’d appreciate all your criticisms and suggestions. All this is important not just for Italy but for making sensible models to inform policy all over the world, including here.

Carlos Ungil writes: The IHME released an update to their model yesterday. Using now a better model and taking into account the relaxation of mitigation measures their forecast for US deaths has almost doubled to 134k (95% uncertainty range 95k-243k). My [Ungil’s] charts of the evolution of forecasts across time can be found here. I […]

What’s new? The new and shiny reduce_sum facility released with Stan 2.23 is far more user-friendly and makes it easier to scale Stan programs with more CPU cores than it was before. While Stan is awesome for writing models, as the size of the data or complexity of the model increases it can become impractical […]

David Rohde points us to this new seminar series that has the following description: Machine learning is changing the world we live in at a break neck pace. From image recognition and generation, to the deployment of recommender systems, it seems to be breaking new ground constantly and influencing almost every aspect of our lives. […]

John Fund writes: [Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths. . . . In 2002, Ferguson predicted that […]

After getting 80 zillion comments on that last post with all that political content, I wanted to share something that’s purely technical. It’s something Bob Carpenter wrote in a conversation regarding implementing algorithms in Stan: One thing we are doing is having the matrix library return more expression templates rather than copying on return as […]

Proposal to temporarily loosen restrictions on on-site sales faces uncertain prospect in session's final days.

After closing amid the coronavirus pandemic, the National Park Service is testing public access at several parks across the nation, including two in Utah, with limited offerings and services. Visitor centers and campgrounds remain largely shuttered at Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef, but visitors are welcome at some of the sites.

Two legislative stalwarts lose endorsements as a wave of younger, more liberal challengers emerges in Minneapolis.

The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation's top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government e-mails.

As heads of state, local leaders, business owners and individual citizens weighed the costs of re-opening the global economy, fears of new outbreaks grew. A central question emerged: How much infection and loss of life will emerge amid the push to restart business?

Returning Internal Revenue Service workers in Kansas City are being directed to a room well-stocked with face masks, while some other IRS offices were still telling staffers to buy or make their own as the Trump administration starts rolling out a location-based plan for returning more of the some 2 million federal workers to job sites.

After snapping up more than $500 billion in emergency loans in just three weeks, small-business owners have lost interest in the federal Paycheck Protection Program. Minnesota business owners are among those who may give back a chunk of their forgivable loans.

Pandemic expected to magnify differences between healthy retailers and those with big financial troubles.

It's the first Orioles game to be played there under a long-term partnership with the Naval Academy.

The fan-favorite outfielder abruptly left the team last week.

Major League Baseball's teams have pledged $30 million for ballpark workers who will lose income because of the delay to the season caused by the novel...

The union representing 700 hospitality workers at Camden Yards is asking for financial help on what would have been opening day.

Wall, Kenneth E. Jun 13, 1928 - May 4, 2020 Kenneth E. Wall, 91, of Englewood, Florida passed away Monday, May 4, 2020 at .....