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.

A COVID-19 outbreak at a Maryland nursing home contributed to an increase in virus cases Sunday across the state that the governor described as “frightening.”

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

Pope Francis called for solidarity the world over to confront the “epochal challenge” posed by the coronavirus pandemic, as Christians celebrated a solitary Easter Sunday, blending the joyful feast day with sorrow over the toll the virus has already taken.

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

Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Andy Harris are weighing in.

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.

The number of cases of coronavirus in Maryland continues to rise.

Meteorlogist Taylor Grenda has a look ahead to a chilly May weekend.

The U.S. unemployment rate hit 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression.

According to Wikipedia, “An oil painting is painterly when there are visible brushstrokes, the result of applying paint in a less than completely controlled manner, generally without closely following carefully drawn lines.” It also describes the effects created by a […]

The post How to Add Painterly Effects to Your Photos appeared first on Tech Tips » Surfnetkids.

No, no, no, NO! There is NO legalese that you can post on your Facebook wall that will protect your privacy nor the ownership of your posts and photos. The agreement between you and Facebook is completely defined by the […]

The post How to Post a Facebook Privacy Notice appeared first on Tech Tips » Surfnetkids.

President Donald Trump participated in a tour of a Honeywell International plant that manufactures personal protective equipment, Tuesday, May 5, 2020, in Phoenix .

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.

The Min No Aya Win clinic on the Fond Du Lac reservation has seen a small amount of patients on a daily basis as they prepare for a wave of COVID-19 cases to hit their area. Dr. Vainio MD, a member of the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe tribe has worked at the clinic for decades and has never seen anything like this pandemic. The week of May 4th, he worked the respiratory cases at the clinic. Only one doctor a week takes all the respiratory cases to minimize the amount of people potentially exposed to the virus.

Teens were photographed fishing at the Rum River Dam in Anoka and at Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park in Coon Rapids Wednesday afternoon and evening, May 6, 2020.

COVID cases are surging in Stearns County, in large part due to three meat packing plants in the area. We photograph St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis as he broadcasts his daily COVID-19 update to constituents on Thursday, May 7, 2020 at St. Cloud City Hall in St. Cloud, Minn.

Flavio Bartmann writes: Over the last few days, as COVID-19 posed some serious issues for policy makers who, both in the US and elsewhere, have employed statistical models to develop mitigation strategies, a number of non-statisticians have criticized the use of such models as useless or worse. A typical example is this article by Victor […]

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 […]

I’d still go with this article by Ed Yong, which covers biology, epidemiology, medicine, and politics. Here’s one bit: In 2018, when writing about whether the U.S. was ready for the next pandemic, I [Yong] noted that the country was trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. It rises to meet each new disease, […]

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 […]

Lauren and Jonah wrote this case study which shows how to do Mister P in R using Stan. It’s a great case study: it’s not just the code for setting up and fitting the multilevel model, it also discusses the poststratification data, graphical exploration of the inferences, and alternative implementations of the model. Adam Haber […]

  This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I’m going to say right up front that I’m not going to give sources for everything I say here, or indeed for most of it. If you want to know where I get something, please do a web search. If you can’t find a source quickly, […]

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 […]

The above line is not a joke. It’s from Buzzfeed. Really. Stephanie Lee interviewed a bunch of people, including me, for this Buzzfeed article, “Two Big Studies Say There Are Way More Coronavirus Infections Than We Think. Scientists Think They’re Wrong.” I liked the article. My favorite part is a quote (not from me) that […]

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 […]

The following came in the email: I’m a reporter for **, and am looking for comment on the stats Gov Cuomo just released. Would you be available for a 10-minute phone conversation? Please let me know. Thanks so much, and here’s the info: Here is the relevant part: In New York City, about 21 percent, […]

Jon Baron read the recent article, “Presenting Characteristics, Comorbidities, and Outcomes Among 5700 Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 in the New York City Area,” and sent the following message to one of the authors: I read with interest your article in JAMA. I have been trying to follow this issue closely, if only because my wife […]

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 […]

Steven Wood writes: There now some controversy regarding the effectiveness of Remdesivir for treatment of Covid. With the inadvertent posting of results on the WHO website. https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/ One of the pillars of hope for this treatment is the monkey treatment trial (the paper is here). As an experience clinical trialist I was immediately skeptical of […]

Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: Here’s a joke we used to tell about someone in econ grad school, a few decades ago. Two economists were walking down the street. The first one says: “Isn’t that a $20 bill?” The second one says: “Can’t be. If it were, somebody would have picked it up […]

Suppose I play EJ in chess—I think his rating is something like 2300 and mine is maybe, I dunno, 1400? Anyway, we play, and my only goal is for the games to last as many moves as possible, and EJ’s goal is to checkmate me in the minimal number of moves. Say I have to […]

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 […]

I’ve been reading a couple of old books of book reviews by Anthony Burgess. Lots of great stuff. He’s a sort of Chesterton with a conscience, for example in this appreciation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: As for Tom’s forgiving Christianity—‘O, Mas’r! don’t bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than […]

I originally gave this post the title, “Stigler: The Changing History of Robustness,” but then I was afraid nobody would read it. In the current environment of Move Fast and Break Things, not so many people care about robustness. Also, the widespread use of robustness checks to paper over brittle conclusions has given robustness a […]

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 […]

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 […]

The University of Washington in Seattle is a big place. It includes the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has produced a widely-circulated and widely-criticized coronavirus model. As we’ve discussed, the IHME model is essentially a curve-fitting exercise that makes projections using the second derivative of the time trend on the log scale. […]

Part 1 Andrew Lilley, Gianluca Rinaldi, and Matthew Lilley write: You might be familiar with a recent paper by Correira, Luck, and Verner who argued that cities that enacted non-pharmaceutical interventions earlier / for longer during the Spanish Flu of 1918 had higher subsequent economic growth. The paper has had extensive media coverage – e.g. […]

By default, ggplot expands the space above and below the x-axis (and to the left and right of the y-axis). Andrew has made it pretty clear that he thinks the x axis should be drawn at y = 0. To remove the extra space around the axes when you have continuous (not discrete or log […]

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 […]

A sheriff's deputy in North Carolina is facing criminal charges after authorities say he led a group of armed people to wrong home in a search for a missing girl.