“This was an issue of inaction,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies China. “There was no action in Wuhan from the local health department to alert people to the threat.”

The first case, the details of which are limited and the specific date unknown, was in early December. By the time the authorities galvanized into action on Jan. 20, the disease had grown into a formidable threat.

It is now a global health emergency. It has triggered travel restrictions around the world, shaken financial markets and created perhaps the greatest challenge yet for China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The crisis could upend Mr. Xi’s agenda for months or longer, even undermining his vision of a political system that offers security and growth in return for submission to iron-fisted authoritarianism."

...

Beijing was involved from the get-go

"The day before, on Dec. 31, national authorities had alerted the World Health Organization’s office in Beijing of an outbreak."

...

“Stressing politics is always No. 1,” the governor of Hubei, Wang Xiaodong, told officials on Jan. 17, citing Mr. Xi’s precepts of top-down obedience. “Political issues are at any time the most fundamental major issues.”

Shortly after, Wuhan went ahead with a massive annual potluck banquet for 40,000 families from a city precinct, which critics later cited as evidence that local leaders took the virus far too lightly.

...

Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, later took responsibility for the delay in reporting the scale of the epidemic, but said he was hampered by the national law on infectious diseases. That law allows provincial governments to declare an epidemic only after receiving central government approval. “After I receive information, I can only release it when I’m authorized,” he said.

Even after cases were being reported in Thailand and South Korea, Wuhan officials organized holiday shopping fairs like the one Pan visited. They held a downtown community potluck attended by as many as 40,000 families. They distributed hundreds of thousands of tickets to local attractions.

“Everything was down to not collecting cases, not letting the public know,” said Dali Yang, a prominent scholar of China’s governance system at the University of Chicago. “They were still pushing ahead, wanting to keep up appearances.”

Without clear government warnings, people kept traveling — both within and beyond China.
Yang Jun, a prominent sales executive in the photovoltaic equipment industry, traveled to a meeting in Wuhan on Jan. 6 and returned home on the train to Beijing via Shanghai a week later.

A day before he checked himself into a hospital, he attended a school event with his daughter and sat in a lecture hall with hundreds of other parents, according to a statement released later by the Beijing school that asked all parents to quarantine themselves.

Yang died this week

...

In a Jan. 27 state media interview, Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang said he was not authorized by his superiors to disclose the epidemic earlier

...

The Supreme People’s Court also issued an unusual statement admonishing the Wuhan police for detaining eight scientists.

“If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors,’ and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today,” the high court said. “Rumors end when there is openness.”

in the end, it's a failure to have an informed, interested electorate

"GOP senators and aides were confident that voters were paying little attention based on a survey conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official campaign arm of Senate Republicans."

also a willingness to buy completely bogus arguments. basically: the president can do anything he wants if he thinks it's in his personal interest, because that's in the national interest (quid pro quo is not impeachable):

"Even if Bolton’s allegations of a quid pro quo were true, isn’t that still not an impeachable offense, so would his testimony add anything? Patrick Philbin, a deputy White House counsel, responded that it would not be an impeachable offense. That answer was pivotal, especially in getting Lisa’s vote,” Cruz said."

TL;DR: - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it - Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing - Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none of us - It's ok that people have their e-mails hosted at Big Mailer Corps as long as there's enough people outside too EDIT (2019-12-15) A practical guide to set up a mail exchanger was published on this blog.

"Chinese authorities are cracking down on negative media coverage and social media commentary about the coronavirus outbreak, threatening anyone who breaches their rules with up to seven years in jail." including in private chats, with rumour defined as broadly as describing daily life

To maintain its authority, the Communist Party of China must keep the public convinced that everything is going according to plan. That means carrying out systemic cover-ups of scandals and deficiencies that may reflect poorly upon the party’s leadership, instead of doing what is necessary to respond.

But perhaps the most tragic part of this story is that there is little reason to hope that next time will be different. The survival of the one-party state depends on secrecy, media suppression and constraints on civil liberties. So, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping demands that the government increase its capacity
to handle “major risks”, China will continue to undermine its own – and the world’s – safety, to bolster the Communist Party’s authority.

When China’s leaders finally declare victory against the current outbreak, they will undoubtedly credit the party’s leadership. But the truth is just the opposite: the party is again responsible for this calamity.

Ax and BoTorch leverage probabilistic models that make efficient use of data and are able to meaningfully quantify the costs and benefits of exploring new regions of problem space. In these cases, probabilistic models can offer significant benefits over standard deep learning methods such as neural networks, which often require large amounts of data to make accurate predictions and don’t provide good estimates of uncertainty.

what nature can achieve with 16 neurons

Intercepting a moving object requires prediction of its future location. This complex task has been solved by dragonflies, who intercept their prey in midair with a 95% success rate. In this study, we show that a group of 16 neurons, called target-selective descending neurons (TSDNs), code a population vector that reflects the direction of the target with high accuracy and reliability across 360°. The TSDN spatial (receptive field) and temporal (latency) properties matched the area of the retina where the prey is focused and the reaction time, respectively, during predatory flights. The directional tuning curves and morphological traits (3D tracings) for each TSDN type were consistent among animals, but spike rates were not. Our results emphasize that a successful neural circuit for target tracking and interception can be achieved with few neurons and that in dragonflies this information is relayed from the brain to the wing motor centers in population vector form.

that got real deep

"We can’t seem to take each other seriously, except when we take each other way too seriously. This “darkness and light” battle seems to have created a situation where you are either on one side or the other. There is no middle ground. There is no nuance. We don’t agree to disagree. We just disagree. Even as we descend into a culture of memes and in-jokes, there is still the harsh reality of being human.

If one of the most valuable companies in the U.S. is willing to poke fun at their foibles, maybe we can continue working our jobs at a flawed, imperfect company as well."

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting …

Or “Top Ten Diet Myths Debunked“. That would have fit almost as well. Ok, so in retrospect, I think I screwed up on the title. Many myths just happened to be connected to intermittent fasting (meal frequency, breakfast skipping, etc.). Well, live and learn. November 4th Addendum Section added at the end of the article. …

Intermittent fasting (IF) is a dietary protocol where energy restriction is induced by alternate periods of ad libitum feeding and fasting. The present study has sought to investigate the relationshi...

PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

The city that had been founded to police the traffic of opium became the epicenter of Hong Kong’s narcotics trade.

On this tiny rectangle of ground, a single community created something that had only existed before in the avant garde imagination: the “organic megastructure.”

Perhaps Kowloon was also the first, true, physical monument to the internet. A city that offered a glimpse into the infinite horizons, structural possibilities—and inherent amorality—of the digital realm.

Adata also aims to impress with the XPG Sage's read and write IOPS, which allegedly come in at 1,000,000 and 800,000.

Microsoft and NIST agree special characters shouldn't be required, and to not force password resets/changes, with an 8 character minimum

I’ve been following the NSNG (No Sugar No Grains) ‘way of eating’ for the last year and the results have been incredible. I weighed 191 pounds near the beginning of 2017 and today (Dec 7, 2017) I weighed in at 160.  So, 31 pounds have disappeared, which is truly incredible.  The statins I had been taking …

Wide neural networks with random weights and biases are Gaussian processes,
as originally observed by Neal (1995) and more recently by Lee et al. (2018)
and Matthews et al. (2018) for deep fully-connected networks, as well as by
Novak et al. (2019) and Garriga-Alonso et al. (2019) for deep convolutional
networks. We show that this Neural Network-Gaussian Process correspondence
surprisingly extends to all modern feedforward or recurrent neural networks
composed of multilayer perceptron, RNNs (e.g. LSTMs, GRUs), (nD or graph)
convolution, pooling, skip connection, attention, batch normalization, and/or
layer normalization. More generally, we introduce a language for expressing
neural network computations, and our result encompasses all such expressible
neural networks. This work serves as a tutorial on the tensor programs
technique formulated in Yang (2019) and elucidates the Gaussian Process results
obtained there. We provide open-source implementations of the Gaussian Process
kernels of simple RNN, GRU, transformer, and batchnorm+ReLU network at
github.com/thegregyang/GP4A.