David L Smith

@joel_c_miller It depends on whether the analysis is designed to answer questions about what we know or what we should do. What’s the point of the study? Who is the audience?

I'm giving an undergrad lecture on communicating uncertainty with disease models. Telling them to emphasize qualitative descriptions and scenarios and making clear it's not a quantitative prediction. What other suggestions do people have?

Please look at Figure 4: journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… Drug resistance (mainly chloroquine, but SP too) were rising during the 1990s. Some people wanted to blame rising cases on temperature. Drug policy changed, temperature kept going up, but cases stopped rising. Do the math.

This article is infuriating. In particular, the discussion of the Kericho data and analysis of it. The salient point, ignored by the commentary, is that if you follow the data set a few years longer, temperature kept rising, but malaria cases didn't. science.org/content/articl…

@RandPaul Red for Russia?

I thought I was clear when I said no photographs.

I would like to announce that I have been studying Darmok in order to speak only through allegory. I am freeing myself from the need to speak plainly ever again. Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.

New data from @WHO and @UNICEF show promising signs of recovery in global vaccination rates. But this progress hasn’t happened equally around the world, with many low-income countries faring the worst. reuters.com/business/healt…

@Fredros_Inc @JahnRek I want to hear what Barbie says about her newfound fame @JahnRek

@JahnRek @ProfDavidLSmith She must be very famous brother. Every where Barbie! Barbie! Barbie! Was wondering, whoa this Barbie that everyone is talking about??

What’s Barbie?

@Fredros_Inc Local knowledge and the local populations are the most underused resource at present, IMO. It’s time to invest more in education and engaging politicians in the fight.

Scientists gain ground in centuries-long malaria struggle – but more innovation is needed to stay ahead of evolving parasites gsk.com/en-gb/behind-t…

@Noahpinion Sort of like the nuclear winter generation? We’ve been doing well enough, once we learned to love the bomb...

The more people in their early 20s I talk to, the more I realize how many are caught up in the climate doomer culture. I don't think this culture is hurting the wider world at all, but I do think it's unhealthy and bad for these kids' emotional health.

@Jo_Maths Sort of the nature of things…

One of the lessons I have learnt in data-driven research is to ask questions that can be answered with the aid of available data or initiate the need to get the right data else, it's all going to be theoretical studies with much uncertainties. #DataAnalytics #mathmaticalModeling

Following @skunkcabbages because parasitic plants.

@GYamey The Xe is pronounced like “sh” and the 2nd e is the short “i” as in ick

#PhD Position on improving our understanding of global #Dengue transmission dynamics and building seasonal dengue forecast models at @lshtm @cmmid_lshtm with @OliverBrady1 @yangliubeijing Duration: 3 years Closing date: August 21st, 2023 #VBDs #Epidemiology #Modeling #Climate

Listening to RFK Jr is almost guaranteed to lower your intelligence. His brain is a convoluted mess.

@benlandautaylor Reminds me of… youtu.be/xxX7QCll3oc

Of course orcs have menus. Restaurants are the tip of the iceberg. Think about it. Mordor sends out gigantic armies with well-drilled formations and excellent discipline, which clearly require a sophisticated logistical operation to keep them fed and supplied, and with a terrific siege train to boot. This means at least the officer class is highly literate, you absolutely cannot use that strategy at that scale otherwise. Any civilization that can produce armies like Mordor’s will necessarily have extremely sophisticated art and culture, and may well be on a trajectory towards decadence. Of course you won’t see most of this by looking at an army in the field—you won’t see the heights of American culture at a forward operating base either—but we do get a few glimpses. We see their monumental architecture at Barad-dur and the Black Gate, which are ornamented in a well-developed style which is clearly distinct from the artistic tradition of Numenor. These are massive undertakings requiring a well-organized workforce, not to mention a tremendous logistic capacity as Gorgoroth is far too barren to supply the laborers so food must have been brought from elsewhere (probably Nurn), and even so the laborers may well have suffered casualties comparable to the Qin Emperor’s levees for building the Great Wall. Mordor’s turn towards decadence is visible in the splendid and impractical armor of commanders with political functions, like the Witch-King of Angmar or the Mouth of Sauron, even if it hasn’t yet reached so far as to affect the dress of purely military field commanders, whose gear is still utilitarian. To produce these sites and artifacts, Mordor must have a large and competent artisan class. They must have an urbanized and highly stratified population. The Nurnen slave plantations are entirely capable of supporting a society like this—compare the latifundia of Rome. In any case we can be confident that the cities of Nurn are on par with the great cities of premodern Earth. Mordor is more than sophisticated enough for restaurants, and wealthy enough, and cosmopolitan to boot—just going by the fragments we see through the lens of war, we can safely assume that Mordor gets the finest spices from the Corsairs of Umbar, expert chefs from the Haradrim, exotic recipes from the Easterlings, and who knows what else. The restaurants must be incredible, and that’s the least of it. Mordor probably has, like, great novelists writing comic adventure stories about an orcish explorer who gets lost among the hobbits. Astounding poets who will make you weep with despair as they describe being trampled by Sauron. Grand and incredibly racist operas about the crimes of the elves.

@Carlos_Chaccour @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon Why not delete this tweet

@ProfDavidLSmith @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon I dont underatand. What do you think is my position? Have you read from the beggining?

Periodic reminder that we will never *ever* eradicate vivax malaria.

@Carlos_Chaccour @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon You think a cluster of cases in a high resource setting is evidence that eradicating vivax is impossible. I think that’s not attentive to history.

@Carlos_Chaccour @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon Now do Singapore…

@ProfDavidLSmith @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon I am one of those rare pro-eradication people out there. So I will not argue against the vision of a malaria free world. @JuanCGabaldon point was: these clusters in a high resource setting mean we cannot eradicate. My answer is we have reason to be more positive. I stand by it

@Carlos_Chaccour @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon Make an argument that these cases threaten progress in some real way, and I might be convinced. Otherwise, I think that they must be seen, as I’ve said, in their context as quite ordinary. Since vivax keeps failing to reestablish, over decades, here & elsewhere…

@Carlos_Chaccour @alt_dave_smith @JuanCGabaldon I can’t see why you believe that.