Skip to main content

Looks like COVID Pandemic is ending

 September Coronavirus Update 2020/09/12

Back in January, I heard about the Coronavirus. In February, I took a look at the data coming in and it was alarming. I told friends and family in February and I posted about it then. It was clear from the data that the spread was exponential. Exponential curves rise very quickly in a way that is counter intuitive. In the real world, curves like this follow a smooth path and this one was sharply upward. I posted various graphs predicting awful numbers and as these things usually go, those numbers were realized. 
Mercifully, it has become apparent that the curve has followed its course and we were on the other side of it. Numbers are down and it is in the nature of these types of curve that it will continue on its downward course until it is gone. 
The US curve is slightly different and because their numbers are so large they skew global results. The green line shows world figures excluding the US. In either case, the trend is clearly down and out. 

You don't need to know the underlying causes to predict what happens next. In the real world, data like this typically follows the pattern sketched out by the curves you see. That is what has happened here. 


In Canada, the nature of the curve is similarly trending down. Particular experiences were different in different regions, but the overall trend is the same as the rest of the world. 


The raw data for these graphs can be had on github here:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The system cannot execute the specified program

It always annoys me no end when I get messages like the following: "The system cannot execute the specified program." I got the above error from Windows XP when I tried to execute a program I use all the time. The message is hugely aggravating because it says the obvious without giving any actionable information. If you have such a problem and you are executing from a deep directory structure that may be your problem. It was in my case. Looking on the web with that phrase brought up a bunch of arcane stuff that did not apply to me. It mostly brought up long threads (as these things tend to do) which follow this pattern: 'Q' is the guy with the problem asking for help 'A' can be any number of people who jump in to 'help'. Q: I got this error "The system cannot execute the specified program." when I tried to ... [long list of things tried] A: What program were you running, what operating system, where is the program? What type of
2 comments
Read more

Coming Soon: General Artificial Intelligence

The closer you get to experts who understand the nuts and bolts and history of AI, the more you find them saying that what we have is not nearly General Artificial Intelligence (GAI), and that GAI seems far away. I think we already have the roots in place with Neural Networks (NN), Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML), and primitive domain limited Artificial Intelligence (AI). Things like computer vision, voice recognition, and language translation are already in production. These are tough problems, but in some ways, machines are already better than humans are. I expect GAI to be an emergent property as systems mature, join, and augment one another. I was around during the 70s AI winter, and was involved in the 80s AI winter as one of the naysayers. I built a demonstration system with a Sperry voice recognition card in 1984. I could demonstrate it in a quiet room, but as a practical matter, it was not production ready at all. Around 1988 we built demonstration expert systems usin
Post a Comment
Read more

Your call is important to us, but not much.

Rogers entire network is down and Rogers either does not know why or sufficiently disrespects its customers that it won't say. I was on the advisory committee for the largest private network in Canada serving 150,000 employees countrywide. I was also an active participant building out that network. I installed the first Local Area Networks there. I wrote a code generator responsible for the most critical portion of Bell's mobile network. I also wrote a portion of code for a system in the United States that detected and pinpointed line breaks in their network before they happened. For a time, I held the title 'Networking Professor' at our local College. I registered my first domain name in the 1980s. I have administered Internet network servers for decades. In one capacity or another, I have worked with most of the telecommunications providers in Canada past and present. Nearly a billion devices use a small network codec written by me decades ago.  Except that Rogers was
Post a Comment
Read more