I have worked in ad tech for a while and I am not sure that I really believe a lot of this article.
I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about. Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical goods, since most of those will require an email address and facebook can use that to link up the sales.
Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).
App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would definitely be affected.
I saw him live in Foxboro MA in the 1994 world cup match vs Greece (before he was disqualified for drug use). The crowd reaction to him was amazing. Every time he ran near the section I was in the crowd would go crazy just because he was close, even if the ball was far away. It was an amazing experience.
A friend of mine had a 10 acre field in Vermont with bad soil. He did not mow it for a few years and the trees just took over. It took him years and a lot of hard work to clear it back to a field. Certainly in Vermont, the forests are voracious. They will quickly take over almost any open land. Obviously, different parts of the world have very different ecosystems, but in New England, I do not think replanting trees is needed.
A group of trees is called 'a wood'. And while it's really hard to have a forest without trees, it's really easy to have a bunch of trees but not a forest. The apex tree species in a forest don't come until much later. They are in many cases the tree that grows in the space left by the death of a tree that grew in the space left by the death of yet another tree.
Your friend had a field full of pioneer tree species. Those trees stopped his field from being a meadow (a badly, badly damaged meadow) but they have to die to make way for the real forest building species.
For instance, a pioneer tree dies. A hemlock, which likes to grow on fallen trees (nurse logs) takes its place. When the hemlock grows old and dies, your old-growth species might establish in the same spot, or it may wait to replace whatever grew after the hemlock.
True, although the notion of a climax forest in New England is a bit of a myth, since they are constantly changing. For example, there is something called a "fir wave" where waves of fir trees die and are replaced with other trees.
Don't think I knew about fir waves, but from a human perspective, most of the interesting things happen at the edges of a forest (much of the stuff we can eat grows in clearings or edges), so windbreaks falling like dominoes makes a good deal of sense.
Where humans are involved in planting the trees, I'd expect statistical clusters, because if you plant a thousand oak trees in the same year, many will die within the same decade or so. My forestry friend in college complained about how every time trees died on campus, they'd replace them all with some other species, creating waves of dead trees every few decades, whether disease or old age, instead of a tree or two every year.
But then even without humans, nut trees are born in statistical clusters as well, ('masting' is an adaptation to overwhelm predator populations) so it stands to reason they'd die in clusters too. And a bad spring may result in more seeds germinating the following year.
Agree about the clusters. I am most familiar with the northern forests of New England (strictly as an amateur) and they are a wonderfully dynamic place. From big events like the Hurricane of '38, to small wind storms, fires, ice storms, and just an individual tree getting old and falling over, they are in a wonderful constant state of flux.
One of the saddest things is the loss (or coming loss) of so many important species. The American Chestnut and Elms are long since gone. The Hemlock and Ash are also under threat from pests and the Beech may be as well.
That's been my impression of Vermont -- everywhere you turn, farmhouses with caved-in roofs, pastureland gone back to forest, shuttered country churches, forested hillsides where you can just make out what used to be a ski slope by the change in vegetation. On my last visit I had an almost opressive sense that stubborn nature was reclaiming the state. I usually enjoy the woods, but the sense of desolation in rural Vermont can be eerie.
The northeast in general is slowly evolving into suburb/exurb and forest. Farms are mostly no longer economically viable. That said, those "takeover" trees are often junk trees or invasive species. Nice hardwoods take time to establish.
You can accelerate mature forest creation by planting native and more late cycle trees to prime the pump. I have a buddy who inherited ~50 acres in central NY after college. It had limited road frontage and sale value, so he basically pays the taxes by leasing ~10 acres to a farmer, and spent about $15k planting black walnut, oak, etc. It probably
Large scale farms at least. Some things like cheesemaking are still viable, because you only need a handful of cows to make an enormous amount of cheese.
Some of the leading vaccines present their own logistical challenges. Some of the leading vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer) are quite fragile and are hard to transport and store. Moderna needs to be shipped and stored at -20C (-4F) this is tricky but not that hard, since it is in the range of commercial freezers. The Pfizer vaccine needs to be shipped and stored at -70C (-94F) which is outside the range of ordinary freezers (bio labs have them but doctors labs do not). Pfizer can be packed in dry ice to ship, but the ice needs to be replenished every 24 hours. https://twitter.com/LizSzabo/status/1298646754884300800
How does that compare to, say, flu vaccines? If these are hitherto unsolved problems at scale I’d be worried that a rush to deploy them will lead to no small number of failed vaccinations.
Flu vaccines are stable in household refrigerators. At the hospital I worked at, we stored roughly 10,000 doses in a 38°F fridge that wasn’t even on a dedicated backup. The benefits of decades of research...
There is no compelling evidence proving that the disease cannot spike in NYC.
There are small hints that it MIGHT not be possible. The antibody tests measured the infection rate around April 15 or so, the number should be higher now. Second, there is some evidence that a percentage of people don't develop antibodies (only T cells) but are immune. Finally, we don't really know what is required for herd immunity.
None of this is to say you are wrong, just why it MIGHT be possible that NYC cannot have a second spike.
That ruffed grouse video is great but does not really do justice to how startling that sound can be. Imagine walking through the woods, no one around, and all of a sudden it sounds like a lawn mower starting up very close to you. It is unbelievably startling, even if you know what it is.
Note that there is a bit of subterfuge in this -- some or all of the lyrebirds mimicking were in captivity and would have heard these unnatural sounds much more than the typical wild bird.
I agree that the goals seem to have changed. We have never contained a widespread respiratory virus without a vaccine and the fastest vaccine ever developed was Mumps and that took 4 years. I guess the best hope now is that by slowing it down, we have more time to develop better treatment options. Or maybe with how much effort is spent on vaccine development, we can develop one in a year? The optimistic estimates for vaccine development seem to put the timeframe at around a year at the earliest? Are we expecting to contain this for a year via social distancing?
This also came out today. http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/media...
We really have no idea what the IFR is, just that is probably in the .1% to 1% range.
Also, it takes around 2 weeks to develop antibodies, so the tests are showing how many people had covid 2 weeks before testing.
That antibody timeline was an estimate derived from data obtained from the "original" SARS virus, but it isn't accurate with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. IgM antibodies are present within hours of the onset of symptoms, and IgG antibodies after a few days.
Sure, find any manufacturer of rapid antibody test kits and look at their documentation for a nice trailhead into plenty of literature about antibody response times with this virus.
There is a limited amount of time we can be on a lockdown. For example, in Massachusetts where all non essential business are shut down, pretty much all routine medical care has stopped. The major safety net hospital in Boston is laying off 10% of the workforce because they are not seeing routine patients). So the time in lockdown needs to be spent wisely, otherwise we will create more health problems than we solve. 8-9 million people a year die from cardiovascular disease in the US. If that rises by just 5%, we will have made things a lot worse
Agreed. Another example: I have a dental abscess I can't get treated because all dentists have shut down at least into May. In my case it can probably wait, but some people's dental issues will lead to acute complications here and now, and also bad dental health can lead to heart problems in the long term, thus again worrying in terms of cardiovascular disease.
Doctors and dentists routinely catch colds and flus from their patients. In most countries they are not working behind a perspex face shield (and as you know, there is now a shortage of such safety equipment). Consequently, they could easily catch coronavirus during this lockdown and spread it, or even perish from it.
SAT scores is heavily correlated with income level (the data I have is for the standard tests, not the subject ones, but I would guess they follow a similar pattern).
Is it? I've heard about the movement to make the SAT optional for years. The argument was that grades correlate with success much more than SAT scores. That SAT scores were how privileged were "gaming the system" because they could afford tutors, can take it multiple times, and appeal for phony disability claims allowing extra test taking time.
I'm all for objective tests, but a single test mostly shows subject knowledge, not necessarily success. When I studied and took them, I always felt like it mostly evaluated standardized test-taking skills (which is a trained skill I feel many smart and successful people lack). It doesn't show anything if people cheat or if the process is gamed.
I don't really have a strong opinion either way--this is just what I've gleaned from following the news over the past few years. Here's an article I found that mirrors what I've heard:
I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about. Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical goods, since most of those will require an email address and facebook can use that to link up the sales.
Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).
App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would definitely be affected.