Let me first restate the abstract in different words to assuage any lingering doubts somebody might have that I didn't in fact read the paper.
The paper in fact fine. Like stuff like this gets published all the time. Worse than this in fact.
The paper does not in fact start an entirely new field of human endeavor, nor will it represent the final word in a long standing debate. It will win no scientific prose prizes, nor is it a series of incoherent non sequiturs.
It is in fact a competently executed foray into a reasonably interesting topic, which deploys currently accepted methodology. It is in fact logically possible to conjure threats to the ID strategy, none of which would however sustain a paper on their own.
However I will now propose adding a number of controls which can only be measured with great error, so that in fact if their results are invalidated it will most likely be due to bad luck rather than some deep structural fault.
Why you ask? Well I am concerned that if I write "it's a great paper, publish as is" the other two reviewers will come back with "uh, they are regressing y on y" or some enormous glaring mistake I missed, so I am just going to hedge my bets a little. But really the paper is fine.
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I'm going to tell you a couple of three things about Omertà, since this might come in handy in the next couple of months. I'll use an example from The Day of The Owl by Sciascia, a very interesting detective novel set in a small Sicilian town.
Incidentally AFAIK it's the first novel on the mafia ever, published 8 years before the Godfather, for example.
My copy is in Palermo so I'm going off of memory.
In the opening scene, an intercity bus arrives in the dusty town square, and everybody gets off.
Some have people waiting for them, and there's also a few people milling about or crossing the square on their way somewhere. Suddenly a shot rings out, and a man falls to the ground in a pool of blood.
Let's spare a thought for Carlo Urbani, the microbiologist whose intuition and self sacrifice almost certainly saved thousands of lives in 2003 by first identifying SARS as a deadly new disease, notifying the WHO and persuading Vietnamese authorities to isolate patients.
...and screen passengers. He was called to treat the patient that brought SARS to Hanoi, and realized that the staff at the hotel was already falling sick. His early warning, and successful policy activism with local authorities limited the extent of the outbreak.
Before the WHO, Urbani had been the president of @MSF in Italy, and was part of the delegation that accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. He was an expert on tropical diseases, and a tireless advocate for universal availability of essential medicines in poor countries.
Saw a few posts on the Neolithic Revolution in the last few days,so I thought I could interrupt the regularly scheduled programming of making fun of sourdough bakers and pulling my hair at the Covid response of the national governments of both my countries of birth and residence,
and actually talk about my research on this. Inventing farming is clearly one of the most important advances humanity has made. It is also very mysterious! The main puzzles are:
1. Why was it invented independently by several places around the same time? 2. Why wasn't it invented earlier? 3. What did those places have in common? 4. Why did people become shorter after starting to farm?
According to Crisanti, the director of the virology lab of U Padua, as little as 10% of #COVID2019 carriers show any symptoms at all. He sampled repeatedly the entire 3k+ population of Vo ', one of the initial clusters.
He managed to virtually eliminate the disease in Vo', by testing not only the symptomatic patients to confirm they had the disease, but all of their contacts in the preceding days. These were then tested even if they did not show symptoms. And in fact 9/10 of positives did not
show any symptoms. It is these asymptomatic carriers that were doing the bulk of the spreading, at least after the initial measures were put in place. This means social isolation alone is not effective, or at least not efficient. He +- eliminated the disease in Vo' by :