Data mamagement progress

The data learning curve is steep.

To transform data into information, you need to format, clean, parse and segment the data.

To build knowledge, you must undestand the relations beetween data and create a system.

Insight is gained through experimentation and experience.

As for wisdom, I am not quite sure that "data" is the right starting point! 

The magic of haptic technology (video)

The progress of haptic technology are stunning! They offer the possibility to control complex layers of information in a easy and intuitive way, provided we work out intelligent interface. This is the next stage of technology where a whole virtual world will be created offering natural interaction and optimal control. But to really take off, this "world" need to be more secure than the current IoT, therefore probably based on blockchain technology, both distributed and decentralized, the opposite of the current trend. Privacy and people need to be placed back at the center of technological development. The alternative is a smart city for robots controlled by computers with no room left for humans. 

Creating a data catalog and understanding the importance of metadata

Creating a data catalog may indeed be the easiest way to understand and access data in a company. A data catalog is not about the data itself but about organizing meta-data. It is this organization which will eventually constitute the backbone of the database structure and efficient organization. Well worth a read, it only to understand better what is possible! #Data #Database #SQL #CRM #Datalake #Datawarehouse

https://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/a-step-by-step-guide-to-build-a-data-catalog

Introduction to anomaly detection (algorithm)

A rather interesting introduction to anomaly detection. Clear and instructive. This can have many applications beyond "vision" as the principle can be applied to all kind of data. #data #ML #database #machinelearning #machinelearningalgorithms
https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2020/01/20/intro-to-anomaly-detection-with-opencv-computer-vision-and-scikit-learn/

700 years of interest rates!

A surprisingly clear and impressive long term interest rates chart.

But what comes after "zero" when money is essentially free?Since we have just reached this point, we shall know very soon.

Is the Wuhan Corona Virus a bio weapon?

So is the Wuhan Corona Virus a bio weapon?

As reported earlier, the feedback we are receiving from China is very murky and difficult to interpret.

What we know so far is that the Wuhan virus also called nCoV, it's scientific name, is very contagious although it's real R0 (R naugh) is still difficult to calculate. Most estimates currently are between 3 and 4 which would be relatively high compared to other virus. (see below)

In reality, these numbers are statistical numbers with little actual meaning related to the future since they can vary wildly over time. A contagion may start with a high R0 to see this number later dwindle as measures are taken to isolate sick persons and contain the outbreak. More important to the global spread of the virus is how it propagates between people. A long lasting virus like HIV which propagates through sexual transmission will see a slow be steady propagation ending up with a relatively high R0 whereas the flu with a lower R0 will spread much faster through the air in spite of its low rate of transmission. The worst virus known is the measles virus with a maximum R0 of 18 which can linger in the air for over 2 hours. In between, you find Zika which transmits through mosquitoes and nCoV which transmits through the air like the flu.

The second important factor is the death rate. As of today, Tuesday, February 4th the death toll is 425 but this number is highly unreliable. Although the Chinese authorities have done some efforts to become more transparent lately, initially the dead were not reported and it is still likely that many deaths are voluntarily or not misdiagnosed as other causes such as pneumonia. (In many cases it may just be because there is no diagnostic kit available!)

If we compare the fatality rate of the Corona virus to other virus, it looks relatively low at about 2%. It is still low if you double this number which may be a good estimate. (But in that case, we can also double the number of cases and end up with a similar 2% fatality rate.)
 
This has been used as an argument against the virus being a bio weapon since such a weapon would by definition have a high fatality rate. But in reality, the fatality rate is just one factor among many. Another is the number of serious cases necessitating intensive care which at over 25% is very high.

The most damning accusation to date that the virus may be a weapon came from a team based in India which asserted that studying the genome of the virus they found 4 insertions which had similarities to the genome of HIV. In this respect, it is important to note that the research was not peer reviewed and has since been retracted. Other scientists have noted that these codons are not specific to HIV and can be found in many virus including other Corona Virus so not a proof as such.

This said, it is widely reported that patients with Corona Virus respond well to HIV treatments... Again, not conclusive but certainly an interesting factor to take into consideration.

More interestingly, running the Blast statistical software on the genome of nCoV shows that 89% of this genome comes from the NG strand of SARS with some nucleotides from the KY strand which code the S-protein. The S-protein being the part of the genome which codes what binds the virus to human tissues in the lung. Reason why is appears as pneumonia and pass on so easily from people to people.
(source)
 
All this remains to be proven.

In the scientific literature, it is obvious that conclusions are closely linked to the genetic models as well as the assumptions you are using and that no consensus has yet been found on the origin of the virus beyond the fact that it is originally, probably, a bat virus which has mutated significantly.

So the original question can now be rephrased:

Knowing that the outbreak happened in Wuhan, the only city with a P4 level laboratory in China, that the virus has characteristics from different strands of the Corona Virus which makes it especially virulent and contagious, and that the virus seems to be able to propagate during the incubation phase when people show no signs of being sick, a relatively rare characteristics, could this virus be a bio weapon?

Virus do evolve naturally. This is why, more or less every year we have a new strand of the flu. They are also known in some instance to exchange part of their genome with other virus.  To answer more precisely the question, we now need to understand better the genome of nCoV. (The fact that the genome has been decoded does not mean that we understand the details of its origin and evolution yet.)

Many teams around the world are working on this subject so the answer should be clear within a month.

Still, although the damning evidences may be circumstantial, it is clear that China has spent a month from mid December to mid January trying to silence doctors who were warning us about the outbreak. Then when the scale of the pandemic became clear, the country took extreme measures by isolating a whole city, then a whole province while reassuring people that everything was under control and not as bad as anecdotal reporting suggested. Sure enough, it was worse!

The suppression of information and obfuscation is in the DNA of the Chinese government. This alone does not prove fool-play. Still altogether, all these factors are difficult to explain as pure coincidence. Statistics allow unlikely events to occur but beyond a threshold that the Corona Virus seems suspiciously close to, a human helping hand becomes the simpler explanation. So although it cannot be said yet that the nCoV virus is a bio weapon, the assertion cannot be dismissed out of hand so easily either. The possibility that Chinese scientists where indeed working on dangerous pathogens with the aim to eventually transform them into weapon as some like Dr Francis Boyle have accused them of doing although difficult to prove is real.   

The end is near / (Programmer's joke!)

Corona Virus: No science can be based on lies and incorrect information!

How many sick people are there in China?

How deadly is the Wuhan Corona Virus?

Somehow it looks more and more like nobody can answer these questions precisely. The number of sick people, close to 10,000 now does not square with what little we hear as feedback from overwhelmed hospitals in Wuhan nor with the extreme measures taken by the Chinese authorities. Likewise, the number of death not reported because they are attributed to other causes or because bodies are sent directly to crematoriums are allegedly much higher than official figures.

This matters a lot!

In politics, it is almost a duty to obfuscate and often lies through your teeth. Then lie again until people start believing that 2+2 equal 3. But not in science. If you base your assumptions on the wrong numbers, you end up with the wrong conclusions and recommendations.

Somehow, this seems to be what is happening with the current epidemic.

Is it just a "normal" flue virus albeit without any vaccine recourse which would mean that most of what we do is overshooting or is it something else which needs to be stopped by all means? The answer to this question depends on two factors, the R0 (propensity to infect other people) and the sick to death ratio.

As always with statistics, if the input data is inaccurate, the output or conclusion will be faulty.  Again, this may well be the case here. The R0 is definitively high and the death ratio seems to be much higher than announced. But, if that is the case, then what?

A country of 1.4 billion people cannot be completely isolated. And in any case, even if it could, it would already be too late. The extreme measures also seems to be counter productive. It looks like 4 to 5 million people did actually escape from the city just before it was closed off. Who can blame them? They did the most logical thing: Run before the storm!

We are less than a month into this pandemic and it already looks out of control, with secondary cases in Japan and maybe in Thailand too. As well as all over China.

The only area in the world from which we have heard nothing yet is Africa. This is odd, because there are close to two million Chinese people living there. It is very unlikely that the virus will avoid the continent. Africa with it's hot climate may not be ideal for a flue-like virus but conversely the continent could very well become a breeding ground for the virus.

Whatever route the virus takes to invade the geographic realm, it has already invaded the economic one. The risk there is not that airlines or hotels will suffer, but that the whole supply chain will be interrupted and will have to permanently relocate out of China. If this happens, then the recession which was already in the cards will become unavoidable and arrive well before the 2020 American elections in November. 

Then what? As with all good black swans, the consequences of this one are impossible to predict. We are still not sure yet that this one is for real, but it looks much more menacing than it did a week ago. It is likely that we will know if the curve is exponential next week, or maybe not if the numbers are not reliable. But by then we will be running behind a virus which will jump by leaps and bonds across borders and incur growing economic pain.

I find it interesting to note that the last big recession started in Wall Street in 1929 (Technically it started a little earlier in Vienna but this is a detail.) but that the US was also the first country to come out of it. Could the pattern repeat this time with China?

An interesting distinction between AI and Human intelligence

Boeing, long the symbol of America, now the epitome of what's wrong with corporations in the US?

As Boeing is launching it's new 777x, it is important to understand that the Boeing "MAX" fiasco is not a bug but a fixture of the company and our changed society!

Evolution is a slow process, mostly invisible to our senses, except when it speeds up and becomes catastrophic. We now understand that this is how it really works, more than the slow adaptation that Darwin discovered, although it still plays a role, it is sudden events breaking down the status quo, which spur bursts of accelerated transformation to adapt as fast as possible to a changed environment that really define evolution. Most often the result is the elimination of the not so fit, the not so flexible, and sometimes just the plain unlucky.

The laws of evolution apply likewise to our societies and civilizations. They rise with new resources, new technologies and stable climates to later fall with wars and pestilences while rigidities accrued over the years play a role in their demise. And so it goes with corporations and their endless cycle of creation and destruction, just faster, which makes the process easier to understand, and sometimes act upon.

Boeing is to the airline sector what Ford is to the car industry and General Electric to manufacturing, not just the symbol of the rise of corporate America in the 20th century but the full display of birth, rise to dominance and decay as slowly financial engineering started replacing manufacturing excellence to finally explode in a fireworks of dismaying products while maintaining a sky-high market capitalization.

The 737 "MAX" may have been built by "clowns supervised by monkeys" but it is still a well built, competitive airline which would not have had any problems if the company did not try to sell it for what it is not: a 737! For this is where everything went wrong.

When Boeing launched the 737 in 1967, they had only two larger body planes in the air, the 707 and the 727, and consequently, the plane quickly found not just a niche, but created the short haul mass air transport market to become Boeing best seller plane over the next 40 years with over 10,000 jets produced. The first plane to reach this milestone.

The plane was followed by the hugely successful super jumbo-jet 747, the 757, the 767, then the equally successful 777 and finally the 787. And then nothing.

In between, the airline industry had changed tremendously. With the birth of Airbus and the arrival of cheap mass transportation, pressure on prices and deliveries had grown beyond the ability of the company to respond. But it is the 2008 financial crisis which put a nail on new projects as by then all "new" planes were just redesigned older models, the 737x (Future MAX), the 747x which failed and finally the 777x just being launched.

The advantages were obvious, faster certification, faster deliveries, no need to train pilots for a new configuration, and cheaper "new" planes...

At least this was true on paper. In reality, the planes were mostly new with major changes including for the 737Max the position of the much bigger engines which necessitated a major software adjustment called MCAS to help the pilot stabilize the plane. This should have been dealt with seriously including added training for the pilots to master this new feature. Cost savings said otherwise and the software was proactively hidden to avoid expensive hours of simulator and accelerate the transition from the old to the new models.  

This strategy was successful at first. As sales grew arithmetically from $ 68 billion in 2009 to $ 101 billion in 2018, net income was multiplied by 10, and so was the share price of the company (see below). Although this was more a miracle of financial engineering than of airplane manufacturing as the debt of the company also exploded in the meantime, with over $ 48 billion  of share buybacks during the period, with total liabilities at $ 136 billion finally exceeding total assets at $ 132 billion now.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the company's management found it more efficient to prop up the company's shares by directly buying those shares than by developing new planes. Boeing ended up with planes which were half new, masquerading as older models to lower the cost of acquisition while not fully implementing redesign ideas which would have solved technical issues while costing more to develop.

The result, with liabilities exceeding total assets, the need for another $ 10 billion of emergency funding just to paper over the current fiasco and no new planes on the drawing board, is that technically Boeing is bankrupt. (The 747x has failed and it looks more and more likely that nobody will accept the 777x as an old 777 which means another 2 or 3 years of certification for a plane which is only an upgrade of the older 777!)

Because Boeing is so important to the American economy, including its military arm, it is very unlikely the the government will let the company go under.  Still, putting the giant corporation back on its feet will be complex and probably extremely expensive. The recent failure, this past December, of its Starliner spacecraft to reach the space station only illustrates the challenge ahead.

Software and financial engineering are important aspects of modern management but they are not palliatives to engineering and product development. Boeing employees will have time to think about it while traveling on Airbus planes which are expected to take a growing share of the market in the coming years.