Day: 9 May 2020

The Times today leads with the story that the Government is planning to quarantine all travellers coming to Britain for two weeks. Under the new measures, likely to come into force in early June, travellers will be asked to provide an address at which they'll self-isolate for 14 days, with spot checks and fines of up to £1,000 for those who don't comply. Needless to say, the aviation industry isn't happy abut this and nor is the travel industry. Airlines UK, which represents British Airways, EasyJet and others, says the proposal will “effectively kill international travel to and from the UK, and cause immeasurable damage to the aviation industry and wider UK economy”. It added: “Nobody is going to go on holiday if they’re not able to resume normal life for 14 days, and business travel would be severely restricted.” Isn't this a case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted? According to Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, 6.6 million Brits might already be infected. Screening arrivals into British airports and ports, and quarantining those with a temperature, would have made much more sense back in January. Similar policies were adopted in those Southeast Asian countries that are the success stories of this pandemic, such as Thailand, which introduced airport temperature screenings ...

by Sue Denim I'd like to provide a followup to my first analysis. Firstly because new information has come to light, and secondly to address a few points of disagreement I noticed in a minority of responses. The hidden history. Someone realised they could unexpectedly recover parts of the deleted history from GitHub, meaning we now have an audit log of changes dating back to April 1st. This is still not exactly the original code Ferguson ran, but it's significantly closer. Sadly it shows that Imperial have been making some false statements. ICL staff claimed the released and original code are “essentially the same functionally”, which is why they “do not think it would be particularly helpful to release a second codebase which is functionally the same”.In fact the second change in the restored history is a fix for a critical error in the random number generator. Other changes fix data corruption bugs (another one), algorithmic errors, fixing the fact that someone on the team can't spell household, and whilst this was taking place other Imperial academics continued to add new features related to contact tracing apps.The released code at the end of this process was not merely reorganised but contained fixes for severe bugs that would corrupt the internal state of the calculations. That is very different from “essentially ...