Day: 21 May 2020

Good story on the Mail's front page today. But is it true? According to the paper, Boris has set a 10-day deadline to operationalise the Government's 'track-and-trace', programme. Once it's in place, he's promised to dial down the lockdown. On the plus side, the number of people tested yesterday hit a record of 177,216 and the Government has reportedly hired a 25,000-strong army of trackers. But if the NHS's contact-tracing app is part of the plan, we may be in for a longer wait. According to the front page of the Independent, it won't be ready by June 1st. Simon Dolan Serves Papers on the Government Lawyers acting for Simon Dolan, the aviation entrepreneur mounting a legal challenge against the lockdown, filed over 1,000 pages of legal documents with the High Court this morning. The proceedings are against Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care – whose name is on the lockdown laws – and Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education, who has presided over the closure of schools and universities. The aim of the court action is to lift the lockdown, restore our civil liberties, and allow schools, healthcare services and the economy to restart. Due to its huge potential significance, the Court is being asked to deal with the matter urgently on ...

by Hector Drummond Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson has drawn a lot of criticism recently for the poor state of the code in his COVID-19 model: "Code Review of Ferguson’s Model”"Second Analysis of Ferguson’s Model”"Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say expert""Neil Ferguson's Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time”“A series of tubes” This criticism, it should be noted, is not even directed at his original code – which he still refuses to release, so we can guess how bad that is. The criticism concerns the completely rewritten code that has been worked on by teams from Microsoft and Github. However, Simon Anthony, sometime contributor to Hector Drummond Magazine, has recently written in the Critic magazine that the poor quality of Ferguson's code is beside the point. I actually agree with this claim. Of course, it is quite right that the poor quality of Ferguson’s code should have been drawn out into the open, and I think his critics should be congratulated for doing this. I also think it is revealing of the poor standards at work in general with Ferguson’s team. But, in the end, Anthony is right that the sort of modelling Ferguson is doing is not discredited by the fact that his own effort was so ...