Notes from 20/4–4/4
The term has ended once again, end of this week is time for another 14 week review.
But for now, news!
COVID19
The race for coronavirus vaccines: a graphical guide
Absolutely brilliant infographics
Would like to know the difference in approaches though, in terms of time
New Zealand has ‘effectively eliminated’ coronavirus. Here’s what they did right.
The country began mandatory quarantines for all visitors on March 15, one of the strictest policies in the world at the time, even though there were just six cases nationwide. Just 10 days later, it instituted a complete, countrywide lockdown, including a moratorium on domestic travel. The Level 4 restrictions meant grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, and petrol stations were the only commerce allowed; vehicle travel was restricted; and social interaction was limited to within households.
The plan seems to have worked. The daily infection rate in the island nation of 4.9 million steadily dropped from a maximum of 146 in late March to just a few cases a day by mid-April. All told, New Zealand reported a high of 1,476 cases and 19 deaths. On April 26, the country experienced a watershed moment when no new COVID-19 cases and no community transmissions were reported for the first time in over six weeks, though seven new cases cropped up by April 30.
r0 calculator for US states
their inspiration is epiforecast
The first modern pandemic
One potential treatment that doesn’t fit the normal definition of a drug involves collecting blood from patients who have recovered from COVID-19, making sure it’s free of the coronavirus and other infections, and giving the plasma to people who are sick.
Another type of potential treatment involves identifying the antibodies produced by the human immune system that are most effective against the novel coronavirus.
Unfortunately, the typical development time for a vaccine against a new disease is over five years. This is broken down into: a) making the candidate vaccine; b) testing it in animals; c) safety testing in small numbers of people (this is known as phase 1); d) safety and efficacy testing in medium numbers (phase 2); e) safety and efficacy testing in large numbers (phase 3); and f) final regulatory approval and building manufacturing while registering the vaccine in every country.
One step that was taken after the foundation and others called for investments in pandemic preparedness in 2015 was the creation of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Although the resources were quite modest, they have helped advance new approaches to making vaccines that could be used for this pandemic. CEPI added resources to work on an approach called RNA vaccines, which our foundation had been supporting for some time.
Testing BERT based Question Answering on Coronavirus articles
Incredible, it got most of it right!
COVID-19 Superspreader Events in 28 Countries: Critical Patterns and Lessons
And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one I’ve assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:
- Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or missionary work. This includes massive gatherings such as February’s weeklong Christian Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people. But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a Calgary home.
- Nineteen of the SSEs — about one-third — involved parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and birthdays.
- Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
- Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This includes large-scale events such as Biogen’s notorious Boston leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business meetings — from the unidentified “traveling salesperson” who spread COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund official who spread the disease in Malaysia
How Covid-19 Kills
According to one preprint, 27% of 85 hospitalized patients in Wuhan had kidney failure. Another reported that 59% of nearly 200 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in China’s Hubei and Sichuan provinces had protein in their urine, and 44% had blood; both suggest kidney damage. Those with acute kidney injury (AKI), were more than five times as likely to die as COVID-19 patients without it, the same Chinese preprint reported.
Another striking set of symptoms in COVID-19 patients centers on the brain and central nervous system. Frontera says neurologists are needed to assess 5% to 10% of coronavirus patients at her hospital. But she says that “is probably a gross underestimate” of the number whose brains are struggling, especially because many are sedated and on ventilators.
Blockchain
Inside China’s Plan to Power Global Blockchain Adoption
Not really a full plan. But basically free cloud hosting.
“Deploying [distributed ledger technology] applications on major cloud services such as Ali Cloud and Huawei Cloud can cost developers tens of thousands of dollars per year,” he said. “To make it less cost-prohibitive for developers to deploy DLT applications, the minimal cost on BSN is only $300 per year.”
Career
About the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam — (GCP 2019)
Gave suggestions on how to get through this exam. Especially on what material would be relevant/useful.
Deep Learning
Deep Learning Course notebooks worth $2,000 are now open source
The fastai book , is now free in Github
Product
A framework to define your product metrics
- Start with an external metric that has potential for improvement
- Find a series of internal metrics that have a connection with your external metric (…and prove the connection)
- Design a feature/product/service that drives your internal metric
- Watch your external metric to see if you were successful
How to up your product skills compared to your colleagues
Furthermore, has an entire reading list to clear especially in terms of skills to pick up.
Tips for new product managers (with expert quotes)
- Plan with a longer time frame in mind — in months
- KNow when to say no — be assertive
- Start from the small things — quick wins
- Get to know your customers — talk to our users
- Build a relationship with your software devs
The Baymard Institute: A glorious, evidence-based trove of UX best practices
Seems to be a link compiler. Basically its a UX research institute.
How Product Managers Can Help Improve Engineering Process
As a product manager, you are at the epi-center of cross functional relationships on your team and you should be skilled in identifying problems.
With clear goals and agreement from the team and our management chain that solving these problems was important, I found partners on the front lines to champion change.
The other incredibly impactful thing you should do as a product manager is to help your team’s process changes land successfully. Thorough and transparent communication is key. Make sure that your entire team and all of your related partners understand the problem that your team identified, the changes that you’re making to address the problem, what everyone needs to do to keep up with the new system, and how and where they can give feedback if they run into friction or new challenges.
Development
Earn Money with Machine Learning by Publishing an API
Didn’t know that this existed, it looks useful.
Algorithmic Trading with Python
How to set up a data pipelines with a trading engine.
Finding the shortest path from Country A to Country B — using Neo4J and Node
Prerequisite: Linux host with Docker engine available to run Docker container (images) and an internet connection. That is all.
- Run Neo4J Container Image (as described in this article by my colleague Rosanna Denis)
- Access Neo4J through browser UI
- Run a Node JS Container Image
- Git Clone a GitHub Repo
- Run Node application (that will fetch the data, load it into Neo4J and execute the query to find the shortest path)
Why You Need to Understand Software Requirements as a Software Engineer
Serves as a good reference of software requirements
How I built and launched Design Resources using Webflow (in under 2 weeks)
Seems promising for a revamp of speakforclimate
It does look quite good, the designresources page
Webflow 101 crash course
When you invent a tool, you need to teach people how to use it.
Build a Chrome Extension with Preact and Webpack
Preact bascially just does the popups
500 free CS courses
I keep coming across this. I’ll probably do a review of the top 10 and why they work or something.
Tools
drawsql database templates
Create, visualize and collaborate on your database entity relationship diagrams
rezi resume generator
Not sure how accurate this actually is
FlowMapp user flow tool
Design exceptional UX for beautiful products, websites, and apps
with the online collaborative tools.
Free plan gets you 1 project
Rapid Image Layers Animation
Really cool webpage animation, probably burns a lot of data though
