> When using a weekly watch-list with a size of 20 variants (less than 0.5% of the weekly average of new variant sequences), EWS flagged 12 WHO designated variants out of 13 (Fig. 4.A), with an average of 58 days of lead time (i.e two months) before these were designated as such by the WHO (Table S.4).
> Our system however does not accurately pinpoint the emergence of the B.1.617.2 Delta family of variants. Delta is known to be neutralised by vaccines24 and its global prevalence can be attributed to other fitness-enhancing factors [than immune escape]. These factors, such as P681R mutation, which abrogates O-glycosylation, thus further enabling furin cleavage, are outside of the scope of our approach.
> Specifically, the EWS identified Omicron as the highest immune escaping variant over more than 70,000 variants discovered between early October and late November 2021.
Whelp, that's completely unreadable to me. Undergraduate computer science fail.
I got as far as "the model of this physical process of entropy can act as a search function for lower entropic states, which given some poking, can resemble problem solution states".
It's the poking part that is problematic.
>To better understand this classical-thermal form (11) of causal entropic forcingwe simulated its effect [12,13] on the evolution of the causal macrostates of a variety of simple mechanical systems: (i) a particle in a box, (ii) a cart and pole system, (iii) a tool use puzzle, and (iv) a social cooperation puzzle
I am wildly unqualified to comment on this paper, but it's suspicious that you would jump to a "tool use puzzle" and a "social cooperation puzzle". It yields a really fun result and a fun way of talking about cognition, but it seems unsurprising to say that once you describe a problem in the physical terms of this framework, your framework can then solve the problem, as in,
>We modeled an animal as a disk (disk I) undergoing causal entropic forcing, a potential tool
as a smaller disk (disk II) outside of a tube too narrow for disk I to enter, and an object of interest as a second smaller disk (disk III) resting inside the tube
The notion that currently understood physical models can act as a learning system, given the right parameters, is really cool and exciting, and there's a great simplicity and metaphoric appeal to it.
phill, this is hacker news, and if someone finds you're wildly unqualified to comment on something, don't worry, he'll be vocal about it and explain exactly why he thinks you're unqualified to comment about it. That's why I love this site. On any similar site aggregator, I'd get cat pictures and people telling me my opinions are stupid because my face is stupid.
More towards the topic, I'd say these kind of articles have to be taken with a grain of something, preferably salt or cynism, depending on taste. I'm usually more of a material science/electronics technology buff, and news articles in that area will not hestitate to present a relatively minor paper as a breakthrough in battery technology that will solve all our energy problems in the next 5 years. But then you read on, compare it against the existing technologies and you realize that they just did something funny to the diodes that increases power density at the cost of usuage time. Somewhat handy in some applications, but not a game changer.
Graphviz only renders a graph which is represented as per dot format. There are other programs: dot, neato etc which can produce jpeg,png,gif... formats through command line tools.
I guess what he meant was tools which can do this for a particular site.
I can't think of any but as a previous poster said - a crawl of desired depth for all local pages, then feed the access log to "statviz" to generate a neat dot file along with the links.
Thanks for your comment! In fact, every time our customers' footprints have gone over their monthly cost, we've paid for the full corresponding number of RECs. That clause is there to protect against gross abuse. For example, if a site consistently receives 20M hits per month (a custom tier) and signs up for a 5M hit per month package, we reserve the right to manage only the first 5M.
Ah, so the clause is specifically meant to exclude the case that a website buys RECs for less than they actually use? That's perfectly reasonable, but I have to admit when I read the bit above, I didn't interpret it that way. You might want to think about tweaking the language to make it harder for skeptics to dismiss you.
Great question! We measure quite a variety of signals, including but not limited to client locations (e.g., is traffic coming from coal-burning areas?), visit lengths, server locations, transfer sizes, transfer times, and window sizes. These signals are fed into a "hand-built" database that allows us to compute aggregate carbon footprints.
The CO2Stats calculation includes the contribution of client electricity use. In order to more accurately measure the time clients spend on a given CO2Stats-powered page, it's necessary to have the client infrequently check in.
Thanks. One more regarding certificates: My guess is that a certificate subsidizes the cost of more expensive clean energy so that it equals the cost of non-renewable energy.
Is this right?
Either way, very interesting business model. Best of luck!
It's not quite as bad as that. It's better to burn coal and buy a few trees than it is to just burn the coal, right?
While I don't think that carbon offsetting is going to solve any long-term problems, it is nice to plant some trees and have a bit more money poured into renewable energy research.
We're not going to see real change until we are out of coal and oil. Hopefully that will happen soon. (Yes, it will be painful. But the sooner the pain starts, the sooner it will be over with.)
That is a different situation. It's not likely that I will ever lose my limbs. It is likely that we will run out of oil and coal some day, since we use a lot and there isn't a lot left.
I think you may be mistaken on ther enot being a lot of coal left:
"According to the widely accepted view, at current production levels proven coal reserves will last 155 years (this according to the World Coal Institute). The US Department of Energy (USDoE) projects annual global coal consumption to grow 2.5 per cent a year through 2030, by which time world consumption will be nearly double that of today."
The article goes on to say that we probably don't have 155 years of coal reserves, but it should still last for some time now, unless the rate of usage sky rockets.
No, my argument would be that in 155 years we'll have better alternative sources of energy. Wind and Solar are already viable alternatives, with time their cost will come down and their efficiency will go up potentially eliminating the need for fossil fuels such as coal.
So if a geo-ip lookup on my location (Which is extremely inaccurate) says I live near a coal station, you assume that I use that power and not power from some other source?
