Gemini works in Canada as of today. Bard was not available in Canada anytime I tried it previously. Maybe the "regulatory uncertainty" was recently resolved [1].
Here is a CBC article [1] with an embedded 17min Quirks and Quarks radio segment on the finding. You can watch how the tool works in the video embedded near the end of the article. The original .mp4 is available as a zipped attachment on the Science paper. Very cool :-)
There are a number of First-of-a-Kind SMR and Micro Reactors planned for the U.S., UK, and Canada. The advantage of the three leading lightwater SMRs (NuScale VOYGR, GE Hitachi BWRX-3000, and Rolls Royce SMR) are fast time to market due to the existing supply chain and continuous innovation on well understood technology. The problem is not so much the solid fuel, but the Zirconium clad fuel bundles that produce explosive hydrogen gas during Loss-of-Coolant-Accidents (LOCA). Accident Tolerant Fuels are being deployed now and may be another important innovation that reduces the likelihood of meltdowns but these systems also address the main sources of LOCAs: 1. isolation condenser system (ICS) replace pressure release valves that caused the Three Mile Island accident, and 2. passive coolant circulation systems that don't require external/backup power like the ones that failed during the Fukushima accident.
The problem with this class of lightwater SMR is that they are essentially base load power and the projected Nth-of-a-Kind costs will be competitive with fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) at best but are not cost competitive nor a good complement to intermittent renewables (wind and solar). They are a good slot-in replacement for existing coal fired plants.
There are also a number of Advanced SMRs and Micro Reactors (mobile and campus-size) that have announced First-of-a-Kind builds like the X-Energy Xe-100, TerraPower/GE Hitachi Natrium, ARC-100, Moltex SSR-W, USNC MMR, Xe-Mobile, and Westinghouse eVinci. These designs compete on a much larger landscape of theoretical trade-offs that may leapfrog the lightwater SMRs. I prefer this diverse mix of technologies and applications over a single anointed technology like Liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). YMMV.
There is not strong evidence supporting a 3rd booster dose in immunocompetent people. We have partly seen a misinterpretation of the Israeli data [1] and specifically the single low effectiveness value that appears to be the result of Simpson's Paradox [2]. Dr. Fauci reported this single value decline from the high nineties to the high seventies on Andy Slavitt's podcast [3]. Pfizer's CEO has promoted this same data, Israel's 3rd dose campaign is well under way, and Fauci's public statements are a strong indicator that the U.S. will follow the same path. British Columbia's Dr. Bonnie Henry indicated yesterday [4] that the Canadian numbers do not yet support a general 3rd dose booster but, like the UK, a longer 2nd dose interval due to a First Doses First (FDF) strategy may be a factor.
The 3rd dose is safe and will probably provide a small benefit to the recipient as Shane Crotty described in TWiV 802 [5]. The downside is that these doses are in short supply globally where they could make a significant difference.
with regards to misinterpretation of israeli data, it's more like miscalculation of israeli data:
1) his calculated efficiency for different age groups is up to 40%+ higher compared to numbers that released by israeli ministry of health in official presentations. when asked about it, he said that he doesn't know how they calculate it and this is his numbers
2) his calculations from the beginning included people that got booster shot. Kinda hard to base statistics about efficiency of two doses when you get inside it data about people who got three
I think the misinterpretation is mainly by the media and the general public. When most of your population is vaccinated and most of the serious disease is in the unvaccinated, you need to report by rate and vaccination status as the Ontario Science Table [1] now does (rather than absolute case numbers).
Simpson's Paradox is more of a data artifact that you have to be aware of. I didn't know about this statistical anomaly before but the takeaway is that if you see a effectiveness percentage decrease from 97% to 77% then you should also check that the value in each age cohort because each individual cohort may surprisingly be above 90%. The Israeli data might be fine but I want to see the "age corrected" range rather than a single effectiveness number.
The bottom line is that we will get good data moving forward from the Israeli 3rd dose program with other quality data sets soon to follow from the U.S., UK, Canada, Singapore, etc.
What we have not yet seen is any good evidence that the vaccinated are contributing to spread, though in the Fauci interview he indicated that the R(t) in the unvaccinated was non-zero. This is an important question, IMO.
i know. as i said he miscalculated efficiency for age cohorts.
israeli data for most age ranges is 45 to 25 percent lower than his calculated 95%-99%+ efficiency.
So maybe, as paradox it's nice, but as calculation go, they suck. and now everybody running around with this site as proof that there is no need in booster because efficiency is still 95%
Do you have a link to the full age cohort effectiveness numbers? I didn't think these numbers were published yet, if they are or don't exhibit Simpson's Paradox then the question is what accounts for the discrepancy with the UK and Canadian data and the immunological lab research done by Shane Crotty and Rockefeller [1].
There were presentation with numbers stratified by age, but I can't find it now. Unfortunately I still can't figure out how to track down everything that ministry of health releases over there. Closet one that I found is this one https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vpb-12082021/he/files_... . Look at slide 7.
Also, if you we are talking about Simpson's Paradox, we need to go deeper. As you can see at same slide, vaccine efficiency going down, the further you get away from second shot. Hence, age cohort effectiveness is useless. You need age/vaccination time frames to judge real efficiency
> a strong indicator that the U.S. will follow the same path. British Columbia's Dr. Bonnie Henry indicated yesterday [4] that
...an even stronger indicator is that the Biden administration seems to have asked two multi-decade long FDA vaccine approval experts to resign following them authoring this report saying that the evidence didn't support the widespread use of boosters as a public health measure.
> ...an even stronger indicator is that the Biden administration seems to have asked two multi-decade long FDA vaccine approval experts to resign following them authoring this report saying that the evidence didn't support the widespread use of boosters as a public health measure.
What you stated did not occur.
What did happen was that the FDA and CDC got into a procedural slap-fight, and because the CDC gave advice first and the White House signaled public acceptance of that advice before the FDA's panel had a chance to finish two people resigned in protest.
Let's break down why the post above is erroneous:
- "Biden administration seems to have asked" no factual basis.
- "authoring this report" they never authorized a report, that's what they were protesting.
- "report saying that the evidence didn't support the widespread use of boosters" since the FDA's Office of Vaccines Research and Review hasn't published a report you cannot state what is in the report.
What did occur is that the two resigning panelists published a review in The Lancet[0] where they essentially said they felt more data was needed to approve boosters and that the WH approval on the CDC's recommendation was premature (although they also said their view may not match the FDA's view as a whole so YMMV what the final FDA report says).
By the way I actually agree with the two FDA panelists on this one, and think the WH jumped the gun. But regardless of my feelings the "Biden had vaccine experts resign to push through the booster" comment above is problematic.
> - "authoring this report" they never authorized a report, that's what they were protesting.
You are commenting on a HN story which is literally linking directly to the document they authored.
I hope you will delete your misguided and grossly uncivil comment in the time that the site lets you do so, and consider offering another response when you've actually read the article that you're commenting on!
> the FDA and CDC got into a procedural slap-fight, and because the CDC gave advice first
The CDC statement is here: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0818-covid-19-boost... you can see that it is unambiguously conditional on FDA approval: "We have developed a plan to begin offering these booster shots this fall subject to FDA conducting an independent evaluation and determination of the safety and effectiveness of a third dose of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines".
> "Biden had vaccine experts resign to push through the booster" comment above is problematic.
This is a false and fabricated quotation, which I did not say at any point. Your inclusion of it makes it extremely hard to see your comment as a good faith attempt to communicate.
> You are commenting on a HN story which is literally linking directly to the document they authored.
You're conflating the timeline and facts a lot. Here is what you stated happened above:
- FDA panelist published a report -> Biden admin asked them to resign -> they resigned.
Here is what actually happened:
- CDC published a report -> WH accepted the CDC's report -> WH signaled moving forward with boosters -> FDA panelists who never got to publish resign -> FDA panelists author review paper in The Lancet critical of boosters (what this article is about) -> [Future] FDA publish their official recommendation
The timelines are completely different (e.g. resign before Vs. after publication), what we're talking about being published is different (e.g. FDA official report Vs. Lancet review), and the whole "asked to resign" is nowhere to be seen.
> This is a false and fabricated quotation, which I did not say at any point.
You said this verbatim:
> Biden administration seems to have asked two multi-decade long FDA vaccine approval experts to resign
You haven't defended or sourced that. Want to go ahead and do that rather than acting offended by my shorthand characterization of it?
I'm fairly convinced that the pharmaceutical companies want Uncle Sam to buy and mandate 350 million shots per year and that's why the boosters are being pushed and combined with flu shots, while Dear Leader figures out the best way to dictate the health choices of his subjects without so much as first having Congress vote on it.
It’s not hard data. It’s nonsense. There are so many confounding factors that comparing Israel and Sweden is non-sensical.
Hard data is easily available directly from the horse’s mouth [1].
As of today, in Israel, for age 60+, per 100K population. Unvaxxed are 4.5X more likely to be seriously ill compared to 2 shot vaccinated and 40X compared to 3 shot.
For under 60. The same ratios per 100K are 3x and 10x.
They're different things entirely. Think of OLAP cubes as more of a model, a set of language (measures, dimensions) for expressing all kinds of aggregation but not necessarily prescribing the how. Column store is the new how so you can still have OLAP queries against it.
A corollary is that SQLite is as ubiquitous to structured storage as JavaScript is to programming and it too lacks the exact decimal representation available as DECIMAL(precision, scale) in other SQL engines.
These are not fatal flaws, IMO, just gaps in need of attention.
Great news, domain constraint enforcement is a welcome new feature. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater; being able to specify an ANYTYPE/VARIANT column on a STRICT table would make this feature more useful. The canonical use case for ANYTYPE is a BIGTABLE or Entity–Attribute–Value (EAV) model.
I haven't checked recently, but I was unable to determine the type of ? parameters in SQLite prepared statements. Maybe this is something that can also be accommodated with STRICT tables.
I'm interested in the API interface while the string literal example is more about the SQL language. JDBC has long provided prepared statement metadata that is used extensively by numerous tools.
The paper An early Miocene extinction in pelagic sharks [1]:
> We present evidence for a previously unknown major extinction event in sharks that occurred in the early Miocene, ~19 million years ago. During this interval, sharks virtually disappeared from open-ocean sediments, declining in abundance by >90% and morphological diversity by >70%, an event from which they never recovered. This abrupt extinction occurred independently from any known global climate event and ~2 million to 5 million years before diversifications in the highly migratory, large-bodied predators that dominate pelagic ecosystems today, indicating that the early Miocene was a period of rapid, transformative change for open-ocean ecosystems.
Nicholas has Waded (pun intended) into the waters of irrational horror over gain-of-function research that seems to gain viral traction following every spill-over event. The only argument presented in the article that leans towards the lab-leak hypothesis is the human-preffered double CGG codon that appears in the furin cleavage site; this is nothing like a smoking gun, IMO. Yesterday's TWiV 751 covered a paper The furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is required for transmission in ferrets [1] which has the following abstract:
> To investigate the importance of the spike polybasic CS of SARS-CoV-2 (PRRAR), a number of spike mutants predicted to modulate the efficiency of furin cleavage were generated (Fig. 1a), including: substituting two upstream arginines to produce a monobasic CS similar to SARS-CoV spike (monoCS), replacing the tribasic CS with the furin CS of a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza haemagglutinin containing seven basic amino acids (H5CS) and two naturally occurring deletions seen following passage in Vero E6 cells and/or in clinical isolates21,26. The first deletion removes eight amino acids including all three arginines of the PRRAR site (ΔCS), while the other removes five flanking amino acids but retains the tribasic CS (Δflank). The mutations were engineered into a spike expression plasmid to enable cell surface expression and generation of coronavirus lentiviral PVs. In addition, to study the importance of the PRRAR motif in the context of live virus, we used a naturally occurring Vero-cell-adapted mutant SARS-CoV-2, ΔCS26. This variant and the wild-type (WT) virus from which it was derived were cloned by limiting dilution to enable studies using individual genotypes.
This is the horror of in vitro and in vivo viral lab research and the result is a magnificent advancement of our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the furin cleavage site, and its role in TMPRSS2 assisted membrane entry. This research follows the equally eye-opening paper covered in TWiV 715 that explained why hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) failed; Vero E6 cells lack TMPRRS2 so HCQ fully blocks entry via endocytosis. It should be noted that this study includes MERS-CoV which also has a furin cleavage site; falsifying one of the claims of Wade's article.
Regardless, lab experiments begin with one or more viral isolates and molecular clock techniques should show that the original Wuhan variant has almost identical non-coding genome segments compared to existing lab isolates. The RaTG13 sequence is a very distant relative using this measure. Also, RaTG13 is not an isolate, only an RNA sample collected in wild bat anal swabs. Conflating viral isolates with RNA samples seems to be a common error; an entry in a genetic database does not imply that a viable viral line exists in a lab. A RaTG13 lab isolate would have been an important achievement to further our scientific understanding.
I'm confused by the dismissals of the natural origins hypothesis. The horseshoe bat roosts, that are studied, are mostly found in or near Kunming, Yunnan. This lush wild area is part of the Lancang/Mekong River watershed/ecosystem shared by nocturnal bats and nocturnal arboreal mammals like palm civets, pangolins, and raccoon dogs. The nearby villages contain people engaged in guano collection, the wildlife trade, and domestic livestock farming.
The average incubation time of COVID-19 is 4.5 days. Armed with Google maps and a basic understanding of planes, trains, and automobiles we can gauge travel time from Kunming Airport to either Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (2 hr 5 min) or Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (2 hrs). In 2003, SARS-1 emerged in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) and the now demonized Dr. Zheng-li Shi and her team traced the origins to palm civets (the intermediate host). Why is this so hard? Why do we not ridicule the assumption that travel between major Chinese transportation hubs must leave a wake of infections along the path?
Finally, Wade's article mentions a U.S. State Department claim [2]:
> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
If true, this is an important early super-spreader event but the remainder of the release consists of a facile analysis performed by people more knowledgeable in geopolitics than science.
From 2014, Host cell entry of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus after two-step, furin-mediated activation of the spike protein [1]:
> Such furin-mediated activation is unusual in that it occurs in part during virus entry. Our findings may explain the polytropic nature, pathogenicity, and life cycle of this zoonotic coronavirus.
MERS-CoV uses furin cleavage of S1/S2 but it does not bind to ACE2 like SARS-CoV-2.
[1] https://g.co/gemini/share/9bde4caabf2c