POLIO ERADICATION UPDATE 4-30-21

 As Zerospinzone followers know, I'm fascinated by the quest not just to control or cure deadly diseases, but to eradicate them completely. The scourge of smallpox was defeated in 1980, and we've been closing in on polio since the deployment of the first (Salk, inactivated virus) vaccine in 1954, country by country, continent by continent.

Polio has been with us for thousands of years

This depiction is from Egypt's 18th Dynasty--1403 to 1365 BC

Credit: Deutsches Grünes Kreuz

Today, the wild polio virus hangs on in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with just one case reported in each of those countries so far this year. We may really be on the verge of totally eliminating the wild polio virus from Planet Earth.

Even when that remarkable feat has been accomplished, the battle won't be over. The oral polio vaccines that have been so incredibly successful have one flaw--the attenuated viruses they use very occasionally mutate back into disease-causing variants. So far this year there have been 73 cases in 10 countries, fewer than last year at this time, but still a serious problem. 

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has developed and initiated a strategy or endgame to deal with this issue. They plan to gradually phase out the massive provision of attenuated oral vaccines, phase in the use of an inactivated-virus vaccine as needed, and, hopefully, bring the millennial reign of polio to an end.

I'll continue to report on their progress towards this grand goal.

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REA 4-30-21 

How hot will it get later this century? So hot that we'll need new terms.

 A new study paints a grim climate picture for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). 

As reported in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal NPJ/Climate and Atmospheric Science, first-of-their-kind regional climate models project prolonged, life-threatening heat waves impacting up to 600 million people in the MENA region if global warming is not brought under control. In a "business-as-usual" scenario, temperatures are projected to soar to 56 degrees Celsius (133 degrees Fahrenheit) and remain at such intolerable levels for days or weeks at a time in the second half of this century. 

We need new terms to categorize such intense, extended and deadly heat events. "Our results for a business-as-usual pathway indicate that especially in the second half of this century unprecedented super- and ultra-extreme heatwaves will emerge," says George Zittis, first author of the new study.

The authors point out that by mid-century, 90 percent of the population of the MENA region are expected to be living in cities. Cities act as "heat islands" that intensify and prolong extreme heat events. That means that a high percentage of the regions projected population of one billion will face such life-threatening conditions almost every year towards the end of the century.

"For the following decades and towards the end of the 21st century, thermal conditions in the region are projected to become particularly harsh as the so-far-unobserved and thus unprecedented "super-extreme" and "ultra-extreme" events are projected to become commonplace," the authors write.

Daily heat wave magnitude averages from 1980s projected through 2100

Credit: Zittis et al./NPJ/Climate and Atmospheric Science

If the world continues on its current business-as-usual path, the Middle East and North Africa will clearly be at risk, not just of increased human mortality, but of disruption of work, agriculture and daily life. Since the most extreme conditions this study foresees have not yet been experienced, how much personal, social, economic and political disruption they will cause remains to be seen. However, like the heat projections, those disruptions are likely to be extreme, super-extreme or ultra-extreme. And, as we know, problems that start in the Middle East do not stay in the Middle East.

If world leaders needed any more motivation to turn the looming climate catastrophe around now, here it is.

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REA/4-29-21

HOW SMART IS GOOGLE ASSISTANT?

I've pretty much given up trying to keep track of all the areas where artificial intelligence--AI--has surpassed human capabilities. AI systems now routinely beat even the most expert humans in many once-strictly human skills, from complex games such as chess and Go to more serious capabilities such as reading x-rays. 

Experts keep reassuring us that although AI can beat us at more and more specific tasks or skills, it will be a while, maybe a long while, before an AI system achieves fully human or super-human general intelligence--Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. We'll see.

Hal, what's this piece of music?

Credit: Mixcloud

 

Recently, however, I stumbled on an AI ability that amazes me.

I like classical music and have been listening to it most of my life. Over the years I've made a game of challenging myself to identify whatever piece I happen to hear. I can usually get a piece that I've heard many times, for example one of Beethoven's symphonies or Rachmaninoff's piano concertos. Even if I don't recognize the specific piece, I can usually identify the composer, for example Scarlatti or Stravinsky. And if I can't ID the composer, I can usually glean something about a piece, for example that it's from the Baroque. the Romantic period or the 20th Century.

I'm sure there are many people who can do much better. I remember that my brother's piano teacher claimed he could recognize almost any classical piece from the first few notes. But I doubt that he or any other mere human can do what Google Assistant now does thousands or millions of times per day:

If you hear a classical piece being played, and if you have an Android smartphone, ask your Google Assistant, "What piece of music is this?" Usually within a few seconds, he/she/it/they will tell you the specific piece, the composer, AND THE GROUP, ORCHESTRA OR PERFORMER PLAYING IT.

So not just Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in B-flat, but that it's being played by the Venice Baroque Orchestra, and that the soloist is Giuliano Carmignola.

In order to be able to do this, this system must have "listened to" and "memorized" just about every recording of every piece of classical music (and other musical genres as well), and be able to home in on the specific piece and the specific recording from a few-second-long snippet from anywhere in the piece, all within a few seconds.* As the Google team who developed this system write, ". . . we didn't want people to wait 10+ seconds for a result."

You can read about how Google Assistant pulls off this superhuman feat at this Google Blog post. The gist is that it maps the few seconds of music that it samples through your smartphone  into a series of overlapping 128-dimensional "fingerprints," which are then matched through a two-step process with the most similar fingerprints in the Assistant's constantly updated database of tens of millions of pieces. 

Smart as it is, the system isn't perfect. I ran an experiment asking it to identify 100 classical pieces played on the radio. It correctly identified 97 of them, but it "only" got the group or soloist right on 74 of those. When the Assistant gets something wrong, you can ask it to try again. That brought its piece recognition up to 98 percent, and its ID of the group, orchestra or soloist up to 78 percent. Interestingly, most of its mistakes on orchestras, groups or soloists were on extremely well known pieces, popular workhorses that have been recorded dozens or hundreds of times. 

As is true throughout the AI world, the Google music recognition team is constantly working to make their system even smarter. "We still think there's room for improvement though," they blog, "we don't always match when music is very quiet or in very noisy environments, and we believe we can make the system even faster."

Right now I'm listening to a very familiar piece, The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas. I recognized it right away, and of course so did Google Assistant. But it really pisses me off that the Assistant didn't just identify the piece, but could tell that it was the version recorded by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra led by Kent Nagano. Damned showoff.

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*To be fair, it appears that the Shazam app, now owned by Apple, has pretty much the same capabilities, although it seems a tad slower to me.

VOTING FOR COVID

If we needed any proof that people's political beliefs shape their reality, this graph from the New York Times provides it:

Credit: NYT, 4/18/21

On the left, appropriately, are the states in which more people voted for Biden in 2020, and on the right, states with more Trump voters. Vaccine hesitancy rates range from less than 10% in true-blue Vermont and Massachusetts to over 30% in true-to-Trump Wyoming. The Times didn't provide a regression line or a correlation coefficient, but having dealt with lots of graphs of this kind, I can say that it's the kind of distribution any researcher would be thrilled to see. 

We're now seeing real-world data showing that fully vaccinated Americans have about one chance in 10,000 of contracting COVID-19, while their un-vaccinated fellow citizens have close to one chance in 10 of catching the virus, and among those who do, close to two percent will die. If the political beliefs reflected in this chart continue to determine vaccination rates, we're going to see two Americas. One that's highly vaccinated, where there's low risk of catching COVID, and where people can return to their normal personal, social and economic activities.  In the other, poorly vaccinated America, people may also be returning to their normal activities, but they'll be doing so with a continued high risk of illness and death from COVID.

Will that contrast wake people up or change many minds.? I doubt it.  As evidence, check this story of death-by-denial, although it's from Norway, not North Dakota.

COVID-19 UPDATE FROM JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY--4/16/21

"Even though we feel we've moved on, the pandemic hasn't."

Credit: CDC

I just tuned into the latest Covid-19 update from experts at Johns Hopkins University. Epidemiologist William Moss and Professor of Public Health Jennifer Nuzzo brought us up to date on the vaccine rollout, vaccine safety--especially the Johnson & Johnson blood-clot issue, and the current rates of infection across the US.

They point out that the CDC is evaluating the J&J problem and will meet and make recommendations a week from today. The blood clots that have been reported are very serious but extremely rare--about one per million, so the risks of the J&J vaccine are far less than the benefits. Still, Moss and Nuzzo are concerned that this will be a major setback for vaccine acceptance in the US and worldwide. "The next big problem will be addressing vaccine hesitancy," Nuzzo says.

Concerning the pandemic their bottom line was clear: we need to continue to be very careful.

Some quotes:

Moss:

     "Daily case numbers are still dangerously high."

     "We have to maintain our vigilance and hold the line a while longer."

Nuzzo:

     Even though we feel we've moved on, the pandemic hasn't.