Early on in the pandemic, the aerosol scientist Jose-Luis Jimenez made available a Google Sheets implementation of the standard model for airborne disease transmission: the Wells-Riley model. This was a very nice idea, to provide a rational way to estimate the risk of transmission. The Sheets implementation is very open about the (many) assumptions made by the model, and it cites supporting literature. It is a good piece of work.
Is mpox mainly a sexually transmitted disease with rarer transmission across the air like COVID?
The latest virus to make the news is the Clade Ib strain of mpox, it looks like a person was infected overseas but infected two members of their household in the UK. There seems to be a lot of confusion as to how it spreads, The Guardian, the NHS, and the USA’s CDC all have different ideas.
The COVID-19 enquiry is back and we have weak leadership, responsibility dodging and lack of the full range of technical expertise
The UK’s COVID-19 enquiry is back and it does not make cheerful watching. I first watched testimony of Dr Barry Jones, Chair of the Covid Airborne Transmission Alliance (CATA). He is was impressive, and is clearly very very unhappy with the IPC Cell (IPC=Infection Prevention and Control), and I agree he has reason to be. The IPC cell was set up at the start of the pandemic and is somehow part of the then Public Health England (PHE) (now renamed as Health Security Agency) and the NHS. It issued “guidance” on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19, that went to PHE who seemed to rubber stamp it and send it to hospitals who all obeyed it. I then watched testimony (continued here) from the Chair of the IPC, for a year of the pandemic, Dr Lisa Ritchie. Dr Ritchie was less impressive.
Move over quantum computing, neuromorphic iontronics is here
About 100 years ago, quantum physics was invented. Then around 70 years later in the ’90s along came quantum computing. And now quantum computing is quite topical. Similarly, over a hundred years ago electrokinetics was developed, then in the early 2000s, along came iontronics, which is on the rise. Iontronics is to electrokinetics roughly as quantum computing is to quantum physics. Quantum computing is an application of quantum physics to doing computations, or making machines to do computing. Electrokinetics is moving around ions etc, often in solution, while iontronics is moving around ions to do computations, or make a computer.
Bullshit images
Hicks, Humphries and Slater have recently published a paper entitled ChatGPT is bullshit. First of all, 10/10 to them for the paper title. Their point is simple:
Applications of these [LLMs like ChatGPT] systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs.
I think this is a fair point, LLMs do produce results that are just wrong, and seem rather indifferent to whether their output is correct.
Not all viruses are the same
Above are schematics of 4 very different viruses (schematic from the PDB). From left to right: The giant of the 4 is the mpox or monkeypox virus, that is a current cause of concern, the WHO declared mpox a “public health emergency of international concern” last week. We appear to have a very poor understanding of how mpox is transmitted except via “close [(broken?) skin to (broken?) skin, prolonged?] contact”. Next is HIV, which is transmitted via sex and blood. The third is SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19 and the recent pandemic, which is mainly transmitted across the air. Finally, the tiny one is poliovirus, the cause of polio, which is transmitted in food/water.
Can LLMs like ChatGPT fit a straight line to noisy data?
Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot are very topical nowadays, and they can all write Python code. Up till the last academic year*, I had a coursework element for my biological physics teaching that was basically to chose variables correctly and then to fit a straight line to noisy data**. I did this partly because data fitting is such a useful skill that I thought using coursework to push students into practicing it, would help them – not sure the coursework was that popular but I contend it taught useful skills.
The students’ performance was mixed, and I was curious to see if ChatGPT et al could do better, given a good prompt. ChatGPT itself couldn’t (at first go), but Gemini’s, Claude’s and Copilot’s code was correct.
Making pretty pictures
Summer at university is quieter so there is more time for doing time consuming but fun things like doing some nice figures. I like doing pretty figures but it can take more time than I have in term time. This is especially true of 3D figures that always take a lot of fiddling with details until they look OK. The image above is of the magnetic field B (green field lines and arrows) produced by a magnetic dipole*, which can be produced by the current loop shown as the red donut.
Scientists dueling via Guildford’s MPs
In the general election, I voted for Zöe Franklin (Lib Dems) not Angela Richardson (Conservative), and was happy when Franklin won, but to be fair I think Richardson took her responsibilities as a constituency MP seriously. A few months ago I wrote to Richardson to express puzzlement at some of the NHS’s guidance on preventing airborne diseases spreading. Richardson then forwarded it to the office of the then minister Maria Caulfield, who replied. The reply is at the bottom of this post as a pdf.
Apparently crazy advice from the NHS
Unfortunately there is currently a resurgence of measles in the UK. Measles is notoriously highly infectious amongst those who are not vaccinated. So it makes sense that the NHS should offer guidance on how to minimise measles transmission. But this guidance contains a recommendation which is, on the surface, just bizarre.
Chance & Necessity 