adtechperson

I have worked in ad tech for a while and I am not sure that I really believe a lot of this article.

I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about. Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical goods, since most of those will require an email address and facebook can use that to link up the sales.

Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).

App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would definitely be affected.

I saw him live in Foxboro MA in the 1994 world cup match vs Greece (before he was disqualified for drug use). The crowd reaction to him was amazing. Every time he ran near the section I was in the crowd would go crazy just because he was close, even if the ball was far away. It was an amazing experience.

Fir waves are pretty obscure.

Agree about the clusters. I am most familiar with the northern forests of New England (strictly as an amateur) and they are a wonderfully dynamic place. From big events like the Hurricane of '38, to small wind storms, fires, ice storms, and just an individual tree getting old and falling over, they are in a wonderful constant state of flux.

One of the saddest things is the loss (or coming loss) of so many important species. The American Chestnut and Elms are long since gone. The Hemlock and Ash are also under threat from pests and the Beech may be as well.

True, although the notion of a climax forest in New England is a bit of a myth, since they are constantly changing. For example, there is something called a "fir wave" where waves of fir trees die and are replaced with other trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fir_wave

For more information, this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9698421-nature-guide-to-... has wonderful information about how northern forests change over time.

A friend of mine had a 10 acre field in Vermont with bad soil. He did not mow it for a few years and the trees just took over. It took him years and a lot of hard work to clear it back to a field. Certainly in Vermont, the forests are voracious. They will quickly take over almost any open land. Obviously, different parts of the world have very different ecosystems, but in New England, I do not think replanting trees is needed.

Some of the leading vaccines present their own logistical challenges. Some of the leading vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer) are quite fragile and are hard to transport and store. Moderna needs to be shipped and stored at -20C (-4F) this is tricky but not that hard, since it is in the range of commercial freezers. The Pfizer vaccine needs to be shipped and stored at -70C (-94F) which is outside the range of ordinary freezers (bio labs have them but doctors labs do not). Pfizer can be packed in dry ice to ship, but the ice needs to be replenished every 24 hours. https://twitter.com/LizSzabo/status/1298646754884300800

There is no compelling evidence proving that the disease cannot spike in NYC.

There are small hints that it MIGHT not be possible. The antibody tests measured the infection rate around April 15 or so, the number should be higher now. Second, there is some evidence that a percentage of people don't develop antibodies (only T cells) but are immune. Finally, we don't really know what is required for herd immunity.

None of this is to say you are wrong, just why it MIGHT be possible that NYC cannot have a second spike.

(herd immunity question): https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-tricky-math-of-covid-19-h...

(T cells and immunity) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.29.174888v1

(peer reviewed article on NYC antibody testing). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104727972...

That ruffed grouse video is great but does not really do justice to how startling that sound can be. Imagine walking through the woods, no one around, and all of a sudden it sounds like a lawn mower starting up very close to you. It is unbelievably startling, even if you know what it is.

I agree that the goals seem to have changed. We have never contained a widespread respiratory virus without a vaccine and the fastest vaccine ever developed was Mumps and that took 4 years. I guess the best hope now is that by slowing it down, we have more time to develop better treatment options. Or maybe with how much effort is spent on vaccine development, we can develop one in a year? The optimistic estimates for vaccine development seem to put the timeframe at around a year at the earliest? Are we expecting to contain this for a year via social distancing?

This also came out today. http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/media... We really have no idea what the IFR is, just that is probably in the .1% to 1% range. Also, it takes around 2 weeks to develop antibodies, so the tests are showing how many people had covid 2 weeks before testing.

There is a limited amount of time we can be on a lockdown. For example, in Massachusetts where all non essential business are shut down, pretty much all routine medical care has stopped. The major safety net hospital in Boston is laying off 10% of the workforce because they are not seeing routine patients). So the time in lockdown needs to be spent wisely, otherwise we will create more health problems than we solve. 8-9 million people a year die from cardiovascular disease in the US. If that rises by just 5%, we will have made things a lot worse

SAT scores is heavily correlated with income level (the data I have is for the standard tests, not the subject ones, but I would guess they follow a similar pattern).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

I applaud the MIT decision in this area.

Pretty impressive stuff. The fraudsters are very sophisticated. I never would have thought BGP hijacking would be used for ad fraud

This is not a new problem. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America" in 1835:

"It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich. The poor man has not always security to produce, even in a civil case; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. A wealthy person, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil cases; nay, more, if he has committed a crime, he may readily elude punishment by breaking his bail. Thus all the penalties of the law are, for him, reduced to fines. Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of which I speak are English, and the Americans have retained them, although repugnant to the general tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas."

I have worked for a number of ad tech companies over the years.

If this really is happening (and it seems possible it could be coincidence) the most likely explanation is cross device targeting using IP address.

So, most ad tech companies do cross device targeting, using device maps bought from other companies (Drawbridge being one). These companies attempt to assign a variety of devices from the same person to a single advertising profile. The simplest way they do this is by IP address. So if they have an IP address with a small number of devices, they decide it is probably a household and assign all those devices to the same advertising profile.

So, by being on the same wifi together (either at your place or hers) they will show ads on her devices based on your behavior (and vice versa).

The other explanations are possible, but I think this is the most likely