As covid-19 has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day. Unfortunately, the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic may be even higher, for several reasons. First, the official statistics in many countries exclude victims who did not test positive for coronavirus before dying — which can be a substantial majority in places with little capacity for testing. Second, hospitals and civil registries may not process death certificates for several days, or even weeks, which creates lags in the data. And third, the pandemic has made it harder for doctors to treat other conditions and discouraged people from going to hospital, which may have indirectly caused an increase in fatalities from diseases other than covid-19.

One way to account for these methodological problems is to use a simpler measure, known as "excess deaths": take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years. We have used statistical models to create our baselines, by predicting the number of deaths each region would normally have recorded in 2020.

No, cryptocurrency is not a currency at all: it's an investment vehicle. A tool for making the rich richer. And that's putting it nicely; in reality it has a lot more in common with a Ponzi scheme than a genuine investment. What "value" does solving fake math problems actually provide to anyone? It's all bullshit.

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Maybe your cryptocurrency is different. But look: you're in really poor company. When you're the only honest person in the room, maybe you should be in a different room.

It is generally accepted that vertebrate animals experience pain; however, there is currently inconclusive evidence that the affective component of pain occurs in any invertebrate. Here, we show that octopuses, the most neurologically complex invertebrates, exhibit cognitive and spontaneous behaviors indicative of affective pain experience. In conditioned place preference assays, octopuses avoided contexts in which pain was experienced, preferred a location in which they experienced relief from pain, and showed no conditioned preference in the absence of pain. Injection site grooming occurred in all animals receiving acetic acid injections, but this was abolished by local anesthesia. Thus, octopuses are likely to experience the affective component of pain.

Are you prepared to receive and process privacy access requests in compliance with the GDPR? The following guide will help you understand your role in promoting access to data and how to create a system that saves you time and prevents damage to your reputation.

HTTP is fundamental to modern development, from frontend to backend to mobile. But like any widespread mature standard, it's got some funky skeletons in the closet.

Some of these skeletons are little-known but genuinely useful features, some of them are legacy oddities relied on by billions of connections daily, and some of them really shouldn't exist at all. Let's look behind the curtain:

Experimental and epidemiological data support community masking to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The prevention benefit of masking is derived from the combination of source control and personal protection for the mask wearer. The relationship between source control and personal protection is likely complementary and possibly synergistic¹⁴, so that individual benefit increases with increasing community mask use. Further research is needed to expand the evidence base for the protective effect of cloth masks and in particular to identify the combinations of materials that maximize both their blocking and filtering effectiveness, as well as fit, comfort, durability, and consumer appeal. Adopting universal masking policies can help avert future lockdowns, especially if combined with other non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, hand hygiene, and adequate ventilation.

Any book of Why We Sleep's length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout, in this essay, I'm going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.

Simple command line tool for text to image generation using OpenAI's CLIP and Siren.

Jamulus is software for playing music, rehearsing, or just jamming with anyone online with low latency. You can use your Windows, macOS or Linux machine to connect to Jamulus servers worldwide. Jamulus is free and you can just use your normal broadband connection. Simply connect to a public server or host your own private one. Jamulus has been in development since 2006 and is designed for high quality, low-latency sound, making it easy to play together remotely and in time.

You can see that for holding periods of less than 9 years the stock strategy is a lot more risky than the bond. However if your holding period exceeds 9 years the stock strategy is both, less risky and yielding better returns. Also notice that in long term, the width of the yield distribution for the stock strategy is about the same as for bonds, but overall it is located above bond yield distribution.

What does it all mean for regular folks that are trying to save for the retirement? Don't worry about whether the market is trending up or down, it's in a bubble or a recession is coming. You will never be able to time the market. But putting money in stocks and not touching them (other than reinvesting dividends) for long periods of time will ensure that your hard-earned money will not be lost, also giving you a chance to earn quite a healthy return - no downside and all the upside.