Carry The Two

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J From time to time academic journals undergo an interesting process of fission. Typically as a result of some serious dissatisfaction, the editorial board resigns en masse to set up a new journal, the publishers of the original journal build a new editorial board from scratch, and the result is two journals, one inheriting the editors and collective memory of the original journal, and the other keeping the name and the publisher. Which is the “true” successor? In practice it tends to be the one with the editors, with its sibling surviving as a zombie journal that is the successor in name only. Perhaps there are examples that go the other way, and there may be examples where both journals go on to thrive, but I have not looked closely at the examples I know about. I’m mentioning this because recently I have been involved in a rather unusual example of this phenomenon. Most cases I know of are the result either of frustration with the practices of the big commerci...

https://ift.tt/2UqndPf The adaptive-triggering policy. On page 12 of a document put out by Imperial College London , which has been very widely read and commented on, and which has had a significant influence on UK policy concerning the coronavirus, there is a diagram that shows the possible impact of a strategy of alternating between measures that are serious enough to cause the number of cases to decline, and more relaxed measures that allow it to grow again. They call this adaptive triggering : when the number of cases needing intensive care reaches a certain level per week, the stronger measures are triggered, and when it declines to some other level (the numbers they give are 100 and 50, respectively), they are lifted. If such a policy were ever to be enacted, a very important question would be how to optimize the choice of the two triggers. I’ve tried to work this out, subject to certain simplifying assumptions (and it’s important to stress right at the outset that these assu...