Matthew Yglesias: Let's get more people vaccinated. One great piece of news about life in the United States of America in July of 2021 is that widely available mRNA Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna are highly effective. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/6: Vaccine Patent Suspension. The Biden administration’s latest strategy for the pandemic is to suspend the vaccine patents without compensation. Our life expectancies are lower than they were last week. (more)

SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, also known as lineage B.1.617.2, is a variant of lineage B.1.617 of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.[1] It was first detected in India in late 2020.[2][3] The World Health Organization (WHO) named it the Delta variant on 31 May 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Delta_variant

CDC warns this is ‘pivotal moment’ in fight against delta variant (of COVID-19). The delta variant, first detected in India, now represents more than 83 percent of cases circulating in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People infected with the variant appear to carry a viral load that is more than 1,000 times that of those infected with earlier forms of the virus, allowing the virus to spread rapidly among unvaccinated people, scientists have found. (more)

Emily Oster: Kids and the Delta Variant: Should you Act Differently?. Vaccines we have remain highly effective against the delta variant. The presence of the variants is an extra reason to get vaccinated, not a reason to not be vaccinated. Virtually all COVID-19 deaths in the US at this point are among unvaccinated individuals (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/08: Delta Takes Over. Delta variant is now two thirds of sequenced samples from the past week, (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/01: Don’t Panic. The case numbers this week were clearly bad news. The raw count was somewhat bad news, and the positive test percentage increase was very bad news. It would be easy to treat the whole shift as fully ‘real,’ attribute it all to Delta variant, and panic. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 6/17 : One Last Scare. The one last scare, from America’s perspective, is the Delta variant. If we can remain stable or improving once Delta takes over, then barring another even more infectious variant, we’ve won. If and where we can’t do that, it’s not over. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/15: Rates of Change. Cases rose by over 60% in America this week, and we’re seeing large jumps in cases around the world. I am highly suspicious about the jump in the rate of increase, but Delta variant certainly seems to be the real deal, and this was well above my expectations. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 6/10: Somebody Else’s Problem. This week’s post includes some non-time-sensitive items from last week, including much of the section on the lab leak hypothesis, as my available time last week was limited (more)

Initial Coin Offering - like IPO but for a CryptoCurrency (more)

a startup looking to release movies – early offerings include a biopic about the founder of the car company and his feud with the founder of Ferrari – has raised a whopping $575 million off its private sale of TTU crypto tokens from investors including BlockTower Capital and even a prince. With that, the startup, called TaTaTu, has raised the third largest round ever using the initial coin offering (ICO) model – surpassed only by EOS and Telegram, according to data from CoinDesk’s ICO Tracker. https://www.coindesk.com/575-million-ico-royal-backing-crazy-might-real (more)

Tether is a controversial[1] cryptocurrency with tokens issued by Tether Limited, which in turn is controlled by the owners of Bitfinex.[2][3] Tether Limited formerly falsely[2] claimed that each token was backed by one United States dollar, but on 14 March 2019 changed the backing to include loans to affiliate companies.[4] The Bitfinex exchange was the subject of a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General for using Tether's funds to cover up $850 million in funds missing since mid-2018.[5][6] The investigation found that iFinex — the operator of Bitfinex and Tether — made false statements about the backing of the Tether and about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars between the two companies to cover up the truth about massive losses by Bitfinex. According to the New York Attorney General, "Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie".[7] Tether is called a stablecoin because it was originally designed to always be worth $1.00, maintaining $1.00 in reserves for each tether issued.[8] Nevertheless, Tether Limited states that owners of tethers have no contractual right, other legal claims, or guarantee that tethers will be redeemed or exchanged for dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)

Bitfinex is a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc., which is headquartered in Hong Kong and registered in the British Virgin Islands.[1][2] Their customers' money has been stolen or lost in several incidents, and they have been unable to secure normal banking relationships. Research suggests that price manipulation of bitcoin on Bitfinex accounted for about half of the price increase of bitcoin in late 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfinex

Telegram is a free and open source, cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging (IM) software. This service also provides end-to-end encrypted video calling,[14] VoIP, file sharing and several other features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software) (more)

Telegram Open Network (The Open Network, abb. as TON) is a blockchain-based decentralized computer network, originally developed by Telegram team. In May 2020, Telegram withdrew from the project after litigation from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).[1] Free TON and TON Foundation projects continued development of the technology, referring to it as The Open Network.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_Open_Network (more)

EOS.IO is a blockchain protocol based on the cryptocurrency EOS. The smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees and also conduct millions of transactions per second... Based on a white paper published in 2017, the EOSIO platform was developed by the private company block.one and released as open-source software on June 1, 2018. In order to ensure widespread distribution of the native cryptocurrency at the launch of the blockchain, one billion tokens were distributed as ERC-20 tokens by block.one. This provided the distribution to allow anyone to launch the EOS blockchain once the software was released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EOS.IO (more)

Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH or Ξ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. After Bitcoin, it is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.[1] Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain.[2][3] Ethereum was proposed in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. In 2014, development was crowdfunded, and the network went live on 30 July 2015.[4] The platform allows developers to deploy permanent and immutable decentralized applications onto it, with which users can interact.[5][6] Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide a broad array of financial services without the need for typical financial intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, or banks, such as allowing cryptocurrency users to borrow against their holdings or lend them out for interest.[7][8] Ethereum also allows for the creation and exchange of NFTs, which are non-interchangeable tokens connected to digital works of art or other real-world items and sold as unique digital property. Additionally, many other cryptocurrencies operate as ERC-20 tokens on top of the Ethereum blockchain and have utilized the platform for initial coin offerings (ICOs)... Buterin argued that Bitcoin and blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and needed a scripting language for application development that could lead to attaching real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain... Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014.[17] During the conference, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio (who financed the project) rented a house in Miami with Buterin to develop a fuller sense of what Ethereum might become.[17] Di Iorio invited friend Joseph Lubin, who invited reporter Morgen Peck, to bear witness.[17] Peck subsequently wrote about the experience in Wired.[18] Six months later the founders met again in a house in Zug, Switzerland, where Buterin told the founders that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum (more)

Sharding is one of several popular methods being explored by developers to increase transactional throughput. Simply stated, sharding is a way of partitioning to spread out the computational and storage workload across a peer-to-peer (P2P) network so that each node isn't responsible for processing the entire network's transactional load. Instead, each node only maintains information related to its partition, or shard. (re blockchain) (more)

A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires coordinating processes to reach consensus, or agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Example applications of consensus include agreeing on what transactions to commit to a database in which order, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts. Real-world applications often requiring consensus include cloud computing, clock synchronization, PageRank, opinion formation, smart power grids, state estimation, control of UAVs (and multiple robots/agents in general), load balancing, blockchain, and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science) (more)