Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
The latest vaccine stats from CDC:
The latest stats show a rolling average about 44K cases daily (note that fewer cases are reported on weekends). That's still well above the roughly 11K pace last July; I'm not sure if the next step is to declare the pandemic an endemic, and if so, the time frame and criteria. We continue to see the rollback of policies in principally Dem-controlled states and especially municipalities (Republican states generally never implemented Draconian policies or relatively earlier rolled back whatever restrictions had been implemented, and in fact moved to liberalize any local/county restrictions.) Most notably, NYC's newly elected mayor has rolled back the controversial vaccine mandate for eatery patrons and of course school mask mandates. Locally, a government client, noting the low risk profile, has upgraded the category, allowing supervisors to bring more employees (i.e., remote) on site and has relaxed masking protocols. As I write, Hawaii became the last state to drop the indoor mask mandate.
Other Notes
It's been interesting binge-watching House MD a decade later. I picked up some details I didn't know, like House and his boss/love Lisa Cuddy were once classmates. There were his arch-nemeses:Vogler, a black pharmaceutical executive who has sway over the hospital because of a significant donatortion obsessed with firing idiosyncratic House; Tritter, a detective who was determined to bring House down over an incident over leaving him with a thermometer in his rectum. You know if the antagonists prevail, the series comes to an end; you're left wondering how House survives. I remembered the Tritter episodes the first time around, but a lot of other episodes I didn't watch or couldn't remember: even major plot angles like House's failed relationship with Cuddy, his bounceback wedding to a sweet Eastern European girl, and (literally) crashing Cuddy's house party. I remembered the final scene of House and ironically cancer-ridden Wilson motorcycling away in the finale, but not the setup, including House's interrupting Wilson, who is delivering House's eulogy. The storyline doesn't really lend itself to a reboot; House is officially "dead", but the emergence of a new genius diagnostician would almost certainly arouse suspicion. Still, there isn't closure: what happens after Wilson passes in 6 months or so? There's a series in there somewhere; I'm not sure: maybe a fugitive healer?
I think I've been watching too many historian Brion McClanahan clips because he appeared in a few dreams as my no-nonsense professor. Oddly enough, he wasn't teaching history; he was more like a business strategy MBA professor. I was in a few group projects from hell during my college years. In particular, I've probably touched on one bad experience from hell at UH. I had recently been accepted into the MIS PhD program and had enrolled in a core systems analysis class. Now I always excelled in my classes and made innumerable Dean's Lists; I wasn't obsessed with grades, but I felt pressure to do well in the course.
The professor required a group presentation, a more detailed presentation on some themes in our course text (off the top of my head, I think ours was based on certain dated IBM methodologies). I think the founders of the group I joined were a couple of Pakistani PLM/Operation Research doctoral students probably minoring in MIS. I had specifically negotiated writing the group report. A few others joined the group subsequently. Long story short, the two founders had found some marketing hype from IBM and demanded I include it verbatim in the report. I refused for ethics reasons and worried about the professor docking us for including promotional material. The two guys responded by reneging on their commitment to me on the paper. They won a group vote, mostly newer members, uncomfortable with the conflict, siding with the group founders. I went to the professor who said she couldn't do a new group at this point (I don't think I went into the details of the dispute; after all, I didn't have access to their report--all I knew was what they demanded me to do). Eventually she told me to try to work it out with the group, but she would give me a workaround if I couldn't work it out. What I didn't know is she also talked to the other faction and had told them she would give me a workaround. And so I showed up to the next group meeting and it took all of about 15 seconds for them to tell me to go to hell. With all due respect, she's a nice, highly competent professor, but she had set me up for failure.
That wasn't the end of the story. I had worked on my part of the presentation, in which I had creatively integrated not-so-obvious discussion of Richard Nolan's stage hypothesis. So the professor allowed the rest of the group to present first and I would have the last 5 minutes. I guess I shouldn't have been shocked, given the fact they were willing to plagiarize IBM marketing material, but I soon discovered they had plagiarized my own presentation--which largely preempted it. So after they were done, the malcontents sat in the first row of the class and loudly talked deliberately, while I went through my presentation. I was furious after class, confronting the professor, who had done nothing during all this nonsense. She simply responded by telling me she had assigned me an A on my presentation.
Post incident: an MBA student in a neighboring PhD student office
cubicle told me EC, a female member of the group (who had voted against
me), was "interested". Not a chance in hell from my perspective.
Let's just say if and when I assigned group projects as a graduate fellow and as a professor, I approached things differently. For one thing, there's often a free rider problem, and it's difficult to say who did what. Probably the most amusing anecdote was in the UH DSS class I was teaching: I didn't recognize a clean-shaven student wearing a suit for his presentation.
