Re: Not to incite a language war but apparently the Corona lockdown was based on 13 year old undocumented C-Code

[Anatoly Chernyshev <achernyshev@gmail.com>]

Hi Olivier,

Thank you for your generous offer. However, this model is an (unorthodox) academic exercise, which draws attention of very few people. So, the development of a UI will be unwarranted waste of time (on my side in any case).

As the current pandemics draws to a close, I probably will make yet another updated forecast in the next week or so, and be through with it. This is not the main application area in our company anyways.

If anything, I'd rather see the GUI implemented in GNOGA. So that the software would automatically download the countries statistics from a WHO server, and update the graphs accordingly on a web page. That would require a major overhaul of my current code though...

That's probably what we can do for the next pandemic, due in the next 8-10 years (according to the recent history). If you don't mind I'll take a rain check for your proposal. Thank you again.

Cheers,

Anatoly

On Friday, June 12, 2020 at 5:28:42 AM UTC+12, Olivier Henley wrote:
> On Saturday, May 16, 2020 at 1:01:05 AM UTC-4, Anatoly Chernyshev wrote:
> > "Clowns will dominate the pandemic-forecasting domain..."
> > 
> > I like that one...
> > 
> > Oh dear, you've lured me out. As a person who just published a Covid-19 forecasting model programmed in Ada, I can't stay away from this heated conversation.
> > 
> > There are so many concerns raised about scientists doing their rookie programming without resorting to professionals, so I don't even know where to start.
> > 
> > First of all, we are curious bunch, and learning something new (like programming) is always fun. Second, in scientific programming the chance that someone in power will lock down a country based on the output of your program is negligible (certainly it wasn't on the radars 13 years ago). Third, fourth... 
> > 
> > To make a long story short, for the experiment's sake, is there anyone willing to review my code? It's not a marvel of Ada programming, it just works.
> > 
> > Yet it's quite short - I went from the model's formulation, programming, testing, data acquisition, manuscript writeup in a matter of a fortnight.
> > 
> > If the review is useful, in terms that it helps to produce more accurate forecasts or identifies a drastic flaw in the code, I would be more than happy to do a revised version of the manuscript in a coauthorship with the reviewer(s). Or even go for a peer-reviewed publication when dust settles.
> > 
> > The model forecasts are here:
> > April 10th: https://xph.co.nz/temp/album/
> > May 12th: https://xph.co.nz/temp/album2005/
> > Some technical details: https://xph.co.nz/index.php/covid-19-progression-model/
> > The model description: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.03.20052985v1
> > 
> > This is not an epidemiology-based model (so you don't have to be one). Rather, it's a phenomenological one. It can predict what will happen, but can't (yet) say why this will happen. A contribution on the model is welcomed too.
> > 
> > The code is not published (since I didn't expect anyone would care), but I'll do it once there's interest.
> > 
> > If keen, please write to me directly: a~at~xph~dot~co~dot~nz
> > 
> > Anatoly
> 
> Hi Anatoly,
> 
> Maybe, if you agree, are interested, and your code is not a nightmare to work with (refactor to expose things needed to drive it in UI), I could find time to code a graphical tool for it. Please consider what I did for Gautier's work (the screenshot does not show but everything is dynamic and the export to .csv works like a charm). It took me half a day learning the qt5ada binding on the fly:
> 
> https://github.com/ohenley/covidsim
> 
> My plan would be quite straightforward; in loose Model-View-Controller terminology:
> 
> 1. Take your 'engine/simulation' code, make a git repo, publish it as a fork on GitHub. No fork this time if your code is not on GitHub already. Would be best for you to own it (create a Github user, upload your code, etc. But if you are not up to that, I will take care of it. You can collaborate on my repo with proper credentials explicitly set anyways.)
> 
> 2. I refactor your code to push at the frontier, only parameters and simulation outputs to be driven/drive the UI layer. I do not touch the simulation calculations, this is not my expertise, and if the engine internals break I want *you* to fix it. I only/mostly touch on the inputs and outputs of those computes for them to become parametrizable externally. (This layer is the Model, your know-how.)
> 
> 3. I create the visual layer, expose the parameters and behavior we want for the tool. (This layer is the View and Controller). I make another git repo out of this. This layer owns your layer to 'talk' with it.
> 
> We end up we 2 codebase/repos, like that, you and other scientists can fix the 'engine' without me knowing/caring because you touch on the 'model' layer only.
> 
> Anytime you come up with new features/computations etc working, you tell me, I repeat steps 2. and 3. to have the feature exposed in the visual tool.
> 
> Let me know what you think if you are interested. I will forward this to your mail too.
> 
> Olivier
> 
> p.s: If your codebase is huge/complex/lot of features maybe we can start to expose only a subset in a tool. From there, because it's available through github, people in this thread could collaborate (clone, edit, push)