Re: Sage & onion
Not my field really, but John Carmack worked on the Imperial College model for a bit before the Microsoft people got involved. The quote below comes from a couple of parts of Carmack's twitter thread about the code...
"Before the GitHub team started working on the code it was a single 15k line C file that had been worked on for a decade, and some of the functions looked like they were machine translated from Fortran. There are some tropes about academic code that have grains of truth, but it turned out that it fared a lot better going through the gauntlet of code analysis tools I hit it with than a lot of more modern code. There is something to be said for straightforward C code. Bugs were found and fixed, but generally in paths that weren't enabled or hit."
It is also worth pointing out that the broad ballpark results of the model were similar in general outline to those produced by a team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They have put a simplified model up as a Web page for educational purposes. You can twiddle around with that and get thoroughly depressed. You need to read the help page and the associated paper to understand how the variables and interventions interact. The point is that these programs are not systems engineering, they are research. We draw some comfort when different research teams using different methodologies, implemented using different tools give broadly similar results.
Finally, it might be worth checking the last paragraph of the article quoted in the parent thread to this. The - no doubt very talented and effective - software engineer who looked at the code seems to have some interesting ideas about how to manage public health which probably lie quite a few standard deviations from the views of the majority in the UK.
(I still think that Ferguson should release the original file)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
