Mehul Kamdar

Mehul Kamdar

Data scientist, developer, writer, bibliophile.

On Mumbai Covid seroprevalence, India’s new education policy, the history of CSS, and the debacle of US tech antitrust hearings

  • Interpreting Mumbai’s sero-prevalence survey results with a summary of the paper itself.
    • “Mumbai’s population is taken to be 13.5 million…. It is assumed that 41.3% reside in slums. From this we can infer seroprevalence in the city to be 0.57(0.413) + (0.16)0.587=0.32933, namely 33%. This would amount to 4.5 million people having antibodies to SARS-CoV2 by the time of the serosurvey.”
    • “All [simulations] give prevalence estimates of 39-42% in the city today.”
    • “I estimate that Mumbai’s official count is missing at least 50% of all its fatalities today…. Put simply, Mumbai’s data has a much stronger signature of missing COVID-19 fatalities than Delhi’s.”
    • “Although a naive calculation gives an IFR of 0.12%, plausible simulations consistent with Mumbai’s early data give IFR values ranging from 0.23% to 0.45%. Higher values are possible if we believe that more than 70% of Mumbai’s COVID-19 fatalities had not been recorded by July 8th.”

  • India released its massive National Education Policy 2020 (this is a link to the 66 page pdf of the policy itself). There’s been lots of sub-par commentary around the Policy so far - you’re better off just skimming the Policy yourself. If you were to read one quick article about it, check out The Wire’s article. And since I can’t help but indulge in the sub-par commentary, check out my blog post on the topic.

  • Remarkable overview & history of CSS.
    • For us oldies who had the audacity of trying to create and style webpages back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, this was a treat to read. But it’s length notwithstanding, I think it’s almost a must-read for anyone trying to design any web pages today.
  • The US antitrust hearings featuring Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) happened on Wednesday.
    • The Wired gives the lawmakers a B-minus. As they note, “overall, the subcommittee managed to highlight a number of clear instances of the four companies buying up the competition to make themselves stronger, or discriminating against rivals on their own platforms. Where they struggled, however, was linking those two things - making the case that the rise of monopolies and the loss of genuine competition have broadly harmful consequences.”
    • Every one and their children (on tech twitter and the Alex Tabarrok types) praised Jeff Bezos’s statement.
    • But maybe they should focus more on the internal documents that show almost all of them as ruthless businessmen with perhaps “winning” as their only goal.
  • And for some escapism, check out How Gödel’s Proof Works
    • It’s a very simple, gentle introduction to Gödel numbers and his two theorems: if a set of axioms is consistent, then it is incomplete (the first incompleteness theorem) and that no set of axioms can prove its own consistency (the second incompleteness theorem).