Code Review of Ferguson’s Model

Lockdown Skeptics ^ | Unknown | Sue Denim

[Renkluaf]

Imperial finally released a derivative of Ferguson’s code. I figured I’d do a review of it and send you some of the things I noticed. I don’t know your background so apologies if some of this is pitched at the wrong level.

My background. I wrote software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years. Obviously I’m giving only my own professional opinion and not speaking for my current employer.

. . .

Conclusions. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.

On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers[sic] and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.

[canuck_conservative]

What’s been released on GitHub is a heavily modified derivative of it, after having been upgraded for over a month by a team from Microsoft and others.

BTW you should also include another important quote from the article:

They know their code can’t withstand scrutiny, so they hid it until professionals had a chance to fix it, but the damage from over a decade of amateur hobby programming is so extensive that even Microsoft were unable to make it run right.

[Basket_of_Deplorables]

15,000 lines of spaghetti code in a single file. And the output varies between runs, with the exact same initial conditions. Without explanation.

We put the world under house arrest for this. And won’t admit it was an awful mistake. So most places are still under some form of house arrest.

Cloward-Piven worked. The economic depression is just getting started. Hang on.

[PapaBear3625]

I am in IT, and it doesn't surprise me. In fact I wrote an email to Chanel Rion of OAN if she would ask Fauchi to release the code. This is exactly what I would expect. Academics, even in computer fields, are crap coders. What is described is probably the norm of any simulation written in academia. Never ever be impressed by an academic who has writted code.

Software in academia is written by students, under the direction of professors, neither of which have experienced the discipline of working in a professional environment where there are costs and penalties for sloppiness and unprofessional behavior.

[PapaBear3625]

I took a glance at the Github repository (and this is the version of the code that Microsoft engineers spent a month cleaning up).

When you see comments like “ Bugs found - code is stable and seems deterministic again. Will finish more tests and send pull request”, it doesn’t reassure....

[AFreeBird]

L8r