computer models are always “best guesses” They are not scientific
GIGO applies here garbage in garbage out
No, there’s far more incomprehensible, political and asinine “climate-change” models out there.
“Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time”
I suspect that it was not a mistake.
FORTRAN has nothing to do with any problem.
This author is nuts.
Characterizing this as a "mistake" is extremely generous.
How is such a model used?
It is simple. The "expert" runs the model multiple times.
They may tweak inputs a bit if the results don't "look right".
When the results "look right" (confirm the "expert's opinion"), they are accepted and treated as gospel.
It is the way it works.
Neil Ferguson is getting major league high fives from the Deep State. The Wuhan Flu has been their most effective weapon yet in their fight for global domination. Don’t you worry about Professor Ferguson. He’s being richly compensated for his statistical “mistake”!
There’s COBOL stuff out there that’s as bad or even worse and COBOL programmers are dying off.
Where’s the quality control?
One “model”?
Was this critiqued? Peer reviewed? If so by whom?
Good grief, I swear I NEVER Thought I’d see such incompetence and evil
God Bless The Greatest Generation and before, what a mess your kids and grandkids Yo Boomers and GenXers have made of what you pieced together winning WW I and II
This was not a mistake. It was a lying model just like they use for climate change.
It’s possible to write clean, clear code in Fortran, but the language doesn’t make that easy. I’m surprised that anyone would choose Fortran for anything other than simple mathematical problems.
But the problem seems to be an inability to program, rather than the language per se.
It could be the most devastating mistake of all time, but then it has to be a mistake doesn’t it? I don’t see how it can be anything but deliberate.
Now, if the program was written as one big main program, yeah, that's a problem. But I think the problem is not so much the coding as it is the assumptions underlying the algorithm (otherwise known as garbage in-garbage out).
Fortran is still used for all kinds of simulations and modeling. Actively supported.
Fauxi and Birx used fraudulent Imperial College model to urge shut down
Well, we can’t have any program use 15,000 lines of code.
What a mess the world would be!
Bet it wasn’t a mistake...
But if it saved even one life, wasn’t it worth it?
Just think of the lives saved if we would just lower all highway speed limits to 45mph, and all city limits to 15mph.
Boy this guy is a whinger !
“Imperial’s model appears to be based on a programming language called Fortran...”
There is nothing wrong with Fortran as an engineering language.
Geez !
My career was built on FORTRAN (and Assembly)
“Mistake”.
Yeah, sure.