Please wait for the arrival of PCIe v.4 enabled laptops with much better CPUs and GPUs, just around the corner. Here is the story on how and why, I took this decision for myself.

How.

In my previous article I described how my initial enthusiasm on the prospect of getting an ARM-powered Mac ended up, after close inspection, in dismay and anger.

My disappointment was exaggerated from the fact that I was almost certain that I will get the Apple M1 powered MacbookPro; I was a Mac user for the past four years, while the principal architect of the RISC-based ARM architecture was one of my teachers at the University. …

If you need a fast small-form factor notebook today look elsewhere

I have less than ten days to buy a small notebook for my new job. I was intrigued to consider the new MacBookPro Silicon M1 but my initial enthusiasm was followed by dismay and anger

Sanity Check & Warning:

This review is not for Apple fanbois with the following traits:

• Those willing to spend about $2500 for a small laptop for the pleasure of carrying a stylish gadget — which in the Covid days they cannot even show off in meeting rooms and airport lounges.
• Sales and Marketing executives not minding that their Microsoft Office applications will need to be processed by Rosetta 2 the first time(*) they run them that results in a performance degradation of anything between 11 and 50% slower — wasting much of the performance improvement of the M1 taunted by their Apple counterparts.
  (*)Please do not ask me which first time: It was impossible to figure out if Apple refers to the very first and only time or every time the system boots. …

In the post-truth era Paul Karl Feyerabend’s “anything goes” is more relevant than ever

According to common sense, this is an impossibility:

• President Trump trails Joe Biden by over 10 percentage points in the poll-of-polls average.
• Expert pundits follow the rational reasoning that “Trump is going to get fewer votes than in 2016 whereas Joe Biden, who is by no means Hillary in provoking negative reactions, is bound to win more votes than she did; so Trump is going to lose”.
• Most important, Professor Alan Lichtman, who invented “13-keys” — by far the most reliable model of predicting US elections — suggests that Biden’s win is a certainty.

Yet, the post-truth era challenges common sense to the point that “impossibilities” ought to be analytically and cautiously scrutinized. …

Looking backward to see ahead

The recent events regarding the demands to (re)write history, by removing inconvenient/unpleasant realities for sections of the public from display, led me to:
1. Rethink how history is applied in my own field of endeavour
2. Consider the ever-lasting benefits of the uncommon study of “failure” rather than the usual unilinear “success story”

Allow me to bring to the attention of our community of Astrophysicists, Computer Scientists, Engineers and Poets here in Predict a (hi)story that combines both:

Analogue and Hybrid Computing

Most of my friends who are aware of the differences between analogue and digital electronics, have the impression that computing is exclusively digital. They are unaware that most of the first computers that were used in ICBMs during the Cold War, or for the computations that enabled the manned missions to the moon in the Apollo Program, or for the design of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet were either analogue or hybrid (analogue in conjunction with digital computing elements). …

Would you tell your friends and family of your situation and urge those you had recent contact with to test themselves, or would you keep quiet about it?

Right now, if you said you had COVID-19 what do you think the reaction would be? Would it be panic from those who know you? What about if you told them this news 6 months from now? Worse yet, what if we don’t find a vaccine for this as quickly as we hope? What if we are in the “worst case scenario” — that is if we will have to co-exist with COVID-19 right into 2021 which, by the way, is when a vaccine is more likely to appear. …

Adapting social distancing policies via the monitoring of crucial home and public behaviour data can help contain the Covid-19 offensive.

Let’s take a closer look in this, widely circulated, chart regarding the progression of the infections:

It appears that its spread -when the case count passes 500- is strikingly similar, regardless of the size or the geographical density of the “sample”.

The chart was provided to me by David Gorelick, Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland with whom we happened to discuss the capability of predicting electoral outcomes (as discussed in a series of articles that started here, whereas in one of the articles it was mentioned how data analysis can be used to draw meaningful conclusions that are insensitive to polling sample size and density). …

This is the last part in this introductory series regarding Propaganda and Electoral Polling in the Social Media era. In the… introduction and the second part of this introduction the “Russian” propaganda techniques as a means to accurately predict, if not influence, electoral outcomes were discussed. In the third part some of the technical tools required to approach such investigations were presented. In this final part I will attempt to present the elements that glue the previous parts into one.

Background studies in Mass Communication

One additional, and final, snapshot of my personal journey that I find worth sharing pertains to my studies in Journalism at City University London for a Masters in Electronic Publishing in the academic year 1999–2000. Close to Fleet Street, the traditional home of the British Press Industry, City hosts one of the leading Schools of Journalism in the world that invites Industry leaders to address the students. In our case our visitors included many of the editors of major British publications such as The Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph. …

It is said that the more you know about a topic, the tougher it is to teach it to others — thus the proverbial “Those who can’t do, teach”. This simplistic and sweepingly general joke about teaching, explains the relative ease of writing the previous two sections in this series and the difficulties that I am facing as I am writing this one, given my full-time 39-year experience on Computer Science versus my part-time experience in Propaganda and Polling over the past decade or so.

“Computer Science” is entering the field of Social Sciences as the need for skills to process Big Data by Social Scientists has become evident over the past few years. For this type of Computer Science skill, such as working with Tableau, there are thousands of articles on the web that a Social Scientist can read if not just try a demo of the tool to see for himself. Nowadays, there are even classes such as the Seminar in Computational Social Sciences offered at Princeton and Oxford, where one can combine lovely holidays in great academic destinations -where usually one failed to matriculate — coupled with the illusion that he/she has learned Computer Science skills that are sufficient to make use of the vast data available in order to provide interpretations to Social issues and, potentially, experiment with viable, evidence-based solutions. …