Government Executive - Authors - Alexis C. Madrigal

‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’

Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Thu, 21 May 2020 12:00:00 -0400

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.

This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.

Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.

The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”

Viral tests, taken by nose swab or saliva sample, look for direct evidence of a coronavirus infection. They are considered the gold standard for diagnosing someone with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus: State governments consider a positive viral test to be the only way to confirm a case of COVID-19. Antibody tests, by contrast, use blood samples to look for biological signals that a person has been exposed to the virus in the past.

A negative test result means something different for each test. If somebody tests negative on a viral test, a doctor can be relatively confident that they are not sick right now; if somebody tests negative on an antibody test, they have probably never been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus. (Or they may have been given a false result—antibody tests are notoriously less accurate on an individual level than viral tests.) The problem is that the CDC is clumping negative results from both tests together in its public reporting.

Mixing the two tests makes it much harder to understand the meaning of positive tests, and it clouds important information about the U.S. response to the pandemic, Jha said. “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” he told us. By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” he said.

The public-radio station WLRN, in Miami, first reported that the CDC was mixing viral and antibody test results. Pennsylvania’s and Maine’s decisions to mix the two tests have not been previously reported.

Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC, told us that the inclusion of antibody data in Florida is one reason the CDC has reported hundreds of thousands more tests in Florida than the state government has. The agency hopes to separate the viral and antibody test results in the next few weeks, she said in an email.

But until the agency does so, its results will be suspect and difficult to interpret, says William Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard. In addition to misleading the public about the state of affairs, the intermingling “makes the lives of actual epidemiologists tremendously more difficult.”

“Combining a test that is designed to detect current infection with a test that detects infection at some point in the past is just really confusing and muddies the water,” Hanage told us.

The CDC stopped publishing anything resembling a complete database of daily test results on February 29. When it resumed publishing test data last week, a page of its website explaining its new COVID Data Tracker said that only viral tests were included in its figures. “These data represent only viral tests. Antibody tests are not currently captured in these data,” the page said as recently as May 18.

Yesterday, that language was changed. All reference to disaggregating the two different types of tests disappeared. “These data are compiled from a number of sources,” the new version read. The text strongly implied that both types of tests were included in the count, but did not explicitly say so.

The CDC’s data have also become more favorable over the past several days. On Monday, a page on the agency’s website reported that 10.2 million viral tests had been conducted nationwide since the pandemic began, with 15 percent of them—or about 1.5 million—coming back positive. But yesterday, after the CDC changed its terms, it said on the same page that 10.8 million tests of any type had been conducted nationwide. Yet its positive rate had dropped by a percent. On the same day it expanded its terms, the CDC added 630,205 new tests, but it added only 52,429 positive results.

This is what concerns Jha. Because antibody tests are meant to be used on the general population, not just symptomatic people, they will, in most cases, have a lower percent-positive rate than viral tests. So blending viral and antibody tests “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,” he said.

The absence of clear national guidelines has led to widespread confusion about how testing data should be reported. Pennsylvania reports negative viral and antibody tests in the same metric, a state spokesperson confirmed to us on Wednesday. The state has one of the country’s worst outbreaks, with more than 67,000 positive cases. But it has also slowly improved its testing performance, testing about 8,000 people in a day. Yet right now it is impossible to know how to interpret any of its accumulated results.

Texas, where the rate of new COVID-19 infections has stubbornly refused to fall, is one of the most worrying states (along with Georgia). The Texas Observer first reported last week that the state was lumping its viral and antibody results together. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott denied that the state was blending the results, but the Dallas Observer reports that it is still doing so.

While the number of tests per day has increased in Texas, climbing to more than 20,000, the combined results mean that the testing data are essentially uninterpretable. It is impossible to know the true percentage of positive viral tests in Texas. It is impossible to know how many of the 718,000 negative results were not meant to diagnose a sick person. The state did not return a request for comment, nor has it produced data describing its antibody or viral results separately. (Some states, following guidelines from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, report antibody-test positives as “probable” COVID-19 cases without including them in their confirmed totals.)

Georgia is in a similar situation. It has also seen its COVID-19 infections plateau amid a surge in testing. Like Texas, it reported more than 20,000 new results on Wednesday, the majority of them negative. But because, according to The Macon Telegraph, it is also blending its viral and antibody results together, its true percent-positive rate is impossible to know. (The governor’s office did not return a request for comment.)

These results damage the public’s ability to understand what is happening in any one state. On a national scale, they call the strength of America’s response to the coronavirus into question. The number of tests conducted nationwide each day has more than doubled in the past month, rising from about 147,000 a month ago to more than 413,000 on Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, which compiles data reported by state and territorial governments. In the past week, the daily number of tests has grown by about 90,000.

At the same time, the portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted, from a seven-day average of 10 percent at the month’s start to 6 percent on Wednesday.

“The numbers have outstripped what I was expecting,” Jha said. “My sense is people are really surprised that we’ve moved as much as we have in such a short time period. I think we all expected a move and we all expected improvement, but the pace and size of that improvement has been a big surprise.”

The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory. If even a third of the country’s gain in testing has come by expanding antibody tests, not viral tests, then its ability to detect an outbreak is much smaller than it seems. There is no way to ascertain how much of the recent increase in testing is from antibody tests until the most populous states in the country—among them Texas, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—show their residents everything in the data.

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America’s Coronavirus Testing Still Isn’t Moving Fast Enough

Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 10:26:47 -0400

Nearly two weeks after the new coronavirus was first found to be spreading among Americans, the United States remains dangerously limited in its capacity to test people for the illness, an ongoing investigation from The Atlantic has found.

After surveying of local data from across the country, we can only verify that 4,384 people have been tested for the coronavirus nationwide, as of March 9 at 4 p.m. eastern. These data are as comprehensive a compilation of official statistics as currently possible.

The lack of testing means that it is almost impossible to know how many Americans are infected with the coronavirus and suffering from COVID-19, the disease it causes. While our analysis has tracked state and local announcements that more than 570 people in 36 states are infected, experts say that number is almost certainly too small to reflect the full extent of the disease’s spread in the U.S. Not enough Americans have been tested for officials to know how many people are ill, they say.

When researchers have used statistical and genetic techniques to estimate the true size of the outbreak, they have concluded that thousands of Americans may have already been infected by the beginning of the month. Health officials have attributed 26 deaths to COVID-19 in the United States, as of today.

The sluggish rollout of the tests has become a debilitating weakness in America’s response to the spread of the coronavirus. By this point in its outbreak, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people for the disease, and it was testing roughly 15,000 people every day. The United Kingdom, where three people have died of COVID-19, has already tested more than 24,900 people.

The Atlantic reached its new estimate through an ongoing collaboration with the data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher and a team of volunteers recruited for their experience with data collection, and after consulting data published by all 50 states and the District of Columbia. States vary widely in their reporting standards. All provide positive case reports. But many do not provide negative or pending case reports, which provide crucial context for both the progression of the virus and the government response to it.

Our effort is necessary because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not regularly providing data on the full scope of American testing. On its website, the federal agency now provides a number (1,707 as of Sunday) that reflects only the number of people tested at the CDC’s laboratory, even though state and private laboratories provide the bulk of testing. (The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

When the CDC has provided data, it has been slow and incomplete.

On Saturday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told reporters that 5,861 specimens—not people—had been tested for the coronavirus by the end of the week. As a rule of thumb, it takes about two specimens to deliver results for a single patient, which would make this equivalent to about 2,900 people tested through Saturday.

Last week, The Atlantic reported that it could only verify that 1,895 people had been tested for the coronavirus as of Friday morning.

Testing capacity still varies enormously across the country. Many states, including some of the country’s most populous, are not reporting how many tests they have conducted overall. Texas, which now has 24 positive cases, has not posted on its website how many people it has tested overall. A spokesman for the state said it had tested 150 people as of last week, but “with private labs coming online now, I don’t think we’re going to have a definitive number for the entire state going forward.” Nevada has not reported any new data at all on its health-department website since March 3.

Massachusetts, which has 41 presumptive cases, has not released its total number of people tested. Neither has Pennsylvania, which has 10 presumptive cases. Last week, a Pennsylvania official told us that the state could test only a dozen or so people a day, suggesting that it has a high rate of positives.

On Friday, California also stopped reporting how many tests it has conducted, switching to releasing only the number of positive cases. The California Department of Public Health told us that the state had tested 778 people as of Saturday, and that the state has 114 positive cases. It now has 15 labs doing tests across the state.

North Carolina, which has two positive cases, and Indiana, which has two, have also never said how many overall tests they have conducted.

LabCorp and Quest, two companies that run routine medical tests for doctors’ offices, have both announced that they can now test samples for COVID-19. The two companies can test a combined 2,500 patients a day, according to a tally assembled by Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner, and published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Altogether, the country can test a maximum of 7,840 people a day, according to Gottlieb’s preliminary tally. His count is another example of the kinds of data tabulation that a federal agency might usually take responsibility for.

The testing situation is so bad that Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at Harvard, says that health officials and journalists should stop reporting the number of positive cases in the United States as “new cases.” Instead, he wrote by email, “they should refer to them as ‘newly discovered cases,’ in order to remove the impression that the number of cases reported has any bearing on the actual number.”

The ponderous rollout of tests—and the stringent criteria that the CDC has imposed on them—has hamstrung doctors and injected anxiety into the lives of ordinary Americans. Are their symptoms pneumonia, the flu, or something worse?

“I have no clue if we could have already or could be now spreading this to others,” a 38-year-old woman who lives near Austin, Texas, who asked not to be identified for privacy reasons, told us.

After returning from Western Europe in late January, the woman and her husband came down with a mysterious illness, which sent them in and out of week-long fevers. She and her husband would wake up coughing in the middle of the night, their ribs aching so badly that they needed to vomit. She has tested negative for the flu, twice, and also tested negative for strep. She has been diagnosed with pneumonia.

On her trip, she had frequently been in large, international crowds, where she could easily have been exposed to the coronavirus. But despite having all the symptoms, she has not been tested for it. When she called Austin’s public-health department to ask for guidance, she was told that unless she was hospitalized or had traveled to China, she could not be tested for COVID-19.

“The woman who I talked to said, ‘There aren’t any cases here [in Travis County],’” she told us. “And I said, ‘There hasn’t been any testing, so how do you know?’”

Without a firm answer about whether she has the virus, she has agonized over how to act responsibly. When is she overreacting? When is she being reckless? She and her husband have stayed home since they became ill, but their son and daughter, both younger than 5, attended school until her daughter ran a fever last week.

“There’s no guidelines out there, even at the urgent care today,” she said. She now plans to keep both kids at home for the next two weeks.

But that’s only one of many arenas where there is currently no firm guidance for people who think they may have the virus, but who cannot get tested for it.

“Am I supposed to tell my team [at work]? Am I supposed to tell my kids’ school? Am I supposed to tell everyone I interacted with for the last four weeks?” she asked. “I don’t want to start a crisis, because I don’t know if I actually have this thing.”

Doctors have expressed similar frustration in getting patients tested. “The Georgia Department of Public Health has basically thrown up their hands when it comes to testing patients who do not require hospitalization,” Josh Hargraves, an emergency-room doctor in Georgia, told us. “On Friday we were told, ‘If the patient doesn’t have a travel history and doesn’t need to be admitted to the hospital, don’t bother calling; we’re not going to test.’” By Saturday evening, when Hargraves saw four prospective coronavirus patients, he managed to get one of them tested, but only after filling out onerous and unusual paperwork.

“We’re still restricting usage and asking thoughtful, knowledgeable medical professionals to jump through hoops to get a test they know a patient needs,” Hargraves said.

The outbreak is not at the same stage in every state. If public-health officials can quickly increase testing, it might be possible to have a much more comprehensive view before community transmission worsens.

We know the virus is here and spreading in many places. Restrictive testing policies—especially ones focused on travel outside the United States—clearly don’t make sense anymore. There are sick people in this country whose doctors think they need testing and who still cannot be tested. Every day that this epidemic continues without adequate testing, the country’s ability to slow the outbreak will deteriorate.

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The FAA Rigorously Tested the Boeing 737’s Software

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 09:44:04 -0400

Two Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes have crashed under similar circumstances in the past six months, one in October in Indonesia and the other in Ethiopia last week. These were new planes, and both had a control system installed that has been implicated in the Indonesian crash, and that might have played a role in the most recent disaster.

The system, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), had one very specific purpose. When flying in manual mode, the MCAS used data from an “angle of attack” sensor to push the nose of the plane down if the plane’s orientation seemed to be approaching the point when it would stall, which is a very dangerous condition. The software was designed to compensate for a new instability that resulted from some small physical-design modifications.

If the MCAS malfunctioned, there was a procedure to cut the software out of the loop. But it required throwing a separate switch, not merely pulling up on the plane’s control stick. If the switch wasn’t flipped, the MCAS would keep nosing the plane down after five seconds. Back in November, as pilots and airline-industry observers mulled over the Indonesian crash, they fingered this “counterintuitive” system as part of the problem. Leeham, an aerospace news service, also noted that the novel behavior of the MCAS “was described nowhere” in the aircraft’s or pilot’s manual. This was a problem, Leeham wrote, because pilots had been told that the two planes were the same, and could be flown interchangeably.

Only after the Lion Air crash did Boeing put out an advisory about the software. My colleague James Fallows has noted that American pilots have also experienced the problem.

What makes the situation troubling, whether or not the system is ultimately implicated in the Ethiopian Air tragedy, is that the problems that could result from this system are not impossible to foresee.

The MCAS relies on sensors that can derive the angle of attack, which a Boeing publication notes is a very complex measurement. Erroneous or mismatched readings could lead to serious trouble. And that’s not normally how the software systems installed on planes work.

Once the problems with the system came to light last year, Southwest almost immediately took steps to address the problem and Boeing announced an update to the MCAS system, which the company had been planning with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“The FAA says it anticipates mandating this software enhancement with an Airworthiness Directive no later than April,” Boeing said. “We have worked with the FAA in development of this software enhancement.”

So, upon review, the FAA and Boeing decided that a software update should be mandatory for the plane. This kind of post-facto decision making would not be surprising in most other realms of software development. After all, Apple has issued five iOS updates since October.

The FAA has extremely strict regulations. This makes sense: It regulates tubes full of people flying in the sky, and any problems could be catastrophic. The stakes are higher than they are with, say, an iPhone app. Every component of every plane must go through a certification process, which MCAS did.

As planes have become much more dependent on computers over the past few decades, the industry is facing the tricky problem of how to certify these systems—and how to train pilots to handle their increasingly inscrutable failures. The FAA runs the Aircraft Certification Service, which “is concerned with the approval of software and airborne electronic hardware for airborne systems (e.g., autopilots, flight controls, engine controls).” It’s important to understand that aircraft makers don’t submit a form to check a box; the FAA is deeply involved.

My colleague James Somers described precisely how software is evaluated under this safety regime. “The agency mandates that every requirement for a piece of safety-critical software be traceable to the lines of code that implement it, and vice versa,” Somers wrote. “So every time a line of code changes, it must be retraced to the corresponding requirement in the design document, and you must be able to demonstrate that the code actually satisfies the requirement.”

In the United States, the current process has worked remarkably well. Across all the millions of flights by American airliners, there was exactly one passenger death from 2010 to 2019.

At the same time, as the pilot Mac McClellan points out, the new flying machine increasingly removes “the pilot as a critical part of the system and relies on multiple computers to handle failures.” While pilots are still trained to handle all manner of flight failures, they just don’t have to with the big planes, which create triply redundant systems to ensure the safety of passengers, no matter what the pilots do. That’s why McClellan’s post is provocatively titled “Can Boeing Trust Pilots?”

One way to see the MCAS problem is that the system took too much control from the pilots, exacerbated by Boeing’s lack of communication about its behavior. But another way, McClellan suggests, is to say that the software relied too much on pilot action, and in that case, the problem is that the MCAS was not designed for triply redundant automatic operation.

So much remains to be seen about the two crashes and the 737 Max 8. The planes are being grounded across the world, even here in the United States, where authorities had held out. And now the workhorse of the American commercial-airline industry is about to come under increased scrutiny.

If this problem—which everyone now acknowledges is a problem, whether or not it contributed to the Ethiopian crash—could sneak through the FAA’s testing, what other surprises might lurk in the software?

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Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Thu, 31 May 2018 12:51:16 -0400

The telephone swept into Americans’ lives in the first decades of the 20th century. At first, no one knew exactly how to telephone. Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to start conversations by saying, “Ahoy-hoy!” AT&T tried to prevent people from saying “hello,” arguing in Telephone Engineer magazine that it was rude.

But eventually, Americans learned to say “hello.” People built a culture around the phone that worked. Etiquette magazines tried to prevent women from inviting people over for dinner via telephone, then gave in. The doctor got a phone, so the pharmacist got a phone. It didn’t happen quickly, but it happened. And once it was done, during my childhood, these social customs sat between me and this raw technical artifact—the handset, the curly cord connecting it to the base, the wires running across the nation, coming together in vast switching stations, amplified, multiplexed, and then branching back out to the other cities, other neighborhoods, other blocks, other houses.

In the moment when a phone rang, there was an imperative. One had to pick up the phone. This thinking permeated the culture from adults to children. In a Hello Kitty segment designed to teach kids how the phone worked, Hello Kitty is playing when the phone starts to ring. “It’s the phone. Yay!” she says. “Mama! Mama! The telephone is ringing. Hurry! They are gonna hang up.”

Before ubiquitous caller ID or even *69 (which allowed you to call back the last person who’d called you), if you didn’t get to the phone in time, that was that. You’d have to wait until they called back. And what if the person calling had something really important to tell you or ask you? Missing a phone call was awful. Hurry!

Not picking up the phone would be like someone knocking at your door and you standing behind it not answering. It was, at the very least, rude, and quite possibly sneaky or creepy or something. Besides, as the phone rang, there were always so many questions, so many things to sort out. Who was it? What did they want? Was it for … me?

“Hello, Madrigal residence,” I would say, and it would make sense of everything for me and whoever was on the other end of the line.

This became a kind of cultural commons that people could draw on to understand communicating through a technology. When you called someone, if the person was there, they would pick up, they would say hello. If someone called you, if you were there, you would pick up, you would say hello. That was just how phones worked. The expectation of pickup was what made phones a synchronous medium.

I attach no special value to it. There’s no need to return to the pure state of 1980s telephonic culture. It’s just something that happened, like lichen growing on rocks in the tundra, or bacteria breaking down a fallen peach. Life did its thing, on and in the inanimate substrate. But I want to dwell on the existence of this cultural layer, because it is disappearing.

No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering—built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture—is gone.

Telephone exchanges of that era were what the scholar Robert Hopper describedas “not quite ritual, but routine to the extent that its appearance approaches ritual.” When the phone rang, everyone knew to answer and speak in “the liturgy of the national attitude.” Now, people have forgotten how to pick up, the words, when to sing.

There are many reasons for the slow erosion of this commons. The most important aspect is structural: There are simply more communication options. Text messaging and its associated multimedia variations are rich and wonderful: words mixed with emoji, Bitmoji, reaction gifs, regular old photos, video, links. Texting is fun, lightly asynchronous, and possible to do with many people simultaneously. It’s almost as immediate as a phone call, but not quite. You’ve got your Twitter, your Facebook, your work Slack, your email, FaceTimes incoming from family members. So many little dings have begun to make the rings obsolete.

But in the last couple years, there is a more specific reason for eyeing my phone’s ring warily. Perhaps 80 or even 90 percent of the calls coming into my phone are spam of one kind or another. Now, if I hear my phone buzzing from across the room, at first I’m excited if I think it’s a text, but when it keeps going, and I realize it’s a call, I won’t even bother to walk over. My phone only rings one or two times a day, which means that I can go a whole week without a single phone call coming in that I (or Apple’s software) can even identify, let alone want to pick up.

There are unsolicited telemarketing calls. There are straight-up robocalls that merely deliver recorded messages. There are the cyborg telemarketers, who sit in call centers playing prerecorded bits of audio to simulate a conversation. There are the spam phone calls, whose sole purpose seems to be verifying that your phone number is real and working.

The Federal Communications Commission has been trying to slow robocalls for at least half a decade, but it doesn’t seem to have done anything to stem the tide. YouMail is an app that tries to block these kinds of calls, and they create an estimate of how many robocalls are being made each month. The numbers are staggering and April 2018 showed them at an all-time high.

Chart derived from YouMail’s Robocall Index

Telemarketers, of course, were the original people who took advantage of the telephone culture’s drive to pick up the phone. But people cost money, even my dumb teenage self calling up plant managers in Alabama trying to sell them software to manage their material-data safety sheets. People get bored with their crappy, repetitive jobs. People quit.

Machines—the software kind that can dial phone numbers, at least—are cheap. They don’t get drunk or go back to school or have a sick child. They just call and call and call and call. As often as not, when I’ve made the mistake of picking up, there’s just dead air, maybe just for a few seconds, as a person is patched in, or maybe—if I don’t say anything—for a while until the machine hangs up. Sometimes it’s a recorded message. And worse, most of the time I pick up, I’m giving the spammer valuable information that my number is a live number, which they will sell to the next spammer.

This happened 3.4 billion times last month, where someone had to make the decision to pick up or to let it go, and give in to the change.

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The Case of the Sick Americans in Cuba Gets Stranger

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 10:12:23 -0500

Toward the end of 2016, years into a slow rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, something strange started happening to CIA agents posing as diplomats in Havana.

This something may or may not have been a sonic attack. It may or may not have been deployed by Cubans, Russians, Venezuelans, or any other country with whom the United States has beef. A detailed new accounting of the affair appeared in ProPublica, the investigative news outlet, Wednesday. After talking with three dozen officials in different countries and looking at what were described as “confidential government documents,” the reporting confirms that no one has any idea what happened in Havana.

The facts of the case, so far as ProPublica has been able to suss out, are as follows: In November of 2016, an American official newly arrived in Havana with his family heard a strange, loud noise. Something like cicadas or insects, but really loud, and perhaps too “mechanical-sounding.” In December, a young man experienced the same thing—and began to suffer serious symptoms. These two people discussed their experiences of the sound in March. Shortly thereafter, the older diplomat and his wife began to receive medical attention for hearing loss and other problems.

In late March, the Americans in Cuba were finally told about what was happening to some of their colleagues. Word spread. Within a month, 80 Americans, including staff and family, wanted to be “checked out” by medical professionals. Word spread to the Canadians, too, and they got examined independently.

The older diplomat and his wife “along with 22 other Americans and eight Canadians ... would be diagnosed with a wide array of concussion-like symptoms, ranging from headaches and nausea to hearing loss.”

But note the difference in the number between the number of Americans checked out (80) and those diagnosed with symptoms (22).

Add to that: FBI investigators have found no evidence about what happened, despite being on the ground.

And finally: FBI officials have “privately emphasized the government‘s cooperation with its investigators,” according to ProPublica.

These are just three of the many things that have confounded investigators. Was there a real attack followed up with mass hysteria, once word started to spread? Or was it all mass hysteria? Or all attack? Or ... what?

The core problem is that no one has heard of or is willing to testify to the existence of this kind of acoustic weapon.

There are crowd-control weapons known by the euphemism “Long-Range Acoustic Devices” that are on the market and have been deployed against protesters at various times. But the way they would damage hearing is pretty obvious: They are really, really, really loud.

The facts of the Cuban case are very different. Some people report loud cicada-like noises. Others none at all. Some reported attacks in hotels, where other guests didn’t hear anything, so it would appear the radius of attack is quite small. A focused, long-range acoustic weapon is unknown to the world.

In 2007, Air Force researchers reviewed the research and literature on the topic and came to a solid conclusion. “Although high-intensity infrasound significantly disrupted animal behavior in some experiments, the generation of such energy in a volume large enough to be of practical use is unlikely because of basic physical principles,” they wrote. “On the basis of experimentation completed to date at a number of institutions, it seems unlikely that high-intensity acoustic energy in the audible, infrasonic, or low-frequency range can provide a device suitable for use as a nonlethal weapon.”

The AP has even released recordings of what it says diplomats heard, but that did nothing to further the case.

So, what the hell happened?

Bizarrely, the easiest explanation would be “mass sociogenic illness,” or what used to be called mass hysteria. There are dozens of examples in the extant literature, usually focusing on rumors of poison gases or, in more recent times, terrorist deployment of chemical weapons. The mind may be powerful, but sometimes, subsequent investigation reveals that there was some toxin causing the symptoms, after all.

Some Cuban scientists “have suggested that the Americans’ illnesses were psychosomatic.” But according to the State Department’s medical director, “No cause has been ruled out ... but the findings suggest this was not an episode of mass hysteria.” Physicians who were allowed to study the medical records of 21 of the affected people argued against the psychosomatic hypothesis in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “If you took any one of these patients and put them into a brain-injury clinic, and you didn’t know their background, you would think that they had a traumatic brain injury from being in a car accident or a blast in the military,” said Rachel Swanson, a coauthor on the study. “It’s like a concussion without a concussion.”

Perhaps the strangest theory that ProPublica explores is that the noise really wascicadas and that they did some damage. But Allen Sanborn, a biologist at Barry University, told ProPublica, “[A cicada] wouldn’t really hurt you unless it was shoved into your ear canal.”

And yet, despite no one being sure what happened, the mystery is now the linchpin of the American case to roll back the changes that the Obama administration made to warm up the relationship between the two countries.

The Trump administration, along with hardliners on Cuba like Senator Marco Rubio, are using the attack (or non-attack) as a pretext for cooling relations between the two countries. “There is no way that someone could carry out [this] number of attacks, with that kind of technology, without the Cubans knowing about it,” Senator Rubio told ProPublica. “They either did it, or they know who did it.”

But if no American team—CIA, State Department, or FBI—knows who did it, or if something even happened, what is reasonable to ask of the Cuban government?

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Navy Gives Up ALL-CAPS Messaging, 160 Years After It Began

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:51:43 -0400

Last month, the Navy personnel chief sent out a note on behalf of Fleet CyberCommand with an important message: ALL-CAPS COMMUNIQUES WERE NO LONGER NECESSARY.

Since the middle of the 19th century, Naval messages have been typed in just the upper-case, Navy Times reported, but that era finally, mercifully, came to an end. Though not everybody's happy about it.

"You have a lot of folks that have been around for a long time and are used to uppercase and they just prefer that it stay there because of the standardized look of it," James McCarty, a messaging program manager at Fleet Cyber Command told the Times.

Read the full story at TheAtlantic.com.

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National Weather Service Warned About School Safety in Oklahoma City Region

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:26:06 -0400

Monday, the National Weather Service's Rick Smith posted a briefing to YouTube at 11:30am, which laid out a scenario for the day's weather events that was eerily precise. Specifically, he mentioned schools as an area of concern and highlighted the potential for an EF-4 tornado in the area south of I-40 and east of I-44 between 3 and 6pm. Shortly after 3pm, an EF-4 (or stronger) tornado hit Moore, which is located just south of I-40 and east of I-44.

It's crushing to realize that this disaster's rough outlines were predicted four hours ahead of time and yet know that this did not stop lives from being lost.

Here are three excerpts from the sadly prescient forecast:

We'll be talking about our increasing concerns for significant severe weather this afternoon and into this evening. We are expecting more significant severe weather today. The highest impacts we expect will be along and south of Interstate 44. Tornadoes and giant damaging hail are likely today. Something that's a little different today than yesterday is we are on a Monday and we do have schools in session and people driving home from work and that is a big, big concern for us as we expect severe weather potential to peak in that 3-6pm timeframe today...

Supercell storms are expected to develop in this area very quickly between 1 and 2 o'clock this afternoon. They will become severe fast, just like yesterday. We had storms that went from virtually nothing to producing large hail and tornadoes in less than an hour in some cases. So it's gonna go fast today.

If you're south of I-40 and east of I-44, you need to have a heightened state of awareness and be super alert to severe weather. We're expecting conditions today to be just as volatile if not even more so than they were yesterday for tornadoes. We've already had one EF4 tornado confirmed that occurred yesterday near Shawnee. I would not be at all surprised to have similar tornadoes occurring south of I-40, east of I-44. We're not trying to freak you out and scare you, we want you to be prepared. We're not guaranteeing a pinpoint forecast this is definitely going to happen, but you need to plan as if it is and be ready for what you're going to do.

See the story at TheAtlantic.com.

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What the Obama Campaign's Chief Data Scientist Is Up to Now

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:34:00 -0400

By all accounts, Rayid Ghani's data work for President Obama's reelection campaign was brilliant and unprecedented. Ghani probably could have written a ticket to work at any company in the world, or simply collected speaking fees for a few years telling companies how to harness the power of data like the campaign did.

But instead, Ghani headed to the University of Chicago to bring sophisticated data analysis to difficult social problems. Working with Computation Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy, Ghani will serve as the chief data scientist for the Urban Center for Computation and Data.

Before the campaign, Ghani said that he found it difficult to use his data skills for social good. There were plenty of corporate jobs that wanted people who could do analytics, but not many non-profits. "The reason I got on the campaign is that I was trying to connect things I cared about with what I was good at. I wanted to use analytics and data for social problems," he said. "But when the campaign was done, I was back in the same place."

And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:24:00 -0500

At first, snuffling through a head cold, I wrote several snarky responses -- e.g. " 'Success is never accidental,' said all multimillionaire white men." -- but never tweeted them. Because I've seen a lot of successful people in action and sometimes you're like, "Holy hell, Bill Gates (or Paul Otellini or James Fallows) is an impressive person." These are hardworking, brilliant people whom I did not want to demean. So, what I ended up tweeting was simple: "And failures?"

It's important that we can recognize the skills of the successful while also noting the many prodigiously lucky factors that allow them to show those skills. To make this point, I want to tell you a couple of stories about Robert Noyce, "the mayor of Silicon Valley" to show what I mean.

Noyce plays a major role in the new PBS show, "Silicon Valley," which debuted this week, and for good reason. Noyce co-founded both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. He's a classic in the human genre of "Great Man."Tom Wolfe, who profiled him ("The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce") in the December 1983 issue of Esquire, said Noyce made people see a halo over his head. In fact, he's the model entrepreneur for people like Dorsey, whether they know it or not. He was selected by his peers to lead the world's most important semiconductor companies, established the start-up funding and organizational model that now defines the Valley, and almost certainly would have won a Nobel Prize if not for his death.

People always seem to find stories about men like this from their youth that seem to mark them with greatness and serve as a metaphor for their genius. With Jobs, perhaps it's his time wandering in India developing his intuition. Edison had his newspaper business. Zuckerberg has his run-in with the Harvard's administration over hacking. Bill Gates has his own run-in with authorities over sneaking access to computers. Stories proliferate; usually you have a few to choose from.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Helping intelligence agencies better predict the future

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 09:48:29 -0500

We would like to know what the future is going to be like, so we can prepare for it. I'm not talking about building a time machine to secure the winning Powerball number ahead of time, but rather creating more accurate forecasts about what is likely to happen. Supposedly, this is what pundits and analysts do. They're supposed to be good at commenting on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone by 2014 or whether North Korea will fire missiles during the year or whether Barack Obama will win reelection.

A body of research, however, conducted and synthesized by the University of Pennsylvania's Philip Tetlock finds that people, not just pundits but definitely pundits, are not very good at predicting future events. The book he wrote on the topic, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, is a touchstone for all the work that people like Nate Silver and Princeton's Sam Wang did tracking the last election.

But aside from the electorate, who else might benefit from enhanced foresight? Perhaps the people tasked with gathering information about threats in the world.

You probably have never heard of IARPA, but it's the wild R&D wing of our nation's intelligence services. Much like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which looks into the future of warfare for the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity looks at the future of analyzing information, spying, surveillance, and the like for the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

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