R&D

COVID-19 Trends in QLD, Australia, UPDATED Sat 4th April , 1st post March 21 2020

~ dan ~ 1 Comment

UPDATED 4/2 2 weeks ago we were at a few hundred cases and the trends suggested we would be at 1000 cases today. in Qld . Well were are actually at 900 cases, which is a bit better than expected. It seems the social distancing has worked. We have hit a new challenge now though, there are cases in the community now with no identifiable source, meaning there are others out there as well. So we move to containment phase…lets hope complacency doesn’t sink in

1/4 Creeping up on two weeks since first post…/5 and nudging the prediction of 1000 cases by then too šŸ™

One the bright side the rate of new cases is steady

29/5

The growth in news cases has held steady for the past week …maybe its even dropping? Well done Qld!

27/5 Is growth slowing with the contain policies of the STAte Government…only the weeks ahead will tell. Can we keep our cases to 1000, rather than 5000?

25/5 There are likely ~5000 cases in the Qld community (assuming a 2 week delay until its measured). With a population of 5M in Qld, that’s 1 in 1000 cases. So any time you are coming into contact with surfaces that have close to this volume of people you are likely exposed. If the numbers are smaller eg your corner shop only has 200 customers a day, then thats a 20% chance.

24/4 See https://sabelconsult.com/c19/ for local information resources(its a bit draft at the moment) .

23/3 Qld Cases Updated 23/3. current trend suggests ~1000cases by 1st April. See comments section for a post from a friend in Germany (22/3) and what life is like there (sorry can’t make a link directly to her facebook post)

A post I shared to facebook Saturday 21 March early afternoon (as it will date pretty quickly). If our thinking (and behaviour) can move faster than the virus, we have a chance!. I’m putting it here so it has traceable references to the author, to avoid fake news accusations etc….

DISCLAIMER:

  1. Before you read my rant don’t trust me, instead see my bio and publications to decide if it’s reasonable or not, as this is well outside my primary areas of expertise

2. This is a useful article on the guardian on digesting information https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/coronavirus-overload-five-ways-to-fight-misinformation-and-fear

3. This is the primary source of Australian information on stats and epidemiology (updated weekly) https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/novel_coronavirus_2019_ncov_weekly_epidemiology_reports_australia_2020.htm

4. ABC News articles and infographics on cases and sources. Some state by state analysis too (It looks like its going to be updated beyond original publication date too). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-data-reveals-how-covid-19-spreads-in-australia/12060704

Deprecated graph 21st March (see top of page for latest..included here only for traceback purposes)

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Hi Everyone, 

Iā€™ve been tracking the Corona cases in Queensland (not Australia, not Italy, not China) but right here where we live and plotted them up. I have plotted them on something called a log scale (because this lets you see exponential data a bit more easily). On the data I have plotted lines for trends since the start, the last 2 weeks and the last week.

It is pretty clear we will hit 1000 detected cases in two weeks or less. 

When something is detected in 2 weeks time, it means it is likely already in the community RIGHT NOW, but symptoms are not showing yet, but spreading is likely. So taking steps right now to isolate and prevent spread is pretty important. As a community we are only going to be as strong as the most unhygienic amongst us, that we come into contact with, so limiting contact and upping our standard of hygiene is pretty important.

So look I am just a  guy in your street and not a medical person or epidemiologist (though they are saying similar things), but I have also been a research scientist for 30 years and my PhD is in Physics. Argument by authority is all things considered a weak form of argument, so am sticking to the data (except for trend lines)

 I encourage you to look at the data (actual confirmed data)  and the trend lines i drew (decide which one you like) and make up your own mind for the sake of your own family as well as for those in the community you might become a spreader for. I am all for listening to authority but I think that guy, Scotty from marketing is moving too slowly and more concerned about the economy and toilet paper sales (this is actually a slightly unfair emotive statement to makeā€¦apologies for that)

Some back of the envelope calculation that helped me decide to keep my oldest home from school this week. Population of Qld is 5, 000, 000, so assuming there are 1, 000 cases that is about 1 in 5000 in the population overall (this isnā€™t completely tru as the detected ones are isolated). His school is 3, 000 kids so thats almost unity odds that he will be exposed (through desk, chair, hand rail etcā€¦ when combined with his not great personal hygiene).

I am hoping the data is wrong, I would love it to be wrongā€¦ā€¦.

best to all ,

Dan

Compromising to produce Excellence

~ dan

compromiseIā€™m working at the moment with another cohort of MBA students on their capstone projects. Its a quite a challenge as the term is short and by necessity there is a strict word limit (thank God). Their ideas are often BIG as they want to hone their newly developed MBA skills and solve something they are passionate about!

So I remind them of the secrets from project management (with a little Pareto on the side), that it is all about finding the right balance between resources (word limit), time (the term) and cost (them).Ā 

While some, in their initial proposal, come out of the blocks with at least 3 PhDā€™s worth of work. As they progressively focus their ideas down to something achievable (often data driven) ā€¦the end result of this compromise is often excellence!

Its a sage reminder for me that less can be moreā€¦.but it takes hard work and quite disciplined thinking to get there, I guess that is part of the crucible of graduate study!

An Accidental MBA

~ dan ~ 1 Comment

mbabyaccident1.pngA few years back I finished an MBA. I didnā€™t set out to do one but thats where I ended up. There are wild MBA evangelists out there (ā€˜it will change your lifeā€™) and the detractors (ā€˜over hyped, you can learn this stuff from a bookā€™) so this is my story.

Establishing an intrapreneurial enterprise within a university almost a decade ago, on the back of a decade of working with industry, I had realised clients generally trusted me on the science, but something else was driving decisions and processes. More often than not the go-no-go decisions were out of my hands and made on something else e.g. market size, profitability, budget cycles or sometimes political issues.Ā  I read ( and still do) a lot of business books to try an get my head in the game, they were extremely useful but they only got me so far. Belonging (and being a board member) of some industry associations put me in a lot more regular contact with business speak, bootcamps ( just quietly…Iā€™ve done a few to many of those), decision making and accelerated time frames (compared to glacial academic ones anyway),Ā  pretty soon I realised I need to take a plunge into something a bit more rigorous.Ā 

A Graduate Certificate in Business Administration was a great start, covering many of the basics including marketing, where I surprised myself by topping the class, HR because after all at least 50% of what I do was Ā working with people… it just made sense. Probably the greatest single influence there was the first introductory subject where I did my first ever scenario analysis and projection on what I had being doing in my research lab for the last 10 years. It was like a lightbulb went off, suddenly I had a crystal ball into the future. It was a nice tool to compliment my intellectual curiosity lay and to balance the pull of the next pay check, both of whichhad been unconsciously positioning my work.Ā 

The successes were almost immediate for the bottom line. By riding trends (instead of fighting or trying to create them), consciously pursuing operational efficiency with technology tools and adopting internal lab standards everything became just that bit easier. It also gave me something more interesting to say at industry conferences than my latest algorithms šŸ˜‰

Dial forward a few years and the tension of trying to be nimble in a large sluggish organisation, where sometimes I completed a ā€˜gigā€™ faster than an invoice could be issued ( and by faster it was only a few months of work) I decided to study up on entrepreneurship and innovation, (which turned out to be more than Malcom Turnbullā€™s latest buzz words).Ā 

Sadly my time at the helm of the entrepreneurial unit came to a close not long after, it had become mainstream enough that it was swallowed back into the loving arms of the tenured. So I took the opportunity to finish up a few more interesting subjects, in particular Strategy (which nicely complimented the first subject I started with) and a smattering of finance and accounting. Just for fun, in a project I looked into the growth of online tertiary education, eerily the case organisation I chose ended up just a year later confirming most the findings (yet unable to steer itself enough to take advantage of them)ā€¦how cool!!

Anyways thats my MBA story, thanks to Griffith, Stanford and Sunshine Coast universities I entered the wilderness of the gig economy better prepared than what one might expect from a yesteryear Physics PhD. For me an MBA hasnā€™t been a silver bullet, but rather a partner on the journey. Its been a gateway to new skills, surviving uncertainty and learning to enjoy the ride. Iā€™m continuing to do research, consultancy with industry, with a side order of online teaching and workingĀ within some growing SMEā€™sĀ whilst raising a family too!

You can pay big bucks (or not so much) for an MBA, but thats something for another post …

Academic idea to entreprise

~ dan

product market fit in university researchI still do quite a bit of work in the university sector. (I guess you get that when you come from a research background). Universities are full of amazing and very capable people with great ideas. These ideas are often well tested in the laboratory too!

The real challenge is getting them out to the ‘Real World’,. To help get ideas out along this path Universities often get in consultants. Its here that it can come a bit unstuck, as the consultant is looking to cherry pick a ready to go product and take it out to industry to get some backing. I think there are a couple of challenges with this approach. Firstly it assumes that a great idea in the lab is equivalent to a product and secondly it really limits the scope of the opportunity that exists within the capabilities in the university.

Instead its important to work together on the whole process. Rather than start with a a laboratory outcome, Ā start with the capabilities that exist therein. And at the other end of the process rather than looking at a particular market, start at the industry level and look at their needs and pain points. Use then the Capabilities and Industry needs to drive the process of developing a product and a market opportunity together. Where they intersect is the product-market fit and it is at this spot that the real opportunity exists.

Knocking on an academics door and asking for a “value proposition” is unlikely to achieve a result, start with the relationship and the whole picture, build a great value proposition together!