On Thu, 14 Aug 2025, Kevin Chadwick wrote: "Seems to be a 404 not found" Dear Mister Chadwick, I had also gotten a 404 error each time for this webpage (but I have successfully retrieved this webpage as I explain below). I did not remark about it because I actually remarked about "code written in the C language that isn't even commented", as complained by Rick Newbie. As for accessing old, badly presented ex-webpages including this 404 ex-webpage in question . . . HTTP://web.Archive.org is a possibility for a well behaved ex-webpage. Some badly behaved examples do not work well with e.g. a normal, bad, GUI webbrowser. This is one such example. So instead w3m can rescue us as follows . . . w3m HTTP://web.Archive.org/web/20200516145237https://ChrisVonCsefalvay.com/2020/05/09/imperial-covid-model said inter alia: |----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .], the computational epidemiologist who has advised the [. . .]| |government on COVID-19 related steps until his recent resignation. I | |have previously been a staunch defender of [. . . his] approach – his | |model was (and is) theoretically sound, and probably as good as such | |models will ever get. [. . .] | | | |And looking at the code, that raises some extremely serious | |questions. I would like to explore some of these issues, but will not | |go into a detailed analysis of the code, for one reason – the code | |eventually (and reluctantly) shared by [. . .] is almost | |definitely not the code used to generate forecasts for [. . .] | |Government. We know that at some point, Github [. . .] | |has been involved in cleaning up some of the | |quality issues. [. . .] obstinately resists releasing | |original code – both via Github and under a valid FOIA request that | |[. . .] lawyers are entirely misinterpreting.1) We can, however, | |safely assume from the calibre of the people who have worked on the | |improved version that whatever was there was worse. | | | |The quality issue | |First of all, the elephant in the room: code | |quality. It is very difficult to look at the [. . .] code with any | |understanding of software engineering and conclude that this is good, | |or even tolerable. [. . .] attempts a very thin apologia | |for this: | | | |[Indentation apparently as a block quotation:] | | I’m conscious that lots of people would like to see and run the| | pandemic simulation code we are using to model control measures| | against COVID-19. To explain the background – I wrote the code| | (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu| | pandemics…| | | | — [. . .] March 22, 2020| |[. . . indentation apparently as a block quotation.] | | | |That, sir, is not a | |feature. It’s not even a bug. It’s somewhere between negligence and | |unintentional but grave scientific misconduct. | | | |For those who are not in the computational fields: “my code is too | |complicated for you to get it” is not an acceptable excuse. It is the | |duty of everyone who releases code to document it – within the | |codebase or outside (or a combination of the two). Greater minds | |[. . .] have a tough enough time | |navigating a large code base, and especially where you have | |collaborators, it is not unusual to need a second or two to remember | |what a particular function is doing or what the arguments should be | |like. Or, to put it more bluntly: for thirteen years, taxpayer funding| |[. . .] and all it produced was | |code that violated one of the most fundamental precepts of good | |software development – intelligibility. | | | |The policy issue | |[. . .] I don’t, of course, know whether that is | |what indeed happened, but I doubt anybody would want to trust their | |lives to thousands of lines of cobbled-together code. | | | |[. . .] | | | |The community issue | |Perhaps the biggest issue is, however, the | |response to people who dare question the refusal by [. . .] to | |release the original source code. This is best summarised by the | |responses of their point man on Github, who is largely spending his | |time locking issues and calling people dumb & toxic: | | | |[An apparent quotation which does not prove what it is apparently | |supposed to demonstrate . . .] | | | |It may merit attention that [. . .] is taxpayer-funded – the self-same| |taxpayer who is deemed unfit to even behold what he paid for. This is | |the worst of ‘closed science’, something many scientists (myself | |included) have worked hard to dismantle over the years. Publicly | |funded science imposes a moral obligation to present its results to | |the funder (that is, the taxpayer), and it should perhaps not be up to| |the judgment of a junior tech support developer to determine what the | |public is, or is not, fit to see. Perhaps as an epidemiologist, I take| |special umbrage at the presumption that everyone who wishes to see the| |original code base would be “confused” – maybe I should write to | |reassure Dr [. . .] that I do understand a little about | |epidemiology. It is, after all, what I do. | | | |The science issue | |None of these issues are, of course, anywhere near | |as severe as what this means – a massive leap backwards, erosion of | |trust and a complete disclaimer of accountability by publicly funded | |scientists. | | | |There is a moral obligation for epidemiologists to work for the common| |good – and that implies an obligation of openness and honesty. I am | |reminded of the medical paternalism that characterised Eastern Bloc | |medicine, where patients were rarely told what ailed them and never | |received honest answers. To see this writ large amidst a pandemic by | |what by all accounts (mine included) has been deemed one of the | |world’s best computational epidemiology units is not so much | |infuriating as it is deeply saddening. | | | |One of my friends, former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, counseled in his | |recent book to “take the high ground, or the high ground will take | |you”. Epidemiology had the chance to seize and hold the narrative, | |through openness, transparency and honesty about the forecasts | |made. It had the chance, during this day in the sun of ours, to show | |the public just how powerful our analytical abilities have | |become. Instead, petty academic jealousy, obsessions with | |institutional prestige and an understandable but still | |disproportionate fear of being ‘misinterpreted’ by people who ‘do not | |understand epidemiology’ have given the critics of forecasting and | |computational epidemiology fertile breeding ground. They are entirely | |justified now in criticising any forecasts that come out of the | |[. . .] model – even if the forecasts are correct. There will no | |doubt be public health consequences to the loss of credibility the | |entire profession has suffered, and in the end, it’s all due to the | |outdated ‘proprietary’ attitudes and the airs of superiority by a few | |insulated scientists who, somehow, somewhere, left the track of | |serving public health and humanity for the glittering prizes offered | |elsewhere. With their abandonment of the high road, our entire | |profession’s claim to the public trust might well be forfeited – in a | |sad twist of irony, at a time that could well have been the Finest | |Hour of computational epidemiology. | | | |[. . .] | | | |(c) Chris von Csefalvay, 2015-. For syndication and reprint | |queries, please use the contact form." | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| A theme in HTTP://web.Archive.org/web/20200516145237https://ChrisVonCsefalvay.com/2020/05/09/imperial-covid-model which is broader than diseases and software is similar to HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/Evil_which_is_so-called_science/ An ex-website of "the Journal of Scientific Practice and Integrity" used to use bad Scholastica so it is too hard to archive. HTTrack; lftp; Pavuk; Wget Version 1.21.3; and Wget2 Version 1.99.1 all failed to archive it so I manually archived it: HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/Evil_which_is_so-called_science/Journal_of_Scientific_Practice_and_Integrity/ My condolences to persons who need to archive bigger Scholastica websites! Archives other than Archive.org might also had archived HTTPS://ChrisVonCsefalvay.com/2020/05/09/imperial-covid-model - I did not check. I hyperlink to webpages about many other archives websites in the last sentence of HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/Evil_which_is_so-called_science/devastating_harassment_and_bullying/maladministration_action_or_inaction_of_a_serious_nature_contrary_to_law_or_unreasonable_unjust_oppressive_discriminatory_improper.HTM If one wants to manually archive something without needing it to be still available after this century, then I would recommend HTTPS://Archive.Li