Alright folks, I’ll fess up right off the bat; I may have fallen face first into Betteridge’s law

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

Leaving aside the empirical support for this adage, it is true that the answer to the eponymous question is ‘no’. But, I’m trying to provoke discussion here alright. Gimme a break.

I’m a bit behind the outrage news cycle here, but In November last year, a student at the University of Cambridge by the name of Amelia (Ally) Louks unintentionally created quite the stink over her PhD thesis entitled “The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose”. It all started with a seemingly innocuous twitter post celebrating successful completion of her degree, and quickly spiralled into a furore that “broke the internet”.

Academics who code are, I think, somewhat known for their less than stellar creations. I have certainly written code that I would prefer didn’t see the light of day. A recent example that attracted a great deal of attention is Professor Neil Ferguson’s CovidSim. As the name suggests, it is a simulator of COVID-19 transmission that works by creating artificial agents representing people and environments that they interact with, in much the same way as the SimCity series of games but without the funky graphics. It was the basis of a paper that is credited with fundamentally altering the course of the UK’s COVID-19 policy. The paper predicted that even under the optimal ‘mitigation’ strategy that was considered, the peak surge capacity of ICU beds in the UK would be exceeded 8-times over due to the pandemic. As of the date of writing, it has 3,910 citations.