Is there any way in which people can help her here?
I believe this is her gofundme https://www.gofundme.com/f/DefendScience
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Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
61–70 of 231 posts
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#62This weekend I heard directly from a current DOT employee, formerly Dept Of Health, in the FL capitol: "We were just following the WHO recommendations." "She's just a web developer and doesn't understand anything about the numbers."
The web developer part is character assassination at its finest. "Just a web developer...what could she know"
JavaScript, for one thing.
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
All she did was be good at her job and tell the truth. What "truth" do you think she was exposing? The original dispute that caused her to leave her job was a boring technical dispute about whether to automatically publish data from PDFs or to have it reviewed for accuracy first: https://polimath.substack.com/p/a-long-one-about-the-florida... . Despite insinuations from various irresponsible media figures, there is z…
Is this case all they have when they accuse Florida of falsifying covid data? I assumed there was more but never looked into it.
She had some procedural complaints as well, but she's since started publishing her own "defudged" data tracker at floridacovidaction.com, and as far as I've heard it's never reported any huge difference from the state's numbers.
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#64While the State has handled this case wrong, she is not innocent in this. She made a bunch of drama about her interpretation of the data, which was, at best, no better than the State's method, and more likely, she was flat-out wrong. She is mostly a drama queen making a crazy mess.
Spoken like a true sexist.
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that have to do with anything? Her job was a web developer, not a data scientist. None of those qualify her to understand statistics better than the plethora of those employed by the state that are working diligently. Plenty of employees have been let go for spreading falsities around COVID, most having been on the other side (COVID isn’t real etc). These behaviors are absolutely unacceptable and are danger…
>>where she completed course work with an emphasis on data science and was working on a doctoral dissertation titled Using Native American Sitescapes to Extend the North American Paleotempestological Record Through Coupled Remote Sensing and Climatological Analysis. >None of those qualify her to understand statistics better than the plethora of those employed by the state that are working diligently. Is your society…
Taking a stats class does not a data scientist make. COVID statistics can be very very difficult to interpret, especially at the beginning when data was scarce.
Edit to add example : For instance, most people agree it is best to exclude totally random testing sites from COVID numbers because even though the false positive rate is very low, at the beginning so was the incidence of COVID which means most of the positive tests would be false positive.
Including them or improperly dealing with that data would be considered base rate fallacy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
This is just one statistical phenomenon that has to be dealt with. It’s complicated and sometimes messy but it absolutely requires top minds
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having cops invade her home and hold her children at gunpoint didn’t scare her into becoming his scapegoat, so it’s important to escalate the campaign of violence against her.
> Having cops invade her home and hold her children at gunpoint didn’t scare her into becoming his scapegoat, so it’s important to escalate the campaign of violence against her. You make it sound like the police broke into her home and deliberately pointed weapons at her children. That’s completely bullshit. The police had a warrant signed by a judge. They repeatedly asked her to open the door, she refused. This went…
The cops aren’t wild animals. They should have the ability to figure out whether or not a web developer/data scientist at home with warrants for nonviolent allegations is worth drawing a gun in a house with children in it.
We need to hold cops to a higher standard of behavior.
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed--as a Florida resident, I have heard a variety of highly-charged opinions on this story from many of my fellow residents, but very few hard facts to confirm or deny any particular narrative. I think the raid on Ms. Jones home was a grotesque and unwarranted use of police force, but I also think her "whistle-blowing" story is highly questionable based on the facts available.
If you have few hard facts, how are you evaluating the justification for raiding her home?
It’s fairly easy to reconcile the opinions “I’m not sure if she has done something criminal” and “the police used excessive and intentionally intimidating force when other safer options were open to them”.
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#68What a weird story that keeps getting weirder. I am a data scientist who spent June in Tallahassee helping coordinate state-wide COVID testing with FDEM (Florida Department of Emergency Management) and state health officials. Everyone I worked with was pretty dedicated to getting the roll out right (including the governor and his appointees too..) My data & work was spread far and wide with no issue - but just a pers…
Your chosen terminology is a little strange to me(weird); would you by chance be an American?
This is a textbook example of the Government(State of Florida) targeting an individual for their speech.
But then again, Do-Nothing DeSantis is the successor to Senator Red Tide Rick. Par for the course with Florida, sadly.
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>where she completed course work with an emphasis on data science and was working on a doctoral dissertation titled Using Native American Sitescapes to Extend the North American Paleotempestological Record Through Coupled Remote Sensing and Climatological Analysis. >None of those qualify her to understand statistics better than the plethora of those employed by the state that are working diligently. Is your society…
Taking a stats class does not a data scientist make. COVID statistics can be very very difficult to interpret, especially at the beginning when data was scarce. Edit to add example : For instance, most people agree it is best to exclude totally random testing sites from COVID numbers because even though the false positive rate is very low, at the beginning so was the incidence of COVID which means most of the positiv…
Are you even capable of reading? No wonder you need a specialist to "decipher" simple data as covid-cases/day.
EDIT: Why are you changing your comment to that extend. That's not honest anymore. Bye
Re: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
"not innocent" Like criminally not innocent? Not clear on what you mean hear.
My interpretation is that she's not the whistleblower she claims to be, and in fact has unfairly cast a dark shadow over the work of everyone else involved in Florida's Covid-19 dashboard through her accusations. Honestly, I think she was just attributing sinister motives to fairly inane bureaucratic decisions about data and reporting. But once she decided to go on CNN and lob accusations, this whole fiasco turned in…
I've been watching with some interest, and feel like I don't know anywhere near the whole story. We all look for "good guys" and "bad guys" to make sense of a narrative, but I come away with the feeling that Ms Jones is not solidly in the former camp. One data point I have for this is the way she tears down others who are doing their best work, for example a very public feud with Emily Oster: https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1344067350216265729
We have some serious work to do. I'm very hopeful that we're going to have a very solid team at the national leadership level in 3 days, after a year of a vacuum, but I'm still concerned about state and local levels. I don't think these types of personality fights are very helpful.