30 seconds after typing that, the stumps of the 1880 - odd Tay Bridge Disaster came into view. In theory, the bridge was strong enough. In practice... not.
The argument could equally well be put as, for a decade or so, companies have been handing out free samples of their drug (information ) and have now started to call in the debts owed by millions of new addicts.
I lived in an apartment under a crack cocaine dealer when I got my first 2400bps modem. I recognised the deal being offered then. The deal is the same now, but the free gear is being stopped.
I had heard of Hantavirus before - typically a SW-desert area disease, if my memory serves well - but I wasn't aware that it was a haemorrhagic virus.
So... how many nurses are there trained and experienced in handling these diseases in the USA? Or, is it a case that essentially everyone who does treat the disease is going to be 30 minutes out of their first training course / briefing? It does take time to change a training course into a practised, skilful performance of the required tasks. That's why we, err, practice things.
It's also why the NE of England had a full dress rehearsal for an Ebola case collapsing in a public place a couple of days ago.
I wonder how long until they go on strike over this?
The unions (RMT, ASLEF) have been pointing out that without drivers, there is going to be no-one to react to suicides (which close tube lines and stations for around a day each time, causing huge disruption, and it happens frequently). The train drivers are also trained to operate the heart attack machines on most trains and platforms, and routinely save the lives of passengers by being present to react.
You're right - there are plans in place for strikes to resist the de-drivering of trains.
Have you any idea what percentage of the UK's GDP might be affected by such a breach in the underground transport system?
I do have an idea that it was really stupid to build in such a place.
I blame the Romans myself for being so inconsiderate as to build a city at a fording point of a major river. If only they'd forded the river up on top of a hill somewhere, London wouldn't have any problems with flooding.
Still, you can avoid it by choosing where to live in the city. My city has a harbour that is inconveniently at sea level, and the harbour often floods in heavy rain or high tides. But my house is 25m above the harbour level and has a site slope of about 2 degrees, so rain water runs away down hill. It's not rocket science.
Many tests for hydrocarbons are cross sensitive, such as a sensor for Propane will detect gasoline, natural gas, butane, etc.
Very true. I've put together and worked gas detection machines for three decades now. Different sensor technologies have different cross sensitivities. It sounds as if your experience is with IR absorption sensors, probably on one wavelength (more wavelengths reduce cross-alkane sensitivity, but increase cost ; single wavelength sensors are fit for purpose for flammability/ explosion risk monitoring, but not for interpretive/ analytical work).
What sensor is used, what is the sample time, what else is it sensitive to, and were there any significant accidents or releases in the area recently?
In the study published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers used observations made by the European Space Agencyâ(TM)s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY)
is a passive remote sensing spectrometer observing backscattered, reflected, transmitted or emitted radiation from the atmosphere and Earth's surface, in the wavelength range between 240 and 2380 nm.
Well, that tells me enough - medium UV to medium IR, plenty of appropriate absorption bands there. If they say "methane" they mean "methane."
If it was from the soil, soil based sampling should have seen this concentration long ago in gas exploration.
Looking for actual figures... the absolute values they're recording are around the 1740-1760ppbv level. Every contractor I've worked with (apart from our own in-house machines) claims to be able to detect at this level in drilling gas results ; none of the contractors I've investigated in depth have been able to prove these claims. When I ran our own machines in the field, I could get them down to this level of sensitivity, but it would take several hours a day of adjustment to keep them there - which is not something you can really spare the time for from your other duties. These days, I set up machines to just detect at this level, then leave it at that level. We're looking for aditions of methane (and other hydrocarbons) to our gas stream from drilling a well ; we're not interested in the atmosphere except as a source of noise to be accounted for.
some estimates put it on the order of being 80 times more powerful.
I don't see that quote in the AGU article, so I'm going to guess that comes from "Vice" ; quite why you'd take a figure from a website about prostitution over one from a geophysical union in a discussion over a science question, I don't understand.
It looks as if Vice's cut'n'pasters (I can't call them journalists) grabbed several figures from various sources and just said "up to [the highest]" without doing any checking on why they were getting a large range. From other sources, I'd have said that methane was about 23 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 ; upthread hyades1 says 25x ; meh to that difference. Where an 80-fold ratio comes from, I've no idea. That could be a figure for some CFCs (they are also potent greenhouse gasses as well as ozone-fuckers) ; it might be true for ethane or higher alkane gasses (minor components of some natural gas deposits) ; or it might just be a figure made up from whole cloth. but the 80x figure is clearly wrong.
The half life of methane in air (against oxidation to CO2) is around a decade ; there are probably considerable temperature effects in there, making an average a bit dodgy to measure. It's not centuries (we'd see it in the records of previous major releases of methane to the atmosphere, such as my bread and butter Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ; it's not days (otherwise this plume would have oxidised away ; it's somewhere in between.
Surely everyone knowns that, for small values of theta (the situation that is being discussed), then sin(theta) ~= theta (in radians). It's a basic trigonometry result, used all over the place where you're looking at small angles. It's probably at the root of the original articles interest in using the sin() calculation to expose the (in-)accuracy of the system's value for pi.
So, if your angle gets to low values (choose where that is for yourself) , then you switch to using that approximation and cut out a large chink of calculation. Saves a lot of hassle. It's as basic as checking for "divide by zero" situations.
Ok, now we've exhausted the 10 beds at the hospital that are usable for quarantine. We've still got 150 patients with symptoms in the emergency room. Put them all in the same room?
Yes. that's what you have school sports halls etc for. You put them into the same room, using whatever beds, blankets etc you have from your emergency stores (you know - for fire, flood, typhoon or tornado ; whatever). And then you put armed guards on the entrances and perimeter of the site. You probably also call out the National Guard/ Territorial Army or whatever equivalent you have to supplement your firearm-trained police. And you take the "kid gloves" off.
That will get us another 5000 patients with the symptoms in the emergency room. Quarantine them? No place. Send them home? And we go another round.
This is why you come down, hard, on day one. you do not want round 2.
Within the quarantine area, you can manage patients. Re-assess them ; when results from round-one blood tests (it takes several days to test blood for Ebola antibodies), you can segregate the known-positives from their contact. But you do not let people leave until they've gone through the full isolation, quarantine and testing regime. That's why the guards are armed.
We do know how to contain disease outbreaks. Whether politicians and the people have the balls to take it is a separate question.
Look, I'm not going to fear monger here, but the fact is that if significant numbers of infected individuals start traveling around the globe we will not be able to maintain containment for long, even with all the resources that ultra-rich 1st world countries have at their disposal.
There's a fair chance that we've already crossed that particular Rubicon.
In high school we would HIDE during fire drills so we didn't have to stand around in the cold/rain/heat/whatever.
this should have been ineffective. the drill should have continued until a full muster had been accounted for. If that takes an hour and a half (I've seen fire drills on oil rigs that took that long) to get a good head count, that's fine. You then go back to normal operations and complete the school day. One and a half hours late.
the people who were responsible get kicked to shit on the way home. Quite rightly.
You can bet that this sort of thing won't happen again.
You can bet that way if you want to. Last week in the bar I was putting up a fiver at 2:1 to bet that it would happen again, within a month. Nobody took the bet.
Apart from the deranged ramblings of ACs, has anyone heard someone seriously proposing something like this? My gut feeling is "bullshit", but I haven't really attempted to think it through. Ebola is much more interesting.
They're almost all variants and fragments of Standard Oil - "Esso" = S.O.= Standard Oil ; Mobil descends from SO-New York ; Chevron from SO-California ; Marathon from SO's Ohio branch.
Shell is one of the small number of oil companies that has never been part of the SO family tree ; BP another (though it has brought up several baby-SOs..
I remember from âoeback in the dayâ, reading that Ebola had a 100% mortality rate; once youâ(TM)re infected, youâ(TM)re as good as dead.
Can you tell us where you read that?
That journal/ newspaper/ milk carton sounds like a good source of arse-wipe paper.
The very worst Ebola outbreak known had about 90% mortality ; more typical figures were 65~75%. you may not think that's a big difference, but I do - it's a difference of about 3-fold in survival rates.
Strange : every African country that I've been into has put an entry and exit stamp, with dates, into my passport. Which is why the Immigration Ossifer at passport control looks through your whole passport before looking at the identification page.
Don't you observe when you go through passport control?
Of course, if you've got a second passport, then you've got another option. Which is why I carry my second passport with me, unless it's off getting another country's visa put into it.
Safe and effective are both important questions. Which is why you test both questions at the same time, along with other questions (dose, administration route, adjuvants). And of course, you want to get all the answers to these questions as soon as possible, and to kill as few people as possible.
Using the population (of infected people) as a control group. Say you have two potential vaccines, A and B (this could even be different dosages of the same vaccine, or different adjuvants at the same dosage, or oral vaccine versus injected). Your population mortality is 65% +/- 5% (because you do not know everyone infected, or everyone who dies) and your two candidate vaccines have mortality rates of 55% +/-15% (smaller sample size leads to higher uncertainty) and 52% +/-20% respectively.
Back to elementary statistics :
- what is the probability that either of the vaccines is better than leaving people unvaccinated?
- which vaccine is better?
- IF you get an valid answer to the previous question, what does that say about the direction to go in order to achieve a more effective vaccine.
By your poor experimental design, you've just guaranteed that you're going to have to go through another cycle of vaccine design and testing. Say, 6 weeks. Say, another 10,000 lives.
I studied some medical statistics at college (the Statistics Department wanted me to transfer into their department and study it full time ; I didn't). It is very very important to get it right, and to think before you act. Because if you act wrongly, people die. And their deaths are your fault.
Now do you see why I didn't continue studying medical statistics?
Slashdot Mirror
30 seconds after typing that, the stumps of the 1880 - odd Tay Bridge Disaster came into view. In theory, the bridge was strong enough. In practice. .. not.
Trite, but true.
I spend a significant part of my working life teaching this to people fresh out of university. I don't see me running out of this sort of work.
I lived in an apartment under a crack cocaine dealer when I got my first 2400bps modem. I recognised the deal being offered then. The deal is the same now, but the free gear is being stopped.
Next article?
Hippos? The whales that did not go to sea?
So ... how many nurses are there trained and experienced in handling these diseases in the USA? Or, is it a case that essentially everyone who does treat the disease is going to be 30 minutes out of their first training course / briefing? It does take time to change a training course into a practised, skilful performance of the required tasks. That's why we, err, practice things.
It's also why the NE of England had a full dress rehearsal for an Ebola case collapsing in a public place a couple of days ago.
The unions (RMT, ASLEF) have been pointing out that without drivers, there is going to be no-one to react to suicides (which close tube lines and stations for around a day each time, causing huge disruption, and it happens frequently). The train drivers are also trained to operate the heart attack machines on most trains and platforms, and routinely save the lives of passengers by being present to react.
You're right - there are plans in place for strikes to resist the de-drivering of trains.
I blame the Romans myself for being so inconsiderate as to build a city at a fording point of a major river. If only they'd forded the river up on top of a hill somewhere, London wouldn't have any problems with flooding.
Still, you can avoid it by choosing where to live in the city. My city has a harbour that is inconveniently at sea level, and the harbour often floods in heavy rain or high tides. But my house is 25m above the harbour level and has a site slope of about 2 degrees, so rain water runs away down hill. It's not rocket science.
Very true. I've put together and worked gas detection machines for three decades now. Different sensor technologies have different cross sensitivities. It sounds as if your experience is with IR absorption sensors, probably on one wavelength (more wavelengths reduce cross-alkane sensitivity, but increase cost ; single wavelength sensors are fit for purpose for flammability/ explosion risk monitoring, but not for interpretive/ analytical work).
FTFA ; sorry, the second FA
FTFIWP (From The Fucking Instrument's Web Page, http://www.sciamachy.org/
Well, that tells me enough - medium UV to medium IR, plenty of appropriate absorption bands there. If they say "methane" they mean "methane."
Looking for actual figures ... the absolute values they're recording are around the 1740-1760ppbv level. Every contractor I've worked with (apart from our own in-house machines) claims to be able to detect at this level in drilling gas results ; none of the contractors I've investigated in depth have been able to prove these claims. When I ran our own machines in the field, I could get them down to this level of sensitivity, but it would take several hours a day of adjustment to keep them there - which is not something you can really spare the time for from your other duties. These days, I set up machines to just detect at this level, then leave it at that level. We're looking for aditions of methane (and other hydrocarbons) to our gas stream from drilling a well ; we're not interested in the atmosphere except as a source of noise to be accounted for.
A quarter is the weight of a tuppenny piece and should cost no more than thirty quid.
With such extensive knowledge of bovine anatomy, can you tell me if Frank Zappa was right? With a tongue like a cow, can she really make me go 'Wow!"?
I don't see that quote in the AGU article, so I'm going to guess that comes from "Vice" ; quite why you'd take a figure from a website about prostitution over one from a geophysical union in a discussion over a science question, I don't understand.
It looks as if Vice's cut'n'pasters (I can't call them journalists) grabbed several figures from various sources and just said "up to [the highest]" without doing any checking on why they were getting a large range. From other sources, I'd have said that methane was about 23 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 ; upthread hyades1 says 25x ; meh to that difference. Where an 80-fold ratio comes from, I've no idea. That could be a figure for some CFCs (they are also potent greenhouse gasses as well as ozone-fuckers) ; it might be true for ethane or higher alkane gasses (minor components of some natural gas deposits) ; or it might just be a figure made up from whole cloth. but the 80x figure is clearly wrong.
The half life of methane in air (against oxidation to CO2) is around a decade ; there are probably considerable temperature effects in there, making an average a bit dodgy to measure. It's not centuries (we'd see it in the records of previous major releases of methane to the atmosphere, such as my bread and butter Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ; it's not days (otherwise this plume would have oxidised away ; it's somewhere in between.
Which part of the original article (first post in the thread) did you not read? Was it the bit that says
So, if your angle gets to low values (choose where that is for yourself) , then you switch to using that approximation and cut out a large chink of calculation. Saves a lot of hassle. It's as basic as checking for "divide by zero" situations.
Yes. that's what you have school sports halls etc for. You put them into the same room, using whatever beds, blankets etc you have from your emergency stores (you know - for fire, flood, typhoon or tornado ; whatever). And then you put armed guards on the entrances and perimeter of the site. You probably also call out the National Guard/ Territorial Army or whatever equivalent you have to supplement your firearm-trained police. And you take the "kid gloves" off.
This is why you come down, hard, on day one. you do not want round 2.
Within the quarantine area, you can manage patients. Re-assess them ; when results from round-one blood tests (it takes several days to test blood for Ebola antibodies), you can segregate the known-positives from their contact. But you do not let people leave until they've gone through the full isolation, quarantine and testing regime. That's why the guards are armed.
We do know how to contain disease outbreaks. Whether politicians and the people have the balls to take it is a separate question.
There's a fair chance that we've already crossed that particular Rubicon.
this should have been ineffective. the drill should have continued until a full muster had been accounted for. If that takes an hour and a half (I've seen fire drills on oil rigs that took that long) to get a good head count, that's fine. You then go back to normal operations and complete the school day. One and a half hours late.
the people who were responsible get kicked to shit on the way home. Quite rightly.
You can bet that way if you want to. Last week in the bar I was putting up a fiver at 2:1 to bet that it would happen again, within a month. Nobody took the bet.
Apart from the deranged ramblings of ACs, has anyone heard someone seriously proposing something like this? My gut feeling is "bullshit", but I haven't really attempted to think it through. Ebola is much more interesting.
Shell is one of the small number of oil companies that has never been part of the SO family tree ; BP another (though it has brought up several baby-SOs..
That does remain an option. It's not a nice option, but it is definitely a possibility.
Can you tell us where you read that?
That journal/ newspaper/ milk carton sounds like a good source of arse-wipe paper.
The very worst Ebola outbreak known had about 90% mortality ; more typical figures were 65~75%. you may not think that's a big difference, but I do - it's a difference of about 3-fold in survival rates.
Don't you observe when you go through passport control?
Of course, if you've got a second passport, then you've got another option. Which is why I carry my second passport with me, unless it's off getting another country's visa put into it.
Safe and effective are both important questions. Which is why you test both questions at the same time, along with other questions (dose, administration route, adjuvants). And of course, you want to get all the answers to these questions as soon as possible, and to kill as few people as possible.
Back to elementary statistics :
By your poor experimental design, you've just guaranteed that you're going to have to go through another cycle of vaccine design and testing. Say, 6 weeks. Say, another 10,000 lives.
I studied some medical statistics at college (the Statistics Department wanted me to transfer into their department and study it full time ; I didn't). It is very very important to get it right, and to think before you act. Because if you act wrongly, people die. And their deaths are your fault.
Now do you see why I didn't continue studying medical statistics?