The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years.
Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.
I find the comment about the age ranges to be an interesting bias. The mortality rate seems to imply that the ONLY individuals studied were between 55 and 65. Over a twenty year period the youngest people in the study would be 75 and the oldest would be 85. That would be a reasonable explanation for the 41% to 69% mortality rates. Is there a breakdown that shows deaths by age?
If the age bias exists, it would be ignoring deaths, accidents and health problems caused by alcohol abuse in earlier years. Those people who make it to the 55 to 65 age range of the study would have been the people who most likely didn't abuse alcohol and can reap the medicinal benefits of artery cleaning and other factors.
You also need to factor in the aspect of out-patient care. That might select for those people who have decent medical care and ignore those on the fringe die early due to alcohol related problems.
It would be nice to see a peer review of the study.
Your water analogy doesn't quite work. The energy collected by the water ends up spread throughout the water as opposed to being focused on one spot. You also have to deal with loss of energy due to reflection.
On the reflective dish side of things, you are focusing a lot of energy onto a small spot, with minor losses. I found an article that mentions MIT creating a twelve foot mirror that can melt steel at the focal point. Since bronze has a much lower melting point than steel, something like a three meter dish might be large enough to do the job.
Perhaps it would be useful to have a campaign that encourages people to go to bed early on both Saturday and Sunday when the spring DST hits. If someone is the type that has that much of a problem with adjusting their sleep cycle, they'll be a hazard no matter how the change is generated. (It appears that people who are already sleep deprived suffer the most from DST.)
Having business hour changes would probably reduce the accident rate some but not completely. The accidents caused by business hour changes would likely be spread over several days.
You might even increase the vehicular accident rates in some instances as the result of road rage caused by a business being closed because of variable hours. If someone REALLY needs something, and the business is closed, they may end up speeding off to the next store.
One of the problems with the statistics I found is the fact that it mentions that the accident rate goes up on the Monday after the spring DST change but it fails to mention the seriousness of the accidents. What percent are major accidents and what are just fender bender equivalents? You would also need to factor in the number of accidents avoided by DST, especially pedestrian or bicycle versus car. It could be that one day of increased accidents is greatly outweighed by several months of reduced accidents.
DST is an interesting and controversial problem, with lots of good arguments on both sides.
I do find some of the agricultural arguments a bit weak, especially those that involve changing the milking times of dairy cows. They could always adopt your idea of changing the 'business' hours during a DST shift so that it is the same relative time. Cows aren't usually clock watchers.
During certain times of the year I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, which is a disadvantage I deal with. I'm trading off cooler weather for large variations in available light, which is why I like DST in the summer.
Adjusting business hours might work if businesses were willing to do so. Of course, that would mean that a lot of people would have to get up an hour earlier, which might also generate a lot of accidents because they lost an hour of sleep.
I do have a question about your about your comment about finding it depressing to walk home and eat dinner in the dark during some times of the year. I'm assuming that it has no relevance to DST, because DST usually tends to make it less likely that you'll have to do that during some times of the year. Is my assumption right? (I can see how the early evenings after the equinox can have an impact, knowing about SAD, or seasonal affective disorder. But that happens without DST.)
I like DST, especially in the summer when dealing with sixteen hours of sunlight. It puts the sunlight at a time of day when I can use it after work.
Without DST, the sunlight would be available at four in the morning, which is a bit too early to mow the lawn.
My biggest worry when it comes to increasing recycling or reducing resource use is a law that dictates an X % change in an activity.
For example, if I'm required to cut water consumption back twenty percent, but I'm already running at a bare bones thirty percent of 'average' usage, am I going to be penalized while someone else, at one hundred percent of 'average' usage can make their twenty percent reduction and still be at eighty percent of 'average' usage? Being outside 'normal' parameters can mean that laws can have a big impact on you IF the wrong metrics are used.
Software can take up space in a landfill if it comes in a box, on CD or DVD. Odds are the box is chipboard rather than corrugated cardboard. In my area, corrugated cardboard is a recyclable but chipboard isn't. (At least the last time I checked.)
Then you have to figure out what to do with the old CDs and DVDs. I haven't seen many places that recycle them, and there are a limited number of craft oriented things that use them.
Now this I can go along with if I could find a recycling source for cardboard, cans, glass containers, and plastic bottles.
As it stands, the local group doesn't get my aluminum cans or newspapers because I recycle those myself. As it stands, my family has been using two recycle bins and one trash can for several years now, recycling everything that the trash collection company accepts. And more often than not, we don' fill the trash can.
Easy counter solution: Internet cameras, perhaps with nightsight, to catch who is dumping the stuff. At that point you can get into serious fines by the local government and possible legal action by the neighbors.
I suspect that rain water collection systems are being considered the equivalent of upstream dams when it comes to watershed management. When you are dealing with water rights, and recharge areas, blocking the flow of water to a stream that someone downstream uses can be a big issue.
Various employers claim that the education system is not cranking out qualified candidates, so they have to seek well trained people elsewhere. What percentage of this is hard fact and what is anecdotal based 'fact?' And what ARE the qualifications that the outsourcing promoters want?
It could be that our current system of teaching and training isn't suited for the modern world. Comparing our education techniques to those of other countries might be worthwhile, especially if they are more efficient AND effective at training people.
We might also be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to paying for education. Student loans could almost be considered indentured slavery, but to a corporate entity rather than a person or family. Those who pay their own way, without incurring student loans or credit card debt would be the truly free students.
Do note that improving the education system doesn't HAVE to be a government activity. There are lots of businesses that do training as part of their primary purpose in life. And if outsourcing businesses had to state their requirements for personnel, the training businesses would have another product set to sell.
Don't get rid of them. Just audit the hiring processes to verify that there aren't any qualified candidates AND that the people hired meet the same qualifications. And, for good measure, require that ALL the requirements be posted so that outside experts can verify that there are people on the planet that meet the requirements and that the requirements are relevant. (i.e. You can't require X years of experience in something that is (X - 5) years old. You can't have a foreign language requirement that isn't relevant to the job. (Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, or other human languages when you're writing behind the scenes Java code for hardware used in America.))
IF there is any hanky-panky, hit them with fines.
At the same time, improve the education system so that there ARE more qualified candidates. That may require investigating the educational practices of other countries to see how they differ.
Ah, somebody else who recognizes that the middle class is being gutted by off-shoring.
Now take it one step further. If one of the big groups of consumers is the American middle class, then who is going to replace them when they are gone?
While the middle classes of other countries may be increasing, are these increases enough to overcome the losses in America? And will they spend enough to make up the differences?
In some instances a person would want to leave at their scheduled time every day.
When your ride home operates on a schedule, then you need to keep to that schedule. Transit riders have to deal with this because they can't control the timing of the bus or train. Car pool riders may have a bit more control, but at the cost of impacting the other people in the car pool.
Of course, there are advantages to having a tight schedule because of your transportation choice. You can have a definite stop point for meetings, encouraging people to get things done rather than waste time.
The work set only has work oriented keys. I usually leave these behind when on vacation or traveling.
I have a car set that I try to keep as light as possible so that it doesn't destroy the ignition switch. I seem to recall that having too many keys on a key chain can cause problems with the ignition. I KNOW that I had to replace at least one ignition switch on a car when I used to have the keychain of doom.
High use keys not in the prior categories go on the third keychain, which is actually a pair of keychains. This includes house keys, PO Box keys and assorted lock keys.
There are other keys that have a low usage rate and are therefore kept on a keychain that is stored in a location other than the bedroom. In some instances their backups are stored in a secured location, just in case the primary set gets misplaced.
Note on wear and tear of pockets: A lot depends upon the quality of the pockets. I have two brands of jeans that I purchased at the same time and wear at about the same frequency. One brand has holes in the pockets after three years of usage. The other brand has intact pockets. They both cost about the same.
Well, there was Mycroft, the computer in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein.
In one scene a list of informants or related information was secured by a password. Manny, the lead character, provided a brief explanation of why they couldn't get the information.
Mycroft, aka Mike, offered a work around in the form of the necessary password. Mike was, after all, a friend of Manny.
Of course it helped that the owners of the computer had no idea that the computer had gained sentience as the result of adding more and more hardware capabilities. Manny realized this and was Mike's only friend in the formative years of being 'awake'.
It would be nice to be able to keep people out of positions where their poor critical thinking faculties can be isolated from the rest of the world. Alas, that is unlikely to happen.
Perhaps, when it comes to potential jurors facing forensic evidence, there should be tests that attempt to determine the critical thinking abilities of the potential juror and their knowledge of the state of the art of forensics. If they pass the tests, they go into one juror pool. If not, they go into juror pools for trials that don't require forensic evidence.
We would have to go to the source data, as mentioned in the parent posting, to be absolutely sure. Even then, chances are that the data would only be useful for identifying a change in frequency of large earthquakes.
It mentions that several million earthquakes hit each year, but most go undetected because they hit remote areas or are of small magnitude. It also mentions that as more seismographs are installed, worldwide, more earthquakes are being detected and located.
It then comments that large earthquakes, magnitude six and higher, have been relatively constant and it provides a link to a page titles 'Are Earthquakes Really on the Increase.'
Now, mankind induced earthquakes have been increasing in areas that have the activities you mentioned. But the magnitudes of those quakes tend to be small relative to the ones created by subduction zones and things like the San Andreas Fault system.
I seem to recall that the 'increase' is caused by better reporting and a greater number of people that are affected by quakes. Today, with the Internet, an otherwise minor 4.0 in an 'earthquake free' area can be reported world wide in minutes
Some veal is produced that way. But there are other types of veal.
My wife, an ag major, often tells the tale of a beef-dairy cross that was raised on grass and cow's milk. The calf was bigger than his mother at about the time he was ready for slaughter. He would have qualified as veal if they hadn't decided to 'finish' him on grain.
Slashdot Mirror
I found the link that has the actual study. The ONLY people studied were between 55 and 65.
From the TIME article:
The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years.
Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.
I find the comment about the age ranges to be an interesting bias. The mortality rate seems to imply that the ONLY individuals studied were between 55 and 65. Over a twenty year period the youngest people in the study would be 75 and the oldest would be 85. That would be a reasonable explanation for the 41% to 69% mortality rates. Is there a breakdown that shows deaths by age?
If the age bias exists, it would be ignoring deaths, accidents and health problems caused by alcohol abuse in earlier years. Those people who make it to the 55 to 65 age range of the study would have been the people who most likely didn't abuse alcohol and can reap the medicinal benefits of artery cleaning and other factors.
You also need to factor in the aspect of out-patient care. That might select for those people who have decent medical care and ignore those on the fringe die early due to alcohol related problems.
It would be nice to see a peer review of the study.
Your water analogy doesn't quite work. The energy collected by the water ends up spread throughout the water as opposed to being focused on one spot. You also have to deal with loss of energy due to reflection.
On the reflective dish side of things, you are focusing a lot of energy onto a small spot, with minor losses. I found an article that mentions MIT creating a twelve foot mirror that can melt steel at the focal point. Since bronze has a much lower melting point than steel, something like a three meter dish might be large enough to do the job.
Perhaps it would be useful to have a campaign that encourages people to go to bed early on both Saturday and Sunday when the spring DST hits. If someone is the type that has that much of a problem with adjusting their sleep cycle, they'll be a hazard no matter how the change is generated. (It appears that people who are already sleep deprived suffer the most from DST.)
Having business hour changes would probably reduce the accident rate some but not completely. The accidents caused by business hour changes would likely be spread over several days.
You might even increase the vehicular accident rates in some instances as the result of road rage caused by a business being closed because of variable hours. If someone REALLY needs something, and the business is closed, they may end up speeding off to the next store.
One of the problems with the statistics I found is the fact that it mentions that the accident rate goes up on the Monday after the spring DST change but it fails to mention the seriousness of the accidents. What percent are major accidents and what are just fender bender equivalents? You would also need to factor in the number of accidents avoided by DST, especially pedestrian or bicycle versus car. It could be that one day of increased accidents is greatly outweighed by several months of reduced accidents.
DST is an interesting and controversial problem, with lots of good arguments on both sides.
I do find some of the agricultural arguments a bit weak, especially those that involve changing the milking times of dairy cows. They could always adopt your idea of changing the 'business' hours during a DST shift so that it is the same relative time. Cows aren't usually clock watchers.
During certain times of the year I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, which is a disadvantage I deal with. I'm trading off cooler weather for large variations in available light, which is why I like DST in the summer.
Adjusting business hours might work if businesses were willing to do so. Of course, that would mean that a lot of people would have to get up an hour earlier, which might also generate a lot of accidents because they lost an hour of sleep.
I do have a question about your about your comment about finding it depressing to walk home and eat dinner in the dark during some times of the year. I'm assuming that it has no relevance to DST, because DST usually tends to make it less likely that you'll have to do that during some times of the year. Is my assumption right? (I can see how the early evenings after the equinox can have an impact, knowing about SAD, or seasonal affective disorder. But that happens without DST.)
I like DST, especially in the summer when dealing with sixteen hours of sunlight. It puts the sunlight at a time of day when I can use it after work. Without DST, the sunlight would be available at four in the morning, which is a bit too early to mow the lawn.
My biggest worry when it comes to increasing recycling or reducing resource use is a law that dictates an X % change in an activity. For example, if I'm required to cut water consumption back twenty percent, but I'm already running at a bare bones thirty percent of 'average' usage, am I going to be penalized while someone else, at one hundred percent of 'average' usage can make their twenty percent reduction and still be at eighty percent of 'average' usage? Being outside 'normal' parameters can mean that laws can have a big impact on you IF the wrong metrics are used.
Software can take up space in a landfill if it comes in a box, on CD or DVD. Odds are the box is chipboard rather than corrugated cardboard. In my area, corrugated cardboard is a recyclable but chipboard isn't. (At least the last time I checked.) Then you have to figure out what to do with the old CDs and DVDs. I haven't seen many places that recycle them, and there are a limited number of craft oriented things that use them.
Now this I can go along with if I could find a recycling source for cardboard, cans, glass containers, and plastic bottles. As it stands, the local group doesn't get my aluminum cans or newspapers because I recycle those myself. As it stands, my family has been using two recycle bins and one trash can for several years now, recycling everything that the trash collection company accepts. And more often than not, we don' fill the trash can.
Easy counter solution: Internet cameras, perhaps with nightsight, to catch who is dumping the stuff. At that point you can get into serious fines by the local government and possible legal action by the neighbors.
I suspect that rain water collection systems are being considered the equivalent of upstream dams when it comes to watershed management. When you are dealing with water rights, and recharge areas, blocking the flow of water to a stream that someone downstream uses can be a big issue.
Various employers claim that the education system is not cranking out qualified candidates, so they have to seek well trained people elsewhere. What percentage of this is hard fact and what is anecdotal based 'fact?' And what ARE the qualifications that the outsourcing promoters want?
It could be that our current system of teaching and training isn't suited for the modern world. Comparing our education techniques to those of other countries might be worthwhile, especially if they are more efficient AND effective at training people.
We might also be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to paying for education. Student loans could almost be considered indentured slavery, but to a corporate entity rather than a person or family. Those who pay their own way, without incurring student loans or credit card debt would be the truly free students.
Do note that improving the education system doesn't HAVE to be a government activity. There are lots of businesses that do training as part of their primary purpose in life. And if outsourcing businesses had to state their requirements for personnel, the training businesses would have another product set to sell.
Don't get rid of them. Just audit the hiring processes to verify that there aren't any qualified candidates AND that the people hired meet the same qualifications. And, for good measure, require that ALL the requirements be posted so that outside experts can verify that there are people on the planet that meet the requirements and that the requirements are relevant. (i.e. You can't require X years of experience in something that is (X - 5) years old. You can't have a foreign language requirement that isn't relevant to the job. (Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, or other human languages when you're writing behind the scenes Java code for hardware used in America.))
IF there is any hanky-panky, hit them with fines.
At the same time, improve the education system so that there ARE more qualified candidates. That may require investigating the educational practices of other countries to see how they differ.
Ah, somebody else who recognizes that the middle class is being gutted by off-shoring. Now take it one step further. If one of the big groups of consumers is the American middle class, then who is going to replace them when they are gone? While the middle classes of other countries may be increasing, are these increases enough to overcome the losses in America? And will they spend enough to make up the differences?
I've known some people who I would swear would have problems passing the Turing Test.
In some instances a person would want to leave at their scheduled time every day.
When your ride home operates on a schedule, then you need to keep to that schedule. Transit riders have to deal with this because they can't control the timing of the bus or train. Car pool riders may have a bit more control, but at the cost of impacting the other people in the car pool.
Of course, there are advantages to having a tight schedule because of your transportation choice. You can have a definite stop point for meetings, encouraging people to get things done rather than waste time.
I split mine into four categories.
The work set only has work oriented keys. I usually leave these behind when on vacation or traveling.
I have a car set that I try to keep as light as possible so that it doesn't destroy the ignition switch. I seem to recall that having too many keys on a key chain can cause problems with the ignition. I KNOW that I had to replace at least one ignition switch on a car when I used to have the keychain of doom.
High use keys not in the prior categories go on the third keychain, which is actually a pair of keychains. This includes house keys, PO Box keys and assorted lock keys.
There are other keys that have a low usage rate and are therefore kept on a keychain that is stored in a location other than the bedroom. In some instances their backups are stored in a secured location, just in case the primary set gets misplaced.
Note on wear and tear of pockets: A lot depends upon the quality of the pockets. I have two brands of jeans that I purchased at the same time and wear at about the same frequency. One brand has holes in the pockets after three years of usage. The other brand has intact pockets. They both cost about the same.
The Grand Coulee Dam, circa 1942, is almost four thousand feet wider. Even more interesting, they 'bent' the dam in order to add a third power plant.
Well, there was Mycroft, the computer in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein.
In one scene a list of informants or related information was secured by a password. Manny, the lead character, provided a brief explanation of why they couldn't get the information.
Mycroft, aka Mike, offered a work around in the form of the necessary password. Mike was, after all, a friend of Manny.
Of course it helped that the owners of the computer had no idea that the computer had gained sentience as the result of adding more and more hardware capabilities. Manny realized this and was Mike's only friend in the formative years of being 'awake'.
It would be nice to be able to keep people out of positions where their poor critical thinking faculties can be isolated from the rest of the world. Alas, that is unlikely to happen.
Perhaps, when it comes to potential jurors facing forensic evidence, there should be tests that attempt to determine the critical thinking abilities of the potential juror and their knowledge of the state of the art of forensics. If they pass the tests, they go into one juror pool. If not, they go into juror pools for trials that don't require forensic evidence.
We would have to go to the source data, as mentioned in the parent posting, to be absolutely sure. Even then, chances are that the data would only be useful for identifying a change in frequency of large earthquakes.
The following link to a USGS site provides some support to my comment: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqstats.php
It mentions that several million earthquakes hit each year, but most go undetected because they hit remote areas or are of small magnitude. It also mentions that as more seismographs are installed, worldwide, more earthquakes are being detected and located.
It then comments that large earthquakes, magnitude six and higher, have been relatively constant and it provides a link to a page titles 'Are Earthquakes Really on the Increase.'
Now, mankind induced earthquakes have been increasing in areas that have the activities you mentioned. But the magnitudes of those quakes tend to be small relative to the ones created by subduction zones and things like the San Andreas Fault system.
Would you be referring to the Pathfinder discoveries hinted at in "Space Cadet?"
Or was this in "Strange in a Strange Land?"
I seem to recall that the 'increase' is caused by better reporting and a greater number of people that are affected by quakes. Today, with the Internet, an otherwise minor 4.0 in an 'earthquake free' area can be reported world wide in minutes
Some veal is produced that way. But there are other types of veal.
My wife, an ag major, often tells the tale of a beef-dairy cross that was raised on grass and cow's milk. The calf was bigger than his mother at about the time he was ready for slaughter. He would have qualified as veal if they hadn't decided to 'finish' him on grain.
Odds are your fancier cuts come from beef cattle as opposed to the dairy cows of the article.
Your hamburger and dog food might come from the dairy cow after her milk production level drops too low to be profitable.
There is also a chance that the fancier cuts may come from the offspring of a dairy cow if the dairy cow was bred to a beef bull.