Dec 20, 2024
biggest laugh of the day
Spokeo has me listed as "deceased", and hasn't updated its information about me in a decade (three addresses ago). Boo!!
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from China
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from Greece
seen from Canada
seen from Canada
biggest laugh of the day
Spokeo has me listed as "deceased", and hasn't updated its information about me in a decade (three addresses ago). Boo!!
So uh, my weather app is glitching and
The worst technology of 2021 - 2022
The worst technology of 2021 – 2022
The drug, sold by Biogen, is an antibody that attaches to brain plaques. Aduhelm flopped in a large human trial, which showed no concrete benefit to patients with the brain disease. Yet the company and the US Food and Drug Administration decided to move forward in June, over the objections of the agency’s expert advisors. Several resigned. One, Aaron Kesselheim, called the episode “probably the…
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Organizational culture
It is of both intellectual and practical interest to understand how organizations function and how the actors within them choose the actions that they pursue. A common answer to these questions is to refer to the rules and incentives of the organization, and then to attempt to understand the actor’s choices through the lens of rational preference theory. However, it is now increasingly clear…
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The US Chemical Safety Board
The US Chemical Safety Board
The Federal agency responsible for investigating chemical and petrochemical accidents in the United States is the Chemical Safety Board (link). The mission of the Board is described in these terms:
The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the agency’s board members are appointed by the President and…
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Testing the NRC
Serious nuclear accidents are rare but potentially devastating to people, land, and agriculture. (It appears that minor to moderate nuclear accidents are not nearly so rare, as James Mahaffey shows in Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima.) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are disasters that have given the public a…
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Pervasive organizational and regulatory failures
Pervasive organizational and regulatory failures
It is intriguing to observe how pervasive organizational and regulatory failures are in our collective lives. Once you are sensitized to these factors, you see them everywhere. A good example is in the business section of today’s print version of the New York Times, August 1, 2019. There are at least five stories in this section that reflect the consequences of organizational and regulatory…
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Soviet nuclear disasters: Kyshtym
Soviet nuclear disasters: Kyshtym
The 1986 meltdown of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was the greatest nuclear disaster the world has yet seen. Less well known is the Kyshtym disaster in 1957, which resulted in a massive release of radioactive material in the Eastern Ural region of the Soviet Union. This was a catastrophic underground explosion at a nuclear storage facility near the Mayak power plant in…
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