Drifter – Foris boots in Matte Black
Tuesday shoesday
What if instead of becoming the world’s police, we’d become the world’s doctors?
In Liberia, we saw that communities with strong primary healthcare were better able to stem the spread of Ebola. We are now applying these lessons to more effectively protect the health of our people should another outbreak strike. We have prioritised investments in primary healthcare to ensure that citizens can secure essential health services free of charge and see primary healthcare providers in their own communities, even in the most remote parts of the country.
Tuesday shoesday
The Ecological Crisis is a Political Crisis – Resilience
Oligarchic control compromises a society’s ability to make correct decisions in the face of existential threats.
…
Citizens in countries such as Canada, the United States, Australia, or the Eurozone members, would generally consider themselves to be living in democratic societies. However, when the political systems of Western democracies are scrutinized, clear and pervasive signs of oligarchy emerge.
A 2014 study by American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page revealed that the great majority of political decisions made in the United States reflect the interests of elites. After studying nearly 1,800 policy decisions passed between 1981 and 2002, the researchers argued that “both individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”
Source: The Ecological Crisis is a Political Crisis – Resilience
Like antibiotic resistance, but for fungi
Aspergillus fumigatus likes very warm temperatures; it grows happily in the steamy interior of a compost heap, which just happens to be the same temperature as the inside of our bodies. So once it settles in the lungs, the fungus reproduces wildly, spills into the bloodstream, and is conveyed to other organs, where it grows and overwhelms them in turn. That outcome is called invasive aspergillosis, and it is diagnosed as often as 500,000 times a year worldwide, in up to 10 percent of immunocompromised patients. It is deadly—or was, until a tiny group of drugs called triazoles came on the market in the 1990s and 2000s. The triazoles, which have names such as fluconazole and voriconazole, worked against many types of fungal infections—a rare feat, because fungi are more like us biologically than bacteria are, and it is harder to make an antifungal that will kill just them and not us than it is to make an antibiotic. Invasive aspergillosis had been a death sentence, but the triazoles dialed the death rate down from 100 percent to 40 percent. In other words, three out of every five patients who would have died began to survive their infections instead.
And then that trend reversed. At Radboud, the death rate began to creep up again, to 88 percent. Running a review of the samples his department had processed, Verweij spotted the reason: The patients’ infections were resistant to the triazoles, possessing cellular defenses that protected them from the drugs’ attack.
Source: When Tulips Kill – The Atlantic
Tuesday shoesday
Drifter – Monk Double Strap in Matte Black
Good idea, failed execution
One of the most common sources of misunderstanding in probability theory is the confusion of an abstract probability distribution with these representations. In an understandable desire to present concrete examples as early as possible, many introductory treatments of probability theory begin immediately with these representations only to end up muddling their relationship with the abstract mathematics that they are characterizing. Now that we have worked through the abstract definitions, however, we can introduce representations in a more principled way.
Source: Probability Theory (For Scientists and Engineers)
I’d be more sympathetic to the above if I hadn’t just spent several hours working through what came above that paragraph and understanding basically nothing in each section until I googled the topic at hand and found a relevant example. As it is, I’m just really annoyed.