That's true -- though the figure you're linking focuses specifically on measles cases rather than overall mortality, which is what the OP article is focusing on.
(as an aside, it's really weird that the (first few) comments here on HN seem a little adversarial; I wonder if maybe some people looked at the headline only and assumed it was attempting some sort of anti-vax argument, which the article isn't doing at all.)
So there is something odd going on with measles. I haven't dug into the data, but from a couple of data points I've seen, it seems that measles mortality was declining for a long time even while measles cases were not. That is, there was a decline in the case-fatality rate, without a decline in cases. The disease was still around but getting less deadly. Then the vaccine actually reduced the number of cases.
So what was reducing the case-fatality rate? I don't know, but it might have been nutrition. There's evidence at least that Vitamin A makes measles less severe/deadly.
Sanitation, antibiotics, oral rehydration therapy, machine ventilation, nutrition, and so on.
It's not the measles itself that was the cause of most fatalities, it was the pneumonia, diahrrea, and other opportunistic infections that come with it.
The problem is that anti-vaxxers will use the headline as their entire justification for their opinion which is not supported by the content under the headline.
Very good link. I think a lot of people get intimidated by the idea of emergency preparedness because it feels like such a big, overwhelming thing to deal with. One cause of this is perhaps the Hollywood/media image of "disaster" as a singular extreme event that obliterates the average person except for a few plucky heroes. In contrast, there's a full spectrum of severity, and any small amount of preparedness can help.
In case anyone here hasn't seen it before, I'd like to share the article "Doomsday planning for less crazy folk" [0]. It's a good, sober-headed step-by-step guide to evaluating one's own threat model and making actionable steps toward improving one's emergency preparedness -- both small-scale and large-scale. I have a routine to-do item to re-read one section of this article every few weeks and think of ways I can make myself more resilient.
Agreed, the GPS priors are very helpful -- the ability to specify prior known positions/orientations of photos, to some known error tolerances, is one of the power features in Agisoft Metashape Pro, which I wish was available in more photogrammetry software. Being able to know the actual nearby photos a priori and avoid the costly O(N^2) pairwise comparison is a great benefit.
Some research I did a few months ago was about trying to find ways to effectively bring in that advantage of outdoor photogrammetry into indoor environments, by piggybacking onto AR HMDs with built-in SLAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldrGpGrOaZc
What should be the exact dollar amount to avoid "looking like he's using it to drum up publicity"? You presumably have some idea of what the "right answer" is since your gut is telling you $1bn is too much.
If I was mistreated by the police for a few days with no permanent harm, arrester on insufficient evidence, the police should pay me a few hundred or thousand dollar a day, maybe. Apple should pay nothing because because they did nothing wrong by sending evidence to the police.
The real problem is that the government considers arrest without conviction to be a civil duty, not a tort.
Additionally, what I find particularly frightening and unsettling is the possibility that we'll never be able to know just how harmful microplastics are, due to the rapid loss of anything we could call a "control group" on the planet. Rapid industrialization and globalization has led to land, water, and sky all being infused with this stuff; are there populated areas anymore where we could point to and say "this place is untouched by microplastics" and compare the health of the people and ecosystem there to the affected areas?
Indeed. And, whatever organisms are/were most likely to die out because of exposure to microplastics, probably already have, given this shit is everywhere now. Sobering thought!
Microplastics have been shown to concentrate environmental toxins, so maybe the microplastics absorb pesticides and deliver high-dosage kill pills to insects? It's a terrifying thought. I'm not an expert, so I couldn't say that is really happening, but it scares me.
> microplastics can leach hazardous chemicals, both those added to polymers during production and environmental pollutants like pesticides that are attracted to the surface of plastic
It's not that they absorb pesticides, but that pesticides are attracted to the surface. Smaller microplastics have greater surface area to volume ratio than the equivalent volume of larger pieces.
This is true, which is why machine learning has long since learned to not even think of what you describe as a meaningful measure of accuracy. If you look at the linked paper [0], you'll find that the author uses the "ROC AUC" metric [1]:
>The ROC AUC score represents the probability that when given one randomly chosen positive instance and one randomly chosen negative instance, the classifier will correctly identify the positive instance
The article didn't mention AUC, so I assumed they were talking about accuracy in the sense people normally mean it, which also matches the definition in the sidebar of the wikipedia link you shared:
A question for anyone who does collecting of stamps/coins/baseball cards, etc.: How do you deal with / feel about the trend of the creators of the collected items making things specifically to be collected?
A while back I picked up a few cheap pre-WW1 German coins -- fun to have a bit of history for not that much money. I haven't pursued coin collecting because I could imagine going down a rabbit hole of spending way too much money on it. But when I see, say, the US Mint releasing special commemorative coins specifically for collectors, my whole interest in the field dries up. It takes a hobby that, in my opinion, would be about discovery and the individual search for something and turns it into merely another consumer product to consume. Same with so many stamps nowadays, being designed and released specifically for collectors to gobble up. And then there's baseball cards and Magic cards and "colllector's editions" of video game boxes that are all designed as these mass-market products that satisfy the collecting urge in a cynical way.
If I did end up really getting into collecting, I'd think it would be more enjoyable to collect interesting rocks found during travel, or historical items like coins/stamps that were all made before the trend of marketing to collectors.
I am not a collector myself, but my grandfather was a "stamp collector". I heard all through my childhood about the stamps he had collected since the 1950's, how big and presumably valuable his collection was. He passed almost 20 years ago, and when we finally went through his (admittedly large) collection about 5 years ago, we discovered that everything he collected was the type of stamp you describe - made to be "collectible", not actually particularly interesting or rare. Essentially worthless in terms of monetary value.
However, he enjoyed his lifelong hobby, so, who can say?
If you list job requirements, make them actual requirements and don't try to upsell the talent you get by exaggerating the requirements.
Some applicants are naturally more haggle-friendly and intuitively "know" they should apply to jobs for which they don't technically have all the listed requirements. Other applicants are more self-doubtful and will not apply, even if given their experience they would be well-suited for the job. Minimize the amount of white-lying both the applicant and the company have to do.
To any Google employees who read HN: please raise this general issue in your internal groups and try to push to change this culture of faceless algorithmic decision making. Companies should not have to rely on getting to the HN front page to have a human being actually look at these issues. You have a voice internally and if you don't use it, in some way you are complicit.
(as an aside, it's really weird that the (first few) comments here on HN seem a little adversarial; I wonder if maybe some people looked at the headline only and assumed it was attempting some sort of anti-vax argument, which the article isn't doing at all.)