Posts by Carol Stewart
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What a fabulous reading treat for a Monday morning. Thank you David!
Does hostens vemod have an inverse equivalent, whereby you can endure unpleasant things in anticipation of treats to come? -
Good on you Bart. Like Tracy, I was steered towards languages at high school, and learned French for three years, which I've taken up again more recently at the Alliance Francaise. It's been useful for travelling around the Pacific - I worked on an island in Vanuatu where only Bislama and French was spoken, and I was definitely thankful for every scrap of French I could muster (and annoyed with myself that I didn't take a dictionary to look up more vocab). I've learned some Spanish too, so I guess I am lucky enough to have reasonable aptitude for languages.
Learning te reo back then was definitely not something that was encouraged for academic kids. That's really a shame, because what little I know of te reo suggests that it's a lovely language to learn.
I'm so proud that my lad is learning te reo at high school, currently at NCEA level 2, and also doing kapahaka. Brilliant life skills.
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Wellingtonians:vigil this evening at 6 pm in Frank Kitts park
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Hard News: An interview with Ben Goldacre, in reply to B Jones,
Level 2 Biology isn't compulsory.
In Level 2 History, there is a strong emphasis on critically evaluating sources of information.
I think it's quite a lot better now than back when I was at high school when there was more of a reliance on authority, and very little attention to critical thinking. -
Fascinating interview! Enjoyed it very much.
I have Ben Goldacre's I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that on my bedside table. He makes the same point about assorted British quacks in the book as he does about Andrew Wakefield in your interview - that it's not really about individuals, it's about how the systems around them allow them to operate unchallenged. Like Ken bloody Ring and his radio appearances here. -
Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to BenWilson,
In the other kind of contamination, the meth residue itself would hardly seem to be the issue. It’s the fact that highly concentrated and toxic chemicals of all kinds have been used in there in large quantities.
Actually the guidelines suggest that the meth residue is very much the issue in the longer term:
Overseas studies indicate that the methamphetamine cooking process can release as much as 5,500 µg/m3 of methamphetamine into the air and deposit as much as 16,000 µg/100cm2 onto surfaces (Martyny et al 2004a). There are concerns that residual methamphetamine generated during the manufacturing process may indeed pose a risk to human health and render the property unsafe for human occupation until it has been decontaminated.
There's no doubt that the various flammable, corrosive, explosive etc chemicals used in the manufacture pose immediate hazards - most of these folks don't exactly have chemistry degrees. Apparently in the USA, one in five labs are discovered because of an explosion.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to BenWilson,
So the TLDR is that:
1. No one knows for sure, because no one has studied it, and it’s unlikely that a controlled study could be conducted
2. Given that, the overall impression of the scientists is that the risk is minimal.Not exactly. It's important to differentiate between houses where meth was smoked to houses that were meth labs (as Russell said in the original post). In the first case, the expert opinion seems to be that health risks are minimal; in the second case, health risks are very substantial, hence the MoH's remediation guidelines. There's a lot of detail in these guidelines about hazard identification from the various substances, exposure pathways, human health risk assessment and so on.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to ,
Does anyone know what the list of specific chemicals are ; the nasty ones that can permeate houses to make them uninhabitable?
Some comments here from toxicologists:
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Mike ought to read a compelling book called "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills" by UK epidemiologists David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. It is a case study and data driven book that shows over and over again, in many different contexts, how government spending on social protection is always worthwhile and has positive fiscal multipliers for economic recovery and growth, and austerity measures are always a bad idea. A couple of examples, from the Guardian's review of the book:
In Greece, cases of HIV infection leapt by 52% between January and May 2011 as the government slashed its budget for a needle-exchange programme targeting drug addicts. In Iceland, authorities rejected the IMF's calls for radical austerity, instead increasing "social protection" spending from 21% to 25% of GDP between 2007 and 2009. The result? Icelanders' health may even have improved during the crisis, while its economy grew by 3% last year.,
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Hard News: The media awards are dead –…, in reply to Deborah,
Photos, or it didn't happen.
Peer review isn't enough? ;-)