Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: Bombathon Begins, in reply to Wendy Stewart,
Grace Jones is playing at Potato Head Beach Club in Bali on 08/10, tempting very tempting.
On the form she's showing in that and other FYF clips, worth a go I reckon.
I'm guessing she's taken some steps with her health – there was a period where she looked overweight and unwell.
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Whoops. Left out this quite brilliant thing:
An Oral History of “We Built This City,” the Worst Song of All Time
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Hard News: LATE: From #Slacktivism to Activism, in reply to Sacha,
data and research and facts
information is broader than those things
True, and that's often where nerd-advocacy falls down: helping ordinary people understand where they fit in, what their rights are. And probably more so for extraordinary (disabled) people. It's important to not let go of your issues as an advocate, and also to let others in.
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Hard News: Reimagining Journalism, in reply to Rob Stowell,
There should be masses of audio from WORD – eventually. I talked to the soundperson doing the recording (at another event), and he said it might be a couple of weeks before it’s all up.
That would be prompt, especially if they plan to schedule it on the broadcast radio.
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Hard News: Orcon IRL on Journalism: The Video, in reply to Kevin McCready,
Perhaps you would like to address the substance of what I am saying about much of modern journalism. ie The all too common view that there is no truth which leads to celebrity “journalists” who think they are entertainers.
I didn't mean to sound too snippy, but I really didn't think that was relevant to what Guyon said and that your criticism was misplaced. Live interviewing is hard and I thought what he said was quite insightful.
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Speaker: After the Apocalypse, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The generally accepted theory in health physics
I’m not sure it’s generally accepted. From your Wiki link:
One of the organizations for establishing recommendations on radiation protection guidelines internationally, the UNSCEAR, has recommended in 2014 policies that do not agree with the Linear No-Threshold model at exposure levels below background levels of radiation to the UN General Assembly from the Fifty-Ninth Session of the Committee. Its recommendation states that “the Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels.” This is a reversal from previous recommendations by the same organization.[2]
There is three active (2016) challenges to the LNT model currently being considered by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. One was filed by Nuclear Medicine Professor Carol Marcus of UCLA, who calls the LNT model scientific “baloney”. [3]
Whether the model describes the reality for small-dose exposures is disputed. It opposes two competing schools of thought: the threshold model, which assumes that very small exposures are harmless, and the radiation hormesis model, which claims that radiation at very small doses can be beneficial. Because the current data are inconclusive, scientists disagree on which model should be used. Pending any definitive answer to these questions and the precautionary principle, the model is sometimes used to quantify the cancerous effect of collective doses of low-level radioactive contaminations, even though such practice has been condemned by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.[4]
So there’s a range of views on the impact of very small exposures, including the view that they’re beneficial.
is that biological damage is directly proportional to the dose, so if we receive 10% higher radiation than background, this will cause a corresponding increase in radiation injury. Obviously this is rather inconvenient to the nuclear industry.
And yes, otoh – the dose makes the poison. But the additional radiation experienced here as a result of Fukushima was, at worst, several orders of magnitude less than 10%. And even flying home from Tokyo after Fukushima would imply a higher dose than simply staying put there.
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Hard News: Reimagining Journalism, in reply to Alastair Thompson,
Was the WordCHCH panel recorded?
Yes, by RNZ.
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Speaker: After the Apocalypse, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I think the issue is more that our exposure to natural background radiation is vastly greater than the additional exposure related to distant nuclear incidents.
The Ministry of Health monitored the impact of the Fukushima incident and reported last year that:
Atmospheric dispersion has been largely restricted to the northern hemisphere although small traces were detected at Darwin for several days in April 2011. The only nuclide detected that was attributable to Fukushima Daiichi was Xe-133 at a level that would result in a radiation dose 100 million times smaller than the annual natural background radiation routinely received by members of the public.
As linger notes, air travel results in exposure to cosmic radiation, more so if you fly over the poles:
In the US, pilots and flight attendants have been officially classed as “radiation workers” by the Federal Aviation Administration since 1994. Staff regularly working on high-latitude flights are exposed to more radiation than workers in nuclear power plants.
What's shocking is the measurable increase in radiation caused by atmospheric nuclear testing:
Frequent above-ground nuclear explosions between the 1940s and 1960s scattered a substantial amount of radioactive contamination. Some of this contamination is local, rendering the immediate surroundings highly radioactive, while some of it is carried longer distances as nuclear fallout; some of this material is dispersed worldwide. The increase in background radiation due to these tests peaked in 1963 at about 0.15 mSv per year worldwide, or about 7% of average background dose from all sources. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prohibited above-ground tests, thus by the year 2000 the worldwide dose from these tests has decreased to only 0.005 mSv per year.
Of course, there is also a scientific view that a little radiation is good for you.
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Hard News: Orcon IRL on Journalism: The Video, in reply to Kevin McCready,
Guyon “push for answers too soon” ??? FFS. And the idea of gladiatorial entertainment is exactly what’s wrong with journalism today.
Sorry, I meant to respond to this earlier. You're (possibly) wilfully misinterpreting what Guyon said. It was a really thoughtful point about taking the audience with you in structuring an interview. Maybe take a step back and think about what he's saying, rather than just reacting.
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Hard News: Medical cannabis: a polling experiment, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m sure they help, but they’re never going to be as discreet as popping a pill.
Somewhere between popping a pill and doing a line :-)
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