Book review: The Checklist Manifesto

Medicine knows too much; even decades of medical training are insufficient for a doctor to know everything…. Patients are subjected to many interventions, most of which are complex and carry some risk; the average ICU patient requires roughly 178 daily care tasks (having worked as an ICU nurse myself, I believe it!), so even getting it perfect 99% of the time leaves an average of about two medical errors per day.

How do humans deal with this complexity? In other areas, especially the field of aviation, one solution is… checklists. And yet implementing these still has issues…

…Part of the change being introduced was a social one: nurses were responsible for documenting that the doctor had carried out each step, and had a new mandate – and backup from management and hospital administration – to chide doctors who forgot items.

Which, it turned out, made all the difference. In the first ten days of the experiment, the line infection rate went from 11% to zero.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dtmmP4YdJEfK9y4Rc/book-review-the-checklist-manifesto. About 1,500 words.

Treason 2021

The insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy.

The story is in three parts:

Before: Red Flags

As Trump propelled his supporters to Washington, law enforcement agencies failed to heed mounting warnings about violence on Jan. 6.

During: Bloodshed

For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watched his supporters attack the Capitol — and resisted pleas to stop them.

After: Contagion

Threats and disinformation spread across the country in the wake of the Capitol siege, shaking the underpinnings of American democracy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/jan-6-insurrection-capitol/

Who were the Romans?

Bret Devereaux (PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Teaching Assistant Professor) says that the extraordinary success of the Roman Empire was in considerable part due to the diversity of its citizens, and that accepting all kinds of people strengthened it:

Every sort of evidence we have for early Rome, from the legends of the Romans themselves to the geographic, linguistic and archaeological evidence of the site, points to early Rome as a sort of ‘frontier town’ – a place defined as the meeting point of many quite different cultural groups.

Understanding how Rome went from just one of Italy’s many self-governing cities to the dominant power in the Mediterranean requires understanding how the Romans handled all of those different Italian people as citizens and allies.

It turns out, by ancient standards, Roman citizenship was radically expansionary.

As the Romans slowly absorbed pre-Roman Italy into the Roman Italy of the Republic, that meant managing the truly wild variety of different peoples in their alliance system…

In short, Roman Italy under the Republic was preposterously multicultural (in the literal meaning of that word)…and it turns out that’s why they won.

https://acoup.blog/2021/06/25/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-ii-citizens-and-allies/. 9,900 words but well worth it.

The cow that could feed the planet

Cultured meat — meat from real animals but grown in bioreactors — could (1) greatly reduce global warming and environmental issues, and (2) reduce animal cruelty. About 4,800 words:

https://time.com/6109450/sustainable-lab-grown-mosa-meat/

Eventually, says (Mark) Post, we would need only some 30,000 to 40,000 cows worldwide, instead of the 300 million we slaughter every year, without the environmental and moral consequences of large-scale intensive cattle farming.

…Mosa is in the process of applying for regulatory approval from the E.U. In the meantime, the company is already expanding into a new space with roughly 100,000 liters of bioreactor capacity, enough to produce several tons of meat every six to eight weeks.

No time to die

An in-depth analysis of James Bond’s exposure to infectious agents

We examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond’s sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3).

Original article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893921002167. It has sections:

1. Nightfall: sexual health

2. The man with the golden gut: food safety and infections

3. A flu to a kill: air and droplet borne diseases

4. The fly who loved me: arthropod-borne diseases

5. Dr nope: other vector borne diseases and neglected tropical diseases

6. Tomorrow in the skies: the problem of poor travel preparation

Also reviewed in Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/you-only-live-once-epidemiologists-analyze-health-risks-in-all-the-james-bond-films/.

Funding

There was no specific funding for this project. Given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.

The Facebook Papers

Just some of the revelations about how Facebook operates:

Facebook fails to moderate harmful content in developing countries

When a pair of Facebook researchers created a dummy account in 2019 to test how users in Kerala, India, experienced the social media site, they found a staggering amount of hate speech, misinformation and calls for violence on the platform. “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the researcher wrote.

Facebook AI struggles with non-English languages

A document showed that in 2020, the company did not have screening algorithms to find misinformation in Burmese, the language of Myanmar, or hate speech in the Ethiopian languages of Oromo or Amharic.

Facebook labeled election misinformation as “harmful, non-violating” content

“Harmful but non-violating”? Really?

Facebook was aware that maids were being sold on its platform

Apple threatened to remove Facebook and Instagram from its app store over the issue, but changed course after the social media giant removed 1,000 accounts linked to the sale of maids from its platform.

Facebook internally debated removing the Like button

When asked why Facebook hasn’t made Instagram safer for children, Haugen said during her testimony that the company knows “young users are the future of the platform and the earlier they get them the more likely they’ll get them hooked.”

https://time.com/6110234/facebook-papers-testimony-explained/

Otterly adorable

Singapore cleaned up its pollution problems and they get a so-cute reward!

Pollution and deforestation drove away Singapore’s otter population in the 1970s. But as the country cleaned up its waters and reforested land in recent years, otters came back in full force, integrating into urban spaces and learning to navigate one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Today, to the chagrin of some and the joy of others, the island is home to more than 10 otter romps, or families.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/singapore-otters-wildlife/2021/10/22/9e85c3ac-2afd-11ec-b17d-985c186de338_story.html

Venezuela cuts six zeros from currency

This is the third time Venezuela’s socialist leaders have lopped zeros off the currency. The bolivar lost three zeros in 2008 under the late President Hugo Chávez, while his successor, current President Nicolás Maduro, eliminated five zeros in 2018….

Under the old system, a two-liter bottle of soda pop could cost more than 8 million bolivars — and many of those bills were scarce, so a customer might have to pay with a thick wad of paper.

So one modern peso equals (fourteen zeros, 100,000,000,000,000) a hundred trillion 2008 pesos. They are doing something wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/venezuela-new-currency_n_6156fc79e4b050254231f042

The Pandora Papers: Hiding illicit wealth in the US

Where are people — including dictators, money launderers, billionaires who want to hide taxable assets — hiding their money? In South Dakota:

The documents — more than 11.9 million records from 14 offshore entities, including law and wealth-management firms — illuminate a hidden world that has allowed government leaders, a monarch, billionaires and criminals to shield their assets.

The Post decided to join this project because we felt certain that the breadth of records obtained by the ICIJ would shine a light on aspects of the international financial system that have operated with little or no oversight. A similar but narrower ICIJ investigation, known as the Panama Papers and published in 2016, revealed hidden wealth that ignited protests in several countries, forcing two world leaders from power.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/03/about-pandora-papers-investigation/