831 karma · joined July 6, 2017
"For COVIDView, the percentage of total deaths occurring in a given week that had pneumonia, influenza and/or COVID-19 (PIC) listed as a cause of death is calculated. PIC deaths are identified based on ICD-10 multiple cause of death codes J09-J18.9 or U07.1. PIC is being monitored in order to provide a more accurate representation of COVID-19 related mortality than would monitoring COVID-19 alone. Deaths due to COVID-19 may be classified as pneumonia deaths or influenza deaths (deaths due to “flu” or “flu-like illness”) in the absence of positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. The combined PIC categorization also prevents double counting of deaths"
The death rate from Covid-19 includes deaths from other causes that have similar symptoms. The reasons for this are good, it's very difficult to identify between these diseases and lumping them together probably gives a more accurate result than relying on confirmed cases. There's no malice here, it's just a very difficult problem to work on, but it's also a methodology that should be likely to give a high side estimate. Then from there, they calculate excess deaths [1], which I was able to find through your link (thank you). Outside of New York/New Jersey and Massachusetts, I don't find a high disparity in the excess death ratio that supports the idea that there is significant under reporting of deaths.
You can find cause of death vs year on their charts at [2] and most of the excess deaths are from cardiac arrest or dementia. Now, that could be caused by Covid, except if we go to New York where Covid has been by far the worst in the US, you see a huge jump in respiratory deaths directly lining up with the peaks in the reported Covid cases. So are more people having heart attacks? Is Covid causing heart attacks? Are people unwilling to get treated at hospitals for heart attacks because they are afraid of Covid? These are unanswered questions and it could go any which way from what I understand. The data appears to be out, and I think it will be out for a while which is why I don't feel comfortable pushing the idea that we are under-reporting deaths or over-reporting deaths because I think that we don't actually know.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm...
My biggest problem is that while it is trivial to find mountains of Covid visualizations, raw data with clear explanations of it's criteria and methodology is very hard to come by. I think it's quiet likely that some locations are over reporting and others are under reporting.
[1]http://www.collegescholarships.org/loans/average-debt.htm
Unfortunately it's getting harder and harder to keep things running with various licensing schemes and whatnot. Hell Microsoft even keeps breaking my old Office install with windows 10 updates forcing me to constantly fix it because they want me to update to their office 360 offering. All that said, both the hardware and software stack are getting a little silly even at the low level. You can send a keypress around the world as a data packet faster than you can send it to your monitor now a days.
which claims to show that THz radiation promotes actin filaments, but their new publication claims are that the THz radiation induces mechanical vibrations which remove or destroy actin filaments. It will be interesting to see where this all goes.
My big problem with a USB oscilloscope is that they are only ground referenced through the USB ground to your computer and if you measure something with a different ground reference you can blow up the USB port on your computer.
Now, is it an ethical dilemma if you are asked to write firmware that disables a redundant safety sensor unless the customer pays additional fees? Is it a ethical to use a dataset that you may know is not fully representative for a crime estimation algorithm in order to achieve cost targets for your contract? Is it ethical to write a software that changes device behavior when being examined by regulators? Is it ethical to design an interface for a public service that will be inaccessible to a portion of the population to meet contract deadlines?
>learning what is useful for your employer" is exactly what university is about, is exactly what you pay for, and is exactly what is expected This is a warped viewpoint that assumes you have no agency. I studied engineering because I wanted to learn how it worked and how to build things. Employers be damned, I have no issue working for myself if I cannot find an employer who I can come to terms with.
If you mean to argue that the standing of engineering as a profession has greatly fallen then I agree with you. Especially in software. However, even if there is no license to be revoked, and no personal feeling of responsibility, the engineer who makes these design choices is not shielded from the legal repercussion of his actions no matter how many times his supervisor told him to even assuming he is willing to be responsible. No matter how much you may wish otherwise, engineers are still considered to hold the public trust and expected to behave accordingly. And you should consider it because when you comply with your employer to do something unethical and shit hits the fan, they are going to put you immediately in front of the firing squad to shield themselves from as many bullets as possible just the same as they are going to take the reward for as long as it flies under the radar.
While in most forms of engineering, a lack of ethics can demonstrably lead to death (and AI is no exception when you look at proposed use cases in military and law enforcement) even web developers work on things that are for the public good.
A crash course in Filter theory, so that people have some historical background of where these methods derived from would be useful as well.
*edited for spelling
Also, don't underestimate wiring in a quantum computer. I don't know the details of Google's system but Quantum computers uses analog RF pulses to interact with the Qubit system which are then later digitized. The design of a wiring system in a Quantum computer is similar to what you would see designing a high end phased array radar system with the need for everything to be phase matched, highly stable, and temperature controlled except that a quantum computer is also extremely susceptible to cross talk at the interfaces. Wiring a system of Google's scale can easily run into the $100k+ range in just material and manufacturing costs. If the other person didn't have any experimental experience like Martinis says, then he would almost certainly run into problems.
It also shows the conflict of wanting to keep as many people employed/working as possible while also wanting to keep people quarantined.
Personally, I think High School Football and funding is a much larger problem in Texas.
When you look at the cost of coffee or soda, providing it free may cost the company in the ballpark of $500 a year per employee (though often less) which is minuscule in the total annual cost of an employee. Taken in a vacuum however, the number looks big. We spent how much on Coffee last quarter! When companies get to the mostly investor owned squeezing for growth stage, it's almost always among the first thing that gets cut. This is then usually followed by other more important quality of life cuts like training, equipment, and bonuses. Many companies hit this stage and start increasing margins by letting inflation eat their employee's high salaries over time for instance.
That said, I was recently discussing a legacy instrument control setup with a customer (GPIB based) and was discussing the master slave controller and they got agitated with my wording. Eventually I realized what was going on and we switched to Main/Secondary and everybody was happy. I'm never going to pick an ideological argument with a customer especially when there is actual work to be done, but I got a private laugh later because Master and Slave were embossed on the connector name plates.
It's a public buyout offer, not profit sharing.
In engineering maths, people lean on Wolfram Alpha to solve and break down equations then pretend like they understand because they know the steps. You can look up endless discussion and breakdown of rhetoric and take a position as your own without applying much critical thought beforehand. Cliffnotes. People these days seems to think that because they can look up information it's the same as knowing it.
That's before we get into issues such as institutional cheating. I know a person who makes most of his daily cash shadow writing essays for college and high school students. It's done through an anonymizing method on the web. No idea how many he actually writes, but he seems to write a lot of them especially late spring/fall.