There's a much more safe alternative with almost same possibilities - a kinda "balls-and-magnetick-sticks". In that case, spheres are just metallic, not magnetic. Only joints, sticks, have magnetic ends capped inside the plastic. These spheres are much safer and the visualizing abilities of that toy is almost the same.
It's not about rarity of the disease. The problem with those percentages is that they're commercial bragging. The 99.9% accuracy is indeed very poor accuracy in case where there is 99.999% chance that one doesn't have a disease at all. It's just measuring the length of a bacteria with carpenter's tape ruler - the tool is too poor.
The technique is reported to be 85% accurate. That is, there's 15% chance of false positive. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanoma#Epidemiology), upper bound for melanoma incidence is 20 per 100000 inhabitants. Consider that 100000 people used the technique to screen themselves. There would be 15000 of them that would got the positive test result and only 20 of them who have melanoma. Thus, for a person having the positive result the probability that he indeed has the melanoma is LESS than 0.013%. That is , the probability of that the technique is reporting B.S. is over 99.8%.
I can't understand why I'm not getting 2% from my point of view.
A person is identified positive in two distinct cases: if it is ill (p1=0.001) AND the test shows positive (q1=0.95), or when it is clean (p2=0.999) but the test wrongly shows positive (q2=0.05). The probability of this event is P=p1 * q1+p2 * q2=0.001 * 0.95+0.999 * 0.05=0.0509
"Rodriguez’s sentence clearly demonstrates the seriousness of his actions."
This awkward moment when the seriousness of the crime is judged by the length of the sentence. Reminds me of a typical Soviet (and modern Russian) "public process" comments like "He wouldn't has been sentenced if he hadn't committed anything criminal", "Our court doesn't just sentence for nothing" etc.
Eventually they might probably encounter a person, a "troll-terrorist", who's demands would be not money, drugs or "release of brethren from prisons", but "introduction of even stricter TSA procedures". The authorities would be in a loose-loose situation, because if they tighten the measures, that would be the fulfillment of terrorist's demands, while if they won't that would be the ignorance of the terrorist threat. ))
There is a proverb in Russia (actually, it's a quote): "There're someone for whom even a mare is a fine bride". So, it's not surprising that for someone Facebook is fine too.
Most people is interested in continuation of themselves and their close relatives. Seven billion of people, driven by this interest, form a hivemind that dictates their own fate. Should it be the extinction of 9.999% of species - so be it.
You're right. For ordinary people around me malaria is not a problem. And yes, here people die in road accidents and should it happen that one side of the accident is a local government/enforcement member friend or relative means that they'd escape justice. And this is the problem. And problems must be solved from largest to smallest, as the cut tree is worked by the big axe first and by the tiny needle last.
You know, when local rednecks witness slight daily weather change, they proudly attribute it to 'global warming'.
I mean, we track the weather for at most a hundred year. We tend to see any several-year trend as an alarming global tendency. Weather change periods definitely have very low-frequency components, so it's unwise to declare any locality as a global tendency.
Why? One would probably tend to keep the impact tolerable enough for themself, but you're not going to find enough people except green fanatics to be motivated to minimize it.
The Earth is fine, people. One herd of farting cows diminishes all the human effort in CO emission decrease in nearby town. One volcano eruption diminishes it worldwide. One major earthquake contributes to Earth landscape change more than all the humanity did.
Claiming that human can change the Earth is like claiming that the single flea drives the whole elephant.
Earth is fine, people.
The article states that reducing leg room from 32 to 31 inches allowed for one additional seat row. Which means that there were already no less than 32 rows on those planes. Six seats per row give 192 passengers. RITA numbers clearly show that the load factor have never exceeded 90% since 2010. That means that at least 10% of seats were empty, that is, 19 seats. There is no sense of adding another 6 seats just to have them empty. If there were a demand for six seats, the people demanding them would just have occupied those of 19 free ones.
Adding another row only makes sense if the plane is full and there's additional demand for seats. We should have looked at the load factor distribution, not only at it's mean value. Most attentively we should have looked at the standard deviation of the load factor around it's mean, but RITA didn't provide such an information.