Lucifage - Slashdot User

Submission + - Diphtheria returns to Europe for lack of vaccination

Submitted by TuringTest on Wednesday June 03, 2015 @08:54AM

TuringTest writes: A six-year-old child was admitted to a hospital in Barcelona and diagnosed with diphtheria, which didn't occur in Spain since 1986 and was largely unheard of in western Europe. The boy had not been vaccinated despite the vaccine being avaliable in free vaccination programmes

Spanish general health secretary called anti-vaccination campaigns “irresponsible" and said: "The right to vaccination is for children, not for the parents to decide".

The child is in critical condition, though he's now being treated with a serum expressly brought from Russia through an emergency procedure.

Submission + - Google Diversity Report Straight Out of "How to Lie With Statistics" Playbook

Submitted by theodp on Wednesday June 03, 2015 @12:08AM

theodp writes: Among the books recommended by Bill Gates for beach reading this summer is How to Lie With Statistics, the published-in-1954-but-timely-as-ever introduction to the (mis)use of statistics. So, how can one lie with statistics? "Sometimes it is percentages that are given and raw figures that are missing," explains the book, "and this can be deceptive too." So, does this explain Google's just-released Diversity Report and the accompanying chock-full-o-percentages narrative (find-all-%-image), which boasts "the Black community in grew [sic] by 38 percent", while the less-impressive raw figures — e.g., the number of Google employees increased by 5,928, but the ranks of Black females only increased by 35 (less than 0.6% of the net increase) — are relegated to a PDF of its EEO-1 Report that's linked to in the fine-print footnotes? To be fair to Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon didn't want people to see their EEO-1 numbers, either.

Submission + - Cool Tool: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick on Monday June 01, 2015 @09:22AM

Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will thrill energy wonks and anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:

1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.; 2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor; 3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to “breed” plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.

This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.

Comment Re:Well... What else is out there? (Score 1) 815

by Lucifage on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:36AM (#10787177) Attached to: Winamp Down for the Count

I recently went through a "must get rid of winamp" phase due to it's library's inability to properly read WMA tags (some excuse about licensing was provided). I ended up stopping and working with MediaMonkey. It is a "pay to unlock bonus features", but the free version doesn't leave much out.

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