Office Building
Israel’s Pfizer Deal Drives Quick Rollout — And Privacy Worries : NPR
How has tiny Israel beat out bigger countries on COVID-19 vaccinations, securing a steady stream of vials and inoculating a larger share of its citizenry than any other nation?
Israel paid a premium, locked in an early supply of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and struck a unique deal: vaccines for data.
The nation of some 9 million promised Pfizer a swift vaccine rollout, along with data from Israel's centralized trove of medical statistics to study "whether herd immunity is achieved after reaching a certain percentage of vaccination coverage in Israel," according to their agreement.
‘Walking While Trans’ Law in New York, Explained
In New York, there’s an anti-loitering statute that has come to be known colloquially as the “Walking While Trans” ban. Advocates say that the law, which is ostensibly meant to target sex workers, allows officers to arbitrarily arrest and detain New Yorkers for simply walking around or standing on the street. It allows police to decide, for instance, that a woman’s skirt is too short, or that she’s been lingering too long on one street corner, and to apprehend her based on suspicion that she’s “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” Trans women — and particularly trans women of color — are disproportionately targeted this way, activists say. “Whether you are ho-ing or not ho-ing, even if you look like you might be trans, you are going to jail,” Tiffaney Grissom, a trans woman from the Bronx who has been arrested multiple times under the law, told The Village Voice in 2016.
The past few days I’ve been enjoying the sunshine
The past few days I’ve been enjoying the sunshine … 💭
But alas, it’s already gone. Just the cold gray skies of winter have returned. While I am sure my wallet appreciates the warmer weather and lower heating bills, those blue skies that didn’t last sure were nice.
I’ve long been fascinated by the role of safety devices and greater risk taking
I’ve long been fascinated by the role of safety devices and greater risk taking.
Study after study has shown that if people normally act a “danger level of 2”, they’ll notch up their danger level to “danger level of 3” or “danger level of 3 1/2” if a safety device is designed to keep the device safe up to a “danger level of 4”.
This obviously undercuts many of the benefits of the safety device, when increased safety margins are just used to promote more dangerous behavior. Often redundancy encourages bad practices, even if it’s designed to increase safety.
… Do take a look at the Normal Accidents article I just posted.
Normal Accidents – Wikipedia
"Normal" accidents, or system accidents, are so-called by Perrow because such accidents are inevitable in extremely complex systems. Given the characteristic of the system involved, multiple failures that interact with each other will occur, despite efforts to avoid them. Perrow said that, while operator error is a very common problem, many failures relate to organizations rather than technology, and big accidents almost always have very small beginnings. Such events appear trivial to begin with before unpredictably cascading through the system to create a large event with severe consequences.
Normal Accidents contributed key concepts to a set of intellectual developments in the 1980s that revolutionized the conception of safety and risk. It made the case for examining technological failures as the product of highly interacting systems, and highlighted organizational and management factors as the main causes of failures. Technological disasters could no longer be ascribed to isolated equipment malfunction, operator error, or acts of God.
Perrow identifies three conditions that make a system likely to be susceptible to Normal Accidents. These are:
- The system is complex
- The system is tightly coupled
-The system has catastrophic potential
Gray Winters Day On Cole Hill
