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Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

nytimes.com

281–290 of 362 posts

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#281
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not safe at all. In my country there are many people who have destroyed their brains using it. I would say even drugs like cocaine are safer.

It's comparatively safe. See e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20503245221127301 . Cocaine is a very dangerous drug both because of its physical effects - cardiac issues, stroke, seizure - as well as its effect on risktaking. In order to "destroy your brain" using nitrous you need to take heroic quantities of it and get hypoxia: from memory somewhere near a hundred times the typical dose is required, and…

You don't seem to know the most basic reason why it is so dangerous, it's not hypoxia. The problem is that it oxidizes vitamin B12 which leads to demyelination and is neurotoxic even in a single dose(Although the harm seems to be reversible in that case). This is what causes the neurological symptoms. Personally I would much rather die from a heartattack or a stroke then never walk again.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#282
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps an automotive "TCAS" would also be useful. Forward Collision Warning systems and automatic emergency braking are becoming common in new cars. The problem and solution spaces are pretty different, so I don't think applying TCAS directly would be helpful --- I don't think there's a chance of cars having transponders anytime soon, and certainly deer, cyclists and pedestrians are unlikely to participate in an a…

Automatic emergency braking is fucking horrifying tho... It has false positives and can be dangerous.

I've only been in a car with two people who claim to get a lot of false positives on their AEB system while driving. Every time I saw a "false positive" it was almost always because they were driving very unsafely, trying to weave through heavy traffic at high speeds, approaching cars extremely rapidly and attempting to leave no room. In other words, not really false just not what the highly unsafe driver was wanting.

Meanwhile across many thousands of miles and a few different makes of AEB I've never once encountered an actual false positive. Every engagement has been pretty reasonable to me.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same as the PISA scores. PISA, which might not be well known is the US, is the International Student Assessment for the 15 years old students in the OECD (and non-OECD) countries. The PISA measures their ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. The PISA scores for 2022 is the lowest in the history of PISA and show a clear trend downward since 2012. T…

I'm not sure phones can explain it. Even when I was in high school 10 years ago everyone had a smartphone with social media.

But you didn’t have ubiquitous smartphones and tablets when you were 6-10 years old, and weren’t handed a smartphone to head off a tantrum during the absolutely critical brain development years before school.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#284
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that COVID is known to be brain invasive and to affect cognition. This looks more like refusing to ever entertain the idea that letting COVID rip was a bad idea and lockdowns and vaccinations and masks were justified because you don't like it , than actual scientific rigor.

Is the cognition impact less-so if vaccinated? How much, if so?

As far as the vaccine leading to more mild infection goes the impact seems to be unclear. There's been some evidence that disease severity can have an effect on how bad the cognitive issues get. Some studies have suggested that people can end up with greater cognitive impairment if the infection got bad enough to result in hypoxemia/hypoxia, or if they were put on ventilators, or spent longer amounts of time in the ICU, but other research didn't show any link between time in the ICU and the severity of cognitive issues, and others found that people with mild infections might even be more likely to have problems than those with severe cases.

As always, vaccinated or not, the best thing you can do for yourself is avoid getting infected in the first place.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#285
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower", Wall Street Journal (June 2, 2015): https://archive.is/lDyOB >A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the fact t…

"Fox Business (officially known as Fox Business Network, or FBN) is an American conservative business news channel and website publication owned by the Fox News Media division of Fox Corporation." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Business

[flagged]

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#286
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was significantly worse than that. There were 2 failures over a total of 135 flights, with 14 fatalities. So that's about 103 fatalities per 1000 flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

I think it's "passenger fatalities per passenger-journey". So need to multiply the number of flights by the crew on each.

Right you are, which brings us back to the ~1.7% number (actually 1.6% if you include the STS-135 mission, which Wikipedia doesn't for unknown reasons).

So a 1 in ~60 chance of dying on any given flight...have to agree that that is far from safe.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#287
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in high school (graduated 2012), my school recommended we take both, since not only do certain schools prefer one to another, but if you happened to score relatively well on one versus the other, you could choose to only send that one instead.

> if you happened to score relatively well on one versus the other This should be reasonable proof that the test doesn't test things very well, IMHO, because there are so many factors that go into getting a good score. I was one of these people -- I got one point below perfect on ACT, but the morning of my SAT, I got into an argument with my mom and got a below-average score.

1. No (nontrivial) test is perfect: we take each with a grain of salt and accompanying context 2. You can take these tests multiple times and use the highest score, reducing impact of one-off ‘off days’ for whatever reason 3. These particular two tests do not claim to assess the same thing (aptitude vs achievement) and do so through different implementations

These factors limit me from tending towards ‘reasonable proof’ on its face when considering the system as a whole.

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACT test scores have plummeted too. Combined with what we know about the physical brain changes that can be observed after a single mild infection, it all paints a potentially concerning relationship with COVID.

The same as the PISA scores. PISA, which might not be well known is the US, is the International Student Assessment for the 15 years old students in the OECD (and non-OECD) countries. The PISA measures their ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. The PISA scores for 2022 is the lowest in the history of PISA and show a clear trend downward since 2012. T…

> The huge drop in 2022 scores can be explained through the longer school closure period during the pandemic lockdowns

The latest PISA scores arrived just last week or so and do not support this.

There is a very weak negative correlation between number school closure days and drop in PISA scores, at least in Western European countries. The higher the number of school closure days, the less the results dropped. But the correlation is so weak that it's basically just noise.

Scores dropped pretty much everywhere so the pandemic probably had an effect, but the data does not support school closures (or at least its duration) of being the primary culprit.

I do not have a good English language source to point to (but the raw data is easy to find).

Re: Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic emergency braking is fucking horrifying tho... It has false positives and can be dangerous.

I've only been in a car with two people who claim to get a lot of false positives on their AEB system while driving. Every time I saw a "false positive" it was almost always because they were driving very unsafely, trying to weave through heavy traffic at high speeds, approaching cars extremely rapidly and attempting to leave no room. In other words, not really false just not what the highly unsafe driver was wanting…

My one car with AEB has been pretty good with activations at speed, sometimes activating for a situation which wasn't really needed, but always understandable. The trickiest one is when a car in front is leaving the lane and slowing, but I wouldn't call that a false positive --- it's not stopping out of the blue or for a falling (tree) leaf; it detected the scenario properly, but not the nuance.

At parking speeds though, it would regularly emergency brake to save bushy flowers encroaching into the driveway, or one, it tried to save a driveway from being backed into (there was some weird pavement angle).

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