> When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
> But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill... It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.
He said that there's a shortage, and that he didn't trust that people would wear the masks correctly. I remember that most of the early anti-mask guidance I heard was claims that they weren't likely to prevent yourself from getting infected because: the mask would become an infectious surface; and people wouldn't handle the mask as infectious.
> It is mainly to prevent those people who have the virus — and might not know it — from spreading the infection to others.
> U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country's alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
I found it a lot easier to understand the harmonic and geometric averages when I learned about the "generalized f-mean". Many averages are arithmetic averages of a transformation of the value. "f" refers to the function which transforms your values. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-arithmetic_mean
- The geometric average is the arithmetic average of the logarithm. It places emphasis on the ratio between numbers, rather than the absolute difference.
- The harmonic average is the arithmetic average of the multiplicative inverse. It averages values by a constant numerator rather than denominator. For example, the average fuel economy of multiple vehicles makes more sense per-distance, so miles/gallon should be rewritten as gallons/mile.
- The (RMS) root-mean-square is the arithmetic average of the square. Electrical power is proportional to the square of the amperage or voltage, so AC current and voltage uses the RMS average to make the power calculations correct.
This report [1] is specific to "Firefighter Arson", so they're looking for things to screen for during hiring for firefighters. The section you'll be interested in is on page 20: "PREVENTION OF FIREFIGHTER ARSON". They list some actions departments have taken: background checks for arson; requiring an affidavit the applicant hasn't conducted arson; "scared straight" lectures on the consequences of being jailed; and screening firefighters with a questionnaire.
But yeah, the profiling section some sound like a way to pathologize arson. I found the motivation section and case studies more interesting. The only corroboration from the case studies is for the age; there's no evidence included for the personality traits.
"White male, age 17–25" is an entire trait. "Homosexual" is a *part* of a trait: "Alcoholism, childhood hyperactivity, homosexuality, depression, borderline personality disorder, and suicidal tendencies". It's significant because of the other descriptors it's grouped with in that trait. It would be weird to have "homosexual" as a trait on its own, but it's obviously weird to group it with these other descriptors in a single trait.
There's a difference between "inherently difficult" and "difficult to update this software package". My reading of this thread is that the MS devs are saying this will take them a lot of effort to implement in this app, not that the new implementation could be simpler than the existing implementation. Asking to rearchitect the application is an involved process which would take a lot of back-and-forth to explain the tradeoffs. The new architecture can be simple, but evaluating a new architecture and moving to it are not.
There's a point at which you've moved from "fix this bug" or "evaluate this new component" to "justify the existing design" and "plan a re-architecture".
You're right that human contact-tracing also has false positives/negatives. I think a better question is how does the error rate compare? The worry is that automated exposure tracking will pick up many more false positives than humans will because it's hard to judge how likely a transmission occurred. A phone doesn't know if there are barriers between people (walls, PPE).
The downside to a higher false positive/negative rate is that you'll create more false alarms. At some point, people will start ignoring false alarms. With phone tracking, you are probably trading off many more false positives for a couple fewer false negatives. It's unclear whether this tradeoff is worth it because we don't know how people will respond long-run to automated exposure notifications.
> When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
> But, when you think masks, you should think of health care providers needing them and people who are ill... It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.
He said that there's a shortage, and that he didn't trust that people would wear the masks correctly. I remember that most of the early anti-mask guidance I heard was claims that they weren't likely to prevent yourself from getting infected because: the mask would become an infectious surface; and people wouldn't handle the mask as infectious.
Opinions started to shift over March, and the CDC put out guidance on 2020-04-03 to wear cloth masks in public. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
> It is mainly to prevent those people who have the virus — and might not know it — from spreading the infection to others.
> U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country's alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
I used wikipedia for dates and sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19...