You say, in response to somebody using it to mean something else.
There is a strange circular logic to saying words mean something new because they are commonly used in a new way and at the same time telling somebody how they're using a word is wrong because it doesn't match this new meaning.
For disease transmission it’s the average population density of the population not the country. Effectively the population density of each area * population in that area divided by total population.
So, assuming 3 areas 1,000 square miles with 2,000 people, 100 square miles with 4,000 people and 10 square miles with 8,000 people you do :
(2,000^2/1,000 + 4,000^2/100 + 8,000^2/10) / (2,000 + 4,000 + 8,000) = 468.8 people per square mile, not (2,000 + 4,000 + 8,000) / (1,000 + 100 + 10) = 12.6 people per square mile.
The reason is adding a huge area that nobody lived in (ex: 1 person across 1 million square miles) doesn’t change the calculation. (1^2/1,000,000 + 2,000^2/1,000 + 4,000^2/100 + 8,000^2/10) / (1+2,000 + 4,000 + 8,000) = 468.8 people per square mile
“Urban” Sweden is much different from other countries. For example, someone else urged us to compare Sweden to France. Yet Paris has a population density of 20000/km^2 versus Stockholm’s 4000/km^2. I’ve lived in places with both densities and one is considerably more “urban” than the other.
If you draw the border of Paris further and further out, I’m sure you can get the density as low as you want. Meaning: the density figure of a city says very little of how dense it is and says more about how far out into sparsely populated farmland the official city limit ends.
Go look at a Google street view of the far ends of Stockholm metro area…
Paris has a population density of 9,800/sq mi across 1,101.7 sq mi and an inner core of 53,000/sq mi across 40.7 sq mi.
Stockholm’s urban area of 11,000/sq mi across 147.35 sq mi, is comparable to Paris, but it’s inner core 73 sq mi is a much lower density 13,000/sq mi. Even if you assumed all those people lived in a 40 square mile “inner inner” core you still don’t get close to 53,000/sq mi.
"Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives."
This is from the abstract, but as far as I could find, this is never mentioned in the actual text of the paper? Certainly there's no reference to "oxygen", "morphine", or "administer" on the linked web page. So I guessed this had something to do with "end-of-life care", which is discussed in Supplement 6. But I could not find any explicit reference to morphine or oxygen there or in the sources of the supplement, either.
Maybe it's in (Habib, 2020), but the link is broken.
> Yngve Gustafsson, professor of geriatric medicine at Umea University, noted that the proportion of older people in respiratory care nationally was lower than at the same time a year ago, despite people over 70 being the worst affected by covid-19. He expressed concern about the increasing practice of doctors recommending by telephone a “palliative cocktail” for sick older people in care homes.
> “Older people are routinely being given morphine and midazolam, which are respiratory-inhibiting,” he told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper [5], “It’s active euthanasia, to say the least.”
Euthanasia requires the explicit desire of being killed, clearly expressed by the patient, normally with the family knowledge and after legal consultation that proves that there is excruciating pain are there is not a better alternative for treatment.
And this is killing a helpless person unable to defend his life or will, and blocking their relatives to help him/her in this task. And it was not exclusive from Sweden, probably.
"A 17 March directive to Stockholm area hospitals stated patients older than 80 or with a body mass index above 40 should not be admitted to intensive care, because they were less likely to recover. Most nursing homes were not equipped to administer oxygen, so many residents instead received morphine to alleviate their suffering."
Population density is not a measure of urbanization.
A country with a single city of 1M and outside it a desert of 1M sq km has a population density of around 1 person per square kilometer.
A country with a single city of 1M and outside it a desert of 10M sq/km has a density of around 0.1 person per square km.
A 1sq km city state with 1M people have 1M people per sq km!
All 3 these countries are 100% urbanized (no one lives in the countryside) and have the same population yet population density varies by four orders of magnitude.
Sweden has a high level of urbanization and a low population density. Or put another way: most people live in few places BUT the areas where people don’t live are large.
He's saying that Sweden is larger but that you can expect the same population density in places where people live, i.e. cities, so just raw national population density is not a good metric.
No, population density is how many people live in a certain area. They can live spread out over the entire area (rural) or concentrated in cities and similar (urban).
Yes. So it's a measure that makes sense for a small region (e.g. a city). A very dense city with lots of people on commiuter trains (Tokyo) vs. a very sprawled city with lots of people in Cars (Houston) will behave very differently in a pandemic.
But in both those cases, it doesn't matter how much unpopulated land there is outside the cities! That is - the population density of a whole country is a completely useless and irrelevant measure when it comes to the pandemic. Urbanization is also a blunt measurement, but at least it's better than density.
In the end, it's all about human contact and movement patterns. Here you can compare a city like Stockholm which has a very large service economy with people working from home during the pandemic (good) with a city of the same size and density in a poorer country with a larger part of the economy depending on manufacturing or services direct human interaction. It's going to fare worse than Stockholm.
The problem with Stockholm was put very simply that there is a large chunk of the population that lives in cramped working conditions, doesn't have private cars and that's immigrants in a few suburbs. They drive taxis, buses or work in other areas with human contacts. They also have disproportionately more comorbidites. Sadly, they are also overrepresented in elderly care work, so the grooup most severely affected also works closely with the most at-risk group. Finally, to add insult to injury the elderly care system has been progressively dismantled, leading to staff shortages and poor working conditions.
So the picture of the early stage of the pandemic in stockholm is basically this: An elderly care worker lives with a large extended family in cramped conditions. He or she has to take public transport to several different care homes, sometimes within a single day to work, despite the fact that there are active Covid outbreaks in some of the care homes and not in others. When there are outbreaks in the care homes, there is no possibility to isolate the sick from the other residents.
What matters is how many people you can transmit the disease to. If population density is high then you are crossing paths with a larger number of people every day then compared to a more population density.
Population density is meaningful only locally... so a country such as australia can have very low population density nationally, but a high one in one of the large cities.
Population densities of both Jerusalem and Stockholm are high enough for covid to spread fast, and forrests and deserts are empty enough to make it hard for covid to spread. Averageas are meaningless here, because even statisticians can drown in a river with average depth of 0.5m.
Elm would be a great fit for that. The language, IMO, manages to be both simple and powerful. And the Elm compiler is a joy to use (great error messages and very fast). I haven't used ClojureScript though, so I can't offer any comparison.
A Treasury bond is just some bits sitting on a hard drive that promises to pay you so many "dollars", which is a purely imaginary unit whose value can be manipulated at the whim of the government. It's every bit as imaginary as Bitcoin. Arguably even more so, since Bitcoin can't be inflated at will and without limit.
They don't have to formally default if they inflate the dollar enough that a current dollar is worth only 10% (or whatever) of what one was worth at the time the bond was issued.
And it's starting to look like that's exactly the strategy that's in play.
What you call "most and least gifted" is in my opinion better described as "most and least privileged". And coeducation of students of different levels of privilege just seems like a good thing, nothing that needs to be dealt with.
Of course higher intelligence is a privilege, as is higher sportive ability and other attributes given to you from birth. This includes your own personal attributes as well as the privilege that comes from your family's wealth and status. But actually, the word "privilege" muddles the waters, because those are two very different things.
I agree that schools should not differentiate based on families' status and wealth. Schools should treat poor and rich children the same.
However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...
However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...
I agree that this can be a difficult balance to strike. But I think it's also important to keep the door open for children who mature a bit later. Stamping someone as "not gifted" by excluding them from a "gifted" group sure seems like it would cause problems, especially for younger children. Of course it's a difficult practical problem to solve; to give every child challenges on their current level.
Also, while there are surely variations in intelligence that are "from birth", I do not know how that compares to all the variations caused by different educational privileges; having parents that have a lot of time to read for/with the child etc. It sort of comes down to "equality vs. equity" I suppose - and that is not a simple question.
Schools do not treat stupid and intelligent children the same, teachers - with few exceptions - do. Not because they are evil, but because to be able to cater to the different levels of intelligence and the variation in interests that you will naturally find in a random sample of children they require the time and opportunities to do so.
As long as we treat teachers as the least important workers, without acknowledging the critical work they do [0], have classes that have more pupils than a teacher can follow individually in a meaningful way and consider education "an expense" that needs reduction, rather than "an investment" we will not have a proper education system.
On the flip side: an uneducated population is easier to sway, so there is not a lot of pressure on the political establishment to change things.
Paying teachers more is beside the point. A well-paid teacher isn't suddenly a better teacher just because it earns more money.
The things we should invest in are more teachers, smaller and more separated classes and better teachers' education. Only the last one correlates (somewhat) with teachers' salaries.
How much of a difference do teachers make in the public school system? I don't mean teacher vs no teacher, but good teacher vs average teacher. The topics in the public school system are not set by the teachers themselves - they have to teach what has been decided elsewhere. A good teacher can engage students better, but how much of that is the teacher's ability as opposed to the teacher and students happening to get along? How much of it is good students self-selecting themselves into academically better schools, therefore having better peers?
Asked in a different way: if we paid (all) teachers 3x as we do right now, would we observe significant long-term improvements in students?
This is odd - I am not using code blocks, I am just typing in the text box to reply. I thought it looked like code as a way of showing my comments. I really don't know why it happens, I will look and see if it's somewhere in the settings.
The issue, in my experience, is that you have to compromise somewhere. That means either leaving the higher performers to be bored, or leaving the lower performers not achieving the minimum. Neither seems like a desirable outcome.
Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us.
Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen?
The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.
If I'm understanding your story correctly your math teacher did the opposite of what the person I responded to said - he separated out the high performers, creating an environment that allows them to thrive and achieve high results. This is great, but what about the ones who weren't picked into the high performing class?
There is nothing saying you can't have good classes for both high and low performers, but with schools that have limited resources it often works out to a poor medium where no one really thrives (hence the caveat of 'in my experience' in my comment).
The ones that weren't picked in the high performing class had the same teacher, but they only studied what was in the standard manual, they did not go above and beyond what they were capable of. At the same time they were not pulling back the ones more capable.
How is this a good thing? No parent would want their gifted child to be held back because there are other less gifted children in the class who will hold their child back. It is easy to understand their point of view. When you say ‘just seems like a good thing’...it begs the question.. ‘for whom’
If you're underprivileged no test is going to detect your gifts. You're going to be hungry, have poor sleep, possibly abused, all sorts of things that will make you look like you're less capable than you are.
You might be interested in Unison, where you edit code in text but let the manager/runtime handle the storage. It changes how you need to work with VCS quite a lot. https://www.unisonweb.org/
Also Dhall, a configuration language, generates hashes for semantics so if you refactor something you can check that the hash is unchanged to know that the function is unchanged. https://dhall-lang.org/
.NET Core does support both WinForms and WPF, but only on Windows (with no plans for other OS). Maybe that's what you meant and I just misunderstood? Regardlessly it used to be the case that .NET Core didn't support those GUI frameworks even on Windows, so it's a bit confusing.
