quality of life tests

News of the day tends to focus on one layer of organization at a time, whether it be e.g. public health, family life, the state of the economy, or cultural beliefs.  When you are only thinking about one layer at at time, it's often easy to cartoonify things in terms e.g. of good guys and bad guys.

Life's quality of course involves simplification, but it also involves subsystem-correlations that look in and out from the physical boundaries of skin, family and culture.  Folks who are greedy on one layer (e.g. in their job) may be acting prudently on another (e.g. for their family).  Hence multi-layer thinking about community health is more likely to be about the balance between different (and sometimes competing) perspectives than it is about good versus bad.

How can we: (i) track what we can know about the health of all six of these correlation layers, and moreover (ii) use that information to optimize quality of life across the board?  This might make for some fun (and constructive) regional competitions in the process.

ideastream science

In addition to perturbing an individual's attention-focus (toward e.g. the buffering of correlations that look in/out from skin, family or culture), unscoped electronic-broadcasts (in any of various forms) can also affect the choice of concepts in terms of which one thinks. Folks unfamiliar with the power of concept-sets to leave blind spots in our awareness (as well as to manipulate neolithic-feelings) may be especially vulnerable to this effect.

Examples of "broadcasts willy-nilly" (i.e. communications to everyone regardless of their mandate) that often do this include:

• xenophobic, fiscal, and/or territorial threat broadcasts, 
• health-risk warnings not accompanied by observational data,
• cartoonifications of individual people as well as lifeform types, etc.

For this reason education in most fields should likely include an explicit discussion of tools for choosing one's concepts and models, as well as the more reliably covered model-based skills of  e.g. informal reasoning and algorithmic implementation.

StL Beacon quote

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
-- Joseph Pulitzer in The North American Review, May 1904

Of course, the means by which ideas travel may have changed a bit between then and now...

ideastream pH

The bloodstream in multicelled animals facilitates asynchronous communication between cells and organ systems.  Even though each end-user can put out, and read in, what it wants from the bloodstream there exist mechanisms to regulate total concentrations of things like hydrogen ions, salt, glucose, etc.

This suggests an interesting way that governments might regulate constructive use of electronic ideastreams without interfering with either consumer choice or freedom of expression.  Look for more on possible specific strategies in this context, here, in the days ahead...

fact free reporting

Does a dispute about topics (e.g. brain cancer caused by cellphones) become newsworthy just because a familiar name brings it up?  Should competent news organizations respect the critical observer in each of their subscribers by referencing relevant observations (e.g. the decline in brain cancer as cell phones proliferate) when technical topics come up in a context whose primary value (for one party or another) may be to pull neolithic strings?

imagination

Can you imagine living with a ton of air sitting on you,
in spacetime so curvy it's tough to jump higher than a meter,
among objects whose spin-rate must increase in steps,
with moving charges that contract enough to levitate,
while you move timeward at nearly the speed of light
relying on a hierarchy of hedges against uncertainty
to keep carbon in the sun-powered living crust on your planet
from returning to its early solar-system gaseous CO₂ form?
You may know someone who does...

meltdown math

Does it help to say "the radiation was 1000 times normal" without saying where and for how long, or how it compares to everyday differences e.g. in visiting the mountains, taking a plane ride, or getting an X-ray?

radiation sources

In that context it might be useful to list here some numbers for various kinds of everyday exposure to ionizing radiation in terms of both exposure rate and of total dose, where one equivalent Joule (J) of absorbed energy per kilogram (kg) of target mass is also known as 1 Sievert (Sv) or 100 Röntgen equivalents for man (rem). We might start with total doses of different types of radiation for various events.

Table 1: Various ionizing radiation doses

Activity	Absorbed dose [μJ/kg]	Equivalent Dose [μSv]	Equivalent Dose [rem]
dental X-ray	10	10	0.001
foot/arm X-ray	10	10	0.001
cosmic rays for year		270	0.027
earth bkgd. for year		280	0.028
mammogram	3,000	3,000	0.3
airline crew for year		9,000	0.9
GI X-ray series	14,000	14,000	1.4
nuclear worker for year		20,000	2
poisoning effects		1,000,000	100

radioactive transport

This might be good place for notes on the expected reduction with distance of radiative dose, and of air-borne and water-borne contamination as well. They might help answer questions about how much you should worry about stuff happening down the road, and/or on the other side of the planet.
For instance, radiation from a localized specimen will fall off as one over distance squared (or faster if there are absorbers in the way). Thus if the dose rate is one rem/hour at 1 meter away, at 10 meters away it will be 0.01 rem/hour or less. That means that if the source of radioactivity stays put, distance between you and it will have a very powerful effect.

On the other hand, lateral transport of radioactive materials away from a point e.g. on the earth's surface may at best result in concentrations that fall off as one over distance. If the flow is not radially outward but unidirectional, the fall-off will be greater for those out of the flow path but less for those in that path. Thus if the outflow of radioactive stuff gives a 1% concentration a kilometer away from the source, the average concentration 10 kilometers away should be only down to 0.1%.

effects of radiation

Similarly the risks of ill-affect associated with the various types of exposure might be of interest to folks who want to decide for themselves what is useful information and what is not. Short of the somatic damage caused by very large (e.g. ≈ 1 equivalent J/kg) doses of radiation, radiation might e.g. increase one's chance to get cancer but by how much?

Estimates e.g. for the effect of 1-rem computer tomography (CT) scans might be something like 4 cases of cancer (developing after a decade or more) for every 10,000 scans. Thus the odds of getting cancer from a CT scan may be less than the odds of throwing 11 coins at once and finding that all of them have landed heads up, i.e. less than 1 in 2¹¹ = 2048 times. If you need the scan, that chance may be one you can afford to take but regardless it should probably be your call.