Audrey Tang in Taiwan is the youngest cabinet appointee in the history of the government there. Audrey has a bias to action like.no.other and is a refreshing figure in the world of government and global politics.
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Jacinda Ardern on Fighting the Pandemic
June 8, 2020 in TIME Magazine on New Zealand’s approach to eliminating COVID-19 before the summer began. It was about how there is no end to working to eliminate — it’s a constant effort.
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Florence Nightingale (1850s)
By examining the soldiers who were dying in the hospitals as compared with the soldiers dying in the field, Florence Nightingale created a visualization to explain how the sanitary conditions of the hospitals were causing more deaths than the battlefield. This was during the Crimean War and an example of how “Nurse Nightingale” should be renamed “Data Scientist Nightingale” plus she was a nurse.
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Cholera in London (1854)
John Snow’s map is one of the world’s first examples of leveraging visualization to track down the center of an epidemic. He placed bars to represent individual deaths at each location in a London neighborhood to figure out where the outbreak actually came from. Answer? A water pump.
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Bats As Virus Supercarriers
Ever since I heard the 40 ℃/104 ℉ stat on bats’ body temperatures in flight and how they represent 1/5th of all mammals on earth, it’s put things in perspective for me. That means that they can carry a virus perfect for humans while flying — and not kill it. Not great, huh?
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Climate Disruption
There’s a big story in the NYT about how the many disruptions to our global climate are expected to land with equal drama to the recent “orange skies” of the San Francisco and Bay Area. The point is made that it used to be we raised these concerns with vulnerable island nations or coral — but now this is impacting everyone.
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California Fires
3,627,010 acres in California were burned across 7,982 incidents with 25 fatalities and 7,517 damaged/destroyed structures just in 2020. Learn more via Cal Fire
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Naegleria Fowleri
Name of an amoeba that enters the nose and makes its way to the brain … and eats it. It’s more commonly known as “brain-eating amoeba.” Good news: you can’t be infected by naegleria fowleri by drinking contaminated water. Bad news: there are only five known survivors with a fatality of 97%. Learn more via CDC
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Needlesticks and Sharp Injuries
As part of the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) work, part number 1904 subpart C is used to record cuts from sharp objects that are contaminated with blood from another person. Read more from the OSHA site.