New York Times Article on Radiation Therapy Problems

There is an interesting article on issues with radiation therapy machines in the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27radiation.html?ref=science&pagewanted=all

You may need to register to read it, but is is free (for now).

Most of the issues came down to poorly trained people using new machines with confusing software.

The story has extensive anecdotal evidence, but little sense of how extensive such problems are. Indeed one of the thrusts of the article, was that the current patchwork of regulations and non-regulations make it difficult to determine how big the problems are. The video that goes with the article implies the error rate is lower than other medical procedures. I didn't find this totally reassuring. There are also issues with some types of radiation therapy being regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and other types being regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

I was disappointed, but not surprised by references to software problems with the therapy machines in some cases. The FDA passed extensive regulations on medical software after the Therac-25 accidents back in the eighties. I read the standards that the FDA published and they required extensive documentation of the design and testing process for software. As with ISO9000, there seems to be a part of the bureaucratic mentality that assumes that you will get a quality product if you document it enough. Indeed, their operational definition of quality seems to be how much paperwork is generated. I'm a little surprised that the NY Times didn't mention the Therac-25 for historical background. Many people were injured and at least two were killed by the Therac-25. There was a software bug, where the machine would sometimes dose people with a 100 times the radiation prescribed. Previous versions of the Therac had the same bug, but there was a hardware interlock that prevented the failure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

The End of Magical Climate Thinking

This is just a heads up to go read a very good article in Foreign Policy called "The End of Magical Climate Thinking".

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/13/the_end_of_magical_climate_thinking?page=0,0

This paragraph sums up the article:

In this, Obama was following two decades of magical thinking among both greens and liberal Democrats about energy technology. In this view, energy efficiency pays for itself, solar and wind power are already nearly cost competitive with fossil fuels, and both can quickly and cheaply reduce emissions. This Pollyanna view of fossil fuel alternatives and efficiency, which makes going green seem cheap and easy -- little more than the cost of "a postage stamp a day" -- has provided the justification for green-policy advocacy that has overwhelmingly focused on pollution regulations and carbon pricing while ignoring serious investment in energy research and development.

This article tends to confirm my belief that the whole Waxman-Markey fiasco was a non-sequitur as far as actually actual substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The trouble is that Congress is populated by people who not only don't understand the basics of climate science, but don't have the educational background to understand the explanations. Law school just doesn't equip you to make intelligent decisions on scientific topics.

The Big Bang Theory TV Show Map

View Big Bang Theory Locations in a larger map

This is kind of silly, but when I'm watching the show, I try to figure out where the locations they mention are, so I put them in a Google map. I try to limit myself to locations close to Pasadena. I can't find a Bob's Big Boy or a Shoes 4 Less close to Pasadena, but they do exist in the LA area.

Please put additions or correction in the comments. If you aren't into The Big Bang Theory or maps please ignore. Click on the link above to view the map full size.

Comparing GISS, HADCRU and UAH Temperature Records

I happened to download the monthly temperature anomalies records from the University of Alabama in Huntsville the other day and plotted it in Excel. I then did a linear trend that through the data and also did a 12 month moving average. I thought it might be interesting to do the same thing with the data from the Hadley climate research unit and also with the GISS data and plot them on the same graph.

The data is based on satellite data that has been collected since December 1978 through November 2009. I set up the other two data sets to start and end on the same months. You can see the resulting graph above. Please click on it to view it at full size.

Each data set uses a different time period to compute the offset for their anomalies, so each data set is offset from the other two. You will notice that all three data sets tend to resemble one another, but the UAH data shows that sharper transitions even when we are looking at the moving average.

You can generate different slopes depending on what start year you use. If you use 1992, which was a year after the Mount Pinatubo eruption, you end up with a much stronger positive slope. If you select 1998, which was a year of the El Niño, you can actually produce a negative slope. 1979 seems like a pretty mediocre year so it seemed like a good year to start with and it lets me use all of the satellite data.

I thought it might be interesting to take all three temperature data sets and project their trends forward to the year 2100 to see how much difference in temperature each one would predict.

It is interesting to note that all three temperature data sets agreed to less than half a degree centigrade in terms of predicting the temperature for the year 2100.

2010 to 2100 Temperature Change

GISS 1.611

HAD 1.422

UAH 1.143

Range 0.468

It is interesting to note that the worst "prediction" from these three data sets is a warming of 1.6°C for the year 2100.

Here is where I downloaded the data from:

UAH:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

HADCRU:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly

I also uploaded the data in a spreadsheet, so you can download it and draw your own graphs with minimal work. Doing it yourself for the UAH and HADCRU is easy, but I had to massage the GISS data a little to get it into the same format.

Link to Spreadsheet:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ajn-XlBIM9nGdHhkYm5RR1Exdl9SdDdRTWozY3YtLVE&hl=en