I joined a university club to do the test even though I'm not a student. It might be worth seeing if a local university has a club that would be happy to help you?
Many European countries share radiological monitoring data with each other, and this is made available to the public through the Joint Research Council: https://remon.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
I'm not sure if it's possible to get historical data, but if so it could be interesting to have a look at data from January.
There are also communities of hobbyists that track radioactivity with custom or home-brew stations. While less sophisticated in what they measure they can be an another point of reference. One of the oldest around is http://radioactiveathome.org/map/ another is http://www.uradmonitor.com/
I totally agree with you here. Culture != race, and to ignore culture means that you are not seeing the whole picture. Anybody who works internationally and ignores cultural issues is going to have a bad time. Acknowledging cultural differences does not have to be negative, and it certainly does not make someone racist.
Citing of cultural differences is often (I'd even say usually) code for citing racial stereotypes as if they were common sense.
I'd say that it's worth discussion that the cultural differences cited by Gladwell about Korea are the same as 150 year old stereotypes of Chinese culture.
The orange planes you see are from the FAA ASDI Data. That feed is delayed by 5 minutes. I would guess the site is meant to ignore the FAA data where ADS-B data is available, but in this case it looks like the call sign is incomplete in the ADS-B data.
Surely this depends a lot on where in the world you are? I regularly break the speed limit while overtaking police cars in the UK and have never been pulled over (but never by much - I figure there's too much work involved to give me a ticket for only going 5 miles an hour over the limit). In fact, I've unintentionally overtaken police while going over the limit in Qatar and the US as well without being pulled over - both places where I'm more fearful of the police than when in the UK.
>I figure there's too much work involved to give me a ticket for only going 5 miles an hour over the limit
True. I typically drive past speed traps at ~10MPH over the limit with no problem. Passing a cop seems to be showing disrespect and I think that's why it'll get you pulled over.
I remember getting an Ericsson (A2618?) phone in around 2000 that was advertised as a WAP phone and being very disappointed that it only supported WAP over SMS (UK networks didn't allow that - I think the closest network with support was in Greece).
The longer restrictions are in place, the more airlines will push to be allowed to fly. I was due to fly from the UK to Qatar today, and I would much rather delay further than take any chances. Safety should be more important than profit.
You talk about profit as if it's something to be ashamed of. Facts are 1) if safety really was more important to you you wouldn't fly anywhere, you'd stay safely at home and 2) if there are fewer airlines operating then you personally will need to pay more for your ticket.
Profit is nothing to be ashamed of, but saying the skies are free of ash and safe to fly in because of a couple of test flights? It seems to me that the airlines are more scared of losing money than they are of losing planes.
Flying done properly is safer than crossing the street and I'm happy to take that risk. Flying through an ash cloud is not something that generally turns out good for aircraft engines; even if an initial inspection shows that all appears fine with the aircraft and first stage fan blades, a borescope inspection may reveal clogged turbine cooling air passages (see Grindle, T., J., and Burcham, Jr., F. W., 2002, Even Minor Volcanic Ash Encounters Can Cause Major Damage to Aircraft).
If once all this is done airlines feel the need to charge more for tickets then so be it - I'm happy to pay more if it's because of safety concerns.
No, but it does mean finding out what those conditions actually are (using satellite images and volunteer pilots) rather than relying computer models (guesswork at this stage).
