The Alternatives

Not all employers are Orwellian in nature. Many employers do not care what you do at home in your off-time they just want to ensure that you are performing your best when you are at work. Out of ignorance, they think the way to ensure high performance is to test for drug use. Obviously it s not. 

There is an alarming number false negatives and false positives in the drug testing industry. That s a fact. And what it means is that competent, law abiding workers are unfairly being denied employment and losing jobs. The employers evaluation of the employees competency is dependent on the competency of the lab. Even when the lab is competent, there are still false positives due to other factors, all of which are outside the control of the employee. 

The fact that there are false negatives can lead to extremely severe disasters in safety critical applications. For example, the case below explained by an anonymous user  

I m the Director of a program that monitors nurses and other health professionals with chemical dependency. We recently had a nurse anesthetist who had clean screens for over six months and we approved her to return to anesthesia practice. Her first week on the job, two of her patients experienced complications during surgery because of her impaired practice and ended up in ICU in critical condition. I don t know if either one will regain neurological function. The nurse went back to treatment and we 

So we have a situation where people assume that because someone passes a drug test, then they must be safe. The fact is, an airline pilot can snort a line of cocaine five minutes before a drug test and pass no problem then step into the cockpit for a couple hour flight and be severely impaired. 

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An additional advantage derived from plotting the residuals is that it can aid in detecting a bad data point. If one of the points noticeably deviates from the trend line, it is probably due to a mistake in sampling, analysis, or reporting. The best action would be to repeat the measurement. However, this is often impractical. The alternative is to reject the datum if its occurrence is so improbable that it would not reasonably be expected to occur in the given set of experiments. 

The ability to handle a wide range of throughput. Many of the alternatives to distillation can only handle low throughput. 

For a three-component mixture, there are only two alternative sequences. The complexity increases dramatically as the number of components increases. Figure 5.2 shows the alternative sequences for a five-component mixture. Table 5.1 shows the relationship between the number of products and the number of possible sequences for simple columns. ... 

Equation (5.8) tends to predict vapor loads slightly higher than those predicted by the full multicomponent form of the Underwood equation. The important thing, however, is not the absolute value but the relative values of the alternative sequences. Porter and Momoh have demonstrated that the rank order of total vapor load follows the rank order of total cost. 

The best few nonintegrated sequences can be identified most simply using the total vapor load as a criterion. If this is not satisfactory, then the alternative sequences can be sized and costed using shortcut techniques. 

MarkownikofT s rule The rule states that in the addition of hydrogen halides to an ethyl-enic double bond, the halogen attaches itself to the carbon atom united to the smaller number of hydrogen atoms. The rule may generally be relied on to predict the major product of such an addition and may be easily understood by considering the relative stabilities of the alternative carbenium ions produced by protonation of the alkene in some cases some of the alternative compound is formed. The rule usually breaks down for hydrogen bromide addition reactions if traces of peroxides are present (anti-MarkownikofT addition). 

Not surprisingly, costs are several times higher than conventional wells. Nevertheless, overall project economics may favour ERD over other development options. For example, BP developed the offshore part of the Wytch Farm Oilfield (which is located under Poole Harbour in Dorset, UK) from an onshore location. The wells targeted the reservoir at a vertical depth of 1,500 meters with a lateral displacement of over 8,000 meters (Fig. 3.20). The alternative was to build a drilling location on an artificial island in Poole Bay. ERD probably saved a considerable amount of money and advanced first oil by several years. 

When a production or injection well is drilled, it is common practice to cement in place a casing which extends across the reservoir interval. The alternative is to leave the reservoir uncased, in a so-called bare foot completion, which is rarely done. When the drilling department finishes its work on the well, it is often left in the state of a cased hole, as on the left of Figure 9.14. 

If you were offered 7,130 today, or 10,000 in exactly 5 years time, you should be indifferent to the options, unless you could find an alternative investment opportunity which yielded a guaranteed interest rate better than the bank (in which case you should accept the money today and take the alternative investment opportunity). 

If the company is fully self-financing for its new ventures, then the appropriate discount rate would be the rate of return of the alternative investment opportunities (e.g. other projects) since this opportunity is foregone by undertaking the proposed project. This represents the opportunity cost of the capital. It is assumed that the return from the alternative projects is at least equal to the cost of capital to the company (otherwise the alternative projects should not be undertaken). 

One way of calculating the IRR is to plot the NPV against discount rate, and to extrapolate/ interpolate to estimate the discount rate at which the NPV becomes zero, as in the Present Value Profile in Figure 13.16. The alternative method of calculating IRR is by... 

The field may enter into an economic decline when either income is falling (production decline) or costs are rising, and in many cases both are happening. Whilst there may be scope for further investment in a field in economic decline, it should not tie up funds that can be used more effectively in new projects. A mature development must continue to generate a positive cashflow and compete with other projects for funds. The options that are discussed in this section give some idea of the alternatives that may be available to manage the inevitable process of economic decline, and to extend reservoir and facility life. 

Due to the orthogonal position of the emission and reception coils, the voltage induced by the alternative magnetic field of emission in the reception coil is zero, so that this will only detect the diffracted magnetic field. 

The efficiency of gas turbines is limited by the maximum allowable turbine inlet temperature (TIT). The TIT may be increased by cooling of the blades and vanes of the high pressure turbine. Cooling channels can be casted into the components or may be drilled afterwards. Non-conventional processes like EDM, ECD or Laser are used for drilling. Radiographic examination of the drilled components is part of the inspection procedure. Traditional X-Ray film technique has been used. The consumable costs, the waste disposal and the limited capacity of the two film units lead to the decision to investigate the alternative of Real-Time X-Ray. 

The alternative approach is to treat the film as a nonideal two-dimensional gas. One may use an appropriate equation of state, such as Eq. Ill-104. Alternatively, the formalism has been developed for calculating film activity coefficients as a function of film pressure [192]. 

We may also define a free energy of mixing [240]. The alternative (and equally acceptable) definition of G given in Eq. 111-87 is... 

In the alternative surface phase approach, Eq. IV-36 may be expanded for mixed films to give [245]... 

The relationship between tlie lattice gas and the Ising model is also transparent in the alternative fomuilation of the problem, in temis of the number of down spins [i] and pairs of nearest-neighbour down spins [ii]. For a given degree of site occupation [i]. 

The alternative simulation approaches are based on molecular dynamics calculations. This is conceptually simpler that the Monte Carlo method the equations of motion are solved for a system of A molecules, and periodic boundary conditions are again imposed. This method pennits both the equilibrium and transport properties of the system to be evaluated, essentially by numerically solvmg the equations of motion... 

If we consider the chord length distribution, we can express the alternating chords and I2 as ... 

The alternative to direct simulation of two-phase coexistence is the calculation of free energies or chemical potentials together with solution of the themiodynamic coexistence conditions. Thus, we must solve (say) pj (P) = PjjCT ) at constant T. A reasonable approach [173. 174. 175 and 176] is to conduct constant-AT J simulations, measure p by test-particle insertion, and also to note that the simulations give the derivative 3p/3 7 =(F)/A directly. Thus, conducting... 

The possibility of a nongradient component in the integrand introduces some difficulty and an alternative formulation has been proposed [273,283]. [At positions that are close to a ci, the alternative approximates well to the angle shown above in Eq. (73).]... 

The sign of the last term depends on the parity of the system. Note that in the first and last term (in fact, determinants), the spin-orbit functions alternate, while in all others there are two pairs of adjacent atoms with the same spin functions. We denote the determinants in which the spin functions alternate as the alternant spin functions (ASF), as they turn out to be important reference terms. 

We here describe the alternative of approximating <,c(S)b via Lanczos method. The Lanczos process [18, 22] recursively generates an orthonormal basis Qm = [qi,.., qm] of the mth Krylov subspace... 

Expressions (2.7) and (2.8) differ by a factor 311/8, or about 1.18, and this is typical of the order of error associated with simple momentum transfer arguments. The flux relation (2.5) can also be written in the alternative form... 

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