LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said this week it will retest 4,000 DNA samples and open an internal investigation after learning that it used potentially flawed test kits for eight months.
Sheriff’s officials said Wednesday that a test kit manufacturer sent a letter in August warning the department to stop using certain kits that were prone to giving incomplete results. However, the letter was received by a civilian employee who didn't discard the kits or send them back, according to a department statement.
The department used the flawed kits from July through February, testing thousands of samples from criminal investigations.
The problem was discovered Monday when a supervisor at the department's Scientific Services Bureau found the manufacturer's letter.
The department said it has opened an internal investigation to assess how much the faulty kits have affected criminal cases, and will retest some 4,000 DNA samples.
“We take the integrity of our criminal investigations and the reliability of our forensic testing very seriously,” Sheriff Robert Luna said in a statement. “The Sheriff’s Department is working diligently to assess the impact and to prevent such situations from occurring again.”
Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said his office had begun working with the sheriff’s department to determine the extent of the problem.
Sheriff's officials said the bad tests might have led to incomplete results, but they are "not likely to have falsely identified any individual.”
I'm pleasantly surprised at the levelheaded reporting. It's strikingly neutral, to the point where the Republican quote sounds like a shrill shreak in a sea of reasonableness.
There's no call for perpetrators being hunted down, no death threats, it's all very civil.
Phone specific issues aside, which might well be the root cause, your pager issues might point at an issue that may be exacerbating your experience.
If there's wideband RF noise around you, many radio services might be affected.
If you have a portable AM transistor radio handy, you can turn it on, tune away from any station and walk around your property. If the noise increases, try to find where it's coming from. There's also https://qrm.guru/ - it's intended for radio amateurs, but we're a friendly (mostly harmless) lot.
As a volunteer firefighter, you might also have amateurs among you or known to members of your group, who might have local knowledge that I lack.
Happy to exchange email. Not sure what the community rules are about sharing it here. I'm happy to send it via DM, it's not a secret.
I'm physically quite large, but most people will outrun me for medical reasons, but you can't tell just by looking at me. It wasn't until #metoo that I considered what it might be like to walk on the street and be afraid for your safety all the time.
My partner shared a few historic experiences which made me want to throw up.
I've read the responses here so far and I've done similar things for the same reasons, noise, humming, nodding, etc.. I'll also cross the road if I think my presence might make someone feel uncomfortable, or if I feel uncomfortable.
I have also walked off a footpath onto the verge to give the person coming towards me, space to move.
I'd be interested to hear what that feels like for people who are experiencing this kind of interaction.
What network connection are you using to get these notifications?
If it's a telco, they might have modified their network and your coverage might have changed.
If it's WiFi, your router or an antenna might have come loose, or a neighbour has updated their WiFi network and is drowning out yours
Have you purchased and installed new equipment? It might be causing interference. An old piece of gear, a power supply, inverter, solar panel, could suddenly generate radio noise and stop things from working too.
You might think of wireless communication as unchanging, but it's constantly updating and reacting to local conditions which in turn can vary from second to second.
If your partner dies before you do, consider what happens to your joint mortgage, your internet, email and phone accounts, your car repayments, if it's coming out of a joint account that's suddenly frozen because one account holder has died.
What happens if your partner sets up your home network and TV subscriptions and their email account is locked because you're not the account holder.
For example, Netflix doesn't have "multiple account holders" as an option, it belongs to one person, the one who pays the bill. Neither does Google, Facebook, Disney, Amazon, Apple, or anyone else.
This is repeated across every single aspect of modern life. Your robot vacuum cleaner is linked to a single person, as are your IoT lightbulbs. It's absurd.
The list goes on, public transport payment system, car ownership, home ownership.
I know people who have had to borrow money from family and friends, just to eat food because the bank needed a death certificate after their partner died, but the process took weeks, some even months.
One person was an executor of their recently deceased parent who was required to produce the non-existent death certificate for the other parent who had died 40 years earlier. Took more than a year.
Dying during a holiday is a special form of torture for the family.
I write software for a living, an exception in software means something unexpected, out of the ordinary, it's treated as a "special case".
In a lifetime, death is not unexpected, it's expected, even guaranteed. The only variable is time, but that's true for many aspects of life.
Take for instance moving house, it's got a high likelihood of happening during a lifetime, multiple times. There's processes to update your address, tell your bank, the utility company, insurance, etc. There's address change services, some even run by government that all but automate this.
Why is it that such a thing doesn't exist for death?
The absurd amount of effort that family members after a death need to get through to deal with things like this is insane.
I'm guessing that they'll be on whatever side Frank Zamboni decided it should be on.
I've only ever heard an Ice Resurfacer being referred to as a Zamboni in the USA. There's not a lot of ice to resurface in Australia and in the Netherlands we used to skate on the river or canal when conditions permitted, no machines there either.
There was also a system where some TV screen pixels were used to send data, but I'm struggling to remember how you were supposed to get it into the computer.
I suspect that you needed to build some light sensor with a serial cable, that you held to the screen, but I'm not sure.
This was in the Netherlands, not sure if it was done elsewhere.
At no point did I state when these statements were made, or for what purpose. For example, Mexico specifically warns about Measles, no doubt the first of more to come.
How the list I've created is used, is entirely up to the individual contemplating travel.
If you actually READ the sentence above the growing list of countries, you'd see the words "some form of travel warning".
The Smart Traveller link you keep responding with, lists a whole washing list of "normal" precautions to take when you visit the USA, including but not limited to: protests, violence, terrorism, guns, etc. Seriously, the advice includes getting active shooter training. That's not normal in any sense of the word.
In addition, the page states that you can apply for an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA), which if you'd done your research before blasting me, you'd discover is at the heart of many of the warnings issued by other countries. Specifically, if your passport doesn't match your gender assigned at birth, then your ESTA will, apparently, cause you to be turned back or locked up.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said this week it will retest 4,000 DNA samples and open an internal investigation after learning that it used potentially flawed test kits for eight months.
Sheriff’s officials said Wednesday that a test kit manufacturer sent a letter in August warning the department to stop using certain kits that were prone to giving incomplete results. However, the letter was received by a civilian employee who didn't discard the kits or send them back, according to a department statement.
The department used the flawed kits from July through February, testing thousands of samples from criminal investigations.
The problem was discovered Monday when a supervisor at the department's Scientific Services Bureau found the manufacturer's letter.
The department said it has opened an internal investigation to assess how much the faulty kits have affected criminal cases, and will retest some 4,000 DNA samples.
“We take the integrity of our criminal investigations and the reliability of our forensic testing very seriously,” Sheriff Robert Luna said in a statement. “The Sheriff’s Department is working diligently to assess the impact and to prevent such situations from occurring again.” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said his office had begun working with the sheriff’s department to determine the extent of the problem. Sheriff's officials said the bad tests might have led to incomplete results, but they are "not likely to have falsely identified any individual.”
The department declined to name the manufacturer.