This is important because you risk unpleasant withdrawal symptoms if you quit cold turkey. Withdrawal symptoms are caused by abruptly discontinuing some types of medication. When you stop taking one of these, your doctor will recommend a gradual tapering schedule, taking the drug's half-life into consideration. Those with a longer half-life will have a longer tapering period. Medication side effects occur usually when the blood level of the drug is not in its steady state. That's why it's important to follow dosage and duration recommendations to the letter.
Otherwise, the drug will be either toxic more than intended , or not therapeutic ineffective for treatment. One impact of half-life is found in the SSRI antidepressants.
Dealing with racing thoughts? Always feeling tired? Our guide offers strategies to help you or your loved one live better with bipolar disorder. Sign up for our newsletter and get it free. Bushra R, Aslam N. An overview of clinical pharmacology of ibuprofen. Oman Med J. The value of plasma acetaminophen half-life in antidote-treated acetaminophen overdosage.
Clin Pharmacol Ther. Ito S. If exposure does occur, for example, by ingestion of contaminated food or water or by inhalation of airborne activity, longer-lived radionuclides may present a greater internal dose threat than shorter lived radionuclides, although the rate of biological elimination is also an important factor that must be considered.
Similarly, long-lived radionuclides in the environment may pose a longer term external dose threat; for example radionuclides released in an accident at a nuclear facility may deposit on the ground or, if in a building, on building internal sources, and these depositions may result in dose rates produced at some distance from the contaminated surfaces.
Long-lived radionuclides, especially gamma emitters may pose an external dose threat to individuals in the area. Short-lived radionuclides may also pose a short-term external dose threat, but one may take advantage of radioactive decay to reduce this hazard so that the area may not be a problem after a reasonable decay period.
These types of considerations play an important role in decommissioning of sites that have been retired from active use of radioactivity but which remain contaminated with radionuclides. The faster the pace of knowledge change, the more valuable the skill of learning becomes. A study by PayScale found that the median age of workers in most successful technology companies is substantially lower than that of other industries.
Of 32 companies, just six had a median worker age above 35, despite the average across all workers being just over Eight of the top companies had a median worker age of 30 or below — 28 for Facebook, 29 for Google, and 26 for Epic Games.
The upshot is that salaries are high for those who can stay current while gaining years of experience. In a similar vein, business models have ever shrinking half-lives. The nature of capitalism is that you have to be better last year than you were this year — not to gain market share but to maintain what you already have.
If you want to get ahead, you need asymmetry; otherwise, you get lost in trench warfare. In the past, models could last for generations.
The majority of CEOs oversaw a single business for their entire careers. Business schools taught little about agility or pivoting. Kaplan writes:. During the industrial era once the basic rules for how a company creates, delivers, and captures value were established[,] they became etched in stone, fortified by functional silos, and sustained by reinforcing company cultures.
Companies with nearly identical business models slugged it out for market share within well-defined industry sectors. Those days are over. The industrial era is not coming back. The half-life of a business model is declining.
In the twenty-first century business leaders are unlikely to manage a single business for an entire career. Business leaders are unlikely to hand down their businesses to the next generation of leaders with the same business model they inherited from the generation before.
The flip side of a half-life is the time it takes to double something. A useful guideline to calculate the time it takes for something to double is to divide 70 by the rate of growth. Known as the Rule of 70, it applies only to exponential growth when the relative growth rate remains consistent, such as with compound interest. The higher the rate of growth, the shorter the doubling time. For example, if the population of a city is increasing by 2 percent per year, we divide 70 by 2 to get a doubling time of 35 years.
The average newborn baby doubles its birth weight in under four months. The average doubling time for a tumor is also four months. We can see how information changes in the figures for how long it takes for a body of knowledge to double in size. Arbesman also gives figures for the time taken for the available knowledge in a particular field to double, including:. The doubling of knowledge increases the learning load over time. As a body of knowledge doubles so does the cost of wrapping your head around what we already know.
This cost is the burden of knowledge. To be the best in a general field today requires that you know more than the person who was the best only 20 years ago.
Not only do you have to be better to be the best, but you also have to be better just to stay in the game. The corollary is that because there is so much to know, we specialize in very niche areas. This makes it easier to grasp the existing body of facts, keep up to date on changes, and rise to the level of expert. The problem is that specializing also makes it easier to see the world through the narrow focus of your specialty, makes it harder to work with other people as niches are often dominated by jargon , and makes you prone to overvalue the new and novel.
As we have seen, understanding how half-lives work has numerous practical applications, from determining when radioactive materials will become safe to figuring out effective drug dosages.
Half-lives also show us that if we spend time learning something that changes quickly, we might be wasting our time. Like Alice in Wonderland — and a perfect example of the Red Queen Effect — we have to run faster and faster just to keep up with where we are.
Read Next. Mental Models Reading Time: 13 minutes. The Basics A half-life is the time taken for something to halve its quantity.
The Discovery of Half-Lives The discovery of half-lives and alpha and beta radiation is credited to Ernest Rutherford, one of the most influential physicists of his time. Swire writes: During the Cold War, the United States developed the basic classification system that exists today. Kaplan writes: During the industrial era once the basic rules for how a company creates, delivers, and captures value were established[,] they became etched in stone, fortified by functional silos, and sustained by reinforcing company cultures.
The Burden of Knowledge The flip side of a half-life is the time it takes to double something. It allows us to calculate how long we must store radioactive waste until they become safe. It enables doctors to use safe radioactive tracers.
Related questions How can you simulate radioactive half-life? How does radioactive decay relate to half-life? What is the radioactive half-life of carbon 14? What is the half-life of Uranium?
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