The Washington Post has a simulation and visualization of how fast Ebola spreads and how deadly it is compared to other infectious diseases.  I ran the simulation:

Ebola vs several diseases

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A comparison that has been made is to the Flu, which kills over 30,000 people every year in the US.  While this figure is certainly true, Ebola is much more deadly, with a death rate of 70% this year.  This is visualized very well with this simple comparison:

Ebola vs Flu

Flu spreads fairly rapidly, infecting 100 people within 14 days.  However, only 2 of those people will die of Flu.

Ebola, by comparison, spreads more slowly, taking 68 days to infect 100 people.  But the consequences are much more severe – about 70% of those infected will likely die.

Thanks to Flowing Data for the link.

My C#.NET application needs to read from an Oracle database. There are many elaborate ways to connect to a database in .NET, including the Linq for Entities ORM. However, this was way too much for my purpose. I’ve found the following code to be much simpler. It’s largely copied from a C# Station post. The key difference is that you have to use the OracleClient class.

First: Make sure that your project has a reference to System.Data.OracleClient


string connectionString = @"
SERVER=(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP
(HOST=OracleHost)(PORT=OraclePort))
(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=OracleServiceName)))
;uid=UserID;pwd=Password;";

OracleConnection conn = new
OracleConnection(connectionString);

OracleDataReader rdr = null;

try
{
// 2. Open the connection
conn.Open();

// 3. Pass the connection to a command object
OracleCommand cmd = new OracleCommand(
"select * from mytable", conn);

//
// 4. Use the connection
//

// get query results
rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();

// print each record
while (rdr.Read())
{
for ( int i = 0;
i Console.WriteLine(rdr[i]);
// Print each field
}

}
catch
{
throw;
}
finally
{
// close the reader
if (rdr != null)
{
rdr.Close();
}

// 5. Close the connection
if (conn != null)
{
conn.Close();
}
} // End of try-catch-finally

Thanks are also due to ConnectionStrings.com