BLUF

And here is where the paper becomes a teaching exercise in understanding statistics or understanding averages or the value proposition that a trained statistician can help microbiologists really begin to get at their data, because averages can conceal context-dependent effects, which we saw here.

And the bottom line upfront statement, or the BLUF statement for those of you in the military, is that active Bunsen burners generally did not reduce average contamination on nearby plates.

The statistical comparisons showed no significant overall improvement in deposition rates.

So you say to yourself, "What does this mean?" This then immediately challenged the common claim that there's some universally protective sterile halo around that magical blue flame.

Thank you SITREP for sponsoring this episode.

Welcome to the Bottom Line Up Front, an Artorias podcast.

My name is Stefano, the Chief Intelligence Officer of Artorias.

And I'm John Larry, your co-hosting today.

Let's move to Syria now, which is the developments in Syria kind of outside of this construct and related to Iran and the United States and the proxy network.

So there's some overlap, obviously.

But I mean, really, it's funny, you know, last weekend when we were scheduling this podcast episode, we actually wanted to talk a lot more about Syria.

And then obviously things kind of went a little bit out of control from there.

And one of the things that I discovered When I had a client that was in particularly just a visionary who was just really all over the place and just kind of dragged the team all over, you know, hither and yon while he talked and he was ideating.

And I discovered this thing called bottom line up front.

Have you ever heard of that?

Yeah, it's from the intelligence community, actually.

Yeah, so can you talk about that? Because I think this is a fascinating way of just crystallizing what we really want people to be doing in their meetings.

So tell us what that is.

Yeah, so I mean, bottom line up front, it's pretty straightforward.

Basically, you take whatever the actionable conclusion of your meeting work or idea is and you say it first instead of last.

I'm not going to start there.

I want to begin using a method that you have talked about, which is preferred in br- government briefings, which is BLUF, and that's bottom line up front.

Right.

Uh, so we're gonna start off, if you were briefing the public today, I want to start with the big headlines.