walls.corpus

Oil games

Thursday, 22 July, 2010. Tagged with: current-events, technological failure

BLDG Blog looks a BP-developed offshore oil board game. There were several others with tiles like: Cartel: The International Oil Game and Gusher.

In case you wanted to eat fast-food hamburger…

Tuesday, 05 January, 2010. Tagged with: food-safety, government, technological failure, unintendedconsequences

I love red meat, and I’m getting tired of reading of how utterly disgusting the industrial process of raising cows, slaughtering them and processing meat is.

Michael Moss writing for the New York Times:

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

I am blown away that a company selling a food product with a well-established pathogen hazard gets a pass on inspection.

Back in October, Moss had another piece about E. coli in tainted hamburger that’s also well-worth reading.

A big part of the solution is knowing and insisting on knowing where your food comes from and how it got there. If you’re committed to eating red meat, find a local butcher, a supermarket like Whole Foods that grinds their hamburger in-store without byproduct or get a Kitchen Aid attachment and grind your own.

TSA, watch lists and screening

Sunday, 27 December, 2009. Tagged with: technological failure, terrorism, travel, tsa

This was written before a Nigerian man became ill on the Dec. 27, 2009 Flight 253, triggering another turnout of police/TSA

I’ve been seeing a bit of reaction on Twitter and on blogs about the TSA failing to keep Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off of Northwest Flight 253.

Andrew Sullivan’s reaction is typical:

Who was the government official who was warned? Why was this loon allowed on a flight to the US? Here’s a simple test for the Obama administration: find the people responsible for this negligence and fire them.

Other commenters on Twitter talk about TSA failing to screen adequately. I’m not sure if they mean physical screening or passenger manifest screening, but let’s look at both.

First, TSA is reliant on other airports and countries to screen passengers from physically getting on planes. Abdulmutallab should have had to have been screened twice. Once in Lagos, his initial departure and again in Amsterdam. There are at least two possibilities here. First, he had the explosive underwear on the entire time and both physical screenings failed to find anything. Second, the syringe/detonator-laden tighty-whities were salted on the plane by someone else.

Either seems plausible.

From sheer volume of passengers, it seems probable that someone will make it through security with contraband. It also seems possible that with the enhanced focus on passenger screening that someone might focus on getting contraband onto a plane in a different fashion. Could be someone with flight-line clearance. Could be someone who just jumps a fence and walks onto a plane. Something like that wouldn’t have to take place in Amsterdam.

But what about the watch list screening? His dad spoke up and warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. Unlike Cat Stevens, Abdulmutallab was cleared to land in the U.S. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano indicated there wasn’t enough information to put him on the no-fly list:

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” she replied that placing him on the no-fly list “required specific derogatory information that was not available to the law enforcement community.” Questioned again about the body check, she said her department was “ going backward” and reviewing what was and was not done in his case.

When there have been upwards of 1,000,000 people¹ — some duplicated — on a watch list, how many resources is it worth devoting to looking at each and every person on it? What are the criteria for identifying people that would be of more interest than others? I don’t know. Remember, while passenger awareness of what was going on saved Flight 253, “See Something, Say Something” generates a lot of noise that has to be sorted through. It’s very possible for that noise to be hidden in. Still, Marc Ambinder asks a relevant question:

If watch list folks are on flights inbound for the U.S., the TSA is supposed to figure this out and notify the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center. That’s the procedure, and it’s been used successfully to prevent a number of nefarious chaps from entering the U.S.

So – if secondary screening in Amsterdam and a validated watch list hit can’t keep someone from trying to blow up an airplane, what can?

Except the “watch list” and the “no-fly list” are not, strictly speaking, the same thing. There is the big consolidated list that has the big number. Then, there are the no-fly and selectee lists the TSA uses which are much smaller, but still around 16,000 people. Interpreting Napolitano’s statement and other data, Abdulmutallab was on the larger list, but not on either the two smaller lists. It seems, from TSA’s information, that they would not see a hit from the larger list against a passenger manifest.

1. The TSA disputes the 1,000,000 people figure. In particular, they state the ACLU is equating database entries with unique people, where instead, the list can have multiple entries, perhaps for different aliases, for the same person.

Two geothermal projects shut down

Saturday, 12 December, 2009. Tagged with: energy, environment, technological failure, unintendedconsequences

The New York Times has two pieces, both by James Glanz, talking about geothermal projects in Switzerland and California being shutdown.

The Swiss project was shutdown over concerns that it would generate millions of dollars in earthquake damage annually.

The California project was getting Dept. of Energy funding. The company’s rationale isn’t known, but several issues are mentioned, including the earthquakes caused in Basel, Switzerland:

Geothermal enthusiasts asserted that drilling miles into hard rock, as required by the technique, could be done quickly and economically with small improvements in existing methods, Professor Schrag said. “What we’ve discovered is that it’s harder to make those improvements than some people believed,” he added.

In fact, AltaRock immediately ran into snags with its drilling, repeatedly snapping off bits in shallow formations called caprock. The project’s safety was also under review at the Energy Department after federal officials said the company had not been entirely forthcoming about the earthquakes produced in Basel in making the case for the Geysers project.

Other projects at the California site have also caused earthquakes. Back in June, Scientific American looked into why geothermal drilling causes earthquakes:

About a million years ago, there was a magmatic intrusion (protovolcano) that didn’t make it to the surface. Under the surface is a rock called felsite—you can think of it like granite; it’s the heat source for the sandstone.

The new project is going to exploit the felsite directly. But there’s no water in the felsite, so they drill, then they pipe water under strong pressure and flow rate, to fracture the rock. They’ll be using earthquake-monitoring equipment and will send cameras down the hole to see which direction the fractures were occurring. Then they drill a second hole to intersect the new fracture.

So the potential is to extract much more heat, but you have to create your own fractures and you have to introduce water.

That bit of creating fractures? That creates the earthquake.

Pilot pwns press

Saturday, 31 January, 2009. Tagged with: journalism, technological failure

Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” columnist, and airline pilot, Patrick Smith absolutely pwns lazy coverage of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 (emphasis his):

I fail to understand how after decades of reporting on aviation incidents, the press cannot make it clear that at least two fully qualified pilots – a captain and first officer – are in the cockpit of every commercial jet. The captain is in command and ultimately responsible for the plane and its occupants, yes, but the first officer, or “copilot,” if we must, is not merely along as a backup or helpful apprentice. Tasks are split 50/50, including all hands-on “flying” duties. A copilot is at the controls for just as many takeoffs and landings as the captain, in both normal and abnormal operations, including many emergencies. (The Associated Press is habitually the worst offender in this regard.)

Following the US Airways crash there has been an outpouring of appreciation for Capt. Chesley Sullenberger. The first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, has gone mostly unmentioned (a nod here to Alan Levin at USA Today, for giving Skiles his due). Sullenberger took over the aircraft from Skiles, who was flying at the moment of the bird strike, but skill was not the issue. Rather, with both engines out, by design, the flight instruments on the first officer’s side would have failed. For all intents and purposes, Sullenberger had to take over. But regardless of whose hands were on the controls, both pilots, together, faced a serious emergency, and both needed to rise to the occasion.

Smith goes to explain what happens during a two-engine shutdown considers heroics vs. professionalism and adds context about other water landings.

A larger point: For some reason, stories seem predisposed to focus solely on single people as heros, in business or real-life. CEOs, for instance. Capt. Sully in this case. It’s lazy reporting. Sullenberger did a wonderful job, to be sure, and Smith’s critique is not aimed at him. Instead, it’s the abject failure to recognize he wasn’t the only one there.