World’s first buildling-integrated wind turbines - in, of all places, Bahrain. 

 This post via TreeHugger.com 

Our enthusiasm about wind-powered energy generally is tempered by our experience as New  York City residents. It’s our understanding that the City has yet to approve a single application for wind-powered generation - because of concerns about noise. We’ve  yet to follow up on this intelligence about the NYC Department of Buildings - but plan to, and welcome submissions from any of our readers who can help us out on this.

A recipe for converting Black & Decker power tools to solar power. 

A great idea, and since it’s well out of our pay grade to evaluate - we’d like to hear about results.

Via Toolmonger. 

Dark Roasted Blend has a series of photos about offshore wind turbines:

The photos are fascinating - especially the series that shows the construction of an offshore wind array. Via BoingBoing.

Professor Robert Frank, Economic Scene: When to Violate the Top Two Commandments of Antigovernment Crusaders, The New York Times, March 15, 2007:
Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell, says that when asked to identify their two most important principles, “most antigovernment crusaders pick (1) public spending shall be kept to an absolute minimum and (2) the state shall not transfer income from rich to poor.” (And many, if pressed, are willing to tolerate just a bit of wealth transfer, as long as it’s from the bottom and middle to the top, where - let’s face it - they’re a better class of people, and they deserve it. But I’m interrupting Professor Frank; excuse me).

Frank says that “[t]he problem is that many compellingly advantageous public policies cannot be enacted without violating the two commandments.

Regulations that limit auto emissions are a case in point. Because these regulations increase car prices, legislators in most jurisdictions exempt older vehicles to avoid imposing unacceptable costs on the mostly low-income motorists who drive them. Yet the cost to society of this exemption far outweigh its benefit for the poor.

Frank, relying on a RAND study, says that making the whole “fleet” compliant with air-quality rules, only by altering the new cars, is very expensive - because the new cars are new, and newly designed, and the old ones are exempt. It would be cheaper , he contends, to impose a small tax on high-income motorists in oder to provide vouchers to low-income motorists so that they could purchase newer, air-quality compliant (and presumably more fuel-efficient) cars.

Our irrationality, says Frank, extends to health care - we’ve set up a system which delivers worse outcomes “at substantially higher cost” than single-payer systems. And our ideoligical concerns - don’t redistribute, the government ought to be small - actually get in the way of keeping everything cheaper for everyone.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his New Yorker piece last February - Million-Dollar Murray

Gladwell makes the case that we have the bell curve, the “normal” curve, framing all the data sets we look at:

Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language of statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.’s troubles had a “normal” distribution—that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically.

He goes on to apply the same examination to other data sets - a population of the homeless in Colorado - and the L.A.P.D.’s costly effort to “catch” people who’d paid their mechanics to circumvent the emission equipment. Problem is that it turns out that this waqs being done by a relatively small number of drivers and a very small number of repair shops (some of whom may have derived their primary competitive advantage from their willingness to break the law).

The Gladwell piece made a big impression on me when I read it last year; both these pieces are worth reading - if only to remind us that whatever problem we’re working on, the devil doesn’t want you to pay attention to the details. I think both of these are worth reading - and I’m going to try to see what else Frank’s written that might interest Popular Logistics readers.

Gladwell maintains a website at www.malcolmgladwell.com , where most, if not all of his New Yorker pieces are available. Frank, whose book “The Economic Naturalist” is due out this sprig, has a site at www.robert-h-frank.com

From “The real first responders: citizens?,” Christian Science Monitor, by Alexandra Marks, July 14, 2005:

As planning for terrorism becomes a part of daily life in the Western World, a growing number of disaster experts are calling for a dramatic reassessment in the way the nation plans for emergencies.

The problem, they argue, is that the current top-down approach views the public as a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be utilized. Officials don’t take into account people’s natural willingness to help or address their most basic needs - like concern about the safety of their spouses and kids.

This upstart group of sociologists, physicians, and terrorism experts contends that the use of ordinary citizens during a large-scale emergency could save hundreds if not thousands of lives. And they are determined to ensure the public is properly prepared before the next catastrophic event.

“It’s critical that we readjust our thinking. If you look at the 9/11 commission report they talked about first responders versus what they called ‘civilians,’ as if all of the civilians did was just stand at the sidelines,” says Kathleen Tierney, the director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “That is so radically at variance with what actually happened that day.”

 - snip -

A major study done by the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health at the New York Academy of Medicine found what many experts call an alarming disconnect between those official plans and the needs of the public. Researchers did an extensive review of the current plans to deal with a dirtybomb explosion and a smallpox attack at an airport. Then they did in-depth interviews with citizens at 14 different locations around the country, and a national telephone survey to find out how people would actually react.

In the case of a smallpox outbreak, they found the official plans expect everyone to go to a vaccination site. But the study found that only 40 percent of the public would actually go. The reasons are twofold: 40 percent of the people surveyed said they basically didn’t trust their government in such a case, and 60 percent were concerned about impact of the vaccine. That’s twice as many as were worried about catching the virus.

The official plans have another vulnerability. Currently, medical experts estimate that 50 million people are at risk of developing life-threatening complications if they get the smallpox vaccine. In the case of an outbreak, the official plans expect even those people to go to public vaccination sites which could unnecessarily put them at risk.

And in the case of a dirty bomb, the study found only 60 percent would “shelter in place” for as long as officials tell them to, primarily because they’d be worried about their families. On the upside, the study found that if people knew that their workplaces were organized and safe, and their children’s schools were safe and prepared, and that they could communicate with family members, they’d be much more likely to follow official instructions.

“Because we haven’t looked at these issues from the perspective of the public, we’re missing some very important information in developing strategies that would work best for them and also would be much more effective in terms of protecting people,” says Roz Lasker, the study’s principal researcher. “There’s been no planning that starts with asking, ‘What would make you feel safe?’ “

That’s why researchers contend it’s crucial to involve whole communities in disaster planning from the start.

“If we really truly want to prepare for a disaster, we need to do it on a local level, where local means down to the level of the workplace and the level of schools,” says Lee Clarke, a disaster planning expert at Rutgers University In New Jersey. “Too many of the usual ways of looking at disaster planning looks at command and control, as if we’re all children and we need the generals to organize us otherwise the world will fall apart.”

Via Jonas Landgren Information Technology and Emergency Response Reflections Comments Thinking Speculations In Swedish and English

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Communications-Applied Technology makes this ICRI-2P

Incident Commanders’ Radio Interface

I don’t know how long they’ve been making them - but this is the type of technology that New York City cops and firefighters had been demanding for years before 9/11  - that, to a large extent, they still don’t have.  So it would seem that, at least at present, the obstacles are political - not technological - to having different groups of first responders communicate with each other.