popular logistics

To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

Barnaby J. Feder, “A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks, The New York Times

Marathons may save lives by reducing automobile traffic:

Worried about dropping dead if you run a marathon? Researchers in Canada say you can put your mind at ease. The risk of dying on a marathon course is twice as high if you drive it than if you run it, they find.

In fact, they conclude, marathons may actually save lives: more people would die in traffic accidents if the race course had not been closed to vehicles on marathon day. (Nor was there any spillover of extra deaths on alternative routes.) Their paper is being published Friday in The British Medical Journal.

“For each death in a marathon, two motor-vehicle crash deaths were averted,” said Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and the lead author of the new study. “It’s riskier if you decide to drive your car around on a Sunday morning than if you go out and run.”

As might be expected, marathon directors were pleased.

The NFL has been asserting that concussions don’t, in fact, pose a long-term health risk. This means that they’ve got access to health data no one else has - but it’s so secret that they can’t discuss it. From today’s Times, “For Jets, Silence on Concussions Signals Unease” by Alan Schwarz:

Laveranues Coles is equal parts receiver and raconteur, the New York Jets player who talks when no one else will. But upon hearing one subject — concussions, specifically the two he has sustained in the past year — he immediately lost his smile, and looked around the locker room to see who might be listening.

“I can’t talk about that,” he said. “You know I can’t talk about that.”

Then he walked away.

We note that the Jets receive government subsidies from the state of New Jersey, and the NFL exists, we understand, by virtue of a government antitrust waiver. Those matters entirely aside from any moral or legal responsibility. Back to the Times piece:

On the afternoon of Thursday, 8 April 2004, U.S. troops stationed in Iraq deployed a small remote-controlled robot to search for improvised explosive devices. The robot, a PackBot unit made by iRobot Corp., of Burlington, Mass., found an IED, but the discovery proved its undoing. The IED exploded, reducing the robot to small, twisted pieces of metal, rubber, and wire.

The confrontation between robot and bomb reflects a grim paradox of the ongoing conflict in Iraq. The PackBot’s destruction may have prevented the IED from claiming a soldier’s life—as of 31 August, IEDs accounted for nearly half of the 3299 combat deaths reported by coalition forces. But the fact remains that a US $100 000 piece of machinery was done in by what was probably a few dollars’ worth of explosives, most likely triggered using a modified cellphone, a garage-door opener, or even a toy’s remote control. During the past four and a half years, the United States and its allies in Iraq have fielded the most advanced and complex weaponry ever developed. But they are still not winning the war.

Although there has been much debate and finger-pointing over the various failures and setbacks suffered during the prolonged conflict, some military analysts and counterterrorism experts say that, at its heart, this war is radically different from previous ones and must be thought of in an entirely new light.

From Robert N. Charette’s piece at IEEE’s Spectrum: 

“What we are seeing is the empowerment of the individual to conduct war,” says John Robb, a counterterrorism expert and author of the book Brave New War (John Wiley & Sons), which came out in April. While the concept of asymmetric warfare dates back at least 2000 years, to the Chinese military strategist Sun-tzu, the conflict in Iraq has redefined the nature of such struggles [see photo, “Road to Perdition” As events are making painfully clear, Robb says, warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to one where the means and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. This open global access to increasingly powerful technological tools, he says, is in effect allowing “small groups to…declare war on nations.”

Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3. Need satellite photos? Download them from Google Earth or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Need to know the current thinking on IED attacks? Watch the latest videos created by insurgents and posted on any one of hundreds of Web sites or log on to chat rooms where you can exchange technical details with like-minded folks.

Robb calls this new type of conflict “open-source warfare,” because the manner in which insurgent groups are organizing themselves, sharing information, and adapting their strategies bears a strong resemblance to the open-source movement in software development. Insurgent groups, like open-source software hackers, tend to form loose and nonhierarchical networks to pursue a common vision, Robb says. United by that vision, they exchange information and work collaboratively on tasks of mutual interest.

Link to Charette’s complete piece.  Charette is also the editor of the IEEE blog The Risk Factor.

The real question is - if we get useful data from it - will we use it?

Read the post on Pruned.

According to a press release from Cygnus Business Media, which arranges the conference,

With the support and confidence of leading industry organizations, the highly regarded Damage Prevention Conference & Expo will celebrate its 10th anniversary this December 5 & 6 at the Las Vegas Hilton. The conference and exhibit floor responds to the demand for innovative products, services and training related to preventing damage to the nation’s underground infrastructure and serves professionals from municipalities; oil & gas facilities; telecom, CATV, and power companies; One-Call centers; excavation companies; utility contractors; and SUE firms. This year, show organizers are especially pleased to announce exclusive package pricing developed to offer the most productive and economical options available for companies sending teams of damage prevention professionals.

For those of you who aren’t following this - what you need to know is that the “one-call centers,” which are mandated by federal law, are

According to Chris Kahn, of the Associated Press, (Yahoo! News article here):

A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it’s killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

“This is definitely something we need to track,” said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better,” Beach said. “In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”

According to the CDC, the amoeba called Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL’-erh-eye) killed 23 people in the United States, from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials noticed a spike with six cases — three in Florida, two in Texas and one in Arizona. The CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.

Kris Alexander at Danger Room has a short report and incisive analysis of these attacks, which PEMEX (Mexico’s oil exporting entity) claims will require hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. PEMEX also claims - in my view, not plausibly - that it won’t cause disruptions in exports (and to United States imports).

Photo by Pablo Spencer of the Associated Press.

Flames were visible at least six miles away. Thousands of people were evacuated; two women died of heart attacks.

Mexican authorities told the Associated Press that a note from a leftist group was found next to at least one unexploded device.

From Kris Alexander’s piece in Wired.com’s Danger Room:

Mexico supplies much of US oil and gas imports. Are higher gas prices on the way? Pemex, Mexico’s state-run oil company, claims that the attacks haven’t disrupted export supplies, but will cost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. With the U.S. economy already on shaky ground because of the sub-prime loan crisis, another such attack that did actually disrupt export oil supplies could have a direct economic impact on the U.S.

Counter-terrorism expert John Robb sees both attacks as a particularily good systempunkt — a point where a series of attacks on key nodes will cause the collapse of the entire system, essentially effects-based operations on the cheap. A few hundred dollars spent on explosives causes millions in damage.

It’s not clear from the underlying Associated Press report, published on MSNBC, whether or not the pipelines are underground or aboveground. Our concern about that detail is that we’re still working up the learning curve in trying to understand the risk of petroleum pipelines. (The “editorial offices” of Popular Logistics are in a roughly .75 square mile area which contain four underground petroleum lines, about which we presently know far too little).

Airline agent (male) put this woman off the plane because her attire was “offensive.” One suspects that he found her attractive and was resentful.

There’s no question that this is unfair to this woman; it’s likely unlawful sex discrimination. But when airline personnel put people off the plane for wearing “offensive” clothing - they’re diverting resources from security. And they are, presumably, in the business of  providing safe air carriage.

Perhaps there’s a niche market for an airline on which passengers’ modest dress as a condition of passage.

From  Xeni Jardin piece Boing Boing - and a derivative tip of the hat to the ever-vigilant Bruce Schneier.

San Diego Union Tribune piece.

Minnesota Bridge Blog Roundup at Boing Boing.

My limited understanding of the Twin Cities’ geography is that there wasn’t -  even before the collapse - a lot of redundancy in river crossing. And considerations that make any quick fixes (Bailey bridges, pontoon bridges, and other military combat bridges) unusable - the need to keep the Mississippi passable.

The Point-by-Point blog has this interesting chart:

Alice at Point-by-Point, in an update, notes that the hypothesis of Abu Ghraib knowledge as causal event is vulnerable. We agree that it can’t be proved - but anecdotal evidence suggests that the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (and “black site”) disclosures have strengthened the rhetorical positions of terrorist cheerleaders and recruiters.

From Tyler Cowen’s post at Marginal Revolution.

Which cites a May 4, 2007 article in The Wall Street Journal:

According to a voluntary survey cited in the report, 48% of Caribbean adolescent girls surveyed described their own “sexual initiation” as forced.

A single rape is a great evil; assuming that this number is even remotely accurate - I’ve no reason to think otherwise - this suggests a widespread tolerance - or endorsement of forcible sex among men. And resignation to it among women. From MacBeth: 

when sorrows come, they come

not single spies, but in battalions.

On further reflection - I’m not sure what the other layers of meaning are here - only that rape - like torture, hunger, homelessness - it’s within our collective power to end them. Had we the wit and will among us to do it.

Our GIS chops are what they’re going to be - so with a tip of the hat to the historian Daniel Soyer, here’s what we believe to be the relevant data about the behavior of storm drains local to ZIP 11218 during last weekend’s storm:

1. water was on the sidewalks - overflowing from the curb - at the Caton School, the public school which is the nearby reception center in OEM’s flood planning. We’re not sure if there is a storm drain at that intersection; if there was, it wasn’t working very well.
2. At the traffic circle at Coney Island Avenue and Parkside (the beginning/end of Coney Island Avenue - water was surging out of the storm drains a full 24 hours after the rain had stopped. This is a location which is diagonally across the Parade Ground from the Caton School - and even closer to the buillding which houses both Parks Department personnel and the NYPD’s Brooklyn South Task Force.
3. During the storm, the drains on the other side of the Parade Ground - at the intersection of Caton and Stratford, the drains were clearly not functioning.

It certainly seemed as though a major flood-evacuation reception center might, given heavier rains, have been renderes less useful. According to the National Weather Service records, most of our area has gotten about ten inches of rain for the entire month - including last weekend’s storm.

By appearances - and to untrained eyes, to be sure - it seemed as though a larger amount of rain - say 24 inches - would have interfered with the operation of the reception center planned for the Caton School building - not least because of the difficulties of using motor vehicles in water.

There may be some other planning or mechanisms of which we’re not aware. We’re still on this.

For all of you who submitted data, and helped us test the form, we thank you. We hope in the near future to have a more sophisticated, easier to use interface - which might allow both long-term, planning-related and fast-and-dirty real-time data collection. We’re working on it.

JS

More than eight months before September 11th, 2001. We trust othat our readers  can judge the relevance, weight and implications of this document. Res ipsa loquitur

Thumbnail via Skyscraper Safety.

Document via The National Security Archive at The George Washington University.

The NPMS Public Viewer  generates maps of gas and “hazardous liquid” pipelines.

We’ve yet to sort out the definitions (precisely what “gas” and “hazardous liquid” mean), the map viewer (you see we haven’t provided a sample map), and what’s in the restricted access database (the main page provides for government and contractor login - it may just be for submissions).

Check back for more on this. Anyone who knows their way around .asp applications - and how we can export images - we’d be happy to have some assistance.