Author Archives: Jon

"The exact scenario … had actually been foreseen … years ahead of the event"

From the appellate court decision in Nash v. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority had moved to set aside a jury verdict or, in the alternative, be granted a new trial. The litigation involved the 1993

truck-bombing, which killed six people and injured hundreds. The Appellate Division, First Department (New York’s intermediate appellate court) ruled against the Port Authority in a unanimous decision decided on April 29, 2008, with an opinion by Presiding Justice Jonathan Lippman:

the exact scenario followed by the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had not merely been foreseeable, but had actually been foreseen and brought to the attention of the Port Authority management by its internal and retained security consultants years in advance of the event.

The entire opinion is worth a read – and is so well-written that non-lawyers will likely be able to follow some of the nuances of the legal arguments.

MIT Professors, Grad students, develop nanotube detector for airborne toxins

From Nano TechWire, this excerpt from Super-sensitive and small: New MIT detector uses nanotubes to sense deadly gases
 

Using carbon nanotubes, MIT chemical engineers have built the most sensitive electronic detector yet for sensing deadly gases such as the nerve agent sarin.

The technology, which could also detect mustard gas, ammonia and VX nerve agents, has potential to be used as a low-cost, low-energy device that could be carried in a pocket or deployed inside a building to monitor hazardous chemicals.

“We think this could be applied to a variety of environmental and security applications,” said Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and senior author of a paper describing the work published this week in the online edition of Angewandte Chemie.

Read the rest at NanoTechWire.

Urgent Request to Sign Petition Objecting to FEMA decision – no ice in disasters

SIGN THIS PETITION:

FEMA has decided that it’s not going to deliver ice in disasters, except in narrowly defined “medical” or “life-threatening” circumstances. Ice, of course, is a staple in disasters. The Disaster Accountability Project has coverage of the FEMA decision here

.

And DAP has also organized a petition drive – sign the petition at this link .

Architect Sheila Kennedy: "It’s curtains"

Architect Sheila Kennedy has, with her colleagues (whose names we don’t know, hence no attribution) designed The Soft House; Jorge Chapa at Inhabitat has an excellent post on Kennedy’s prototype house whose solar-collecting curtains would produce 16KWH. We strongly recommend you read Chapa’s post – and that you check in regularly at Inhabitat.

Sheila Kennedy/KVArch

Given our concern with worst-case scenarios – and preventing them – this technological use could go far in prevention by producing more power cleanly and locally. But we want to see rugged and waterproof textile uses for tents and canopies and emergency shelters and sails – consider the possibility of transporting the equivalent of a circus tent to the site of a disaster or power failure – as contrasted to the transportation of heavy petroleum-consuming generators – or solid photovoltaic panels or turbines.

One last thought: Kennedy’s design, we suspect, likely does more than produce energy: it probably acts as a cooling mechanism, preventing or mitigating the effects of a heat emergency.

NanoTechWire has a short interview with Sheila Kennedy here.

J.C. Winnie/After Gutenberg – replacing transportation fuel with renewables

The ever-methodical J.C. Winnie at After Gutenberg has an outline of how the United States could replace fossil fuels with renewables for transportation needs – and this without a large change in vehicle weight, use patterns, or increases in mass transportation. Add those, and we’d have a plan that would be not only environmentally more palatable, but would substantially increase environmental efficiency. From After Gutenberg:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG; and, such anthropogenic emissions unequivocally contribute to

climate change. The rise of CO2 corresponds to

the rise in global temperature and loss of arctic ice mass. Annual carbon emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. Coal-fired electric power plants comprise the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. By and large, such admonishments are being ignored by U.S. policy-makers.

While a planetary engineer in Germany, Roland Moesl, envisions saving life as we know it on Planet Earth, a green pundit in America, David Roberts, describes the Syllogism of Doom. Of course, in Germany between 2000 and 2003 their installed PV capacity quadrupled. And, this was while Germany was becoming the world leader in wind development. It is way past time, ‘Merika, to start doing things right.

A good start would be “the most comprehensive and credible report released on wind power by a federal agency in a decade” (and studiously ignored by mainstream media), which indicates how we could achieve 20% wind power by 2030. Yes, 2030 is too late to stop using coal, but as many have observed, no single strategy will suffice. Switching sooner to electric vehicles, strong support for solar and wind energy development, conservation and improved efficiencies can make an earlier contribution than the delayers have programmed us to expect. The growing risk with peak oil is that in their search for alternative fuel, Americans will ignore much more catastrophic change brought on by anthropogenic emissions. The coal and corn zombies must be repulsed.

That’s just an excerpt. Read the rest of this persuasive analysis at Project Gutenberg.

And we’ll pose a question – we’re beginning to notice county and local impediments to renewable installation – and an absence of state mandates to require utilities to buy surplus power back at reasonable rates. If end users installing renewables in grid-tied systems are discouraged from building capacity in excess of their own use, we’re going to have problems.

One alternative is the setting up of local power coooperatives. But we’re leery of solutions that require lots of lawyers and incorporations. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in The Tipping Point, sometimes the tipping point is making things easy.

Reorganization of Special Forces command likely "unremarkable"

blog at the Washington Post: “In This Case, Rumsfeld was right”: (I’m quoting at length because Arkin writes better, and I’m not sure how much to pare away without distorting a nuanced point)

If there were a musical about the Pentagon today, the opening number and reprise would be “If Rumsfeld Was for It, We’re Against It.”

Witness the portrayal of the reversal of a “controversial” plan by the former secretary of Defense, first reported in the New York Times last week, to use special operations forces as the lead element in the war against terror.

There is a lot wrong with the way the United States has been “fighting” the war against terror in the past seven years, and there is much wrong with the special operations aesthetic. But any push to reduce their role and turn over counter-terrorism to the conventional military instead is wrong in every way.

I have often criticized special operations for being too secretive and for a lack of basic accountability; for pursuing a “direct action” (read: head-hunting) approach to counter-terrorism that is circular and never-ending; and finally for believing their own P.R. about how great they are. But the “quiet warriors,” as they often call themselves, are just the right element of the military to contribute to counter-terrorism efforts.

If there’s going to be a “war” against terrorism, it needs to be quiet and stress the non-military. This means a small military footprint and fewer bases and a fully coordinated “interagency” and international effort. For all this, the Army and Marines are just too much of a blunt instrument. Haven’t we learned that blundering out there, as we are blundering in Iraq, just confirms our desire for subjugation and empire in the minds of far too many in the Islamic world?

First the news: As reported in the Times, Special Operations Command, which under presidential directive has been given authority to conduct independent counter-terrorism missions, is supposedly backing off of this unilateral role and focusing on working with regional commanders to conduct joint operations. Adm. Eric T. Olson, the new special operations commander, says that he will continue to play the role as counter-terrorism coordinator around the world, a “shift” that the Times suggests means the old Rumsfeld way is dead and that special operations command will not conduct unilateral operations.

In some ways the news is unremarkable.It is simply impractical for special operations forces to do their own thing without coordinating fully with the regional commands and the CIA and the conventional forces, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where 90 percent of the effort is expended. In fact in Iraq the coordination has become so intimate that a two-star special operations forces general has been deployed there to coordinate at the highest level of the military command, a level of collaboration that has proven more useful and productive.

– snip –

So are special operations forces being spanked getting some comeuppance? I don’t think so. For all the changes, the super-secret “Delta Force” and commando and intelligence teams of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite of the elite, are going to continue to conduct unilateral operations and go where the conventional military — even the conventional Special Forces — can’t. Of course, to be effective, they have to coordinate with the regional commanders, the CIA and State Department, FBI, etc. Duh.

– snip-

That doesn’t necessarily mean it should be the Pentagon’s job, and it certainly doesn’t mean that Rumsfeld was able to implement a sensible plan through all of his megalomania. But a shift of the conventional military to a global counter-insurgency focus? If this is the plan, both our counter-terrorism efforts and our military needs will be weakened.

William Arkin’s Early Warning blog at the Washington Post is morphing into a weekly column and discussion group. That’s probably good for Arkin – and Arkin’s work once a week is still a lot better than no Arkin at all.

McCain’s Katrina claims refuted

Senator McCain, during a recent New Orleans press availablility, said that he

“supported every investigation” into the government’s role regarding the hurricane, when in fact he twice voted against an independent commission.”

From “Katrina Kerfuffle,” on FactCheck.org .

Notwithstanding the merits of the the votes in question – it’s hard to have a national discussion about important issues – such as what the lessons learned from Katrina might be – when United States senators lie, are uninformed, or misinformed, about their own voting records.

Magnetbox.com: EveryBlock special reports

Ben at MagnetBox – a keen observer of information arrays and streams – reports on Everyblock.com and its new special reports about more complex geographically-related data:

We’ve launched our first EveryBlock “special report” — an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation “Operation Crooked Code.”

As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We’ve been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we’ve been building the site, we’ve come across a number of types of information that don’t exactly fit the EveryBlock mold.

We’ll interrupt this excerpt here to point out that this tool might be of particular use to groups like the Disaster Accountability Project – particularly with decentralized efforts like its  Disaster Accountability Monitor and Blogger network

.

For example, an architectural group named “Chicago 7 Most Endangered Buildings ” in January. That’s geographically relevant news (i.e., if you live near one of those endangered buildings, you’d likely be interested in knowing about it), but because it’s such a “one-off” type of information, we haven’t done anything with it on EveryBlock. It didn’t make much sense to add such a relatively obscure type of information to our list of news types.

From the EveryBlock blog.

Via Magnetbox.

After Gutenberg: IBM claims to have developed most efficient solar cell technology

After Gutenberg reports in IBM Concentrator Photo Voltaic Cells that

IBM has managed to squeeze 230W of power on to a centimeter square of solar panel using concentrator photovoltaics. The energy was then converted to 70W of usable electric power, the best power efficiency yet achieved, the company claims.

Relying on a piece in EETimes, After Gutenberg, which routinely spots the details that matter, points out that this is a place where semiconductor and photovoltaic technologies overlap. After Gutenberg further quotes the EEtimes as follows:

The IBM researchers used a very thin layer of a liquid metal made of a gallium and indium compound that they applied between the chip and a cooling block. Such layers, called thermal interface layers, transfer the heat from the chip to the cooling block so that the chip temperature can be kept really low.

They suggest that if the silicon can be cooled effectively, concentrated photovoltaics could take over as the cheapest form of solar energy.

However, IBM admits there is much work to be done to move the research project from the lab to the fab.

By using a much lower number of photovoltaic cells in a solar farm and concentrating more light on to each cell using larger lenses, IBM’s system enables a significant cost advantage in terms of a lesser number of total components.

The researchers said that the concentration increases the power of the sun’s rays by a factor of ten, allowing cells that normally generate 20W of power to generate 200W instead.

Their initial results were presented at this week’s 33rd IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists conference , where the researchers showed how their liquid metal cooling interface is able to transfer heat from the solar cell to a copper cooling plate much more efficiently than anything else available today.

“We believe IBM can bring unique skills from our vast experience in semiconductors and nanotechnology to the important field of alternative energy research,” said Dr. Supratik Guha, the scientist leading photovoltaics activities at IBM Research. “This is one of many exploratory research projects incubating in our labs where we can drive big change for an entire industry while advancing the basic underlying science of solar cell technology.”

The researchers developed a system that achieved the “breakthrough” results by coupling a commercial solar cell to an IBM liquid metal thermal cooling system using methods developed for the semiconductor industry.

IBM adds that concentrator-based photovoltaics technologies have the potential to offer the lowest-cost solar electricity for large-scale power generation, “provided the temperature of the cells can be kept low, and cheap and efficient optics can be developed for concentrating the light to very high levels.”

John Walko, “IBM claims major boost in solar cell efficiency

,” in EETimes Europe.

Via the increasingly indispensable, and ever mysterious J.C.W. at After Gutenberg .

Disaster Accountability Blog: Public Accountability Requires Citizen Action disasteraccountability.org

ap-alex-brandon-photo-via-daylifecom610x.jpgThe Disaster Accountability Project Blog reports that an investigation has been called for into allegations that the Corps of Engineers and contractors knowingly installed defective pumps in New Orleans.

In September of 2007 the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) ordered

Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to conduct an investigation into the allegation that defective pumping equipment was delivered and installed at the three new gated closure structures in New Orleans. These are the main pumps protecting the city of New Orleans in the event of a major hurricane or flood. OSC said in its letter to Gates that they concluded the allegations made by this whistleblower had a substantial likelihood of validity and that these pumps are “inherently flawed” due to poor design and have still not been properly tested.

Also, the OSC went on to state this same pumping equipment had previously malfunctioned under favorable contractor testing conditions and was subsequently shown to be defective, yet was knowingly installed by the Corps of Engineers.

In addition, the OSC went on further to state the whistleblower, a veteran Corps engineer who was the Team Leader of Pumping Systems Installation for New Orleans, alleged USACE employees and MWI (the pump manufacturer) circumvented contract requirements in an effort to complete the task, all at the expense of public safety. It was reported that key safeguards were circumvented and “there is an erroneous assumption that…hydraulic pumps are fully operational, and hence, the risk to the public remains high,” in the words of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

New Orleans Pumps Still Questionable at The Disaster Accountability Project Blog.

Image by Alex Brandon of the Associated Press on DayLife.Com


New Solar Handbag: with batteries, many buckles

Costume National reports on a new handbag with solar panels.

  As the venerable Joel Johnson of Boing Boing points out, it depends on how you feel about buckles. But it’s clear some amount of solar carried capacity makes some sense in a society in which people routinely carry things which need electricity – PDAs, phones, music devices, laptops, or some fusion of the above.

And Dr. Johnson notes that he’s “come to think that practical portable solar needs batteries to really be useful.” We agree, and we’d like to add Furman’s Rule of Most Critical Solar Applications: the most important solar installations at present are those which work and are visible, and thus serve to persuade people that solar works.

Via Joel Johnson on Boing Boing.

US Bike Sales Rising With Gas Prices | BikeRadar.com

Richard Peace of Bike Radar reports:

Numerous bike retailers in the United States are reporting a spike in sales on the back of the seemingly inexorable rise of gas prices at the pumps throughout the country.

In particular bike retailers are reportedly noticing a strong rise in commuter cycling queries — unusual in a market that is regarded as primarily a leisure and sports-based one. Recently the price at the pumps hit $3.60 a gallon and the net is full of reports from bike shops across the US noting the price squeeze effect on customers coming through their doors.

“We’re getting more and more customers that are buying bikes to commute in lieu of gas prices,” said Jarvis Polvado of the Texoma Cycling Centre in Wichita Falls, Texas. “Where I’ve seen the biggest increase is people buying bikes to go to work.”

“Everyone that comes in the shop is talking about the gas prices,” said Barry Dahl of Barry’s Bikes in Bismarck, North Dakota.

“People are using their bikes a lot more today for transportation purposes,” added Ken Hartley, owner of Hartley’s Cycle Shop in Hinsdale, Illinois. “We’re selling more racks, we’re selling more fenders, we’re seeing a lot of interest in locks to lock their bikes at the train stations.”

Richard Peace, US Bike Sales Rising With Gas Prices

On Bike Radar.

This is, of course, good news, but we think there are other steps in many communities, certainly here in New York: government support for bicyclists, employer-supplied bike racks, and perhaps tax incentives — like an exemption from sales tax on bicycles and relevant accessories (like racks). In many places, bike lanes don’t yet exist. And — as I believe we’ve reported on other occasions — there’s some evidence that there’s a tipping point of bicycle riders — after which automobile drivers start driving to accommodate them. If prices keep rising at current rates, most of these will be demanded, arranged, or get taken care of.

Thanks to our neighbor Joel Johnson of Boing Boing.

Decorated Marine, author of articles about PTSD, kills himself and brother several weeks after meeting President Bush

Exceptionally sad. Greg Mitchell reports about the deaths of Travis Twigg, 36, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993, and his brother Willard, 38.

The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq war with PTSD continues. The latest that has surfaced involves a decorated vet who wrote about his PTSD for the Marine Corps Gazette– and this week killed himself and his brother after a long police chase in Arizona.

Police have discovered no motive for the killings, nor why the brothers earlier in the week may have planned to commit suicide by driving into the Grand Canyon — Thelma and Louise style.

Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, 36, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993 and held the combat action ribbon — and met President Bush a few weeks ago — wrote a lengthy article in the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette detailing his efforts to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. Tom Ricks, The Washington Post military reporter, recalls in an online piece today, that he carried excerpts from that piece early this year.

Twiggs loved his country so much he named a daughter America, The Arizona Republic reports today.

His brother was Willard J. Twiggs, age 38.

“All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened,” Kellee Twiggs, the wife of Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, said. She said he began changing after his second tour of duty in Iraq, and worsened after he returned from his third stint there, when he lost two good friends from his platoon.
 Continue reading →

Think Progress » Webb: Bush Would Be First President In History To Veto Benefits For Vets

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is the proponent of expanded veteran’s benefits, which have drastically declined in actual value since World War II. Webb’s proposed legislation would pay for the benefits by increasing income tax only on households with incomes in excess of $1 million annually.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his allies have introduced their own version of the bill, which would reserve the most generous benefits for those who have served at least 12 years. Webb pointed out that it would exclude the vast majority of service members:

Seventy to 75 percent of the ground troops in the Army and the Marine Corps have left the service by the end of their first enlistment. And those are the people who are not being taken care of. … They are not getting an opportunity for the first-class education they deserve.

As Webb pointed out, conservatives need to match their rhetoric on supporting the troops with their actions.

Think Progress: Webb: Bush Would Be First President In History To Veto Benefits For Vets

McCain Criticizes Katrina Response as ‘Disgraceful’ – New York Times

Elisabeth Bumiller reports in the

Times

that Senator McCain has not only described the Administration’s reponse to Katrina a ‘disgraceful,’ but that he also believed that the President was directly responsible.

Asked at an outdoor news conference if he traced the failure of leadership straight to the top, Mr. McCain, who has vowed to campaign with President Bush, said, emphatically, “yes.”

Before his news conference, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, spent about half an hour on a walking tour of rubble and still-dilapidated houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, all recorded by two packed, slow-moving flatbed trucks of reporters and camera crews who rumbled just ahead of the candidate and his wife, Cindy.

At least one resident was disturbed by all the media attention, particularly by the lack of seats for local residents at Mr. McCain’s 20-minute news conference. “We need to have an opportunity to have a meaningful dialogue,” said Mary Fontenot, who is with All Congregations Together, a church group working to rebuilding New Orleans. “Twenty minutes out on the lawn does not suffice, with a designated seating for traveling journalists.”

Elisabeth Bumiller, “McCain Criticizes Katrina Response as ‘Disgraceful’ “- The New York Times

Via Buzzflash.