Author Archives: Jonathan Soroko

About Jonathan Soroko

Revived from the dead, 18-July-2013

Are Cheap GPS Jammers Bringing Air Traffic Control Offline?

An investigation into malfunctioning GPS systems at Newark Liberty International Airport revealed that the culprit is the cheap jammers that are easy to buy online.

Like airports across the country, Newark Liberty is in the process of upgrading its navigation to the GPS-based NextGen system that has been planned by the government for ages. According to the report by Bloomberg, one of the new systems used by the airport was inexplicably turning on and off without warning. It turns out that truckers are to blame. Just a mile from the airport truckers cruising down the New Jersey Turnpike are using GPS jammers so that their bosses can’t tell their whereabouts.

GPS jammers are illegal and emit waves a billion times (!) more powerful that your average GPS signal. They’re also incredibly easy to buy online and the report raises an important question: As GPS becomes increasingly critical to our national infrastructure, should we be worried that these systems are apparently so easy to foil? [Bloomberg]

via Are Cheap GPS Jammers Bringing Air Traffic Control Offline?.

Earthquake Resistant Buildings

Randolph Jonsson, writing for Gizmag, reports on a new technique for making buildings resistant to seismic events.  Excerpted from Air Danshin creates airlift system to levitate houses during earthquakes:

When you live in a country as seismically active as Japan, thinking about earthquakes (and tsumanis) probably occupies a good deal of your time. Inventor Shoichi Sakamoto took it a step further. He decided to do something about it and invented a technology, remarkably simple in concept, to protect ho[slideshow id=97]mes from the devastating shaking – an airlift system capable of automatically raising and isolating the whole house until the temblor stops. Already deployed in nearly 90 sites across Japan, the system functions in a straightforward manner: the house is separated from its foundation by an expandable, sliding air chamber. The instant a quake is detected  (within .5 – 1XYZ second), air from a storage tank fills the chamber and lifts the entire structure up to 1.18 inch (3 cm) and keeps it there until a sensor detects the shaking has stopped. Emergency batteries are provided to ensure the system stays functional in the likely event of power-loss. Air Danshin claims that its system (see one of Sakamoto’s patent applications here) is about a third the cost of other seismic isolation systems. Apparently it’s also designed larger versions suitable for facilities such as factories and laboratories. Unfortunately, there was no mention of plans to protect nuclear power plants, but there’s always hope.

 

 

 

MakeZine.com: “civilian-friendly” Geiger counter

Laura Cochrane, writing on Makezine.com, reports on the development of  A Stylish and More User-Friendly Geiger Counter:

Coming on the heels of the year anniversary of the Japanese Tohoku-Oki earthquake, Bunnie Huang, a member of the MAKE Tech Advisory Board, tasked himself with designing a civilian-friendly Geiger counter. He was inspired by the efforts of Safecast, an organization whose goal is to build an open sensor network that aggregates trustable, source-neutral radiation monitoring data.

The problem with the current crop of radiation monitors is that they are basically laboratory instruments: accurate & reliable, but bulky, expensive, and difficult to use, requiring a degree in nuclear physics to understand exactly what the readings meant. Another problem with crises like these is that while radiation monitoring is important, it’s something that is typically neglected by the civilian population until it is too late.

Therefore, the challenge set out before me was to design a new Geiger counter that was not only more intuitive and easier to use than the current crop, but was also sufficiently stylish so that civilians would feel natural carrying it around on a daily basis.

We need one of these on every block, and lots of radiation detectors with IP addresses, widely dispersed. Because we need that many, essentially in a distributed network, we should be able to manage large economies of scale, with substantial reductions in  price.

Grassroots mapping the Gulf oil spill with balloons and kites

Grassroots mapping the Gulf oil spill with balloons and kites   –   via Kickstarter. This is not David and Goliath: it’s a small community outnumbered and outgunned by big agencies and entities with deeper pockets and deeper resources.  So what did they do? They effectively crowdsourced satellite photography — or at least aerial photography. And they went a bit bigger in order to crowdsource the fund-raising, too.

We are a group of citizens and activist mappers who are documenting the effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast with a set of novel DIY tools — we send inexpensive cameras up in helium balloons and kites, and take aerial photos from up to 1500 ft. The data we’re gathering will be vital in both the environmental assessment and response, as well as in the years of litigation following the spill. All the imagery we capture is released into the public domain and is free to use or redistribute. See our Flickr photo pool for more of the incredible imagery volunteers are bringing in.

We need support to keep a supply of helium, and to pay for gas, kites, cameras, and protective gear for our volunteers. We’ve already captured a great deal of amazing imagery which is available online:

http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://grassrootsmapping.org/gulf-oil-spill Louisiana Bucket Brigade, our collaborators and the local HQ, are sending volunteers out to affected coastal sites almost daily, and conducting training sessions for new volunteers in New Orleans and elsewhere along the gulf coast. Our imagery is being published across the web – not just photographs, but stitched maps like these:

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Historical peak for gasoline prices occurred in 2008

Politico, fact-checking a claim made by Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal that gasoline prices under the current administration are higher than they’ve ever been, contradicts Governor Jindal:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Wednesday ripped President Barack Obama over rising gas prices and said any of the Republican 2012 candidates will do “so much better” if elected to the White House. “The reality is, gasoline prices have doubled under this president, highest prices for oil and gasoline in a 150 years. People used to think it was because of incompetence from Obama administration on energy – I think it’s because of ideology. They’re pursuing a radical environmental ideology,” Jindal said on “Fox & Friends.” In fact, the monthly average retail price of gasoline peaked at $4.26 a gallon in inflation-adjusted dollars less than four years ago, in June 2008. It then plummeted to $1.80 a gallon in the next six months during the global financial collapse. Oil isn’t near historic highs either.

Jindal scorches Obama on gas prices  xxx Bobby Jindal scorches Obama on gas prices – MJ Lee – POLITICO.com

AmericaBlog, going further, finds  that gasoline peak prices under President George W. Bush (the 43rd President, 2001 – 2008) tied the peak price under President Jimmy Carter (1977 – 1980), whose administration included the Iranian hostage situation and an OPEC-sponsored petroleum shortage. And more: here’s an infographic noting major events and gasoline prices:

Under what party did gasoline and oil prices reach their peak? Republican, of course.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the original  claim, implying that the Obama Administration’s policies caused high gasoline prices, is its oversimplification. Higher prices matter less – or not at all – if we’re using more efficient devices. A clear example might be traffic lights. Assume for simplicity’s sake that our only use of electricity is for traffic lights: when incandescent bulbs are replaced by LEDs, the energy savings are reported to be in the range of 90%. Once that shift has been made, it would take an increase in cost of 1,000% (that is, a ten-fold increase) in the cost of electricity in order to bring the cost to its original cost – not counting the savings in the labor cost of regularly changing the bulbs. Further, as every traffic light system makes the change, aggregate demand will drop, driving prices down, rather than up.

Similar dynamics – with good and bad outcomes – operate with respect to gasoline and other petroleum products:

  • When an economy declines (painful for most), economic activity – and gasoline consumption – decline, which tends to cause gasoline prices to go down;
  • when prices go up, or regulatory rules require it, we use less gasoline, by making and buying more efficient vehicles, using them more efficiently, or by using them less often; an extreme example would be the United States during WW II, during which the civilian economy had gasoline rationing, use of mass transit and other conservation measures were seen as patriotic actions, resulting, according to the British historian Richard Overy, in a reduction in civilian gasoline use of over 90% during the war years (Richard Overy, Why The Allies Won, citation and page reference to be supplied in an update of this post).

Governor Jindal is thus wrong twice:

  1. First, on the basic facts – the claim that gasoline prices have peaked under President Obama;
  2. That oil prices are something over which a president can exert control, particularly in the face of a hostile Congress;
  3. That high gasoline prices can be looked at in isolation: if we had full employment, more energy-efficiency in the use of gasoline, we’d probably be pretty content as a nation; in fact, it’s not the price per gallon that matters. It’s the price per mile.  we recently wrote about  hybrid electric Lincoln Town Cars. If your Lincoln Town Car doubles in efficiency, operating costs for fuel go down unless the price of gasoline  doubles to follow it, even if the mileage is the same.

We’re surprised that Governor Jindal, from a state with a lot of petroleum production and refining capacity, would oversimplify this issue; and we hope this isn’t a case of partisanship over accuracy.

See also:

Ford selling Lincoln hybrids

 

Toolmonger: go-bags, emergency supplies and tool storage

Toolmongerhas an excellent discussion – don’t just read the post, read the comments, Toolmonger’s  readers are an outstanding crowd – about the best ways to store and transport tools.  Box vs. Bag: How Do You Carry Your Tools?  This discussion is easily applicable to go-bags, or any emergency supplies for emergency response, evacuation, or rebuilding. The same storage principles are useful for paramedics, electricians or soldiers: if perfect, the result is the right tools for a given set of tasks, as light as possible, and easily accessible. Of course, it’s impossible to predict every possible problem – but that makes it even more useful to have sets of tools pre-arranged per task.

 

Wikipedia News: Brazzaville ammunition magazine explosion

Brazzaville arms dump blasts. Via Wikipedia News:

On 4 March 2012, a series of blasts occurred at an army arms dump in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. As of late 6 March, 246 people have been confirmed dead.  ((Rep. of Congo: 246 Dead after arms depot blasts”. NPR. 6 March 2012. Retrieved 7 March 2012))  Additional bodies were said to be “unfindable.  ((CNN Wire Staff (4 March 2012). “Ammo dump explodes in Congo, killing 100-plus”. CNN. Retrieved 4 March 2012.))   Among the dead were six Chinese workers from a Beijing Construction Engineering Group work site close to the armoury.[4] Interior Minister Raymond Mboulou said that nearby hospitals were overflowing with injuries, with many wounded lying in hallways due to lack of space.  Total injures were estimated at 1,500-2,000.   ((Louis Okamba (5 March 2012). “Republic of Congo fire threatens second arms depot; first explosion killed hundreds”. Associated Press. Retrieved 5 March 2012.))  “Tens of thousands” of people were left without shelter. (( Hinshaw, Drew (4 March 2012). “Blasts Rock Republic of Congo’s Capital”. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 4 March 2012.)) One survivor described the event as feeling like “the apocalypse;” (( Scores dead in Congo munitions depot blasts”. Al Jazeera. 4 March 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2012. ))     others described it as “like a tsunami” or earthquake.   ((  “206 killed in Republic of Congo arms depot blasts, including dozens attending Mass”. Washington Post. Associated Press. 4 March 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2012.))

A disturbing example of why hazardous materials must be handled and stored with an abundance of caution and, if possible, away from living things.

Continue reading →

NPR/Pro Publica/Frontline reporting leads to new trial for man accused of murdering infant

From the joint National Public Radio/Pro Publica/FrontLine investigative series on post-mortem investigations in the United States, NPR’s series on wrongful convictions: one report, that of Ernie Lopez, appears to have led to the Texas courts to order Mr. Lopez released pending a new trial. Mr. Lopez was convicted of the murder and sexual assault of a six-month old child Mr. Lopez and his wife were caring for. The government’s case seems to have relied on junk forensic science; Mr. Lopez’s lawyers did not call to testify, and may not even have consulted, any scientific witnesses.

Free, But Not Cleared: Ernie Lopez Comes Home. Here’s the initial report on cases involving child deaths, including that of Ernie Lopez: The Child Cases: Guilty Until Proved Innocent.

Cross-posted on The Discovery Strategist Blog.

Why do American children die at such high rates?

From BBC News,

Why is the problem of violence against children so much more acute in the US than anywhere else in the industrialised world, asks Michael Petit, President of Every Child Matters. Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. That is nearly four times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada’s and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year. Why is that?

Excerpted from America’s child death shame (BBC News)

Liz Cheney — Desist! – NYTimes.com

We generally try to avoid partisan politics, believing that with respect to public health, disaster preparedness and risk reduction, we’re all in the same metaphorical boat. However, Maureen Dowd, writing in The New York Times, has pointed out some alarming statements by Mitt Romney, candidate for the Republican nomination in this year’s presidential election. We’re going to try to parse some of the statements

“If Barack Obama is re-elected,” Romney robotically swaggered in Georgia, “Iran will have a nuclear weapon and the world will change if that’s the case.”

If President Obama is re-elected, then Iran will have a nuclear weapon. That’s the fairest reading, since there’s no point in mentioning the premise/cause (“If President Obama is re-elected”) unless asserting a causal relationship. If Iran’s nuclear weapon development were inevitable, in Romney’s view, he could say that, and then argue that a Romney administration would somehow procure a better outcome with respect to Iran’s nuclear weapons acquisition.

 

It might be true Romney has a better plan.

That apocalyptic answer came in response to a question from an 11-year-old boy at a pancake breakfast. Romney is channeling Dick Cheney, who wooed voters in 2004 with the cheery mantra that voting for John Kerry would lead to a terrorist attack. Message: You die.

Speaking by satellite to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference here, Romney outpandered himself.

“I will station multiple aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door,” he said as if he were playing Risk. Not afraid to employ “military might” (or alarming alliteration), Romney wrote a blank check to Bibi Netanyahu, who governs a nation roiling with reactionary strains, ultra-Orthodox attacks on women and girls and attempts at gender segregation, and increasing global intolerance of the 45-year Palestinian occupation.

As the New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote, Netanyahu and his supporters too often “consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics.”

Nonetheless, Romney promised that “Israel will know that America stands at its side in all conditions and in all consequence.” We will support Israel when its survival is threatened. But we can’t possibly support every single military action of every single Israeli government.

Romney crudely painted Obama as an Arab sympathizer. “As president, my first foreign trip will not be to Cairo or Riyadh or Ankara,” he said. “It will be to Jerusalem.”

The Israeli fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon must be respected, not least because the regime intent on developing this weapon is the world’s greatest center of Holocaust denial. And the timing is tricky. As Bill Kristol put it, Obama’s urge to wait “would precisely undermine Israel’s ability to determine her fate.”

But I’d feel better if our partner was not the trigger-happy Netanyahu, who makes hysterical arguments even in the absence of a dire threat. At Aipac, he compared those who want to be less hasty than he does to America’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz in 1944.

I’d also feel better if war was not being mongered by the same warmongers who drew us into a decade of futile, bloody, expensive and draining battles.

At Aipac, Liz Cheney urged that we put ourselves in Israeli hands because “America’s track record on predicting when nations reach nuclear capability is abysmal.” She’s right about that, given her father’s wildly erroneous assertions about W.M.D.s in Iraq.

“There is no president,” she outrageously averred, “who has done more to delegitimize and undermine the state of Israel in recent history than President Obama.”

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, promised “overwhelming force” on Iran if necessary. And John McCain, who is also calling for an international air assault on Syria, agreed with Liz Cheney, arguing that since the U.S. was “surprised” when Pakistan and North Korea got nuclear technology, it was not fair to ask Bibi to rely on Barry’s judgment about when to use force.

Let’s get back to pre-emptive wars!

The campaign sugar daddy of Newt Gingrich (and soon, Romney) is Sheldon Adelson, a multibillionaire casino owner and hawkish Zionist who endorses Gingrich’s view that the Palestinians are “an invented people” who have no historic claim to a homeland. Gingrich told Aipac that “if an Israeli prime minister decides that he has to avoid the threat of a second Holocaust through pre-emptive measures, that I would require no advanced notice to understand why I would support the right of Israel to survive in a dangerous world.”

At a press conference Tuesday, the president excoriated the “bluster” and “big talk” in this political season about bombing Iran. “When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war,” he said, adding: “This is not a game. And there’s nothing casual about it.” There would be consequences for both Israel and America, he cautioned, “if action is taken prematurely.”

“When I visit Walter Reed, when I’ve signed letters to families,” he said, “whose loved ones have not come home, I am reminded that there is a cost.”

And, he noted dryly, “Typically, it’s not the folks who are popping off who pay the price.”

via Liz Cheney — Desist! – NYTimes.com.

Biological warfare – not for Amateurs. Or is it?

From Carl Zimmer, writing on NYTimes.com, an excerpt from Amateurs Are New Fear in Creating Mutant Virus:

Just how easy is it to make a deadly virus?

This disturbing question has been on the minds of many scientists recently, thanks to a pair of controversial experiments in which the H5N1 bird flu virus was transformed into mutant forms that spread among mammals. After months of intense worldwide debate, a panel of scientists brought together by the World Health Organization recommended last week in favor of publishing the results. There is no word on exactly when those papers — withheld since last fall by the journals Nature and Science — will appear. But when they do, will it be possible for others to recreate the mutant virus? And if so, who might they be and how would they do it?

Not quite the DIY spirit we generally try to encourage. And we don’t have a ready policy answer. Comments solicited. Further  resources:

NIH: Avian influenza (H5N1)

Scientists Debate How to Handle Mutant H5N1 Virus

 

'Crying and screaming' as Air France plane loses height: BBC News

BBC News has a gripping, if alarming, interview with a passenger on an Air France plane which made an emergency landing during a flight to the Azores:

Passengers on an Air France plane forced to make an emergency landing have spoken of people ”crying and screaming” as they feared it would crash.

The AF422 flight from Paris to the Colombian capital, Bogota, made a sudden descent and had to land on the island of Terceira in the Azores on Monday.

Passenger Eden Victoria Erlandsson said there was panic amongst both passengers and cabin crew.

‘Crying and screaming’ as Air France plane loses height (audio/video link on page)

Why the emergency landing? Air France is reported to have said faulty emergency warning notifications in the plane’s systems. A false positive emergency in an airplane is like a bomb scare in a hospital: the costs and risks of emergency measures are in and of themselves life-threatening.

 See also Air France crash: The long hunt for answers (“Exploring the fate of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic ocean on 1 June 2009, killing everyone on board”)

Ford selling Lincoln hybrids

In March of 2011, Keith Barry, writing on the Autopia blog at Wired.com, reported that a Massachusetts-based company was retrofitting Lincoln Towncars as hybrids, pitching the upgrade to fleet owners primarily as a way of cutting fuel costs:

XL Hybrids, a startup in Somerville, Massachusetts, has created a low-cost battery-powered electric motor that installs on a Lincoln Town Car in under six hours, boosting power by 20 horsepower and reducing fuel consumption 15 to 30 percent.

Given that real-world fuel economy in a Town Car seeing hardcore urban duty is 13 or 14 mpg, the hybrid conversion can pay for itself in fuel savings within 24 months, says co-founder Justin Ashton. No word yet on the per-unit cost, but expect payback time to shorten as fuel prices rise.

Ford sold over 10,000 Town Cars last year, with many of them going to livery operators who are not only struggling with fuel costs, but mandates from customers and city governments to go green.

According to Ashton, the project was designed with fleets in mind. “Before settling on an architecture, we got real-world data from fleets,” he said. ”Due to the extreme nature of their driving, their fuel bills are astronomical.”

Though there are myriad reasons for greening a fleet of vehicles, XL pitched their technology straight at the wallet. “We want to reduce fuel consumption, but we know the only way to do that is by saving people money,” Ashton said.

Excerpted from Hybrid Town Car Conversion Cuts CO2, Costs

Now Ford is mass-producing hybrid Towncars.

We wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how much fuel and money will be saved, but we suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of fleet hybrid Towncars as fleet operators hedge their bets against fuel increases. Progress in these matters often comes in small steady increments, and this is one.