Many thanks to David Pescovitz of Boing Boing for spotting this, originally published in New Scientist – “Email patterns can predict impending doom“

The Boing-Boing post, Mining email traffic for bad omens, in its entirety:

Researchers examined Enron email logs during the 18 months before the shit really hit the fan. Amazingly, just analyzing the number of emails and their paths, without peeking at the content, hinted at the crisis to come. Of course, hindsight is everything. Still, the stiudy, by computer scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology, is provocative. From New Scientist:

After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company’s final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times…

(Rolando) Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during

Hub and spoke; spokes have no direct connection with eachother. Courtesy of NetworkWeaving.com

moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and (Ben) Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

Of course – as a large organization breaks into smaller networks which don’t communicate with each other, it loses the robustness associated with redundantly connected social systems.

See, e.g.,

Project 3-2: Robust Wireless Communications in Complex Environments,Principal Investigators Arogyaswami Paulraj and George Papanicolaou,

Effective military wireless communications require robust networks that can operate in complex environments. Links must be reliable, rapid, and multimedia-capable, connecting large, dynamic, mobile networks of users. Such networks must resist hostile jamming and signal “spoofing” while minimizing consumption of electrical power. Designing such communications systems requires the rapid, high-throughput resources provided by high performance computing.

However, enemy action is not required in cases like Enron, where the leadership itself has pointed the ship directly at the iceberg.

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.

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

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.

Nuclear power plant operator does poorly on NRC drill – complains to NRC, wants grade revised upwards. There are a number of interesting issues here. For the moment, we’ll focus on one:

Matthew Wald of the Times reports that David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists

, points out that since the reactor has a water sensor nine inches off the floor, a leak of 150 gallons per minute would take 90 minutes to be detected by the sensor.

Lochbaum has been with UCS since 1996 – but spent 17 years working in nuclear power plants.

Background information on Lochbaum via UCS here.Â

Matthew Wald’s NYT article here.

The March 12 issue of The New Yorker

contains an article by Steve Coll, discussing the present risk(s) of nuclear terrorism and the adequacy of the Administration’s responses.

THE UNTHINKABLE: Can the United States be made safe from nuclear terrorism  is an education in the complexity of the issue, and points out, inter alia, the variety of fissile and “dirty” materials, their ubiquity in everyday commercial and industrial enterprises (e.g. denture cleaner, which generates false positive results in government radiation detection equipment).