Category Archives: Uncategorized

Making "Sand tables" – planning models – using LEGO.

A :”sand table” – as opposed to a sandbox which is elevated,but whose purpose is primarily play – is a flexible modeling area used for planning, briefing, annd the visualization of elevation data.

See:Wikipedia entry for “Sand Table:

This excellent page – “Sand Table Showroom,” which was created by the NWCG Wildland Fire Leadership Development Program, which is, in turn, a program of the National Wildlife Coordinating Group.   ((The Wild Fire Leadership Development Program which is described as follows on the “Program Page” under the heading “Program Components”:

This program is sponsored by the participating agencies of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. The program components were developed by adapting “best practices” from a number of organizations that operate in high tempo work environments including the U.S. Marine Corps University; the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania; the U.S. Air Force Human Factors Research Lab; the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command; the N.A.S.A. Astronaut Development Center; the National Fire Academy; and various commercial aviation Crew Resource Management programs.

I don’t know if this is an unnecessarily unwieldy bureaucratic setup – but if they’re cooperating across agency lines, creating curricula, standards and providing training, all in all, that’s a good thing.

We hope to return to this subject – the structure and funding and control of the fire and other responder services in the United States  – and to compare it to other countries, particularly Germany – our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that Germany has 5-6 tims the number of fire fighters per capita as does the United States.))

For the moment, let’s tour the “Sand Table Showroom.”

The sand tables shown here are primarily used as a platform for delivering Tactical Decision Games. It is important to remember that sand tables can also be used to present briefings, conduct AARs, and teach topography map interpretation. You can build a table as elaborate as a fine piece of furniture or as basic as a hole in the ground filled with sand. All serve the same purpose. Keep it simple and build the table that best suits your facilitation needs. Basic considerations are: mobility requirements, exposure to weather, storage needs, and scale of landscape to be shown. Rule of thumb – the larger the table, the more terrain that can be shown, but the less mobile the table.

Other Options

Special options can increase the utility of your sand table.
Alternate design 1

Alternate design 1

Utah Refinery Blast

Utah-Woods-Cross-798169Via TheStandard.Net, By Loretta Park (Standard-Examiner Davis Bureau), (click here for article)

South Davis Metro Fire Agency Deputy Chief Jeff Bassett said the explosion occurred because a pipe carrying hydrogen and diesel overfilled and sent some of the product onto the ground, where it pooled. It found an ignition source, a furnace, which caused the explosion.

This is what economists in the Neoclassical school call an “externality.” The costs of the disaster are borne by the citizens, not the oil company or the refinery. These costs actually add to the GDP. Economists in the Ecological school, at for example the Gund Institute at University of Vermont or the students in the Marlboro College MBA in Managing for Sustainability, argue we should use the Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI, not Gross Domestic Product, GDP (defined here and described here.)

From WikiNews: Burst pipe probed in Utah refinery blast as questions asked over safety

See also Damage To Homes From Refinery Blast Larger Than First Thought viamid-Utah Radio News;

OSHA Levies a Record Fine against Oil Giant BP from OMBWatch.

This in the immediate aftermath of OSHA’s record-setting proposed fine of $86.7 USD against BP for for a 2005 explosion which killed 15 workers and injured 170. See Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, October 30, 2009, Record OSHA Fine Against BP

Over Texas Refinery Explosion.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administrationannounced the largest fine in its history on Friday, $87 million in penalties against the oil giant BP for failing to correct safety problems identified after a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers at its Texas City, Tex. refinery.

We take the liberty of reproducing Greenhouse’s excellent piece in full:

Record OSHA Fine Against BP Over Texas Refinery Explosion, by Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, October 30, 2009.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced the largest fine in its history on Friday, $87 million in penalties against the oil giant BP for failing to correct safety problems identified after a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers at its Texas City, Tex. refinery.

A series of investigations attributed the March 23, 2005, explosion to overzealous cost-cutting on safety, undue production pressures, antiquated equipment and fatigued employees — some who worked 12 hours a day for 29 straight days

The fine is more than four times the size of any previous OSHA sanction.

Federal officials said the penalty was the result of BP’s failure to comply in hundreds of instances with a 2005 agreement to fix safety hazards at the refinery, the nation’s third-largest.

According to documents obtained by The New York Times, OSHA issued 271 notifications to BP for failing to correct hazards at the Texas City refinery over the four-year period since the explosion. As a result, OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, is issuing fines of $56.7 million. In addition, OSHA also identified 439 “willful and egregious” violations of industry-accepted safety controls at the refinery. Those violations will lead to $30.7 million in additional fines.

Contacted Thursday night after federal officials disclosed the OSHA citations to The New York Times, BP said it was disappointed.

“We continue to believe we are in full compliance with the settlement agreement, and we look forward to demonstrating that before the review commission” which has the power to modify OSHA penalties, BP said in a statement.

BP said the penalties related to a previously announced disagreement with OSHA as to whether BP was complying with the 2005 settlement agreement.

“While we strongly disagree with their conclusions, we will continue to work with the agency to resolve our differences,” the company said, voicing dismay that OSHA was announcing the fines before the review commission had given the matter full consideration.

BP added that it takes its “responsibilities extremely seriously and we believe our efforts to improve process safety performance have been among the most strenuous and comprehensive that the refining industry has ever seen.”

BP says that since the explosion it has spent more than $1 billion to upgrade production and improve safety at the refinery.

A series of investigations attributed the March 23, 2005, explosion to overzealous cost-cutting on safety, undue production pressures, antiquated equipment and fatigued employees — some who worked 12 hours a day for 29 straight days.

The explosion was caused by a broken gauge and flammable hydrocarbons that were overflowing from an octane processing tower, which lacked a flare system to burn off volatile vapors. Those escaping vapors were ignited by the backfire of a nearby truck.

In addition to killing 15 people, the explosion injured 170 workers and obliterated 13 employee trailers and damaged 13 others, some as far as 300 yards away. The Texas City facility is capable of refining 475,000 barrels of crude a day and is located on a 1,200-acre site some 35 miles southeast of Houston.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has repeatedly said that “there’s a new sheriff in town,” signaling that she would take a more aggressive approach in enforcing wage and labor laws, after what she said was lax enforcement under President George W. Bush.

But one department official said that the record penalties assessed against BP were not an effort to send a signal to industry, but a straightforward move that punished a company with a long record of moving slowly to address safety problems.

In the 30 years before the 2005 explosion, there were 23 deaths at the Texas City refinery.

One Labor Department official said BP was likely to seek to have the fines reduced by appealing them, first to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission and then perhaps in federal court.

Federal officials say they expect BP to dispute that the company was required to do all that OSHA said and that it had failed to meet the deadline to remedy problems.

Six months after the explosion, BP entered into a settlement with OSHA in which it agreed to pay a $21.3 million fine, then the largest in OSHA history.

The previously highest fine was an $11.5 million penalty ordered in 1991 against the Angus Chemical Company and IMC Fertilizer Group, operators of a Louisiana fertilizer plant where an explosion killed eight workers and injured 120.

As part of the settlement, BP also promised to commission an independent audit and to take actions to eliminate potential hazards found in the audit, which was conducted by the AcuTech Consulting Group.

One Labor Department official voiced dismay that BP had four years to correct the problems identified after the settlement, yet OSHA still found hundreds of violations.

BP has already pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the explosion and agreed to pay $50 million, the largest criminal fine ever assessed against a company for Clean Air Act violations. Those violations included failing to maintain the safe startup of processing units and the mechanical integrity of the refinery

Since the explosion, BP has settled more than 4,000 civil claims, paid from a $2.1 billion fund it set aside to resolve claims.

Systems Thinking on the Gross National Product

Robert F. Kennedy, in a speech at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968,  said:

Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy

“Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Thinking In Systems, by Donella H. Meadows

Thinking In Systems, by Donella H. Meadows

As Donella Meadows explains in Thinking In Systems, ISBN: 978-1-60358-055-7, “The GNP lumps together goods and bads. (If there are more car accidents and medical bills and repair bills, the GNP goes up.) It counts only marketed goods and services. (If all parents hired people to bring up their children, the GNP would go up.) … It measures effort rather than achievement, gross production and consumption rather than efficiency. New light bulbs that give the same light with one-eighth the electricity and that last ten times as long make the GNP go down.”

“GNP,” Professor Meadows said, “is a measure of throughput – flow of stuff made and purchased in a year – rather than capital stocks, the houses and cars and computers and stereos that are the source of real wealth and real pleasure. It could be argued that the best society would be one in which capital stocks can be maintained with the lowest possible throughput, rather than the highest.”

Navy Captures Surprised Pirates – John Lewis, Somali, Congress

mudvillegazette.com – 5/9/2009

Navy Captures Surprised Pirates

—

SOMEWHERE OFF THE SOMALI COAST : The pirates on board the two skiffs must have thought they had an easy target – but they were in for an unpleasant surprise. Their prey was actually a U.S. Navy vessel, transiting northward to join other U.S. Navy and coalition ships operating in the area. …

via Navy Captures Surprised Pirates – John Lewis, Somali, Congress.

Der Zauberkünstler – Hieronymus Bosch

Der Zauberkünstler (The Conjurer)

Der Zauberkünstler (The Conjurer)

Hieronymus Bosch: The Conjurer, 1475-1480 Note that the man in the back row is stealing another man’s purse. He is also applying misdirection by looking up at the sky to misdirect the audience from his actions. The artist has even misdirected us from the thief, because we are drawn to the magician. The original is currently at the unicipal museum of, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a western suburb of Paris, France. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Mindgrowth – affordable, effective biofeedback devices

[Note: we’re reprinting this here to accompany a related post which will follow shortly].

Mindgrowth

, a U.S.-Canadian company – distributes biofeedback equipment  – with MindGrowth's GSR deviceand without tracking software – used for, among other things, pain management/reduction, treating PTSD, panic disorders, and other uses.The GSR2 (pictured below) is designed and manufactured in North America by Thought Technology, the largest manufacturer of biofeedback products in the world. There are more than 550,000 of the GSR2 in use worldwide, including the United States Veterans’ Administration medical system.

Biofeedback is no longer “experimental” – there’s no question that it works, not only for medical uses, but also in enhancing athletic performance and cognitive function. It has a substantial drawback in the context of the United States health system: once purchased, and used/learned, some people have lasting effects and never touch the equipment again – others need to return to the biofeedback equipment to “relearn” the original “lesson.” To keep this example simple – think of someone trying to unlearn a fear response to a particular stimulus – loud noises, for example. Continue reading →

Nublabs – USB sensor suggests many possibilities

Boston-based NubLabs, mad scientists all ((Of course, we mean that in a nice way.))  (if you don’t believe me, look at their projects page) have developed a USB thermal sensor.This – just in its guise as a thermal sensor – could have outstanding applications in, say, a Sahana installation. ((We’ve just gotten our own Sahana installation up – which can be seen, in its infancy, at http://sahana.popularlogistics.com)).

NuBlogger sensor from NubLabs.org

NuBlogger sensor from NubLabs.org

But, according to Nublabs, “the platform can be easily adapted to any number of sensors.”  So – here are a few straightforward applications for disaster detection and response:

  • Seismic activity
  • presence of particular substances (e.g. chlorine)
  • air quality
  • Wind speed/direction
  • incline (if the PC is on a mobile comms platform, say a barge, knowing incline is a good way to know about capsize risk; on an automated buoy, a good way to know about water communications
  • light – if in an area which is normally illuminated – absence of light can be sign that the power grid  is down.
  • Noise – either by volume or pitch – detection of gunfire/explosions. Sad to say that this seems worth considering. But it may well be.

More on this after we make an attempt to have a word with NubLabs.

Tadataka Yamada, M.D. “Poverty, Wealth, and Access to Pandemic Influenza Vaccines” in N.E.J.M.

From Dr.  Tadataka Yamada’s  “Poverty, Wealth, and Access to Pandemic Influenza Vaccines”

in N.E.J.M (link is to free full-text article):

On June 11, 2009, Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared that the status of the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic had reached phase 6 — active transmission on a global scale. Until now, the case fatality rate of this influenza has been quite low, but history teaches us that the situation could take a turn for the worse during the next wave of the pandemic. If a 1918-like pandemic were to occur today, tens of millions of people could die, the vast majority of them in the world’s poorest countries.

Fortunately, the prospects for developing an effective vaccine to prevent infection with the current H1N1 virus are excellent, and the world’s pharmaceutical companies are working diligently at this task. In contemplating equal access to such a vaccine, it is important to consider three key issues: manufacturing capacity, cost, and delivery.

Only a few countries in the world have plants for manufacturing influenza vaccine, and three companies — GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, and Novartis — account for most of the world’s manufacturing capacity. The number of doses of vaccine against H1N1 influenza that could be produced with the existing capacity is very large, but the sobering truth is that even if production were switched over completely from seasonal influenza vaccine to pandemic influenza vaccine, there would not be nearly enough for everyone in the world. The size of the gap in potential supply depends greatly on the dose that is required, and it may be possible to reduce the necessary dose by as much as 75% with the use of an adjuvant. The challenging problem is that much, if not most, of the manufacturing capacity is already spoken for through purchasing contracts held by many of the world’s wealthy countries. Continue reading →

Sonic Battle

A recent issue of The New Yorker (June 29, 2009) included a short piece on a City College professor who has studied “the role of music in military recruiting, combat, interrogations, and morale” during the ongoing conflict in Iraq.

Of course, even Garry Trudeau has caught on to this. The Doonesbury character “Toggle”–a trooper in Iraq–routinely “got crunked” on heavy metal not only before, but during missions. (By the way, the current story arc that has him coping with Traumatic Brain Injury or TBI incurred in a roadside bomb blast is one of the best the strip has run in a long time).

Of necessity, the profile only scratched the surface, but it prompts the following scattered reflections.

Historically, there are lots of precedents for soldiers psyching themselves for operations with music. Cromwell’s Ironsides sang hymns as they went to into battle. French Revolutionary armies roared the sanguinary lyrics of the Marseillaise as they defended France and poured across its borders in the name of liberte, egalite, fraternite. Union troops marched to “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the Civil War.

Besides the fictional Air Cav unit in “Apocalypse Now” that flew into battle to the strains of  “Ride of the Valkyries,” Michael Herr reported in his classic Dispatches how Vietnam grunts kept Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane high up on their personal playlists.

In my own experience, soldiers frequently prepared themselves before high stress operations by pumping up the volume. “Guns ‘n Roses” and Metallica were particular faves then, as apparently they are today.

Mordant parodies also abound. Long before the Jimmy Buffet take-off (“Mortaritaville”) described in the New Yorker article, Vietnam-era soldiers crooned a variant of the Lennon-McCartney ballad “Yesterday” that included the lyric “Blown away/I’m not half the man I used to be/A Claymore [type of mine] just got through with me…” It was still around when I went on active duty in the 1970s.

The piece also describes soldier-created music videos coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq that marry lurid images with angry, loud music. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, I recall seeing a soldier-produced and circulated bootleg video that combined the track to Lynyrd Skynryd’s “That Smell” (“Ooooh that smell/The smell of death surrounds you”) with raw footage of the so-called “Highway of Death’ leading out of Kuwait City–miles of burned out vehicles and charred corpses created by our airpower as the terrified Iraqis fled north.

And an analog, of course, exists in just about every weight room and locker room where young men with elevated testosterone levels prepare themselves for violent sport by listening to ear-splitting music.

21C Education

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela

“We need a new environmental consious on a global basis. To do this we need to educate people.” – Mikhail Gorbachev

“True education and progress lie in challenging assumptions, not in accepting them.” – Ralph Meima, Vermont Commons, Marlboro MBA

Marlboro MBA – Managing for Regeneration – Tom Rossmassler

“Don’t Follow Trends, Start them” Wendell Berry

“Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.” Einstein

“We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to.” Terri SwearingenTerri’s Goldman Prize

A small body … can alter the face of history – Mohatma Gandhi

The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of this planet. – John F. Kennedy

We hold in our hands the power to end povery and the power to end life on this planet. – John F. Kennedy