Category Archives: Energy

Energy, History, Security

Rain = 600% increase in So. California road accidents

1 Comment

Southern Californians are known for a love, if not obsession, with spending much of their time holding a steering wheel and staring at the tail lights in front of them.

Los Angeles county road

One might think all the time on the road and money spent on cars would mean that risk will decline, but here is some new data that suggests the exact opposite can happen — when it rains:

Traffic crashes jumped more than 600 percent in Los Angeles County Saturday morning, compared to the same period last Saturday when roads were dry.

[…]

Some 422 crashes were reported in Los Angeles County between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., CHP Officer Tatiana Sauquillo told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. During the same period a week ago, when the weather was dry, 58 collisions were reported, she said.

This is a nice example to pull into information security discussions for at least two reasons.

First, given the technology advances to handle wet conditions people still were unable to avoid disaster. Just like with information security the users may not have had the latest technology, they may not have had sufficient training to use the technology, or they may simply have been in a situation that the technology was unable to prevent. It is clear that technology has not yet solved a problem — inclement weather control — that has been a serious concern for decades.

Second, it is not clear whether this risk was a factor in the decision by those who removed the largest streetcar system in the world and replaced it with asphalt and unprofessional drivers.

Clearly, GM waged a war on electric traction. It was indeed an all out assault, but by no means the single reason for the failure of rapid transit.

It was not the single reason, perhaps, because of natural market effects when new technology is introduced. Buses at first were probably easy to market as superior to the streetcar. Then cars were easy to market as superior to buses. Why the streetcar had to be removed is not clear, however, which is why a bus/car manufacturer might be seen as the source of pressure to remove the streetcar as an option.

Whether or not you buy the conspiracy, or the natural market, argument about technology choices for transportation in Los Angeles there continue to be some very interesting data points related to the study of risk compared with other urban areas. In brief, factors like pride, conformance, convenience, cost, etc. may drive consumers (pun not intended) into positions of higher short-term and long-term risk.

“Exhibit 2” from General Motors and the Demise of Streetcars, Transportation Quarterly, Vol. 51. No. 3 Summer 1997, p. 52

Energy, Food, Security

Harvard Study: Bacon Kills

Leave a comment

A new study says people who eat red meat have a far higher risk of premature death. The study reviewed more than 100,000 cases over 20 years, which really is just a tiny amount of data. Nonetheless, here’s the news from the LA Times:

…adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.

You might be thinking the researchers are nuts, and you might be right.

Eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying during the study.

Not much is said in the article about researcher bias or data integrity issues. This is their best effort at a disclaimer:

…there can be a lot of error in the way diet information is recorded in food frequency questionnaires, which ask subjects to remember past meals in sometimes grueling detail.

But Pan said the bottom line was that there was no amount of red meat that’s good for you.

With that out of the way the reporter then highlights the cost savings from reducing risk.

…a plant-based diet could help cut annual healthcare costs from chronic diseases in the U.S., which exceed $1 trillion. Shrinking the livestock industry could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the destruction of forests to create pastures, [UC San Francisco researcher and vegetarian diet advocate Dr. Dean Ornish] wrote.

No word yet on whether eating less bacon could have a far greater impact on healthcare costs than patching Windows faster.

Energy, Sailing, Security

Live Global Ship Positioning

Leave a comment

I couldn’t think of a better title. It’s a tongue-twister but it is in reference to the Live Ships Map on MarineTraffic.com based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder data and iAIS.

AIS Graphic

You can find out a lot of information about ships underway. There is no data off the coast of East Africa, let alone Somalia, unfortunately. So here’s the Bay Area, as an example instead:

Clicking on one of the ships brings up its dox.

A micro view shows proximity of the boats and, in this example, you can even watch the pilot boat come out to greet the Filipino “Sun Right” ship and take over navigation for the Bay.

A macro view tells a very different story. If you pull out far enough on the maps you get green boxes with numbers indicating the number of data feeds. California ports show hundreds at the most. Green boxes around the Asian ports show numbers in the thousands.

Take a look at Shanghai. Pink squares represent navigation aids. Green is cargo, red is a tanker, grey are “unspecified”.

You also can create watch lists or “fleets,” search for specific vessels and ports, display their tracks, show predicted courses, and add GRIB (wind) data. Even small vessels should be able to easily incorporate this data into warning, distress and chart systems, marking a huge difference in situational awareness especially in low/no visibility conditions.

I am curious about the ability to build fleets or watch lists based on manifests such as port of call or country…imagine building a map with the tracks and the predicted courses for all the fuel tankers from or headed to a country.

I also wonder about correlating the movement of tankers to the rise and fall of fuel prices. It is said that diesel prices in the Bay Area rise when tankers arrive from Latin America and fill up. Not all the data is clean, however. I ran through the Shanghai ships reporting themselves as passenger vessels and found at least one that was actually a oil/chemical tanker.

Energy, Security

Why the NYPD hates bicyclists

4 Comments

There is ample evidence that the NYPD harshly and regularly discriminates against bicyclists. In a city that would benefit immensely from alternative transportation one might conclude that the police would be spearheading a campaign to promote and protect cycling. They do the opposite instead.

A recent case adds a new twist to what is really happening on the streets; the police spent more resources on surveillance of those who suffered a loss than on the attacker who caused it.

Incredibly, there are no photos of the scene of the incident in the NYPD’s file because “the investigators’ camera was broken.” However, the file does contain “numerous” photos of the Lefevre family and their attorney, prompting Erika Lefevre to write, “Apparently, NYPD cares more about investigating our family’s efforts to get information from it, than about properly investigating Mathieu’s death.”

[…]

A description of surveillance video of the crash, as provided to Streetsblog, describes Mathieu being struck by the passenger side of the truck before being hit again by the driver’s side wheel. The footage makes the NYPD’s decision to not file criminal charges against Degianni all the more puzzling.

Camera broken? The police in New York City could not find a functioning camera?

The necessary change, if you agree with the risk thermostat theory I’ve written about before, is to get the police out of their tax-guzzling gasoline cars (you thought I would say doughnut shops, didn’t you) and onto bicycles. It would help if city officials also would ride, like Mayor Villaraigosa in Los Angeles.

The mayor was riding in the bicycle lane on Venice Boulevard in Mid-City at about 6:50 p.m. when a taxi abruptly pulled in front of him. The mayor hit his brakes and fell off the bike.

[…]

The mayor’s accident comes as bicyclists in the city have increasingly been complaining about safety issues and pressing city officials to do more to make cycling safe.

It is a sad fact that one incident in Los Angeles has a very different outcome than all the combined accidents in New York, yet that is just further evidence of how empathy plays a major factor in our risk thermostat.

Just one month after he was injured in a bicycle accident, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spearheaded a special bike summit on Monday morning, aimed at improving bicycle safety across the city.

Even if there are brush-ups between cyclists and the police, and a lack of training about why cyclists are safer and easier to deal with, the economical and logical fix is more police and officials riding cycles. That would generate empathy and dramatically shift their view of how incidents should be investigated.