crisiscommons.org

As the engineering professor from Purdue University, Steve Wereley, told the Senate this week, the BP oil leak is larger than we thought.  His estimate of the spill is based on analysis of a video showing a gusher of oil coming from near where the well’s blowout-preventer was.  According to an NPR story about this: Dr. Wereley used a:

well-established scientific technique to measure flow from the biggest of three leaks near the seafloor, he determined that the flow coming out of the end of the pipe could be 10 times the size of the official figure.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, he said that leak alone appears to be bigger than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day. “What I get is 25,000 barrels a day coming out of that tiny hole — that’s a 1.2-inch hole,” he said, adding that it seemed “incomprehensible.” Wereley says the oil in this part of the pipe is under tremendous pressure. Add his current figure to last week’s estimate of about 70,000 barrels a day, and his total approaches 100,000 barrels a day. And, there’s another leak he has yet to analyze.

When asked Wednesday what the likelihood was that BP’s figures were accurate, Wereley said he didn’t see “any possibility, any scenario under which their number is accurate.”

It’s frustrating not to be able to do much about this, except listen to the increasingly bad news and worry.  Although if you have a smartphone, you might soon be able to at least document and follow the oil spill’s effect on the coastline.

A new app from researchers at The Visualization Center at San Diego State University and Crisis Commons, an online community that uses technology to respond to crises, would allow users to take photos of the coast, send them back to San Diego with a time stamp and GPS location, and have them processed with all the other photos, creating a map of the coast along the Gulf of Mexico. The maps will be available to the public, and will show changes to the coast over time, according to an article about the app by Mary Helen Miller in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  The new application is called Slick View (get it?).  Eric Frost, director of the SDSU Visualization Center, told Miller: “If you took tens of thousands of pictures, especially if you took them all at once, you would have an extraordinary view of the oil spill in a way that’s never existed before.”

But what would you use it for?  Those seeking to mitigate this monumental disaster could conceivably use the maps to figure out where to use oil-containment booms or to see where oil made it through booms, according to the story.  And scientists might be able to use the data to study the oil’s effect on vegetation, or make predications about how weather will affect the spill. Although it won’t make this disaster any less painful, it might help us learn from it.

from http://kids.lovetoknow.com

As if we needed any more proof to fight the fanatics at the NRA claiming that every home should have a gun… (and every car, truck, footlocker, desk drawer, etc.)… New research from the Harvard School of Public Health informs us that more than three-quarters of children under 15 who die in shooting accidents are shot by someone else, usually another child. The study was the first multi-state, in-depth study of who fires the shots that kill unintentionally.  David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at HSPH, and colleagues Catherine Barber and Matthew Miller, used data from 17 states participating in the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2003 to 2006 to determine who fired the shot in unintentional firearm fatalities. Among the 363 unintentional firearm deaths, about half were inflicted by others. The percentage that was other-inflicted declined with the victim’s age. For shooting victims under age 15, 78 percent were other-inflicted, while among those age 55 and over, 81% had shot themselves. (just how it’s determined if those shots were meant as suicide, I have no idea…)

Perhaps the saddest thing about this study is this bit of info from HSPH:

In the large majority of shootings that were other-inflicted, the shooter was young; four out of five of the shooters were under age 25, and one in three were under age 15. Fifty-nine percent of the fatal incidents took place in a home; among these, over a third took place in a home other than the victim’s. The shooters were well known to the victims: 47% of shooters were related to the victim, most often the victim’s brother. Another 43% of shooters in these incidents were friends of the victim. Most of the remaining shooters were acquaintances: fewer than 2% were strangers.

What this says, it seems, is that having a gun in your house is a really bad idea.  Why gun advocates seem to believe that a gun in the house makes us safer, I will never understand.  In fact in more than one-third of American homes with children, there are guns. Many of these are left unlocked or loaded or both. Says Hemenway: “The young age of most of the shooters and victims shows what can happen when young people get their hands on a gun,” said Hemenway. “Youth with guns are a danger to themselves, but even more so to their friends and family.

According to research by RAND Health, 34 percent of children in the U.S. (and that’s more than 22 million kids in 11 million homes) live in a house with at least one firearm. In 69 percent of homes with firearms and children, more than one firearm is present. RAND’s report on the topic said that many firearms in homes with children are “dangerously accessible. In nine percent of homes with children and firearms, at least one firearm is stored unlocked and loaded, and in another four percent, at least one firearm is unlocked, unloaded but stored with ammunition.” We are talking, here, about 13 percent of U.S. homes with kids—2.6 million children in 1.4 million homes—that have guns around, unlocked, near ammo, ready to go.

And yet gun advocates are so confident about the safety–and necessity–of firearms they feel its fine and family-friendly to carry some heat into the local Starbucks, or cheer the lifting of bans on guns in national parks, descend on Washington D.C. and other cities in April with holstered handguns and unloaded rifles strung over shoulders to claim their Second Amendment rights, or push—as they did in March in Illinois—for the right to carry a concealed weapon.  And the debate, sadly, has become so intractable that neither this nor any other study is likely to change their minds.

the founders of diaspora*, taken from the ReadWriteWeb site

With anger towards Facebook and it’s privacy policies—which require users wanting to protect their privacy navigate a maze of opt-out menus that are part of its “Instant Personalization” feature—it’s not surprising that a very young group of upstarts is staring a social network in response. In fact rumors circulated at the end of last month that CEO Mark Zuckerberg “doesn’t believe in privacy.”

Then NY Senator Charles Schumer petitioned the FTC to request the agency look at the issue of social networks’ privacy policies. Schumer and three other senators also penned an open letter to Zuckerberg expressing their concerns

So now comes diaspora*, a social networking project started by four NYU programming students (in the photo in a recent NYT story, almost none of them looks old enough to shave) in an effort to create a social network that will allow you to connect with others but not have to give up lots of private, personal information to do so. Today—May 13^th—the site’s founders hit $100,000 in financing, from the public, mind you, not venture capitalists, that will allow them to spend the summer building what they have said will be “an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data.” A chunk of that funding came from international sources as well, and on the diaspora* site, the founders write: “…we had no idea we would get such worldwide support….”

The fundraising platform they are using is called Kickstarter.com–which allows artists, journalists, musicians, designers, inventors and the like to solicit funds from the public online–and diaspora* has wildly exceeded their initial goal of $10,000. (just looking around Kickstarter’s site give you hope for the future—lots of innovative projects garnering public support.)

The four guys—Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy—met at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and are capitalizing on growing animosity towards Facebook.  Kurt Opsahl did a great timeline (though it’s not actually a timeline) of “Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy” on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website that chronicles the oppressive, rising control over your information the site has continued to implement. In 2005, for instance, none of your personal information submitted to Facebook would be available to users of the site who didn’t also belong to at least one of the groups you belonged to. By April 2010, the site’s privacy policy was thus: “When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you.” Somehow the upper-case General Information makes Facebook seem less like a cool social network and more like, well, the Chinese government. That’s a lot of control over a lot of information.

The guys behind diaspora* are important because they challenge the status quo. They want to use a decentralized, peer-to-peer approach to networking. What does that mean? I’m not technically savvy enough to explain, but the people at ReadWriteWeb are:

Instead of being a singular portal like Facebook, Diaspora is a distributed network where separate computers connect to each other directly, without going through a central server of some sort.

Once set up, the network could aggregate your information – including your Facebook profile, if you wanted. It could also import things like tweets, RSS feeds, photos, etc., similar to how the social aggregator FriendFeed does. A planned plugin framework could extend these possibilities even further.

Your computer, called a “seed” in the diaspora* setup, could even integrate the connected services in new ways. For example, a photo uploaded to Flickr could automatically be turned into a Twitter post using the caption and link.

And yes, there is some concern that this could be a technical challenge to would-be users “because not everyone will be technically capable (or interested in) setting up their computer to function as a seed,” according to the same post. But ReadWriteWeb commented that there are plans to offer a paid turnkey service too, similar to Worldpress.com, the blogging platform. So, perhaps you could customize your diaspora* or opt for an easy-to-use free version instead.

There’s a lot of hope that this will give Facebook a run for its money. The Times says the “diaspora* crew has no doubts about the sprawling strengths and attractions of existing social networks”. (As of today “joindiaspora” has nearly 14,000 followers on Twitter.) “So many people think it needs to exist,” Mr. Salzberg told the Times. “We’re making it because we want to use it.” Me too.

The effectiveness of the cleanup of the massive oil slick—which has tripled in size over the last two days–from the explosion of BP’s oil rig Deep Horizon in the Gulf Mexico will be both a matter of speed and technology. And on both fronts, we may lose.

Anyone who’s had seventh grade science knows oil and water don’t mix, which is why all that oil is floating on the surface of the ocean right now. After an oil spill, cleanup protocol usually involves the use of booms to contain it and floating skimmers to remove it. This is a lot tougher than it sounds and typically only 10-15 percent of the oil in major maritime spills is actually recovered.  The longer the oil is in the water, the less usable it is—because of salt, sediment and other stuff in the water. This includes all the oil destined for the southeastern coastline, because it will probably become a tar-like material that sticks to the beach. It’ll have to be disposed of in the landfill.

Booms and skimming are what we were doing as far back as 1969, when a Union Oil well blew out five miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. It was dispersed with chemicals, soaked up with straw and other materials, according to a story in the Washington Post. Here we are, 40 some-odd years later facing possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, and the tools we’ve got to use are pretty much the same.  According to that story in the Post:

From the mid-’80s, it is the same thing,” said Lois Epstein, an Alaska-based engineering and policy consultant to nonprofit conservation organizations. “At the time of the Valdez spill, we were utilizing booming and dispersants and controlled burns — the same three major techniques as now.

The reason for the lack of technological innovation for this sort of cleanup? “A failure of imagination” said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial “The industry says it never had a blowout,” he said, and as a result the oil  ”industry is not going to spend good money on problems that it says aren’t there.”  King said:

You need new technology to deal with the problems that your other new technology got you.” The federal government, he added,  “instead of just collecting its royalties, should have made sure that research took place.”

The most visible tool for containing the oil slick is the long string of floating plastic booms. Half a million feet of booms are on hand and about half of them have been set out so far, but they work best in calm seas.

“They presume oil is floating on the surface and the sea is still,” said Hammond Eve, a former specialist in the environmental impact of offshore drilling at the Minerals Management Service who lives just east of New Orleans. “The sea is certainly not still now. They don’t stick up very high. The waves are going right over them, the oil’s going right over them. They don’t work very well.”

And nearly impossible to clean up will be whatever is below the surface. UC Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea, who serves on a National Academy of Engineering panel on oil pipeline safety, told Yahoo News, “There’s an equal amount that could be subsurface too.” And that oil below the surface “is damn near impossible to track.”  Popular Mechanics has very good piece by Joe Hasler that gives an overview of the cleanup technologies on hand for cleaning up the spill. The  author called the situation: “Humpty Dumpty.”  There are three approaches, none of them new. The boom and skimmer tactic,  applying chemical dispersements, and burning the collected oil.  According to the story:

Dr. Gerald Graham, a 30-year veteran in the oil spill business, says all three standard approaches remain essentially the same as they were at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill, incremental improvements have been made in all areas. Booms are more resilient in fast currents, for example, and dispersants are considerably less toxic than they once were. The biggest improvements, according to Graham, have come in information technology and how responders collect and use data—oil spill response atlases, spill-trajectory modeling, satellite spill sensing, and using laser fluorosensors to detect spills from aircraft have all become commonplace in the years since Exxon Valdez.

Finally a report in the Christian Science Monitor on Monday reminded us that BP hasn’t been able to manually shut the blowout preventer either—the shut valves on the wellhead– and that it could take three months to drill a relief well.  BP is trying to put a containment structure over the wellhead that would capture the oil and pump it to the surface, but so far, it hasn’t happened.  And the EPA? They are doing a lot of monitoring, but that’s about all they can do.  Track and monitor the government’s response to the spill here and here.

Taking the concept of the niche job board to a new level comes BeautifulJobSeekers.com. The release announcing the site’s creation tells us that as current unemployment rates spike ‘through the roof’ [for some reason the writers of this release felt the need to put that phrase in single quotes…] the competition in the job market has also increased. ‘Standing out from the crowd’ there we go with the single quotes again] has become even more important for job seekers than ever before. In turn, employers may put a greater emphasis on beauty, attractiveness and good looks. Gone are the days, where ‘having skills and talent’ [sic on the single quotes again] alone was sufficient.” Yeah, gone are those days. The days when you had to have actual, tangible qualifications. Now a little Botox here, a good bra, losing that extra ten—that’s what will get you your dream job.

Ralph vanTroost, the site’s founder, calls his job board “a beautiful solution.”  (Rather than, say, a shallow solution.) He is quoted as saying:

I figured if no-one else is going to close this ugly gap between beautiful job seekers and employers looking to hire them, I’m going to do it myself. So, I founded BeautifulJobSeekers.com to find the right match. It’s very straightforward actually; we bring together the beauty, the employer and the job!

Just who decides who makes it as a Beautiful Job Seeker, as opposed, say, to a Qualified Job Seeker or an Intelligent Job Seeker or even a Talented Job Seeker, is a bit murky. It appears this is how it will work: You have to upload your photo and visitors to the site rate your attractiveness. Score high enough and you’re a Beautiful Job Seeker, and the site will match you up with an employer.

I went on the site and was asked to register, which included loading a photo (I chose a dog wearing a tux) but had lots of trouble just getting through registration. Although it seems there are companies advertising jobs on the site, I can’t see any of them yet… I’m not a confirmed Beautiful Job Seeker (and may likely never be…) but I can’t imagine the kind of companies that really care how good looking their employees are… unless it’s a bar, perhaps, or an escort service.

Even if you skip the obvious discussion about the kind of employer that would seek someone on a job board like this, you could ask: do beautiful people really need their own job board? A study published two years ago in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that “the attractiveness of interviewees can significantly bias outcome in hiring practices, showing a clear distinction between the attractive and average looking interviewees in terms of high and low status job packages offered,” according to a write up about it on ScienceBlog. The piece went on to quote the authors of that study:

When someone is viewed as attractive, they are often assumed to have a number of positive social traits and greater intelligence,” say Carl Senior and Michael J.R. Butler, authors of the study. This is known as the ‘halo effect’ and it has previously been shown to affect the outcome of job interviews.

The good news, I guess, is that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of demand, just yet, for beautiful people. And very few, ironically, in the land of beautiful people—California.

Mary Ann Milbourn, who blogs about the economy for the Orange County Register, did manage to navigate registration and poke around the site. She wrote:

Apparently there’s no great demand for beautiful people in Orange County — or Southern California for that matter.  Only two jobs are listed in California.  Both are in Oakland.Other areas apparently have a beautiful-people workforce deficiency. The other 20 jobs listed are in other states, mostly in the East.