Working the customer base that I do (federal agencies) this time of year is especially busy. Adding to that is my company’s annual sales meeting, currently ongoing. That means I’m in a lot of meetings this week, often without any contact via voice or e-mail. One of my usual contacts told me that the Coast Guard was responding to an explosion on a rig off the coast of Louisiana. I honestly thought he was kidding for a moment but I see, now that I’m out of the latest meeting, that this is a new event:
An offshore petroleum rig exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay.
A spokesman for the Coast Guard told Fox News Radio that all 13 crew members on the rig are alive and have been safely accounted for. One person was injured in the blast, though the extent of that worker’s injury was not known.
The rig, which is in about 2,500 feet of water, is owned by Mariner Energy of Houston and located 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.
No details are available as yet as to the cause, whether or not the rig was actually pumping oil or gas, or whether anyone was even aboard. More to come as I hear more.
It is a fact that petroleum leaks out of the seafloor and into the ocean on a constant, naturally-occurring basis. It has for centuries – as best as we can tell, it’s actually been millennia. Oil is present in seawater, in other words, and always has been. When massive quantities of the stuff gets released at once, however, it represents an unsafe condition. We don’t want to be immersed in the stuff nor do we want to be ingesting it, either directly with the water or indirectly by consuming seafood that’s been over contaminated. But if oil is always in the seawater, then the seafood we eat is always in contact with it. It is scientifically impossible to get seafood from the open ocean that hasn’t been in contact with petroleum at some level or another.
Ah, but what level is considered unsafe versus safe? That’s what we’ve done research to figure out and what we developed tests to determine. Given the fact that it’s an absolute certainty that there’s some level of these substances present in any seafood we catch, up to what level can we feel secure in seeing and still consider it safe to eat? Since 1970 we’ve had an agency of the federal government around to look at these matters: the EPA. Along with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the EPA has set levels that cannot be exceeded and still have a given food store permitted into the food supply. Operating under those guidelines, officials tasked with the responsibility to monitor and report on the safety of seafood coming out of the gulf after the BP oil spill are testing the gulf catch and either opening or closing areas of the gulf for fishing. They are confident their testing methods and abilities are sufficient to make that determination.
Some of the fisherman are reportedly not in agreement:
“We are not here to listen to your protocols,” [fisherman Danny] Ross said. “We have questions and there has been a breakdown in the pipeline since this whole thing started.
“Everybody that works these waters is seeing strange things out there and you cannot tell me that with that much oil and dispersant something did not get contaminated.”
So, if the testing we’re doing and the fact that they’re coming up with a “safe” determination “can’t tell him” that a given area isn’t showing contamination, what is he looking for? He says he doesn’t want to “listen to your protocols” but it’s those protocols that are describing the testing being done. If no amount of testing will do the trick, then how does he suggest we proceed? Ban seafood from the gulf permanently?
I also note that there were no examples given of the “strange things” “everybody” is seeing out there that’s convincing them the area’s contaminated. And I think it’s not unreasonable for people to ask for him and his “everybody” to be able to provide those examples in hard evidence. Of course, if we’re going to hold him to the same standard that he’s using, I’m unsure how he plans on getting the hard evidence. No testing is good enough, remember?
Perhaps there were other questions raised at the meeting that just didn’t get reported but I certainly hope there’s more to it than asking “who’s responsible if someone gets sick.” That’s not a question about how to determine safety, that’s a question about who’s going to pay the jury-awarded penalty to the people who get sick. That’s a legal question, not a scientific one, and if the fisherman want that one answered they should address it to the right people in the right venue. These guys are scientists and lab geeks; they talk tests and data.
To simply dismiss the possibility that seafood from a given area might be safe in the face of the best scientific evidence we can muster isn’t rational and the people who have concerns – rightly, I might add – need to understand that. If they have an issue with the process of determining safety they need to lay their cards on the table and explain themselves. They also need to be ready to help us figure out what would be required to allay their fears.
Thanks to an e-mail I received from VA State Delegate Tom Rust (VA-86), it’s come to my attention that a major information systems failure is currently affecting Virginia’s government systems. The DMV is affected:
Statewide Computer Issue Halts In-Person Driver’s License Transactions Vehicle Titles, Decals, Etc. Still Being Processed in DMV Offices
RICHMOND – Due to a statewide computer system problem, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles is currently unable to process driver’s license transactions inside its 74 customer service centers in Virginia. Customers who can renew licenses through another service option are encouraged to go online at www.dmvNOW.com, or use the automated telephone service at 1-888-337-4782. The Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) is working to resolve the server problem that is affecting 24 different state agencies. VITA has not reported a recovery time.
At DMV, all other types of transactions, including vehicle decals and titles, transcripts, etc. are being processed normally.
That’s an interesting comment – the web site appears to work and it’s handling transactions that the in-person, on-site DMV employees can’t? As a network professional, the situation interests me and suggests quite a number of scenarios. Clearly, if the transaction resources aren’t completely dead (and they’re not, or you wouldn’t be able to do them on the web site) and the interface web site isn’t dead (ditto) then the issue must be one that affects the local sites directly. That’s either a connectivity problem (which wouldn’t affect multiple locations simultaneously) or there’s some issue with the internal systems at the DMV that’s not affecting external systems such as the DMV’s site.
The outage, flaring Wednesday afternoon and expected to disrupt some services through the weekend, is attributed to 228 malfunctioning servers, which supply shared software and applications to clusters of state agency computers.
Twenty-six of more than 80 state agencies were hit by the shutdown, including the office of Gov. Bob McDonnell.
“We’re disappointed to have a failure, an outage of this magnitude,” Samuel A. Nixon Jr., head of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, said yesterday. “No matter what you do, it’s going to happen on occasion.”
Ah, so what’s happened appears to be that several servers handling internal access to resources have died. The external ones that we all access via the Internet (likely located in what’s called a DMZ) were apparently unaffected. The fact that those servers can still apparently access the data means that the data stores appear to be available and intact, it’s just that the internal servers that handle the government employee’s interfaces are down.
I’m going to have to take some issue with that last comment by Mr. Nixon at VITA. I can assure you that there are companies out there (banks, Google, Amazon) who architect their environments to make it as sure as is humanly possible that such “occasions” do not occur. The story at WSLS indicates that the infamous VITA-Northrop Grumman IT contact is at the heart of this. NG’s subcontractor EMC (a network storage company) was reportedly “checking for faulty equipment” and, in the process, killed the 228 servers. That’s a helluva faulty equipment check that manages to take out a couple of hundred mission-critical systems. And do it badly enough, I might add, that it takes 5 days to recover. Where are the backup systems?
Nixon also said that the interruption was of insufficient magnitude to activate a backup system at a duplicate computer center in Russell County, in Southwest Virginia.
A full-on, deader-than-a-doornail failure is of “insufficient magnitude” to “activate” a backup system? Sorry, again, but I call bullshit on that one. Any backup system that can’t step in and handle the task for which it was designed to back up when the primary drops dead of brain failure isn’t a backup system at all – it’s a completely separate system that’s now sucking up power and providing nothing but space heating. I may not be privy to the internal discussions and the full picture of the situation but that line of crap is a man just throwing chaff into the air hoping to confuse people. If he’s serious, then he either doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about or he’s being lied to.
Either way, an investigation needs to be performed and the citizens of Virginia need to be apprised of the results, in clear language. Either the government wasn’t clear or knowledgeable enough to articulate proper requirements or the contractor simply isn’t performing according to the contract. Either way, that needs to be fixed and fixed now.
WTOP is reporting that the design for the proposed Metro stop at Dulles International Airport might be changing. The initial design called for an underground station located under the hourly lot in front of the terminal. Folks who have used the Daily parking deck there already know that there’s an underground walkway from the deck to the terminal that goes underneath that hourly lot.
Well, now they’re talking about making the station an above-ground station (like most of those on the Orange Line out into northern Virginia) which, clearly, they cannot do if they leave it in the middle of the hourly parking lot. The new location is supposed to be in the thin slice of land between Parking Garage #1 and Saarinen Circle, the main traffic path in front of the terminal. If positioned there, the walk to the terminal for any passengers arriving by Metro would be about the same as if they had parked at the garage. It’s not 10 steps, but it’s not a marathon, either. Not a bad idea, I suppose, and it would avoid having to either tunnel beneath the hourly parking lot or tear it up completely to finish the station.
Thoughts, my fellow locals? (And yes, I know some of you are thinking, “Yeah, don’t build the damned thing…” That’s OK, too.)
Short answer: no. By applying a bayesian backcast method (well understood and widely used in this kind of analysis) they determined that the data does not produce the sharp spike of temperature now well-known as the “hockey stick.” Check out the graphs side-by-side at Mr. Watts’ site at that 1st link I’ve provided.
The paper itself is scheduled to be published in the next issue of the Annals of Applied Statistics but you can view the submitted paper here. (Download it here, too.)
In short, the authors found that the proxies used by Mann and analyzed with their backcast don’t predict the temperatures any better that a randomly-generated series of numbers. Furthermore, they don’t predict the steep incline Mann’s hockey stick shows. In their conclusion, they state, “[c]limate scientists have greatly underestimates the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions ahd hence have been overconfident in their models.”
Watts reports that certain AGW proponents are actively deleting any comments entered on their blogs and forums that so much as mention this paper which, as he says, “tells you it has squarely hit the target.”
A question of significance in this matter is whether Mann and his team knew about these flaws – or became aware of them amid the questioning of their findings – and simply decided not to reveal that knowledge. If so, then they have deliberately misrepresented the situation even while making greater demands for both public funding of their continued “research” and for policy changes affecting us all. This is the question being pursued by Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli who is seeking access to files used by Dr. Mann at the University of Virginia. Mann received tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to pursue his work and the question of whether he committed fraud by misrepresenting the truth in his applications for those funds needs to be answered. UVA is attempting to block Cuccinelli’s access to those records. Their attempt to have his request summarily dismissed failed and a judge heard arguments on the matter on Friday. He is scheduled to rule on the matter in the next 10 days.
Whether AGW is correct or not remains an open question, although given that historical records indicate temperatures at or exceeding today’s levels were seen prior to any industrial activity on man’s part it’s not looking good for the AGW team. What we can do about it – and whether we should do anything about it – is a question that can only be answered by real and accurate information about the situation. History is rife with examples of human interference in local environments that began with a woefully incorrect understanding of the situation as it was. Politics needs to be removed from this debate and the matter decided upon not with an eye toward bringing about a desired social state or curtailing practices some of us find offensive but with a goal of understanding the situation as it is. With that understanding, actions can be decided upon in as great a confidence as our limited abilities can provide.
So telling people they can’t co-opt someone’s funeral to spew vile hatred and twist a virtual knife in the open wounds of grieving families is an infringement of free speech but arresting someone for praying the rosary outside an abortion clinic is perfectly fine?
“God Hates Fags” is protected speech but it’s an arrestable offense to utter “Our Father Who art in Heaven”?
I am drawing a line in the sand Mr. President: No matter how much money you and Governor Doyle try to spend before the end of the year, I will put a stop to this boondoggle the day I take office.
It’s outrageous for Secretary La Hood to suggest that your administration can force Wisconsin to continue building a train it doesn’t want and cannot afford. Almost as outrageous as the fact that the decision to saddle Wisconsin taxpayers with untold millions in operating and maintenance costs, forever, was never debated or voted on by the Wisconsin legislature. If it had been, this letter would not be necessary.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, my opponent in the race to replace Governor Doyle, has made the Milwaukee to Madison train the centerpiece of his economic development plan for Wisconsin. The Mayor tells us that spending $810 million on high-speed rail will create thousands of new Wisconsin jobs, but according to the federal government’s own estimate, the total number of permanent jobs created will be 55. That’s $14.5 million per job, not including any hidden costs!
Yeesh, that’s worse than the average of $300K per job I’ve seen elsewhere. This is the 2nd locality I’ve seen where a large, expensive public-works transportation program has been enacted with little support from the citizens living in the area. (The other one is Cincinnati.) After Seattle’s experience with a transport project of such scale and expense, I would have thought there would be a bit more caution about projects like this. That’s especially true in this economy and with existing transportation infrastructure in such need of the funding.
Last week I caught a story that told us about a New Jersey school system that has decided that “D’s are simply not useful in society” and will therefore ban that letter grade from their middle and high schools. Students will now get either an “A”, a “B”, or a “C” or they will simply fail, receiving an “F.”
The way the Mount Olive school district sees it, its students should not be getting by with D’s on their report cards, either. This fall, there will no longer be any D’s, only A’s, B’s, C’s and F’s.
“D’s are simply not useful in society,” said Larrie Reynolds, the Mount Olive superintendent, who led the campaign against D’s as a way to raise the bar and motivate students to work harder. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”
Certainly sounds reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Of course, that presumes that each and every student that gets a “D” today does so simply because they’ve just decided to “get by.” But if this approach is supposed to be effective, then why stop there? Why allow students to merely settle for “average”, which is what a “C” grade represents? Why not ban the “C” grade as well, forcing students to step it up and become “A-B” caliber?
There’s another issue with this and that’s holding students at this district at a disadvantage over their peers. I had a similar discussion during the discussion here in Loudoun County and in our neighboring Fairfax County over the matter of our grade scale, here, here, and here. Holding the students at one district to a different grade scale than those in surrounding districts puts them at a disadvantage. While not as severe as the grade scaling question in those previous posts, this decision produces a situation where 2 students in neighboring districts could take the same class, get the same scores on the tests, and have 1 pass (barely) and the other fail. If that was a required course in the senior year of school, you now have 1 student who graduates and the other doesn’t. The 2nd one misses the chance to apply to college (unless he’s lucky and there’s a make-up course available over the summer) and suffers a modest hit to his GPA, relative to the other student.
Threatening students with trumped-up fails isn’t fixing the issue. The question is why students can’t seem to muster the “give-a-damn” to excel rather than just barely pass. Perhaps it’s an issue with a teacher, perhaps it’s a matter of the perceived relevance of the course. Either way, the answer is to find out what’s the problem and address it rather than just putting nails into the stick you’re using to motivate them.
Jim Callaghan, a veteran writer for the teachers union, told The Post he was booted from his $100,000-a-year job just two months after he informed UFT President Michael Mulgrew that he was trying to unionize some of his co-workers.
“I was fired for trying to start a union at the UFT,” said a dumbfounded Callaghan, who worked for the union’s newsletter and as a speechwriter for union leaders for the past 13 years.
That would be the definition of hypocrisy – that an organization dedicated to both unionizing every school system they can and making it extremely difficult to fire any teacher holding membership in their union would respond by immediately firing an employee of theirs who dared to attempt to emulate their act. Told about the intention, UFT President Michael Mulgrew was apparently blunt about the reason for his resistance:
“I told him I want to have the same rights that teachers have,” said Callaghan, 63, of Staten Island. “He told me he didn’t want that, that he wanted to be able to fire whoever he wanted to.”
The UFT has long strenuously resisted city efforts to make it easier for school administrators to fire teachers.
Indeed they have. Which begs the question: if it’s so important to Mulgrew that he have this ability, why wouldn’t it be important for a school system to have the same? After all, a bad speechwriter can only affect the guy using his work to give a speech. A bad teacher can negatively affect the learning ability of hundreds or thousands of students over a career. I’d say it’s even more important to be able to fire bad teachers than bad speechwriters.
I have extended family that are members of unions and they’re not all bad. But the overall air of elitist entitlement these teachers’ unions display just shows this kind of hypocrisy isn’t a one-off case, it’s endemic. I’d recommend UFT reverse themselves quickly if they don’t want to take a major hit in the public’s eye.
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