Locus Medius

CIA Reinventing Itself

From the comments section of this posting on Secrecy News, I found a link to an article on Federal Computer Week regarding usage of wikis at the CIA.

This passage is of note:

Wikis and blogs allow real-time analysis and reaction to intelligence information to occur as quickly as users can update information, Andrus said. “It just happens, just like an ant hill happens."

Blogs can be used to track and share individuals’ intellectual capital, especially their disagreements and mistakes, Andrus said. Wikis can aggregate common knowledge and wisdom, he said, and they don’t require participants to get permission to act or update.

“Wikis and blogs allow us to stand on the shoulders of others and have brilliant ideas we would not have had otherwise in the service of protecting our country,” Andrus said.

The CIA already has more than 1,000 internal blogs and an internal wiki with about 10,000 pages, Andrus said. To encourage employees to release information, the agency had to change its policy forbidding the posting of any information on its network, he said. Emphasis and link mine

A wiki strikes me as an excellent resource for this type of information analysis. It lets people incorporate new information into the initial analysis in a distributed, but trackable, way. So Analyst 5, for example, can update the analysis immediately when he learns new information, spots a fallacy or spots an incomplete conclusion. And anyone reading the article can look at the tracking information to see who added that new analysis.

Evacuate Without My Dogs? Never!

New Orleans finally officially changed their policy and will allow people to bring their pets on evacuation buses.

I would absolutely have been one of those people who stayed behind because they wouldn't leave their pets.

Open Tip Bullets

A week or so ago, there was an interesting article over at Murdoc's site concerning an Army JAG who issued an order banning snipers from using open tip rifle bullets over concern that they are similar to expanding hollow point bullets. Blackfive also posted about this issue. The open tip bullets are used because they are more accurate than regular full metal jacketed military bullets and, in fact, are not expanding bullets at all.

Murdoc and Blackfive have pretty good discussions of the legality of open tip and hollow point bullets and the degree to which the JAG stepped out of bounds. Specifically, it appears that JAGs are not even authorized to issue these types of orders in the first place. They advise commanders who then issue orders based on that advice.

After reading these articles, I found myself asking a variety of questions. Why are open tip bullets more accurate? Since they have an open tip, why don't they expand the way hollow points do? Knowing nothing about bullet design/aerodynamics, I spent some time over the last week looking around for some information on-line. I did not find a lot, so I figured I'd draw some pictures and post what I have been able to find.

Amazing!

I went over to ifilm to watch the Pat Robertson video — you know, the one where he says Sharon's stroke was punishment by God for "dividing God's land". What an asshole.

But what I really wanted to post about is this guy. Amazing, huh?

Someone Actually Gets It

BizzyBlog and the Glittering Eye actually get it right. Coal mine fatalities are down during the Nutjob-controlled congress and Bush administration.

The Glittering Eye gets a couple numbers wrong in their post (see number of coal miners here), but otherwise these guys are right on.

For people following the trackbacks here, these were my previous posts on the subject.

I've Been Waiting for This

I just saw this post that PaulVA at Daily Kos made about the mine disaster in West Virginia. He clearly goes spouting off on something he knows nothing about.

First, we don't know if the Sago Mine disaster was in any way related to any of the previous safety violations at the mine or if it was even avoidable at all. [Note that you can't link directly to the page on MSHA with previous reports about the mine. The previous link has instructions to get to that page.] Coal mining is dangerous and even with the best of the best safety precautions, accidents are going to occur. I think he should wait for an investigation before he goes blaming Nutjobs and lax enforcement for the disaster.

Second, he clearly has not seen my previous post about this or the statistics tracked by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. If he had seen those statistics he would not have written

And what I found should not have been as disappointing to me as it was. You see, since 1994 OSHA changed dramatically in how it has undergone its enforcement authority.

Today, an OSHA inspector needs to provide PRIOR WARNING to an employer at least 24 hours before an inspection. Why? Because of GOPers such as Cass Ballenger. He headed the Employment and Workforce Committee and played a major role in deforming it in the 90s.

Where OSHA was once effective at pursuing law breakers and fining them, OSHA has now been defanged as enforcement money was earmaked for "non-enforcement" programs that would do relative harm to all those poor small businessmen Ballenger would always champion.

Because he would have seen that mine safety has continued to improve in the 11 years since the 1994 regulation changes. Fatalities in 2004 were approximately 60% of the number in 1994; fatalities in 2005 were less than half those in 1994. Even with the Sago disaster, the trends show that 2006 will probably have fewer coal mine fatalities than 1994.

Paul's post is typical partisan politics. Something bad happens, blame the other guy before we even really know what happened.

Good going, Paul. Way to help continue the trend of well-informed, nuanced political debates currently in vogue in the U.S. [In case anyone missed it, that's sarcasm.]

High Profile Tragedies — A Little Perspective, Please

Its awful to think of those 13 coal miners trapped, and probably dead, in that West Virginia coal mine.

The reason I wanted to post about it was not merely to add one more voice to the mix about how sad it is and what a tragedy it is, although both are true.

What I wanted to comment on is how high-profile tragedies — mine collapses, airplane crashes, etc. — make headlines out of proportion to other fatality statistics. Such headlines also tend to disregard how fatalities in that area may have changed over time.

Did you know, for instance, that 2005 saw the least fatalities in U.S. coal mines ever? Only 22 fatalities, or approximately 2 per 10,000 coal mine workers. As recently as 1995, there were 3.6 fatalities per 10,000 coal mine workers, while in 1980 it was 5.2. And, although probably not a fair comparison, 28.5 workers per 10,000 lost their lives in the coal mines during 1944 — during the height of WWII.

So mine safety has been improving at a pretty consistent rate. Of course there are worse years than others and 2006 is not starting out well. I haven't taken the time to do any kind of detailed analysis, but the trend is pretty clear from this table. (2005 from this table.)

While coal mining is still  a dangerous occupation, the fact is that mine fatalities are a tiny percentage of preventable deaths in this country. Over 5,500 people died on the job in 2003 (0.4 per 10,000 workers). And to put that in perspective, over 42,500 people died in traffic accidents in 2004 (1.4 per 10,000 U.S. residents). In other words, while a coal miner is five times more likely than the average worker to die on the job, he is only 40% more likely to die on the job than to die in a car crash.

So when we have these "big" tragedies ... please, lets keep things in perspective. They are still tragedies and if someone was negligent they should be held accountable, but these types of tragedies are nothing in the scheme of all the accidental (i.e. preventable) death that happens every year in the U.S. (let alone the world).