Tag Archives: risk

cascading computer system failure at Delta

A cascading computer system failure knocked Delta airlines out of commission on August 8.

At least half of all Delta Air Lines flights Monday were delayed or canceled after a power outage knocked out the airline’s computer systems worldwide…

Delta representatives said the airline was investigating the cause of the meltdown. They declined to describe whether the airline’s information-technology system had enough built-in redundancies to recover quickly from a hiccup like a power outage…

Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated systems to operate flights, schedule crews and run ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays.

As the world becomes more automated, things might get smoother when everything is working well, but when something goes wrong it might get harder and harder to recover. Hopefully, major government, military and financial computer systems will have “enough built-in redundancies”.

They do, according to an article in The Week. Delta actually had backup systems in place, and the problem was that they didn’t kick in correctly. Major financial companies have even more layers of backups and pay more attention to them because they have even more at stake.

Delta, like most major airlines, likely had one or more back-up systems in place to take over in an emergency like this. Often a company has an extra system housed in its main data center identical to the main system, plus another one in a separate data center in case both local systems are taken out in a major event, like a fire. Some companies even have a third redundant system that is cloud-based or housed in a separate location.

“Some of these disruptions should not have occurred,” Hecht says. “Delta IT did something wrong that caused its redundancy structure to not function as needed. The problem was not the power failure itself; 99.9999 percent of power failures never cause service disruptions.” …

…most airlines use manual testing to verify their data protection, meaning a human being actually has to take time out of their day to test the system on a regular basis. Other industries, like banking and finance, rely on automatic systems to lower the risk of a full blackout. Automated systems can be pricey, and while Delta’s outage is probably costing the company a hefty sum (Southwest’s outage last month was expected to cost the airline up to $10 million), an hour-long outage in the banking sector would create far more mayhem and profit-loss, so finance companies are more likely to pay up for automated systems.

 

Bill Perry on today’s nuclear threat

Bill Perry, who was secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, has released a new book called My Journey at the Nuclear Brink – here’s an article at New York Review of Books. He was present at the front lines through a number of historic events, from Hiroshima to the Cuban missile crisis to development of submarine-launched missiles to efforts to secure weapons following the Soviet collapse. I’ll pick a short excerpt below but this whole article is really worth a read.

…Perry concluded that there could be no acceptable defense against a mass nuclear attack, an opinion from which he has never deviated. Many political leaders, including several presidents, have disagreed with Perry and have sponsored various types of anti-missile defense systems, the latest being the ballistic missile defense system now being installed in Eastern Europe.

Then as now, Perry writes, he believed that America would possess all the deterrence it needs with just one leg of the so-called triad: the Trident submarine. It is very difficult for armies to track and destroy it, and it contains more than enough firepower to act as a deterrent. The bombers provide only an insurance policy for the unlikely contingency of a temporary problem with the Trident force, and also have a dual role in strengthening our conventional forces. Our ICBM force is in his mind redundant. Indeed the danger of starting an accidental nuclear war as a result of a false alarm outweighs its deterrent value.

…nuclear weapons can’t actually be used—the risk of uncontrollable and catastrophic escalation is too high. They are only good for threatening the enemy with nuclear retaliation. Our submarine force, equipped with nuclear weapons, is virtually invulnerable and can perform that deterrent function well. (It should be noted that the doctrine of deterrence is severely criticized by those who worry about the implications of threatening mass slaughter.)

He talks about how there was a brief period of good will and cooperation between the U.S. and Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, when the former adversaries cooperated on weapons reductions, securing of loose weapons, and the conflict in the Balkans. That all ended when the U.S. insisted on expanding NATO “right up to the Russian border”, which Perry considers a huge mistake. He also talks about the catastrophic fallout from an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange, and the risk of nuclear terrorism in a U.S. city like Washington D.C.

This article suggests a couple clear policies. One is that the U.S. could unilaterally eliminate all its nuclear weapons right away except for the submarine force. This would actually reduce risk for our country and the entire world. If our leaders don’t have the courage to do this tomorrow, they could at least cancel “modernization” plans for all but the submarine force, and phase weapons out as they become obsolete. This would give us the moral high ground when we insist somewhat hypocritically on nuclear nonproliferation for everyone else. The final step would be to negotiate with other nuclear powers to eliminate their weapons in exchange for elimination of the U.S. submarine weapons, with a robust worldwide inspection and verification program.

This would save tens of billions of dollars every year, some of which could be invested in homeland security and intelligence to counter the terrorist threat, and some of which could be invested in infrastructure or education or tax cuts. I see no logical argument against any of this.

earthquake prediction

Here’s an interesting article on earthquake prediction. Basically, it has eluded scientists so far and will probably continue to do so.

Since the early 20th century, scientists have known that large quakes often cluster in time and space: 99 percent of them occur along well-mapped boundaries between plates in Earth’s crust and, in geological time, repeat almost like clockwork. But after decades of failed experiments, most seismologists came to believe that forecasting earthquakes in human time—on the scale of dropping the kids off at school or planning a vacation—was about as scientific as astrology. By the early 1990s, prediction research had disappeared as a line item in the USGS’s budget. “We got burned enough back in the 70s and 80s that nobody wants to be too optimistic about the possibility now,” says Terry Tullis, a career seismologist and chair of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC), which advises the USGS.

Defying the skeptics, however, a small cadre of researchers have held onto the faith that, with the right detectors and computational tools, it will be possible to predict earthquakes with the same precision and confidence we do just about any other extreme natural event, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The USGS may have simply given up too soon. After all, the believers point out, advances in sensor design and data analysis could allow for the detection of subtle precursors that seismologists working a few decades ago might have missed.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The three biggest natural disasters in human history, measured in dollars and cents, have all been earthquakes, and there’s a good chance the next one will be too. According to the USGS, a magnitude 7.8 quake along Southern California’s volatile San Andreas fault would result in 1,800 deaths and a clean-up bill of more than $210 billion—tens of billions of dollars more than the cost of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill combined.

 

Moore

Here is an interesting article about Moore, Oklahoma, which has been hit by four incredibly powerful tornadoes in sixteen years, which is statistically all but impossible. Beyond the sheer spectacle of it, and the fact that I’ve spent some time in central Oklahoma, the statistical side of it is interesting to me, as I sometimes find myself asked whether some system should be designed to withstand a storm that happens 10 times a year on average, 4 times a year on average, once every 10 years on average, once every 25 years on average, etc. We don’t have a million years of data to base these things on, and even if we did the climate seems to be changing, and even if it were not there is ultimately a judgment call involved about how much risk is too much given our finite resources we have to divide up among so many things.

…tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus, a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.

Are you safer on the crumbling D.C. Metro or on the highway?

Well, this is kind of embarrassing. On the surface, the D.C. Metro is one of the country’s more modern and efficient transit systems, at least compared to the trains and subways I am used to riding in Philadelphia. And most major U.S. cities don’t have a comprehensive and reliable system like Philadelphia’s, dirty, old, slow, and laden with bad attitude as it is. So it’s embarrassing that not only can we not build the new infrastructure we need to help the economy operate efficiently and grow, we are letting the infrastructure we have fall apart apparently.

Embarrassing though it is, this little ironic piece (which never admits to being irony, and there are actually people online arguing over whether it is real) points out that if safety is really the main concern, to the point that some are suggesting shutting down the D.C. Metro, car and truck travel should also be banned. In fact, shutting down the nation’s most dangerous transit system and forcing people to drive would be statistically certain to kill people.

Since 2009, 14 Metro riders and employees have died in collisions, derailings, and other incidents. On an annual basis, that translates to about 0.48 fatalities per 100,000 weekday riders.*

However, Secretary Foxx noted that this is exceeded by the fatality rate of car crashes in every single American metropolitan area for which data was compiled in a recent report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In San Francisco, 3.75 people died in automobile crashes per 100,000 residents in 2014, a rate 7.8 times higher than the fatality rate on Metro. In Raleigh, NC, the automobile crash fatality rate was 7.50 per 100,000, or about 15.6 times higher than the fatality rate on Metro. And in Dallas, the automobile crash fatality rate was 12.02 per 100,000, or about 25.0 times higher than the fatality rate on Metro.

It’s not acceptable to have people dying due to negligence and preventable accidents, but this does illustrate the double standard where we accept the commonplace violence on our roads and streets as a necessary evil, assuming it is not preventable. We are also just desensitized to it, whereas the occasional transit accident or plane crash is a shock and gets a lot more media coverage paradoxically because it is not that common.

how aliens could be hiding in plain site

There’s always that puzzle – if conditions were such that life could arise on this planet, and the universe is so vast that there must be similar conditions out there, and given the unfathomable amounts of time for that to happen, is it really likely or even possible that this is the only place it ever happened? And if life is actually common, how could it be that we have never detected it? One answer to the puzzle would be if sophisticated life is out there, even relatively nearby, and doesn’t want to be detected by us for some reason.

Serious people at serious universities like Columbia study this, the technology side at least if not the existential questions. If aliens are hiding from us right now, here’s one way they might be doing it. Or if we thought there was somebody bad out there (one of those infinitesimal probability, infinite consequence risks that are hard to wrap your head around) and wanted to hide, here is how we could try to do it.

A Cloaking Device for Transiting Planets

The transit method is presently the most successful planet discovery and characterization tool at our disposal. Other advanced civilizations would surely be aware of this technique and appreciate that their home planet’s existence and habitability is essentially broadcast to all stars lying along their ecliptic plane. We suggest that advanced civilizations could cloak their presence, or deliberately broadcast it, through controlled laser emission. Such emission could distort the apparent shape of their transit light curves with relatively little energy, due to the collimated beam and relatively infrequent nature of transits. We estimate that humanity could cloak the Earth from Kepler-like broadband surveys using an optical monochromatic laser array emitting a peak power of ∼30 MW for ∼10 hours per year. A chromatic cloak, effective at all wavelengths, is more challenging requiring a large array of tunable lasers with a total power of ∼250 MW. Alternatively, a civilization could cloak only the atmospheric signatures associated with biological activity on their world, such as oxygen, which is achievable with a peak laser power of just ∼160 kW per transit. Finally, we suggest that the time of transit for optical SETI is analogous to the water-hole in radio SETI, providing a clear window in which observers may expect to communicate. Accordingly, we propose that a civilization may deliberately broadcast their technological capabilities by distorting their transit to an artificial shape, which serves as both a SETI beacon and a medium for data transmission. Such signatures could be readily searched in the archival data of transit surveys.

Economist Risk Analysis

The Economist “Intelligence Unit” issues a top ten list of global risks each month. The high probability and high impact ones include severe recession and debt crises in Asia, military tension between the U.S. and Russia, and a breakup of the E.U. Donald Trump makes the list as high impact but only moderate probability:

In the event of a Trump victory, his hostile attitude to free trade, and alienation of Mexico and China in particular, could escalate rapidly into a trade war – and at the least scupper the Trans-Pacific Partnership between the US and 11 other American and Asian states signed in February 2016. His militaristic tendencies towards the Middle East (and ban on all Muslim travel to the US) would be a potent recruitment tool for jihadi groups, increasing their threat both within the region and beyond.

Terrorism, U.S.-China confrontation, and a sudden oil price shock make the list lower down as potentially severe but less likely.

February 2016 in Review

I’m going to try picking the three most frightening posts, three most hopeful posts, and three most interesting posts (that are not particularly frightening or hopeful) from February.

3 most frightening posts

3 most hopeful posts

3 most interesting posts

  • The U.S. election season certainly is getting interesting, although not really in a good way. ontheissues.org has a useful summary of where U.S. political candidates stand…what are the words I’m looking for…on the the issues. Nate Silver has an interesting online tool that lets you play around with how various demographic groups tend to vote.
  • Fire trucks don’t really have to be so big.
  • Titanium dioxide is the reason Oreo filling is so white.

2015 Year in Review

I’m going to try picking the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting post from each month. If the most interesting is also the most frightening or most hopeful, I’ll pick the next most interesting. Then I’ll have 12 nominees in each category and I’ll try to pick the most frightening, hopeful, and interesting posts of the year.

JANUARY

Most frightening: Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Most hopeful: It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.

Most interesting: Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them.

FEBRUARY

Most frightening: There are some depressing new books out there about all the bad things that could happen to the world, from nuclear terrorism to pandemics. Also a “financial black hole”, a “major breakdown of the Internet”, “the underpopulation bomb”, the “death of death”, and more!

Most hopeful: A new study suggests a sudden, catastrophic climate tipping point may not be too likely.

Most interesting: Government fragmentation explains at least part of suburban sprawl and urban decline in U.S. states, with Pennsylvania among the worst.

MARCH

Most frightening: The drought in California and the U.S. Southwest is the worst ever, including one that wiped out an earlier civilization in the same spot. At least it is being taken seriously and some policies are being put in place. Meanwhile Sao Paulo, Brazil is emerging as a cautionary tale of what happens when the political and professional leadership in a major urban area fail to take drought seriously. Some people are predicting that water shortages could spark serious social unrest in developing countries.

Most hopeful: If we want to design ecosystems or just do some wildlife-friendly gardening, there is plenty of information on plants, butterflies, and pollinators out there. There is also an emerging literature on spatial habitat fragmentation and how it can be purposely designed and controlled for maximum benefit.

Most interesting (I just couldn’t choose between these):

  • Innovation in synthetic drugs is quickly outpacing the ability of regulatory agencies to adapt. (I struggled whether to put this in the negative or positive column. Drugs certainly cause suffering and social problems. But that is true of legal tobacco and alcohol, and prescription drugs, as well as illegal drugs. The policy frameworks countries have used to deal with illegal drugs in the past half century or so, most conspicuously the U.S. “war” on drugs, have led to more harm than good, and it is a good thing that governments are starting to acknowledge this and consider new policies for the changing times.)
  • “Germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined.” This means basically editing the DNA of egg and sperm cells at will. I put this in the positive column because it can mean huge health advances. Obviously there are risks and ethical concerns too.

APRIL

Most frightening: A group of well-known economists is concerned that the entire world has entered a period of persistently low economic growth, or “secular stagnation“.

Most hopeful: Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.

Most interesting:

  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)

MAY

Most frightening: We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.

Most hopeful: The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world.Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.

Most interesting: Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.

JUNE

Most frightening: One estimate says that climate change may reduce global economic growth by 3% in 2050 and 7-8% by 2100. Climate change may also double the frequency of El Nino. The DICE model is available to look at climate-economy linkages. Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers describe what a coming long, slow decline might look like. Rising temperatures in the Arctic are drying things out, leading to more fires, which burns more carbon, which raises temperatures, in an accelerating feedback loop.

Most hopeful: Stock values of U.S. coal companies have collapsed.

Most interesting: According to Paul Romer, academic economics has lost its way and is bogged down in “mathiness”.

JULY

Most frightening: James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations.

Most hopeful: Edible Forest Gardens is a great two book set that lays out an agenda for productive and low-input ecological garden design in eastern North America. You can turn your lawn into a food forest today.

Most interesting:

AUGUST

Most frightening: Steven Hawking is worried about an artificial intelligence arms race starting “within years, not decades”.

Most hopeful: It may be possible to capture atmospheric carbon and turn it into high-strength, valuable carbon fiber. This sounds like a potential game-changer to me, because if carbon fiber were cheap it could be substituted for a lot of heavy, toxic and energy-intensive materials we use now, and open up possibilities for entirely new types of structures and vehicles.

Most interesting:

  • “gene drive” technology helps make sure that genetically engineered traits are passed along to offspring.
  • Technology marches on – quantum computing is in early emergence, the “internet of things” is arriving at the “peak of inflated expectations”, big data is crashing into the “trough of disillusionment”, virtual reality is beginning its assent to the “plateau of productivity”, and speech recognition is arriving on the plateau. And super-intelligent rodents may be on the way.
  • Robotics may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion, which will almost certainly be bad for some types of jobs, but will also bring us things like cars that avoid pedestrians and computer chips powered by sweat. I for one am excited to be alive at this moment in history.

SEPTEMBER

Most frightening: Climate may be playing a role in the current refugee crisis, and the future may hold much more of this.

Most hopeful: The right mix of variety and repetition might be the key to learning.

Most interesting: Edward Tufte does not like Infographics.

OCTOBER

Most frightening: Corrupt Russian officials appear to be selling nuclear materials in Moldova.

Most hopeful: Elephants seem to have very low rates of cancer. Maybe we could learn their secrets.

Most interesting: Stephen Hawking is worried about inequality and technological unemployment.

NOVEMBER

Most frightening: I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out.

Most hopeful: There are plenty of ways to store intermittent solar and wind power so they can provide a constant, reliable electricity source.

Most interesting: Asimov’s yeast vats are finally here. This is good because it allows us to produce food without photosynthesis, but bad because it allows us to produce food without photosynthesis.

DECEMBER

Most frightening: Cyberattacks or superflares could destroy the U.S. electric grid.

Most hopeful: We had the Paris agreement. It is possible to be cynical about this agreement but it is the best agreement we have had so far.

Most interesting: I mused about whether it is really possible the U.S. could go down a fascist path. I reviewed Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascism. I am a little worried, but some knowledgeable people say not to worry. After reading Alice Goffman’s book On the Runthough, one could conclude that a certain segment of our population is living in a fascist police state right now. There is some fairly strong evidence that financial crises have tended to favor the rise of the right wing in Europe.

DISCUSSION

Well, one thing that certainly jumps out on the technology front is biotechnology. We have a couple articles about the possibility of drastic increases in the human lifespan, and what that would mean. “Germ-line engineering”, “gene drive”, and “CRISPR” are all ways of monkeying with DNA directly, even in ways that get passed along to offspring. To produce more food, we may be able to monkey with the fundamentals of photosynthesis, and if that doesn’t work we can use genetically engineered yeast to bypass photosythesis entirely.

At the risk of copyright infringement, I am reproducing the “Gartner hype cycle” below, which was mentioned in one of the posts from August.

Gartner Hype Cycle

Gartner Hype Cycle

Government and corporate labs have been making huge advances in biotechnology in the last decade or so, so it is well beyond the “innovation trigger”. It has not yet reached the “peak of inflated expectations” where it would explode onto the commercial and media scene with a lot of fanfare. I expect that will happen. We will probably see a biotech boom, a biotech bubble, and a biotech bust similar to what we saw with the computers and the internet. And then it will quietly pervade every aspect of our daily lives similar to computers and the internet, and our children will shrug and assume it has always been that way.

Obviously there are dangers. A generation of people that refuse to die on time would be one. Bioterrorism is obviously one. Then there is the more subtle matter that as we raise the limit on the size our population and consumption level can attain, the footprint of our civilization will just grow to meet the new limit. When and how we come up against these limits, and what to do about it, is the subject of the updates to two seminal papers on these issues, by Rockstrom and Costanza. We have entered an “unsafe operating space” (Rockstrom), where we are depleting much more natural capital each year than the planet can replenish (Costanza), and there will be consequences. The Paris agreement is one hopeful sign that our civilization might be able to deal with these problems, but even if we deal with the carbon emission problem, it might be too late to prevent the worst consequences, and there are going to be “layers of limits” as the authors of Limits to Growth put it all those decades ago. If we take care of the global warming problem and figure out a way to grow food for 50 billion people, eventually we will grow to 50 billion people and have to think of something else.

So without further ado:

Most frightening: I can’t pick just one. In the relatively near term, it’s the stalling out of the world economy; the convergence of climate change, drought, and the challenge of feeding so many people; and the ongoing risks from nuclear and biological weapons.

Most hopeful: I see some hope on energy and land use issues. The Paris agreement, combined with renewable energy and energy storage breakthroughs, the potential for much more efficient use of space in cities rather than letting cars take up most of the space, are all hopeful. The possibility of making carbon fiber out of carbon emissions is a particularly intriguing one. At my personal scale, I am excited to do some sustainable gardening of native species that can feed both people and wildlife. I don’t expect my tiny garden to make a major difference in the world, but if we all had sustainable gardens, they were all connected, and we weren’t wasting so much space on roads and parking, it could start adding up to a much more sustainable land use pattern.

Most interesting: I’ve already mentioned a lot of stuff, so I will just pick something I haven’t already mentioned in the discussion above: the rise of synthetic drugs. It’s just an interesting article and makes you think about what it will mean to have advanced chemical, information, and biological technologies in the hands of the little guy, actually many, many little guys. It is a brave, new, dangerous, exciting world indeed. Happy new year!