Various Commentaries

[drwex]

Helpfully arranged by topic. We cut because we care.


I can't avoid commenting on this, much as I'd like to. I'm no expert on bombs, but I am an expert on analyzing systems and human responses to technology. Here's the problem:

Boston officials overreacted and now that they're in a hole they're failing the first rule "Stop digging!" They look stupid and are acting more stupid, with the active complicity of the sensationalist popular media.

Yes, it's true that things with batteries and wires could be bombs. Dear lord don't let these people into a Radio Shack please. Yes, it's true that bomb squads get paid not to have senses of humor and probably need to treat things as bombs once they're called in.

But... but... you cannot avoid two irreducible conclusions: either Boston's response was right and 9/10 of the world are idiots or the other cities where these devices were found responded in a reasonable and calm fashion and Boston overreacted. I don't see any other way to read this, and I think that the people who are now arguing the "90% of you are wrong" position are just totally missing the point.

Item 2: high alert states, paranoia, and false alarms are not free. I'm not talking about wasted dollars here. I'm talking about how we live our lives. If we spend our time jumping at shadows then we lower our life quality and, being fallible humans, we become LESS likely to respond to real threats. 'Boy who cried wolf' isn't just a child's tale - it's a parable about how people behave and respond to repeated stimuli. Anyone who has ever done work on situations where alarms matter (medical equipment/tests, cockpit design, manufacturing processes) knows how important it is to keep the air clean of false and distracting noise.

It's imo wrong to say "well, they had to take it seriously, that's their jobs" - that misses the whole context in which those jobs get carried out.

Those of you old enough to remember Three Mile Island should remember that those operators did in fact get the right alarms in that situation, but part of the problem was that the relevant signal was buried in so much noise that it was missed. We have a natural tendency to think that more is better, so more data collection must improve our intelligence analysis, more alerts must improve our responses to threats, and so on. In fact, the opposite is true. False positives are extremely harmful, and this one is a doozy.



Work is very stressy. Personnel shifting around here will probably turn out to have been beneficial in the long run but right now I'm trying to figure out how to deal with an environment where I make a suggestion and my grand boss responds "Yes yes!" - exclamation point and all - and then two days later I'm told that this suggestion "caused a problem." I'd like "Confusing Mixed Messages" for $1000, Alex.

I'm likely to be very spastically busy with trying to keep up at work for at least the next few weeks. With luck things will settle down. I tend to doubt it, though. I'm coming home frazzled and unsettled and unsure what to do about it.



We're still ill. I took a sick day this week partly because I was feeling draggy but mostly because L's school called saying he was running a fever and wanted him taken home. Pygment was asleep since she'd been woken up around 3:30 by L's coughing and his unwillingness to go back to sleep. Oh, and I woke myself up at 3AM for who-knows-what reason and couldn't get back to sleep.

We lost all of last weekend's fun to being ill and this coming weekend isn't looking good. L was spiking random fevers all yesterday. The doc first said ear infection and put him on antibiotics; now they say his ears are clear but maybe it's a sinus infection. I'd be tempted to throw in a "fucking doctors" comment here except I know they're doing their best and it's just a fact of growing up that sometimes kids get sick with random viruses and you kind of don't have much choice but tough it out.

Still, going on two weeks of ill health at one level or another, low on sleep and high on bad behavior is NOT making for a happy household.



L has, in addition to the obvious behavior issues that come with being a sick child, been in an extremely challenging phase. Like "I'm going to challenge my parents on everything in sight, dig in my heels at every chance, and scream like I'm being murdered when consequences are enacted." Hours of time-outs, loss of TV and computer privileges and such-like aren't having much effect. He has my brother's level of stubbornness, which is much worse than mine, if you can believe such a thing. I'm stubborn, but at least when I realize the consequences of being stubborn I'll try to de-escalate. K does the same thing. My younger brother? Not so much. He's totally a "consequences be damned" person and L is showing the same behaviors. Sigh.

It doesn't help that he's doing it when his parents are sick and low on cope and mental flexibility in general.



Diesel on Tuesday was excellent, if crowded and overwarm. Mostly because I got to have good conversations with good people even in the crowd. It helped me get over a bad case of sandpapered nerves I had acquired at work that day. I also saw a couple of faces I hadn't seen in some time.

Last week wifey and I went to see the latest Bond flick before it disappeared from the big screen; that was pretty good and much better than most recent Bond. This week we watched a DVD of Tom Yum Goong - translated into English as "The Protector." It's a Thai martial-arts flick starring Tony Jaa. I personally think it should have been called "maim a thug for elephants" - it's long on action and fights, with some impressive bits, and really short on plot. I thought Jaa was OK, but the fight choreography was second-rate. It looked fine at full speed but they kept slowing things down which really let you see how fake some of the moves were. I'm not sure if more of Jaa's movies are going to make it to the US; if they do I'll probably watch at least one or two more tos ee if he gets better.

I missed a date with the g/f this week. Between our two situations we couldn't manage to get together. Sadness.


Overall I give the past two weeks a 3 out of 10. Not precisely fired, but really not even close to average.

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Those of you old enough to remember Three Mile Island should remember that those operators did in fact get the right alarms in that situation, but part of the problem was that the relevant signal was buried in so much noise that it was missed.

i believe that is an incorrect statement. iirc, one of the root causes was an indicator saying that thus-and-such valve was closed, when actually what it indicated was that the valve had been instructed to close. and in reality it wasn't actually closed. so while they were venting the system to avoid having the steam pipes go solid because they thought it was an otherwise-closed system, they were running nearly dry.

[drwex]

I'll have to go dig up the RISKS and other discussion of the time, but there were a number of factors:

1. Things that were alarms weren't distinguished. On their console "all green" wasn't a good state - some lights were supposed to be red. On others, red was an alert state.

2. There was an aural cacophony. Everyone present testified that they had a hard time hearing each other and distinguishing important audible alarms.

3. As you said there was at least one failure of equipment and at least one failure of sensors. The operators had, in theory, enough information to make the right decision. In practice they missed that info and took the wrong action, as you said.

I think we're in vehement agreement - the operator screwups were compounded by false alarms and horrible information presentation.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

I think we're in vehement agreement

yep.

and iirc, the three mile island plant also had one thing from an instrumentation standpoint that peeves me off whenever i encounter it -- in this case, a temperature readout that reported N degrees, even tho it was much higher than N, because it wasn't actually coded to report anything higher and didn't indicate anything indicating that it had gone beyond it. (i want to say it was a temperature readout near the valve that failed to close. otoh, i might be remembering some other power plant failure.)

i *loathe* things that tell me "i'm at this level" when it might actually mean "i'm at something above here but i don't know what".

[drwex]

I also vehemently agree with your loathing. That's an intensely dangerous failure state for a sensor device, even in non-nuclear situation.

[mizarchivist]

Peace to ye- that's quite a bucket of stress.

[drwex]

Thanks. It is indeed.

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I miss you too. Sorry its been a less than pleasant week, I hope you are feeling better soon.

[drwex]

yeah, it's going to suck not being able to kiss this weekend. We're currently thinking we'll split-shift the party, with one of us staying home with L the whole time. The amount he's coughing we really can't let him around open public food.

[cutieperson]

i'm going to respectfully request that you & yours keep a distance from me at the party, as i absolutely cannot afford to get sick this weekend.

*hugs* i hope things ease up in many directions soon.

[drwex]

Understood. Though if you haven't picked up anything from Tuesday you're probably past the danger zone. We won't be bringing the main germ source with us.

[cutieperson]

i would rather be paranoid than have surgery rescheduled.

[harlequinaide.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much of L's behavior is being a second child. You said that his behavior mirrored your younger brother, and it certainly mirrors my sister (who has no sense of consequence), whereas I also learned early to stop digging. (You laugh, but when I fail to stop digging I do so deliberately, and often for comedic effect. When I get the sense that actual harm is being done (as opposed to false positives, as per your other comment) I tend to change my behavior immediately.) Maybe it's that, as olders, we shield them from consequences enough that they get used to it, or that consequences mean a bigger share of the attention? I'm not sure, but it seems to be worth looking at.

Feel better.

[drwex]

Yes, I'm sure there's a non-trivial amount of second-child stuff going on. It's clear that L sees K doing things and setting examples that K never had set for him. It's also true that they're MUCH worse behavior-wise when together than either is apart. As a second child he's got much more competition for parental and other adult attention. Not really much we can do about any of this, sadly.

[harlequinaide.livejournal.com]

I hear middle children are better behaved than second-and-youngest. ;-)

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

Being a middle child I can say this is pretty much the truth. My Mom has often been quoted as saying that my behavior changed almost over night after my baby sister was born.

That is until I reached Senior Year of High School and I decided I was sick of being the "Good Girl" all the time. Then I started hearing things like "Not even S gave me trouble like this!"

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

No.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

*hugs*
Sounds like you should pack everyone into a plane down here! Warm. The viruses and stuff that were going around up there were vicious. I've been here for, what, almost 3 weeks? And am only just now getting over the mung. And that's under some of the best of all possible circumstances. I'm sorry things are sucky.

[drwex]

I didn't write about the money suckage. Plus, traveling with the kids is SO not a vacation in my brain. I do appreciate the offer and wish we could see you sooner. Glad you're finally over "the mung". I'd make some kind of bean joke here, but I'm just too tired.

[ariesd.livejournal.com]

As much as it can be said that the Boston Police overreacted I think two factors need to be brought into this.

1: The MTA has been on a heightened alert kick with random searches and thus nothing had shown up. I think they were triggered to overreact. That being said, I would rather have the overreaction the first time and it be something like this than an actual hoax of a bomb threat. I don't want the next time to be dismissed because of the "cried wolf" problem. I totally agree about false positives, but I'm glad to see they *can* react to that level if needed.

2: Midway through this people knew what was going on and didn't speak up. I'm not going to get into intent, or any of the garbage about hoaxes, but trespassing, negligence in fessing up and just the idea of hanging an object above a roadway is just wrong.

Sorry you're feeling yucky and stressed, do you suffer from stress feeding into illness and making it worse? Anything the sweetie and I can do to help out?

*hugs* and it was nice to see you Tuesday, you did look tired.

[drwex]

I think we just fundamentally disagree on this incident. It's quite likely I didn't express myself particularly well - read Shneier's blog entry on the topic; I think he expresses it well.

do you suffer from stress feeding into illness and making it worse?

Not usually. It's probably not helping, esp insofar as I'm not sleeping enough.

Anything the sweetie and I can do to help out?

Offer appreciated. If I think of something I'll mention it.

[ariesd.livejournal.com]

Try to feel better and hopefully we will see you tomorrow.

[guenpanther.livejournal.com]

*hug*

Good luck with work, I hope you feel better soon, and remember once the kids grow up you'll remember their childhood with much fondness (or so I keep hearing from various parents/grandparents :-).

[drwex]

Thanks. Yes, I'm sure some day we'll look back on all this with... well, less pain. Not sure I'll ever be able to smile about it.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

$500,000 just from the Emergency Reponse Teams.

Another $500,000 from the MBTA and such-like.

Boston blew a million dollars trying to determine whether these devices (or just one in a passel of devices) were dangerous.

There already exist significantly more cost-effective methods of doing this.

[cutieperson]

not to mention their reaction to Turner Broadcasting calling them and saying "these are ours" was to continue to investigate other leads.
seriously, how hard would it have been to go online and look up ATHF when told what it was?

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

It's apparently very hard. The ostensible journalists at CNN, right down the hall from Cartoon Network in the same office building, didn't manage to do it.

[cutieperson]

*snort*