Vital Systems Security

Check out this article about a unit of the Parsons School of Design, which is developing some kind of mapping tool “that can rapidly search open data sources and then present the information geographically, in real-time.” Of course the students are upset. (And say the usual range of stupidities about the liberal and pacifist tradition at the New School — let’s just say that I don’t think the German Jewish intellectuals who came after ‘33 were pacifists, and they definitely weren’t “progressives” in the sense that these kids think they were.) But actually, the technology is interesting, and the questions about the nature of this complicity would be interesting to explore.

The recent confirmation of an outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter (Peter Pan and Great Value brands) demonstrates another weakness in U.S. disease surveillance. This CDC announcement details the process by which a food-borne disease outbreak is detected, confirmed, and tracked.

“PulseNet (the national subtyping network for foodborne disease surveillance coordinated by CDC) detected a slowly rising increase in cases of Salmonella Tennessee this fall. OutbreakNet (the national network of public health officials coordinated by CDC that investigates enteric disease outbreaks) then worked for several weeks to identify this unusual food vehicle. Public health officials from several states have isolated Salmonella from open jars of peanut butter of both Peter Pan and Great Value brand. For nine jars, the serotype has been confirmed as Tennessee and DNA fingerprinting has shown that the pattern is the outbreak strain.”
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The FDA advisory committee endorsed yesterday an experimental human vaccine for a strain of the H5N1 avian influenza virus. The vaccine seems to provide a protection of only 45%. According to the NYT, it requires 12 times the dose of antigen delivered by a typical shot for seasonal influenza and it has to be given in two shots several weeks apart…

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The New York Times reports: “In 2005 M.I.A., the Sri Lanka-born, London-raised rapper, released her acclaimed debut, “Arular,” a wildly inventive mash-up of punk, hip-hop, dancehall and electro. Now she’s added South Asian sounds to the mix. Her electrifying new single, “Bird Flu,” was partly recorded in South India, where she also filmed the video posted on her MySpace page (myspace.com/mia). The track is pure, surreal rhythm: thunderous dhol drums, poultry squawks and chanting children. (It may be included on her as-yet-untitled album, due in June on Interscope.) Last year a “bird flu dance” craze swept the Ivory Coast and Jamaica. It involves imitating a dying chicken, and naturally you can find plenty of examples on YouTube. In a highlight of M.I.A.’s video, a tiny boy leads a group of dancing villagers, flapping his arms like wings.”

I’m posting this here as well as at the bio-nano blog, since it is a nice point of overlap…

Dupont, the chemical giant, has put its peanut butter in the chocolate belong to Environmental Defense, the environmental action NGO. Or did ED’s chocolate end up in DuPont’s peanut butter? In any case they have teamed up to produce a “NanoRisk Framework” that combines techniques risk analysis and product development to help companies monitor the production of new nanomaterials. It is, at first sight, a surprising partnership, but as it turns out, I guess ED is known for “finding the ways that work” as their website puts it. It is also another example of the desire to bring a public into being, as the framework is publicly distributed, and available for comment until March 30th. It’s a nice document too– the kind of thing that isn’t normally freely available on a website…

Stephen Flynn did a series for NPR this week called The Edge of Disaster that would be worth a listen. One of the themes is that reduced attention to population security has also increased vulnerability of vital systems, as this nice diary from DailyKos points out in relation to avian flu.

The New York Times thinks so, in this editorial.
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17-18 April, 2007 | Lancaster, UK

Deadline: 9 March, 2007
The ability to notice trouble and see scope for remedial action is crucial in many different contexts of work. Doctors, mechanics, help-line operators, firefighters, experimental scientists, the police, teachers, surveyors, computer programmers, and many other professionals do it. . Diagnostic practices are a pervasive and important feature of contemporary life. They matter, not least because it is through diagnosing and diagnoses that different perspectives - e.g. novices and experts, users, developers and designers, patients and healthcare professionals - meet. Diagnostic practices are integral to any move towards change. A deeper and broader understanding of diagnosing practices is highly desirable.

An article in Slate about heat beaming weapons — which are supposed to be harmless, although they make you feel like you are on fire — makes an interesting observation about how the military got interested in such technology. It notes that “Twelve years ago, the Department of Defense observed that our armed forces were increasingly being used for peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and protection of civil society. More of our enemies were blending in with, or disguising themselves as, civilians. Through the media, more eyeballs, hearts, and minds could see the infrastructure we destroyed. The DOD proposed the development of weapons ‘to incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment.’”

NewScientistTech has a funny little article on the role of social networking sites — or something like them — in communicating information about disaster response among members of the “public.” The idea, in part, is that peer-to-peer technology might improve information sharing. There is much of interest here, including the possibility that the “public” in a disaster might have a new kind of agency if it were able to actively, and in real time, disseminate information about what is going on. Also of interest, one supposes, is the application of the web — built as a communication system that would keep ticking after nuclear attack due to its distributed structure for passing along information — to disaster response.