Vital Systems Security

One of the blog phenomena of this electoral cycle has been 538, a blog written by a statistician who uses simulation techniques to create predictive models for electoral outcomes. I haven’t looked into the details, but in their broad structure these models are similar to the simulations that we have been looking at from the 1960s on in the context of defense and emergency management. They incorporate a bunch of electoral and demographic data, and then run simulations using a randomizer (like a Monte Carlo simulation). Effectively, this randomizer produces a large number of different “worlds” — which are just outcomes of the simulator. Back in the day it took weeks to run one such simulation. But now, with massive computing power, every time new data comes in — in the form of new polls — they plug them in and run the simulation again. It is then possible to run standard statistical analyses on the outcomes of these simulations, essentially treating them like an archive of past events. If you check out the charts on the right side of the home page, you see an “electoral vote distribution” graph. This essentially shows the number of simulations that produced a given outcome in terms of electoral votes. From this you get some probabilities that a given candidate will win or lose, but also win or lose with different combinations of state-level outcomes.

In fact, this sort of thing is becoming increasingly routine. I have seen similar techniques applied, for example, to baseball statistics. (One particularly interesting example was an attempt to use simulations to figure out how likely it was that the record for consecutive games with a base hit would be tied or broken — the answer is fairly likely). And this is definitely the technique used in many formal catastrophe models.

Environment and Planning A has a new issue out with many articles about biosecurity, including one by Lyle Fearnley on Syndromic Surveillance that draws on work that is familiar to all of us. Here is a table of contents for the issue:

Issue 7

Commentary

Theme issue: Biosecurity: spaces, practices, and boundaries
Guest editors: Nick Bingham, Gareth Enticott, Steve Hinchliffe

Guest editorial

Securing life: the emerging practices of biosecurity 1534 – 1551
Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham

Biosecurity after the event: risk politics and animal disease 1552 – 1567
Andrew Donaldson

The spaces of biosecurity: prescribing and negotiating solutions to bovine tuberculosis 1568 – 1582
Gareth Enticott

Safe from the wolf: biosecurity, biodiversity, and competing philosophies of nature 1583 – 1597
Henry Buller

Flexible boundaries in biosecurity: accommodating gorse in Aotearoa New Zealand 1598 – 1614
Kezia Barker

Signals come and go: syndromic surveillance and styles of biosecurity 1615 – 1632
Lyle Fearnley

Affect work and infected bodies: biosecurity in an age of emerging infectious disease 1633 – 1646
Claire Major

The practice of biosecurity in Canada: public health legal preparedness and Toronto’s SARS crisis 1647 – 1663
Estair Van Wagner

Here is an interesting piece from NY Times on some familiar issues we have been dealing with in the OEP research. 

The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop.

They also brought into sharp relief a new economic hazard. As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.

Apparently the price of ethanol went up by 19 percent in a month after the floods. The article goes on to construct a scenario that can take place once the share of biofuel in the overall supply of gasoline goes up to 20 percent:

Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.

Just as in the case of OEP once again a catastrophic event (storm and flood) in a medium inherently governed by stochastic processes (the weather) problematized as a potential threat to the stability of the economy as a vulnerable system (eventually leads to the question of resilience again as we saw in the case of war mobilization and inflation problem by the early 70s under Nixon). As the article argues, introduction of biofuel leads to a new level of vulnerability:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita interrupted a quarter of the nation’s oil production and closed dozens of refineries for weeks. Lines formed for the first time since the 1970s as gasoline spiked above $3 a gallon, a record at the time. The nation’s increasing dependence on crops for motor fuel adds another level of vulnerability from the weather.

I thought what is particularly interesting in this case is the opening up of a blockage as we pass a threshold with the emergence of biofuel. To my knowledge this is a very new development as corn, a conventional and critical source of food for populations is becoming a source of energy as the seemingly stable barrier between these two categories of vital domains are being linked for the first time as we demolished the barrier separating these two domains. Now we face with a new interface that is in need of being governed as one can even see in the concerns that IMF and World Bank have expressed their worries about this new phenomenon recently. 

It seems like at a technical level the first 3 generations of biofuels, there is nothing new about the process of transforming biomass into biofuel. It is a simple process of production of ethanol. However, what is interesting is that a company called Synthetic Genomics is is genetically engineering microorganisms to produce fuel directly from carbon dioxide on an industrial scale, which might be a possible solution to the problem of vulnerability mentioned above. I believe the founder of the company might be a familiar figure to those who are working on synthetic biology: Craig Venter, a member of the effort to map the human genome and the founder of The Institute for Genomic Research. An interesting convergence of VSS and Synthetic Biology and Nanotechnology blogs…