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Feb 17 (Reuters) – Iran will never shut down its Fordow uranium enrichment plant, a senior legislator was quoted as saying on Sunday, brushing off a demand from world powers who fear Tehran is working to develop an atomic weapons capability.
The Islamic republic, which insists its nuclear programme is purely peaceful, started building the plant inside a mountain in secret as early as 2006, to protect it from air strikes.
Last week, Reuters reported world powers were planning to offer to ease sanctions barring trade in gold and other precious metals with Iran in return for steps to shut down Fordow.
Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, referred to the reported offer on Sunday and dismissed any idea of a closure, the Iranian Students' News Agency reported.
"Fordow will never be shut down because … our national duty is to be able to defend our nuclear and vital centres against an enemy threat," Boroujerdi was quoted as saying by the agency.
"This suggestion (shutting down Fordow) is meant to help the Zionist regime (Israel)," he added.
Israel has threatened to attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to curb its nuclear programme, raising fears of a regional war.
The United States and its allies are particularly worried about Fordow because Iran is refining uranium there to a fissile concentration of 20 percent, which Iran says it needs for a medical reactor. Twenty percent purity is only a short technical step from weapons-grade uranium.
Western officials said last week the offer to ease sanctions barring gold and other precious metals trade with Iran would be presented at Feb. 26 talks between Iran and world powers in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
They acknowledged it represented a relatively modest update to proposals that the six major powers put forward last year.
Iran's parliament has little control over the Islamic Republic's foreign policy, which is decided by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
By Reuters
The Iran Project is not responsible for the content of quoted articles.


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Woman in Beautiful landscape of Taormina, Italy
Keywords / Tags
Beautiful, landscape, sicily, Taormina, Italy, sea, beach, woman, bikini, Free Photos, free images, royalty free, Free Cliparts
Similar Public Domain Pictures
License (CC0)
Free for commercial use - Public Domain Images: This image has been placed in the public domain by the author/original copyright holder. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See more Information.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Republicans Pick Foley to Challenge Malloy, but Foley Will Face Primary in August Peter Hvizdak\/New Haven Register The road to unseat Dannel Malloy is now forked with at least three paths, as the Republican Party\u2019s nomination process yielded a nominee, and two other candidates vowing to primary. Tom Foley, who topped the ticket in 2010, secured the party\u2019s nomination again. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton and state Sen. John McKinney both secured enough delegates to qualify for the August 12 primary. Foley secured 57 percent of the delegates; Boughton received support from 22 percent and McKinney earned support from 17 percent of the delegates at the convention. Although his win was contested, Foley still remains the Republican front runner to take on Malloy in the fall. \u201cConnecticut wants for a more promising direction under smarter policies and more competent leadership,\u201d Foley said, accepting his party\u2019s nomination. \u201cIn the campaign ahead I want to reach out to every voter in Connecticut to show them that we can turn this around that they don\u2019t have to leave here to get what they want and deserve. We can restore the pride and promise that Connecticut had before Dan Malloy became governor.\u201d The theme of the convention has been a \u201cConnecticut Comeback.\u201d Party leaders have stressed the need to unite to defeat Malloy. Still some Republicans remain concerned that a three-way race could split the party, despite candidates promising to fight a clean primary race. McKinney has gone so far as to say he\u2019d sign a pledge that he won\u2019t attack other Republican candidates, and suggested his promise to run a clean campaign may have tipped delegates to his side Saturday. \u201cI think at the end of the day, we were able to convince people we are going to run a clean campaign and that a primary won\u2019t hurt the party, and that my message will help the party move forward,\u201d McKinney said. Connecticut Democrats were largely optimistic about the prospect of a three-way primary. \u201cOn one hand, over the course of the primary, voters will see just what these Republican candidates are: pandering politicians who are out of touch with mainstream Connecticut and on the wrong side of the issues. On the other, we\u2019re going to have to bear months and months of empty promises, laughable claims on tax cuts without spending cuts, and more pandering to the NRA,\u201d\u00a0 Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo said in a statement Saturday. Connecticut Republican Party Chairman Jerry Labriola, Jr. said he\u2019s reassured that the candidates will focus on unseating their common enemy and focusing on his economic failures. \u201cAll the candidates have indicated that they will wage their primary races in a positive and constructive manner with the primary focus being on Dan Malloy and our underachieving economy,\u201d he said. \u201d Boughton\u2019s chosen running mate, the former Mayor of Groton, Heather Somers, and McKinney\u2019s chosen mate, former U.S. Comptroller, David Walker, both qualified for the primary as lieutenant governor candidates, but lost the party nomination to Penny Bacchiochi. She found herself embroiled in controversy Friday, after Bacchiochi alleged Walker\u2019s camp had started a disparaging \u201cwhisper campaign\u201d about her mixed-race family. With at least three candidates running and participating in the state\u2019s clean elections program, $4.5 million in public money could be injected into the state promoting Republican messaging which the candidates could use to hold Malloy accountable and further promote the Republican\u2019s message, McKinney said. Thus far Foley is the only gubernatorial candidate that has raised enough cash to qualify for up to $1.25 million in public campaign funds to assist his primary run. The other candidates may be hard pressed to keep pace, and a lack of funds could derail Boughton and McKinney\u2019s respective bids. \u201cThe potential is probably for a three-way primary, or no primary at all,\u201d State Party Chairman Jerry Labriola, Jr. said. Foley had led Republicans in the polls, and during the convention established an early delegate advantage that he never surrendered. After the first round of delegate counts, a flurry of activity combusted on the convention floor. McKinney fought to secure more delegates, while Boughton worked to keep all of his in line. Delegates began the usual process of switching. McKinney peeled off just enough to qualify for the primary. Speculation swirled around the convention floor as to what contributed to McKinney\u2019s late surge. His campaign worked the convention floor hard for candidates, but some insiders wonder whether Foley pushed him into the primary to build a firewall between the front-runner and his closest challenger Boughton. McKinney supporters pointed to his credentials and not convention floor tactics as the reason for his late surge. \u201cThere was no pressure, there was a pressure to get a candidate that can beat Malloy,\u201d said Stamford Republican Party Chair Eva Maldonado, a delegate who switched her vote from Foley to McKinney after the first round of balloting. The crowded field could play to the advantage of Boughton. \u201cI\u2019m going to let those folks fight over Fairfield county, and I\u2019m going to spend my time in the rest of the two-thirds of the state earning the votes of Republican voters across Connecticut,\u201d he said. A fourth candidate, former West Hartford Town Councilman Joe Visconti, hopes a petition can vault him into the August 12 primary. He needs more than 8,000 signatures to qualify for the primary ballot and says he has collected 3,500 thus far. Shelton Mayor Mark Lauretti fell short of earning enough to primary, and has not decided if he\u2019ll petition to get on the ballot. (This article was originally published on a different platform. Some formatting changes may have occurred.)


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Best Apps for Family Travel
by Matt Villano
What are the best apps for traveling families? Jen Leo knows, and she has shared some of insights with us.
Nobody knows the world of family travel apps like Jen Leo. I mean, nobody. She's a mom (her daughter is almost 4). She's a (decorated) travel writer. She's also a co-founder of Best Kids Apps, a site that reviews all the kid-oriented iPhone, iPad and Android apps as they become available. Naturally, then, when I set out to try and cull some of the best apps for traveling families, Leo hooked me up. She also answered a few questions about what we parents should seek in a travel app. Here's a part of our chat.
Q. What would you say is the single most important attribute of a family travel app?
A. For family travel apps, or apps for kids during travel, the most important attribute is depth. Does the app have enough to engage the child for an extended length of time? Whether you're on a road trip, or a cross-country flight, if the app doesn't hold the child's interest, it's not going to be of much use to you. For toddlers and preschoolers, My Playhome or any app from Toca Boca [such as Toca Kitchen] is great for lengthy engagement. For grade school kids, try Stack the States or Tales2Go, an app that lets your child, or the whole family, listen to audio stories of familiar books and tales for kids aged 3-preteen. For general travel apps like city guides, I think the most important attribute is accuracy with the map functions. You don't want to be in a city you don't know and follow the map directions religiously to an attraction only to not have it anywhere close to where the app says it should be.
Q. Generally speaking, in your experience, for what kinds of data are traveling parents using family travel apps?
A. I think traveling parents use apps to research travel opportunities on their mobile device, and then separately, find apps for their kids to use on the road, and those apps can be either educational, entertaining, or both. And it's not all about apps and games. I think parents are turning to buying TV shows, books and movies for their kids' tablets, and Smartphones too.
Q. A majority of the apps on your BestKidsApps site are iPhone and iPad apps. To what extent are there worthwhile offerings for Android and — gasp! — BlackBerry? Should traveling families even consider these devices, or are iPhones really the best bet right now?
A. I am an Apple fan. My personal opinion is that the apps available for iOS devices are superior and easier to use on an iPad or iPhone vs. an Android. And I can say that having used an Motorola Android phone for more than a year. However, not everyone can afford an iPad for their child, nor should they feel pressure to buy one for them. We've just published a list of great tablets for kids with moderate prices that will please both parents and kids alike.
Readers, what are YOUR favorite family travel apps? Leave a comment and let us know.


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MigrationMilitary Update
Blended retirement's lump-sum feature is enticing, but is it fair?
April 13, 2017
When the first wave of active-duty personnel who opt into the new Blended Retirement System (BRS) next year start to retire a decade later, they will face a decision on retired pay so unusual that the Department of Defense Board of Actuaries has called it inappropriate and asked Congress to rescind the choice.
The decision they will face might be explained like this:
Congratulations on your pending retirement. Do you want your full immediate annuity? Or do you prefer to get part of its value in a discounted lump sum at retirement, in return for forfeiting either one half or one quarter of your retired pay until age 67, when you would see full annuities restored?
Lump-sum buyouts of pension obligations are common in the corporate world but not the formula Congress has prescribed for setting military lump sums. The amounts offered will be too large to ignore for many retirees seeking to get out of debt, buy a home or start a business. But the lump-sum choice also will have members lowering the lifetime value of their own retirement packages significantly.
Most disturbing to actuaries and other critics of BRS is that Congress ordered lump sums calculated using "personal discount rates," a concept that pension guardians don't recognize as actuarially sound or perhaps even fair. Personal discount rates measure an individual's preference for current dollars over promised future dollars. The higher the discount rate assumed for folks being offered lump sums in exchange for reduced annuities, the greater the savings realized by the retirement plan's designers, in this case the U.S. government.
In January, DOD officials announced the formula to be used for setting an aggregate personal discount rate for enlisted and officer retirees. It will combine an inflation-adjusted, seven-year average of the Department of Treasury High-Quality Market (HQM) Corporate Bond Spot Rate Yield Curve at a 23-year maturity with an adjustment factor of 4.28 percentage points. That last factor seeks to capture some of what past studies have learned about military personal discount rates.
It's a formula incomprehensible to most of us. But Air Force Capt. Daniel Kopp, who has an economics degree from Purdue, is studying to be a financial planner and operates a financial advice blog called militarylifeplanning.com, has it figured out. He said that if adopted today the formula would support applying a discount rate of 7.3 percent in calculating lump-sum amounts under the BLS.
What sort of dollars are we talking about? DOD officials will not announce the actual personal discount rate to be used to illustrate lump-sum values until June 1. But here are calculations Kopp made that actuaries have deemed as reasonable.
If a 38-year-old E-7, completing a 20-year career, could retire today under the BRS formula, the lump-sum offer would be $174,454 in return for forfeiting 50 percent of retired pay until age 67, when this generation also reaches full retirement age for Social Security. The second lump-sum option for the same E-7, payable for accepting a 25 percent annuity cut until old age, would be $87,277.
Kopp looked at a 42-year-old officer retiring after 20 years in the rank of O-5. The lump-sum offer would be $309,132 to take a 50 percent retired pay cut until age 67, and $154,566 to accept a 25 percent annuity cut for 25 years.
Kopp also calculated total retirement dollars these retirees would forfeit to accept lump sums. From age 38 to 67, the E-7 who accepted a 50 percent cut in retired pay would get total retired pay of $488,363 — and would forfeit an equal amount to accept a lump sum of $174,454 at retirement. The E-7 who accepted the 25 percent cut until 67 would forfeit $244,182 to receive $87,277 at retirement.
To allow these calculations Kopp assumed retired pay cost-of-living adjustments of 3 percent to match annual inflation. He also plugged in that personal discount rate of 7.3 percent for both officers and enlisted retirees.
The BLS plan enacted for new entrants starting in 2018, with an opt-in option for current members having fewer than 12 years' service by then, is the vision of the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission. Besides a lump sum to attract a 50 percent annuity cut, the commission proposed one big enough to entice new retirees to suspend any retired pay until age 67.
"Research shows that the value a person attaches today to a stream of future payments is typically less than the cumulative amounts eventually paid out," the commission explained in its final 2015 report.
To estimate required lump sums, however, the commission used RAND Corp. analyses that assigned a personal discount rate of 12.7 percent to a 38-year-old E-7 retiring at 20 years, and a 6.4 percent rate for the 42-year-old officer retiring at 20 years as an O-5. That sharp disparity in rates dampened significantly lump sums projected for enticing enlisted to accept annuity reductions.
DOD asked Congress not to include the commission's lump-sum scheme in the final BRS plan. The House initially agreed while shaping its retirement reform legislation. Senators, however, favored the feature to hold down costs. So, the final compromise that became law allows lump-sum offerings for accepting a 50 percent and a 25 percent cut in retired pay until age 67.
The law also directs the department to establish lump-sum amounts based on the "discounted present value" of forfeited annuities using "average personal discount rates" derived from "reputable studies" of military personnel behavior.
Last April, as DOD officials focused on how to implement the Blended Retirement features, the American Academy of Actuaries sent a letter to the department roundly criticizing the law's mandate that personal discount rates be used to calculate lump-sum offerings at retirement.
"Such discount rates would result in lower lump sum amounts … than would be paid, for example, by private pension plans," the Academy complained.
Discount rates to calculate lump sums for pensions should be shaped by financial input only, not "individual preference or utility," two factors that influence personal discount rates, the Academy said. It added that there "are no generally accepted actuarial principles … for selecting or utilizing personal discount rates."
Discount rates typically used to calculate lump sums for corporate pension plans had ranged from 2 percent to 4 percent from 2010 to 2015, the Academy said.
The DOD Board of Actuaries delivered its own critique of the lump-sum scheme in its December report to the president and Congress on the Military Retirement Fund. Calculating lump sums using personal discount rates is "not an appropriate approach for discounting in a retirement plan environment," it said.
The board predicted accurately that the department would settle on "some type of aggregate personnel discount rate" for both enlisted and officers. But it also predicted the resulting lump sums could produce behaviors by retirees significantly different than what the commission or Congress had projected. It also could feed a belief the lump sums are designed "to take advantage of our service members."
Send comments to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120; email firstname.lastname@example.com; Twitter: @Military_Update.


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In Dave Boyle's neo-noir "Man from Reno," a Japanese crime novelist finds herself involved in a real San Francisco murder case that keeps getting more and more complicated — and romantically unsettling. Should be atmospheric; fog, at the very least, is promised.
Los Angeles Film Festival screenings at 6:40 p.m. June 15 and 9 p.m. June 18.
For more LA Film Festival news and reviews, be sure to check out www.dailynews.com/la-film-festival.


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Our History
It All Started with an Idea as Fresh as the Food
Nearly forty-five years ago, a young man named Sandy Beall hatched an idea that would lead to the creation of one of America's favorite brands. Ruby Tuesday was born of his vision of a restaurant where the food and drinks were handcrafted, fresh, and full of flavor, made with quality ingredients and prepared and served by friendly, caring people, passionate about their work. He wanted a place that was casual and comfortable but that looked great, too. It was a combination so unique and special that he and his team had to invent it themselves.
From that first restaurant near the campus of the University of Tennessee in 1972 to more than 600 restaurants across the United States and around the globe, Ruby Tuesday grew to become part of a large public foodservice company in 1982, to be its own independent, publicly traded company in 1996, and along the way to become one of the most well-known and beloved brands in casual dining.
Today and every day, the simple, founding philosophy of quality food and beverages, passionate people, and pride in everything we do continues. Our history is a proud one, and our future remains dedicated to making each and every one of our guests thoroughly satisfied and delighted every time they visit Ruby Tuesday.


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Source code loss is a very serious problem for many software developers. As most Visual Basic 5.0/6.0 applications were developed a long time ago, their source code (.vbp, .frm, and .bas files) has already been lost due to migrating to a new computer, replacing a hard drive, etc. Based on the experience of most of our customers, we can say that losing source code can be a tragedy. Just imagine that you have written a program, spending a lot of effort, time, and money, but now all that is left is the compiled program (the EXE file with DLL libraries).
Some day you may suddenly discover that your source code is gone. Maybe you have upgraded your PC or migrated your data to another cloud, or your hard drive just failed, and you do not have a backup. You are starting to panic. What should you do? Just take VB Decompiler and decompile most parts of your project! VB Decompiler will recover as much as possible of your source code with a higher success rate than any competitive product.
Visual Basic has two different compilation modes: p-code (pseudo code) and native code (assembler). VB Decompiler can restore the source code from p-code as close to the original one as possible, so after a few modifications you can get some really workable source code. Of course, in case of a program compiled to native code, the decompilation success rate will be lower, but you still can recover up to 70 percent of the original source code. VB Decompiler has a few powerful built-in tools: an x86/x64 disassembler, an emulator for assembler commands, and a tracing engine. Thanks to them, the result of decompiling the binary code will be very close to Visual Basic code. Because of the diversity of modern code optimization and code protection methods, the result will not always be perfect. But in a dire situation like that, VB Decompiler can really help you with software analysis and reverse engineering.
If you develop your software in Visual Studio 2022 (or in VS 2019, 2015 or lower), using .NET Framework - that's no problem! VB Decompiler can easily restore the code structure from the assembly tables and will be useful for disassembling and analyzing the IL code of Visual Basic .NET, C#, or other .NET assemblies.
VB Decompiler does not require that you install .NET Framework. It works fine on any 32-bit or 64-bit Windows system, as well as on any 32-bit or 64-bit Linux system (with Wine), without requiring that you install any additional software.
As you can see, VB Decompiler is an ideal source code analyzing and restoring tool. It is a must-have for VB developers who value their effort, time, and money.
Complete documentation:English German Chinese Japanese Russian Spanish Portuguese


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Welcome to our The Artiste in 3D Blog Hop!
In this hop, you will see a variety of wonderful projects featuring the 3D Object key of the Artiste Cricut cartridge! If you love creating paper crafts, you are at the right place and the Artiste Cricut Collection is a must-have.
If you are coming from Stephanie's Blog, you're in the right place. If this is your first stop, you can go to the beginning: Lucy's blog – Love 2 Create.
Supplies used are all Close to My Heart: Artiste Cricut Collection cartridge, Colonial White cardstock, Color-Ready Seam Binding Ribbon, Bitty Opaque Pearl Adhesive Gems, Opaques Pearl Adhesive Gems,
I chose the little booties on page 63 of the Artiste handbook for my 3D project. This was one of the first images that stuck out for me when I was browsing the new book with all the fun projects this cartridge has to offer. They remind me of some cute little shoes that my daughter has and these will hang in her room. I had a hard time deciding how to embellish these because I wanted to keep them simple. I chose the Bitty Pearls and Color-Ready Ribbon. I thought about adding some of the Rosette Ribbon but didn't have any at the time and thought they looked fine how they were. So cute!
Your next stop on the Artiste in 3D blog hop is Laura Wolff- ~ Scrappinsweetie's Escape.
Here is the complete lineup in case you get lost along the way:
1. Lucy ~ Love 2 Create
2. Darla ~ Caution: Crafting is Contagious
3. Stephanie ~ The Quilted Scrapper
4. Wendy Kessler ~ My Scrapbooking Blog
5. Laura Wolff- ~ Scrappinsweetie's Escape
6. Kindred Hearts ~ That Makes Total Cents
7. Theodora Stacey ~ Celebrate Crafts
8. Priscilla ~ Priscilla's Paperie
9. Michelle ~ My Flights of Fancy


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This is the Liberal-Conservative coalition government's week of data transparency. We've just had the salaries of everyone in the public sector earning more than the prime minister - and there are other major datasets to come. Including - in the near future - the coins database.
David Cameron kickstarted the process with a public letter to every government department using data.gov.uk. This is the full text:
Greater transparency across Government is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account; to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public spending; and to realise significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data.
The Government must set new standards for transparency, and our Coalition Programme for Government sets out a number of specific commitments. The Government's initial transparency commitments are set out below, alongside deadlines for publication. Limited exemptions on national security and personal privacy grounds will be permitted.
Central government spending transparency
• Historic COINS spending data to be published online in June 2010.
• All new central government ICT contracts to be published online from July 2010.
• All new central government lender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge.
• New items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010.
• All new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011.
• Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.
Local government spending transparency
• New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011.
• New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011.
Other key government datasets
• Crime data to be published at a level that allows the public to see what is happening on their streets from January 2011.
• Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants with salaries above £150,000 to be published in June 2010.
• Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants and NDPB officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale to be published from September 2010.
• Organograms for central government departments and agencies that include all staff positions to be published in a common format from October 2010.
Given the importance of this agenda, the Deputy Prime Minister and I would be grateful if departments would take immediate action to meet this timetable for data transparency, and to ensure that any data published is made available in an open format so that it can be re-used by third parties. From July 2010, government departments and agencies should ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.
Of course, the release of the datasets specified in the Coalition Programme is just the beginning of the transparency process. In advance of introducing any necessary legislation to effect our Right to Data proposals, public requests to departments for the release of government datasets should be handled in line with the principles underpinning those proposals: a presumption in favour of transparency, with all published data licensed for free reuse.
To oversee the implementation of our transparency commitments, a Public Sector Transparency Board will be established in the Cabinet Office, which will be chaired by the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude. Board representation will include a mix of external experts and data users, and public sector data specialists; members will include Tom Steinberg, one of the UK's leading experts on data transparency. The Board will provide support to departments as they deliver on the Government's transparency commitments set out in this letter. The Board will also be responsible for setting open data standards across the public sector, publishing further datasets on the basis of public demand, and – in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice – will further develop the Right to Data and advise on its implementation.
I look forward to welcoming rapid progress on this agenda in the coming weeks.
I am copying this letter to Cabinet colleagues and to Sir Gus O'Donnell.
David Cameron
What do you think - how open is the government being?


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Lost Coast
By Barbara Kaplan Bass
(Click images to enlarge)
We found ourselves at a crossroads: which route should we take from Humboldt down to Sausalito, the next stop in our California adventure? 101 would be faster, more direct and purposeful, but we had just come from communing with the Giant Redwoods, which left us—so to speak—peaced-out. And it was Thoreau who said, "The swiftest traveler is he who goes afoot." We weren't exactly "afoot," but we were open to exploring, taking the slower route, Thoreau's spirit of exploration and Robert Frost's "road less traveled" were guiding our way: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/And I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference."
We chose Route 1, a winding two laned road that would take us along the Pacific Coast. It was about an inch and a half on the map, not much out of the way. The few towns mentioned sounded alluring: Shelter Cove, Westport, Mendocino. We looked forward to breathtaking views of the Pacific coast, opportunities to explore virgin territory. Feeling adventurous, and maybe a bit overconfident, we headed away from the highway and drove south to the sea.
As we descended into this northern coastal forest, we discovered that we were farther from the ocean than expected. We would have to wait to glimpse the Pacific. When I put the nearest town into our GPS, we had another surprise: no cell service. What if there were an emergency? As we drove on, we noted sparsely placed call boxes located in small pull-off areas. Suppose we needed help and weren't near these links to civilization?
Engulfed by the forest, we saw the last of the afternoon light filtering hazily through the towering trees. Then we noticed that the road had no shoulder. We hadn't seen another car —or a place of business —since we began our descent. We soldiered not so merrily along, no longer feeling to be intrepid explorers out for an adventure.
As the sun began to sink behind the redwoods, we also realized that there were no streetlights on Route 1. Once the sun slipped below the horizon, we would be driving in pitch dark on a two-lane road with no shoulders, no cell service—only the occasional call box. It was then that our fuel gauge light began to flash on and off. We're out of gas?
My husband put the car in neutral and let it coast on the downhill slope. Our little adventure had become a scary trip into the unknown. In the 51 years that we have known each other, we have never run out of fuel. "We 're not empty yet," my husband said, as we coasted into the next pull-off. He pushed a few buttons on the callbox and the Highway Patrol answered. Hooray! Wait, what? "You won't come until we are completely out of gas? What if we hit empty and we're not near a callbox? How long will it take to reach us?"
As I think about this, we may have overreacted. What was the worst that might have happened? Anyway we could have flagged a passing motorist after perhaps an hour or two, then waited for the Highway Patrol to show up—or just spent the night in the pull-off. But these possibilities only occur to me in retrospect. Back in the forest, things looked bleak. However, right before we began scratching our last-will-and-testament into the paint on the car door, and drafting a final farewell note to our children, two "angels" appeared in a late model Ford: Claudia and her daughter, Christine. "Can we help you?" Why is it that when someone is kind to me, I start crying? I had been dry-eyed, but when these two Samaritans stopped to help us, I broke down in sobs. They didn't have extra gas, but they promised to follow us to Westport, the first town on the map, just twenty miles away.
Their presence calmed us enough to continue, still mostly in neutral, still panicking on every upgrade, checking every few seconds for Claudia and Christine in our rear-view mirror—but we finally made it out of the forest and were treated to the magnificent view of the North Pacific Coast. I would like to say that the view made it worthwhile, but it didn't. I still get palpitations thinking about what could have happened on that treacherous stretch of highway—bandits , Freddy Kruger, Michael Myers—they all haunt by dreams.
When we coasted into Westport, our sense of relief began to wane: a few scattered houses and no downtown. We may have been literally out of the woods but not figuratively. We pulled up alongside a lone citizen walking along the road and asked if there were a gas station in town. "No gas station," he said, "but there's a pump outside the general store," and he pointed across the street and down the road. "There's not another pump for 40 miles. That's why they call it the 'The Lost Coast.'"
Gas was $4.99 a gallon, but who cares? Hearing the gurgle of fuel through the hose was pure music, worth every penny. We waved goodbye to Claudia and Christine, blowing kisses of gratitude, and headed toward Mendocino with a full tank, relieved and now confident we would survive.
And we can still say that we have never run out of gas. We also learned that an inch and a half is not always an inch and a half—at least not on a map—and that there are helpers out there when we need them.
I must return to Robert Frost here – a different poem, but an insight into our experience: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep."
Barbara Kaplan Bass was a member of the English Department at Towson University for 43 years, teaching writing and American literature before retiring last June. She is now enjoying the luxury of spending time reading and writing and traveling. She is currently working on a book of essays—one for each year of her life—for her three granddaughters.


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I'm taking it upon myself to review as many Oktoberfests and Pumpkin Ales as I possibly can during the Halloween Season. All while listening to "Thriller".
Next up: Wachusett's Octoberfest Ale
Since I needed a break from pumpkin ales, I decided to go back to our old friend, the Oktoberfest Ale. It was while I was drinking this particular ale that I realized that I really don't know what defines an Oktoberfest ale. What separates it from other ales? Age, mid-range alcohol content and an amber color apparently. Oh, and it has to be brewed in Munich, otherwise it's not an authentic Oktoberfest beer.
Which might be why Wachusett went with a slightly different spelling of Octoberfest here. Their beer is definitely amber in color, a nice red-orange glow that would look at home on a pumpkin ale.
It's light and airy and crisp, a perfect complement to a Fall day. It's flavor is a little tart, a little sweet and very refreshing, if not overly complex. Unlike some other ales I might mention, it is not bland or lacking definition, but manages to find a balance between a light and pleasing flavor without sacrificing all of the complexity.
I definitely recommend it for people who don't really want to chug down a lager or any darker, more mysterious beer filled with things hiding in the abyss. This is a beer made for sitting and relaxing on the porch while the first Fall leaves begin to fall from the trees.
I give it a smiling scarecrow, a goofy dancing skeleton and a couple of ears of corn.
Also, you can probably only buy it in New England.


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Local farmers say they're not the one with issues
North Fork farmers are facing new government regulations they say will lead to too much paperwork — only to fix a problem that exists elsewhere in the U.S.
The new regulations, part of the federal government's Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2011, aim to protect U.S. consumers from contaminated food products by improving produce production and packaging safety. The regulations pertain mostly to water quality monitoring, worker training and cleanliness. They also require documentation that farmers are meeting these standards, as well as daily record-keeping of activities on the farm. The idea, according to the FDA, is that during an outbreak of food-borne illness, the records could help determine the source of the food involved.
But local farmers say all the large outbreaks of food-borne illness from U.S. produce is related to food grown elsewhere in the country.
"A lot of these issues that have come up over the years have been from the West Coast or very large growers — far from what I consider a family farm," said Phil Schmitt of Schmitt Family Farm in Riverhead. "They have huge facilities where they produce more in two hours than I produce all year. Meanwhile, we have the same type of regulation after us."
"I've been here for 25 years and I have never heard of any situation as a result of Long Island produce," said Long Island Farm Bureau executive director Joe Gergela. "We've never had an outbreak."
Before the new regulations were drafted, 14 FDA officials toured three North Fork farms in August 2011 to see how local farms were run.
"We showed them what the impact would be on small farms and the practicality of such regulations," Mr. Gergela said. "We're a bit disappointed."
Of all the regulations, the documentation process will likely have the biggest effect on local farmers.
"All the growers are practicing so many aspects of food safety, they are just not documenting them to the extent that this new rule is going to make them," said Sandra Menasha, a Cornell Cooperative Extension educator who trains local farmers to meet the new regulations.
Growers are going to need to be able to trace back every product that leaves their farm to the field where it was harvested, down to the hand that picked it, Ms. Menasha said. She has a 70-page document listing the different types of records growers will need to keep, which include daily temperate readings of refrigeration units, dates and times equipment is cleaned and sanitized and lists of visitors to the farm.
"We're trying to keep up with everything but it's getting harder," said John Kujawski, a potato farmer in Riverhead. "With all the stuff we have to do, it's almost like we have to get a full-time secretary here."
One upside to the new law is that some small farms will be exempt from the regulations. Farms with an average annual income of less than $500,000 for the past three years, which sell more of their products direct to consumers than to other distributors, would be considered exempt, according to the act.
Many area farms, however, do not qualify for the exemptions. Ms. Menasha estimates that about half of the North Fork's farmers will still have to deal with the new regulations.
Depending on the size of the farm, the FDA estimates it will cost farm owners between $5,000 and $30,000 annually to comply with the new regulations.
Lyle Wells, whose family has been farming in Riverhead for centuries, said it would probably cost him $30,000 to hire someone full-time to handle the documentation alone, aside from all the other requirements he will have to meet.
"On top of the increased cost of production — fertilizer, fuel, the increased burden of environmental stewardship — the record keeping and regulations make it harder for our farmers to compete , not only on the world market but the U.S. market," Ms. Menasha said. "We're all small family-run farms,"
These new food safety regulations are still up for debate, as the FDA will be accepting comments on them through Sept. 16, a 120-day extension from its original deadline of May 16.
Comments can be submitted electronically at www.regulations.gov or mailed to Division of Dockets Management (HFA-305), Food and Drug Administration, 5630 Fishers Lane, Room 1061, Rockville, MD 20852.


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Chemist hopes new chemical structures will jumpstart stalled antibiotic discovery efforts
"I routinely call hospitals and request their yearly antibiotic susceptibility testing data," said Washington University in St. Louis' Timothy Wencewicz. "The log might say, for example, that they've treated hundreds of patients for Acinetobacter baumanni, a bacterium brought into U.S. hospitals by soldiers wounded in the Iraq war, with 30 different antibiotics. The column listing the percentage of patients that responded to each antibiotic might say 1 percent or 2 percent. What happened to the other 99 percent of the patients? It's frightening. You should see at least one drug that has a 100 percent response rate. But you don't."
Listening to Wencewicz can be unsettling. Wencewicz, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, has carefully studied antibiotics and antibiotic resistance, and very little of what he has learned is reassuring.
On the other hand, since he knows most of the moves and counter-moves that have been made in this deadly game, he has at least a fighting chance of discovering antibiotics that will stem the rising tide of antibiotic resistance.
Over the past decade, most of the big pharmaceutical companies have dropped their antibiotic discovery programs. No new antibiotics were being found by traditional methods and new methods—including genome sequencing, combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening—had yielded almost nothing.
And so the burden of replenishing the antibiotic pipeline has fallen on the shoulders of small biotech companies and university labs, said Wencewicz. He is under no illusion that a small lab can compete with big companies that can assign hundreds of biologists and chemists to a problem.
"What we can do," he said, "is to discover new antibiotics made by plants, fungi or bacteria and learn enough about the details of how these molecules work that a big company will bite on and develop them."
The key, he said, is to find drug candidates with entirely new scaffolds (core structures). Every major class of antibiotics in use today was discovered between the 1940s and the 1960s, called the "golden age" of antibiotic discovery. Chemists have been able to deal with successive waves of resistance by tailoring the chemical groups on the periphery of antibiotic molecules—the "decoration"—while leaving the core intact, but this strategy is failing.
New molecular scaffolds that act on different biological targets are desperately needed to manage antibiotic resistance over the long term, he said. One promising candidate, an antibiotic made by a bacterium than infects plants, caught his attention because it contains an "enchanted ring," the beta-lactam ring that is found in penicillin and the cephalosporins, but the ring in the plant molecule acts against a different target than the traditional beta-lactam antibiotics.
Its target, glutamine synthetase, is an enzyme the microbes that cause tuberculosis (TB) use to build their cell envelope. About a third of the world's population has latent TB (people carry the bacterium but are not yet ill). Bacterial strains resistant to at least one of the first-line drugs used against TB have been found in every country the World Health Organization has surveyed.
The strange history of antibiotics
Wencewicz comes to WUSTL from the lab of Christopher T. Walsh, PhD, at Harvard Medical School. Walsh knows so much about antibiotic discovery that he is said to have served as a kind of walking institutional memory for the companies with whom he consulted.
As one of Walsh's last postdoctoral students, Wencewicz was given a unique parting gift: a "minus-80 freezer," or deep cold freezer that holds DNA constructs, cell lines, bacteria —almost everything the lab generated. In effect, Walsh gave Wencewicz his lab's long-term memory.
Last year Walsh and Wencewicz co-authored a review article in a Christopher T. Walsh honorary issue of The Journal of Antibiotics that summarized the last 50 years of antibiotic discovery. The golden age for the discovery of natural antibiotics of clinical significance lasted just 20 years, from 1940-1960, Wencewicz said.
The new miracle drugs were found in all sorts of odd places, such as the sewers of Sardinia, but many of them came from the soil. "(Pharmaceutical companies) Eli Lilly and Merck sent teams around the world to screen soil samples for new bacteria and fungi," Wencewicz said. "They would ferment the soil microbes and screen the fermentation broths for biologically active components. That's how almost all of the antibiotics were found."
"Some microbes in the soil have been producing bacteria-killing compounds for millions or billions of years," said Gautam Dantas, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology in the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
"Scientists have long debated whether these compounds are produced in the soil at concentrations approaching their therapeutic doses in human medicine or at much lower concentrations, which might mean they play roles other than as weapons," Dantas said. In the end, we know very little about soil bacteria, only about 1 in 100 of which can even be grown in culture.
But, Wencewicz said, a microbe cannot deploy these chemical weapons against the cellular processes it shares with other microbes unless it is itself immune to the chemical's effects. So as microbes evolved genes to synthesize antibiotics, they also evolve genes to disable the antibiotics.
"Bacteria have been under immense selective pressure for millions or billions of years to develop resistance," Dantas said. And so the soil is an immense reservoir of resistance. This is why antibiotic resistance emerges with such startling speed after new antibiotic drugs areintroduced, sometimes within a year. Pathogens just have to swap in resistance genes from the ancient reservoir of resistance in the soil microbes," Dantas said.
By 1960, Wencewicz said, the low-hanging fruit had been picked, and it became harder to find new molecules to replace ones hobbled by resistance. The "golden age of discovery" yielded to what Wencewicz calls a "golden age of medicinal chemistry."
Chemists at the big pharmaceutical companies added or altered chemical groups on antibiotics while leaving their core intact. In this way cephalosporin became cefalotin, cefuroxime, ceflazidime, ceflepime, and cetaroline, all of which have the same core structure.
But, he said, incremental modification of these agents does not fundamentally alter their interaction with their targets and it was inevitable that this strategy would eventually fail. "You're really just kicking the can down the road, because you're using the same chemical scaffold and the same biological target," he said. "It's not a long-term management plan for antibiotic resistance."
What happened to big pharma?
For a while, in the 1990s, huge advances in basic science and in laboratory technology promised to overleap the barriers of the past and lead to a new golden age. The two crucial developments were the ability to sequence the DNA of organisms (genomics) and souped-up synthetic chemistry, called combinatorial chemistry.
In his review, Wencewicz cites a paper by GlaxoSmithKline scientists describing an all-out attempt to use genomics and combinatorial chemistry in an antibiotic discovery program. The company spent 7 years identifying targets in the H. influenza genome that, if hit, would kill the bacterium, and then ran 70 high-throughput screens, at a cost of $1 million per screen, looking for chemical compounds that would be effective against those targets.
To everyone's shock, they found nothing.
This demoralizing result eventually led to the abandonment of the major antibiotic discovery efforts at GlaxoSmithKline. Most other big pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck—got out as well.
A Trojan Horse
Given the flaming wrecks littering the landscape of antibiotic discovery, it took a certain amount of courage to try again. And yet people did. Wencewicz was particularly inspired by the example of pharmaceutical scientist Steven J. Brickner.
Working on his own time, Brickner, PhD, and two colleagues developed a synthetic compound into linezolid, a drug effective against the superbug methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and other resistant Gram-positive bacteria.
Linezolid was the first member of an entirely new class of antibiotics to reach the market in 40 years.
"The development of a molecule with a new structure and new mechanism of action was a game changer," Wencewicz said. "Brickner redefined how collaborative drug discovery works and set a new standard for bringing a drug to market.
To duplicate Brickner's success Wencewicz has to find a compound with a new structure. "Every day there are new molecules published and patented in the literature," he said. Most of these potential drug candidates are not pursued, and so old patent literature is a great place to look for new antibiotic candidates, Wencewicz said.
He is currently working on a molecule called tabtoxin, which is produced by a pathogen that causes wildfire disease in plants. "I was interested in this molecule because of its unusual structure," he said. "It contains abeta-lactam, the enchanted ring that gives the penicillins their antibiotic properties but it hits a different biological target than penicillin."
The penicillins target enzymes called transpeptidases that crosslink molecules in a bacterium's cell wall, giving it strength. If those enzymes are inhibited the cells lose integrity and rupture.
Tabtoxin, however, acts against an enzyme called glutamine synthetase that converts glutamic acid to glutamine, an essential amino acid that plays many biochemical roles. When the enzyme is blocked by the drug, two things happen: toxic levels of ammonia build up in the cell, and the cell is starved of an essential amino acid.
"In my lab we want to understand at a fundamental molecular level why this beta-lactam inhibits glutamine synthetase and not transpeptidases," Wencewicz said. "This might open up a new chapter in the pharmacology of the enchanted ring."
And there's something else. Most antibiotics fail because they can't cross the bacterial membrane, he said. Getting a molecule inside a bacterium is more difficult than getting it into a human cell because bacteria are surrounded by multi-layered, selectively permeable cell envelopes. One reason naturally occurring antibiotics such as tabtoxin are attractive to drug developers is that they have a built-in delivery system as well as a killing mechanism.
The high-throughput screening campaign launched by GlaxoSmithKline ultimately failed, Wencewicz said, because the libraries of chemical compounds they tested for antibacterial activity were designed to hit targets in cells like ours. The bacterial envelope is much harder to cross and most of the chemicals couldn't get in the cells.
Tabtoxin has two parts, connected by a bond. One is a nontoxic amino acid, threonine, and the other is a toxic compound, tabtoxinine beta-lactam. The bacteria takes in the molecule thinking it is getting a free amino acid lunch, cleaves the bond to get access to the amino acid and inadvertently releases the potent toxin.
"You won't find that type of fined tuned delivery system in a library of synthetic compounds sitting in a pharmaceutical company," Wencewicz said. "Only nature engineers mechanisms like that."
Wencewicz said tabtoxin might be useful against multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, because mycobacteria express glutamine synthetase on the outside of the cell and rely heavily on the enzyme to build their cell envelopes. "A group at UCLA has shown that inhibiting the enzyme shuts down TB in animal models," he said, "and that has encouraged us."
"I'm optimistic," Wencewicz said. "There's very little in the pipeline right now, but as clinical resistance rises and new antibiotic approvals decline, the problem will command more attention. I feel there will be an upswing in antibiotic discovery, and, through a coordinated effort by the government, companies, physicians, and universities, an outpouring of new drugs."


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Posts Tagged aerospace
Feynman's Minority Report and Top-Down Design
Posted by Bill Storage in Aerospace, Engineering, Probability and Risk, Systems Engineering on November 11, 2013
On reading my praise of Richard Feynman, a fellow systems engineer and INCOSE member (International Council on Systems Engineering) suggested that I read Feynman's Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Enquiry. He said I might not like it. I read it, and I don't like it, not from the perspective of a systems engineer.
Challenger explosion, Jan. 28, 1986
I should be clear on what I mean by systems engineering. I know of three uses of the term: first, the engineering of embedded systems, i.e., firmware (not relevant here); second, an organizational management approach (relevant, but secondary); third, a discipline aimed at design of assemblies of components to achieve a function that is greater than those of its constituents (bingo). Definitions given by others are useful toward examining Feynman's minority report on the Challenger.
Simon Ramo, the "R" in TRW and inventor of the ICBM, put it like this: "Systems engineering is a discipline that concentrates on the design and application of the whole (system) as distinct from the parts. It involves looking at a problem in its entirety, taking into account all the facets and all the variables and relating the social to the technical aspect."
Howard Eisner of GWU says, "Systems engineering is an iterative process of top-down synthesis, development, and operation of a real-world system that satisfies, in a near optimal manner, the full range of requirements for the system."
INCOSE's definition is pragmatic (pleasantly, as their guide tends a bit toward strategic-management jargon): "Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems."
Feynman reaches several sound conclusions about root causes of the flight 51-L Challenger disaster. He observes that NASA's safety culture had critical flaws and that its management seemed to indulge in fantasy, ignoring the conclusions, advice and warnings of diligent systems and component engineers. He gives specific examples of how NASA management grossly exaggerated the reliability of many systems and components in the shuttle. On this point he concludes, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." He describes a belief by management that because an anomaly was without consequence in a previous mission, it is therefore safe. Most importantly, he cites the erroneous use of the concept of factor of safety around the O-ring seals between the two lower segments of the solid rocket motors by NASA management (the Rogers Commission also agrees that failure of these O-rings was the root cause of the disaster). An NASA report on seal erosion in an earlier mission (flight 51-C) had assigned a safety factor of three, based on the seals having eroded only one third of the amount thought to be critical. Feynman replies that the O-rings were not designed to erode, and hence the factor-of-safety concept did not apply. Seal erosion was a failure of the design, catastrophic or not; there was no safety factor at all. "Erosion was a clue that something was wrong; not something from which safety could be inferred."
But later Feynman incorrectly states that establishing a hypothetical propulsion system failure rate of 1 in 100,000 missions would require an inordinate number of tests to determine with confidence. Here he seems not to grasp both the exponential impact of redundancy on reliability, and that fault tree analysis could confidently calculate low system failure rates based on historical failure rates of large populations of constituent components, combined with the output of FMEAs (failure mode effects analyses) on those components in the relevant systems. This error does not impact Feynman's conclusions about the root cause of the Challenger disaster. I mention it here because Feynman might be viewed as an authoritative source on systems engineering, but is here doing a poor job of systems engineering.
Discussing the liquid fuel engines, Feynman then introduces the concept of top-down design, which he criticizes. It isn't clear exactly what he means by top-down. The most charitable reading would be a critique of NASA top management's overruling the judgments of engineering management and engineers; but, on closer reading, it's clear this cannot be his meaning:
The usual way that such engines are designed (for military or civilian aircraft) may be called the component system, or bottom-up design. First it is necessary to thoroughly understand the properties and limitations of the materials to be used (for turbine blades, for example), and tests are begun in experimental rigs to determine those. With this knowledge larger component parts (such as bearings) are designed and tested individually…
The Space Shuttle Main Engine was handled in a different manner, top down, we might say. The engine was designed and put together all at once with relatively little detailed preliminary study of the material and components. Then when troubles are found in the bearings, turbine blades, coolant pipes, etc., it is more expensive and difficult to discover the causes and make changes.
All mechanical-system design is necessarily top-down, in the sense of top-down used by Eisner, above. This use of the term is metaphor for progressive functional decomposition from mission requirements down to component requirements. Engineers cannot, for example, size a shuttle's fuel pumps based on the functional requirement of having five men and two women orbit the earth to deploy a communications satellite. The fuel pump's performance requirements ultimately emerge from successive derivations of requirements for subsystem design candidates. This design process is top-down, whether the various layers of subsystem design candidates are themselves newly conceived systems or ones that are already mature products ("off the shelf"). Wikipedia's article and several software methodology sites incorrectly refer to design using off-the-shelf components as bottom-up – not involving functional decomposition. They err by failing to consider that piecing together existing subsystems toward a grander purpose still first requires functional decomposition of that grander purpose into lower-level requirements that serve as a basis for selecting existing subsystems. Simply put, you've got to know what you want a thing to do, even if you build that thing from available parts – software or hardware – in order to select those parts. Using off-the-shelf software subsystems still requires functional decomposition of the desired grander system.
F-117 frontal view
Off-the-shelf is a common strategy in aerospace, primarily for cost and schedule reasons. The Lockheed F-117, despite its unique design, used avionics taken from the C-130 and the F-16, brakes from the F-15, landing gear from the T-38, and other parts from commercial and military aircraft. This was for expediency. For the F-117, these off-the-shelf components still had to go through the necessary requirements validation, functional and stress testing, certification, and approval by all of the "ilities" (reliability, maintainability, supportability, durability, etc) required to justify their use in the vehicle – just as if they were newly designed. Likewise for the Challenger, the choice of new design vs. off-the-shelf should have had no impact on safety or reliability if proper systems engineering occurred. Whether its constituents were new designs or off-the-shelf, the shuttle's propulsion system is necessarily – and desirably – the result of top-down design. Feynman may simply mean that the design and testing phases were rushed, that omissions were made, and that testing was incomplete. Other evidence suggests this; but these omissions are not a negative consequence of top-down design, which is the only sound process for the design of aircraft and other systems of systems.
It is difficult to imagine any sound basis for Feynman's use of – and defense of – bottom-up design other than the selection of off-the-shelf components, which, as mentioned above, still entails functional decomposition (top-down design). Other uses of the term appear in discussions of software methodologies. I also found a handful of academic papers that incorrectly – incoherently, in my view – equate top-down with analysis and deduction, and bottom-up with synthesis and induction. The erroneous equation of analysis with deductive reasoning pops up in Design Thinking and social science literature (e.g., at socialresearchmethods.net). It fails to realize that analysis as a means of inferring cause from observed result (i.e., what made this happen?) always entails inductive reasoning. Geometry is deduction; science and engineering are inherently inductive.
The use of bottom-up shows up in software circles in a disparaging sense. It describes a state of system growth that happens with no conscious design beyond that of an original seed. It is non-design, in a sense. Such "organic growth" happens in enterprise software when new features, not envisioned during the original design, are later bolted-on. This can stem from naïve mismanagement by those unaware of the damage done to maintainability and further extensibility of the software system, or through necessity in a merger/acquisition scenario where the system's owners are aware of the consequences but have no other alternatives. This scenario obviously does not apply to the hardware or software of the Challenger; and if it did, such bottom-up "design" would be a defect of the system, not a virtue.
Hydro-mechanical system components in 737 gear bay
Aerospace has in its legacy an attitude – as opposed to a design method – sometimes called a bottom-up mindset. I've encountered this as a form of resistance to methodological system-design-for-safety and the application of redundancy. In my experience it came from expert designers of electro-hydro-mechanical subsystems. A legendary aerospace systems designer once told me with a straight face, "I don't believe in probability." You can trace this type of thinking back to the rough and ready pioneers of manned flight. Charles Lindbergh, for example, said something along the lines of, "give me one good engine and one good pilot." Implicit in this mentality is the notion that safety emerges from component quality rather than from system design. The failure rates of the best aerospace components tend to vary from those of average components by factors of two or ten, whereas redundancy has an exponential effect. Feynman's criticism of top-down and endorsement of bottom-up – whatever he meant by it – could unfortunately be seen as support for this harmful and oddly persistent notion of bottom-up.
Toward the end of Feynman's report, he reveals another misunderstanding about design of life-critical systems. In the section on avionics, he faults NASA for using 15-year-old software and hardware designs, concluding that the electronics are obsolete. He claims that modern chip sets are more reliable and of higher quality. This criticism runs contrary to his complaint about top-down design of the main engines, and it misses a key point. The improvements in reliability of newer chips would contribute only negligibly toward improved availability of the quad-redundant system containing them. More importantly, older designs of electronic components are often used in avionics precisely because they are old, mature designs. Accelerated-life testing of electronics is known to be tricky business. We use old-design chips because there is enough historical usage data to determine their failure rates without relying on accelerated-life testing. Long ago at McDonnell Douglas I oversaw use of the Intel 87C196 chip for a system on the C-17 aircraft. The Intel rep told me that this was the first use of the Intel 8086-derivative chip in a military aircraft. We defended its use, over the traditional but less capable Motorola chips, on the basis that the then 10+ year history of 8086's in similar environments was finally sufficient to establish a statistical failure rate usable in our system availability calculations. Interestingly, at that time NASA had already been using 8086 chips in the shuttle for years.
Feynman's minority report on the Challenger contains misunderstandings and technical errors from the perspective of a systems engineer. While these errors may have little impact on his findings, they should be called out because of the possible influence they may have on future generations of engineers. The tyranny of pedigree, as we saw with Galileo, can extend a wrong idea's life for generations.
That said, Feynman makes several key points about the psychology of engineering management that deserve much more attention than they get in engineering circles. First among these in my mind is the fallacy of induction from near-misses viewed as successes, thereby producing undue confidence about future missions.
"His legs were weary, but his mind was at ease, free from the presentiment of change. The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in the logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident, as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to retain a believing conception of his own death."
– from Silas Marner, by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans Cross), 1861
Text and aircraft photos copyright 2013 by William Storage. NASA shuttle photos public domain.


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Thursday, 22 November 2012 10:41 AM EST
PARIS — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is in court to answer questions about suspicions he illegally accepted donations from France's richest woman to fund his 2007 election campaign.
For whatever reason — political or personal vendettas, public dismay over years of suspected scandals — prosecutors in France have been increasingly going after their former top leaders.
Here are cases involving French presidents or premiers that brought two acquittals and two convictions, while two — including Sarkozy's — are pending.
Sarkozy lost his presidential immunity when he lost the presidency to Socialist Francois Hollande. Sarkozy was questioned by a Bordeaux judge who will decide whether the former president will be charged with taking advantage of Bettencourt, 90, during the 2007 election. Sarkozy could either face preliminary charges or be given special witness status with the possibility of facing charges later, his lawyer said.
The former president, who turns 80 next week, was found guilty of embezzling public funds to illegally finance the conservative party that he long led — dating back to his 18-year stint as mayor of Paris. He was handed a two-year suspended sentence. Chirac was targeted in a string of suspected corruption and illegal party financing cases over the years, but was immune from prosecution while head of state from 1995 to 2007.
Juppe, Chirac's first prime minister, was convicted in 2004 over the same party funding scheme, when he served as finance director at Paris City Hall under Chirac. Juppe received a suspended prison sentence and one-year ban from elected office from an appeals court — a far more lenient penalty than the original, and potentially career-ending, 10-year ban handed down by a lower court. Juppe proved that French politicians can bounce back from scandal: Today mayor of Bordeaux, he served as both foreign minister and defense minister under Sarkozy and remains a conservative party heavyweight.
Villepin, Chirac's last prime minister, was acquitted last year of charges claiming that he took part in a murky smear campaign against Sarkozy — his archrival — exposing the personal nature of some scandals. Villepin made his name internationally as France's leading voice of opposition to the U.S. drive to war that brought down Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Villepin, whose aristocratic image contrasts with Sarkozy's feisty persona, struggled and badly failed in his own presidential ambitions.
Balladur, a former Sarkozy mentor who was prime minister in the early 1990s, has denied allegations that his failed presidential campaign in 1995 — when Chirac won — may have received illegal kickbacks related to a defense deal between France and Pakistan. A Lebanese-born businessman suspected of a role in a bribery scandal involving a 1994 sale of French submarines to Pakistan has filed suit against Balladur for allegedly benefiting in the so-called Karachi affair. Investigators are examining whether the case had ties to a 2002 attack in Karachi, Pakistan that killed 11 French naval construction workers and four others.
On the Socialist side, Fabius, a former prime minister, was acquitted in 1999 of manslaughter in a scandal involving thousands of people who were given blood transfusions tainted with the virus that causes AIDS. France's high court also threw out cases against doctors who had prescribed tainted blood products before 1985, arguing they did not know the products might be deadly. Fabius, described as a 37-year-old political wunderkind when Francois Mitterrand chose him as prime minister in 1984, is still active in politics: He is Hollande's foreign minister.
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Here's my quick response to the Brookings report released yesterday on the long term effects of vouchers on a randomized pool of participants in New York City.
Let's say I conducted a study in which I rented a fleet of helicopters and used those helicopters to, on a daily basis, transport a group of randomly selected students from Camden, NJ to elite private day schools around NJ and Philadelphia. I then compared the college attendance patterns of the kids participating in the helicopter program to 100 other kids from Camden who also signed up for the program but were not selected and stayed in Camden public schools. It turns out that I find that the helicopter kids were more likely to attend college – therefore I conclude logically that "helicopters improve college attendance among poor, minority kids." The simple policy solution then is to rent more helicopters and use them to send kids, well, wherever. After all, it's the helicopters that matter????? Clearly, that would be a ridiculous assertion.
Similarly, the "major" findings of the new Brookings study were that, in particular, black participants in the voucher program seemed to have an increased likelihood of attending college. The study involved a randomized pool of individuals who qualified, applied and received the vouchers (and attended a private school) and those who qualified, applied and didn't receive the vouchers.
The study purports to find [or at least the media spin on it] that "vouchers" as a treatment, worked especially for black students. I won't spend my time quibbling over design and statistical issues here, because I think the simplest issue to address – the big one – is the definition of the treatment itself.
This is not necessarily a study of whether "vouchers" as a treatment affect long run outcomes. Just like my hypothetical above had little to do with helicopters! Rather, it is a study of using "vouchers" as a funding mechanism to place a relatively small sample of low income minority children into a set of schools with fewer low income and minority peers. Schools that happen to be private schools. So it's not really a study of whether "private schools" are more (or less) effective either. As such, the study really has little or no policy implications for "voucher systems" themselves, or private schooling.
Personally, I was struck to find that the only reference to peer group or peer composition was in a single sentence at the end of the report – but this sentence really says it all:
To the extent that student learning is dependent on peer quality the impacts reported here could easily change.
Yeah… that's no throwaway line here! In fact it has the potential to completely re-frame the entire paper.
So what is the treatment?
Well, the use of a "voucher" system to alter the educational setting for a group of kids is most certainly not the treatment. Voucher is merely the mechanism used here to achieve the treatment. It may be a policy mechanism that is useful under limited circumstances to achieve changes in educational setting. But the "voucher" is NOT the treatment.
And the use of vouchers in this narrow context may have few if any policy implications for new voucher programs in Indiana or Louisiana if they do not result in low income minority students being better integrated with higher income peers predisposed to have college aspirations.
The sector of schooling is most certainly not the treatment either – public or private school – catholic or non-religious school. While the sector of schooling is a variable in this analysis, it also may or may not have anything to do with the characteristics of the educational setting that most influenced college going behaviors. There's a whole separate body of literature on that topic that is notably absent in this report. And it's quite possible that we could find a policy mechanism which has nothing to do with either vouchers or private, or catholic schools which shifts more low income minority students into educational settings that promote college going behaviors.
So before we get in some huge tizzy about "vouchers" and "private school" effects, lets go back and define the treatment in this study for what it actually is and then try to figure out what it means in terms of effective policies for increasing college attendance among low income and minority students.
Tangent: I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
The voucher offer also has a much larger impact than does exposure to a more effective teacher. Elementary school teachers who are one standard deviation more effective than the average teacher are estimated to lift their students' probability of going to college by 0.49 percentage points at age 20, relative to a mean of 38 percent, an increment of 1.25 percent (Chetty et al. 2011b). If one extrapolates that finding (as the researchers do not) to three years of effective teaching, the impact is 3.75 percent. The impacts identified here for African American students—an increase of 24 percent—are many times as large.
Basically, what this paragraph/extrapolation boils down to is the distinct possibility that the variations in setting (largely peer group) achieved in this voucher study yield what appear to be stronger effects than the measured (really noisy measured – which may matter here) variations in teacher effect in the Chetty study. In other words, quite possibly… peer composition is actually the strongest in-school effect on long term student outcomes!?? [note that this is speculative based on the somewhat questionable comparison made in the above paragraph].
Second Tangent: Quite honestly, the cost comparison comments in this paragraph are so shoddy, poorly documented, etc. that they do much to undermine the report and should be cut.
These impacts are somewhat larger than the long-term impacts of the much more costly class-size intervention in Tennessee. Dynarski et al. (2011) estimate that being assigned to a smaller class in the early elementary grades increased college enrollment rates among African Americans by 19 percent (5.8 percentage points on a base of 31 percent). Reduction of class size in Tennessee was estimated to cost $12,000 per student (Dynarski et al. 2011), whereas the social cost of the SCSF intervention was about $4,200 per student to the foundation and reduced costs to the taxpayer by reducing the number of students who would require instruction within the public sector. If the government had paid for the voucher, the expenditure could have taken the form of a simple transfer from the public sector to the private sector, which in the long run need not add to the per-pupil cost of education. In fact, it could decrease costs because Catholic schools spend less on average than public schools. Around the time of the SCSF evaluation, New York City public schools spent more than $5,000 per student, as compared to $2,400 at Catholic schools (Howell and Peterson 2006, 92).
First, this paragraph and the sources it cites provide little if any solid evidence regarding "costs" and "expenditures" citing only that the Archdiocese of NY at the time said so (p. ii) regarding Catholic school costs being about $2,400 per pupil (and ballparking out of nowhere the $5k public district figure). This paragraph also compares estimated expenditures on one strategy (class size reduction) in one context (TN) and point in time to partial subsidies on another strategy in another context at another point in time. A while back, I criticized another report, also by Matt Chingos (nothin' personal, I generally like his work) in which he referred to Class Size Reduction as the "Most Expensive School Reform" without legitimately comparing the costs of CSR to any other reform. The above paragraph is strikingly similar in its gaping holes of logic and evidence. I could go on and on. The authors also make no attempt to provide reasonable assumptions & estimates for the full cost of operating and scaling up a large scale voucher system. As such, this stuff really has not place in this paper. For a more thorough discussion/analysis of public/private school spending, see: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/private-schooling-US
Since the authors didn't actually conduct any real analysis of schooling resources/finances, they really shouldn't have gone there in their conclusions. This kind of back of the napkin, half-baked cost savings assertion really cheapens a study that does have some interesting findings to offer.


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Corrections Department #6: Stryker Redux
April 5, 2011
No. At least, not quite.
Leslie Stevens took sole screen credit for directing Stryker, aka "Fanfare For a Death Scene," the trashy Daystar Productions pilot we examined last month. However, Stryker shared an unfortunate fate with The Haunted, the other Daystar pilot I wrote about in that piece: both saw their original director fired and replaced by the producer, arguably to the detriment of the finished product. In fact, Stryker's production proved far more chaotic than that of The Haunted.
The initial director of Stryker was actually Walter Grauman, a highly regarded episodic and telefilm director with a forceful, action-driven style and a resume the size of the phone book. Though his credits also include Matinee Theater, Naked City, and over fifty Murder She Wrote segments, Grauman was best known for his association with producer Quinn Martin. He established the look of The Untouchables, directed the pilot for The Fugitive, and helmed many episodes of QM's later detective shows, especially The Streets of San Francisco and Barnaby Jones.
Grauman worked on Stryker for about half of its official production schedule, before Leslie Stevens, in his capacity as producer, fired Grauman and took over as director.
Initially, Grauman was hired to direct Stryker in July 1963, while he was on location in England directing the feature 633 Squadron. Stryker, set to start filming on October 7, was delayed for a week and a half, and then another six weeks, for reasons that are unclear. During the hiatus, Grauman directed a single episode of Burke's Law, but nothing else that fall; likely the delay cost him work, as it was too late for Grauman to book any other jobs during the original shoot dates.
When filming finally began on December 9, 1963, Grauman's original director of photography was a journeyman named Monroe Askins, whose most substantial TV credits were a number of cheap action shows (Highway Patrol, Bat Masterson, Sea Hunt) for Ziv. The pilot had a budget of $256,000 and a ten-day schedule, of which Grauman shot at least six days. Grauman directed interiors at the Goldwyn Studio (also home to The Outer Limits) and exteriors, all at night, on MGM Lot #2, the Bel Air Sands Hotel (off Sunset Boulevard next to the 405 Freeway), and the Huntington Hartford Theater (now the Ricardo Montalban Theater, on Vine Street between Hollywood and Selma).
(The Hartford Theater provided both the exteriors and interiors for the climactic concert sequence. The Bel Air Sands probably doubled for the exterior of Stryker's apartment, and the MGM backlot – where most of the exteriors for The Outer Limits were staged – was likely the site for the opening scenes outside the asylum, among others.)
At the beginning of his second week on Stryker, Grauman reported to work for more location shooting at the Wilshire-Comstock Apartments in Westwood (later the site of Freddie Prinze's suicide). Leslie Stevens was already there, and Grauman was informed that his services would no longer be needed. Askins was also replaced, by The Outer Limits' primary cinematographer, Conrad Hall. Hall had just wrapped on "The Bellero Shield," The Outer Limits' final segment of the year before a two-week Chrismas hiatus, on December 16, and it is possible that his availability triggered the timing of the personnel changes.
Why was Grauman fired? We may never know: Grauman, apparently, was never fully informed, and Stevens died in 1998. The two men had never worked together before, and it is possible that Stevens took exception to some aspect of Grauman's distinctive style. But Stevens, on Stoney Burke and The Outer Limits, favored directors who took visual chances, and who shared Grauman's love of bold compositions and aggressive camera moves: Leonard Horn, Tom Gries, Paul Stanley. Stevens himself worked that way. It is hard to fathom any obvious aesthetic clash between the two men.
Here is a purely speculative hypothesis: that Stevens saw the first week's rushes, recognized the deficiencies in the script to an extent that he hadn't before, and felt that the only hope for salvaging the turkey that was Stryker was to take the reins himself. But whatever Stevens thought he could add obviously didn't help.
(A simple clash of egos is another possibility. Grauman and Stevens were both known as strong personalities.)
As Stevens struggled to assemble something usable out of the mess of Stryker, the pilot went over schedule and far over budget (Grauman estimated, perhaps too generously, a final tally of $1 million). In addition to finishing the script, Stevens reshot most of Grauman's work. During a recent viewing of Stryker, Grauman recognized only some of the Huntington Hartford sequences as his own.
For Grauman, being fired represented a psychological blow, but not a major career setback. In January of 1964, he directed some of his finest work, the "Angels Travel on Lonely Roads" two-parter for The Fugitive (featuring Eileen Heckart as Sister Veronica, a performance so memorable that the character was brought back three years later) and a pair of Kraft Suspense Theaters. One of those, "Knight's Gambit," was a routine pilot that didn't sell, but the other, "Their Own Executioners," was an extraordinary sophisticated piece of work, featuring a script by Luther Davis (Grauman's collaborator on his best film, Lady in a Cage) and a deeply moving performance by Herschel Bernardi.
One reason I filed this piece in the dreaded "Corrections Department" is that I committed a lazy gaffe in the original Stryker essay. I included the bumper-level shot of a car passing the camera in a list of typical Conrad Hall compositions, but in fact, it is a signature Walter Grauman shot; so much so that other directors I have interviewed have gently mocked Grauman's fondness for low-angled framings of automobiles and buildings. I love these images – in an abstract way they express the prosperity, the urgency of the Camelot era – and they are very much Walter's.
The camera starts below Richard Egan's Lincoln Continental . . . and then tilts up to emphasize the enormity of his digs. I believe that Stryker's office exterior, seen here, was actually the Wilshire-Comstock building, so this may have been one of the last shots Grauman completed.
Author's Note: Although I have interviewed Walter Grauman on several occasions, we never discussed Stryker. Nearly all the information in this post, including the initial tip regarding Grauman's involvement, was contributed by a fellow historian who prefers to remain anonymous. The contributor's sources were his own interviews with Grauman, and Grauman's papers at the USC Cinema-Television Library. His generosity in allowing me to publish this research is gratefully acknowledged.
4 Responses to "Corrections Department #6: Stryker Redux"
April 7, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Thanks for another very interesting story.
I think you say Walter Grauman was hired in July 1963 and filming was originally going to start October 7. But then there was a week and a half delay followed by another six week delay. That would indicate shooting didn't start until December 1963.
Richard Egan had starred as Jim Regigo in "Empire" during the 1962-3 season. Egan came back in the 1963-64 season as "Redigo". "Redigo" was quickly canceled although the last of the 15 episodes wasn't aired until December 31, 1963.
Even if "Redigo" was canceled by October 1963, how could Egan have been ready to start shooting a new pilot by October 7?
I wonder if another actor had originally been signed to play Stryker and that perhaps the seven and a half week delay was needed to find a replacement.
April 8, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Anything you can find out would be fascinating.
It doesn't seem likely Leslie Stevens would have hired Walter Grauman in July 1963 without having a star already on board. Egan definitely wouldn't have been able to sign on for the "Stryker" pilot in July with "Redigo" starting in September. I suppose it's possible Grauman was going to help find the right star, but I kind of doubt it.
I think I read that Leslie Stevens signed Jack Lord to a long term contract for televison and movies at the time the fine "Stoney Burke" was started. "Stoney Burke" was canceled after the 1962-63 season, so Lord would have been availabe in July 1963. Lord could have been good as Stryker, better than Egan. Maybe Lord backed out when he saw there were quality problems.
I thought the "Styker" premise was promising even though the pilot was flawed. I didn't think Egan was the right guy to play the hero, even though I liked him a lot in "Empire". But I did like Dee Hartford as Stryker's sexy secretary. I wish Stevens had given her more to do.
I'm a little surprised that the "Stryker" pilot may have pre-dated "The Man from UNCLE", at least in conception.
My idea about Jack Lord is obviously pure supposition. I hope you're able to find out the real answer at some point.
Thanks again for the story and for this great site.
April 10, 2011 at 6:19 am
I read your overview on "Stryker" which is Daystar's second unsold pilot but have you found something on the first unsold pilot "Mr. Kingston", starring Peter Graves and Walter Pidgeon. IN one "Outer Limits" episode entitled "The Special One", you can hear a snippet from the pilot.
Just a second before Mr. Zeno rings the bell, the Benjamin's are currently watching a Daystar's unsold pilot on TV: "Mr. Kingston" and if you listen carefully, you can catch dialogues ("please, I must call, Mr. Kingston!") blended with a Dominic Frontiere's cue.


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Maybe it's because I'm stuck in my own little bubble of obscure hip-hop, but I had no idea that Boyz II Men had a new album out. They topped the charts this week for urban releases, although Coldplay owned the Billboard 200 this week by selling 447,000 units of their latest album Mylo Xyloto. In my eyes, the real story this week is the success of Jedi Mind Tricks' seventh studio album, Violence Begets Violence, as it marks the group's first release without their producer, Stoupe. Despite mixed reviews and reluctance from longtime fans, the album moved nearly 4,500 units in its opening week. Statik Selektah and Freestyle Fellowship also fared well during their albums' opening week, while Korean rapper/producer/songwriter Tablo had a moderately successful opening week for the international release of his debut EP, Fever's End Pt 1, which was quickly followed by Pt. 2.
Boyz II Men "Twenty 18,385 (46% digital)
Jedi Mind Tricks "Violence Begets Violence" – 4,351 (60% digital) [read review]
Statik Selektah "Population Control" – 1,520 (45% digital) [read review]
Freestyle Fellowship "Promise" – 713 (32% digital)
Tablo "Fever's End, Pt 1" – 389 (100% digital)
Terrace Martin"Locke High 2" – 369 (100% digital)