technical information on fukushima daiichi

In the aftermath of Japan's earthquake and tsunami, reliable technical information about the crisis affecting the nuclear power plants at Fukushima has been difficult to discern from the media coverage. The demand to know what is happening, however, is very great. The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering held an information session for the MIT community about the current situation at Fukushima on March 14, 2011. Topics discussed include: the characteristics of the boiling water reactors at Fukushima; the possible causes of the accidents; the current status of the reactors; the technical options that may now be available to the reactor operators; and the possible future implications. NSE students, with support from our faculty, are maintaining a technical information blog at mitnse.com to continue to provide non-sensationalized, factual data from engineers in a manner that can be understood by the general public.

japan earthquake shifted earth on its axis

LATimes | Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake in Japan shifted Earth on its axis and shortened the length of a day by a hair. In the future, scientists said, it will provide an unusually precise view of how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under another, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The unusually rich detail comes from an extensive network of sensors that were placed at sites across Japan after that country's Kobe earthquake of 1995, a magnitude 6.8 quake that killed more than 6,000 people because its epicenter was near a major city.

"The Japanese have the best seismic information in the world," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards project at the U.S. Geological Survey, at a Saturday news conference at Caltech in Pasadena. "This is overwhelmingly the best-recorded great earthquake ever."

libyan oil mostly underexplored...,

useia.gov | Libya, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, followed by Nigeria and Algeria (see below). According to Oil and Gas Journal (OGJ), Libya had total proven oil reserves of 46.4 billion barrels as of January 2011, the largest reserves in Africa. Close to 80 percent of Libya's proven oil reserves are located in the Sirte basin, which accounts for most of the country's oil output.

Libya hopes to increase oil reserve estimates with incentives for additional exploration both in established oil producing areas as well as more remote parts of the country. Recent increases in foreign investment have begun to slow as a result of uncertainties stemming from OPEC quotas, infrastructure constraints, and contract renegotiations.

Libyan oil is generally light (high API gravity) and sweet (low sulfur content). The country's nine export grades have API gravities that range from 26.0o – 43.3o. While the lighter, sweeter grades are generally sold to Europe, the heavier crude oils are often exported to Asian markets.

Refining
According to OGJ, Libya has five domestic refineries, with a combined capacity of 378,000 bbl/d. Libya's refineries include:

1) the Ras Lanuf export refinery, completed in 1984 and located on the Gulf of Sirte, with a crude oil refining capacity of 220,000 bbl/d;

2) the Az Zawiya refinery, completed in 1974 and located in northwestern Libya, with crude processing capacity of 120,000 bbl/d;

3) the Tobruk refinery, with crude capacity of 20,000 bbl/d;

4) Sarir, a topping facility with 10,000 bbl/d of capacity; and

5) Brega, the oldest refinery in Libya, located near Tobruk with crude capacity of 8,000 bbl/d.

Libya's refining sector was impacted by UN sanctions, specifically UN Resolution 883 of November 11, 1993, which banned Libya from importing refinery equipment. Libya is seeking a comprehensive upgrade to its entire refining system, with a particular aim of increasing output of gasoline and other light products.

aljazeera has won the information war...,

AL-JAZEERA 1 OF 3
Uploaded by Top-Notch112. - News videos from around the world.

CounterPunch | None other than the US Secretary of State herself, Hillary Clinton, paid fulsome tribute to Al Jazeera last Wednesday, March 2. Appearing before a US Foreign Policy Priorities committee, she was asked by Senator Richard Lugar to impart her views on how well the US was promoting its message across the world.

Clinton promptly volunteered that America is in an "information war and we are losing the war," and furthermore, that "Al Jazeera is winning".

"Let’s talk straight realpolitik," Clinton went on. "We are in a huge competition" for global influence and global markets. China and Russia have started multi-language television networks, even as the US cuts back in this area. "We are paying a big price" for dismantling international communications networks after the end of the Cold War. "Our private media cannot fill that gap."

As noted here across the past couple of weeks, there’s been a flourishing little internet industry claiming that the overthrow of Mubarak came courtesy of US Twitter-Facebook Command. The New York Times runs numerous articles about the role of Twitter and Facebook while simultaneously ignoring or reviling Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Of course, in any discussion of the role of the internet in fuelling the upsurges across the Middle East, WikiLeaks should be given major credit. But WikiLeaks, along with Twitter and Facebook, all pale into insignificance next to the role of Al Jazeera,

Millions of Arabs can’t tweet. Facebook is unfamiliar to them. But most watch TV, which means they all watch Al Jazeera. And of course it was Al Jazeera which detonated the IED exploding under the Palestinian Authority, namely the cache of documents known as the Palestine Papers.

There were huge ironies in Clinton’s confession to Senator Lugar and his colleagues. In the late 1970s, radicals in the United Nations were eagerly promoting the need for a 'New World Information Order' (NWIO) to counter the lock on world communications and hence propaganda by the advanced industrial countries, preeminently the United States.

how we use social media in an emergency

Mashable | The use of social media during national and international crises, both natural and political, is something that Mashable has followed with great interest over the past few years.

As a culture, we started becoming more aware of the power of social media during times of crisis, like when the Iran election in 2009 caused a furor, both on the ground and on Twitter. More recently, the Internet and social media played an important role in spreading news about the earthquake in Haiti and political revolution in Egypt.

But what about other kinds of natural disasters or crime? Can social media be used to good effect then?

In 2009, two girls trapped in a storm water drain used Facebook to ask for help rather than calling emergency services from their mobile phones. At the time, authorities were concerned about the girls’ seemingly counterintuitive action.

However, according to new research from the American Red Cross, the Congressional Management Foundation and other organizations, social media could stand to play a larger and more formal role in emergency response. In fact, almost half the respondents in a recent survey said they would use social media in the event of a disaster to let relatives and friends know they were safe.

wikileaks true value (smear and denial - part 2)

medialens | The UK and US media smears described in Part 1 should be kept in mind when considering the gravity and importance of the latest WikiLeaks. In addition to thousands of previously unreported civilian killings, the leaks revealed more than 1,300 claims of torture by Iraqi police and military between 2005 and 2009. More than 180,000 people were detained at some point between 2004 and 2009, or one in 50 Iraqi males.

But these are only the incidents the US military knew about, or chose to know about, or chose to report; and the documents are an unknown sample of all documentation held by the US government. There are, for example, no reports from the “shock and awe” year of 2003, and none from the tens of thousands of after-attack Pentagon bombing assessments. The leaks also report no civilian deaths in major US atrocities, including the offensive that devastated Fallujah in 2004.

The leaks corroborate previous allegations that US forces turned over prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the Iraqi interior ministry's commandos, infamous for their torture and extra judicial killings. This was not merely ‘turning a blind eye’ to torture, as investigative journalist Gareth Porter notes: “The implication was that the Shi'a commandos would be able to extract more information from the detainees than would be allowed by U.S. rules.”

US forces, then, were complicit in the torture. Indeed, under international law, as the occupying power, the coalition is accountable for all of these crimes.

US troops are actually commanded to not investigate the tortures by an order called Frago 242. Issued in June 2004, this instructs coalition troops not to investigate any abuse of detainees unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi forces on Iraqis, "only an initial report will be made... No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".
The leaks reveal that the US military was also aware that the Iraqi government had murdered detainees.

Civilian Deaths - The “Standard Accepted Figure”
The leaks reveal, not just a staggering level of violence and criminality in occupied Iraq, but also the determination of the Iraqi government and US forces to hide civilian casualties.

This is hardly surprising and fits with evidence that the US and UK governments have worked hard to smear credible scientific analysis of the likely death toll. A recent study by Professor Brian Rappert of the University of Exeter reported of the UK government: “deliberations were geared in a particular direction – towards finding grounds for rejecting the [2004] Lancet study [estimating almost 100,000 Iraqi deaths from the war] without any evidence of countervailing efforts by government officials to produce or endorse alternative other studies or data”.

Nevertheless, with a near-uniform intellectual sleight of hand, journalists have managed to turn evidence that civilian casualties are likely much higher (as much as ten times higher) than most media have been reporting into evidence that casualties are perhaps 15 per cent higher. As one seasoned journalist told us privately, “WikiLeaks has been Guardianised” - their true significance has been disarmed, defanged and contained by the media.

are we raising a generation of nincompoops?

bostonglobe | Second-graders who can't tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who've never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.

Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?

Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter "literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."

Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her "kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger."

Many kids never learn to do ordinary household tasks. They have no chores. Take-out and drive-through meals have replaced home cooking. And busy families who can afford it often outsource house-cleaning and lawn care.

"It's so all laid out for them," said Maushart, author of the forthcoming book "The Winter of Our Disconnect," about her efforts to wean her family from its dependence on technology. "Having so much comfort and ease is what has led to this situation -- the Velcro sneakers, the Pull-Ups generation. You can pee in your pants and we'll take care of it for you!"

num8er my5teries

Guardian | Eager to find new ways to involve his readers in the mysteries of numbers, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy looked to new technology. A revolution is coming, he argues, and the whole idea of what a book can do is about to change.

Consider two books: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Not the printed books, the apps – software for mobiles and the iPad. The Wolf Hall app is a thing of beauty. It contains the text, of course, but readers can also move slickly between the text, family trees of the Tudors and the Yorkists, extra articles by Mantel and a fascinating video discussion between the novelist and historian David Starkey. All of which gives a deeper and richer understanding of the novel's historical context and its characters.

But this is nothing compared to Alice for the iPad. You can throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts, help the Caterpillar smoke his hookah pipe, make Alice grow as big as a house and then shrink again. You can watch as "the Mad Hatter gets even madder", and throw pepper at the Duchess. Over the 52 pages of the app there are 20 animated scenes. Each illustration has been taken from the original book and has been made gravity-aware, responding to a shake, tilt or the touch of a finger. The story is never the same twice, because users are Alice's guide through Wonderland. The Caterpillar will smoke his hookah in a new way when you tilt your iPad, or you can throw more pepper the second time around.

It would have been quite simple to convert the printed files of Carroll's book and drop it straight on to the iBookstore, but what Atomic Antelope (atomicantelope.com) has done, through painstaking artistry, is to capture, for adults and children alike, the fantastical nature of the story. This is about recreating what a book is and can be. With the advent of new technology – devices such as the iPhone or iPad, the Sony Reader or the Kindle – authors and publishers are being offered a huge challenge: to reconceive their content to provide a visual and interactive experience that the printed book cannot provide. Art books with huge numbers of accessible images; architecture books with 3D plans of buildings; travel books with videos and interactive maps; children's books with games and characters who introduce themselves; and so on and on. The potential is vast. This is not a case of simply trying to cram written content on to an e-reader; this is about taking that content and completely reinventing it.

Currently readers are being offered little more than the novelty of a book on an electronic device, but the thrill of turning the page by clicking a button quickly pales. Many of the current projects are just tarted-up books for electronic media, but if it doesn't move the experience on to a new level, to enhance the material, what's the point? What authors and publishers need to do is to go back to the drawing board and, at the moment ideas are conceived, work out how – if at all – to make use of these new toys.

bookRings

organelle | The illustration at the top of the page represents a recombinant “ring of ‘books’”. It’s purpose is to at once suggest a ‘specific and valuable ring’ and also to illustrate the concept of scalarly recombinant ‘bookRings’— as a learningToy. To create and play with this toy we will imaginally credential the following assertions:

Language, and minds, have sources.
These sources are not yet clear.
Languages emerge from interscalar psybiocognitive connectivity. (not from humans or ‘knowledge’)

Our human experiential sentience is deeply linkted to ‘lingual’ systems and figures.
The sources of language and sentience are linked.
The stories of these linkages are far more interesting than we suppose.

Flatness is a cognitive problem created by mechanization.

Understandings of Emergence and Scalarity remedy flatness problems.

Chiastic relationships established via triangulations provide a positive toySystem for exploring these domains.

When we read books, we imply they are important. If any book can be important, we could decide that some books are essentially and functionally far more important than others — in a given set of active domains.

But by what means would we decide this?

A Toy:

(there is an ancient accessToy which all living creatures share. It is engineered to solve this riddle, faster, each time it's accessed by any being whatsoever. The toy is not hidden, but it is cognitive in nature. Language, and logics, can interfere with it dramatically)

You're spontaneously transported to 'the library of worlds'. This library contains every moment of every cognitive being's experience since the universe began (and unto it's end) encoded in tiny books; each one fits in your human palm.

As you arrive, you notice a note in your hand:

Greetings EarthHuman,

You are in the library of worlds. It is one square mile in surface area, and is octagonal in shape. You are in the center of the library.

Your world is dying. You've got 144 minutes of oxygen, thus, you are dying as well.

Within the time allotted to you, you must locate one of three books.

Book 1 will return you to your dying world.
Book II will return you with the knowledge to save it, but you will perish from having known it.
Book III Will rescue you and your world, leaving all parties unharmed.

Whichever book you open first, will accomplish that mission. You may open as many as you desire in the process of seeking. You need only open the book and glance at its pages once to resolve the dilemma.

There are more books here than you have cells in your entire lineage. To succeed, you will need to allow yourself to touch your sources. Any other strategy will result in your expiration, and that of your planet. The chances of you accidentally stumbling on even one of the books, without a real connection strategy aren't worth considering.

There are 288 shelves arranged in a starPattern around your current location. Speak the linkName of any book into the central station and that book will be delivered into your hand.

You are then given the internal understanding of the basics of access and standards of organization of the library. Somehow, this is ‘communicated into you’ instantly.

On the floor, at your feet, is a stopwatch. Twelve minutes have elapsed since your arrival.

If you can't locate the essential and ‘alingual’ migration skill in yourSelf, which book will most rapidly and efficiently lead you to the skill you seek?

Why?

Tick. Tock.

We could probably agree that, given a game of survival and elaboration, arriving in any library at all might imply that there is a single key book which is perhaps more important than any other possible book, to become cognitively intimate with. And strangely, there are 'more than one' such book(s)', in any library — part of this is a result of the essential generality of the universe and its paradigms of organizational symmetry.

Books, are, it turns out, scalar accretions more than they are linear recordings. This secret has for far too long been hidden. Experiencing it as a reader grants some extremely uncommon cognitive experiences, abilities, and emergent skills. That is the goal of this toy.

I believe that probably for as long as we have had written language there has been something that is in essence a ‘book of how to talk’ to the beings who live in the transports, which are within you, as you are within them.

This is the finest possible goal of knowing — to return us to active relation with its sources, and to authorize us to again experience the innocence, wonder, and miraculous nature of our birthright and their power to insure liberty, unity, mutual uplift, and rescue.

the earth's secrets, hidden in the skies

NYTimes | ONE of the greatest advances in space technology has been the military’s Global Positioning System satellites, which provide remarkably accurate navigation information for everything from smart phones and cars to pet collars.

But the navigational data is only one part of the program’s mission. The Nuclear Detonation Detection System, an array of sensors also on board the satellites, watches the world for nuclear explosions. In the process, it collects mounds of environmental data which, in the hands of climate scientists, could add greatly to our understanding of global warming.

Unlike the G.P.S. information, however, much of the detection system data is hidden behind bureaucratic walls by national security agencies, which treat it as classified, even though it isn’t, and even though there’s no compelling national security reason to do so.

The history of the G.P.S. system shows the impact satellite data can have on commercial and scientific progress. Since it was first made publicly available in the 1980s, G.P.S. has revolutionized industries from telecommunications to agriculture. Estimates place its economic value in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. And that’s not counting its impact on everyday activities like hiking, boating and golf.

Then there’s the science: using the G.P.S. radio waves that travel through the earth’s atmosphere, researchers can better understand its temperature, density, water content and other properties, data that is critical to work on climate change and pollution.

Meanwhile, in the process of watching for a nuclear detonation, the detection system’s sensors — designed to observe visible light, high-frequency radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays and other data that might point to a nuclear explosion — stream an amazing array of data on powerful lightning strikes, space hazards like meteoroids and man-made debris and severe solar and space weather events.

It’s a daily trove of scientifically useful data that is not duplicated by any other sensor systems, military or civilian. True, other agencies collect similar data; sadly, it’s not nearly as comprehensive or global as the detection system’s information.

Unless a nuclear explosion takes place, the data has no immediate relevance to national security. Yet bureaucratic inertia has kept in place the presumption that because some of the data might be sensitive, all of it has to be protected; as a result, a thicket of paperwork and procedures deters all but the most resourceful and patient scientists from gaining access to it.

the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology

Video - The process of digitally capturing the book.

rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.....,

organelle | What transforms the relatively benign grasshopper into the apocalyptic swarms of soldiers we call locusts is a simple thing: proximity to other grasshoppers initiated by feeding behavior.

From Wikipedia (locust):

“Research at Oxford University has identified that swarming behaviour is a response to overcrowding. Increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs causes an increase in levels of serotonin. This causes the locust to change color, eat much more, and breed much more easily. The transformation of the locust to the swarming variety is induced by several contacts per minute over a four-hour period. It is estimated that the largest swarms have covered hundreds of square miles and consisted of many billions of locusts.” (italics added)

From WIkipedia (Desert Locust):

“When vegetation is distributed in such a way that the nymphs, usually called hoppers, have to congregate to feed, and there has been sufficient rain for a lot of eggs to hatch, the close physical contact causes the insects’ hind legs to bump up against one another. This stimulus triggers a cascade of metabolic and behavioral changes that cause the insects to transform from the solitary form to the gregarious form.”

From Arundhati Roy:
“It is not a coincidence that the political party that a carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire was called the Committee for Union and Progress. “Union” (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and “Progress” (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.

Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of “progress” is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide?

The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and at this point in time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and dying has already begun.”

— Field notes on Democracy
Listening to Grasshoppers
Arundhati Roy, Haymarket Books, 2009, pp 153

average insects and men...,

Video - cricket singing.

The average insect can easily generate a communications burst of less than 1 second which contains more information than the entire internet. Humans, it turns out, are made to receive these transmissions. The problem is that humans think that -representations- like text and video are interesting. They can no longer understand -the living media-. In point of fact, most of them cannot and (in order for their adopted creeds to retain authority) must not believe in it.

— organelle 03.04.10