Germany and USA agree on plan to improve container security

- Oct. 2009 (A bit out of date, but still valid for research)

Research on scanning containers without delays...

German security researchers are developing methods to scan containers on their way to the US without delays. This accordingly to Prof. Frieder Meyer-Krahmer, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in view of the upcoming "Container Security Conference" which will take place in Bremen in mid November. At the invitation of the EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen, European and American experts will discuss the perspectives of sea freight security.

Bremen is the largest European port for transatlantic shipping and would be particularly affected by new security requirements. Researchers, therefore, have been asked to find ways to prevent the massive obstruction of freight traffic. This comes as a result of strict regulations, passed by the US congress after 9/11, requiring all containers destined for the US to be scanned at the port of dispatch beginning in 2012.

However, because adequate technology to ensure smooth processing is still in development, there is a risk that the flow of goods around the world will be significantly slowed down. Germany and the US have agreed to develop a working plan, based on an agreement of cooperation in civil security research, signed by both countries last March. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has announced funding measures to establish a national programme which encourages researchers, businesses and consumers to submit their best solutions for safeguarding the flow of goods. The first round of the selection process has just concluded.

Article

Authors suggest ways to alleviate L.A. cargo port "constipation"

- March 23rd 2011

In January, the port of Los Angeles received more than 330,000 containers; the possibility that one of those 330,000 containers could have contained a dirty bomb, or worse, keeps security experts up at night; experts say that to ensure security and prevent logjams, the best approach to container security would be to replace the current system, which singles out only those containers whose documentation raises questions, with a system which will see terminal operators X-ray every container, regardless of its eventual destination; only those containers flagged during the low-level scan would be subjected to a more thorough
search.

In January, the port of Los Angeles received more than 330,000 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units, the standard measuring unit for shipping containers). The possibility that one of those 330,000 containers could have contained a dirty bomb, or worse, keeps security experts up at night. Legislation passed in 2007 requires that every single container entering the United States be scanned for a potential weapon.

Currently the Customs Bureau receives information on containers’ shipping manifests, which must be transmitted at least twenty-four hours before departure. If the manifest looks suspicious, the container in question must be taken out of the queue, inspected, and returned to its place. This process can be cumbersome.

Stephen Flynn, a Coast Guard veteran and president of the Center for National Policy, a security-focused Washington think tank, points out that the largest ships begin loading containers eighteen hours before departure, making it difficult to find the potential offender. Try to handle more than the small fraction of containers which currently get scanned and the whole inspection line becomes, in Flynn’s words, “constipated.”

Just how constipated becomes apparent in modeling done by Nitin Bakshi of London Business School and Noah Gans of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, who co-authored a recent Management Science paper with Flynn on the question of port security. Using two months’ data from two large international container terminals, Bakshi and Gans created a simulation to gauge what delays would result if the Customs Bureau began requiring that all inbound containers be evaluated. Inspecting only 7 percent of containers, they found, would mean delays for nearly every single container.

How, then, can the Customs Bureau meet the legal mandate of scanning every container without perpetually snarling ports? Bakshi, Gans, and Flynn propose an alternative approach. Instead of singling out only those containers whose documentation raises questions, terminal operators would X-ray every container, regardless of its eventual destination. Only those containers flagged during the low-level scan would be subjected to a more thorough search. Think of it as everyone who will be boarding a plane having to go through security, as opposed to a select few being asked to leave their seats and answer questions as the plane was about to depart.

The authors call their approach “industry-centric,” since the terminal operators would play a greater role in the scanning (and bear the corresponding cost). It has several advantages: the entire “dwell time” of a container at the port, not just the last twenty-four hours, can be used to evaluate its safety. More to the point, subjected to the same simulations as the current inspection process, the industry-centric approach handled all the modeled container traffic with far fewer problems.

The authors intended their paper for two audiences, the general shipping and logistics firms, and the other being policymakers, who might have given up hope of the possibility of achieving full port scanning. For them, however, the paper leaves important questions unanswered. How would other countries react to their inbound containers being scanned in an American initiative? For that matter, how would the prospect of Hong Kong scanners being responsible for L.A.-bound goods play politically? Who would control the data resulting from millions of container scans?p

This may be why, as Flynn suggests, some political courage would be necessary to change current container security procedures. At least the courageous policymaker will have some research to wave at opponents.

Article

Radiation threat to Tokyo Bay ports

Japan’s nuclear power station crisis could have a major impact on container shipping, if the threat of radiation forces the closure of ports in the Tokyo Bay area (pictured, from space).

Analyst AXS Alphaliner said that so far damage from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami was having a slight impact on Japan’s container supply chain.

But it warned that if the risk of nuclear radiation from the Fukushima power plant escalated it would cause the closure of the ports in Tokyo Bay, Tokyo and Yokohama, which handled 7.5 million teu in 2010, or 38% of Japanese container throughput.

Currently, ships are avoiding an exclusion zone of 30km around the Fukushima plant, and seven container ports have been damaged.

“The direct impact of the Japanese crisis from the earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent damage of the nuclear plants at Fukushima, will reverberate through the container shipping sector in the coming months,” said the analyst.

“Current assessment of the situation in Japan has been sketchy and often conflicting, with news agencies mostly overstating the impact on the shipping sector.

“Of the ports that suffered serious damage as a result of the disaster, only seven handle container cargo – Sendai, Hachinohe, Hitachinaka, Onahama, Kashima, Ofunato and Ishinomaki – and these ports only handled 1.3% of the total Japanese container throughput in 2010.

“The largest among them – Sendai – handled only 155,611teu last year.”

The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami has now risen to more than 9,400, and nearly 15,000 people are listed as missing.

Engineers have been trying to cool Fukushima’s reactors and spent fuel rods to avoid a major release of radiation, after power to the cooling systems was knocked out by the earthquake and tsunami.

But work at the plant was yesterday halted again, after black smoke was seen rising from reactor three.

This article is published courtesy of IFW

Florida a hotbed of cargo theft

It's a multibillion-dollar industry. Those in the field work long hours in carefully chosen teams organized by well-known, influential leaders. It might be considered a growth industry, if it weren't illegal.

Cargo thefts — at times massive heists involving millions of dollars in stolen wares — are on the rise nationwide, and Florida has become a major hub for stolen goods and home to some of the nation's most daring thieves.

Experts struggle to define the true extent of cargo theft's impact nationally. But one thing is clear: Each year, hundreds of high-dollar heists are pulled, some with militarylike precision that resembles a scene from "Ocean's Eleven."

These thefts can damage businesses, threaten jobs and impact prices on the consumer level.

And according to local and national experts, the heists are not isolated incidents or even a trend. They're part of a cargo-theft culture, made up of interconnected groups of mostly professional criminals who are experts in their trade.

------

It was also the biggest recorded heist in the state in five years, according to FreightWatch International, a cargo-security provider that tracks cargo-theft statistics. According to FreightWatch, 117 cargo-theft incidents were reported in the Sunshine State in 2010, and more than 500 in the past five years.

Experts say South Florida is where much of the cargo heisted on the Eastern Seaboard winds up — often in transit to Central or South America. It's also where many of the groups who perpetrate these crimes are based.

South Florida is also home to the Tactical Operations Multi-Agency Cargo Anti-Theft Squad, better known as TOMCATS, considered among the nation's elite task forces targeting cargo theft.

Based out of the Miami-Dade Police Department, TOMCATS represents a partnership of local, state and federal agencies, including the FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida Highway Patrol and the Florida Department of Transportation, among others.

Read the full article here

This is my presentation from the CSUN Conference on Assistive Tech in San Diego last week

video about how people are unable to walk straight without references to fixed objects

This is a really interesting thing. It is highly relevant to the WiiCane project that I discussed a while back. More information can be found here. 

Unbelievable and disturbing images of Japanese Tsunami wreckage.

I was just looking at a lot of images of the devastation in Japan. It looks as if the entire part of the country was just destroyed. Ships like the one in this photo were just tossed across a road like a toy on the sidewalk (which this picture looks like at first).

I think that this incident makes the fragility of our civilization very tangible. All it took was a 3 foot fall of part of the sea floor to cause the wave, which then wiped out a huge area with no warning. How horrible to get swept away that way. For me, it puts into perspective how tragic and ludicrous that we also have to deal with wars that and other manmade horrors.

I wonder if this event will lead to a whole new product category for surviving tsunamis. Sorry if this subject is sad, but I think it must be confronted.

User testing consent form

Hey guys,

I made a consent form for my user testing this week, I found it to be pretty helpful. It's in the dropbox in the user testing consent form folder.

Stunning, Lego-Like Tiles Let You Create New Rooms in a Snap

Co-design - 4th of march 2011

Say you lay off half your workers. Just build a wall, and voila! A new, smaller office.

Ditto, the striking modular building material shown here, was designed explicitly for no-frills, recession-era architecture, but you’d never guess it by looking at the stuff.

Depending on how you arrange the modules, you can create anything from a screen reminiscent of shimmery fish scales to a tunnel that could’ve been carved out of a translucent honeycomb. Ditto is made out of 40% pre-consumer recycled resin, and the pieces snap together and apart in a jiffy, making them an ideal architectural flourish at a time when everyone in the building industry is desperate to save time and money. Well, almost everyone.

“When the recession hit, architects were saying, ‘There are less of us now doing just as much work. We have very limited hours,'" says Azar McMaster of 3form, Ditto's producer. "So the more you, the manufacturer, can do to help us, the better.’”

3form is known primarily for manufacturing large resin panels that architects customize for room dividers, artwork, and other features. The panels aren’t especially simple to install, though, and once they’re in, they’re there to stay; you can’t readily experiment with different permutations. With Ditto, you can. Say you throw together a bunch of modules to form a room divider in your office. Then you go and lay off half your employees and suddenly, the divider's completely superfluous. The modules can be rearranged into some sort of inspirational wall art -- lord knows what remains of your staff will need it.

Ditto is still relatively new, but McMaster says it’s already been specified for a few Burger Kings and BBC’s offices in New York. For more info, visit 3form's website.

Look here for more photos

My User Testing

Maybe this might give you guys some inspiration for your videos.

amazing story

CARACAS JOURNAL

A 45-Story Walkup Beckons the Desperate

By SIMON ROMERO and MARÍA EUGENIA DÍAZ

Published: February 28, 2011

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CARACAS, Venezuela — Architects still call the 45-story skyscraper the Tower of David, after David Brillembourg, the brash financier who built it in the 1990s. The helicopter landing pad on its roof remains intact, a reminder of the airborne limousines that were once supposed to drop bankers off for work.

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Squatters on the Skyline

Enlarge This Image

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

A woman looks out of a crudely constructed cinder block balcony on an upper floor of the “Tower of David.” Squatters live in the bottom 28 floors of the 45-story, uncompleted skyscraper, located in downtown Caracas.

The office tower, one of Latin America’s tallest skyscrapers, was meant to be an emblem of Venezuela’s entrepreneurial mettle. But that era is gone. Now, with more than 2,500 squatters making it their home, the building symbolizes something else entirely in this city’s center.

The squatters live in the uncompleted high-rise, which lacks several basic amenities like an elevator. The smell of untreated sewage permeates the corridors. Children scale unlit stairways guided by the glow of cellphones. Some recent arrivals sleep in tents and hammocks.

The skyscraper, surrounded by billboards and murals proclaiming the advance of President Hugo Chávez’s“Bolivarian revolution,” is a symbol of the financial crisis that struck the country in the 1990s, the expanded state control over the economy that came after Mr. Chávez took office in 1999 and the housing shortage that has worsened since then, leading to widespread squatter takeovers in this city.

Few of the building’s terraces have guardrails. Even walls and windows are absent on many floors. Yet dozens of DirecTV satellite dishes dot the balconies. The tower commands some of the most stunning views of Caracas. It contains some of its worst squalor.

“I never let my child out of my sight,” said Yeaida Sosa, 29, who lives with her 1-year-old daughter, Dahasi, on the seventh floor overlooking a bustling artery, Avenida Andrés Bello. Ms. Sosa said residents were horrified after a young girl recently fell to her death from a high floor.

Some families have walled off their terraces with cinder blocks, blotting out the sun to avoid such tragedies. Others, aware of the risks, prefer to let in the breeze flowing off El Ávila, the emerald green mountain looming over Caracas. “God decides when we enter his kingdom,” said Enrique Zambrano, 22, an electrician who lives on the 19th floor.

Mr. Zambrano, like many of the other squatters in the skyscraper, says he is an evangelical Christian. Their pastor is Alexander Daza, 33, a former gang member who found religion in prison. Mr. Daza, commonly known as El Niño, or The Kid, led the occupation of the Tower of David in October 2007.

Back then, the building had already been vacant for more than a decade. Its developer, Mr. Brillembourg, a dashing horse breeder, died of cancer at age 56 in 1993, leaving behind hobbled companies. The government absorbed their assets, including the unfinished skyscraper, during a 1994 banking crisis.

Robert Neuwirth of New York, the author of “Shadow Cities,” a book about squatter settlements on four continents, said the Tower of David may be the world’s highest squatter building.

Once one of Latin America’s most developed cities, Caracas now grapples with an acute housing shortage of about 400,000 units, breeding building invasions. In the area around the Tower of David, squatters have occupied 20 other properties, including the Viasa and Radio Continente towers. White elephants occupying the cityscape, like the Sambil shopping mall close to the Tower of David and seized by the government, now house flood victims.

Private construction of housing here has virtually ground to a halt because of fears of government expropriation. The government, hobbled by inefficiency, has built little housing of its own for the poor. The policies toward squatters are also unclear and in flux, effectively allowing many to stay in once empty properties.

On occasion, Mr. Chávez has called for squatters to be dislodged. But in January, he urged the poor to occupy unused land in well-heeled parts of Caracas. Then he qualified these remarks by asking them to have “patience” as officials tried to build low-income housing.

Many here refuse to wait. The Tower of David stands as a parable of hope for some and of dread for others.

“That building is a symbol of Venezuela’s decline,” said Benedicto Vera, 55, an activist in downtown Caracas. “What’s our future if our people are living like animals in unsafe skyscrapers?”

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A version of this article appeared in print on March 1, 2011, on page A6 of the New York edition.

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