Power Law Analysis Implications of the San Bruno Pipeline Failure

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Oliphant ◽  
Wayne Bryce ◽  
William Luff
Keyword(s):  
Power Law ◽  
Characteristic Curve ◽  
Power Law Distribution ◽  
Industry Performance ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transmission Pipeline ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pipeline Failure ◽  
The Relationship

When major pipeline incidents occur there is always a question as to how applicable the learnings from that incident are across the industry. To address this question for the San Bruno pipeline failure in 2010, an analysis of historical transmission pipeline industry events was conducted to determine if San Bruno was consistent with past industry performance or whether it was an outlier event. This paper draws on Power Law analysis to generate a characteristic curve of past transmission pipeline accidents in the US. Power Law, or Pareto, behavior has been observed for a wide variety of phenomenon, such as fire damage, earthquake damage and terrorist attacks. The size of these events is seen to follow not the typical normal distribution but the Power Law distribution, where low probability - high consequence (LPHC) events play a more significant role in the overall risk picture. Analysis shows that the consequences of pipeline incidents in a variety of pipeline industries (gas distribution, gas transmission, gas gathering and hazardous liquid pipelines) are seen to exhibit Power Law behavior. The Power Law model is seen to capture the distribution of the size of consequences from pipeline incidents and defines the relationship between the size of an incident and its frequency. Through characterization of these distributions, it is possible to project the likelihood or expected frequency of events of a given magnitude and to assess if a given incident fits within historical industry patterns; i.e. whether the incident is consistent with past observations or is an outlier. The Power Law analysis shows that the San Bruno incident, which caused eight fatalities and an estimated $380 million in property damage in 2010, is not an outlier. Rather, this incident lies on the Power Law curve for historical transmission pipeline incidents, with an estimated frequency of once every 40 years. The event is consistent with the history of gas transmission pipeline consequences in the US. This paper argues that the San Bruno incident, therefore, provides lessons relevant to the industry as whole.

From Competition to Cooperation: A History of Canada–US National Park Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Young ◽  
Alan MacEachern ◽  
Lary Dilsaver
Keyword(s):  
National Parks ◽  
National Park ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Park Service ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Flow Of Information ◽  
The Relationship

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

History of the Incap Longitudinal Study on the Effects of Early Nutrition Supplementation in Child Growth and Development

1992 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merrill S. Read ◽  
Jean-Pierre Habicht
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Child Growth ◽  
Nutrition Intervention ◽  
Pilot Studies ◽  
Childhood Health ◽  
Early Childhood Health ◽  
Nutrition Supplementation ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

In the mid-1960s a longitudinal, multidisciplinary nutrition intervention study was undertaken in rural Guatemala by the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama in conjunction with the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The goal was to elucidate the relationship between undernutrition in pregnancy and early childhood, health, and subsequent behavioural development in infants and young children. Extensive detailed planning coupled with three years of pilot studies in the field preceded the initiation of the longitudinal study in 1969. This article outlines the problems encountered in planning and implementing the study, and their resolution. Many of these experiences will be helpful to others considering community-based intervention studies.

scholarly journals The Economics of Tipping

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-236
Author(s):  
Ofer H. Azar
Keyword(s):  
Social Norm ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Economic Behavior ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Income Source ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
The Relationship

Tipping involves dozens of billions of dollars annually in the US alone and is a major income source for millions of workers. But beyond its economic importance and various economic implications, tipping is also a unique economic phenomenon in that people pay tips voluntarily without any legal obligation. Tipping demonstrates that psychological and social motivations can be a substantial reason for economic behavior, and that economic models should go beyond a selfish economic agent who has no feelings in order to capture the full range of economic activities. This article discusses some aspects of tipping, with an emphasis on economic issues: the history of tipping, the main reasons for tipping, why tipping could be a welfare-increasing and sustainable social norm, the relationship between tipping and service quality, how tipping represents a struggle over rents, and issues of discrimination and sexual harassment related to tipping.

A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE CONSUMER

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 709-736 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHERYL KROEN
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
International Negotiation ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between the consumer and the citizen from the eighteenth century to the present in Europe and the United States. Part I highlights the political narrative underlying the opposition between courtly consumption (absolutism) and the inconspicuous consumption of the middling sorts, and explores early formulations of the relationship between consumption and democracy. Part II looks at the first half of the nineteenth century, defined by the opposition between consumers (coded feminine, and as ‘despised’) and citizens (coded masculine, and as ‘restrained’). Part III goes from the 1860s to the 1930s. American historians have emphasized the positive political agency of consumers in this period, and their contribution to the notion of social citizenship. This article emphasizes the less democratic aspects of consumer politics, and the contributions of anti-liberal movements on the extreme left and right to a stronger tradition of social citizenship in Europe. Part IV takes Lizabeth Cohen's claim that a ‘Consumers' Republic' was forged in the US in the post-war period, and casts the Marshall Plan and the Cold War as the context that gave rise to an international negotiation over the relationship between consumption and democracy that continues to the present.

“Different than an infantry unit down in Georgia”: Narratives of queer liberation in the post-DADT military

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 776-792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Connell
Keyword(s):  
Officer Training ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Don't Ask Don't Tell ◽  
The Us ◽  
Rotc Cadets ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Unanimous Approval

More than five years out from its implementation, we still know relatively little about how members of the US military and its ancillary institutions are responding to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to what one might expect given the long history of LGBTQ antipathy in the military, I found in interviews with Boston area Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC) cadets unanimous approval for the repeal of DADT. When pressed to explain why there was so much homogeneity of favorable opinion regarding the repeal, interviewees repeatedly offered the same explanation: that Boston, in particular, is such a progressive place that even more conservative institutions like the ROTC are spared anti-gay sentiment. They imagined the Southern and/or rural soldier they will soon encounter when they enter the US military, one who represents the traditionally homophobic attitudes of the old military in contrast to their more enlightened selves. This “metronormative” narrative has been critiqued elsewhere as inadequate for understanding the relationship between sexuality and place; this article contributes to that critique by taking a new approach. Rather than deconstruct narratives of queer rurality, as the majority of metronormativity scholarship has done, I deconstruct these narratives of urban queer liberation. I find that such narratives mask the murkier realities of LGBTQ attitudes in urban contexts and allow residents like the ROTC cadets in this study to displace blame about anti-gay prejudice to a distant Other, outside of their own ranks.

scholarly journals British Black Power: The anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 945-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Narayan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
British History ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.

Neural Networks for Modeling the Contact Foot-Shoe Upper

2010 ◽  
pp. 561-573
Author(s):  
M. J. Rupérez ◽  
J. D. Martín ◽  
C. Monserrat ◽  
M. Alcañiz
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Computer Aided Design ◽  
Characteristic Curve ◽  
Neural Model ◽  
Computer Aided ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Aided Design ◽  
Footwear Design ◽  
The Relationship

Recently, important advances in virtual reality have made possible real improvements in computer aided design, CAD. These advances are being applied to all the fields and they have reached to the footwear design. The majority of the interaction foot-shoe simulation processes have been focused on the interaction between the foot and the sole. However, few efforts have been made in order to simulate the interaction between the shoe upper and the foot surface. To simulate this interaction, flexibility tests (characterization of the relationship between exerted force and displacement) are carried out to evaluate the materials used for the shoe upper. This chapter shows a procedure based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) to reduce the number of flexibility tests that are needed for a comfortable shoe design. Using the elastic parameters of the material as inputs to the ANN, it is possible to find a neural model that provides a unique equation for the relationship between force and displacement instead of a different characteristic curve for each material. Achieved results show the suitability of the proposed approach.

scholarly journals Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 389-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Mountz ◽  
J. Loyd
Keyword(s):  
Buffer Zone ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Us Federal Government ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cold War History

Abstract. This article examines transnational framings of domestic carceral landscapes to better understand the relationship between offshore and onshore enforcement and detention regimes. US detention on mainland territory and interception and detention in the Caribbean serves as a case study. While the US domestic carceral regime is a subject of intense political debate, research, and activism, it is not often analyzed in relation to the development and expansion of an offshore "buffer zone" to intercept and detain migrants and asylum seekers. Yet the US federal government has also used offshore interception and detention as a way of controlling migration and mobility to its shores. This article traces a Cold War history of offshore US interception and detention of migrants from and in the Caribbean. We discuss how racialized crises related to Cuban and Haitian migrations by sea led to the expansion of an intertwined offshore and onshore carceral regime. Tracing these carceral geographies offers a more transnational understanding of contemporary domestic landscapes of detention of foreign nationals in the United States. It advances the argument that the conditions of remoteness ascribed frequently to US detention sites must be understood in more transnational perspective.

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