Performance based codes promise to use modem engineering tools to satisfy the social goal of fire safety. Social fire safety goals can include life safety, property protection, or even requirements for redundant systems. But current proposals for performance based codes do not contain any technical method for connecting engineering designs to social goals. As a result, designers, not society, have been setting the key technical inputs, in particular designers have proposed that performance based solutions should only deal with a design fire, rather than providing the promised overall safety. This change allows designers substantial freedom, but at the cost of shifting key decisions on safety from public to private hands. Performance based codes will require a method for specifying the social requirements for fire safety in useable engineering terms, and enforcing those requirements on the building as completed.
As a volcano refugee in Frankfurt, it was rather interesting to see a slow motion regulatory science disaster taking place. On April 14 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted sending millions of tons of ash into the upper atmosphere. The ash cloud, blown by the prevailing winds, moved down over northern Europe. European air traffic authorities, following well established and widely published safety protocols, began shutting down the air transport system due to the well known hazard of volcano ash. The shutdown lasted 6 days and soon became an unequal political contest between airline money on the one side and regulatory science on the other. In a classic case of shooting the messenger bringing bad news the responsible airline parties tried to shift the blame for shutdown to the regulators, while nervous governments quailed before the bullying of the airline executives.
Mathematical models and solution frameworks are described for the assessment of command-and-control strategies in the centralized coordination of crowd movement. The effectiveness of several strategies–-from providing only information to reconfiguring the built environment through architectural design changes and forcing pedestrians to follow system-optimal evacuation routes–-is investigated and compared with the use of proposed mathematical formulations and computational solutions. These formulations and solutions are tested on an example network as an illustration. Differences in system performance under these strategies are assessed, and performance (as total travel time) is compared. Efficiency gains obtained with command-and-control strategies in crowd movement are investigated.
Toxic torts are product liability cases dealing with alleged injuries due to chemical or biological hazards such as radiation, thalidomide, or Agent Orange. Toxic tort cases typically rely more heavily than other product liability cases on indirect or statistical proof of injury. There have been numerous theoretical analyses of statistical proof of injury in toxic tort cases. However, there have been only a handful of actual legal decisions regarding the use of such statistical evidence, and most of those decisions have been inconclusive. Recently, a major case from the Fifth Circuit, involving allegations that Benedectin (a morning sickness drug) caused birth defects, was decided entirely on the basis of statistical inference. This paper examines both the conceptual basis of that decision, and also the relationships among statistical inference, scientific evidence, and the rules of product liability in general.
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