In addition to the problems that I cited in my earlier post, the law also forbids teachers who also happen to be parents from communicating privately with their own children.

While I fully understand the desire to protect children, and the desire to create legislation which will forge a safe society, the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act perfectly exemplifies a failing attempt to use a law to solve a problem which cannot be solved by government. The government can, and already has, made it illegal for adults and children to have inappropriate sexual contact. The government cannot force adults and children to only communicate “safely.” We adults, parents, teachers, etc., bear the responsibility to teach our children how to communicate safely. We teach our kids about secrets, safe and dangerous; about telling a trusted adult if another adult does or says anything suspicious; etc. Most importantly, we teach our children how to build appropriate relationships with other adults. Teachers, in addition to teaching academics, play a vitally important role in helping children learn how to interact with adults.

Here is a typical comment on implementation:

The Fort Zumwalt School District revised its electronic communications policy in June. “Basically our policy says that our teachers cannot have private conversations on a social network site,” said Superintendent Bernard DuBray. “You can have students on Facebook and other sites, but you don’t have a private conversation on them.”

Any communications between students and teachers has to be open and available to parents and administrators, he said.

From: http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/stcharles/education/article_d45b61a8-b87b-5bb6-a641-9f143f6f4b3d.html#ixzz1Ud4qVBIn

The law prohibits social networking contact between students, past and present, and teachers. Here are just a few reasons why it is a bad law.

Teachers play a critically important role in the lives of many students. Often, kids will talk to teachers about things that they will not discuss with their parents. For instance, one of my high school friends trusted one of her teachers enough to have frank dialogs about sexual identity and pre-marital sex. These conversations happen in ways that are comfortable for the student. Most important, these conversations take place in private. If a student is comfortable talking on Facebook or via text messages, blocking that channel discourages the communication. I know a family of children suffering in an abusive home situation. (Yes, the local authorities are aware.) Can you imagine any of these kids talking to a teacher about it if the conversation was also open to the parents?

This law sends a whole host of bad messages to students. It tells them that, as a group, teachers are untrustworthy. It tells students that they are not skillful enough to judge safe versus unsafe private communication with teachers. It tells kids that they cannot learn about safe social networking with their teachers, though other adults are OK. It tells them that lawmakers and school districts can protect them in their on-line activities. None of these messages are true.

The Amy Hestir Student Protection Act overreaches any bounds of sanity. It forbids me, as a grey-bearded computer engineer, from having a private conversation on LinkedIn, a social networking site geared towards professional careers, with my high school physics teacher. It forbids a student from sending a text message to a teacher, even one saying, “Caught in traffic. Will be 5 minutes late. Don’t let the field trip bus leave.” It forbids a teacher from responding via text message, “OK.”

As adults, we certainly need to keep our kids safe. We do that by teaching them good judgement and empowering them to practice that judgement in reasonably safe venues. We encourage our children to grow into independent adults who can protect themselves. We fail completely with bad laws like the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act.

I started by checking the current radar map  and noting that the storms had moved east while, more important, new storms were not developing behind them. In other words, it looked like good flying just west of my intended route with nothing threatening to move in. Here is a picture. (Click on the pictures to see larger versions.)

The planned flight path involved going west and north to avoid the weather.

By taking a route west and then north, I would be able to get to a point where I could fly northeast into Oshkosh, completely avoiding the storms. There is a little bit of rain in Wisconsin but nothing that I would not be able to fly around when I got there. At worst, one of those might be directly over the airport when I arrive. Were that to happen, I would land at another airport in the vicinity and wait for half an hour or an hour, then take off again and complete my flight.

I wanted to confirm my guess about the lack of storms to the west of my intended route, though. There are a lot of people who know a lot more about weather than I do and, fortunately, pilots have access to some of them by calling Flight Service. I got a briefer on the phone and he concurred that no new storms were likely to develop to the west.

I did make the flight, as you can see in this screen snapshot. The weather in the image shows the storms when I took off. Since they continued to move eastward, I was able to cut the corners, saving distance and time, without ever flying through any significant rain.

The actual flight went west of the weather and involved cutting the corners to save time

I did  run into some clouds around Madison but was able to fly east and into gloriously clear weather. Once out of the clouds, I landed at Oshkosh in sunshine for a most excellent week of camping at AirVenture. The delay was inconvenient but not terribly so. I hope that this pair of postings has helped you understand how pilots make go/no-go decisions based on weather tools beyond what is available on TV and “regular” weather web sites.

I canceled a flight from St. Charles, MO to Oshkosh, WI this morning, despite gorgeous sunny weather in both cities. Not only did I cancel the flight, I cannot accurately predict when I will be able to make the trip, despite relatively good weather forecasts in both Missouri and Wisconsin. It could be 48 hours or more until I can safely fly, proving the adage: Time to spare, go by air.

I started my weather briefing this morning by laying my intended course on top of a current radar map. From this, you can see the immediate problem. (Click on the image to see larger version.)

Planned flight route which would take the plane through a thunderstorm

Small airplanes and red stuff on the radar map don’t mix so the first thought is: Perhaps I could fly west, through the “gap” between the large storms. This might well be successful if the small storms cells over southeast Iowa are dissipating instead of growing. The animated radar loop answers this question. (Click the image to see it larger.)

The animated radar loop shows smaller thunderstorms growing between two larger systems.

The animation, showing the progression of the storms over the last hour, shows that the space between the large systems is filling with more red stuff (strong, small storms). It is becoming a wall, not an open gap. With the closure of the space between the systems, the storm line from well west of Kansas City to Chicago blocks travel by small plane from Missouri to Wisconsin.

Since I cannot fly now, the next question becomes: When can I go? For this, we turn to the current surface weather analysis chart and the 24 hour forecast chart. (Click for larger versions.)

Surface analysis chart shows a front extending from the central plains well past Lake Michigan

The 24 hour surface forecast chart show the front moving south but still generating weather that might block flights to Wisconsin

The surface analysis chart shows the weather at about 4:00am this morning. The 24 hour forecast shows that, at about 1:00am tomorrow, a front will still lie across my route and may well be generating more rain and thunderstorms.

From this unscientific analysis, I reached several conclusions. First, I am not flying to Oshkosh this morning. I am much better off at home, frustrated with a delay, than stuffed into a smoking crater in a farm field under a thunderstorm in Iowa. Second, there is some small chance that the storms will blow through by later in the day and I might be able to fly late this afternoon or early this evening. Third, tomorrow is another day, even though it does not look very promising, either.

If you want to poke around at these charts yourself, see www.AviationWeather.gov and www.Wunderground.com.

For the conclusion of this story, see When the Weather Cooperates.

Dr. Norm Robertson II
Valparaiso, IN 46383

The letter got delivered, right on time. (Here’s a grateful tip of my virtual hat to the US Postal Service employee who went above and beyond the call of duty to make that happen.)

In sixth grade, I had a paper route and wanted a checking account. Teaching me about banking seemed like a good idea to my mom so she and I walked down to the First National Bank of Valparaiso and, in a few short minutes, I was the proud bearer of my first checkbook. It even had my name, alone, on the checks. I learned how to deposit my pay and wrote checks at the bank when I needed some cash. By mid-December, I had accumulated enough money to buy my mom the electric can opener that I had been eying at Sears. The clerk was a little dubious when confronted with a sixth-grader with a checkbook but, when I told her who my parents were, the store took my check and I walked out a much more grown up boy than I had walked in.

It’s nice to be known.

These days, it is easy to get paranoid about protecting our privacy. I am not sure that we ever had much privacy so I wonder where this fear originated. How did we get from that  comfy feeling of being a well-known part of a community to worrying that our neighbors might find out too much about us? Fretting about privacy does not make us less well known; it just raises our anxiety levels.

I was idling away some time the other evening, looking up race results for some of the people that I have met since I began running in July. The Google searches turned up not only race results but ages and home addresses and photo albums. The photos even told me which high schools had been attended (a uniquely St. Louis concern, it seems). I felt like I was back in small town Indiana. Instead of being just running partners, these people became more human, more friend-ly.

I savor that small town feeling again, even if I would have to drive a car to their houses instead of ride my bike.

I know my friend’s pain. In the 30 years that I have been doing system administration, there have been numerous times when my own bacon has been saved by backups. I have been struck by the dread BUOD error (Bad User On Device) in which a glitch sitting between the chair and the keyboard has made the computer do all kinds of hideous deeds. The worst, early in my career, idled a team of a dozen programmers for three days. Why three full days? You guessed it: no backups. At the other end of the spectrum, a member of my team recently trashed a critical configuration file on one of our servers. This, however, resulted in no downtime; we simply grabbed a copy from the backups and continued on our merry ways.

If you accidentally delete a file from your web site (or, in my friend’s case, all of the files), can you recover it? Does your hosting company provide backups and, if so, can  you recover files from their backup? In many cases, hosting companies’ backups are only for their use in cases of disk drive failure.

My company offers one (excellent, in my opinion) solution, Nest Egg Backup for Web Servers. There are many other alternatives. Do choose and implement one. When you go comparison shopping, ask the key question: How long are the backups retained? If only for one night, that means that your window of opportunity is extremely limited. If you delete a file at 10:00pm and wait until 8:00am to try to get it back, you are out of luck. You should have at least three days of retention, preferably more, preferably a lot more. Thirty days can give you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling of safety and security.

Lesson of the day: Back up your hosting accounts! And be sure to include everything (email folders, MySQL databases, PHP config files, etc. etc. etc.) The day disaster strikes is a day too late to start backing stuff up.

Immediately (as in, within a couple of hours) after the accident, the calls-to-action to improve safety in the “VFR corridor,” the name of the airspace where the collision occurred, began. These calls took many forms, from the sensational TV news reporters and politicians who demanded that the VFR corridor be closed and the helicopter tourist business be shuttered to the FAA which convened a New York Airspace Working Group panel to review everything from airspace structure to pilot training to air traffic controller practices. The focus has been on safety much more than on blame, and that’s a good thing.

Compare this to the common reaction to a driving accident: If the accident is big enough to make the news, the key reporting points are a) what happened, and b) who caused it or blame. Rarely do we react to an automotive accident with an urgent need to prevent future accidents in the same place and of the same type. We may well get to this point, of course, but only after several accidents have happened. A city might install a traffic light at an intersection, for instance, but only after several accidents have occurred at the intersection.

According to the Air Safety Foundation, the August 8 collision was the first accident of this type (airplane and helicopter) over the Hudson River in ten years. It may well have been the only accident ever. What is the cultural difference between flying and driving that we demand safer flying, even after a single accident, yet we accept car accidents as the daily norm?

Pilots place safety first. The Federal Aviation Regulations stipulate biennial “flight reviews,” essentially flying tests, by FAA certificated flight instructors. Fail the review and you don’t fly until you get some training and are “passed” by the flight instructor. Beyond that, the flying culture strongly encourage all pilots to participate in on-going training such as the FAA’s WINGS Pilot Proficiency Program. This, in turn, builds on the assumptions that none of us are perfect and that all of us can learn from others’ mistakes and can become better, safer pilots. We actively seek out and study stories of bad situations, not to assess blame but to learn and improve our skills. Even more to the point, most of us regularly fly with a safety pilot, asking the safety pilot to critique our performance. I try to get up once a month, though it is sometimes as infrequently as every three or four months, with either Jack or Linda. On these flights, I expect them to be vocal with me about anything I do that is less than perfect. Some of the training is during the flight; some during a debriefing afterwards. I always come away from these flights having learned valuable lessons.

We act differently with our cars, though. Most of us are deeply offended if anyone suggests that we might need to take either a written test or a driving test when renewing our driver’s license. We never volunteer for recurrent training on driving. One of the best ways to make a friend angry is to suggest that he or she do something differently while driving. Why? I think because driving is more important to us, on a personal level, than safety. We judge that we are “safe enough” that we don’t need to stress about driving safely any more. What is most important is that we preserve our “right” to drive, pretty much at any cost.

I think our priorities are a little mixed up and I have a suggestion. First, bear with my while I share a few figures with you.

• In 2005, 43,510 people died in the US in fatal car crashes.
• That same year, another 2,699,000 people were injured in the US in car crashes.
• In 2005, the latest year for which the NTSB reports aviation statistics, 563 people died in the US in fatal aviation accidents.
• That same year, another 723 people were injured in US aviation accidents.

Consider again our reactions as a society to aircraft accidents and to traffic accidents. Now take it to a personal level: How do you react to aviation accidents versus fatal car crashes? Are your reactions congruent with the numbers of people killed and injured in each type of accident?

Here is my suggestion to improve traffic safety, to reduce the number of deaths and injuries.

1. I’m not a perfect driver. Join me in admitting that you aren’t perfect, either.
2. Get a friend to act as your safety driver for an hour. Go drive around. As you drive, talk to your safety driver about what you are seeing, what you are thinking, and how you are making your decisions. Invite your safety driver to give you constructive criticism on how you might improve your driving.

It’s that simple. Imagine how many fewer people would die if we took driving safety as seriously as we  take flying safety.

Julie Pukelis put a camera in front of a telescope to get this view of the scene in the river.

As I am sure you know by now, a US Airways A320 ditched into the Hudson River this afternoon, just minutes after departing from LaGuardia Airport. The accident appears to have been caused by multiple bird strikes. It is truly amazing that the simplest things, from ice to birds, can bring down our most promising machines despite our best efforts.

But, and this is huge, unlike that fateful night in 1912, today everybody lived. It looks like everybody got out of the plane to safety due to the exemplary work of the pilots, the crew, the mechanics, and the people who designed and built the plane and its safety gear.

Did you realize that the US airlines did not suffer a single passenger fatality in a crash in either 2007 or 2008? This is the first time since the airlines began flying jets, 50 years ago, that two consecutive years have passed this safely. So the next time you fly, or see an airplane, or think about someone who is flying, send some appreciative energy to the men and women who make aviation safe, the

• Pilots
• Crew
• Mechanics
• Air traffic controllers
• Designers
• Builders
• Managers

Safety is no accident.

• AirTran Airways ejected nine people from a flight (including two women and three children, ages 7, 4, and 2) because two of the men in the group discussed the proximity of their seats to the engines.
• Amtrak police arrested photographer Duane Kerzic for refusing to delete pictures he had taken of Amtrak trains. Kerzic took the photos while standing on the public platform of New York’s Penn Station. He was trying to enter Amtrak’s own Picture Our Train photo contest.

AirTran has since apologized to the people who were removed from the flight and given them full refunds. Amtrak has changed Kerzic’s arrest charge to trespassing.

We all know the old joke: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. As a society, we seem to have taken this to heart… and it is wrecking our quality of life. Our paranoia is making people miserable while neither saving lives nor improving safety. If we want to keep people alive, to improve the level of safety in our lives, we are working way to hard in much the wrong areas.

Here is one example. I am quite sure that you can think of dozens more.

In 2001, just 2,976 Americans died from the terrorist attack using airliners. I say “just,” though this is a terrible trajedy, because 17,448 people died from alcohol related traffic fatalities in the same year. Worse, the drunk driving deaths go on year after year after year: 17,419 more people in 2002; 17,013 people in 2003; 16,694 died in 2004; 16,885 in 2005; and 16,005 in 2006.

That’s about 101,000 dead from drunk drivers and about 3,000 dead from maniacs in airplanes.

What the heck are we doing? How can anyone, in good conscience, profess that all of this paranoia is about saving lives?

The beginning of the new year is a good time for resolutions. Let’s resolve to set aside our paranoia and turn our attention and our resources to things which can actually make our lives better. We live in a bountiful world, courtesy of a loving G-d and the the loving attentions of our fellow human beings. Let’s enjoy it.

I am going to dress up as a voting United States citizen.

Yup; you read that right. I am going to dress up as a voter because voters are so potentially dangerous that several school districts (Ft. Zumwalt, Francis Howell, and Wentzville) have canceled classes on election day, November 4. I blogged about this last February, in Paranoia is Not Safety. Since then, I forgot about it, figuring that this was so ridiculous that nothing would come of it. Wrong!

When I look around my county, I see students coming into contact with voters all over the place all the time: in stores, in shopping malls, at movie theaters, on sidewalks, at public libraries, in public parks, etc. Of course, no one recognizes these voters as the predators that they are because 364 days of the year, the voters are cleverly disguised as ordinary people including trustworthy neighbors. Thank goodness that for one day of the year, all of these perpetrators are unmasked and gather at polling places so that we can keep our children away from them.

Someone should make a list of all of these voters. If it is not safe to let our children be in the same building with them on November 4, I cannot imagine how it would magically become safe on November 5. If any of the school teachers, administrators, and support staff happen to vote, by no means should they be allowed back into the schools the day after election day. Someone should also check for 18 year old voters who are still enrolled in high school, a particularly pernicious bunch. These heinous fiends intermingle with teenagers on a daily basis and might never be spotted if we do not catch them at the ballot box.

Here are a few tidbits from “Several Schools to Close on Election Day,” published in the Suburban Journal, October 29, 2008, page C1. I cannot link to the article because it did not appear in the on-line edition of the paper.

Fort Zumwalt School District Superintendent Bernard DuBray said,

They’re expecting a huge turnout. We’re concerned with that kind of turnout about the security in the building, so it just made sense to close the schools.

What kind of turnout is that, Dr. DuBray? Do voters become a marauding pack above a certain critical mass? Is there evidence of such behavior? Has it been observed in the wild?

Rich Chrismer, director of elections for St. Charles County responded to phone calls from people “wondering why he would allow strangers to vote in a school building” by getting the superintendents “to agree to shut down their schools on November 4.” Mr. Chrismer, did you ever think to point out that these voters are not strangers? Did you mention that the voters are people who live within the same voting district as the school? Did you tell the callers that these voters live in the same neighborhoods as the kids who attend the schools?

[Added 11/4/08] I sent a copy of this posting to Dr. DuBray. He was kind enough to reply and point out that the newspaper misreported this item. All of his schools are closed on election day. The make-up day is Friday, November 7. It gets more absurd: The same Dr. DuBray who decided that voters are too dangerous also decided that they are not too dangerous if the students have already missed a day of school recently. Some of the Ft. Zumwalt schools will hold classes on November 4 because they had been closed on October 9 and those students need to make up the day. Are the voters dangerous or not, Dr. DuBray?

This foolishness will not stop until we citizens, that would be you and me, loudly voice our opinions. We deal a hard blow to our children and ourselves and our country when we pretend that students need to be physically separated from American citizens exercising the right to vote.

She bought a copy of The Internet for Dummies and that has been helpful but even this book assumes she knows too much. She has had questions for me like, “When do I press on the right side of the bar?” She is using a touch pad on an Asus Eee PC so her question translates to, “When should I right-click?” That’s a good question and the answer, “When you want a pop-up or context menu” means nothing to her.

Then she asked, “When do I click twice on the left side of the bar?” This was a little easier. To be non-technical, I advised her to single click and, if that does not do what she wants, try double-clicking. The jury is still out on whether this helps.

Finally, she described a real corker of a problem. Neither Candy nor I had any real advice for her, other than to check her manual for a Num-Lock key. The problem, as she described it, was that whenever she typed the “3″ key, she would see an asterisk. Since she lives 850 miles away, I cannot see her screen. I am dependent on her descriptions. I assume she accurately describes what she is seeing and she assumes that I understand what she tells me.

Bad assumptions all around.

At first, it sounds like she is getting shifted characters, or at least the asterisk, all the time. Then it develops that the problem only happens in Firefox, not in OpenOffice.org. Then she tells me that it only happens when trying to enter her password into a new web site, not when doing anything else in Firefox. Ah ha! It turned out that she was typing her password and the browser was obfuscating it, completely correct behavior. But she is so new to the whole computer “thing” that even this behavior, which we take as much for granted as getting water from a sink when we turn the tap on, was baffling.

It’s easy to forget how much we know. That forgetfulness makes teaching all the more difficult.

Science News, in Shifting Priorities at the Wheel, reports on a new study which demonstrates that simply listening to conversation severely reduces a driver’s ability to safely maneuver a car.

Even a simple form of multitasking — driving while listening to someone else talk — disrupts the ability to navigate a car safely, a new study finds.

An intriguing neural response underlies vehicular mishaps associated with such distractions, say neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior.

This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit.

Pilots know how distracting simple chit-chat can be. When I am taking off and landing my plane, I ask everybody else on board to stop talking, even to each other; I need to concentrate. If I am flying with several children and they won’t keep quiet, I use the “isolate” switch on my audio panel so that I don’t have to listen to them.

This is a significant enough issue that the FAA formalized it into the Sterile Cockpit Rule in 1981. Wikipedia summarizes it nicely,

The Sterile Cockpit Rule is an FAA regulation requiring pilots to refrain from non-essential activities during critical phases of flight, normally below 10,000 feet. The FAA imposed the rule in 1981 after reviewing a series of accidents that were caused by flight crews who were distracted from their flying duties by engaging in non-essential conversations and activities during critical parts of the flight. One such notable accident was Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, which crashed just short of the runway at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in 1974 while conducting an instrument approach in dense fog. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that one probable cause of the accident was distraction due to idle chatter among the flight crew during the approach phase of the flight.

It is worth being aware of the biological limits to what our brains can do. When hurtling down the road in a two ton missile, with innocent bystanders on foot nearby, and women and children blithely motoring along in their own cars next to yours, pay attention to the most important task at hand: arriving alive.