The email did not fire someone. The email was sent to remind an employee that was already leaving what needed to be done on the last day of employment. Maybe people should read more than a summary before jumping to conclusions.
Another possibility was that the sender was using the directory and the "allstaff" mailing list was just above or just below the one wanted. The sender could have clicked a bit off and selected the wrong address, not notice it and sent the email. It is not hard to do and is a rather simple mistake with no real consequences other than a few minutes uproar when people read their email.
By the way, as others have reported no one was fired by email. The email was sent to remind an employee that was already leaving what needed to be done on the last day of employment. Maybe people should read more than a summary before jumping to conclusions.
The moderate Iran President was eventually overruled by Iran's religious hardliners for being too "moderate" or "modern", and his post went to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Actually Mohammed Khatami served his maximum two terms as president; much like the US. Iran's religious hardliners didn't kick him out he just could not run again by law.
The Iran situation could, at any point, turn into another "Hot War" (Israel in particular seems to like that idea a lot).
Yeah, Israel really wants a Hot War where thousand of their people may die and possibly millions if they get nuked. I don't think they are that stupid. Israel wants security and that is very difficult with a nuclear Iran considering some of their statements such as proposing moving the Jewish state to Europe (which ignores the fact that most Jewish holy places are in Israel)..
Here is some interesting evidence that the Iranian ruling elite didn't want better relations with the US;
An opinion poll in 2003 asking Iranians if they supported resuming government dialogue with the United States found 75% in favor. The pollsters were jailed and at least one spent several years in prison.
Why jail pollsters if one is not trying to suppress the information.
Here is an interesting quote from wikipedia;
n 2003, Jahangir Amuzegar, Finance Minister and Economic Ambassador in Iran's pre-1979 government, identified several obstacles to "resumption of relations" between the two countries from the American perspective:[69] Iranian state sponsorship of international terrorism[70] Pursuit of weapons of mass destruction Threats to neighbors in the Persian Gulf Repeated statements by the Iran's highest government officials that they wish "Death to America" and for Israel to "Vanish from the pages of time" Opposition to the Arab-Israeli peace process Violations of human rights
Notice the date as being near the end of Khatami's first term and one year before the US presidential election. Even at that point there were many huge obstacles to diplomacy. Do you really think that Bush Junior would have been re-elected had he opened relations with Iran at that time with all those issues? It is likely he would have been seen as soft and unelectable.
Where you seem to think that it was solely an issue on the US side that relations were and still are poor it appears that both sides have their hardliners that make diplomacy impossible.
The article I quoted was to refute your claim that only corporate funded research has issues. All 11 papers done by this researcher that were found to be fraudulent were funded by the government. The government is a form of pooled funding; people pay taxes and the government decided who to fund.
You have said that journals will not publish negative papers. Care to post some references at to this actually happening? Here are a couple of issues you seem to have missed as well. Pressure from universities to publish or not get tenure. Pressure from Universities to bring external funding to the University.
The CFO and the CTO will typically be in a political war with each other and it doesn't get better or saner anywhere else in most companies.
Do you know a large number of CFOs and CTOs? Are you intimately familiar with their interactions? Care to cite any papers on corporations being "split-brained and schizophrenic"?
Companies are much the same. It's more profitable to file patents without doing the work, since work costs. The less work you can do, the more money you make. At the limit, you do nothing and get everything. That's where the big money is.
Are you even reading what you are writing? We are discussing corporate funding of research. I see no difference between corporations doing the work and funding the work; it is still millions of dollars being spent on research whether it is done in a private lab or a University. True a corporation would like to "do nothing and get everything" but they understand that is not the way things work so spend millions on research. In fact your "pooled" solution can facilitate the "do nothing" issue. Say an industry does not contribute to a pool but researchers submit proposals that would research technology helpful to them. If the research is done the companies who contributed nothing will benefit from the "pool; spend nothing get something.
All your comments are generalizations and unsupported by any references. You ask for references but do not seem to need to supply references. Who do you think is worse; the corporation who funds research they need or the researcher who ignores all standards of honor, honesty and ethics who publish papers they know are false? In my mind the researcher is no more than a sophisticated thief and can do continuing damage when their false papers are referred to.
Why should a corporation have to put research money into a pool that anyone can draw from? Corporations donate into areas thay are interested in. Why should an energy company spend money on researching background radiation. When people donate thy usually pick a cause; cancer, homelessness, poverty, etc. Corporation are basically doing the same thing.
Then instead of filling up on gasoline one must fill up on liquid oxygen and electricity. That is just swapping one liquid for another. Also oxygen tanks are not light as they have to contain a lot of pressure or very low temperature. Also if you have a fire with fuel like gasoline from the other vehicle and add a lot of oxygen you get an explosion.
He has evidenced over the past number of years a strong anti science agenda. He has fired scientists for talking to the press and IIRC even for publishing papers his government doesn't like. He has barred scientists from the National Research Council climate research from attending a number of conferences including United Nations climate conferences. This would be equivalent to barring experts from NOAA or NASA weather experts from attending. He even managed to find a way to bar other members of the government, including opposition parties from attending. When they were caught out in some lie, his minister of the environment had the gall to tell the opposition parties that if they wanted to make a certain point, they should have attended the conference they were barred from going to.
Lets just post allegations without names and dates so no one can check the story What scientists were fired? What exact conference were scientists barred from? Hod did he "bar other members of the government" from attending and who were these other members? What lie were they caught in?
Actually barring opposition parties from being seen as speaking for the government is quite common. Would any party in power want to give the opposition an international platform?
If you want to make allegations then please be specific or it comes off as blatant bashing.
You only want to here about things when they are available?
When a research paper puts a time line like 8 to 18 years for implementation in anything usable they usually mean the following; 1. We have little or no confidence that this technology is actually viable. 2. We hope better technology will come along in the mean time making our research moot and hiding the fact that it would never work in the first place. 3. Give us money now anyway.
Come on, 18 to 18 years? Anything that will take top scientist that long to refine is not a "breakthrough" but very preliminary research. We may have portable fusion generators by then.
People have been trying to make lithium air batteries since the 1970's. All this article adds to the conversation is that IBM is looking into it too. Is that really news?
I really wish people would read about batteries before they tout faster ways of dumping energy into them. All batteries have a limit on how fast they charge. Charge them too fast and they heat up and explode. Another issue is getting power to the vehicle. For example a Tesla model S can go 300miles on 85KwH. to charge that in five minutes would require an input of 85*12=1.02Mwatts. At 220V that would be 4636 amps. Considering that a 1/2" copper wire can only handle a little over 302Amps think how big the wire would need to be to handle 4600 Amps. That is even assuming the charging efficiency is 100%; which it is not.
You can't just do a little simple math and charge faster.
By the way, flywheels are generally used to even out power on the grid. When the is a little too much generated they spin up. When they need a little more juice they spin down.
The "trickle-charged from the grid" at a service station is just mathematically ludicrous. Say a station has 5 charging stations and a charge takes 5 minutes and each charge is 40Kwh. What happens when every station is busy. Even taking to account 5 minutes extra for payment and other things that would be 5 stations * 6 cars per hour * 40 kWh = 1.2MWh of electricity every hour. How many flywheels would it take to store that much energy? What happens on a long weekend when this could go on for hours? Eventually the flywheels will spin down and energy will have to be drawn from the grid. Otherwise one would have to wait for the flywheels to spin up and that could take a while. I do not think that a 1.2MW draw from the grid could be considered trickle.
From the linked video it states that a car sized batter will probably not be available until 2020 or 2030. I think the subtext to that is really "We don' think this technology is actually viable and hope that some new technology will be found within the next 8 to 18 years that will make our research moot but give us money now anyway".
According to the video we won't see these batteries in cars until "2020 or 2030". That seems like a long way off considering the summary says "demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery" As far as I can glean from the vague articles is that all IBM has done is demonstrate the fundamental chemistry on a supercomputer. As far as I can tell they have not actually built a working battery of significant size and definitely not one of a size that would power a vehicle. There have been may technologies that work well in pristine laboratory environments but fail when they attempt to scale and/or have to deal with the dirty environment. Sure the battery may even work on a small scale when exposed to pure oxygen but how does it deal with the other elements in the atmosphere? Take a look at this. I do not see where IBM shows how that deal with any of these issues.
3. The FO took a 2–hour nap in the afternoon before reporting for duty feeling well rested.
To me afternoon is usually 3-4 and that is the time when many people become tired. So it wasn't 18 hours since he slept it probably around 9 hours. The nap he had on the plane was his second nap of the day.
The problem was that the captain did not allow the FO time for a cup of coffee before engaging the FO in current flight operations. I have no issue at all with the FO taking a nap. The issue is that the "well rehearsed dance" was ignored by both the Captain and the FO. The procedures they broke were as follows; 1. Informing the lead flight attendant that a rest was occurring. (that way the lead flight attendant can remind the awake pilot to wake up the other pilot and also check to ensure both pilots are not asleep) 2. The maximum nap time was supposed to be 40 minutes. The pilot allowed to FO to sleep 75 minutes with known consequences for the long nap. 3. The napping pilot is not supposed to be engaged in flight operations for at least 15 minutes after waking(time for a coffee). The pilot engaged the FO seconds after he was awakened.
The point I was trying to make was how is an airline supposed to schedule pilots when they stretch the truth about how tired they are? What are airlines supposed to do when aircrew ignore procedures?
The point about desalination was in response to theis question;
However, I wonder, if it has access to salt water, why not adapt it to use ocean water instead of the humidity from the air? Is it a problem of what to do with the salt and other minerals?
I agree that condensing water that has been naturally evaporated is better.
Wasn't the air so devoid of moisture there that you needed a breathing apparatus to not dessicate that way?
The breathing apparatus was designed to capture all moisture in the exhaled air. That moisture was then stored in the suit and available for drinking at any time. The idea was that instead of breathing water out they captured it and drank it again.
According to their spec sheet even in desert conditions one can get 350 l/day
Abu Dhabi is a coastal city in the United Arab Emirates so it does mean on the coast.
The issue with many desalination plants is not the disposal of salts/minerals but keeping the system clean from all those salts/minerals. The issue being that salts/minerals have a tenancy to build up inside the pipes causing the system to need lots of maintenance. Desalination is a well known process and using regular turbines to power the plant is a good idea. This technology is for a different purpose.
What happens if there is a failure in an engine that makes the aircraft pitch or roll violently? Anyone not in the cockpit is not going to get there. The issue with this incident was the FO was awakened gently and reacted to a situation he thought he understood. That is very different than awakening in a pitching/rolling aircraft with warning buzzers going off and the Captain yelling orders at you. Under those conditions one becomes awake almost instantly as the adrenaline kicks in. One may be disoriented for a few seconds but nowhere near as long as a gentle awakening.
I have a similar experience. My alarm clock has two modes to wake me up. One is the sound of a water flowing over rocks. It wakes me up generally quite well. In that mode it usually take me 10 minutes to get fully awake.I can if I want turn that alarm off and go back to sleep. The other mode is a very obnoxious buzzer that I only use if I have to get up early. When that thing goes off I am awake in about 5 seconds and I can not get back to sleep. Adrenaline is a powerful thing.
Several deviations from Air Canada controlled rest SOP occurred. They included:
not advising the cabin crew of the intention to rest;
not agreeing in advance on an end time of 40 minutes;
not stopping the rest at 40 minutes; and
not providing recovery time after the rest.
If anyone was at fault it was the Captain for not following proper procedure which put the First Officer in the position of making a snap decision while just waking up.
The FO, still groggy, saw Venus directly ahead and misidentified it as the C-17, immediately diving.
This is a false statement perpetuated by the posted summary. It sounds like the FO dove to avoid Venus. That is not what really happened. Here is the real sequence of events; 1. Captain advised FO of approaching C-17. 2. FO searched the sky and thought he found the aircraft. 3. The captain corrected the FO that what he say was actually Venus and the other aircraft was dead ahead and below. 4. The FO found the real aircraft, misinterpreted its movement and dove the aircraft. The FO did not dive to avoid Venus; he dove to avoid the other aircraft. Here is the supporting quote from the Safety Report;
Coincidentally, an opposite–direction United States Air Force Boeing C–17 at 34 000 feet appeared as a traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS) target on the navigational display (ND). The captain apprised the FO of this traffic.
Over the next minute or so, the captain adjusted the map scale on the ND in order to view the TCAS target 5 and occasionally looked out the forward windscreen to acquire the aircraft visually. The FO initially mistook the planet Venus for an aircraft but the captain advised again that the target was at the 12 o'clock position and 1000 feet below. The captain of ACA878 and the oncoming aircraft crew flashed their landing lights. The FO continued to scan visually for the aircraft. When the FO saw the oncoming aircraft, the FO interpreted its position as being above and descending towards them. The FO reacted to the perceived imminent collision by pushing forward on the control column.
Here are a few things to note from the Transportation safety board of Canada Report 1. The FO had two days off before the flight took place. 2. On the day of the flight he FO reported 8 hours of rest with some child care interruptions before waking at approximately 0600. 3. The FO took a 2–hour nap in the afternoon before reporting for duty feeling well rested. 4. Both crew members checked in at the required time of 1935 and the aircraft pushed back at 2109. 5. The FO started the nap at 0040 (3 hours and 31 minutes after push back and 18 hours 40 minutes after wake up.).
The FO had only worked for 4 hours in the previous three days before requesting a nap.Should not someone who just had two days off not be "already-fatigued"? The Pilots Association are talking about flights later in the work week and not on the first day. How is an airline supposed to react when a pilot reports as well rested after a two day break? Yes it was an 8 hour flight but the incident occurred only 3.5 hours into the flight.
That statement was true in their time when only the US and USSR had ICBM technology. Things have changed in the last 35 years where a the big boys are generally not aiming at each other and there are a proliferation of smaller countries who have or are researching nukes. A 35 year old statement is probably not so relevant today. All it takes is one nuke in the hands of a country that will accept the deaths of thousands of their own people to hold any country hostage. What do you do when North Korea says "Abandon South Korea or we turn Hawaii into slag"? They are already starving millions of their own people working toward that goal. With a proper missile defense such threats could be defended against.
Notice you said "most". By law, everything, no matter how minor, even is it is a subcommittee dealing with a minor issue, would require a public hearing. That is the problem with absolutes like "when ever 3 or more members talk". You have to agree that there are some issue where three or more board members talk that do not require a public audience.
If you want to allow working people to participate in these proceedings then these meetings would have to be held after normal working hours which means that staff and security overtime would have to be paid.
And you are missing my point; by making it easy to make all discussion public it makes it easy to see when back room deals are made. I agree that discussions need to be public but I see little difference between an email log and sitting in a room listening to someone. Lets take your scenario. As it seems to have happened you were shut out of a decision making process. I agree that this is bad and should be against the law. On the other hand if there was an official site where such discussion are meant to take place there would be no excuse for not having the discussion in public.
The law itself has a couple of big holes in it in that three or more people have to be in the conversation and interaction must be "virtually simultaneous". Would you rather have "I talked to Bob, Bob talked to Martha and Marta talked to Larry. there were no more than two people in the conversation at any one time and it was over the space of a couple of weeks so it is legal" or all communications between board members about board issues posted in a public forum? Personally I would prefer the latter.
There is another term for them; petulant obstructionists. The colloquialism is "cutting of the nose to spite the face".The point is that delaying all government decisions it not a good thing especially when the same people gripe that government moves to slowly..
I am not talking about what the law says; I am asking is the law reasonable? Do you have any idea how much public meetings cost in time and money? Have you ever seen a public meeting that was less than an hour long? Do you really want to spend thousands of dollars in advertising, security, clerical support, etc. every time a few hundred dollars is discussed? Do you want to delay every decision by months? Treating a thousand dollar issue the same way as a million dollar issue is just stupid. I agree there needs to be public visibility and transparency on the big issue but the is a point at which one is spending more on visibility than the project is worth. Much of the issue of transparency can be dealt with by emails transcripts and a single public meeting.
Perhaps if your Board had a public forum (board members could post but the public could only read) where all board communication were posted then you would have been aware of things being discussed and would have been able to comment on them. Perhaps a companion forum could be added where the public could comment on discussions. That would increase public input and may even garner input from people who do not have the time to attend public meetings. Instead of working against technology how about trying to find ways to embrace it and use it to add transparency.
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The email did not fire someone. The email was sent to remind an employee that was already leaving what needed to be done on the last day of employment. Maybe people should read more than a summary before jumping to conclusions.
Another possibility was that the sender was using the directory and the "allstaff" mailing list was just above or just below the one wanted. The sender could have clicked a bit off and selected the wrong address, not notice it and sent the email. It is not hard to do and is a rather simple mistake with no real consequences other than a few minutes uproar when people read their email.
By the way, as others have reported no one was fired by email. The email was sent to remind an employee that was already leaving what needed to be done on the last day of employment. Maybe people should read more than a summary before jumping to conclusions.
The moderate Iran President was eventually overruled by Iran's religious hardliners for being too "moderate" or "modern", and his post went to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Actually Mohammed Khatami served his maximum two terms as president; much like the US. Iran's religious hardliners didn't kick him out he just could not run again by law.
The Iran situation could, at any point, turn into another "Hot War" (Israel in particular seems to like that idea a lot).
Yeah, Israel really wants a Hot War where thousand of their people may die and possibly millions if they get nuked. I don't think they are that stupid. Israel wants security and that is very difficult with a nuclear Iran considering some of their statements such as proposing moving the Jewish state to Europe (which ignores the fact that most Jewish holy places are in Israel)..
Here is some interesting evidence that the Iranian ruling elite didn't want better relations with the US;
An opinion poll in 2003 asking Iranians if they supported resuming government dialogue with the United States found 75% in favor. The pollsters were jailed and at least one spent several years in prison.
Why jail pollsters if one is not trying to suppress the information.
Here is an interesting quote from wikipedia;
n 2003, Jahangir Amuzegar, Finance Minister and Economic Ambassador in Iran's pre-1979 government, identified several obstacles to "resumption of relations" between the two countries from the American perspective:[69]
Iranian state sponsorship of international terrorism[70]
Pursuit of weapons of mass destruction
Threats to neighbors in the Persian Gulf
Repeated statements by the Iran's highest government officials that they wish "Death to America" and for Israel to "Vanish from the pages of time"
Opposition to the Arab-Israeli peace process
Violations of human rights
Notice the date as being near the end of Khatami's first term and one year before the US presidential election. Even at that point there were many huge obstacles to diplomacy. Do you really think that Bush Junior would have been re-elected had he opened relations with Iran at that time with all those issues? It is likely he would have been seen as soft and unelectable.
Where you seem to think that it was solely an issue on the US side that relations were and still are poor it appears that both sides have their hardliners that make diplomacy impossible.
The article I quoted was to refute your claim that only corporate funded research has issues. All 11 papers done by this researcher that were found to be fraudulent were funded by the government. The government is a form of pooled funding; people pay taxes and the government decided who to fund.
You have said that journals will not publish negative papers. Care to post some references at to this actually happening? Here are a couple of issues you seem to have missed as well. Pressure from universities to publish or not get tenure. Pressure from Universities to bring external funding to the University.
The CFO and the CTO will typically be in a political war with each other and it doesn't get better or saner anywhere else in most companies.
Do you know a large number of CFOs and CTOs? Are you intimately familiar with their interactions? Care to cite any papers on corporations being "split-brained and schizophrenic"?
Companies are much the same. It's more profitable to file patents without doing the work, since work costs. The less work you can do, the more money you make. At the limit, you do nothing and get everything. That's where the big money is.
Are you even reading what you are writing? We are discussing corporate funding of research. I see no difference between corporations doing the work and funding the work; it is still millions of dollars being spent on research whether it is done in a private lab or a University. True a corporation would like to "do nothing and get everything" but they understand that is not the way things work so spend millions on research. In fact your "pooled" solution can facilitate the "do nothing" issue. Say an industry does not contribute to a pool but researchers submit proposals that would research technology helpful to them. If the research is done the companies who contributed nothing will benefit from the "pool; spend nothing get something.
All your comments are generalizations and unsupported by any references. You ask for references but do not seem to need to supply references. Who do you think is worse; the corporation who funds research they need or the researcher who ignores all standards of honor, honesty and ethics who publish papers they know are false? In my mind the researcher is no more than a sophisticated thief and can do continuing damage when their false papers are referred to.
Here is an example for you, http://www.naturalnews.com/035315_red_wine_resveratrol_scientific_fraud.html Please note that this "scientist" was funded by public money. Funding from a pool will not change misconduct by scientist who will fake results.
Why should a corporation have to put research money into a pool that anyone can draw from? Corporations donate into areas thay are interested in. Why should an energy company spend money on researching background radiation. When people donate thy usually pick a cause; cancer, homelessness, poverty, etc. Corporation are basically doing the same thing.
Then instead of filling up on gasoline one must fill up on liquid oxygen and electricity. That is just swapping one liquid for another. Also oxygen tanks are not light as they have to contain a lot of pressure or very low temperature. Also if you have a fire with fuel like gasoline from the other vehicle and add a lot of oxygen you get an explosion.
He has evidenced over the past number of years a strong anti science agenda. He has fired scientists for talking to the press and IIRC even for publishing papers his government doesn't like. He has barred scientists from the National Research Council climate research from attending a number of conferences including United Nations climate conferences. This would be equivalent to barring experts from NOAA or NASA weather experts from attending. He even managed to find a way to bar other members of the government, including opposition parties from attending. When they were caught out in some lie, his minister of the environment had the gall to tell the opposition parties that if they wanted to make a certain point, they should have attended the conference they were barred from going to.
Lets just post allegations without names and dates so no one can check the story What scientists were fired? What exact conference were scientists barred from? Hod did he "bar other members of the government" from attending and who were these other members? What lie were they caught in?
Actually barring opposition parties from being seen as speaking for the government is quite common. Would any party in power want to give the opposition an international platform?
If you want to make allegations then please be specific or it comes off as blatant bashing.
You only want to here about things when they are available?
When a research paper puts a time line like 8 to 18 years for implementation in anything usable they usually mean the following;
1. We have little or no confidence that this technology is actually viable.
2. We hope better technology will come along in the mean time making our research moot and hiding the fact that it would never work in the first place.
3. Give us money now anyway.
Come on, 18 to 18 years? Anything that will take top scientist that long to refine is not a "breakthrough" but very preliminary research. We may have portable fusion generators by then.
People have been trying to make lithium air batteries since the 1970's. All this article adds to the conversation is that IBM is looking into it too. Is that really news?
Announcing "breakthrough" technology that will take 8 to 18 years to com to fruition? We may have portable fusion generators by then.
I really wish people would read about batteries before they tout faster ways of dumping energy into them. All batteries have a limit on how fast they charge. Charge them too fast and they heat up and explode. Another issue is getting power to the vehicle. For example a Tesla model S can go 300miles on 85KwH. to charge that in five minutes would require an input of 85*12=1.02Mwatts. At 220V that would be 4636 amps. Considering that a 1/2" copper wire can only handle a little over 302Amps think how big the wire would need to be to handle 4600 Amps. That is even assuming the charging efficiency is 100%; which it is not.
You can't just do a little simple math and charge faster.
By the way, flywheels are generally used to even out power on the grid. When the is a little too much generated they spin up. When they need a little more juice they spin down.
The "trickle-charged from the grid" at a service station is just mathematically ludicrous. Say a station has 5 charging stations and a charge takes 5 minutes and each charge is 40Kwh. What happens when every station is busy. Even taking to account 5 minutes extra for payment and other things that would be 5 stations * 6 cars per hour * 40 kWh = 1.2MWh of electricity every hour. How many flywheels would it take to store that much energy? What happens on a long weekend when this could go on for hours? Eventually the flywheels will spin down and energy will have to be drawn from the grid. Otherwise one would have to wait for the flywheels to spin up and that could take a while. I do not think that a 1.2MW draw from the grid could be considered trickle.
From the linked video it states that a car sized batter will probably not be available until 2020 or 2030. I think the subtext to that is really "We don' think this technology is actually viable and hope that some new technology will be found within the next 8 to 18 years that will make our research moot but give us money now anyway".
According to the video we won't see these batteries in cars until "2020 or 2030". That seems like a long way off considering the summary says "demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery" As far as I can glean from the vague articles is that all IBM has done is demonstrate the fundamental chemistry on a supercomputer. As far as I can tell they have not actually built a working battery of significant size and definitely not one of a size that would power a vehicle. There have been may technologies that work well in pristine laboratory environments but fail when they attempt to scale and/or have to deal with the dirty environment. Sure the battery may even work on a small scale when exposed to pure oxygen but how does it deal with the other elements in the atmosphere? Take a look at this. I do not see where IBM shows how that deal with any of these issues.
Sorry by you missed point number 3.
3. The FO took a 2–hour nap in the afternoon before reporting for duty feeling well rested.
To me afternoon is usually 3-4 and that is the time when many people become tired. So it wasn't 18 hours since he slept it probably around 9 hours. The nap he had on the plane was his second nap of the day.
The problem was that the captain did not allow the FO time for a cup of coffee before engaging the FO in current flight operations. I have no issue at all with the FO taking a nap. The issue is that the "well rehearsed dance" was ignored by both the Captain and the FO. The procedures they broke were as follows;
1. Informing the lead flight attendant that a rest was occurring. (that way the lead flight attendant can remind the awake pilot to wake up the other pilot and also check to ensure both pilots are not asleep)
2. The maximum nap time was supposed to be 40 minutes. The pilot allowed to FO to sleep 75 minutes with known consequences for the long nap.
3. The napping pilot is not supposed to be engaged in flight operations for at least 15 minutes after waking(time for a coffee). The pilot engaged the FO seconds after he was awakened.
The point I was trying to make was how is an airline supposed to schedule pilots when they stretch the truth about how tired they are? What are airlines supposed to do when aircrew ignore procedures?
I agree completely but the FO reported in as being well rested. Did the FO take a flight he knew he was not rested for?
The point about desalination was in response to theis question;
However, I wonder, if it has access to salt water, why not adapt it to use ocean water instead of the humidity from the air? Is it a problem of what to do with the salt and other minerals?
I agree that condensing water that has been naturally evaporated is better.
Wasn't the air so devoid of moisture there that you needed a breathing apparatus to not dessicate that way?
The breathing apparatus was designed to capture all moisture in the exhaled air. That moisture was then stored in the suit and available for drinking at any time. The idea was that instead of breathing water out they captured it and drank it again.
According to their spec sheet even in desert conditions one can get 350 l/day
Abu Dhabi is a coastal city in the United Arab Emirates so it does mean on the coast.
The issue with many desalination plants is not the disposal of salts/minerals but keeping the system clean from all those salts/minerals. The issue being that salts/minerals have a tenancy to build up inside the pipes causing the system to need lots of maintenance. Desalination is a well known process and using regular turbines to power the plant is a good idea. This technology is for a different purpose.
What happens if there is a failure in an engine that makes the aircraft pitch or roll violently? Anyone not in the cockpit is not going to get there. The issue with this incident was the FO was awakened gently and reacted to a situation he thought he understood. That is very different than awakening in a pitching/rolling aircraft with warning buzzers going off and the Captain yelling orders at you. Under those conditions one becomes awake almost instantly as the adrenaline kicks in. One may be disoriented for a few seconds but nowhere near as long as a gentle awakening.
I have a similar experience. My alarm clock has two modes to wake me up. One is the sound of a water flowing over rocks. It wakes me up generally quite well. In that mode it usually take me 10 minutes to get fully awake.I can if I want turn that alarm off and go back to sleep. The other mode is a very obnoxious buzzer that I only use if I have to get up early. When that thing goes off I am awake in about 5 seconds and I can not get back to sleep. Adrenaline is a powerful thing.
Here is a quote from the Safety board report;
Several deviations from Air Canada controlled rest SOP occurred. They included:
not advising the cabin crew of the intention to rest;
not agreeing in advance on an end time of 40 minutes;
not stopping the rest at 40 minutes; and
not providing recovery time after the rest.
If anyone was at fault it was the Captain for not following proper procedure which put the First Officer in the position of making a snap decision while just waking up.
The FO, still groggy, saw Venus directly ahead and misidentified it as the C-17, immediately diving.
This is a false statement perpetuated by the posted summary. It sounds like the FO dove to avoid Venus. That is not what really happened. Here is the real sequence of events;
1. Captain advised FO of approaching C-17.
2. FO searched the sky and thought he found the aircraft.
3. The captain corrected the FO that what he say was actually Venus and the other aircraft was dead ahead and below.
4. The FO found the real aircraft, misinterpreted its movement and dove the aircraft.
The FO did not dive to avoid Venus; he dove to avoid the other aircraft. Here is the supporting quote from the Safety Report;
Coincidentally, an opposite–direction United States Air Force Boeing C–17 at 34 000 feet appeared as a traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS) target on the navigational display (ND). The captain apprised the FO of this traffic.
Over the next minute or so, the captain adjusted the map scale on the ND in order to view the TCAS target 5 and occasionally looked out the forward windscreen to acquire the aircraft visually. The FO initially mistook the planet Venus for an aircraft but the captain advised again that the target was at the 12 o'clock position and 1000 feet below. The captain of ACA878 and the oncoming aircraft crew flashed their landing lights. The FO continued to scan visually for the aircraft. When the FO saw the oncoming aircraft, the FO interpreted its position as being above and descending towards them. The FO reacted to the perceived imminent collision by pushing forward on the control column.
Here are a few things to note from the Transportation safety board of Canada Report
1. The FO had two days off before the flight took place.
2. On the day of the flight he FO reported 8 hours of rest with some child care interruptions before waking at approximately 0600.
3. The FO took a 2–hour nap in the afternoon before reporting for duty feeling well rested.
4. Both crew members checked in at the required time of 1935 and the aircraft pushed back at 2109.
5. The FO started the nap at 0040 (3 hours and 31 minutes after push back and 18 hours 40 minutes after wake up.).
The FO had only worked for 4 hours in the previous three days before requesting a nap.Should not someone who just had two days off not be "already-fatigued"? The Pilots Association are talking about flights later in the work week and not on the first day. How is an airline supposed to react when a pilot reports as well rested after a two day break? Yes it was an 8 hour flight but the incident occurred only 3.5 hours into the flight.
I see nothing "heroic" about causing every decision to be delayed.
Actually it does just take a simple majority; in the next election. The new legislature can repeal laws.
That statement was true in their time when only the US and USSR had ICBM technology. Things have changed in the last 35 years where a the big boys are generally not aiming at each other and there are a proliferation of smaller countries who have or are researching nukes. A 35 year old statement is probably not so relevant today. All it takes is one nuke in the hands of a country that will accept the deaths of thousands of their own people to hold any country hostage. What do you do when North Korea says "Abandon South Korea or we turn Hawaii into slag"? They are already starving millions of their own people working toward that goal. With a proper missile defense such threats could be defended against.
Notice you said "most". By law, everything, no matter how minor, even is it is a subcommittee dealing with a minor issue, would require a public hearing. That is the problem with absolutes like "when ever 3 or more members talk". You have to agree that there are some issue where three or more board members talk that do not require a public audience.
If you want to allow working people to participate in these proceedings then these meetings would have to be held after normal working hours which means that staff and security overtime would have to be paid.
And you are missing my point; by making it easy to make all discussion public it makes it easy to see when back room deals are made. I agree that discussions need to be public but I see little difference between an email log and sitting in a room listening to someone. Lets take your scenario. As it seems to have happened you were shut out of a decision making process. I agree that this is bad and should be against the law. On the other hand if there was an official site where such discussion are meant to take place there would be no excuse for not having the discussion in public.
The law itself has a couple of big holes in it in that three or more people have to be in the conversation and interaction must be "virtually simultaneous". Would you rather have "I talked to Bob, Bob talked to Martha and Marta talked to Larry. there were no more than two people in the conversation at any one time and it was over the space of a couple of weeks so it is legal" or all communications between board members about board issues posted in a public forum? Personally I would prefer the latter.
There is another term for them; petulant obstructionists. The colloquialism is "cutting of the nose to spite the face".The point is that delaying all government decisions it not a good thing especially when the same people gripe that government moves to slowly..
I am not talking about what the law says; I am asking is the law reasonable? Do you have any idea how much public meetings cost in time and money? Have you ever seen a public meeting that was less than an hour long? Do you really want to spend thousands of dollars in advertising, security, clerical support, etc. every time a few hundred dollars is discussed? Do you want to delay every decision by months? Treating a thousand dollar issue the same way as a million dollar issue is just stupid. I agree there needs to be public visibility and transparency on the big issue but the is a point at which one is spending more on visibility than the project is worth. Much of the issue of transparency can be dealt with by emails transcripts and a single public meeting.
Perhaps if your Board had a public forum (board members could post but the public could only read) where all board communication were posted then you would have been aware of things being discussed and would have been able to comment on them. Perhaps a companion forum could be added where the public could comment on discussions. That would increase public input and may even garner input from people who do not have the time to attend public meetings. Instead of working against technology how about trying to find ways to embrace it and use it to add transparency.