I wouldn't call it engineering. It involved taking the traffic count numbers provided by the City of Raleigh and creating projections of future use based on simple logic and mathematics. According to the report, the future use aspect had been ignored.
Anybody with a calculator, a few maps and the web accessible "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices" could have done it if they were mathematically inclined.
If the report had presented traffic intersection layouts, it could be considered engineering. Since it only dealt with traffic counts, current and projected, it is more in the realm of transportation planning, not transportation engineering.
The eight page report focuses on traffic counts and the fact that the engineering firm seemed to use current conditions and not projected future use. One of the future conditions being ignored was growth in the area. Another was the fact that the road was being expanded from two lanes to four lanes. A third future condition mentioned that half of the current left turn opportunities for one area would be eliminated due to the addition of a median.
Speaking from the point of view of someone with a degree in City and Regional Planning, the analysis is something that a planning student could do if they know simple mathematics and logic.
Start with the fact that the road is going from two lanes to four lanes. That adds an additional risk factor that warrants a closer look at the future conditions.
Then factor in known future development in the area. The number of housing units multiplied by X trips per unit, spread out proportionally on a hour by hour basis gives you future loads. It is not rocket science folks.
Calculating the future loads caused by the closing of several left turn lanes is even simpler if you assume that the traffic from the closed left lanes will all feed into the single open left turn lane. You just add up the numbers on an hour by hour basis.
Since the City of Raleigh did the traffic counts used by the report, and since the report showed the math AND referenced the Federal Highway Administration's Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, it is kind of hard to ignore the report based on numbers alone. It is also kind of hard to consider it to be engineering that needs to be approved by a PE because it is just looking at the loads that would justify putting in traffic lights and NOT suggesting the configuration of the traffic lights.
The board should be intelligent enough to realize that the work was not done by a professional. All the DOT has to do is point out that it is NOT the professionally recognized product of a licensed traffic engineer. A disclaimer would have helped though.
Of course, the DOT may have to respond to the issues brought up by the report, which may be valid. I could see the board requesting additional information from the activist group AND the DOT and having an independent group review it. That investigation might show that there were mistakes made in the original analysis.
If those mistakes were caused by faulty data provided by the DOT, then people in the DOT may find themselves in hot water.
While there is always a chance that the activist group is also using faulty data, I would expect them to build as strong a case as possible using unimpeachable sources that are hard to take down. If I were in their position, I'd make it bullet proof and perhaps even use PEs for the analysis. The PEs might not want to let their names be know, for fear of being blacklisted.
There could always be a chance that the computer scientist happens to be an expert in computer traffic simulation and, using data from various public sources, ran his own analysis.
I have a degree in City and Regional Planning and know about a lot of the data that goes into transportation planning. I've also done some traffic modeling using simulation software, so I know results can vary a lot depending upon your assumptions. I don't claim to be an expert, but I do think of myself as a well informed citizen.
I have found, as an informed citizen activist, that some groups assume that you don't know as much as they do. A few 'experts' have even claimed that the studies are 'too complex for you to understand' when asked for details in public sessions.
It would be very tempting to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the raw data used for various transportation projects and see if the results can be duplicated. I suspect that some engineering firms will claim that it is proprietary information and refuse to release it. Of course if it is for a public project, one funded by public money, it should be public information.
The guarantee that they have knowledge would be found in the details of the report. If the report is well designed, it will have the assumptions that went into the conclusions. Those could be verified by an independent source.
In this instance it sounds like the citizen activist group is challenging the assumptions used by the engineering firm that did the original work. Unless the N.C DOT is brain dead, they won't use the citizen activist report as part of the design documents for the proposed project without doing their own additional research. They need to see if the assumptions of the citizen activist report are reasonable and investigate the assumptions for accuracy. There is always a chance that the engineering firm made mistakes, perhaps through faulty data.
It would be interesting figuring out WHAT a PE would be liable for in this case. Could they be held accountable for holding up a flawed project if their analysis is more accurate than the engineering firm?
Civil War reenactors, Victorian era reenactors (Dickens), and steampunk costumers would be people who use button hooks for high-button shoes. Plus Hollywood.
Buggy whips would be even more common among those who train horses to pull carts and sulkies.
I seem to recall that one of the unintended side effects of Proposition 13 was the fact that property owned by corporations tend to have a much lower tax rate because they are rarely sold, which puts the tax burden on residential owners. I don't recall if that problem was remedied by changes in the law.
At the same time, the intent of Prop. 13 was good, because people were getting taxed out of their homes by property tax increases. When the value of your property doubles, and the tax rates remain the same, your property tax doubles.
There are times when I wonder if part of the 'blame' for the conditions that lead to Prop. 13 could be placed on real estate speculators, property tax assessments, and the tax structure. While people want the value of their property to go up, they don't want to pay the additional taxes associated with that increased value. At the same time, if the tax rates remain unchanged, taxes go up. And then you add in delays in property tax assessments, which creates problems when you try to adjust the tax rates.
Another teacher that needs to be exiled to a place where they are not permitted to teach.
Or, if rules prohibit that, they should only be able to teach special students in VERY limited numbers. These students would be those who require a very special learning environment where their narrow minded teaching style does wonders.
One of the biggest problems with the 'spiral curriculum' is that it seems to assume that all students are on the same track with the same quality teaching throughout the country. If you happen to change schools, or have different quality teachers, or even use different systems, you are up a creek without a paddle.
Even worse, some of the books students use don't even have examples of what they are trying to show because they assume that was learned in an earlier cycle. That makes it difficult for parents to help students when the students get stuck.
The mindset of the teacher reminds me of the Harry Chapin song "Flowers Are Red."
Teachers that are that narrow minded should be transferred to places where they can't do any damage to students. Perhaps a prison environment would be best for them. They could at least try to help some of the people they screwed over.
The fatal accident caught everybody by surprise because it involved a facility that hadn't caused them any problems before the accident. Thankfully it was ground based and didn't involve any of the aircraft.
Figure that this style of spaceflight is the 'carrot before the horse' type of spaceflight. As people realize that there is a market for it, one that actually generates revenue, others will start to join in and the passengers of SpaceShipTwo will want more thrills for about the same price.
Go the additional step and formally copyright the files, complete with payment to the appropriate copy right agency. That allows you to sue for damages if Hollywood decides to use your content in a professional remake.
A low level employee at a large company downloads illegal content despite safeguards. The company gets shut down. Lots of money is lost. Big time lawsuit, with in house lawyers in charge. (The low level employee could even be a plant.)
A volunteer for a politician downloads illegal content. Web access at a national level gets shut down.
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."
I call the apparent decline in product quality the 'WalMart Effect.' WalMart sells cheaply made things at a low price so a lot of the market has to respond with cheaper products to remain competitive. You eventually end up with a situation where you can't buy quality items without having to look extra hard for them.
It would be interesting do some comparison shopping, looking at similarly priced products in different stores and comparing them to similar products of different quality. It would be even more interesting to see how product quality has changed over the years, on a quantitative basis. While anecdotal examples are fun, hard, quantitative numbers might reveal some trends that could prove or disprove the 'WalMart Effect'.
To be fair to both parties, you have to mention that GW Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976. He even admitted to "drinking too much" before he quit. So you could say that GW was alcohol addled in his younger years.
But GW Bush decided to stop drinking after his fortieth birthday. I commend him for that.
Obama, it appears, used drugs in high school and college but also gave them up. You have to commend Obama for that AND the fact that he admitted to drug use.
I suspect that you could add lots of public figures to this list, those that, in their early years, abused drugs and/or alcohol. That seems to be a common thing in some circles.
Rush, unfortunately, should have been old enough to know better. The only 'saving' grace is the fact that people in pain will often do stupid things to push back that pain. It would be nice if Rush were a bit more vocal about the stupidity of prescription drug abuse AND if the media reported said activity.
Almost any public figure who abuses drugs will have their abuse mentioned, whether said abuse happened during their youth or in recent years. It appears to be one of those things that people do, especially when their 'hero' is criticized by the other side.
You would probably want to do more than a simple phone call since you would want an audit trail. The phone call could start the process, assuming you can get through. But you would want official notification that the lawyer had been notified. (If they have a log of attempted calls from the date they got the summons, that might indicate they tried.)
You would probably want to follow up a phone call with a certified letter addressed to the lawyer.
I can see the possibility of the summons getting to the wrong company and ending up in the hands of the wrong person in that company. A disgruntled employee who is planning on bailing might round file a summons. The complaint I read in a PDF didn't appear to name names, other than of the company.
The Los Angeles based group owns 'thedirt.com' while the Scottsdale, Arizona group owns 'thedirty.com' if I'm reading related articles correctly.
The complaint was delivered to an address in Los Angeles. Is there a chance that a 'we are not these people' type response went back to the plaintiff and was ignored or lost in transit?
A few people have suggested that a simple call to the plaintiff's lawyers would have been enough to diffuse things. Unfortunately, unless you have some backup to say that you have made said call, it can be ignored.
It would be interesting if the Los Angeles group did everything they could to point out that the wrong group was being sued and thought they had resolved the issue, only to find that it still went to court.
If they had responded by appearing in court, could the Los Angeles group have demanded that their expenses be paid because they were NOT the ones that owned the offending site?
If the court delivered the papers to the address in the WHOIS information, there might be a very good reason for 'TheDirt' to have NOT received them. The WHOIS address is a generic one that applies to thousands of people who don't want their home or business address accessible from WHOIS. It would be fairly easy for a summons to get lost in the mail if there is a lot of mail going through that address.
You could also run into a problem of the summons NOT being delivered in time, especially if the owner of the domain is on vacation or had moved and failed to update their behind the scenes WHOIS information.
What we need is more information about the delivery of the summons.
The actual research study has even more facts to consider, like the fact that life long abstainers were excluded from the study and that a significant number of the 'abstainers' had drinking problems as well as health problems. There is also a 'light' drinker category that is in the research study but not the TIME article.
It is interesting how those facts never make it into the mainstream articles.
In fact, in tests of potential covariates, we found among
these older adults that at baseline, abstainers were significantly
more likely to have had prior drinking problems, to be
obese, and to smoke cigarettes than moderate drinkers and
significantly higher than moderate drinkers on health problems,
depressive symptoms, and avoidance coping.Moreover,
at baseline, abstainers were significantly lower than moderate
drinkers on SES, physical activity, number of close friends,
and quality of friend support and significantly less likely to be
married than moderate drinkers. Moreover, all of these covariates
significantly predicted mortality. We found only 2 gender
interactions associated with increased mortality (the effect
for being unmarried was relatively stronger for men and the
effect for avoidance coping was relatively stronger for
women). However, including these interactions in the full
model affected the model only slightly.Moreover, the association
between alcohol group membership and mortality risk
did not vary by gender.
Ah, so the 'abstainers' in the study were more likely to have had prior drinking problems, as well as other health problems. An interesting part of the study that didn't make it to the TIME article.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call it engineering. It involved taking the traffic count numbers provided by the City of Raleigh and creating projections of future use based on simple logic and mathematics. According to the report, the future use aspect had been ignored.
Anybody with a calculator, a few maps and the web accessible "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices" could have done it if they were mathematically inclined.
If the report had presented traffic intersection layouts, it could be considered engineering. Since it only dealt with traffic counts, current and projected, it is more in the realm of transportation planning, not transportation engineering.
The eight page report focuses on traffic counts and the fact that the engineering firm seemed to use current conditions and not projected future use. One of the future conditions being ignored was growth in the area. Another was the fact that the road was being expanded from two lanes to four lanes. A third future condition mentioned that half of the current left turn opportunities for one area would be eliminated due to the addition of a median.
Speaking from the point of view of someone with a degree in City and Regional Planning, the analysis is something that a planning student could do if they know simple mathematics and logic.
Start with the fact that the road is going from two lanes to four lanes. That adds an additional risk factor that warrants a closer look at the future conditions.
Then factor in known future development in the area. The number of housing units multiplied by X trips per unit, spread out proportionally on a hour by hour basis gives you future loads. It is not rocket science folks.
Calculating the future loads caused by the closing of several left turn lanes is even simpler if you assume that the traffic from the closed left lanes will all feed into the single open left turn lane. You just add up the numbers on an hour by hour basis.
Since the City of Raleigh did the traffic counts used by the report, and since the report showed the math AND referenced the Federal Highway Administration's Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, it is kind of hard to ignore the report based on numbers alone. It is also kind of hard to consider it to be engineering that needs to be approved by a PE because it is just looking at the loads that would justify putting in traffic lights and NOT suggesting the configuration of the traffic lights.
The board should be intelligent enough to realize that the work was not done by a professional. All the DOT has to do is point out that it is NOT the professionally recognized product of a licensed traffic engineer. A disclaimer would have helped though.
Of course, the DOT may have to respond to the issues brought up by the report, which may be valid. I could see the board requesting additional information from the activist group AND the DOT and having an independent group review it. That investigation might show that there were mistakes made in the original analysis.
If those mistakes were caused by faulty data provided by the DOT, then people in the DOT may find themselves in hot water.
While there is always a chance that the activist group is also using faulty data, I would expect them to build as strong a case as possible using unimpeachable sources that are hard to take down. If I were in their position, I'd make it bullet proof and perhaps even use PEs for the analysis. The PEs might not want to let their names be know, for fear of being blacklisted.
There could always be a chance that the computer scientist happens to be an expert in computer traffic simulation and, using data from various public sources, ran his own analysis.
I have a degree in City and Regional Planning and know about a lot of the data that goes into transportation planning. I've also done some traffic modeling using simulation software, so I know results can vary a lot depending upon your assumptions. I don't claim to be an expert, but I do think of myself as a well informed citizen.
I have found, as an informed citizen activist, that some groups assume that you don't know as much as they do. A few 'experts' have even claimed that the studies are 'too complex for you to understand' when asked for details in public sessions.
It would be very tempting to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the raw data used for various transportation projects and see if the results can be duplicated. I suspect that some engineering firms will claim that it is proprietary information and refuse to release it. Of course if it is for a public project, one funded by public money, it should be public information.
The guarantee that they have knowledge would be found in the details of the report. If the report is well designed, it will have the assumptions that went into the conclusions. Those could be verified by an independent source.
In this instance it sounds like the citizen activist group is challenging the assumptions used by the engineering firm that did the original work. Unless the N.C DOT is brain dead, they won't use the citizen activist report as part of the design documents for the proposed project without doing their own additional research. They need to see if the assumptions of the citizen activist report are reasonable and investigate the assumptions for accuracy. There is always a chance that the engineering firm made mistakes, perhaps through faulty data.
It would be interesting figuring out WHAT a PE would be liable for in this case. Could they be held accountable for holding up a flawed project if their analysis is more accurate than the engineering firm?
Civil War reenactors, Victorian era reenactors (Dickens), and steampunk costumers would be people who use button hooks for high-button shoes. Plus Hollywood.
Buggy whips would be even more common among those who train horses to pull carts and sulkies.
I seem to recall that one of the unintended side effects of Proposition 13 was the fact that property owned by corporations tend to have a much lower tax rate because they are rarely sold, which puts the tax burden on residential owners. I don't recall if that problem was remedied by changes in the law.
At the same time, the intent of Prop. 13 was good, because people were getting taxed out of their homes by property tax increases. When the value of your property doubles, and the tax rates remain the same, your property tax doubles.
There are times when I wonder if part of the 'blame' for the conditions that lead to Prop. 13 could be placed on real estate speculators, property tax assessments, and the tax structure. While people want the value of their property to go up, they don't want to pay the additional taxes associated with that increased value. At the same time, if the tax rates remain unchanged, taxes go up. And then you add in delays in property tax assessments, which creates problems when you try to adjust the tax rates.
Oddly enough, the text book my Philosophy 101 class used was "Mathematics and logic for digital devices" by James T. Culbertson.
Of course, I was in a technical college at the time and the person teaching the class also taught mathematics and computer science.
Another teacher that needs to be exiled to a place where they are not permitted to teach.
Or, if rules prohibit that, they should only be able to teach special students in VERY limited numbers. These students would be those who require a very special learning environment where their narrow minded teaching style does wonders.
One of the biggest problems with the 'spiral curriculum' is that it seems to assume that all students are on the same track with the same quality teaching throughout the country. If you happen to change schools, or have different quality teachers, or even use different systems, you are up a creek without a paddle.
Even worse, some of the books students use don't even have examples of what they are trying to show because they assume that was learned in an earlier cycle. That makes it difficult for parents to help students when the students get stuck.
The mindset of the teacher reminds me of the Harry Chapin song "Flowers Are Red."
Teachers that are that narrow minded should be transferred to places where they can't do any damage to students. Perhaps a prison environment would be best for them. They could at least try to help some of the people they screwed over.
The fatal accident caught everybody by surprise because it involved a facility that hadn't caused them any problems before the accident. Thankfully it was ground based and didn't involve any of the aircraft. Figure that this style of spaceflight is the 'carrot before the horse' type of spaceflight. As people realize that there is a market for it, one that actually generates revenue, others will start to join in and the passengers of SpaceShipTwo will want more thrills for about the same price.
Go the additional step and formally copyright the files, complete with payment to the appropriate copy right agency. That allows you to sue for damages if Hollywood decides to use your content in a professional remake.
A low level employee at a large company downloads illegal content despite safeguards. The company gets shut down. Lots of money is lost. Big time lawsuit, with in house lawyers in charge. (The low level employee could even be a plant.)
A volunteer for a politician downloads illegal content. Web access at a national level gets shut down.
So many possibilities.
Maybe they should print the identification details on neon blue paper with cyan ink.
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."
John Ruskin
I call the apparent decline in product quality the 'WalMart Effect.' WalMart sells cheaply made things at a low price so a lot of the market has to respond with cheaper products to remain competitive. You eventually end up with a situation where you can't buy quality items without having to look extra hard for them.
It would be interesting do some comparison shopping, looking at similarly priced products in different stores and comparing them to similar products of different quality. It would be even more interesting to see how product quality has changed over the years, on a quantitative basis. While anecdotal examples are fun, hard, quantitative numbers might reveal some trends that could prove or disprove the 'WalMart Effect'.
To be fair to both parties, you have to mention that GW Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976. He even admitted to "drinking too much" before he quit. So you could say that GW was alcohol addled in his younger years.
But GW Bush decided to stop drinking after his fortieth birthday. I commend him for that.
Obama, it appears, used drugs in high school and college but also gave them up. You have to commend Obama for that AND the fact that he admitted to drug use.
I suspect that you could add lots of public figures to this list, those that, in their early years, abused drugs and/or alcohol. That seems to be a common thing in some circles.
Rush, unfortunately, should have been old enough to know better. The only 'saving' grace is the fact that people in pain will often do stupid things to push back that pain. It would be nice if Rush were a bit more vocal about the stupidity of prescription drug abuse AND if the media reported said activity.
Almost any public figure who abuses drugs will have their abuse mentioned, whether said abuse happened during their youth or in recent years. It appears to be one of those things that people do, especially when their 'hero' is criticized by the other side.
You would probably want to do more than a simple phone call since you would want an audit trail. The phone call could start the process, assuming you can get through. But you would want official notification that the lawyer had been notified. (If they have a log of attempted calls from the date they got the summons, that might indicate they tried.)
You would probably want to follow up a phone call with a certified letter addressed to the lawyer.
I can see the possibility of the summons getting to the wrong company and ending up in the hands of the wrong person in that company. A disgruntled employee who is planning on bailing might round file a summons. The complaint I read in a PDF didn't appear to name names, other than of the company.
If they had shown up, could they have demanded that the plaintiff pay for their expenses?
The Los Angeles based group owns 'thedirt.com' while the Scottsdale, Arizona group owns 'thedirty.com' if I'm reading related articles correctly.
The complaint was delivered to an address in Los Angeles. Is there a chance that a 'we are not these people' type response went back to the plaintiff and was ignored or lost in transit?
A few people have suggested that a simple call to the plaintiff's lawyers would have been enough to diffuse things. Unfortunately, unless you have some backup to say that you have made said call, it can be ignored.
It would be interesting if the Los Angeles group did everything they could to point out that the wrong group was being sued and thought they had resolved the issue, only to find that it still went to court.
If they had responded by appearing in court, could the Los Angeles group have demanded that their expenses be paid because they were NOT the ones that owned the offending site?
If the court delivered the papers to the address in the WHOIS information, there might be a very good reason for 'TheDirt' to have NOT received them. The WHOIS address is a generic one that applies to thousands of people who don't want their home or business address accessible from WHOIS. It would be fairly easy for a summons to get lost in the mail if there is a lot of mail going through that address.
You could also run into a problem of the summons NOT being delivered in time, especially if the owner of the domain is on vacation or had moved and failed to update their behind the scenes WHOIS information.
What we need is more information about the delivery of the summons.
The actual research study has even more facts to consider, like the fact that life long abstainers were excluded from the study and that a significant number of the 'abstainers' had drinking problems as well as health problems. There is also a 'light' drinker category that is in the research study but not the TIME article.
It is interesting how those facts never make it into the mainstream articles.
From the actual research study:
In fact, in tests of potential covariates, we found among these older adults that at baseline, abstainers were significantly more likely to have had prior drinking problems, to be obese, and to smoke cigarettes than moderate drinkers and significantly higher than moderate drinkers on health problems, depressive symptoms, and avoidance coping.Moreover, at baseline, abstainers were significantly lower than moderate drinkers on SES, physical activity, number of close friends, and quality of friend support and significantly less likely to be married than moderate drinkers. Moreover, all of these covariates significantly predicted mortality. We found only 2 gender interactions associated with increased mortality (the effect for being unmarried was relatively stronger for men and the effect for avoidance coping was relatively stronger for women). However, including these interactions in the full model affected the model only slightly.Moreover, the association between alcohol group membership and mortality risk did not vary by gender.
Ah, so the 'abstainers' in the study were more likely to have had prior drinking problems, as well as other health problems. An interesting part of the study that didn't make it to the TIME article.
Ah, and for the record, lifetime abstainers were not considered as part of the data base.