FYI: Why Are Escalators So Dangerous?

By Ryan BradleyPosted 05.23.2011 at 4:17 pm3 Comments

Crikey! Hazardous Crocs Getty Images/Washington Post

The escalator was patented in 1892, and the design hasn’t changed much since then. The landing platforms make entry and exit dicey endeavors—particularly when the moving stairs disappear beneath them, and all manner of clothing and body parts can get stuck. In recent years, escalators have torn the big toe from a Croc-wearing child in Singapore, bucked dozens of riders in Washington, D.C., and strangled a tipsy sushi chef when the hood of his sweatshirt got caught in the gap between the stairs and the landing platform.

One of the worst escalator accidents in modern history occurred in 1987, when a London Underground station escalator exploded, billowing flame into the ticketing hall. Thirty-one people died. The cause was found to be pounds of “fluff”—bits of paper and lint—and grease that had collected in the inner workings and undercarriage of the machine.

Since then, deflector brushes, emergency stop buttons and automatic sprinklers have been added to many escalators. In 2002, New Delhi’s Metro system opened with escalators that featured modified landing platforms and trays to collect hair, dust, water and oil and keep them from entering the gears. The platforms also prevented sari-wearing patrons’ clothing from getting caught.

David Chan, the director of the Centre for Information Leadership at City University London, says escalator design hasn’t changed radically because there is “no incentive for escalator manufacturers to do anything different.” What’s in place is safe enough, and, he says, the international standards make systemic change very difficult to implement. Four companies (Otis, Schindler, ThyssenKrupp and Kone) dominate the market.

Last year, Chan and Jack Levy, a mechanical-engineering professor at City University, unveiled a moving staircase called the Levytator that doesn’t double back on itself like a conveyor belt. Instead it loops so that a single installed escalator is actually two moving stairways, up and down. In between the stairways, the Levytator levels out as a moving walkway. There doesn’t have to be a landing platform, so it’s safer. And, Chan says, repairs are far easier, because only a stair or two needs to be removed at a time. Regular escalators must be entirely dismantled.

There’s an alternative, of course: plain old stairs. But nearly 12,000 people die in the U.S. every year after falling down a staircase. Moving up and down, it seems, always has its risks.

Have a science question you've always wondered about? Send a tweet to @PopSciFYIGuy or email to fyi@popsci.com.

Is the IP address the new SSN?

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By Chad Perrin

May 23, 2011, 12:00 PM PDT

Takeaway: Like SSNs before them, IP addresses were never meant to be used as personal identification numbers. Like SSNs before them, IP addresses are being treated like personal ID numbers anyway.

The Social Security Administration started issuing Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the mid-1930s. It took about three months from the start date to issue 25 million numbers. The purpose of the SSN was to identify Social Security accounts. Until the 1980s, Social Security Cards explicitly stated that they were not to be used for identification purposes. Over time, however, the federally maintained database of SSNs has made it convenient to use SSNs and Social Security cards for individual identification, and it was in the 1980s that this prohibitive text was removed from the cards. SSNs have become de facto national identification numbers — a fact that many individualists, libertarians, and privacy advocates find distasteful.

The Internet Protocol Suite, often referred to as TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol), was developed in the 1960s and 1970s to provide a standardized set of protocols for interaction between computers in a distributed network. The means by which nodes on this network are identified so that one computer “knows” how to contact another is a numeric addressing scheme. The Domain Name System (DNS) was developed as a means of attaching more human-readable names to these numbers, so that, for instance, techrepublic.com can be used to access the servers located at address 216.239.116.137. That number, consisting of four “octets” (so named because each of the four dot-separated numbers is in fact representative of an eight-digit binary number), is known as the Internet Protocol address, or IP address.

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The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a means of reusing IP addresses so that computers can join a TCP/IP network and get a number assigned automatically by a centrally managed system, which means that, in general, IP addresses are not guaranteed to be related to any given computer. The fact the IP addresses apply to visible network nodes is also problematic for purposes of establishing any guarantees about the computer responding to a given IP address, for a number of reasons:

• Network Address Translation (NAT) can allow one device with one IP address to provide network access for an arbitrary number of other devices.
• IP address spoofing through a variety of different means can deceive those who might want to correlate information between an IP address and a given computer.
• Anonymous proxies go out of their way to hide any individually identifying data, including the IP address of the computer using the proxy.

Unauthorized access to a network whose authorized nodes are wholly owned by a single individual can also cause problems for identification via IP address. A number of cases have demonstrated how easily someone can be misidentified as a malefactor when, in fact, he or she is only the unfortunate owner of a network accessed without permission by someone else.

Major copyright industry corporations and lobbying groups such as the MPAA and RIAA have used IP addresses in attempts to identify copyright infringers in court. Tracking the trade of copyrighted materials across peer to peer file sharing networks leads to subpoenas sent to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) requesting the names of people whose accounts are associated with those IP addresses, just as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have used IP addresses to track down suspected criminals. In many cases, for both corporate and governmental enforcement efforts, the wrong people are identified. Unfortunately, being found innocent is no guarantee that one’s life will not be ruined by allegations of terrorist plotting or pederasty, and reasonable doubt is no guarantee one will be found innocent in a civil suit when being shaken down for gobs of money by copyright industry lawyers. Despite all this, IP addresses are increasingly being used as a new form of (inter)national identification number — the SSN for the digital age.

In cases where some criminal act has actually been perpetrated, the primary concern should of course be to find the criminal, rather than simply labeling the most easily found patsy with the term “criminal”. One of the most important factors that bears on the likelihood of correctly identifying the criminal is the willingness and ability of investigators to differentiate between actually identifying evidence and merely facile, apparently identifying numbers that do not, in fact, necessarily pertain to any single individual. Between the variability of IP address assignment, the simplicity of misappropriating such numbers to mask one’s true identity, and other obstacles to such use for these numbers, no conscientious person could reasonably conclude that an IP address alone is enough to identify a given computer — let alone to confirm that a given human being was behind that computer. For the most part, the technical details of the situation escape the understanding of legal professionals, many of them because they intentionally ignore the facts of the matter in the pursuit of an easy judgment, but there is still hope that a little sanity may be injected into the legal landscape for matters related to identifying criminals.

In light of the facts of the situation, one might be excused for being surprised that Illinois District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied copyright holders legal standing to subpoena ISPs for user identities based on IP addresses. As reported by TorrentFreak:

A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the “pay-up-or-else-schemes” that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year.

The less restrictive rules of civil courts, as compared with those of criminal courts, do not place the same burden of proof on a plaintiff as on a prosecutor. This means that a defendant in a civil case will quite often find himself in the position of having to prove innocence, rather than requiring opposing counsel to prove guilt. Such a state of affairs, coupled with the vast resources of major corporations and the incredibly high penalties handed out for file sharing copyright infringement in similar cases in the past, results in conditions where accused parties often find it preferable to settle out of court. Settling is all too often the best of a bad set of options, even when defendants are innocent of any wrongdoing in the eyes of the law, where a decision may be made simply to avoid costly, drawn out litigation that the individual victims usually cannot hope to win.

These conditions are ripe for extortionary tactics employed by copyright enforcement law firms. The resulting accusations that copyright enforcement has turned into what amounts to nothing more than an extortion racket have been frequent, incisive, and generally ignored by litigative copyright industry organizations. In contrast to the arguments made in many recent copyright infringement cases targeting IP addresses as defendants, Judge Baker’s decision appears reasoned, balanced, and informed. It is possible, if this decision serves as precedent for future decisions, that the era of the mass John Doe copyright infringement lawsuit may be drawing to a close.

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Why is my Internet different from your Internet?

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By Michael Kassner

May 23, 2011, 6:39 AM PDT

Takeaway: At home you search for something on Google. Ten minutes later, at work, you enter the exact same query into Google, but get different results. Why?

December 4th, 2009 was a pivotal day for the Internet. Still, as Eli Pariser points out in his new book, The Filter Bubble, very few people noticed what the search giant Google had done. Fortunately:

“Search engine blogger Danny Sullivanpores over the items on Google’s blog, looking for clues about where the monolith is headed next, and to him, the post was a big deal. In fact, he wrote later that day, it was the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines.”

Filter bubble? What is it?

Mr. Pariser’s book is titled after the phenomenon he calls the “filter bubble”. He explains what it’s all about in the book:

“The new generation of Internet filters looks at things you seem to like-the actual things you’ve done, or the things people like you like-and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you’ll do and want next.

Together these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us-what I’ve come to call a filter bubble-which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information.”

What Google has known all along

For some time now, Google has been capturing the following information:

• Search History: Google keeps track of what is clicked on in search results. If Google notices a certain site is picked more often, it will get a rankings boost.
• Signed-Out Web History: This history is browser-centric. Google tracks all the searches and search-result selections.
• Signed-In Web History: This history is user-centric. If the user is recognized by Google, everything is tracked.

Google uses the above data to provide customized-search results to signed-in account ownerswho give their permission.

What changed?

So what was this dramatic change? Google altered Personal Search, enabling it for everyone not just those logged on, by using what they call signed-out customization:

“When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie. Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.”

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Turning Personal Search on for everyone concerned Mr. Sullivan. Calling it the “New Normal“, he explains:

“The days of ‘normal’ search results that everyone sees are now over. Personalized results are the ‘new normal,’ and the change is going to shift the search world and society in general in unpredictable ways.”

To put it another way, Mr. Sullivan mentions:

“Happy that you’re ranking in the top results for a term that’s important to you?

Look again. Turn off personalized search, and you might discover that your top billing is due to the way the personalized system is a huge ego search reinforcement tool. If you visit your own site often, your own site ranks better in your own results-but not for everyone else.”

And, here I thought my articles were getting high rankings because of their merit. Ouch.

PageRank and then some

PageRank is what made Google famous, more than a few people rich, and how Google rates web pages. In 2009, Google altered their holy grail, in order to revamp Personal Search. Mr. Pariser, in his book, points out that Google now uses 57 different variables or “signals” to create search results tailored specifically for you. Some of the known signals are:

• Search history
• Location
• Active browser
• Computer being used
• Language configured

I suspect the other 52 will remain secret, much like the formula for Coke.

What it all means

Ever have one of those feelings that something doesn’t seem right, but you can’t put your finger on it? I suspect that’s why it took me until now to realize the implication of Google’s Personal Search. And, why Mr. Pariser has spent a great deal of time and effort coming to his conclusions.

I’m glad I read the book. Understanding Mr. Pariser’s concerns will help me gage search results more realistically. For the time-challenged, Mike Elgan offers a synopsis of the book, in his blog post, How to pop your Internet ‘filter bubble’:

“In this column, I’m going to tell you how personalization works, why you may not want it, and also how to pop the bubble and opt out of a system that censors your Internet based on stereotyping.”

I found the following tips by Mr. Elgan useful:

• Deliberately click on links that make it hard for the personalization engines to pigeonhole you. Make yourself difficult to stereotype.
• Erase your browser history and cookies from time to time.
• Use an “incognito” window for exploring content you don’t want too much of later.
• Use Twitter instead of Facebook for news. (Twitter doesn’t personalize.)

Update: As for Twitter and Facebook, I just read a Yahoo Finance article prepared by WSJ and felt compelled to share it with you. The article refers to the Facebook “Like” button and Twitter’s “Tweet” button that is displayed on web pages:

“These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don’t click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.”

The article goes on to explain something that may surprise you:

“For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts.”

How about that?

An afterthought

The advantage afforded those with the ability to manipulate search-engine results is huge. And, I was interested in learning what Mr. Pariser and Mr. Sullivan thought about that. Time did not allow Mr. Pariser to respond. Mr. Sullivan did.

Kassner: Ultimately, my concern is how do we know that queried search results are not forced biases leading us to follow someone else’s agenda?

Sullivan: I think despite personalization, the search results still reflect lots of diversity. I also think that results are only the start of research into a new area. Wherever you end up, you’ll probably get some pointers to other material-and that also leads to greater diversity.

I also think it’s easy to assume the worse. My friends are all liberal (let’s say), so I’ll never see anything but a liberal view of the world. Perhaps. But the reality is that some of your friends will probably point toward some anti-liberal material, as part of their discussions. And that’s exposing you to more diversity.

Assuming the worse, Google could intentionally try to bias its search results to a particular view. But that assumes there’s a particular view on literally billions of unique searches that are done each month. There’s just not. Some of them have no particular slant one way or another. But even if you managed it, as I said, some of those resources (just like your friends) will point toward content they don’t agree with.

The challenge isn’t that we won’t get exposed to contrary statements. The challenge is that people are seemingly more and more happy to ignore contrary material and create their own beliefs without any critical thinking. “True Enough” is a good book on this topic. Perhaps this really isn’t something new but rather has always been there. But it sure feels new to me.

Kassner:I am seeing people preferring to use links mentioned by Twitter and Facebook. They trust those opinions over the search engines. Are you seeing that as well? Do you see this as a growing trend?

Sullivan: I do see it growing, and it’s because our social networks offline have “caught up” to being as accessible as search engines for quick answers. We can ask many people for answers to anything, and that’s particularly attractive for subjective questions where there’s no right answer, where we want opinions from those we know.

Kassner: What is your opinion on the general health of search today?

Sullivan: I think the general health is actually pretty good. We should look for search engines to do more to increase quality, which means probably relying less on the link-based systems of ranking that worked in the past and more toward using social signals as well as our own behavior.

Kassner: Good advice. I intend on heeding it.

Final thoughts

My goal is to make you aware of what Mr. Pariser calls the filter bubble. And, explain why my Internet is different from your Internet. Just knowing search customization is happening is more than half the battle.

I learned a great deal from Mr. Sullivan about a subject I thought I understood. I was wrong and I thank him for his help.

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