“Scott Barker: Ash spill must lead to cultural change at TVA - Knoxville News Sentinel” plus 1 more |
| Scott Barker: Ash spill must lead to cultural change at TVA - Knoxville News Sentinel Posted: 04 Dec 2010 08:50 PM PST The very last trainload of outbound coal ash sludge left the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant last month, headed for a landfill in Alabama. While there's still plenty of sludge left from the Dec. 22, 2008, spill to be cleaned up, the last of the stuff to be shipped off site marks a milestone in the recovery efforts. The spill from a ruptured retention structure - basically a combination of settling ponds and a man-made heap of coal ash sludge - dumped 5.4 million cubic yards of the toxin-laced crud into the Emory River and surrounding countryside. Miraculously, nobody was killed, a fortunate occurrence primarily due to the fact that the spill happened just after midnight. The sludge transported to Perry County, Ala., was from the first phase of the cleanup, which was the removal of about 3 million cubic yards of coal ash from the Emory River. According to TVA, 414 trains have hauled 40,000 carloads of ash to the landfill in Alabama operated by the Knoxville firm Phillips & Jordan. Ash from the second phase, which consists of the sludge that filled the Swan Pond Creek embayment and covered some 300 acres of land, will be returned to the ruptured facility. The ash pond/hill eventually will be capped and closed. The spill and the subsequent public outcry prompted TVA to make plans to close all other such wet-storage facilities in the future. Eventually, all ash generated from burning coal at its fossil plants will be stacked dry. What remains to be seen is whether TVA's culture, which according to the TVA Inspector General contributed mightily to the spill, has changed as well. The IG noted that TVA traditionally treated coal ash disposal as an afterthought. That afterthought will cost TVA up to $1.2 billion to clean up and an unknown amount in litigation costs and possible fines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Records I reviewed as a reporter covering the spill's aftermath indicate TVA basically stacked the ash up behind a dike not built to be the base for an ash heap. Even TVA's own engineers as early as the mid-1970s warned of potential problems, and the records don't indicate anything was ever done to address their concerns. Eventually, according to an independent probe conducted by the IG's office, the pressure exerted by the sludge blew out the dike. "We would have had to spend more money in the past to prevent (the spill at) Kingston," TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore said in a visit Thursday with News Sentinel editors and reporters. That may be true, but my guess is that TVA - and by extension its ratepayers - would have paid a lot less to address the issues in the 1970s or 1980s than it will cost to clean up the legal dockets and the environmental damage now. TVA is talking a good game about how it plans to handle coal ash in the future. And the utility's announced shift away from coal and toward nuclear power and alternative sources should in the long term mean that TVA will produce cleaner energy. But TVA must also walk the walk - and few organizations are as resistant to change as a federal agency. Kilgore maintains TVA is a changed organization. I just hope he doesn't confuse reorganization, which the federal utility has accomplished, with cultural change. It will take more than changing titles to prevent another catastrophe like the Kingston ash spill. Scott Barker is the editorial page editor of the News Sentinel. He may be reached at 865-342-6309 or barkers@knoxnews.com. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Posted: 17 Dec 2010 11:09 AM PST Posted on: Friday, 17 December 2010, 13:12 CST Online tool enables anyone to quantify cultural trends going back centuries Researchers have created a powerful new approach to scholarship, using approximately 4 percent of all books ever published as a digital "fossil record" of human culture. By tracking the frequency with which words appear in books over time, scholars can now precisely quantify a wide variety of cultural and historical trends. The four-year effort, led by Harvard University's Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, is described this week in the journal Science. The team, comprising researchers from Harvard, Google, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, has already used their approach -- dubbed "culturomics," by analogy with genomics -- to gain insight into topics as diverse as humanity's collective memory, the adoption of technology, the dynamics of fame, and the effects of censorship and propaganda. "Interest in computational approaches to the humanities and social sciences dates to the 1950s," says Michel, a postdoctoral researcher based in Harvard's Department of Psychology and Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. "But attempts to introduce quantitative methods into the study of culture have been hampered by the lack of suitable data. We now have a massive dataset, available through an interface that is user-friendly and freely available to anyone." Google will release a new online tool to accompany the paper: a simple interface that enables users to type in a word or phrase and immediately see how its usage frequency has changed over the past few centuries. "Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena in the social sciences and humanities," says Aiden, a junior fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows and principal investigator of the Laboratory-at-Large, part of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "While browsing this cultural record is fascinating for anyone interested in what's mattered to people over time, we hope that scholars of the humanities and social sciences will find this to be a useful and powerful tool." This dataset, which is available for download, is thousands of times larger than any previous historical corpus. It is based on the full text of about 5.2 million books, with more than 500 billion words in total. About 72 percent of its text is in English, with smaller amounts in French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. It is the largest data release in the history of the humanities, the authors note, a sequence of letters 1,000 times longer than the human genome. If written in a straight line, it would reach to the moon and back 10 times over. "Now that a significant fraction of the world's books have been digitized, it's possible for computer-aided analysis to reveal undiscovered trends in history, culture, language, and thought," says Jon Orwant, engineering manager for Google Books. The paper describes the development of this new approach and surveys a vast range of applications, focusing on the past two centuries. The team's findings include: * Some 8,500 new words enter the English language annually, fueling a 70 percent growth of the lexicon between 1950 and 2000. But many of these million-plus words can't be found in dictionaries. "We estimated that 52 percent of the English lexicon -- the majority of words used in English books -- consist of lexical 'dark matter' undocumented in standard references," the researchers write in Science. * Humanity is forgetting its past faster with each passing year. The Harvard-Google team tracked the frequency with which each year from 1875 to 1975 appeared, finding that references to the past decrease much more rapidly now than in the 19th century. References to "1880" didn't fall by half until 1912 -- a lag of 32 years -- but references to "1973" reached half their peak just a decade later, in 1983. * Innovations spread faster than ever. For instance, inventions from the end of the 19th century spread more than twice as fast as those from the early 1800s. * Modern celebrities are younger and more famous than their 19th-century predecessors, but their fame is shorter-lived. Celebrities born in 1950 initially achieved fame at an average age of 29, compared to 43 for celebrities born in 1800. But their fame also disappears faster, with a "half-life" that is increasingly short. "People are getting more famous than ever before," the researchers write, "but are being forgotten more rapidly than ever." * The most famous actors tend to become famous earlier (around age 30) than the most famous writers (around age 40) and politicians (after age 50). But patience pays off: Top politicians end up much more famous than the best-known actors. * Culturomics is a powerful tool for automatically identifying censorship and propaganda. For example, Jewish artist Marc Chagall was mentioned just once in the entire German corpus from 1936 to 1944, even as his prominence in English-language books grew roughly fivefold. Evidence of similar suppression is seen in Russian with regard to Leon Trotsky; in Chinese with regard to Tiananmen Square; and in the US with regard to the "Hollywood Ten," a group of entertainers blacklisted in 1947. * "Freud" is more deeply engrained in our collective subconscious than "Galileo," "Darwin," or "Einstein." --- On the Net: This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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