H/T Paul Kedrosky.
This Chris Sorensen/Macleans.CA article provides an excellent overview of an issue that is of interest to all air travelers – that is, the increasing number of loss-of-control airline accidents over the past five years:
Statistically speaking, modern avionics have made flying safer than ever. But the crash of [Turkish] Flight 1951 is just one of several recent, high-profile reminders that minor problems can quickly snowball into horrific disasters when pilots don’t understand the increasingly complex systems in the cockpit, or don’t use them properly. The point was hammered home later that year when Air France Flight 447 stalled at nearly 38,000 feet and ended up crashing into the Atlantic, killing all 228 on board. . . [. . .]
Why is it happening? Some argue that the sheer complexity of modern flight systems, though designed to improve safety and reliability, can overwhelm even the most experienced pilots when something actually goes wrong. Others say an increasing reliance on automated flight may be dulling pilots’ sense of flying a plane, leaving them ill-equipped to take over in an emergency. Still others question whether pilot-training programs have lagged behind the industry’s rapid technological advances.
It’s a vexing problem for airlines, and a worrisome one for their customers. Unlike mechanical failures that can be traced to flawed design or poor maintenance, there is no easy fix when experienced and highly trained pilots make seemingly inexplicable decisions that end with a US$250-million airplane literally falling out of the sky. “The best you can do is teach pilots to understand automation and not to fight it,” [flight simulation expert Sunjoo] Advani says, noting that the focus in recent years has, perhaps myopically, been on simplifying and speeding up training regimes, secure in the knowledge that planes have never been smarter or safer. “We’ve worked ourselves into a little bit of a corner here. Now we have to work ourselves back out.”
Read the entire article. And then have a stiff drink before you get on your next commercial flight.
H/T Guy Kawasaki.
The late Duke University philosophy professor Rick Roderick talks about, among other things, the underpinnings of the drug culture of the United States.
Marcia Angell, an internist and pathologist who is a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, has recently written two lengthy book reviews for The New York Review of Books — The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? and The Illusions of Psychiatry – that has re-ignited a debate among medical professionals regarding the effectiveness of modern psychiatry.
Dr. Angell reviews three books that challenge the effectiveness of psychiatric medications and the hypothesis that disordered neurotransmitters cause psychiatric ailments. Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth analyzes research on antidepressant medications and concludes that the vast majority of their impact stems from the placebo effect.
Roger Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America is even more disturbing in that Whitaker contends that the huge increase in diagnosis of serious psychiatric illness is actually caused by the detrimental effects of the medications. According to Whitaker, the problem isn’t that medications don’t help, it’s that they make the problem worse. Yowza!
Finally, in Dr. Angell’s second article, she takes on the entire profession of psychiatry in discussing Daniel Carlet’s Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry — A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis and the American Psychiatric Association’s controversial "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" a/k/a "DSM."
As Harriet Hall points out, Dr. Angell’s criticisms – particularly in regard to DSM – borders on psychiatry-bashing, which is of dubious merit. Sure, psychiatry is less science-based than other medical fields, but it has undeniably saved lives and improved the quality of life of many tortured souls. Are we simply to dispense with that progress?
Nevertheless, Dr. Angell reviews – as well as the books that are their subjects – provide a more nuanced view of human interaction that takes into consideration both the importance of both the "brain" and the "mind" without forcing a choice based on competing pseudo-truths.
These are discussions that need to be nurtured, both for the benefit of developing better protocols for patients afflicted with such disorders and for a society that still struggles on how best to deal with the social impact of such disorders.
The space shuttle Atlantis’ landing this past Thursday was the end of an era of U.S. space exploration.
Lawrence Krauss contends that the space shuttle was a dud and that we can do better in space exploration. Former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale disagrees and believes that the shuttle program was worthwhile.
Meanwhile, Neil deGrasse Tyson asserts in the video below that the space shuttle program was never really about the promotion of science in the first place.