Author: noelle.brunelle@gmail.com

I will be the first to admit I do Paris totally wrong.  This trip would be my fourth time through, and so far the closest I had come to the Eiffel Tower was speeding past it in a taxi.  I was determined that this time it would be different.  When I had booked travel to my next destination, a small town in the breadbasket of France, I had built in a night in a small town near the airport.  The plan was to fly in, stash everything in my room, hop the Metro, and give myself a proper tour of Paris (or at least a few elements of it), returning in time to catch the train in the morning. Fate, or perhaps my subconscious self, had other plans.

I had started to nod off during the approach to Charles de Gaulle airport, the excitement and cognitive workload of the past few days taking their toll once again.  Once on the ground, it took longer than expected to collect my luggage and maneuver to the platform where I would meet the courtesy shuttle (navette).  It was hot, with no shade for waiting passengers, and after a short time I, and all the passengers around me, were sticky.  Once on the bus we careened through the airport and down the highway (past a Concorde static display, swoon) to our lodgings.  By the time I made it to the front of the check-in line I had the mother of all headaches.  It was at this moment, when I just wanted to collapse into the lap of luxury, I was advised the king room I had reserved was not available, and they would be providing me a twin.  All I could picture was the small, hard single bed I had slept in while at monastery, and it was all I could do to hold back the tears.  Respite came in the form of the language barrier.  When I opened my door, it was to find a sunny, coolish, and thankfully quiet room with two (count them two!) double beds for my enjoyment.  Once cleaned up, I accepted I was in no shape to explore a strange city on my own at night,

The idea of downtown Paris abandoned, I decided to seek out a nice meal.  Google maps had indicated nearby cafés and even a quik-e-mart (or the French version of), so after refreshing myself with coffee (Nescafé avec little cups of cream) I set out to find some sustenance.  I crossed the street and entered a green space that turned out to be the town’s municipal park. A path of neatly placed pavers took me past a playground (swings, slide, monkey bars, roundabout) full of enthusiastic youngsters, and an open-air amphitheater on the back of the mairie (municipal building), surrounded by rose bushes, where a self-organized group of kinder-age girls were acting out an impromptu play.  Much to my dismay, the cafés on the other side had anglicized menus and were filled with British tourists.  Seeking local flavors, I continued in to the town.

I passed a patisserie, a librarie (bookstore), and a pizza shop (take out or by the slice) but nothing sit-down that appealed to me.  (Okay, the patisserie appealed to me but I did not think it was a good recovery strategy.)  In the end I popped in to the quik-e-mart (a CarreFour*), where I was pleasantly surprised to find fresh fruit and veg and cheese section in the cooler.  After careful consideration, I purchased some carrots, plums, a red pepper, triangles of cotswold and brie, and a box of crackers and headed back to my room.  Every one ahead of me in line had been air crew, most with a selection from the surprisingly complete wine, beer and spirit section of the store.

Once back in my room and sated from my grazing, I curled into bed with a book.  Little did I know, the best part of the day was still to come.

More soon!

* This is the name of the brand, like Stop and Shop or Publix.  Another big chain in France is Casino.

The Symposium complete, we lingered in the school’s courtyard over lunch.  I sat with a group of Americans, most physicians, but one the insurance company researcher.  Between conversations about health care at the VA and in private industry, he shared stories of his work (the director of a large restaurant chain had called him to ask about older people and stairs and curbs.  His answer: they don’t go well together, try ramps) and also suggestions for me as a younger researcher (self-driving vehicles).  As the afternoon sun grew hot and the groups thinned, I took the opportunity to explore the grounds.

The north border of the courtyard was a tall stone wall.  For days I had been teased by a small door, and I slipped through.  There I was met by a stone courtyard (driveway?) and a small chapel.  This chapel, I would later learn, had been in this spot in some form since the thirteenth century when an image of Our Lady of Funchal was observed on the site.  The current incarnation, a white plaster exterior accented with grey stone (and an oddly placed clock) had been built and dedicated in the aftermath of the 1755 earthquake.  The chapel bordered a street, and on the other side was a small park that allowed a view of the canyon and hillside beyond it.  And also a gift – a young man, seated at the base of a cross, practicing his Portuguese raps.

Along the school’s southern border was a park.  I had become curious about it our first morning while I had watched a woman, small and thin yet strong, with the dignity that many people who survived the Second World War all seem to have, walk her equally small, strong and equally arthritic smokey grey poodle around the fountain just beyond the fence. The two had been there the following days as well, their slow, short, proud steps a steady presence that provided a glimpse at life in and the rhythms of the neighborhood.  Upon my return from the church, the symposium crowd had thinned considerably, and so I said my good-byes.  On my way to the Metro station I took a detour through the park to take a look.

The park was a normal park, one you would find in any city.  It was small-ish, one block wide and several blocks long, with a structured form of sidewalks (laid out with the symmetry of a formal garden), hedges (dark green and brown from the heat), with benches, lawns and play areas laid out along the sides. The paths were filled with locals, mostly older (the local school was still in session), ladies chatting as they walked, older couples and singles watching from the benches, gentlemen playing cards in the picnic area near he concession stands.  The park was surrounded by apartment buildings, cement blocks twelve stories high, and these plus the trees created a nice shade.

Along the eastern border were a series of apartments, newer and slightly more stylish than the others, and I detoured off pavement to take a look.  The ground floor, the other side of a narrow street, each side packed with cars, alternated empty garages and finished open space (possibly for studios and shops) with enclosed alcoves for reaching the apartments above.  There were terrific views of the canyon and neighborhoods beyond, but it all looked a bit unkempt, as if people only passed through counting on a non-existent someone else to keep things up.  I found the juxtaposition between the two, the old world of the park and the new world of the street, the manicured wealth of the school and the shabbiness of the neighborhood a bit jarring.  I quickly grew tired, and made my way to the Metro station.

Dinner was an egg and croissant from the bus station’s automat (not for looking, I will spare you that tale of woe).  As night fell I turned in, feeling restless, and tossed in my sleep for most of the night.

“We, as a community, need to identify the core values of our field.”

The talk’s theme was health care, and it had begun with a history of medical error.  Human error, it turns out, is a relatively recent phenomena in medicine.  For years, the presenter advised, the term used had been ‘risk’, and risk had been framed as the price we pay for medical progess.  In addition, there was a shared understanding that the dangers of new methods must be accepted, that benefits and risks are inseparable, with loss rates remarkably low.  These views had persisted even after the 1974 publication of Ivan Illich’s Limits of Medicine*, when the author’s comparison of medical morbidity rates to those of traffic and industrial accidents were considered an attack on the field. But slowly, beginning in the late 1980s, this belief began to shift.

The shift, the ER physician and researcher explained, had begun for several reasons.  The first, of course, was the desire of the profession to improve.  Another was the annexation of processes from other domains: TQM from business, CRM from aviation, root cause analysis methods from engineering and design.  But, the presenter theorized, one of the main drivers of the shift from ‘risk’ to ‘error’ was the increasing industrialization of medicine, and the resulting shift from physician-led hospitals, seen as a greater good, to MBA-led institutions and their focus on shareholder value. “Technocratic, ‘scientific-bureaucratic’ managers” (as he called them) strived to use standardization to improve scheduling and economic efficiency, and used ‘error’ to enhance their authority by undermining clinical expertise.

But, he continued, hospital operations are surprisingly complex.  These operations, for the most part, succeed; and succeed in no small part due to the everyday adaptations of doctors, surgeons, nurses and other expert caregivers.  These experts, he suggested, know how to improve the system, and health professionals should find a way to maintain control of healthcare and enable the evolution of improved practices.  Key to this, he stated, is that health professionals, as a community, need to identify the core values of their field.

I perked up in my seat. I had been a safety professional for ten years, and this was the first time, other than the occasional professional group’s mission statement, that I had considered what the core values of the safety field might be.  To do no harm?  To maximize good?  To advance the field?  Do they include day-to-day actions, such as individual courage, or treating others with dignity?  And how does this work in fields such as mining, military operations, or autonomous entities (including artificial intelligence) where proper use of the product fundamentally and permanently alters the environment?  My mind swirled in delight.

After a quick break and a talk on defining the resilience engineering (RE) problem space and developing a framework for RE tools, we moved on to an open forum to share our views on the Symposium.  The week’s presentations had generated many trains of thought:  How do we engineer systems to be resilient?  Do we need control of our systems for them to be resilient?  How does resilience work in systems that are already there?  How do changes to existing systems impact resilience?  How can we take advantage of existing resilience?  We batted these questions around, and more, in a thoroughly engaging conversation.  Then, my favorite idea, by a lion of the field, “If we, as system designers, are relying on emergency procedures as the last control between system instability and failure, we need to give more respect to our operators.”

For those not familiar with the design and build processes, there is a structure used when safety analyses identify issues with a design.  The structure, known as the system safety order of precedence, states that when a hazard is identified during the design process, the preferred option is to revise the design to eliminate the risk.  If this can’t be done, the risk should be reduced by selecting the least risky option, or by designing in redundancies or fail-safe features that reduce the probability the risk will occur.  When this does not eliminate the risk, barriers or controls designed to reduce the spread or escalation of the risk are included, and periodic checks are included in operating instructions to ensure these features are working effectively.  If design or safety devices cannot be counted on (or are considered impractical) to effectively reduce a risk, warning signals, placards, training, and routine and emergency procedures are implemented to counter the shortcomings of a design.  Thus, the adaptability of front line operators becomes the key design feature counted on to prevent disaster.  Usually this strategy is successful, but in some cases it is not.  And when a front-line operator (or a team of front-line operators) cannot adapt at the pace required to fill gaps in engineering or design imagination, a program manager’s budget, or an operational schedule, they, and not the underlying design or operating processes, are blamed for the accident.  So I sat, grateful that someone else had said out loud the thought I had been pondering for the last few years.

Unfortunately, there were no quick and easy answers.  We spoke of adding buffers to increase flexibility, the efficiency versus thoroughness trade off, and the notion of optimizing a system for recovery.  We drifted back to problem domains, and considered the perspective of solution domains.  Someone brought up that to solve these questions, or have the opportunity to solve these questions, we would need to increase the credibility of resilience engineering as a field.  And then our time was up, and the symposium over.  With a promise to meet again, we broke for lunch in the courtyard one last time.

• Description and review available here: http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/library/by-az/limits-of-medicine.html

The Resilience Engineering Association has, in concert with the Symposium, a Young Talents program.  This program invites graduate-level students pursuing research related to system resilience to share their work with the wider resilience community.  On the day prior to the Symposium the ten selected Young Talents had met with thought leaders in the field, presented their work, and received feedback.  This morning, the final morning of the Symposium, the students shared their work with our greater audience.

Still punch-drunk from my erratic and insufficient sleep patterns, I sat, taking in their presentations.  They varied in domain; some in transportation, some in medicine, one disaster response, another social services.  The presentations also varied in topic: how do we create a forward-looking accountability (as in, how do we hold leaders accountable in the future for the effects of decisions made today), how do we reconcile the different goals within an organization, how moments of success can create the obstacles and challenges in our next adaptive cycle(s).  And then a gem, from a female student from Japan: are some organizations more lucky than others?

I had first noticed luck as a component of successful (or at least less disastrous) outcomes reading about United Flight 232.  The accident sequence began with an uncontained engine failure, the debris from which severed lines serving all three hydraulic systems, rendering the flight controls of the DC-10 unresponsive.  The cockpit crew, led by Al Haynes, could have been overwhelmed by the situation.  One of the factors that contributed to the survival of so many on board was that a senior instructor pilot with the airline, one who just happened to practice and teach the use of differential thrust (turning an aircraft by reducing or adding power on one side and not the other) was riding as a passenger.  His assistance managing the engine controls is cited as the critical factor that enabled the crew to triage the situation, control the aircraft, and guide the disabled airliner to the runway at Sioux City, Iowa.  Over the years I had heard other stories that suggested luck: an engineering student who asked the right question of the right engineer; an oil platform manager who happened to notice an odd combination of readings in a control room; a pilot or disaster manager who happened to have heard a story (or otherwise learned some tribal wisdom) that provided the key to averting an adverse outcome.  I had thought I was the only one to consider this, and was encouraged by its mention.

The lecture led to lively conversation as the next student set up his presentation: Do the components of resilience generate luck as a by-product?  If so, which components are key, and can they be measured, designed in, or taught?  Is it the extra resources available when an organization relaxes efficiency so a key measure of slack is available during non-standard operations?  Is it the comprehensive mental models (developed over long periods of time and that include the key dependencies and interrelations between systems) that experts use to predict, prepare for, and call on in times of unease?  Is it the presence of (and the culture that supports the presence of) requisite imagination (defined by Westrum as the fine art of imagining what might go wrong) that can see failure paths that others cannot?  Or a combination of the these three, or others we had not considered?  I sat, grateful that someone else had given voice to a question I had been pondering for the last few years.

By then, the next speaker was ready to begin, and we returned to the Young Talents program.

More Soon!

* Instructors and mentors take note:  additional information about the Young Talents program, including application requirements and deadlines, are available here: http://www.resilience-engineering-association.org/blog/2016/11/15/rea-talent-program-2017-now-open/  The deadline for submissions for the June symposium is 26 January 2017.

A cool breeze from the Atlantic wafted over us, a welcome change from the heat earlier in the day.  We were on a rooftop garden, sipping drinks and discussing research, the banquet room to our west providing shade from the setting sun.  Below us, people explored the geometric gardens and fountains of the Jardim Praca do Império (Empire Square).  Jesus, in the form of a 260 foot stone monument, watched over us from just past the 25 de Abril Bridge.  And to our south were the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries) and the Tagus River.  We were at the Cultural Center, a combined performing arts, exhibition and conference center originally constructed to accommodate Portugal’s European Union Presidency, for the Symposium’s banquet.

The Cultural Center is located at the mouth of the Tagus, in the parish of Santa Maria de Belém.  A natural lagoon, the harbor historically provided safe anchor for mariners, and the lowland fishing and agriculture fed the nearby city of Lisbon.  Construction of the Jeronimos Monastery, a blocks-long complex just north of the Cultural Center, began in the fifteenth century, and, as the Manueline style structure matured, it came to represent Portuguese expansionism.  After the 1755 earthquake, the royal family evacuated to a large estate on the hills above the monastery (and much of Lisbon to its grounds).  Over time, the buildings were expanded and renovated and, in the late 19th century, became the royal palace. Today it is the President’s residence; and this night, the cabbie who drove us to the Cultural Center had explained, its salmon-pink walls were guarded by extra police and soldiers due to a state dinner.

As the sun set, we drifted inside, again organizing by geography and shared language.  The American table quickly filled and I ended up a stray at the Scandinavian table.  There, a kind gentleman from the cruise ship industry took pity on my language skills and included me in the conversations.  Dinner was a local fish, rice and veg dish, followed by an ice cream confection.  And, of course, this all came with a hearty offering of local wines and port.

Fortified with good food and budding friendships, we broke for the evening to make our way back to the hotel.  We were told that if there were no taxis outside the building, we should make our way to the far side of the square, where a taxi line was available to take late evening revelers to their destinations.  The near sidewalks bare, we made our way around the water fixture of the garden to a lonely ‘taxi’ sign on the designated praca (street).  Here also, no taxis, just a long line of black town cars.  Worse, as we waited, the taxis we did see would not stop.  Our hotel was a good ten miles away, what were we to do?

We stood, tired, on the corner, considering our options.  Should we continue walking?  Should we ask one of the palace guards?  Then it hit me; the limos were waiting for the dignitaries at the state dinner.  The locals knew this, and were staying away.  I also knew security would not want a bunch of tipsy tourists loitering in the area, distracting them from their mission.  I pantomimed to one of the drivers, asking him to call for cars for us.  A few moments later they appeared like magic: three taxis for our group of twelve.  We piled in according to our destination (four in the backseat, two in the front of the one to my hotel) and were on our way.

It was with bittersweet relief my head hit the pillow: relief because I was so, so tired; bittersweet because tomorrow would be the last day of the conference.

If I were to ask you to name some safety-critical domains, what are the fields that come to mind?  Airline operations?  Nuclear power, spaceflight or submersibles?  Do disaster preparation and response, hospitals, power transmission, rail systems, pipelines or the roads and bridges that make up our surface transportation system make the list?  These are the type of domains that resilience engineering is most interested in: high-tempo, complex systems with a high cost of failure.  The afternoon plenary reviewed one that I had until then not considered.

The internet was initially conceived during the Eisenhower era as a way to interconnect the main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and Strategic Air Command Headquarters (Strategic Air Command is the Air Force Major Command in charge of strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles).  This would allow  information sent by one of these terminals would be available to any of the other terminals in the event of nuclear war.  The first ten years were slow, as the DOD-funded teams encountered many technical challenges including the development of a common language to use between terminals and the process of message blocks to increase the survivability of data in reduced-bandwidth connections.  Finally, an initial connection was made between computers at UCLA and Stanford.  Terminals at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were quickly added to the array, and similar projects emerged in the UK, France and the state of Michigan. Over the next dozen years, the arrays grew and combined in to the DARPANet.  In1976, after several years of debate regarding operating rules, the International Telecommunications Union Standard x.25 was approved.  The internet, as we know it, grew from there.

The two afternoon presenters were both Chief Technical Officers of internet service providers, one an online marketplace, the other a stock exchange.  Their talk began with an introduction to software development and operations (DevOps), a domain has gradually broadened the focus from developing and shipping code to maintaining online operations.  The reason was simple: system outages of more than a few minutes not only increase customer frustration, but also become national news (think Facebook, Netflix, Amazon).  The online marketplace CTO then shared an experience when, after loading new software, nine of the company’s ten servers failed.  This required rapid identifying and fixing of the code that had caused the failure while valiantly maintaining degraded service with the one operational server.  (I say valiantly because part of the code to keep the system on line involved a ‘handshake’ between servers.  Since there was only one, the handshake was accomplished by having an intern press ‘Enter’ on a keyboard every five seconds for the duration.)  In the end, the failure was traced to a flaw in the upgrade, new code was written, the software was successfully loaded and deployed.  The event had lasted for two hours, and thousands of customers were affected.

The talk then turned to financial markets.  In financial markets, transactions are performed at the millisecond level, and software or server outages can have an impact on financial markets. Until recently, when folks thought of Wall Street, they pictured traders scrambling on the trading floor.  These days, almost all transactions are performed by computers executing high-frequency conditional algorithms.  He then told the story of the 2010 ‘Flash Crash’. On May 6, 2010, a young man, reportedly working out of his parents’ suburban house, initiated a series of ‘spoofed’ stock trades.  These transactions were so frequent and vast they triggered the selling algorithms of major mutual funds. Within nine minutes major equity markets had dropped 300 points, and by the time trading was stopped five minutes later, trading was down nearly 1000 points.  Once trading resumed, the market regained some, but not all, of these losses.  This event lasted 2.16 billion milliseconds (36 minutes) and affected every mutual fund investor on earth.

These events, combined with the U.S. State Department’s request that Twitter delay routing maintenance to help anti-government protesters during the 2009 Iran uprising, had led the two speakers to realize that the internet has become a critical resource, and that more attention should be spent on supporting operations once a site was on line.  They described the challenges of maintaining and upgrading software across deep server structures based on 1985 technology while it was running live.  In the end, in addition to scaring the pants off the investors in the room, we came to appreciate the internet as more than just ordering books and watching cat videos.  “Computers are awful,’ one of the presenters stated, “and this is why we drink.”  So after some closing comments, we broke for the day to do just this.

• You can learn more about the flash crash here: http://www.nanex.net/20100506/FlashCrashAnalysis_Intro.html   and trading algorithms here: https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world

Related Links:

John Allspaw: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2015/06/26/reflections-on-the-6th-resilience-engineering-symposium/

Zoran Perkov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVtpZgn9_W4

Laura Bell (not related to the talk directly, but it has informed my systems and safety thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2IX9QvmDIM&index=1&list=PL055Epbe6d5Y86GSg3nhUH3o_v62FGpCI

Happy winter holiday of your choosing!  🙂

We were back in the garden.

I had been jostled awake as my fellow conference attendees exited the auditorium for our morning break.  After catching my bearings (and a quick check for drool) I joined them in the garden.

One of the nice things about this conference was the international flavor of the participants.  The speakers and practitioners were drawn mostly from the EU: Lund University in Sweden, Delft University in the Netherlands, and Paris Science and Lettres in France; with additional cohorts from Japan, the States, Brazil, and Russia.  As I navigated to the main house for coffee and a morning snack the conversations I overheard reflected this diversity: Dutch, German, Japanese, Portuguese, a stray strand of English, and probably others I did not recognize. This was much different than the aviation conferences I had attended during the previous ten years: English is the standard language of flight, and dominated lectures and conversations at these venues.  It was invigorating and a bit lonely at the same time.

After some coffee mixed with orange juice (they had run out of cream by the time I arrived) and a slice of veg and egg frittata, it was back to the auditorium.  And we were in for a treat: a presentation by Liberty Mutual’s Chief of Human Factors Research on the strengths and perils of sociotechnical systems.

For those not familiar, sociotechnical systems are those that combine people, technology, and the rules and procedures needed to operate effectively.  These systems tend to be large, such as hospitals, transportation and power generation systems, and nuclear power plants.  One common feature of these large entities is stratified leadership: corporate management, middle management, supervisors, and, at the bottom of the heap, the sharp end workers.  He explained that due to the complexity of these systems, no one person can understand them in full; and, depending on where you were compartmentalized by expertise, location in the hierarchy, and focus of attention, your mental model and goals could be vastly different than others operating within the same system.  Because each person or team in the structure has an incomplete model, decisions made in one area (which naturally ripple throughout a system) led to not only to intended consequences, but, in his experience as an insurance investigator, a vastly greater array of unintended consequences. (The eventual and permanent closure of Mill Stone (CT) Reactor 1 due to deferred maintenance was raised as an example.) He recommended that organizations should be viewed as control systems, and we should be careful which processes and goals are stressed as operational process and management commitment to safety are only two of the goals that need to be balanced.

I drifted through most of the day, catching lectures in railway control room operations, measuring excess capacity within systems, and resilience in healthcare, before drifting off again during another session I had been looking forward to, a panel discussion on resilience in practice by representatives from aviation, maritime and other domains.  I again woke, disappointed (and slightly defeated, did I really come all this way just to nap?), during the break.  Fortunately, two of the most dynamic presentations of the event were yet to come.

More soon!

“Here be dragons.”

This was the lecture I had travelled to Portugal to hear: my rock star, David Woods, speaking on resilience engineering.

It was the second morning of the conference, and we were back in the main auditorium.  I was seated in my normal spot, the center of the back row.  The breeze drifting in from the garden through the side doors cooled my skin (and the room, still warm from the afternoon before) ever so slightly.  Outside birds chirped, leaves rustled, and the occasional car horn blared.

Dr. Woods’ lecture began along the usual lines: we live in an adaptive universe* and this universe has basic rules, but these rules aren’t always what you think they are.  All systems have finite resources and change is constant; this, combined with our misunderstanding of ‘the rules’ and the interconnectedness of our systems lead to unexpected consequences (a.k.a. surprises).  And, most important, if you wait until you are surprised to take action, it is already too late.

So, the question became, how do we prepare ourselves to be surprised?  Surprise happens, he posited, at system boundaries.  These boundaries are ill-defined, and are often based on incomplete information.  Thus it is hard to know where the borders of safe operations are.  To add to the challenge, these boundaries move around, and if there is a boundary, there is something beyond the boundary.  “Here be dragons”, the slide stated, just below a medieval image of a pair of fire-breathing reptiles guarding a stone wall.  We were getting to the good stuff.**

The answer, Dr. Woods posed (and I was here to hear it!), is unease.  We should be uneasy with our complex and precarious systems, we should be uneasy with the plans, procedures, automation and rules we use to support them, we should be uneasy with the constant adjustments our systems require of us to remain stable.  We need to be uneasy with our constant drive for optimality, to better match our response capability to what happens (be, as he called it, regularly irregular), to become better at anticipating and preparing for crunches.  We need to maintain this unease, he continued, so we are alert and can recognize, adapt and effectively respond to unexpected events.

But wait!  What was this?  Have my eyes, itchy from lack of sleep, suddenly become heavy?  No No No No No!  This cannot be happening.

I sit up straight, slap my cheeks to wake myself up, and double down on taking notes.  I.  Will.  Not.  Fall.  Asleep.  During.  This.  Talk.

And for a few minutes I am fine.  But the breeze over my shoulders is now warm, and my eyes become harder and harder to keep open.  I tell myself it is okay to just listen, just for a minute.

What?  I missed a slide?  My eyes are wide open.  I am frantically scribbling notes, determined to stay awake.  But my body betrays me: my eyes are so heavy, the room so warm, the dim lights of the auditorium soooooo invite me to slumber.  My eyes close again.

And with that, the eleven hours of sleep I’ve had over the past four nights catch up with me, and I am out, blissfully napping in the back row of the lecture hall.

* Dr. Woods uses the term ‘adaptive universe’ to describe environments that are constantly evolving in response to small changes.

** At this point my proofreader shared “Ever since I learned Genesis 3:24 I have suspected that the good stuff was usually beyond something involving fire.  Like the Advanced Propulsion course in 1974.”

Earthquake, tsunami, flood and fire, these are not the first things that came to mind when I arrived in Lisbon.  But it turns out that back in 1755 the city was almost destroyed by this very sequence of events.  One morning, the sea bed 120 miles southwest of the city shifted, and the resulting wave surged inland, reaching well in to the countryside.  Once the waters receded, people fled from high ground to the port, only to be drowned by subsequent waves, waves so strong and fast they were difficult for even horses to outrun.  Fires then broke out and raged for five days, reducing much of the city to ash.  Recent reviews of historical records suggest the quake was felt (and the waves travelled) as far as Brazil.

The destruction was extensive; most of Lisbon’s buildings were leveled or burned, including the palace, the royal library, the royal hospital and most churches.  While the royal family escaped physically unharmed, the king was psychologically traumatized, and responsibility for the city’s recovery fell on the shoulders of the prime minister, the Marquis de Pombal.  After a year spent assessing the damage and possible recovery strategies, the city’s planner presented the Marquis with four options ranging from reinforcing existing structures to razing large sections of town and rebuilding without restraint.  The Marquis chose to begin anew, ordered that debris be cleared from the city, and had it rebuilt, with the new masonry buildings constructed with internal wooden support cages, the first seismically protected structures in Europe.

These days we take it for granted that after a disaster, teams of government, insurance and public health impact assessors will swarm the area, determining the extent of damage and injury.  But this had never been done before 1755.  After the quake, the Marquis of Pombal took the then-unusual step to do just that, dispatching letters to all the parishes in the land requesting information regarding the quake and its after-effects.  The questions were both scientific (When did the ground began to shake?  How long did it last?  Did the sea rise or fall, how many times, and how high or far?) and practical (How many deaths and how much structural damage did your locality experience?) and  the Marquis used these reports to respond to the disaster.  At some point they had found their way to Portugal’s National Archives, and this is where the final presenter of the day, an engineering professor interested in natural disasters, had found them.

The project was two-fold: historical research using machine-learning techniques. The researcher and his students had been granted access to the files, used an optical scanner to ‘read’ the text, and then sought to see patterns in the data.  At the time of the presentation his team was in the midst of their analysis, and his talk focused on their progress rather than their findings.  There were gaps in the records; over time many had been lost, damaged, or returned to their home parish and lost to time.  The reports were in an older version of Portuguese, one not fully compatible with modern language interpretation programs.  In addition, the script of the day was highly stylized (especially the letter ’s’), and this posed challenges for the machine learning algorithms they were using to translate the documents.  Once these processes are complete and reports are assembled and translated, they will be available for advanced data analysis.  After short remarks to close the day, we retired to the courtyard for fado and a local port wine.

The school was built on the crest of a hill that overlooked the Rio Tajo, and had large cement apartments not blocked the view, on a clear day we could have seen the harbor.  The area had originally been a country estate, and the sixteenth-century manor house was now the school’s executive offices and meeting rooms.  The school’s courtyard had been the home’s garden, and features, including a fountain and gazebo, were still in place.  The dining rooms and the garden of this structure was where we took our meals, and in this case, our music.  During the afternoon sessions tents had been erected to shade us, and we sat, warm summer breeze on our shoulders, discussing the day’s lectures and catching up on each others’ research.  Once dizzy with wine, I began to explore the grounds, the frescoes on the courtyard walls, the flower beds, a small gazebo. I was delighted when I discovered the veranda of the main house, and its view of neighboring orchards and a sliver of water in the distance.

But it was not to last.  Overcome with fatigue, I returned to the hotel, hoping for some sleep.

More next week!