“Smart grid” refers to a very large collection of technologies that would vastly increase the complexity and sophistication of the power generation and distribution system. The September 2009 issue of Power Engineering magazine quotes Brian Seal, senior project manager, power delivery and utilization, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) as saying: “Smart grid is a marketing term that is devoid of technical definition.”

The scope of the smart grid includes just about everything an engineer could imagine such as grid connected home solar arrays, wind farms, small hydroelectric plants, using electric cars as batteries for the grid, hundreds of thousands of electric car charging stations, complex control systems, new transmission lines and transmission corridors, smart meters in every home and a huge data network to support millions of new computer systems to monitor and control its components. The current scope is undefined and every power company has their own idea of what should be included. If this was an information technology project, monstrous budget overruns would be guaranteed, as well as fantastic profits for those implementing it and selling the hardware.

Power in North America is still quite inexpensive, making alternative energy sources uneconomical without subsidies, mandates and permission for rate increases to pass these costs back to consumers. Given the potential scale of expenditures (in the order of a trillion dollars) and the opportunity for considerable profits, it is not surprising that the power industry is excited. A quick look at opensecrets reveals a great deal of lobbying by the major players. For example, Southern Company:

Most consumers have heard of “smart meters”, and assume that they are needed to support the smart grid, or are indeed the smart grid. Other than enabling new consumer billing schemes (think cell phone bills), they are a very tiny component of the smart grid initiative. Some of the larger components include:

• Monitoring and Control: Millions of new sensors for voltage and current would be installed all over the grid — at transformers, substations, points along power lines and connected to computers that in turn make decisions (disconnecting lines, compensating for reactive loads, changing voltage taps, etc.) and/or send the data over a data network to another control system. The acronym SCADA, supervisory control and data acquisition, is often used to describe these types of control systems. Your laptop running Linux is probably far more powerful, but these systems are likely more reliable and fault tolerant.

  Someone, presumably the USA or Israel, has written a worm called stuxnet to infect SCADA systems manufactured by the German company Siemens to attack Iran’s nuclear industry, we should expect the favor to be returned. From the New York Times article linked above; “It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable. “

• Increased Line Capacity: Real-time monitoring of transmission lines allows a more accurate determination of maximum load before the lines heat up and sag into the trees (not a good thing). This would allow more power to be transmitted over existing power lines. Better transmission cables capable of handling larger loads are also available.
• Changing Consumer Behavior: Computerized meters in homes allow new billing schemes, and can reduce demand at peak times by either disconnecting some loads, or by terrorizing customers via power bills. The euphemism for this is “price signal“. It wouldn’t take too many $400 surcharges to teach you not to run that air conditioner during a heat wave. Reducing peak load allows constant power sources like nuclear and hydroelectric generators to provide more of the load and minimizes the cost of supplemental generators (such as gas turbines) that are more expensive to run.
• Power Routing: The bi-directional routing of power across large geographic areas requires computer system integration across many regional power companies. Presumably the direction of power flow would be dictated by the highest bidder and that price premiums will be charged rather than “poor Californians, let me help you out with that heat wave”. Enron would have loved this. You could cause congestion and then charge peak rates for it.
• New Data Networks: Vast quantities of data would be generated, requiring either extensive use of the existing cellphone networks, or entirely new, and very fast network infrastructure with coverage everywhere there is electricity.
• Integration with Electric Cars Vehicle to Grid (V2G) integration would use automobile batteries for grid support (stabilizing voltages) and storage.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are hundreds of ideas that could be “smart grid” material. There are however, a great deal of unknowns that have cannot be simulated with computer models, so utilities around the world are experimenting with various pilot projects to see what happens. For example, do people really reduce demand when hit with a “price signal”, and if so, by how much? Would electric car owners participate in plans that kept their car unused from 6pm to 6am so that it could contribute to storing wind energy at night?

Consider the following quotes from the Electric Power Research Institute, Demonstration Initiative Two Year Update:

“to better understand and demonstrate the technologies, business models, and prices required to further commercialize the concepts” – KCP&L Smart Grid Demonstration Project or

“By deploying and demonstrating integration of these technologies and applications, it will address many of the unknowns” Southern Company Smart Grid Demonstration Project.

The complete package of technologies being considered part of a national (USA) “smart grid” has been estimated by industry groups to cost between 300 and 400 billion dollars with an uncertainty of +/- 100 billion. ($338 to $476). This is what is called a SWAG (scientific wild assed guess) and the real cost of most highly complex projects far exceeds the initial estimates. Take a look at this GAO report on NASA budget overruns as an example:

“GAO assessed 18 NASA projects with a combined life-cycle cost of more than $50 billion. Of those, 10 out of 13 projects that had entered the implementation phase experienced significant cost and/or schedule growth. For these 10 projects, development costs increased by an average of 13 percent from baseline cost estimates that were established just 2 or 3 years ago and they had an average launch delay of 11-months. In some cases, cost growth was considerably higher than what is reported because it had occurred prior to the most recent baseline. Many of the projects we reviewed experienced challenges in developing new technologies or retrofitting older technologies as well as in managing their contractors, and more generally, understanding the risks and challenges they were up against when they started their efforts.”

All of these costs will be passed onto consumers, so it is very important that it not be allowed to get out of control and that lobbying be monitored. Have a look the EPRI document “Methodological Approach for Estimating the Benefits and Costs of Smart Grid Demonstration Projects” to get a feel for the complexity of estimating potential benefits, and then ask yourself if it seems credible that all this would save between $1.3 to $2 trillion, meaning that the smart grid would actually pay for itself.

Smart grid reliability is often promoted as a cost saving potential, yet more complicated systems operated with lower spare capacity (or increased utilization) is a recipe for large scale outages. The old saying that the most reliable part of any system is the piece you leave out is apt. Although the existing grid is becoming less reliable as it ages, a lot of the problems can be only fixed the old fashioned way — keeping right of ways clear, replacing aged equipment and towers and insulators, adding new lines and power stations, better training and maintaining adequate staff. Adding a large SCADA layer to the network will alert you to failure quicker but isn’t going to address the antique physical infrastructure.

Distributed power generation and storage have many possibilities. For example, a hospital emergency generator could be fired up remotely by the power company to make up for a local shortage in another community, and power that normally flows one way in a grid, could become bi-directional.

Electric Cars have large batteries that can be used for regulating grid voltage or to store excess wind energy during windy periods. In the article “The economics of using plug-in hybrid electric vehicle battery packs for grid storage” the authors looked at a hypothetical situation where Chevy volts were used by their owners for driving between 8am and 5pm, and then charged and made available for grid storage. If the owners are clairvoyant and know in advance when it is cheapest to recharge, and the most profitable hour to resell, a driver in Boston might make between $12 and $48 a year (life reducing, extra wear factored in). This isn’t enough to be worth the inconvenience, and car manufacturers would have to modify their warranty agreements to include such usage. Each home would also need a 7200 watt grid tie inverter to convert DC back into 220 VAC/60Hz with low harmonics (a nice, clean looking sine wave). If enough people joined in to actually balance the load, there would be no opportunity for arbitrage. Governments could pay car owners willing to participate for the sake of being better able to use variable sources like wind farms but any payment system has the potential to be misused.

The article Using fleets of electric-drive vehicles for grid support looks at using company owned vehicle fleets to provide voltage regulation services for power companies. In some regions, vehicle to grid (V2G) power can be profitable, but is highly dependent on market rates.

All this sounds like it has some potential, but at some point the big question has to be asked. Why are we doing this, and at what cost? If a trillion in added costs are to be added on top of the ever rising price of fossil fuels, we need to be very clear about what the objectives should be.

The standard answer to the first part of this rhetorical question is “to keep up with the ever increasing demand for power”. This unfortunately is not even remotely possible. We have an exponentially growing population that increases about 13% per decade and declining non-renewable resources.

Growth can’t go on indefinitely despite all the political statements talking about the importance getting the economy growing again. The White House has a report called “Living within our means” and has the ludicrous subtitle – “…plan for economic growth”. The report is absolutely littered with the references to economic growth. For a dose of reality, watch professor Albert Barlett’s lecture – it has more than three million hits on YouTube.

Fossil fuels will be available forever, but there will come a time where the energy used to extract them (e.g. expensive deep water drilling) will be equal to the energy in the fuel itself. At this point, it no longer makes sense to extract it except for special cases. One of the more well known examples of dubious yields is the return on corn based ethanol (see theoildrum). Although there is considerable argument on what to include in calculations for energy return on energy invested (EROI), there is general agreement that it is deteriorating. See “The Economic Cost of Energy, EROI, and Surplus Energy” at theoilldrum for some in depth discussion.

Uranium based nuclear isn’t long term either. The NEA states “There is enough uranium known to exist to fuel the world’s fleet of nuclear reactors at current consumption rates for at least a century, according to the latest edition of the world reference on uranium published today.” A hundred years is nothing — many people born today will be around then and if we scale up nuclear power, we will run out a lot faster. As uranium becomes scarce, Thorium reactors are possible, but this technology is still a long way off.

Can Renewable Energy Save the day?

In Sustainable Energy – without the hot air by David JC MacKay, a professor at the University of Cambridge, looks at the renewable potential of the USA using truly extreme examples, and then adds them all up to get a feeling for the upper limits of what is possible. Here are some excerpts:

“The windiest spots are in North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. They reckoned that, over the whole country, 435 000 km2 of windy land could be exploited without raising too many hackles, and that the electricity generated would be 4600 TWh per year, which is 42 kWh per day per person if shared between 300 million people. ”

“If we assume that shallow offshore waters with an area equal to the sum of Delaware and Connecticut (20 000 km2, a substantial chunk of all shallow waters on the east coast of the USA) are filled with offshore wind farms having a power density of 3 W/m2, we obtain an average power of 60 GW. That’s 4.8 kWh/d per person if shared between 300 million people.”

“The hydroelectric facilities of Canada, the USA, and Mexico generate about 660 TWh per year. Shared between 500 million people, that amounts to 3.6 kWh/d per person. Could the hydroelectric output of North America be doubled? If so, hydro would provide 7.2 kWh/d per person.”

He adds these kind of things up to 62 kWh/d per person which is a far cry from our current average of 250 kWh/d per day. Even worse, if outsourced jobs and manufacturing ever return, we will be using a lot more energy in North America. How could energy demand be reduced by 75%? How about giving up cars, air conditioning, air travel and winter heat? Too extreme? Perhaps eliminating of agricultural fertilizers (and see food prices soar), street lighting, rail transport and all those products from Walmart while keeping the car and winter heat? Of course, it isn’t all or nothing, the most likely income is that all these areas would be reduced and that the average person will fly about as often as they used to fly the Concorde. Our great grandparents would be laughing at us.

The production of renewable energy in a scale vast enough to replace our current demands runs into a number of problems:

• The mega projects required would be astronomically expensive. Diverting massive military budgets to rebuilding infrastructure is one of those things that ought to happen, but wont, without regime change.
• Much of the energy available from wind and solar is not near major population centers. Unlike previous centuries when people lived near rivers for transportation and water, or in great farming areas — we live all over the place because we can. No water? Drill the aquifer or divert a river. Cold as hell? Use electric heat. No electricity? — build thousands of miles of transmission line. No food? Build highways and truck it in. This is enormously wasteful and great deal of energy is lost in long transmission lines. Fixing this would require population migrations.
• It takes up front energy to manufacture replacement technology such as wind turbines (steel, copper, Aluminum must be mined and manufactured) and to build enough capacity to keep up with the decline in oil production, we would have to divert almost all our spare capacity into alternate energy (e.g. suffer now for capacity later). This will not happen.
• The best hydro resources with large reseviors are already developed, with a few exceptions like the lower Churchill in Canada.

If there is going to be a war like effort to solve the upcoming crisis, it needs to have a larger scope. Will we ever see propaganda this again? We could treat our energy dependency as a common enemy.

There is more to energy than just electricity

The trillion dollar smart grid initiative, even if it could be flawlessly implemented along with equally large investments in solar capacity would still come nowhere to enabling the continuation of the current North American lifestyle. Most heating is via natural gas, the vast highway system consumes asphalt, building materials like cement and aluminum require large energy inputs, liquid fuels are indispensable for air travel because of the high energy density, agriculture consumers natural gas as a fertilizer feed stock and much more.

A far better use of resources is to not use the energy in the first place. This is not really that difficult, however disruptive technologies will be attacked. There are trillions in existing infrastructure, and “preserving the investments in the existing infrastructure” is going to be a major concern of corporate lobbyists.

I see the following as being essential.

• Low energy homes. Each climatic region needs custom designs (this is a good task for public universities) for solar passive homes. Regulations need to be implemented to set minimum thermal standards. It is possible to build homes that do not need air conditioning, and only minor axillary heat in the winter using inexpensive local building materials.
• Long range city planning. Residential subdivisions are really dumb. These often have no place to work as a wage slave, forcing excessive commuting, nor enough land to be self sufficient even on a subsistence level. Every lot should have septic, water and room for a small garden. It is ridiculous that 15% of Americans are on food stamps and that they have no ability to feed themselves without government assistance. Subsistence living is not a goal — but it should be an option.

The existing power infrastructure is fine if we slash our power needs, keep up the grid maintenance and stop economic and population growth. We don’t need a trillion dollar “smart grid” upgrade. We do need self sufficiency at the homestead level. 15% of Americans rely on food stamps and nearly 20% are unemployed. We need to reevaluate our priorities.

The chief disadvantage is that the cost of implementation will be billed back to consumers, and its use as an enabler for new, more profitable business models which in turn fund larger “green” schemes. The smart grid initiative does nothing to reduce our dependence on vast quantities of energy. The word “smart” is just marketing and propaganda to make computerized billing sound like a noble idea. Predatory or Opportunistic billing is a better description. It is also a small component of the 500+ billion dollar “smart grid” initiative which I cover here..

There is nothing intelligent about a smart meter. They are simple computerized meters with the brains of something like a microwave oven. They can send data to another computer and keep track of how much energy was used in various time slots. You can purchase your own smart meter for about $200 if you want real-time feedback of your energy use for educational purposes. The educational benefit can also be achieved by using a plug in $30 meter like the Kill-A-Watt and reading a few books.

As for supporting grid tie operations (PV on your roof with the excess sold to the grid), this is better done on a case by case basis rather than updating millions of meters on houses that will never have a $30,000 PV system on their roof.

Another potential benefit is being able to collect detailed energy usage data in real-time. This is of very little use given that power demand is already known at the substation level which in some cases, comes down to a few city blocks. If the government really wants to understand usage patterns, all they need is to select a statistical sample (e.g. install a few hundred meters randomly) and collect data for a year. Collecting everything is wasteful and adds little value.

Can peak demand really be shifted?
Starting with the largest potential benefit to the grid, flattening demand, we should be asking “Will it do this?”. If you do shift the load, what do you shift?

Peak demand varies depending on where you live. In warm areas, peak demand is likely due to afternoon air conditioning loads, with smaller peaks at meal times. In a province like Newfoundland that uses a great deal of electric baseboard heating, the peak period is all winter long and requires a thermal generator full time. Adjusting peaks in the summer would achieve very little since the system is underutilized and primarily hydroelectric.

In Newfoundland’s case, shifting heating to Spring isn’t going to work. Electric hot water can be shifted with a timer (commonly done in Europe) so that it turns off at 6am and assuming a tank large enough for a morning shower vs on-demand types. However if the grid is so overloaded that electric hot water tanks are a problem, then it would be more effective to create an incentive to use natural gas, perhaps working with the gas distributors to ensure it is always the cheaper option.

Most little things can be shifted (later meals, nocturnal laundry, using the delay button on the dishwasher, etc.). However, they are so small compared to heating and cooling as to be insignificant with respect to billing yet massively inconvenient. Customers won’t understand the math, and will endure all sorts of inconvenience, afraid that if they don’t, their bills will be even higher and that it will be their fault.

Air conditioning in the summer is always in peak periods. You will either pay peak or sweat. A far better solution is to reduce cooling loads by enforcing improved building standards, not by exposing a sizable hunk of the population (often unemployed or elderly) to heat stroke.

If it was possible for everyone to adapt en mass and they managed to lower their bills, how long would it be before the utility company obtained a rate increase or time of use adjustment to counteract the resulting decline in revenue?

With respect to adoption rates, the above article notes:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these studies have found a stronger DR (demand reduction) when more sophisticated,and more expensive, enabling technologies are used than when the customer still has to intervene to reduce demand.

This means that customers that need to shift demand to keep their rates down are going to install hundreds or thousands of dollars of new equipment, or be forced to micro mange their power usage keeping track of the latest rates and the clock. As a practical example, a consumer could have an electrician install an axillary service panel with a relay such that it turns off during peak periods. Various outlets could be rewired to the new panel so that the hot water tank, deep freeze and fridge were connected to it. The major inconvenience of course is that you’d have no light in the fridge and appliance settings might reset to factory defaults. New appliances will no doubt appear with behavior like shutting off the compressor (of a fridge) while keeping on the ice maker and lighting. Buying all new smart grid enabled major appliances would be a terrible waste if the existing ones are modern and already quite efficient.

What is really driving this?

Business. The conservation/green argument is camouflage. If Canada’s political system was really interested in ecology, they wouldn’t have crapped on the Kyoto protocol. Lets look at the cash flow:

• To support new billing models, mechanical meters will require replacement with computerized meters. This is a significant cost, but one that will be billed back to consumers so the power company really doesn’t care what it costs. Potential savings from catching basement grow-ops and power theft will not materialize, especially since these people are unlikely to become paying customers and the only loss was the generation cost (not the customer rate). Expect to pay $300 or so spread over future bills to pay for a smart meter and installation costs.
• New meters allow remote reading which allows all those contract meter readers to be laid off and improves the corporate bottom line. The capability to connect and disconnect services remotely could be added to eliminate many electricians.
• New computer systems, such as upgrading the old mainframe system to SAP (an ERP software vendor) are required. Billing used to be really simple, but time of use generates a whole lot more data that the old systems cannot handle. A SAP implementation can cost a few million, and all the way up to 100 million in botched, multi-year projects implemented by the big guys like Deloitte. This isn’t a problem for management, because the favor will be returned if senior management wants work for the IT vendors afterwards (they may become a managing director), plus the overruns can be charged back to consumers as higher rates.
• The price premium for peak usage will be high enough to generate significantly increased revenue and allow creative business models. After that, it is a game to predict the optimal combination of times and rates to maximum demand and profit needed to pay for the “smart grid” and their growing empire. This is a business after all, and the only thing that matters is cash flow. Even non profit organizations like to generate more revenue because it allows their empires and expenses to expand, and to pay more to their executive. See this salary list: PARKINSON, TOM – President/CEO Hydro One/Ont Power Generation $1,106,668.21 or 2,484,945.89 Ontario Power Generation HANKINSON, JAMES F – President/CEO. Nalcor’s CEO Ed Martin made $505,700 which is more than four times the salary Newfoundland former premier Danny Williams used to donate to charity. The power industry pays its executives very well. How often do you think a public utilities board denies a rate increase because power industry executive salaries or operating expenses were too high?

Losing Arguments

Some people worry that smart metering and remote reading via RF (radio frequencies) is a health risk. This is possible of course but highly unlikely. Power companies love arguments like this because public health departments will back them and most of the public will discount the naysayers as the fringe. There are far better arguments — economic waste, increased prices, industrial collusion, governmental corruption and zero progress towards sustainability.

Let’s consider that RF can indeed cause cancer in some circumstances. The damage due to RF is a function of its energy content — the more powerful (like inside your microwave oven) the more dangerous. If you move twice as far away, it the energy per area drops by 1/4. Four times further away, and it is 1/16. This is important, because whatever emanates from your wireless router, remote meter, TV remote control etc. is absolutely nothing compared to pressing a cell phone to the side of your skull. Until people believe that cellphones can cause health problems, you will never convince the general public that something ten thousand times weaker will be a health problem.

If you have university library access, you can search all the worlds research journals for free and look for papers that look into health and RF issues. You will not find any peer-reviewed literature to support low powered RF transmissions causing health problems. In the extremely unlikely even that you do, I’d be happy to download them and post links here. It is a good thing really — with WiFi and cellular networks everywhere, Bluetooth headsets around our ears and cell phones pressed against our heads, we’d all be sick by now.

It is possible that some utility companies are using high powered transmitters which could conceivably be dangerous when the meter is a foot away from a bedroom wall. A quick look at the trading site Alibaba.com finds many that claim a 1W transmit power. The maximum permitted transmit power of a hand held GSM cellphone is between 1 and 2 Watts depending on the band, however, phones automatically reduce their power level when the cell tower is near by. 1 Watt is excessive if the goal is to communicate with equipment on a nearby telephone pole and a huge liability if a clear health link is ever established. For more on the bewildering array of communication technologies, see the American Radio Relay League’s comprehensive page called Electric Utility Communications, Applications and Smart Grid Technologies.

Professionals to the Rescue?

Unfortunately no. Professionals like engineers and doctors do, in many cases, have the breadth of training to see the problems and their potential solutions. They are however, trapped in a system where to be “professional” also means they have to follow the unwritten political rules designed to maintain the staus quo. Any engineer that dares make a public statement exposing the stupidity of some government plan, or worse yet, his own employers motives — is likely to be fired. Even Canadian Government employees can be suspended for talking. This is also true for non tenured university professors. There are always a small percentage of oppositional professionals that have the guts to speak up, and these are the people that we need as leaders. Of course to do that on any scale, wholesale changes are needed to the political and voting process so that people without financial backing and media support (which is controlled by a few wealthy individuals) can get elected.

If you are a professional I encourage you to speak up, even if it is an anonymous blog posting. I will host it for you. Find some other like minds and support movements for change. There are enough of you to make a big difference. Borrow the book called “Disciplined Minds” and you will understand where I am coming from. It should be required reading in all Canadian engineering schools and to counter the propaganda from the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board.

What should be done?

Looking at a larger picture, economics as if people mattered, we see dependency on non-renewable resources. This is the essence of un-sustainability. The oil from the Hibernia oil field in Newfoundland is already half gone. The goal should be to slash energy usage so that Canadians can live off hydro power and local generated power (solar, wind). Since the largest residential loads are heating and cooling, that is the place to start. Rather than variable billing rates via smart metering and attempting to change peoples habits, consider these permanent solutions that require homeowners to do nothing and which would result in vast energy savings:

• All new homes should have a southern exposure with extensive glazing (for solar gain). This requires layout changes to all new subdivisions.
• North walls should have no windows. They lose far more heat then they ever gain via sunlight, and the R-value of a window is only about 4. The walls around them by comparison are at least 20. This guarantees that all those new homes with dozens of windows will be energy hogs until the day they are bulldozed or their windows are removed.
• Insulation standards should be vastly increased (double wall construction), and local materials allowed (saw dust, newspaper, or local climate appropriate material instead of expensive fiberglass or flammable plastics)
• Heat pumps can be 4 times more efficient than baseboard heaters — offer interest free loans to home owners.
• Universities should be tasked with designing free home plans and construction techniques (patent and royalty free) that are climate specific for their area and which minimize energy consumption to the point where a small solar array could provide the electrical needs. Unfortunately, many universities are now obsessed with patenting everything, selling naming rights to buildings in return for corporate sponsorship, and get to keep 60% of the royalties of any patent a grad student or professor submits. I’ve suggested putting things into the public domain (at a public university) and got the same hostile, incredulous reaction you would saying that in a corporate boardroom.

  Passive technologies are vastly superior in the long run and immune to future energy cost increases. Have a look at the solar passiv institute to see what Europe is doing. Any university with an engineering or architecture school can do this. There should be a financial penalty for any new home that does not meet basic thermal standards. Industry will object. Citizens must make it clear that governments that support industrial greed over the needs of the population will be removed from office, otherwise it will be business/government as usual.

There is also a very real privacy issue with monitoring anything that can be a proxy for human activity. If I set up a smart ventilation system that senses C02, then I know when you are awake or asleep and how many people live inside. Same for power demands. I can see the day when subpoenaing power records will be common. I can also see police warrants because that new electric hot tub was flagged as a basement grow-op, or that anyone with an electric hot tub is automatically suspected of using it as cover, while actually heating it with propane, the power being used for lighting. Data will be collected and mined. It will be abused. The only solution is forbid its central collection.

If you want to experiment with your own energy metering and analysis, read this (I don’t sell these). For more on the smart grid, continue here.

A recently published paper shows mathematically that there is *one* core group of tightly interconnected super nodes (powerful corporations) that dominate worldwide commerce. Their interconnected nature ensures that they have common interests, so no conspiracy is required and their massive wealth ensures that they can outright own any corrupt government that can be bought, such as the current Regime in the USA.

To show this, the authors started with 43060 transnational (TNC) corporations taken from about 30 million records in the Orbis 2007 database. They then analyzed the ownership links coming into and out of each TNC paying attention to who controls the majority of its shares. The following observations were noted:

1. Mutual cross-shareholding (A owns part of B and B owns part of A) is very common. This discourages competition.
2. There is only one strongly connected component in the core. If each of companies A, B and C all link to each other, then it is said to be a “strongly connected” component. Approximately three quarters of the ownership of each company in the core is held by the core itself. It is sort of like a case of extreme incest or an “old boys club”.
3. Each company in the core on average has an ownership interest in 20 other core companies.

This passage from the paper sums it up nicely:

“We find that, despite its small size, the core holds collectively a large fraction of the total network control. In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations.” [1]

Look closely at the list of the top 50 transnational corporations in the table below, ranked by control of the global network of interconnected core companies. NACE codes that starts with 65 through 67, are financial institutions. SCC in the Network Position column means the company is part of the strongly connected core.

Number 15 is Walton Enterprises, the holding company for WalMart and its growing empire. It is classified T&T (tubes and tendrils) meaning that it is connected to the core but not as intertwined with other core members. China petrochemical group is also T&T – these make sense since they are massive, but newer players.

Members like Vanguard #8 marked IN (inward links) make sense since it holds billions in retirement investments and owns a great deal of everything.

Given that this small group of 50 companies controls 40% of the intertwined core, anything that would collectively benefit them all is something that you would expect them to try to acquire. Goldman Sachs for example, has had many former employees in high ranking positions in the US Government. Henry Paulson is a good example. What then would benefit the core?

Globalization, Automation, Banking Deregulation and tax havens are obvious areas. Of these, globalization is the most dangerous.

Free trade agreements and union busting allow human capital to be harvested at the bottom of the barrel where wages are poverty level, benefits non-existent and environmental regulations can be ignored. The only thing that gets in the way are trade protection rules and unions willing to strike. In the US and Canada, this translates having everything made in China. Walmart #15 has the most to lose from this so it should be not surprising that no Walmart store in North America has been successfully able to unionize and the total dominance of Asian made products for sale. Consumers are also partially to blame for not insisting on “made locally” products. However, with downward wages and inflation, people often shop at dollar stores out of desperation. The exodus of millions of manufacturing jobs is exterminating the middle class.

Most of the closely connected core companies are financial institutions. Finance is the only business where you can make trillions by being a parasite. They manufacture no real products and can get a small cut on every transaction. Their vast financial clout can manipulate prices globally to their benefit.

The ideal situation for them is to control the money supply of the world’s most valuable currency (via the Federal Reserve), remove all regulations to enable creative accounting (and fraud), have enough political influence to ensure that they will not be prosecuted when things go bad, promote the idea of privatizing gains and socializing losses (bailouts). Complicating tax laws helps too since transnational corporations can move product through many companies and claim the profits are incurred wherever taxes are lowest. Goldman Sachs helped Greece defraud the EU.

Significance for Canada

1. Some of the tightly connected core are right here – like Sun Life. This is not just a US problem. The core is too powerful to exist and needs to be regulated or broken up whenever possible. It is reasonable to expect that core companies will be promoting things that do not appear to be related to their apparent line of business because of the web of control.

2. Corporate lobbying and contributions to politics must be made illegal with severe repercussions for any form of bribery. Both the politician and lobbyist should be legally liable. The connected core has effectively unlimited resources to spend and will exploit every advantage.

3. All negotiations between corporate or foreign interests and politicians must be held in a public forum and recorded. Closed door negotiations should be illegal. While some deals may not happen without privacy, the potential for abusive underhanded dealings far outweighs any benefits. For example, should Canada be able to secretly negotiate trading North Atlantic fish quotas for a promise to buy Alberta wheat?

4. Harmonization of laws with other countries should NEVER be a primary goal. Corrupted regimes like the USA have many laws written by corporate lobbyists (copyright laws are a good example). These laws are not in the interest of US citizens let alone the rest of the world. Insuring our laws are similar is no different than letting the connected core companies write them for us. Why would Canadian politicians leak advance copies of laws to the US embassy for approval or feedback or as a favour?
This kind of behavior needs to land a politician in jail.
“Bernier promised to keep the Ambassador informed on the copyright bill’s progress, and indicated that USG officials might see the legislation after it is approved by Cabinet, but before it is introduced in Parliament.” — Wikileaks document here

5. Strictly enforce local and diverse ownership of media (newspapers and TV) to limit its role as a mass propaganda organ. Media ownership should never be intertwined with other commercial interests. Ideally, there would be many independent radio and TV stations. Public radio and TV should be publically financed and completely independent of political interference.

6. Reform the voting system. One vote favors a two party system that is easily corrupted. Being able to check off all acceptable boxes on a ballot eliminates vote splitting and makes it far easier for a 3rd party candidate to get elected.

7. Implement term limits for all elected offices.

8. Pass strict whistle blower protection laws. Governmental classified documents that expose crimes should leak, and the messenger should be protected, not prosecuted.

The only way to see what is really going on is to bypass MSM (mainstream media) entirely, e.g. ignore the propaganda from the New York Times, CNN, and newspapers. The best place to get started is with twitter and search for a hash tag like #occupywallstreet. This will lead you to tweets with up-to-date links where you will find commentary, pictures and video. You will also find a lot of dis-information and lies posted by trolls, lunatics and paid propagandists. However, the human brain is a good noise filter and you will rapidly see a common thread of sanity and be able to find good material.

The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya all started out small, but then expanded quickly and exponentially. While only thousands of people are marching in New York City every day, millions of people are following on twitter and social media. Support is global.

The central theme is that the vast majority (the 99%) have very little say in their “democracy” because corporations have been able to fund elected officials and this institutionalized bribery has resulted in countless policies that are wiping out the middle class. It also doesn’t matter anymore who you vote for because all the political parties serve the same interests, interests which have little in common with the 99%.

Many other themes will emerge later such as anti-capitalism. Improving democracy is the more socially acceptable rally cry at the moment but as people realize that our current society which was built on exponential growth and unlimited energy resources is dying — there will be demands for fundamental social changes. The 1% are powerful and have a lot to lose and will use their proxies (propaganda, police, intelligence agencies and the military) to fight to the end.

See 7 Core Demands from the Occupy Wall Street Movement for some of the demands that are emerging. These currently include:.

• End the Collusion Between Government and Large Corporations/Banks, So That Our Elected Leaders Are Actually Representing the Interests of the People (the 99%) and Not Just Their Rich Donors (the 1%).
• Investigate Wall Street and Hold Senior Executives Accountable for the Destruction in Wealth that has Devastated Millions of People.
• Return the Power of Coining Money to the U.S. Treasury and Return to Sound Money
• Limit the Size, Scope and Power of Banks so that None are Ever Again “Too Big to Fail” and in Need to Taxpayer Bailouts
• Eliminate “Personhood” Legal Status for Corporations
• Repeal the Patriot Act, End the War on Drugs and Protect Civil Liberties
• End All Imperial Wars of Aggression, Bring the Troops Home from All Countries, Cut the Military Budget and Limit The Military Role to Protection of the Homeland

Have a look at the “We are the 99%” photo blog for a disturbing personal reminders of how bad things are in the USA. Here is a sample:

I went to graduate school believing that there might be some financial security afforded by a higher degree, and that with that security I could finally buy my mom her own house and take care of her. Instead, I have wasted six years of my life and am about to enter a job market that will tell me that I am overeducated and overqualified. I will no longer be able to help my mom pay for health insurance, and I will no longer have my own. I pray for our good health because that’s pretty much all we will have left. I am the 99%

All of the protesters demands are reasonable, and the only violence so far has been inflicted by the New York Police Department. For example: Women’s screams and cries as a police mace them in captivity and the video is here.

The image below shows three women that have been trapped behind a construction fence by the police. A while collar NYPD officer named Anthony Bologna comes up to the fence and sprays these these women in the face with mace.
Also note the view count on the video — more than a quarter of a million views in one day and the ratio of likes to dislikes is 92%.

Go to https://twitter.com/search and enter the search term #occupywallstreet or #takewallstreet and read the tweets.

There is a live video at http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution which is also embedded immediately below this.

Anonops is here: http://anonops.blogspot.com/

Adbusters has good coverage http://www.adbusters.org/

The NYC General Assembly of OccupyNYC has its own web site.

Occupy Wall Street also has its on Wikipedia page.

The diplomatic cable below states that there is a consensus amongst Canadian economists that union is beneficial — and given the nature of world politics, “beneficial” is clearly limited in scope to the benefit of powerful interests and not regular citizens. I would like to know who these economists are. Perhaps economist and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is one of them.

The use of quotes in the passage “Our research leads us to conclude that such a package should tackle both “security” and “prosperity” goals” is also interesting since it implies the writer considered them to be highly questionable.

A few more quotes stand out:

• The central bank governor has taken the position that “monetary union is an issue that should be considered once we have made more progress towards establishing a single market.”
• When advocating NAI, it would be better to highlight specific gains to individual firms, industries or travelers, and especially consumers.

It would be almost impossible to implement regulations and policies that maximize the quality of life for the average Canadian citizens if they had to be harmonized with US regulations, or worse yet, there was no Canadian authority. Far too many US policies are developed in conjunction with, and sometimes written by and for the exclusive benefit of large entities, such as the agricultural giant Monsanto, banks or the recording industry. The USG (U.S. Government) has a very low regard for the majority of humanity.

Some examples:
There are many good reasons to avoid genetically modified plants, especially the impact to a farmer’s legal rights to produce free seed for the next harvest. Whereas before a farmer could be self sufficient, now they have a corporate parasite in the food chain that can control the price of seeds. Countries that object to GM products are pressured or manipulated by the US government. See these cables French TV Film Attacks Us Biotech Regime or SLOW BUT STEADY: MOVING AGRICULTURAL BIOTECHNOLOGY FORWARD AT THE VATICAN

Feeding formula to infants when mothers do not have clean water to mix with the formula, can lead to diarrhea and death — so why would the USA lobby against it in a foreign country? POWERFUL LOBBY AND QUESTIONABLE LOBBY BACK POSSIBLE RESTRICTIONS ON MILK FORMULA

Canada’s attempts at reforming its copyright laws were heavily intertwined with US interests. Consider this:

Minister of Industry Maxime Bernier “also stated that the final copyright legislation “would be in line” with USG priorities, but was not more specific.”

“Bernier promised to keep the Ambassador informed on the copyright bill’s progress, and indicated that USG officials might see the legislation after it is approved by Cabinet, but before it is introduced in Parliament.”

Industry Minister Tony Clement’s policy director asked U.S. officials to add Canada to their Special 301 Priority Watch List known as the Copyright Blacklist. Zoe Addington, Director of Policy, Industry Canada “said that they have not yet determined if they will use bill C 61 as a model or start from scratch. In contrast to the messages from other Canadian officials, she said that if Canada is elevated to the Special 301 Priority Watch List (PWL), it would not hamper – and might even help – the GOC’s ability to enact copyright legislation. ”

Economic union would be an even greater disaster — Canada has a small population with vast resources, including hydroelectric resources that will be around long after the oil is gone. It is not recklessly inventing money (quantitative easing) and has been rather conservative with borrowing. The currency has real value. Canada is also free to set interest rates that make sense for current economic conditions unlike countries in the EU.

Contrast that with the US dollar which could easily collapse. It is also worth looking at the mess in Europe with the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece) threatening to take down the euro zone. Economic unions might work if all member economies were similar, their governments actually represented the people that voted them into power and corruption was not rampant. This is clearly not the case, and judging from the rest of the cables, most national governments constantly scheme against their citizens, lie continuously and commit atrocities – the only common thread being that some corporate entity or wealth family always benefits from the actions.

One part of the solution is clear — small (Disintegration) is better since it limits the power to do evil (see Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered), and anytime you hear about “efficiencies” ask yourself, “efficient or profitable for what”?

It is bad enough that some Canadian politicians are just as crooked as their foreign counterparts and work to deceive the voting public so that they can implement laws that harm their constituents but benefit corporate interests or make friends in the USG. However,”integration”, perhaps styled after the EU, would be vastly worse since there would be no local authority to object to outrageous abuses or at least, attempt to implement ethical policies.

The text below is the cable about NAI (North American Integration) referred to earlier. Please read it and make sure it never happens.

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 OTTAWA 000268

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE

STATE FOR WHA/CAN – BREESE AND HOLST

WHITE HOUSE/NSC – SHIRZAD

STATE PASS USTR FOR CHANDLER

USDOC FOR 4320/OFFICE OF NAFTA/GWORD/TFOX;
3134/OIO/WESTERN HEMISPHERE

TREASURY FOR IMI

GENEVA FOR USTR

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: ETRD EINV CA
SUBJECT: PLACING A NEW NORTH AMERICAN INITIATIVE
IN ITS ECONOMIC POLICY CONTEXT

REF: (A) 04 Ottawa 3431 (Regulatory agenda)

(B) 04 Ottawa 066 (Canadian trade policy)

SUMMARY/INTRODUCTION
——————–

¶1. THIS MESSAGE IS SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED. NOT FOR
DISTRIBUTION OUTSIDE USG CHANNELS.

¶2. (SBU) An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks
for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain
the most support among Canadian policymakers. Our research
leads us to conclude that such a package should tackle both
“security” and “prosperity” goals. This fits the
recommendations of Canadian economists who have assessed the
options for continental integration. While in principle
many of them support more ambitious integration goals, like
a customs union/single market and/or single currency, most
believe the incremental approach is most appropriate at this
time, and all agree that it helps pave the way to these
goals if and when North Americans choose to pursue them.

¶3. (SBU) The economic payoff of the prospective North
American initiative – in terms of higher incomes and greater
competitiveness – is available, but its size and timing are
unpredictable, so it should not be oversold. Still, a
respectable economic case has been made for such an
initiative, and this message spells it out. We believe
that, given growing Canadian concern about “border risk” and
its effects on investment, a focus on the “security” side
could also produce the most substantial economic/trade
benefits.

END SUMMARY/INTRODUCTION

CANADIAN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE
—————————–

¶4. (SBU) Canadian economists in business, academia and
government have given extensive thought to the possible
options for further North American integration. Nearly all
of this work assumes that each of the three countries is
pursuing standard economic policy goals – growth,
productivity and competitiveness (rather than more specific
concerns raised by Mexican analysts such as migration
management, regional development, or environmental
protection). Since 9/11, Canadian economists working in
this area have generally endorsed a comprehensive initiative
with the United States on security, trade, and immigration.
Following is our summary of the professional consensus:

PROCESS: At this time, an “incremental” approach to
integration is probably better than a “big deal”
approach. However, governments should focus on
choosing their objectives, and not on choosing a
process.

BORDER VS. PERIMETER: Even with zero tariffs, our land
borders have strong commercial effects. Some of these
effects are positive (such as law enforcement and data
gathering), so our governments may always want to keep
some kind of land border in place. Canada and the
United States already share a security perimeter to
some degree; it is just a question of how strong we
want to make it.

BORDER RISK: The risk that business will be obstructed
at the border by discretionary U.S. actions, such as
measures to defend against terrorism or infectious
disease, in addition to growing congestion, have become
major risks to the economy, inhibiting investment in
Canada. For small businesses, the complexities of
navigating the border are apparently even more
intimidating than the actual costs. Reducing this risk
is Canada’s top motive for pursuing further
integration.

LABOR MARKETS: Many Canadian economists point to labor
markets – both within and among countries – as the
factor market where more liberalization would deliver
the greatest economic benefits for all three countries.
They advocate freeing up professional licensing laws,
and developing a quick, simple, low-cost work permit
system, at least for U.S. and Canadian citizens.

REGULATION: Canadian economists agree that Canadian
regulations (if not their standards, then their
complexity) are needlessly restricting foreign
investment and impeding food, communications and other
industries. (Inter-provincial differences are
important here, since Canada’s federal government does
not have the benefit of a U.S.-style “interstate
commerce” clause). While much of the problem is
domestic in nature, an international initiative could
help to catalyze change.

CUSTOMS UNION: A common external tariff, or a customs
union which eliminated NAFTA’s rules of origin (ROO),
is economically desirable. NAFTA’s ROO are so
restrictive that importers often prefer to pay the
tariff rather than try to prove North American origin.
However, economists differ on the size of the benefits
available and on whether these would justify the effort
of negotiation. One study estimated that a full
customs union which eliminated ROO would only raise
national income by about one percent.

CURRENCY UNION: Canadian economists are split on
whether a return to a fixed exchange rate, or adopting
the U.S. dollar, would benefit Canada in current
circumstances. (Canada last tied its dollar to the
U.S. dollar from 1962 to 1970). The central bank
governor has taken the position that “monetary union is
an issue that should be considered once we have made
more progress towards establishing a single market.”

NORTH AMERICAN INTEGRATION: WHAT WE KNOW
—————————————–

¶5. (SBU) Past integration (not just NAFTA but also many
bilateral and unilateral steps) has increased trade,
economic growth, and productivity. Studies suggest
that border efficiency and transportation improvements
(such as the lower cost and increased use of air
freight) have been a huge part of this picture.
Indeed, they may have been more important to our
growing prosperity over the past decade than NAFTA’s
tariff reductions. Freight and passenger aviation are
critically important to our continent’s
competitiveness, and businesses are very sensitive to
the timing, security, and reliability of deliveries –
hence the “border risk” which so concerns Canadian
policymakers.

¶6. (SBU) A stronger continental “security perimeter”
can strengthen economic performance, mainly by
improving efficiency at land borders and airports. It
could also facilitate future steps toward trilateral
economic integration, such as a common external tariff
or a customs union, if and when our three countries
chose to pursue them. Paradoxically, the security and
law enforcement aspects of the envisioned initiative
could hold as much – or more – potential for broad
economic benefits than the economic dimension.
WHERE’S THE UPSIDE?
——————-
¶7. (SBU) Some international economic initiatives (such
as FTAs) produce across-the-board measures that
generate broad benefits for a country’s industries and
consumers on a known time-line. This was true of NAFTA
but it is less likely to be true of the economic
aspects of the NAI. Non-tariff barriers such as
standards and regulations generally must be tackled one-
by-one. This is a piecemeal process and the ratio of
payoff to effort is likely to be lower than with across-
the-board measures. Governments naturally focus on
resolving the problems which their firms or citizens
bring to their attention. While this approach has
merits, it tends to deliver the payoffs toward
particular interests. If there are hidden costs, there
might be little impact on national performance. As we
move toward a list of barriers to tackle, it will
remain important to balance those interests. For
example, some Canadian economists have suggested that
NAFTA fell short of expectations with respect to
increasing consumer choice in Canada; that may be a
theme we should stress as efforts to promote further
integration take shape.

¶8. (SBU) In contrast, cooperative measures on the
“security” side, a critical focus of current bilateral
efforts, can deliver substantial, early, and
widespread economic benefits. Security and law
enforcement within North America have evolved rapidly
since 9/11, leading to many less-than-perfect processes
for handling legitimate international traffic.
Collaboration to improve these processes could yield
efficiency improvements which would automatically be
spread widely across the economy, leading to general
gains in trade, productivity, and incomes.

A NOTE OF CAUTION
—————–

¶9. (SBU) There is little basis on which to estimate the
size of the “upside” gains from an integration
initiative concentrating on non-tariff barriers of the
kind contained in NAI. For this reason, we cannot make
claims about how large the benefits might be on a
national or continental scale. When advocating NAI, it
would be better to highlight specific gains to
individual firms, industries or travelers, and
especially consumers.

CELLUCCI

The role of an engineering accreditation board is to set minimum standards for engineering programs and give a stamp of approval. Once accreditation is granted, institutions use it to market their programs as not just an applied bachelor of science degree, but a degree with the word “Engineering” in the title. Graduation from accredited programs then allows membership into professional societies who have exclusive rights to the title “Engineer” which in turn sponsor the accreditation organizations.

All five programs in the Faculty of Engineering at Memorial University were granted a full six-year accreditation, the maximum accreditation period possible for engineering degree programs in Canada, after a review by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB).

The Accreditation criteria can be found here . Since these procedures cover many areas, I will quote selected passages and add commentary.

“A detailed questionnaire is completed by the institution and sent to the team prior to the visit. During the visit, the team examines the academic and professional quality of faculty, adequacy of laboratories, equipment and computer facilities and the quality of the students’ work.”

The response to any detailed questionnaire will be very carefully worded and cross checked to ensure that the institution puts itself in the best possible light, therefore the site visit is critical. The stakes for the institution are very high and anything negative will be hard to find in only three days.

Starting with the section 3.4, we see reference to quality, morale and commitment.

“3.4 Program environment 3.4.1.1 The quality, morale, and commitment of the: a. students b. faculty c. support staff d. administration”

What could an accreditation team possibly know about the quality of the faculty or morale of the students? Obviously, the institution is not going to volunteer anything negative, and the Engineering code of ethics discourages anyone from exposing malfeasance unless there is documented proof and then, only up through official channels. This poses two obvious problems — smart people don’t document bad behavior in e-mails or signed documents, and bringing complaints to the administration at any level from department chair, associate dean, dean, presidents office etc. seldom achieves anything other than to get you branded a malcontent. For obvious reasons, the most forbidden action is to go public with damaging information. Public ridicule is the only true threat to professional societies and the reason they actively discourage it through indoctrination and professional ostracism.

Consider this professor Aziz Rahman – read the link and then ask yourself: do you think this represents quality and professionalism? How does this reflect on the Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Newfoundland and Labrador of which he is a member? What do you think your morale would be like taking a course from someone like this? One professor even vanished without notice, see L. Lobo.

This behavior has been going on for decades so it is silly to blame individual employees as scapegoats. It is an institutional problem. The administration of the department of Engineering and Applied Science either condones such behavior, disapproves of it but has zero control over its employees, is apathetic, anything goes as long as you publish, is entirely dysfunctional or is some unfortunate combination of these. Many professors have contempt for the administration but are not going to state this publicly. If you don’t have tenure, it would be career suicide to speak out.

Section 3.4.2 sounds fairly obvious – you would certainly expect the department to have sufficient faculty to implement and teach the curriculum. Before each accreditation cycle, all professors must update their resumes with their latest research papers. The assumption is that these glowing resumes represent the quality of staff that will be teaching.

3.4.2.1 There must be sufficient faculty to cover, by experience and interest, all areas of the curriculum.

Only two of five courses are taught by professors in Term 7 Electrical Engineering (Summer 2011). Contractors are teaching Industrial Controls and Automation, Engineering Design, Digital Signal Processing and Digital Communications. Graduate students with little teaching experience and sometimes, poor knowledge of the subject material are being used as contractors. Some of these people have major language difficulties and are unable to comprehend questions posed by students without multiple attempts. Two electives were cancelled this term because there was nobody to teach them; Communication Electronics, Process Control and Instrumentation.

Contract teaching is a bad thing for two reasons, the first of which is its random nature. Contractors can range from quite good to what you would expect if you told a student to read ahead and teach the next lecture to the rest of the class. A more insidious problem is that it prevents catastrophe — cancellation of an engineering program because there is nobody to teach core courses — a catastrophe that would ensure they actually hired professors. There is a financial incentive too — as long as there are people desperate enough to teach a course for about $3000 a shot, why hire permanent faculty?

How do students react to poor teaching? Well, attendance is not mandatory at Memorial unlike many colleges which will fail you if you skip more than three classes without reason. The course Industrial Controls and Automation has had as few as three one person in attendance.

3.4.2 Faculty: The character of the educational experience is influenced strongly by the competence, expertise, and outlook of the faculty.

Most of the students I know are disillusioned with the system and have no interest in staying on for a Masters or Ph.D. All professors are now required to have Ph.D’s so this makes it difficult to find Canadians to fill these positions. Decades ago, some of the professors only held a Masters Degree. It would seem that a Masters from some place like MIT and an ability to teach should outweigh having a Ph.D. which by its very nature, is focused on an extremely narrow area and perhaps totally unrelated to anything being taught at an undergraduate level.

Section 3.4.4 is also fairly obvious. You would expect professors to have very advanced knowledge, and a broad understanding of engineering.

“3.4.4 Expertise and competence of faculty: Faculty delivering the engineering curriculum are expected to have a high level of expertise and competence, and to be dedicated to the aims of engineering education and of the self-regulating engineering profession, which will be judged by the following factors:

Their experience in teaching, research, and design practice.

Their level of scholarship as shown by scientific, engineering, and professional publications.

Their appreciation of the role and importance of the self-regulating engineering profession, and of positive attitudes towards professional licensure and involvement in professional affairs.”

All this sounds fine, but without any feedback from students or 3rd party observers, how would you know if a professor has a “high level of expertise and competence”? Graduate students sometimes do a professor’s research for them and if that professor has a circle of colleagues that cite each other incessantly, they can build up a truly impressive looking resume. A publishing track record is a poor indicator of quality. For example, Aziz Rahman has published numerous articles and has an international reputation yet believes that Heavy Water is H202 (hydrogen peroxide), that lead acid batteries have copper and zinc plates, and that gold is the most conductive metal and is algebraically challenged at times.

The professor above is an extreme and highly disturbing example because his tenure allows him to speak his mind, but there are others who are just as bad as educators and clearly should not be teaching. Given that this has been going on for many years, it is unfair to blame these professors as “the problem” when it is clearly a failing of current and past administrations of the faculty of Engineering and Applied Science to do something tangible about it.

Another problem with the focus on PhDs and research is that their focus becomes extremely narrow, and as they age, the basics they are supposed to be teaching, simply vanish. For example, I posed the following question to three engineering professors. 10 +/- 10% squared is 100 plus or minus what? Nobody knew, although two of them were brave enough to admit that they didn’t know and suggested asking any professor in the chemistry or physics faculties. Ironically, the answer has an entire section devoted to it in the book Introduction to Professional Engineering in Canada, but that chapter isn’t taught.

When a university brands itself as a “research university” and relies heavily on the cash flow from research grants and promotes “publish or perish” rather than stressing learning objectives and outcomes – education suffers. Memorial University could hire educators and researchers separately and not tie advancement, salary and tenure to publishing.

Since Memorial University holds a monopoly position in granting engineering degrees in the province of Newfoundland, Education should be the clear priority with research taking a back seat. Most of the students are undergraduates trying to learn their field — they need a good basic education from people that can teach, and some auxiliary support in the form of hands on training in physical laboratories. If it wasn’t for the laboratory component, you’d do better to get your education from the online lectures at MIT, YouTube and the hundreds of excellent tutorials posted by enthusiastic educators worldwide especially since virtual labs using computer simulation are now feasible.

The requirement that faculty possess a positive attitude towards licensure and self regulation sounds rather self serving, coming from Engineers Canada. This has no place in certification, nor should a positive attitude towards an accreditation body be a requirement for accreditation by that same body. There are other models that work including no licensure (such as the case with IT professionals). If universities abandoned CEAB accreditation, they would have to stand on their own reputation and not hide behind accreditation. If the CEAB then insisted that only accredited schools be admissible as engineers, the obviously solution would be to remove the requirement for the P.Eng in job descriptions and either not require a P.Eng., or operate it as a government license that could be revoked in the rare case of incompetence.

4.4 Accreditation visit c. interviews with individuals and groups of students,

How were students selected for this? I can imagine that they were very carefully selected since an outspoken individual could be disastrous. Each term, students get a chance to complain to the department chair in communal “bitching sessions” who in turn, dutifully takes notes. Complaints often center around professors that clearly have not mastered the material they are forced to teach, are abusive, unstable or incomprehensible. Unfortunately, absolute nothing changes as the result of this except that every term, the student body becomes a little more cynical. It isn’t the fault of the department chairs either since escalating things to the Dean has also proven ineffective. To add further insult, Orwellian doublethink prevails where “Bad is Good” as if having to ignore one required course that is graded generously to pass some other mandatory course taught by a tyrant is good experience for the workforce and for setting priorities, or that “our weaknesses” are “our strength”. I learned to adjust distributor points in total darkness, carried a full set of mechanics tools and became good at overhauling internal combustion engines because I had two primitive 1978 Volkswagen rabbits that broke down monthly. It would have never occurred to me to claim they were good vehicles because they taught me to be an automobile mechanic — because they were inferior, unreliable and pathetic pieces of junk engineering.

Memorial University has had over 40 years to refine the engineering program — there is no excuse for bad behavior.

“d. tours of physical facilities such as laboratories, libraries and computing facilities to evaluate their effectiveness, and

How would you evaluate the effectiveness of a library or laboratory? Perhaps reviewing *all* the laboratory manuals would be a start. Many are embarrassingly bad, complete with errors, incomplete directions and virtually devoid of supporting theory. Labs are an area of great deficiency and any short search with Google can find far better laboratory manuals from dozens of community colleges and universities world wide. Apparently Memorial hired someone to rewrite them all but he quit. This is the kind of work that needs to be assigned to a professor and taken seriously.

e. a review of recent examination papers, laboratory instruction sheets, student transcripts (anonymous, if necessary), student reports and theses, models or equipment constructed by students and other evidence of student performance

During the last accreditation cycle (2010), our work was copied and a few exams were selected to represent poor, average and exceptional performance. There is no doubt that these were carefully selected. I have seen exam papers that were graded outrageously, the marks clearly invented and not open for discussion.

Unwanted side effects of Accreditation

Anyone that challenges the administration for any change runs into the “required for our accreditation” excuse. This could be a challenge for credit, request to do an advanced individual project versus a group project or substituting a course. In fact, it was a response like this that inspired me to post this blog — I just couldn’t help but think – How could you be concerned about a well documented challenge for credit affecting your accreditation? It is sort of like being concerned about weeds growing in the front yard while the house is on fire.”

It would appear that if an institution wants to dedicate a team of competent administrators to manage the accreditation process, then accreditation is almost a certainty. On the other hand, we see staffing advanced courses with contract personnel, professors that can do literally anything they want with impunity, no real public accountability, cancelled electives because of there is nobody to teach it and running a program so badly that “hate” and “I have gone too far to start from scratch in another program” is all too often used to describe the student experience. What then does accreditation mean other than having a good looking curriculum and the ability to manage the accreditation process?

Important Note to Employers
In no way has this affected the quality of the graduates from the program, especially since learning is lifelong and much of what is needed in the workforce will be learned after graduation. There may be some holes in their knowledge (the graduates one year might be clueless about operational amplifiers while another graduating class might find motors confusing or vaguely remember that three phase has something to do with root three) depending on who taught what. However, much of what students have learned was self taught and this will continue, filling in important gaps that were supposed to be taught — and just as significantly, important things that simply aren’t in the curriculum at all. It wasn’t all that long ago when thermodynamics was taught to all students; civil, mechanical and electrical because it was considered important for all engineers to understand. Today, graduating electrical engineers don’t have a clue how a heat pump works. Fortunately, until recently it has been a 4 year (8 term program) with as many as 6 courses a semester and four work terms — plus it required a year of studies before applying. This means that all graduating students have completed more than 50 university semester courses and have over a year of practical, paid work experience. That is a lot of study and it exceeds by far the requirements of a typical honors degree.

There are world class professors in the faculty that work hard at filling in gaps and it is manifestly unfair to tar them all with the same brush. The combination of the well deserved work ethic associated with the Canadian Maritime region and the proven ability of students to survive a difficult program like this virtually guarantees that anyone that graduates from here would make a valuable employee. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to hire any of them. In keeping with the Orwellian doublethink reference above, I should point out that this is not a good thing because many highly intelligent and creative people that would have made excellent engineers refused to take the abuse and quit, or graduate but decide to not pursue a Masters or Ph.D.

This is a place holder for a longer investigative article I am writing, and I am hoping that if yours failed too that you will leave some comments.

My experience was a total failure of a Mazda MPV 2002 automatic transmission (JATCO) with less than 100,000 miles and Mazda denying that there was any kind of known issue with them. The quoted price for a replacement from Mazda Canada was $5,500 installed which is outrageous. I opted for a used junkyard transmission but the first one the dealership installed slipped between gear changes to they had to find a second junkyard transmission and I had to rent a car for two weeks. I suspect a lot of Mazdas are just sent to the junkyard when the transmission fails.

Mazda Canada states “Regarding your transmission inquiry, there are no known manufacturing defects that will result in the failure of your transmission.” . However, in the literature link below, there is a update handbook available that refers to “many engineering changes” that need to be applied in the rebuild process. Mazda needs to recall these transmissions and apply these updates, or at the very least, offer them to customers with failed transmissions. Of course “should” doesn’t improve short term profit and recalls look bad on the financial statements, so I am not holding my breath. The only real cost to Mazda are the thousands of people like myself that will no longer be loyal customers. If I had done a Google search and found nothing out there, I would have written it off as bad luck and not bothered with this page — but there are thousands of complaints out there and the issues of lemon laws, class action law suits and recalls have been mentioned numerous times.

I also had a look at the JATCO site and saw that you could ask them questions provided that you agree “We send email replies only for the purpose of responding to specific questions from customers. We strictly forbid transfer, secondary use or disclosure to any third party, of all or part of the contents of such replies without our permission.” Outrageous – now customer service comes with prearranged gag order.

Technical Literature
Automatic Transmission Service Group

“The JATCO 5 speed automatic transmission is known as the JF506E in the Jaguar X Type and Land Rover’s Freelander. In the Mazda 6 and MPV it is known as the JA5A-EL and with VW’s Golf, GTI and Jetta it is the 09A. Overseas it is known as the 5F1J or the Durashift -5-Tronic transmission used in the Mondeo vehicle starting in 2002.5 model year. This manual contains the procedures necessary to diagnose, overhaul and/or repair the Mazda JF506E transaxle, and is intended for automotive technicians that are familiar with the operation of automatic transmissions.

Note: There have been many engineering changes in this transaxle since its introduction in 1999. ATSG also has available an “Update Handbook” which includes the many changes and is required along with this manual for a proper overhaul or repair.”

… more soon

Example Repair Costs

• Feb 2011 – CDN$2300 for a local junkyard replacement, installed with 5 year warranty on part only. Dealer claims it is a nightmare and they are on their second used transmission 10 days later.
• Feb 2011 – CDN$5500 for a Mazda Canada replacement, installed

Links that have discussions of Mazda failures and some quotes:
There are a lot of horror stories over at MPVclub.com too.

Consumeraffairs.com
“I purchased a 2002 Mazda MPV mini van brand new. I had taken it in a couple of times for a problem of when i pressed the gas it would stall and then jerk and make a clunk sound. the dealer could never replicate the issue, and the problem continued. now i justed turned 70,000 miles and the transmission failed and needs to be replaced at a cost of 2500-3000. As i look online i see hundreds of complaints on this same issue. there needs to be a recall on the transmissions. K of MT PROSPECT, IL Oct. 22, 2010 ”

APA (Automobile Protection Association) – 2004 Mazda MPV complaints
- there should be a lot more by now -
“Forty-one complaints concerning the 2000-2002 Mazda MPV have been filed by the public since November 2002. The owners who contacted the APA complained mostly about vibration and transmission problems. From November 2002 to March 2003, complaints were filed at the Toronto office using the short one-page form; twelve such forms were filled out by consumers. From May 2003 until today, complaints have been filed using the two-page form available on the web site and were sent to both the Toronto and Montreal offices. Twenty-nine such complaints were sent to the APA. All of the consumers who sent the APA completed forms identified themselves and left us their telephone numbers and, in most cases, their e-mail addresses.”

Edmunds.com Mazda MPV Transmission Problems (this thread has 170+ messages)
“My 2002 MPV with 68,000 miles started having problems with the transmission slipping into neutral. I took it to the local dealer who and service manager indicated there was an “internal failure” in the transmission and repair cost would be $3,500. They would order a rebuilt transmission from Mazda and install it. A transmission failure at this low mileage is not acceptable. My first and last Mazda! I’d strongly advise any MPV owners out there to get rid of their vans before it is too late.”

“I called Mazda today. They were useless. They said because I was out of warranty based on mileage and time of ownership ( 45 months and 68,000 miles) they could not do anything. It is annoying that the tranny would go at such low mileage and equally annoying that the repair is so expensive. Anyone reading this that owns a MPV, dump it now!”

“On Sept. 7th, 2010 at 97174 miles the transmission gave out. I lost the 4th, 5th, and reverse gears. I was able to get around at 25 mph in gears 1-3. Up until now shift shock had always been present. I didn’t get the recommended reflash because according to what I’ve read on various MPV blogs and forums most people that had it done still had shift shock. I concluded it wasn’t worth it. I had never changed the transmission oil because it isn’t recommended by Mazda. Why? I’ve pondered that for a long time. This repair in out of my league. I got quotes from $1200.00 to $3500.00 for rebuild or remanufactured (there is a difference). I contemplated a used transmission from the junk yard. Then the dreaded thought of sending my beloved MPV to the scrap heap. This year MPV qualified under the Cash For Clunker program. I should have done it then. I decided on a $2000.00 local rebuild buy a reputable well established transmission shop that was well acquainted with this type transmission and its flaws. I learned it is a JATCO (Japanese automatic transmission company) JF506E transmission. Used in certain Jaguar, VW, Mazda, Ford, Landrover models and other manufacturers. Excessive valve body wear and cracked and/or broken reverse piston seem to be the major and very common problems. Jaguar actually had a recall on the transmission. According to the transmission shop, all the new rebuild kits come with upgraded parts. all part flaws have been addressed. My MPV is on the road again. ”

Where to file complaints

Government agencies

Comsumer Protection sites

.. convenient links coming soon

Please leave a comment if you want to be notified of any future recall or action. I won’t publish your e-mail address so you won’t be getting any spam. If you leave failure details (mileage, age, year of the vehicle and repair cost or salvaged perhaps and some comments) will add them to a table.

complete article is at:http://nlcpr.com/OnDemandVentilation.php

I had previously written here about indoor air quality and ventilation requirement rules of thumb. These are generalities like how many times an hour the air in your home should be exchanged (ACH) such that you have decent indoor air quality. The idea was to size your ventilation system to be able to meet these targets — but as it turns out, the whole exercise is misguided.

We will now take a more fundamental look at the problem.

CO2 (carbon dioxide)

Human activity generates carbon dioxide (you breath it out) and this raises the levels above what you find outdoors. The level outside is about 400 ppm (parts per million) and once you enter your house, you start adding to these levels. A classroom with the door closed in school is about 1000 ppm when people start yawning and the point when many would say it is stuffy inside.

Oxygen levels also drop, but this is negligible because there is already lots of oxygen in the atmosphere. At 20% or about 1/5 of your living room full of oxygen, you are not going to notice a reduction in oxygen that makes you feel like you are on a mountain top somewhere. By contrast, CO2 levels start out at .0039% and are very tightly connected to your body’s biochemistry. If they rise, your breathing rate changes and you may feel tired.

Let’s start by looking at the CO2 and humidity levels in a room during a typical day where you sleep at night, have a burst of activity and then leave the home vacant and go to work. You return at 6pm and go to bed close to midnight.

Note the following:

• The rate that the CO2 levels goes up is approximately double during the day as it is at night. This is because you aren’t exerting yourself much at night and burn less energy. You burn sugar and fats and make carbon dioxide just as your car produces CO2 by burning gasoline.
• Rates fall off quite rapidly when you leave the house because of natural infiltration (drafts). They fall off even faster if the ventilation fan is on or it is windy outside.
• Humidity is totally useless as an indicator that someone is home. You may get spikes during a morning shower as in the graph above, but unless you are boiling water for hours, it doesn’t change much throughout the day. Humidity is the red line in the graph above and one of the intakes for the ventilation is a foot from a shower stall.

There are many other pollutants that can lower the indoor air quality, but almost all of them are associated with humans being in the house. Smoking and cooking are obvious examples. If you can keep the C02 levels under control, you will likely keep everything else under control too. Of all the things you can test for, humidity is one of the most useless but unfortunately, that is exactly what the controls on a Venmar heat exchanger do.

Notice that there is a setting for Summer, assuming it will be more humid then so raising the set point will prevent it being on all the time. No matter what you set it at, it will either be on or off almost all the time since humidity levels don’t change rapidly. If you look at the red line in the graph above, where would you have set humidity control to turn on and off? (no good answer here). In other words, it is useless.

I previously suggested using a timer to turn the fans on and off with a set rhythm — two hours on and two hours off. This cuts your operating expenses in half, but is unfortunately still pretty dumb.

Natural air infiltration

Most houses have a lot of leaks and don’t need extra ventilation on windy days or perhaps at all. The house tested for this article had been very well sealed, for example:

• The dryer vent was replaced with a non draft ball vent.
• All plastic vapor barriers were glued together with acoustic sealant (a soft tar like black goo)
• All pot lights were made air tight with plastic and expanding foam
• One way air flaps were added to every bathroom fan
• Door seals were touched up with silicone so that there were zero drafts
• All wall sockets were sealed, some with special plastic boxes that seal the incoming wires.

So, given that this is far tighter than your average home, was the air infiltration very significant? Well, it all depends on the wind. When the winds are high (say 50 kmh and above, which is a typical city speed limit) the CO2 levels don’t even rise. When there is no wind at all, it gets stuffy rapidly. If you get your house tested with a blower door, they decrease the pressure by 50 Pascals (not enough to pop your eardrums) and look for drafts. A windy day does the same thing.

The graph below shows that on a really windy period, you don’t need extra ventilation to keep the CO2 levels low. On a day with no wind and lots of activity in the house, it can’t keep up. You could have a larger ventilation unit to solve this, but then it would be even more important for it to be intelligent enough to know when not to be on.

To verify this, the Davis Vantage Pro weather station on the solar collector was used to overlay the C02 and humidity readings, and this was the result:

The colors have changed. Red is the high wind gusts so you can see this is a ridiculously windy place (Canadian North Atlantic). The lower dark blue link is the average wind speed, and the yellow is the CO2 level in parts per million. The period in brackets spanning about two days did not need extra ventilation and it isn’t surprising given the red (wind gusts) were hovering around 40 kmh. The controller was programmed to come on if the levels exceeded 750 ppm but this never happened.

The graph above shows that the wind finally stopped and the CO2 levels began to rise, and at the right bracket, the fan was finally triggered. The spike immediately after was due to some intense activities. If you start lifting heavy boxes or working out, you will find the levels go up very rapidly. Using a car as an example, exhaust at idle or a human sitting watching TV is nothing compared to driving at highway speeds or running on a treadmill.

There are a few ways we can keep the air quality decent and not waste too much expensive heat or cooling by having the fan run when it is useless. Since using the humidity control is useless and using a timer will save money but has no idea if it really ought to be on or not, we are left with:

• Turn the unit on when it feels stuffy (instead of opening a window like you would have years ago). In this case, you are the carbon dioxide sensor.
• Write a small program using a cheap remote control device like the X10 and its "firecracker" adapter to poll yahoo for the weather results and turn the ventilation on when wind levels are low, and also turn it off during periods when you are never home (e.g. single person that works 9-5).
• Actually measure the gasses in the return air duct and make intelligent decisions based on reality.

To experiment with the 3rd, option, the following was set up:

Gas sensors were installed in the incoming and outgoing heat exchanger ports since this is the place where you can make an intelligent decision about whether it should be on or off.

The diagram below shows the basic layout of a heat exchanger. Warm air leaving (red arrow) passes through the diamond shaped block and warms the air coming in. This heat exchange and the ability to run the air through a filter is the whole reason behind using an $800+ ventilation system instead of opening your windows for free. The latter is often a good idea, especially when the temperature outside is pleasant.

Then using a micro controller like you might have in your microwave oven, a control program was set up to do the following:

• Sample the air for 2 minutes and record various gas concentrations (CO2 is the important one), temperature and humidity. I’ve yet to detect propane, methane or natural gas in this house.
• Keep it on for 2 minutes and then if the levels exceed 750 ppm, keep the fan on high until the levels drop back down to 700 ppm.
• Once levels are back down to 700 ppm, stay off for 30 minutes, and then sample again for 2 minutes to see what changed.

The final results are very interesting. The screen above shows the percentage of time that has been used for sampling and for purging stale air. Over the last week, the average has been:

• 9% sampling (which is just the cost of sampling)
• 25% purging (when it needs to be on)
• The remaining 66% of the time it was off because it wasn’t needed.

Obviously if you used a timer to turn it on 25% of the time you would exhaust the right quantity of air, but there is no way it would be timed right. Furthermore, without the controller, I would never have known that 25% was what I needed on average this January, either. This of course is the whole problem with rules-of-thumb and sizing units based on the suggested number of air exchanges per hour. There are too many variables, so unless you have some way of measuring the pollutants in the air, you are just taking a wild guess.

This picture above is showing that the current C02 level is 633 ppm (not enough to feel stuffy) and the fan is Off. The system has been idle for 19 minutes and 30 seconds and will soon turn on the fan for another sampling period.

This photo above shows the real value of a heat exchanger. The air going out is 23.8°C with 30.7% humidity (room temperature) but the incoming air is already 16.9°C despite being -3°C outside (just below freezing with 75% humidity). The outgoing air is warm and releases heat from condensation when it cools in the heat exchanger core. If this was a ventilation system without the heat exchanger core, the incoming air would be a frigid -3°C instead of almost room temperature.

There is also a lot more that can be done with on-demand ventilation such as:

1. Making a proper PID controller for it (e.g. control theory instead of on at 750 and off at 700ppm) and letting it control the motor speed. There are algorithms to minimize the operation costs or maximize rapid performance.
2. Turning the fan on to cool the house after a hot summer day when it cools down after sunset or after a thunderstorm.
3. Adusting the humidity levels when possible (based on the difference between the inside and outside humidity) to reduce the possiblity of mold growth. This is more of a comfort feature than saving money, although reducing humidity could save you from mold damage.
4. Monitoring dust as well as CO2 by counting dust particles by adding a real-time dust particle counter. (cheap ones don’t exist so I will have to build one from scratch)
5. Going bizzerk when explosive levels of propane/natural gas or poisonous carbon monoxide are detected (fan high and alarm sounding).
6. Identifying the food being cooked and your guests by their odors and making voice comments (just kidding – although the technology is rapidly getting to that point.

It is a shame that millions of homes are stuck with brainless HRV units with failing motors leaving everyone with variable air quality and excessive utility bills. A fan motor draws about 200 watts and at 24 hours a day, this is 1725 kWh per year or about $175 in North America. The potential savings here would have been 66% or $115 a year, just for running the motor. The savings from the heat exchange part could also be significant if you live in a very cold climate and use electric heat. The health considerations around indoor air quality have some value too, but it would be impossible to quantify but potentially significant if you have smokers and non-smokers in the same household or have breathing problems.

All the data is now streaming into a SQL database and I’ll do some crunching later once I have all four seasons to analyze.

The audio recording link below was recorded approximately Feb 19, 2011. The original recording has an English translation and I have made a transcript from that so that Google can index it and future researchers studying war crimes can find it. If you know the proper place names, please correct the army division, hospital and street name — I don’t speak the language — sorry.

I have also archived a copy here: Libya war crimes.

Transcript
The number of people injured and killed is about 900. As for the army division called sp?Alfadeel from five o’clock up until 10 minutes ago young people were throwing hand bombs at the army. And the army division is made up of three groups. And there are cars spread in the region and every car carries 4 people. And those people are armed with hand guns. And they are going through the roads and shooting young people. And they are still here. As for Tripoli, I called Tripoli and I have been told that there is an airplane coming to Benghazi full of the African mercenaries.

Today I was in hospitals. And I stopped by Jalaa hospital and I also stopped by a clinic on sp?sheen street and I passed by 1200 beds. I also went to sp? Al Hala hospital and they are full. The number of people who are either injured or killed total is totaling 900 and the majority of them are in critical condition because the few that are not being hit by regular bullets are hit by bullets normally used for shooting airplanes. And they are using that against the protestors. And they are still shooting right now. And I am hearing the sound of bullets normally used to bring down airplanes again.

Those people in the military division are a mix of soldiers and mercenaries. And the same goes for the county courthouse. And young people, they are not willing to stop because they know if they stop that will be the end of them in Benghazi. They are still in the streets waiting in different places.

And also there is a shortage in the blood supply in particular in O-negative. There is also another thing. The special forces of sp?Monmoth they are attacking hospitals and executing doctors there in an effort to prevent them from taking care of the injured. And I can see some of the doctors lying on the ground. They have now taken control of the hospitals here.

ENGLISH LPC #Benghazi man: “Protesters being shot w/bullets used for shooting down
airplanes.” #Libya #Feb17

@feb17voices

http://boos.audioboo.fm/attachments/937494/Recording.mp3?audio_clip_id=282991

Now for something really horrible — reading the above doesn’t quite have the same impact as seeing what heavy artillery does to people. From @LybianThinker “they have been using anti aircraft, anti-tank and heavy artillery on civilians for 2 days now.”

@WyldDarkHeart The Head of Libya Doctors association talked about total destruction of the bodies in a way he had never seen before Also: @leila_na. For those asking me about “weapons not used against human beings before” statement, it was the Head of Libyan Doctors Assoc. on Al-Jazeera

You can find more at: http://yfrog.com/froggy.php?username=LibyanThinker

If anyone knows the story behind this picture, please leave a comment and I will add it here. Below the picture is the data on the projectile canister.

http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/180408_153336844723229_100001407432404_306260_1310739_n.jpg

MP-4-R3 – HARD RUBBER BATON (3) PROJECTILE – 37-38 / 40mm
NonLethal Technologies, Inc. 9419 Rt 286 Hwy West Homer City, PA 15748 USA

WARNING Serious injury or death may occur if fired directly at subjects at close ranges

DESCRIPTION
The MP-4-R3 Hard Rubber Baton Projectile is an effective tool for the dispersal of crowds at longer ranges. The round contains 3 hard rubber batons that are skip fired toward the subjects. The projectile is also effective in tactical situations for distraction purposes.
Our 37-38/40 aluminum alloy cartridge cases are designed to reliably fire and extract from all 1.5” (37/38mm) gas/riot guns currently on the market. They can also be fired from M79 type 40mm grenade launchers and M203 type launchers.

SPECIFICATIONS
Type Projectile, Multiple Hard Rubber Baton
Projectiles 3 Batons
Projectile Material Thermoset Plastic
Projectile Weight 29 grams
Velocity 250 fps
Length Overall 4.8“ (120 mm)
Diameter 1.5” (37 mm)
Cartridge Material Aluminum
Overall Weight 185 grams
Maximum Range 100 yards (91 M)
Effective Range 50 Yards (45 M) Skip fired
Waterproof Lacquer coated primer and paint sealed top
Shelf Life 5 Year from date of Manufacture
Launched With 1.5” (37/38mm) riot guns, and all current 40mm grenade launchers