Academic literature on the topic 'United States. National Railroad Adjustment Board'

ABSTRACT ID: 2017-145. In July 2016, TRC Environmental Corporation (TRC) and Hildebrand and Noll Associates, Inc. (HNA) were requested to develop planning guidance on train derailments involving large volumes/high concentrations of denatured ethanol for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA). As part of this project, as well as similar projects conducted by HNA for other clients, TRC and HNA assessed current firefighting strategies for the release of ethanol and/or crude oil from High Hazard Flammable Trains (HHFT) and developed the planning assumptions necessary to prepare for these types of incidents. For these projects, studies and in-depth analyses of 27 HHFT derailments resulting in tank cars breaches that occurred in the United States and Canada involving denatured ethanol1 (ethanol) and/or crude oil2 from 2006 through 2015 were performed. The analyses were primarily based on the information from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and/or Transport Canada (TC) databases, with supplemental information from news reports in some cases. The objective of these analyses was to identify key planning assumptions that would be used in developing appropriate firefighting strategies by focusing on the number and types of cars derailed, approximate train speeds at the time of the derailment, number of cars breached, amount of product released, and whether or not the released product caught fire. Additionally, the studies included obtaining and reviewing information on the properties and characteristics of ethanol, crude oils, and other Class 3 flammable materials, as well as information for railroad tank cars. Insights and understandings gained from these studies were used to further develop the firefighting strategies for HHFT derailment fires.

Abstract. At the beginning of 2009 new space-borne observations of dry-air column-averaged mole fractions of atmospheric methane (XCH4) became available from the Thermal And Near infrared Sensor for carbon Observations–Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TANSO-FTS) instrument on board the Greenhouse Gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). Until April 2012 concurrent {methane (CH4) retrievals} were provided by the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CartograpHY (SCIAMACHY) instrument on board the ENVironmental SATellite (ENVISAT). The GOSAT and SCIAMACHY XCH4 retrievals can be compared during the period of overlap. We estimate monthly average CH4 emissions between January 2010 and December 2011, using the TM5-4DVAR inverse modelling system. In addition to satellite data, high-accuracy measurements from the Cooperative Air Sampling Network of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory (NOAA ESRL) are used, providing strong constraints on the remote surface atmosphere. We discuss five inversion scenarios that make use of different GOSAT and SCIAMACHY XCH4 retrieval products, including two sets of GOSAT proxy retrievals processed independently by the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON)/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the University of Leicester (UL), and the RemoTeC "Full-Physics" (FP) XCH4 retrievals available from SRON/KIT. The GOSAT-based inversions show significant reductions in the root mean square (rms) difference between retrieved and modelled XCH4, and require much smaller bias corrections compared to the inversion using SCIAMACHY retrievals, reflecting the higher precision and relative accuracy of the GOSAT XCH4. Despite the large differences between the GOSAT and SCIAMACHY retrievals, 2-year average emission maps show overall good agreement among all satellite-based inversions, with consistent flux adjustment patterns, particularly across equatorial Africa and North America. Over North America, the satellite inversions result in a significant redistribution of CH4 emissions from North-East to South-Central United States. This result is consistent with recent independent studies suggesting a systematic underestimation of CH4 emissions from North American fossil fuel sources in bottom-up inventories, likely related to natural gas production facilities. Furthermore, all four satellite inversions yield lower CH4 fluxes across the Congo basin compared to the NOAA-only scenario, but higher emissions across tropical East Africa. The GOSAT and SCIAMACHY inversions show similar performance when validated against independent shipboard and aircraft observations, and XCH4 retrievals available from the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON).

Patients with hemophilia (PWH) have a higher prevalence of hypertension and intracranial hemorrhage than the general male population. However, the etiology of the hypertension, and to what extent blood pressure and associations with cardiovascular risk factors vary from the general population, is incompletely understood. We therefore investigated the prevalence of hypertension as well as the associations of blood pressure measurements with usual cardiovascular risk factors, in a cross-sectional analysis of a cohort of 486 PWH. The PWH (median age 38 years) came from 3 geographically different areas in the United States. They were compared against males from the contemporary National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), matched for age and race in a 1:5 ratio. Subsequently, at the University of California San Diego, a pilot cohort of PWH (n=28; median age 37 years) was examined prospectively for hypertension and associations with hemophilia-specific risk factors pertaining to joint health. PWH had a significantly higher prevalence of hypertension compared to subjects from NHANES. The prevalence of hypertension was 53.4% in PWH compared to 28.8 % in NHANES (p<0.01). In untreated (not taking anti-hypertensive medications) and treated subjects median systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were significantly higher in PWH than in NHANES. Differences in prevalence of hypertension and blood pressure measurements were most pronounced in the youngest age group (18-29 years). In untreated PWH median SBP and DBP were 125 and 78 mmHg (118 and 72 mmHg in NHANES), and in treated PWH 134 and 84 (127 and 76 mmHg in NAHES), respectively; all p-values <0.0001. However, despite higher blood pressures the usual cardiovascular risk profile was better in PWH compared to NHANES, in that body mass index (BMI), total cholesterol, smoking and diabetes were lower and renal function was better. While the usual cardiovascular risk factors were associated with blood pressure in both PWH and NHANES, they did not account for the differences between the two groups. Whether each risk factor was considered by itself, or in combination with the others in multivariate models, the blood pressure differences remained. Therefore, to elucidate to what extent hemophilia-specific factors might play a role in the pathophysiology of hypertension, we assessed hypertension and blood pressures in association with joint health parameters in a pilot cohort of young adult PWH. These patients underwent prospective baseline examination of 6 joints (both elbows, knees and ankles, n=168) for joint pain (Visual Analogue Scale 0-10), radiographic Pettersson score (maximum score 78), clinical Hemophilia Joint Health Score (HJHS, maximum score 120), severity of hemophilia (severe vs mild/moderate), clotting factor usage, and joint vascular perfusion quantified with Power Doppler (PD, maximum score 54) and high resolution musculoskeletal ultrasound. We found that 54% were hypertensive, similar to the larger cohort. In univariate analysis, PD score was the risk factor most strongly associated with hypertension (p = 0.07). After adjustment for confounders, the odds for hypertension increased by 1.29 (95% CI: 1.04, 1.60; p = 0.02) for each unit increase in PD score. Moreover, there was a strong association of PD scores with SBP when adjusted for confounders. In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that PWH not only have a significantly higher prevalence of hypertension, but also significantly higher blood pressures compared to the general population, even when treated with anti-hypertensive medications. The difference in blood pressures could not be explained by the usual cardiovascular risk factors but appeared to be strongly associated with the degree of vascular changes in the joint. Based on previous findings that vascular remodeling is a prominent feature of hemophilic arthropathy and may be mediated systemically, we postulate that vascular remodeling is associated with the etiology of hypertension in hemophilia. These findings warrant further basic and clinical investigation. Disclosures Kruse-Jarres: Octapharma: Consultancy, Honoraria; CSL Behring: Consultancy, Honoraria; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria; Novo Nordisk: Consultancy, Honoraria; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria; Bayer: Consultancy, Honoraria; Baxter: Consultancy, Honoraria. Quon:Novo Nordisk: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Grifols: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Bayer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Biogen: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Baxter: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau. von Drygalski:Novo Nordisk: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Baxalta: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Biogen: Honoraria, Research Funding; Pfizer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; CSL Behring: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Hematherix Inc: Equity Ownership, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Patents & Royalties; Bayer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding.

Online shopping is all the rage these days and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming. At Spectre Studios, sculptor David Johnson sells flexible plastic action figures of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy and plans to produce a figure of Jack the Ripper in the future. Although some might think that making action figures of serial killers is tasteless, Johnson hastens to assure the potential consumer that he does have standards: “I wouldn’t do Osama bin Laden . . . I have some personal qualms about that” (Robinson). At Serial Killer Central, you can buy a range of items made by serial killers themselves, including paintings and drawings by Angelo Buono (one of the “Hillside Stranglers”) and Henry Lee Lucas. For the more discerning consumer, Supernaught.com charges a mere $300 for a brick from Dahmer’s apartment building, while a lock of Charles Manson’s hair is a real bargain at $995, shipping and handling not included. The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as “wound culture,” consisting of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). According to Seltzer, the serial killer is “one of the superstars of our wound culture” (2) and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere. In a culture defined by celebrity, serial killers like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are the biggest stars of all, instantly recognized by the vast majority of Americans. Not surprisingly, murderabilia has been the focus of a sustained critique by the (usually self-appointed) guardians of ‘decency’ in American culture. On January 2, 2003 The John Walsh Show, the daytime television vehicle of the long-time host of America’s Most Wanted, featured an “inside look at the world of ‘murderabilia,’ which involves the sale of artwork, personal effects and letters from well-known killers” (The John Walsh Show Website). Featured guests included Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victim Assistance Office in Houston, Texas; ‘Thomas,’ who was horrified to find hair samples from “The Railroad Killer,” the individual who killed his mother, for sale on the Internet; Elmer Wayne Henley, a serial killer who sells his artwork to collectors; Joe, who runs “Serial Killer Central” and sells murderabilia from a wide range of killers, and Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Despite the program’s stated intention to “look at both sides of the issue,” the show was little more than a jeremiad against the murderabilia industry, with the majority of airtime being given to Andy Kahan and to the relatives of crime victims. The program’s bias was not lost on many of those who visited Joe’s Serial Killer Central site and left messages on the message board on the day The John Walsh Show aired. There were some visitors who shared Walsh’s perspective. A message from “serialkillersshouldnotprofit@aol.com,” for example, stated that “you will rot in hell with these killers,” while “Smithpi@hotmail.com” had a more elaborate critique: “You should pull your site off the net. I just watched the John Walsh show and your [sic] a fucking idiot. I hope your [sic] never a victim, because if you do [sic] then you would understand what all those people were trying to tell you. You [sic] a dumb shit.” Most visitors, however, sympathized with the way Joe had been treated on the show: “I as well [sic] saw you on the John Walsh show, you should [sic] a lot of courage going on such a one sided show, and it was shit that they wouldnt [sic] let you talk, I would have walked off.” But whether the comments were positive or negative, one thing was clear: The John Walsh Show had created a great deal of interest in the Serial Killer Central site. As one of the messages put it, “I think that anything [sic] else he [John Walsh] has put a spark in everyones [sic] curiousity [sic] . . . I have noticed that you have more hits on your page today than any others [sic].” Apparently, even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity finds itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity. John Walsh’s attack on the murderabilia industry was the latest skirmish in a campaign that has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. One of the campaign’s initial targets was the internet trading site eBay, which was criticized for allowing serial killer-related products to be sold online. In support of such criticism, conservative victims’ rights and pro-death penalty organizations like “Justice For All” organized online petitions against eBay. In November 2000, Business Week Online featured an interview with Andy Kahan in which he argued that the online sale of murderabilia should be suppressed: “The Internet just opens it all up to millions and millions more potential buyers and gives easy access to children. And it sends a negative message to society. What does it say about us? We continue to glorify killers and continue to put them in the mainstream public. That’s not right” (Business Week). Eventually bowing to public pressure, eBay decided to ban the sale of murderabilia items in May 2001, forcing the industry underground, where it continues to be pursued by the likes of John Walsh. Apart from highlighting how far the celebrity culture around serial killers has developed (so that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they are religious icons), focusing on the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia also emphasizes how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. Quite apart from the way in which John Walsh’s censoriousness brought more visitors to the Serial Killer Central site, one could also argue that few individuals have done more to disseminate information about violent crime in general and serial murder in particular to mainstream America than John Walsh. Of course, this information is presented in the unimpeachably moral context of fighting crime, but controversial features of America’s Most Wanted, such as the dramatic recreations of crime, pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program simultaneously condemns. An ABCNews.Com article on murderabilia inadvertently highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a legitimate from an illegitimate interest in serial murder by quoting Rick Staton, one of the biggest collectors and dealers of murderabilia in the United States, who emphasizes that the people he sells to are not “ghouls and creeps [who] crawl out of the woodwork”, but rather “pretty much your average Joe Blow.” Even his family, Staton goes on to say, who profess to be disgusted by what he does, act very differently in practice: “The minute they step into this room, they are glued to everything in here and they are asking questions and they are genuinely intrigued by it . . . So it makes me wonder: Am I the one who is so abnormal, or am I pretty normal?” (ABCNews.Com). To answer Staton’s question, we need to go back to 1944, when sociologist Leo Lowenthal published an essay entitled “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” an essay he later reprinted as a chapter in his 1961 book, Literature, Popular Culture And Society, under a new title: “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Lowenthal argues that biographies in popular magazines underwent a striking change between 1901 and 1941, a change that signals the emergence of a new social type. According to Lowenthal, the earlier biographies indicate that American society’s heroes at the time were “idols of production” in that “they stem from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or represent a serious attitude toward their art” (112-3). Sampling biographies in magazines from 1941, however, Lowenthal reaches a very different conclusion: “We called the heroes of the past ‘idols of production’: we feel entitled to call the present-day magazine heroes ‘idols of consumption’” (115). Unlike the businessmen, industrialists and scientists who dominated the earlier sample, almost every one of 1941’s heroes “is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve society’s basic needs (e.g., the worlds of entertainment and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially productive agent” (115). Lowenthal leaves his reader in no doubt that he sees the change from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption” as a serious decline: “If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result . . . the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the movies, the ball parks, and the night clubs” (116). With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as “deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies” (144), one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s “mass idols.” The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates. Throughout the edition of The John Walsh Show that attacked murderabilia, Walsh showed clips of Collectors, a recent documentary about the industry. Collectors is distributed by a small company named Abject Films and on their website the film’s director, Julian P. Hobbs, discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism. Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, “a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse” (Abject Films). But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: “Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images” (Abject Films). Along with Rick Staton, Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded. For example, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience” (91). When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication? The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: “Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath . . . is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero . . . but as the most genuine representative of American life” (13). The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts. As Sigmund Freud has explained, the act of disavowal that accompanies the formation of a fetish allows a perception (in this case, the Americanness of serial killers) to persist in a different form rather than being simply repressed (352-3). Consequently, just like the sexual fetishists discussed by Freud, although we may recognize our interest in serial killers “as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by [us] as a symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering” (351). On the contrary, we are usually, in Freud’s words, “quite satisfied” (351) with our interest in serial killers precisely because we have turned them into celebrities. It is our complicated relationship with celebrities, affective as well as intellectual, composed of equal parts admiration and resentment, envy and contempt, that provides us with a lexicon through which we can manage our appalled and appalling fascination with the serial killer, contemporary American culture’s ultimate star. References ABCNews.Com. “Killer Collectibles: Inside the World of ‘Murderabilia.” 7 Nov. 2001. American Broadcasting Company. 9 May 2003 http://www.abcnews.com>. AbjectFilms.Com. “Collectors: A Film by Julian P. Hobbs.” Abject Films. 9 May 2003 http://www.abjectfilms.com/collectors.html>. BusinessWeek Online. 20 Nov. 2000. Business Week. 9 May 2003 http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_47/b3708056.htm>. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” On Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1977. 351-7. The John Walsh Show. Ed. Click Active Media. 2 Jan. 2003. 9 May 2003 http://www.johnwalsh.tv/cgi-bin/topics/today/cgi?id=90>. Lowenthal, Leo. “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961. 109-40. National Examiner. “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” 7 Jun. 1994: 7. Pizzato, Mark. “Jeffrey Dahmer and Media Cannibalism: The Lure and Failure of Sacrifice.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 85-118. Robinson, Bryan. “Murder Incorporated: Denver Sculptor’s Serial Killer Action Figures Bringing in Profits and Raising Ire.” ABCNews.Com 25 Mar. 2002. American Broadcasting Company. 27 Apr. 2003 http://abcnews.com/>. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sharrett, Christopher. “Introduction.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 9-20. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Schmid, David. "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>. APA Style Schmid, D. (Nov. 2004) "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>.

The National Transportation Safety Board in the United States and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada publish reports about major railroad accidents. The text from these accident reports were analyzed using the text mining techniques of probabilistic topic modeling and k-means clustering to identify the recurring themes in major railroad accidents. The output from these analyses indicates that the railroad accidents can be successfully grouped into different topics. The output also suggests that recurring accident types are track defects, wheel defects, grade crossing accidents, and switching accidents. A major difference between the Canadian and U.S. reports is the finding that accidents related to bridges are found to be more prominent in the Canadian reports.