Airline Schedule Recovery after Airport Closures: Empirical Evidence Since September 11th

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, repeated airport closures due to potential security breaches have imposed substantial costs on travelers, airlines, and government agencies in terms of flight delays and cancellations. Using data from the year following September 11th, this study examines how airlines recover flight schedules upon reopening of airports that have been closed for security reasons. As such, this is the first study to examine service quality during irregular operations. Our results indicate that while outcomes of flights scheduled during airport closures are difficult to explain, a variety of factors, including potential revenue per flight and logistical variables such as flight distance, seating capacity and shutdown severity, significantly predict outcomes of flights scheduled after airports reopen. Given the likelihood of continued security-related airport closings, understanding the factors that determine schedule recovery is potentially important.

Did NEPA Drown New Orleans? The Levees, the Blame Game, and the Hazards of Hindsight

This Article highlights the. hazards of hindsight analysis of the causes of catastrophic events, focusing on theories of why the New Orleans levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and particularly on the theory that the levee failures were caused by a 1977 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lawsuit that resulted in a temporary injunction against the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 hurricane protection project for New Orleans. The Article provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the decision process that eventuated in the New Orleans storm surge protection system, focusing both on the political and legal factors involved and on the standard project hurricane risk assessment model that lay at the heart of the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 decisionmaking process. The Article then offers a detailed analysis. of how and why Hurricane Katrina overcame the New Orleans levee system. As this analysis demonstrates, the argument that the NEPA lawsuit played a meaningful causal role in the Katrina disaster is not persuasive. Parallel lessons are then drawn for forward-looking disaster policy. The same problems of uncertainty and complexity that confound the attempt through hindsight to attribute causal responsibility for a disaster also confound the attempt to predict using foresight the variety of outcomes, including potentially disastrous ones, that may flow from policy choices. Focusing narrowly on any single parameter of complex natural and human systems is likely to dramatically distort environmental, health, and safety decisionmaking, whether the parameter is a standard project hurricane when planning a hurricane protection plan, or the equally mythical lawsuit that sunk New Orleans when attempting to allocate responsibility for the plan\u27s failure some forty years later

Did NEPA Drown New Orleans? The Levees, the Blame Game, and the Hazards of Hindsight

This Article highlights the. hazards of hindsight analysis of the causes of catastrophic events, focusing on theories of why the New Orleans levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and particularly on the theory that the levee failures were caused by a 1977 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lawsuit that resulted in a temporary injunction against the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 hurricane protection project for New Orleans. The Article provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the decision process that eventuated in the New Orleans storm surge protection system, focusing both on the political and legal factors involved and on the standard project hurricane risk assessment model that lay at the heart of the Army Corps of Engineers\u27 decisionmaking process. The Article then offers a detailed analysis. of how and why Hurricane Katrina overcame the New Orleans levee system. As this analysis demonstrates, the argument that the NEPA lawsuit played a meaningful causal role in the Katrina disaster is not persuasive. Parallel lessons are then drawn for forward-looking disaster policy. The same problems of uncertainty and complexity that confound the attempt through hindsight to attribute causal responsibility for a disaster also confound the attempt to predict using foresight the variety of outcomes, including potentially disastrous ones, that may flow from policy choices. Focusing narrowly on any single parameter of complex natural and human systems is likely to dramatically distort environmental, health, and safety decisionmaking, whether the parameter is a standard project hurricane when planning a hurricane protection plan, or the equally mythical lawsuit that sunk New Orleans when attempting to allocate responsibility for the plan\u27s failure some forty years later

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Human Factors in Information-Age Trade Secret Protection

[Excerpt] Trade secret information security involves a multi-dimensional array of human, legal, and technological factors. I argue that organizational culture, employee policies, and other human factors are fundamental prerequisites to the successful implementation of legal and technological security measures. After a brief introduction to trade secret law for the nonlegal reader, I present an overview of trade secret litigation and an analysis of computer hacking strategy to emphasize the extent to which the legal and technological dimensions of trade secret information security are predicated on human factors. I conclude with a discussion of how human resource policy can engender cultural sensitivity to trade secrets and mitigate the risk of information leakage

Lime: Data Lineage in the Malicious Environment

Intentional or unintentional leakage of confidential data is undoubtedly one of the most severe security threats that organizations face in the digital era. The threat now extends to our personal lives: a plethora of personal information is available to social networks and smartphone providers and is indirectly transferred to untrustworthy third party and fourth party applications. In this work, we present a generic data lineage framework LIME for data flow across multiple entities that take two characteristic, principal roles (i.e., owner and consumer). We define the exact security guarantees required by such a data lineage mechanism toward identification of a guilty entity, and identify the simplifying non repudiation and honesty assumptions. We then develop and analyze a novel accountable data transfer protocol between two entities within a malicious environment by building upon oblivious transfer, robust watermarking, and signature primitives. Finally, we perform an experimental evaluation to demonstrate the practicality of our protocol

Is the responsibilization of the cyber security risk reasonable and judicious?

Cyber criminals appear to be plying their trade without much hindrance. Home computer users are particularly vulnerable to attack by an increasingly sophisticated and globally dispersed hacker group. The smartphone era has exacerbated the situation, offering hackers even more attack surfaces to exploit. It might not be entirely coincidental that cyber crime has mushroomed in parallel with governments pursuing a neoliberalist agenda. This agenda has a strong drive towards individualizing risk i.e. advising citizens how to take care of themselves, and then leaving them to face the consequences if they choose not to follow the advice. In effect, citizens are “responsibilized .” Whereas responsibilization is effective for some risks, the responsibilization of cyber security is, we believe, contributing to the global success of cyber attacks. There is, consequently, a case to be made for governments taking a more active role than the mere provision of advice, which is the case in many countries. We conclude with a concrete proposal for a risk regulation regime that would more effectively mitigate and ameliorate cyber risk

Advocacy Coalition Framework Lens on Pressing Healthcare Issues

In deciding how to interpret and understand public policy, many experts use theories and frameworks to justify their reasoning. One of the most common avenue of viewing policy involves the advocacy coalition framework based on its broad applicability. This popular framework consists of banding like-minded individuals together into a coalition to advance the narrative by creating acceptable policies for their group. These coalitions normally include a wide range of professional backgrounds from interest groups, elected officials, researchers in academia. These groups utilize special events to influence subfields consisting of actors who decide the solutions for policy problems. Subfields normally are made up of key players employed in government institutions and private industrial groups who willingly agree to work toward a compromise with the goal to create policy acceptable for both sides (Cairney 2014) These coalitions influence the subfield in different ways through capitalizing on their influential power or by ignoring the alliances and mergers of the groups. This paper shall explore how advocacy coalition framework works for three pressing issues facing the healthcare industry. These three policies focus on drug pricing, heath data privacy and opioid liability. This paper will explore the policy in depth, provide historical context and the major players while outlining how the specific proposals fit in the framework as well as identifying the framework’s limitations with the policy