Rotundus.com

Was hearing a lot of people saying that Singapore Airlines shouldn't have been running a meal service when it recently encountered severe turbulence resulting in one death from a heart attack and quite a few people in hospital including some severely injured. How has Singapore Airlines responded?

SIA will shortly put all-inclusive safety measures in place. Previously, only hot beverages and soup were prohibited from being served and service may continue at the crew's discretion. Meal service must now be totally stopped when the seatbelt sign is activated.

Similar to how airport security is sometimes described as security theatre, it seems to me that this might simultaneously be described as mostly being safety theatre (though nonetheless not a terrible policy to put in place). Would it have helped in this situation? According to the timeline on Wikipedia:

07:49:21 UTC

First trace of turbulence was first encountered

07:49:32 UTC

"one of the pilots called out that the fasten seatbelt signs had been turned on" (not sure if this means a cabin announcement but sounds like the passengers would have seen the seatbelt sign turn on and probably some audible notification of that).

07:49:40 UTC

-2.8G change in vertical acceleration over 0.6 seconds

07:49:41-45 UTC

Vertical acceleration changed to +3G over 4 seconds

07:50:05 UTC

Autopilot re-engaged (after manually flying for 21 seconds)

07:50:23 UTC

Autopilot finished returning the flight to the selected altitude.

i.e you basically have 19 seconds from the first trace of turbulence to things going completely haywire, (and the flight returned to "normal" in about a minute). Even if the flight attendants had immediately started running as fast as possible to lock down the meal carts as soon as the first trace of turbulence sit I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have made it. I'm not opposed to stopping meal service on planes during turbulence, but doubt it would have done much here.

The thing to be aware of is clear-air turbulence. Per the description:

Clear-air turbulence is usually impossible to detect with the naked eye and very difficult to detect with a conventional radar, with the result that it is difficult for aircraft pilots to detect and avoid it. However, it can be remotely detected with instruments that can measure turbulence with optical techniques, such as scintillometers, Doppler LIDARs, or N-slit interferometers.

I'm not quite clear from doing a little poking around just how those things work, but it doesn't seem like any of them are included on current-generation commercial aircraft (and I have no idea how difficult it might be to adapt those to use to improve turbulence detection either).

For consider this a suggestion that one bit of advice you'll usually be given when taking a flight, i.e. to keep your seatbelt fastened as much as possible throughout the flight, is good advice to take. 11 seconds to go from the first trace of turbulence to a signal to fasten your seatbelt doesn't seem to me like a particularly unreasonable response time by the pilots.

Only so much that can be done when something like that happens though.

Eternal Equipoise: millennia at Eurasia’s heart

"the Uyghurs' current geopolitical predicament is only a bit more than 250 years in the making. The modern name of their homeland, Xinjiang, comes from the Chinese word for “New Territories.” A vast land more than twice the size of Texas, it was only annexed in the 1750’s by the ethnic Manchu emperors of China, during the Qing Dynasty, when ravenous imperial powers divvied up Eurasia’s heart between them."

Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks

"analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide shows that given the probability distribution of kick direction, the optimal strategy for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal's center. Goalkeepers, however, almost always jump right or left. We propose the following explanation for this behavior: because the norm is to jump, norm theory (Kahneman and Miller, 1986) implies that a goal scored yields worse feelings for the goalkeeper following inaction (staying in the center) than following action (jumping), leading to a bias for action."

Are Women Overinvesting in Education? Evidence from the Medical Profession

"The median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. While there is a wage gap, our result occurs primarily because most female physicians do not work enough hours to rationalize medical school whereas most men do." The cost is more socialized in other countries, but the cost to society as a whole would seem to have some similarities.

“Intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history, etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell, 1944. pic.twitter.com/JK8gmennUR

— English Radical History (@EnglishRadical) March 17, 2019

(Some context here).

Women's anticipation of the employment effects of motherhood: Evidence and implications

"If women are not fully anticipating the employment effects of motherhood, we would expect that the birth of the first child serves as an information shock, causing them to update their beliefs regarding their ability to maintain both family and work commitments. Consistent with this idea, we find that women become more traditional in their attitudes about gender roles regarding work and family after the birth of their first child. ... Interestingly, college-educated women appear most caught off-guard by motherhood, as they experience a larger ‘anti-work’ shift in their views than non-college-educated women."

Nearly half the world’s kids are exposed to dangerous levels of lead

"Flint became the symbol of catastrophic lead exposure in the United States. The breakdown of a long-neglected system was so terrible that it led to headlines for months and even became an issue in the 2016 presidential election. Yet children in low- and middle-income countries are, per this estimate, 10 times likelier to have high blood lead levels than children in Flint were at the height of the city’s crisis."

Black Ownership Matters: Does Revealing Race Increase Demand For Minority-Owned Businesses?

Wonder how this has shifted (and continues to shift) over time: "we investigate the impact of a new feature on a large online platform that made the race of a set of Black business owners salient to customers. We find that this feature substantially increased demand for Black-owned businesses - in the form of more calls to the restaurant, more delivery orders, and - using cell phone data from a different platform - more in person visits to the restaurant. New customers to Black-owned businesses were more likely to be White customers - suggesting demand among White restaurant goers for Black-owned businesses."