Mueller, Stewart publish new book on airline security
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 9/11, airline passengers have learned to put liquids in 3ounce containers, take off their shoes, and go through full-body scanners, all in the name of protecting themselves from terrorism.But are these extra measures making us any safer?About $10 billion is spent each year to deal with terrorist attacks to aviation, yet these expenditures are rarely subjected to cost-benefit or risk analysis.Are We Safe Enough?Measuring and Assessing Aviation Security, by Mershon affiliates Mark Stewart and John Mueller, seeks to fill that void.The book, published by Elsevier, explains how standard risk and cost-benefit analysis can be applied to aviation security in a systematic, straightforward, and fully transparent manner.It constructs a full model of the security system, describing the effectiveness, risk reduction, and cost of each layer, from policing and intelligence, to checkpoint passenger screening, to armed pilots on the flight deck.Stewart and Mueller conclude that it is entirely possible to attain the same degree of safety at far lower cost by shifting expenditures from measures that provide little security at high cost to ones that provide more security at lower cost.For example, the air marshal program in the United States costs more than $1 billion per year, but reduces risk of a terrorist attack by only 0.2 percent.Installing secondary barriers to cockpits would see a greater reduction of risk while saving hundreds of millions of dollars to both taxpayers and airlines.In addition, the book shows how the system can be made more efficient, providing great benefits to passengers, the airlines, and the taxpayer.It also finds that aviation security costs proportionately much more in the United States than in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.The authors also evaluate, and put into context, the degree to which terrorism presents a threat to aviation, and they discuss and apply the key notion, largely ignored by excessively risk-averse officials, of acceptable risk. Key features of the book includeQuantifying the risks, costs and benefits of various aviation security methods, including policing, intelligence, PreCheck, checkpoint passenger screening, behavioral detection, air marshals and armed pilots Focusing on security measures that reduce costs without reducing security, including PreCheck, Federal Flight Deck Officer program and Installed Physical Secondary Barriers Featuring risk-reduction insights with global applications that are fully transparent, and fully explored through sensitivity analysis More information is available on the book flyer.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it