Impact of the 2003 Blackouts on Internet Communications. available at http://www.renesys.com/news
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In August 2003, electric power outages affected 50 million people in the Northeastern US and Canada, causing economic losses estimated to exceed $5 billion. The outage was not only the largest in US history, but also the first of its scale since the rise of the commercial Internet and the World Wide Web. In this report we examine the impact the blackout had on Internet connectivity and traffic routing in the region, as recorded in real time in data collected from Internet routers worldwide. We find that Internet connectivity in the blacked-out region was far more seriously affected than has been publicly revealed. While the very largest provider networks (the Internet backbones) were apparently unaffected by the blackout [KN1, KN2], many thousands of significant networks and millions of individual Internet users were offline for hours or days. Banks, investment funds, business services, manufacturers, hospitals, educational institutions, internet service providers, and federal and state government units were among the affected organizations. The scale and duration of the Internet connectivity outages recorded during the blackout strongly suggest that without additional investment in higher-quality interconnection and backup power at its edges, the Internet will be in no shape to supersede the telephone network as the nation’s primary communications infrastructure. 1 This preliminary report is organized as follows: The main section is a summary of findings written with a minimum of technical language. Two appendices provide technical information concerning the methodology and a comparative analysis of Internet connectivity during a country-wide blackout in Italy on September 28, 2003 that reveals some interesting qualitative similarities despite significant differences in Italian Internet architecture. Summary of findings This report presents an analysis of the reliability of Internet connectivity to customer networks during the wide-area failure of the electric power grid in Northeastern US and Canada on 14–16
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.010 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".