After my last entry about the Chinese Firewalls I started to get curious about the origins of the phrase “Chinese Fire Drill”. The Phrase Finder has an odd story that someone posted:
It is my understanding that this phrase originated in the early 1900s. It came from an naval incident where a ship officered by the British and crewed by the Chinese set up a fire drill for fire in the engine room. In the event of a fire the crew was to draw water from the starboard side, take to the engine room and throw it on the fire. Another crew in the engine room was to take the thrown water and throw it over the port side.
When the drill was called the first moments went according to plan then it got confused. The crew began drawing the water from the staroard side and runing over to the port side and throwing the water over, by-passing the the engine room completely.
Thus the expression “Chinese Fire Drill” entered our lexicon as meaning a large confused action by individuals accomplishing nothing.
Perhaps “British Navy Fire Drill” did not have the same ring to it, but it seems to be a more accurate description of the event. After all, wasn’t the reason for the Chinese being employed on the ships their experience and talent for seafaring that Europeans had always envied and emulated, combined with their willingness to work in high-risk endeavors? In other words would you blame the workers or management for a failed disaster plan? And would you really come up with a phrase for a single event like this, or were there other more likely reasons (prejudice against the Chinese)?
I guess the phrase is an unfortunate or even unfair turnabout. Reminds me of the “Chinaman’s minute” or “Chinaman’s chance” which were apparently coined by those who employed the Chinese for building railroads but did not mind leaving them exposed to high risk and physical harm from dynamite. Workers were lowered by rope and boatswain chair down steep inclines in order to set dynamite. When they weren’t pulled back up in time…I remember reading once that the delay could even have been intentional, due to rivalries and ethnic strife among the workers and managers.
Bruce Schneier has posted on his blog about Richard Clayton’s attempts to work around the Chinese government’s content controls. This is, quite literally, child’s play (think parental consent and how kids locked in their room often figure out how to slip out the window).
Customs officials found a prescription bottle labeled as Viagra in his luggage that didn’t have Limbaugh’s name on it, but that of two doctors, said Paul Miller, spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
A doctor had prescribed the drug, but it was “labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes,” Roy Black, Limbaugh’s attorney, said in a statement.
Privacy? Medical records are protected, so had his name been on the bottle it would have been his right to demand it be kept private. However, by carrying a controlled substance with someone else’s name on the bottle he not only loses the information security controls put in place to protect him but he incurrs the risk of a second-degree misdemeanor.
Limbaugh reached a deal last month with prosecutors who had accused the conservative talk-show host of illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping painkiller prescriptions. Under the deal, the charge, commonly referred to as “doctor shopping,” would be dismissed after 18 months if he continues to submit to random drug tests and treatment for his acknowledged addiction to painkillers.
Ok, but what can be done about an addiction to misrepresentation of the truth for personal gain?
Sahana was apparently born out of the Indonesia tsunami as a free and collaborative (open source) solution:
It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.
A concern would be whether the code is reviewed often and carefully enough to catch backdoors and other gaps. Motives and threats can be very sticky to pin down in disaster recovery, especially in destabilized nations with contentious leadership. Seems like a lot of the success of the system depends on the information reported from various sources,and so I wonder if they’ve considered using a ranking system based on validity of past reports to shore up the integrity. I noticed they mention biometrics but I can’t tell how widely it’s used — perhaps only to authenticate aid workers entering names into the database, rather than to provide signatures for reported information.