Alex Kirlik’s Human Factors research activities as a member of a University of Illinois team advising Silverstein Properties (NYC) on design enhancements for the new World Trade Center-7 building reached fruition with the building’s completion this year. Human factors enhancements to the building include exit stairs 20% wider than required by code, overly-wide stairwell landings to reduce loss of kinetic energy while turning and descending, and the use of photo-luminescent paint on stairs and railings (www.wtc.com...). Skidmore, Owings and Merrill architect Carl Galioto highlighted these human factors enhancements in the PBS Nova episode Building on Ground Zero, first broadcast on September 5, 2006 (www.pbs.org...). These efforts have played a role in prompting updates of the New York City high-rise building code mandating increased stair widths and the use of photo-luminescent paint to facilitate egress.

The new building is 750ft (229m) tall and has 2ft (60cm) thick reinforced concrete and fireproofed elevator and stairway access shafts in the core. The building is considered New York City's first 'green' office tower by gaining gold status in the US Green Building Council's LEED program.

Originally posted by Pootie

9/10/2001 - Donald Rumsfeld reports that the Dod has LOST (as in cannot locate/track/find) $2.3 TRILLION dollars. TRILLION with a T.

Rumsfeld PROMISED CHANGE would come "the next day"... 9/11/2001

digg.com...

I think We the People can spend < .1% of that on a memorial.

By JOHN M. DONNELLY The Associated Press 03/03/00 5:44 PM Eastern

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The military's money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon's inspector general said in a report released Friday.

The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and half a trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments.

Each adjustment represents a Defense Department accountant's attempt to correct a discrepancy. The military has hundreds of computer systems to run accounts as diverse as health care, payroll and inventory. But they are not integrated, don't produce numbers up to accounting standards and fail to keep running totals of what's coming in and what's going out, Pentagon and congressional officials said.

"These ($6.9 trillion in) entries were processed to force financial data to agree with various data sources, to correct errors and to add new data," the inspector general said. "The magnitude of accounting entries required to compile the DoD financial statements highlights the significant problems DoD has producing accurate and reliable financial statements with existing systems and processes."

The department's "internal controls were not adequate to ensure that resources were properly managed and accounted for, that DoD complied with applicable laws and regulations and that the financial statements were free of material misstatements," the report said.

JOHN ISAACS: I hate to break up this love-fest but while I think it's a good idea for the administration to study these issues and I commend the administration for undertaking that, I think the budget is much too high. And I hope the study looks at some of the real problems that exist in the military. One of those problems is we're still buying a lot of Cold War weapons. The F-22, the next generation Air Force plane, is a wonderful plane. It was designed to combat the Soviet Union but the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. And it's three times as expensive as a plane it would replace. We still are... have a two-war strategy planning to fight two wars which the nonpartisan national defense panel several years ago called a justification for high military budgets. There's still huge accounting problems in the Pentagon. They don't even know how much money they have or are spending. The inspector general of the Pentagon said there are 2.3 trillion dollars in items that they can't quite account for. That's not billion. That's trillion dollars. $2.3 trillion -- and the General Accounting Office said there are about $27 billion in inventory items that they can't find. It's not a matter of money -- if the review just results war money put into the pentagon we'll be going in the wrong direction. It's time to move back.