Category: Operational Risk

How a Software Error Made Spain’s Child COVID-19 Mortality Rate Skyrocket

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/excel-error-spain-child-covid-death-rate.html

Excerpt:

“Even though I didn’t know what the problem was, I knew it wasn’t the right data,” Soler realized once he got his hands on the Lancet paper. “Our data is not worse than other countries. I would say it is even better,” he says. Pediatricians across the nation contacted Spain’s main research institutes, as well as hospitals and regional governments. Eventually, they discovered that the national government somehow misreported the data. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, but Soler says the main issue is that patient deaths for those over 100 were recorded as children. He believes that the system couldn’t record three-digit numbers, and so instead registered them as one-digit. For example, a 102-year-old was registered as a 2-year-old in the system. Soler notes that not all centenarian deaths were misreported as children, but at least 47 were. This inflated the child mortality rate so much, Soler explains, because the number of children who had died was so small. Any tiny mistake causes a huge change in the data.

Author(s): ELENA DEBRÉ

Publication Date: 25 March 2021

Publication Site: Slate

Huge vaccine error: 9,000 patients were forgotten

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://stiften.dk/artikel/k%C3%A6mpe-vaccinefejl-9-000-patienter-blev-glemt

Excerpt (via Google Translate):

Jørgen Schøler Kristensen, Medical Director at Aarhus University Hospital, explains the error as follows:

– When patients with a civil registration number beginning with 0 had to be entered, the civil registration number was declared invalid if a hyphen was missing. So 26 percent of the civil registration numbers we have reported have not been entered correctly, so they have not received the invitation in their e-box to be vaccinated as they should have had, says Jørgen Schøler Kristensen.

Patients born the first nine days of any month and having been unlucky with a hyphen were forgotten.

Additional:

Author(s): Jens Christian Thaysen

Publication Date: 19 March 2021

Publication Site: Århus Stiftstidende

Semi-annual time changes are a pointless, disruptive, and expensive annual ritual

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/semi-annual-time-changes-are-a-pointless-disruptive-and-expensive-2021-3

Excerpt:

And this is why our semi-annual time changes need to end. It disrupts coordination, which is the whole point of keeping time. Most of the world does not observe DST. And countries that do adopt it do so on different days. 

This means for a few weeks each year there is total time chaos. People on the East Coast can’t remember if Europe is five or six hours ahead anymore. It wreaks havoc on the airline industry, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in non-pandemic times. JP Morgan estimates consumer spending drops 3.5% every year we return to Standard Time. There are also more heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, and depression. 

And for what benefit? None I can think of. 

Author(s): Allison Schrager

Publication Date: 13 March 2021

Publication Site: Business Insider

How China’s attack on Microsoft escalated into a “reckless” hacking spree

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/10/1020596/how-chinas-attack-on-microsoft-escalated-into-a-reckless-hacking-spree

Excerpt:

At first the Chinese hackers ran a careful campaign. For two months, they exploited weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange email servers, picked their targets carefully, and stealthily stole entire mailboxes. When investigators eventually caught on, it looked like typical online espionage—but then things accelerated dramatically.

Around February 26, the narrow operation turned into something much bigger and much more chaotic. Just days later, Microsoft publicly disclosed the hacks—the hackers are now known as Hafnium—and issued a security fix. But by then attackers were looking for targets across the entire internet: in addition to tens of thousands of reported victims in the US, governments around the world are announcing that they were compromised too. Now at least 10 hacking groups, most of them government-backed cyber-espionage teams, are exploiting the vulnerabilities on thousands of servers in over 115 countries, according to the security firm ESET.

Author(s): Patrick Howell O’Neill

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Finding ‘Anomalies’ Illustrates 2020 Census Quality Checks Are Working

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2021/03/finding_anomalies.html?utm_campaign=20210309msc20s1ccpuprs&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

Excerpt:

So far in 2020 Census processing, 27 of the 33 anomalies we’ve found are of this type. Let me give a couple of examples.

Miscalculating age for missing birthdays. We found that our system was miscalculating ages for people who included their year of birth but left their birthday and month blank. We fixed this with a simple code correction. Making sure ages calculate correctly helps us with other data processing steps for matching and removing duplicate responses.

Incorrectly sorting out self-responses from group quarters residents. The 2020 Census allowed people to respond online or by phone without using the pre-assigned Census ID that links their response to their address. As a result, some people who live in group quarters facilities, such as nursing homes, were able to respond on their own even though they were also counted through the separate Group Quarters Enumeration operation. This also makes their address show up as a duplicate — as both a group quarters facility and a housing unit. Our business rules sort out these duplicate responses and addresses by accepting the response coming from the group quarters operation and removing the response and address appearing as a housing unit. We found an error in how this rule was being carried out. The code was correctly removing the duplicate address but wasn’t removing the duplicate response. We fixed this with another code correction, which enables us to avoid overcounting these residents. 

Author(s): MICHAEL THIEME, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR DECENNIAL CENSUS PROGRAMS, SYSTEMS AND CONTRACTS

Publication Date: 9 March 2021

Publication Site: U.S. Census Bureau

Citi Blocks Firms With Errant Revlon Payout From Debt Deals

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/citi-blocks-firms-that-kept-errant-revlon-payout-from-debt-deals

Excerpt:

Citigroup Inc. is punishing investment firms that kept payments the bank accidentally sent to Revlon Inc. lenders by blocking them from certain new debt offerings led by the bank, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The bank is choosing to not invite these money managers, who hung on to over $500 million, to its new-issue debt deals, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a private matter. Firms targeted include Brigade Capital Management, HPS Investment Partners and Symphony Asset Management, the people said.

These firms and others tangled in a lawsuit with Citigroup can still participate if an issuer specifically requests for them to be able to join their offering, one of the people added.

Author(s): Katherine Doherty, Paula Seligson, Jennifer Surane

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Bloomberg

Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/07/974534021/remembering-allan-mcdonald-he-refused-to-approve-challenger-launch-exposed-cover

Excerpt:

On Jan. 27, 1986, Allan McDonald stood on the cusp of history.

McDonald directed the booster rocket project at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol. He was responsible for the two massive rockets, filled with explosive fuel, that lifted space shuttles skyward. He was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch of the Challenger “to approve or disapprove a launch if something came up,” he told me in 2016, 30 years after Challenger exploded.

His job was to sign and submit an official form. Sign the form, he believed, and he’d risk the lives of the seven astronautsset to board the spacecraft the next morning. Refuse to sign, and he’d risk his job, his career and the good life he’d built for his wife and four children.

“And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime,” McDonald told me. “I refused to sign it. I just thought we were taking risks we shouldn’t be taking.”

Author(s): Howard Berkes

Publication Date: 7 March 2021

Publication Site: NPR

The end of LIBOR to be anything but simple

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.pionline.com/investing/end-libor-be-anything-simple

Graphic:

Excerpt:

LIBOR, which has been plagued by cases of bank manipulation, is set at different currencies, including the U.S. dollar, British pound sterling and euro. New LIBOR-based contracts will cease at the end of 2021, but in November, the Intercontinental Exchange Inc. announced that the ICE Benchmark Administration, which administers LIBOR, would explore ceasing the most utilized U.S. dollar LIBOR tenors in June 2023 instead of late 2021. On March 5, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority confirmed the 2021 and 2023 cessation dates for LIBOR, although it retains the option for a synthetic calculation if needed.

The extension to June 2023 would allow more time for outstanding contracts to mature, thereby reducing the chance of potential disruptions, U.S. regulators said in a December statement.

But the majority of contracts extend beyond mid-2023.

Author(s): Brian Croce

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: Pensions & Investments

National Security Risks of Late-Stage Capitalism

Mary Pat Campbell
National Security Risks of Late-Stage Capitalism

Excerpt:

There are two problems to solve. The first is information asymmetry: buyers can’t adequately judge the security of software products or company practices. The second is a perverse incentive structure: the market encourages companies to make decisions in their private interest, even if that imperils the broader interests of society. Together these two problems result in companies that save money by taking on greater risk and then pass off that risk to the rest of us, as individuals and as a nation.

The only way to force companies to provide safety and security features for customers and users is with government intervention. Companies need to pay the true costs of their insecurities, through a combination of laws, regulations, and legal liability. Governments routinely legislate safety — pollution standards, automobile seat belts, lead-free gasoline, food service regulations. We need to do the same with cybersecurity: the federal government should set minimum security standards for software and software development.

Author(s): Bruce Schneier

Publication Date: 1 March 2021

Publication Site: Schneier on Security

The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-US-Grid-Isnt-Ready-For-A-Major-Shift-To-Renewables.html

Excerpt:

This is one massive system, and the sources that feed it electricity have become increasingly diversified. And while the shortage of natural gas was a big reason for the power outages in Texas, it was certainly not a shortage of gas that caused the blackouts in California last summer during a heatwave. Grid reliability has come to the fore because the decarbonization of electricity generation is not all fun, games, and zero-emission power.

The U.S. grid, as it is now, cannot support the massive shift to low-carbon power generation, Westhaven Power says. Operators need better control of regional grids to be able to anticipate dangerous situations like the ones in Texas and California, but obtaining it would become trickier with more intermittent wind and solar feeding the grid, the utility explains.

“What events in Texas and California demonstrate is the shortcomings of having highly-centralised power systems and the true value of resilience and flexibility in our energy grids, a value that is going to become even more vital as we continue to transition to renewable energy,” says Dr. Toby Gill, the chief executive of UK-based climate tech startup Intelligent Power Generation.

Author(s): Irina Slav

Publication Date: 3 March 2021

Publication Site: Oil Price

The Biggest Business Fails of All Time

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://moneywise.com/a/the-biggest-business-fails-of-all-time

Excerpt:

3. Spreadsheet error costs JPMorgan $3.1 billion

You might recall the “London Whale” incident in 2012, when notorious trader Bruno Iksil — whose other monikers include the White Whale and even Voldemort — conducted a series of credit default swaps that cost JPMorgan Chase $6.2 billion.

What you might not know, however, is that half the loss was incurred by a simple Excel spreadsheet error.

Bloomberg reports that the Excel model, which relied heavily on copy and pasting of information, accidentally “underestimated risk by half.”

Author(s): Serah Louis

Publication Date: 1 March 2021

Publication Site: MoneyWise

Unemployment Scammer Spills Secrets: Illinois Easy Target Because ‘They Don’t Verify Anything’

Mary Pat Campbell
Unemployment Scammer Spills Secrets: Illinois Easy Target Because ‘They Don’t Verify Anything’

Excerpt:

“Over 50% of the claims that we receive in our office are fraudulent claims,” Eckstein said. Before the pandemic he said it was “Less than 1%.”

The bogus claims Eckstein sees are just a fraction of the fraud. The Illinois Department of Employment Security reported, between March 2020 and January 2021, it had stopped close to one million fraudulent claims.

Author(s): Dorothy Tucker and Carol Thompson

Date Accessed: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: CBS Chicago