I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Tucked away in windowless room 288 in New Mexico State University‘s Gerald Thomas Hall, a team of 12 open-source intelligence analysts scours news reports, websites, scientific journals and trade data from around the world.
Their work has earned NMSU the FDA’s 2010 Honor Award.
The team is searching for clues about toxic toys and other dangerous imports that might otherwise be missed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
It’s part of NMSU’s FDA-funded $3.5 million Predictive Risk Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting (PREDICT) program.
“We have certainly doubled FDA’s success rate in terms of finding the bad stuff,” NMSU PREDICT Open-Source Intelligence Team Director Scott Witt said. “We’ve vastly improved the ‘may-pass’ rate for products we know are safe. …Those products can now get into the U.S. much more quickly.”
More than 20 million international shipments of consumer products and other goods arrive in the U.S. each year, according to the FDA website. The number of imports nearly doubled from 2003 to 2009, from 9.4 million imports to 18.5 million, FDA records state.
Data gleaned by the open-source team is added to the PREDICT database, which is used along with historical data on overseas manufacturers and exporters to identify high-risk shipments of consumer products arriving at California and New York ports.
Describing traditional toxic imports controls as rudimentary and reactive, the FDA in February announced completion of the first year of pilot testing of PREDICT at the Port of Los Angeles. PREDICT has doubled interdictions during that time, according to the FDA and NMSU, though neither detailed numbers or trends in intercepted toxic import shipments.
NMSU will showcase PREDICT at an open house June 15, at rooms 297 and 288 in Gerald Thomas Hall. The open house will be held from 3:30 to 5 p.m.
Email rsilver@nmsu.edu for more information.
