The Trucker Newspaper - April 15, 2018
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Features<br />
<strong>April</strong> <strong>15</strong>-30, <strong>2018</strong> • 37<br />
Goodyear honors 3 drivers at annual<br />
Highway Heroes award presentation<br />
Klint Lowry<br />
klint.lowry@thetrucker.com<br />
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Brian Bucenell hails<br />
from Richmond, Virginia. Ryan Moody calls<br />
Tacoma, Washington, home. And Frank Vieira<br />
resides in Ancaster, Ontario, about 55 miles (or<br />
89.5 kilometers, as he would say), southwest<br />
of Toronto.<br />
You would imagine fate would have to put<br />
in some overtime to ever bring these three veteran<br />
drivers together for any reason, much less<br />
to share a spotlight in Louisville, Kentucky.<br />
Yet there they were. On March 22, immediately<br />
after the first day of the Mid-America<br />
Trucking Show, a crowd gathered at the nearby<br />
Crowne Plaza Louisville Airport Expo Center<br />
hotel to celebrate serendipity’s fait accompli,<br />
and three standup guys, as the Goodyear Tire<br />
and Rubber Company marked the 35th anniversary<br />
of its Highway Hero Award.<br />
Each year since 1983, Goodyear has honored<br />
professional truck drivers who perform<br />
extraordinary acts of heroism, often at risk to<br />
themselves. This year, Bucenell, Moody and<br />
Vieira were the three finalists for the award.<br />
Gary Medalis, marketing director for<br />
Goodyear, said that over the years, the Highway<br />
Heroes award has honored drivers who<br />
have saved children’s lives, come to the aid of<br />
police officers and have performed numerous<br />
other feats of bravery. He added that the three<br />
drivers selected as finalists this year are all fine<br />
Virginia ‘Hackathon’ to pit techies against one another to invent way to thwart trafficking<br />
Dorothy Cox<br />
dlcox@thetrucker.com<br />
Around<br />
the Bend<br />
When you read or hear the word, “hacking,”<br />
what do you think of? I think of some<br />
tech-savvy person breaking into an individual’s<br />
or business’s computer system. Or, using<br />
a machete to cut down heavy undergrowth<br />
in a jungle somewhere. Or, not being able to<br />
cope with something, as in, “he wasn’t able<br />
to hack it, so he quit his job.”<br />
Hacking comes from an old English word,<br />
haccian, meaning to ‘cut in pieces’ and is related<br />
to Dutch hakken and German hacken.<br />
So when I heard about a “hackathon” in<br />
Arlington, Virginia, <strong>April</strong> 14-<strong>15</strong> I wrongly<br />
thought people were going to learn how to be<br />
better computer hackers so they could break<br />
into computer systems for ill-gotten gain.<br />
It turns out that’s not what it’s about at<br />
all. But I bet you guessed that already.<br />
choices as the award — the oldest of its kind in<br />
trucking — marks this milestone year.<br />
<strong>The</strong> incidents that led to these three drivers<br />
being nominated for the Highway Hero Award<br />
were about as far-flung from one another as<br />
their hometowns, with one thing in common:<br />
<strong>The</strong>y all exhibited personal and professional<br />
cool under pressure.<br />
For Bucenell, an owner-operator, it all started<br />
just after he’d merged onto the Ohio Turnpike<br />
near Toledo. He heard chatter on the CB<br />
about a high-speed chase going on somewhere<br />
in the vicinity. Moments later, Bucenell saw<br />
several state troopers in his rearview mirror<br />
chasing a car and gaining on him fast.<br />
Just then, he came upon a construction<br />
zone. “We lost the far left lane,” he said. “It<br />
went from three lanes to two lanes. <strong>The</strong>y put up<br />
a concrete barrier, blocking it off.”<br />
When the car reached Bucenell’s truck another<br />
truck was running alongside. Bucenell<br />
said the car tried to pass him on the left, saw<br />
the barrier, then cut back behind him.<br />
From that point on, Bucenell said, the car<br />
kept trying to pass, to the left, to the right, between<br />
the two trucks. Every time he moved, Bucenell,<br />
who’s been driving professionally for 10<br />
years, moved over just enough to cut him off.<br />
“I know my truck pretty well,” Bucenell<br />
said. “It was a mixture of his lack of experience<br />
and my knowing my truck. I think that’s<br />
what let me be able to stop him.”<br />
In this case hack means to put pieces of<br />
something together in order to build something<br />
else, not hacking or breaking into<br />
something.<br />
It means that local computer programmers,<br />
college students, tech gurus, engineers,<br />
tech specialists and others — about 100 people<br />
so far — will be competing to come up<br />
with an algorithm or app or some such thing<br />
in order to thwart human traffickers.<br />
This hackathon is being held by Blue<br />
Compass, a tech development group which<br />
works with government agencies to help<br />
them use data to figure out answers to problems.<br />
And that is way over-simplifying what<br />
they do.<br />
OK. OK. Just for example, say an agency<br />
like the National Center for Missing and Exploited<br />
Children is trying to find out if traffickers<br />
go after a type of child, or they’re<br />
looking for a certain child who has been<br />
kidnapped. Instead of having a human go<br />
through miles of data and pictures of children,<br />
they use all this data to create an algorithm<br />
and feed that to a robot or some sort<br />
of artificial intelligence thing-a-ma-bob and<br />
have it come up with a pattern of what kind<br />
<strong>The</strong> <strong>Trucker</strong>: KLINT LOWRY<br />
From left are Goodyear Marketing Director Gary Medalis, <strong>2018</strong> Goodyear Highway Hero<br />
Award winner, Frank Vieira, and finalists Brian Bucenell and Ryan Moody.<br />
Finally, the driver tried to swerve on the<br />
shoulder again. “I just whipped it toward the<br />
guardrail and stopped,” Bucenell said. <strong>The</strong><br />
car was trapped, and the chase, which Bucenell<br />
later found out had reached 100 mph<br />
of children they’re looking for and what<br />
types of children are at risk of being trafficked.<br />
Or where a specific child might be.<br />
<strong>The</strong> idea, says Christine Jung, president<br />
and CEO of Blue Compass, is that technology<br />
can be used to say, predict the kinds of<br />
places where trafficking is more likely to occur.<br />
From data they have already, they’ve<br />
found it happens more in areas of the country<br />
or in nations that are unstable economically,<br />
where people are desperate and will take desperate<br />
measures to get money. Those areas<br />
are ripe for trafficking, Jung said. It could be<br />
a third-world country or an inner city or rual<br />
area in the U.S.<br />
<strong>The</strong> participants at the hackathon will be<br />
“everyday people,” she said, students from<br />
area schools, young professionals, computer<br />
techs, professors and also people who want<br />
to learn about the subject of human trafficking.<br />
In the trucking industry you hear about<br />
“big data” being generated from the truck engine,<br />
from on-cab cameras and other devices<br />
like the ELD. That data is being used to help<br />
carriers spot waste or garner proof it was the<br />
at one point, was over.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>re were 20 cop cars on him in the blink<br />
of an eye. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bucenell<br />
said.<br />
See Hero on p38 m<br />
four-wheeler that hit the truck, not the other<br />
way around or, some say, to spy on drivers.<br />
One trucking company using trailertracking<br />
devices discovered their trailers<br />
were being used to move goods other than<br />
theirs. And it was causing a lot of unnecessary<br />
wear-and-tear to their equipment.<br />
<strong>The</strong> idea, said Jung, is to understand large<br />
volumes of data, the complexity behind the<br />
data and then figure out how to make sense<br />
of it and like the carrier whose trailers were<br />
being used illicitly, put a stop to it. Whatever<br />
“it” might be.<br />
In this case, it would be trafficking.<br />
Now, don’t ask me whether this will be an<br />
app or what. This is so not my area of expertise.<br />
Also invited to the “hackathon” will be<br />
people who know about human trafficking<br />
and the different ways traffickers use to victimize<br />
children and young adults, such as<br />
posing as a modeling agent or as someone<br />
looking for a “date.”<br />
I’ll keep you posted on what happens<br />
with the event and I hope they will explain<br />
it to me in plain English so that I can understand<br />
it. Just sayin.’<br />
Be safe out there and God bless. 8