I don’t know if Ralph kept a database, per se, but as I noted below his Pinboard account is still active, so if you create an account you should be able to click on “laboratory” from the list of tags on the right side of the page to call up every headline that he tagged with that term: http://www.pinboard.in/u:dchas  Keep in mind that the half life of tagged links is probably somewhere around 18 months, so no more data may be available than the snippets he saved there - and the accuracy of those reports is often dicey at best.

I have no idea how long the Pinboard account may remain active or if he transferred ownership/control before his untimely passing. I’m cc’ing Robin Izzo, the current chair of CHAS, on this reply to see if she can comment on whether Ralph transferred any of his materials to the division in some fashion. If we can’t figure out what happened with Pinboard and someone in the Division leadership wants to take over ownership for posterity, contact me off-list; I have an old email from 2012 from a Pinboard admin about a technical issue we experienced which could be a lead for figuring out how to do that.  Alternatively, there might be a way to download his entire Pinboard collection.

Sammye has a list of all of the flame-jetting related accidents we’ve noted over the past 20 years or so: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00152  My web page at http://www.ilpi.com/safety/demosafety.html aims to collect incidents that have occurred since.

Best wishes,

Rob Toreki

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On Sep 17, 2024, at 6:25 PM, Stephen Taylor <stephen**At_Symbol_Here**LABSAFETYINSTITUTE.ORG> wrote:

Where can we access the database? We are working on an interactive data visualization for Lab Accidents using tableau public and it would be great to pull in the data mentioned above if it is available to the public.
 

Stephen Taylor, Ph.D.
Executive Director

The Laboratory Safety Institute

www.labsafety.org

Stephen Taylor | LinkedIn

PS. Be sure to take our Safer Science Self-Assessment to see how your School or University stacks up!

On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 10:52 AM Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com> wrote:

See https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1016/j.jchas.2013.11.002 which is paywalled by ACS but you may have institutional or membership access.

Snippets from each section here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871553213006026 

Looks like someone posted one of Ralph’s early talks (Dec 2011) concerning the project: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/1-year-of-hazmat-headlines/9175338#1 After he found the articles on his news feed he would manually scan them to decide what to include.

On the News Story Page - Notice the highlighted section of the web article. I set it up for him to be able to highlight the part of the article he wanted to quote. He would then click on a Javascript bookmarklet I developed to export that snippet along with the article provenance data, title etc. to a custom JavaScript data massaging page (the slide that follows)

On the PinBoard page slide, it would import everything into the top fields and use some really clever heuristics that were continually tweaked to assign everything in the lower colored boxes.  The combination of all of these would generate the tag keywords you see in green (which is nice because they were consistent since the computer did that part of it).  Ralph could then tweak anything he wanted or add freeform text, and when he was happy it would post the headline and data to PinBoard.  See http://www.pinboard.in/u:dchas

Then, on whatever schedule Ralph wanted (I set the default to MWF), he could run a second script I wrote that would go out to PinBoard, find everything new since his last post, and write an email for him with the new Chemical Safety Headlines post that we all used to enjoy. All he had to do was run the script, double check the output and send to the list (and then approve his own list submission, I suppose).

Ah, good times.

Rob Toreki

On Sep 13, 2024, at 5:24 PM, Neal Langerman <chemsaf**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM> wrote:

Donna -

You are correct; that was his basic procedure. I curate my list manually, and it takes at least 30 minutes/day. It would be nice to have some automated methods to do that.

Neal

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On Fri, Sep 13, 2024 at 2:19 PM Wrublewski, Donna T. <dtwrub**At_Symbol_Here**caltech.edu> wrote:

Hi all,

 

I asked Ralph about this a while back. He told me this:

 

“I collect the headlines using Google news alerts and have some routines another member wrote some years ago that makes the process relatively automatic. I spend about 10 minutes/day to curate the pinboard collection. Sending it out to the list is three keystrokes.”

 

I don’t think he sent me anything more specific. I hope this helps.

 

Donna

 

Donna T. Wrublewski, Ph.D., MRSC (she/ella)

Librarian for Chemistry & Chemical Engineering

California Institute of Technology

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From: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU> on behalf of Jim Tung <jimtung**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM>
Date: Friday, September 13, 2024 at 10:03 AM
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] And another Chem Demo incident

Does anyone have the keywords that Ralph used? We could attempt to recreate it using Google News. 

 

On Fri, Sep 13, 2024 at 7:44 AM Monique Wilhelm <biocmst**At_Symbol_Here**gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Rob.  When I saw this I thought that it had been a while since I had seen any demo incidents, then quickly realized that it was because we no longer get Ralph's headline searches.  I really appreciated those, too.

On Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 11:17 AM Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com> wrote:

I just updated our demo safety page with this latest incident. I also found a couple others while looking for more info. I added one from Malvern, IA from 2023 and another from Hendersonville, TN from 2018: http://www.ilpi.com/safety/demosafety.html  I found another two, but they were completely paywalled with no info available.

 

I suspect we are probably missing contemporary ones between the world of paywalls and because we don’t have Ralph Stuart’s chemical incident headline service keeping watch for them.  If anyone finds additional recent incidents to add to that list, let me know.

 

Best wishes,

 

Rob Toreki

 

LabLocks™ - The first device that can lock out standard laboratory ball valves: https://www.safetyemporium.com/07400

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On Sep 8, 2024, at 11:57 AM, Neal Langerman <chemsaf**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM> wrote:

 

In a library in Denmark 

 

https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2024/09/07/four-injured-in-danish-library-chemistry-show-explosion

 

Neal Langerman, PhD

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