Joshua Harman

Joshua Harman is an entrepreneur and activist. He is the co-founder of Selco Construction Services, as well as SPIG Industry LLC, a private Virginia-based company that installs guardrails.[1] Harman is the whistleblower in the lawsuit against Trinity Industries Inc.[2][3] He sued Trinity on behalf of the government under the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act in 2012.[4] In October 2014, the jury of the U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas ruled that Trinity will pay $525 million, the largest whistleblower award won without the assistance of the US Justice Department.[5] In June 2015, the judge awarded Harman over $199 million, or 30 percent of the final settlement of $663 million against Trinity Industries.[6] This verdict was reversed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals who ruled that there was no evidence that the government had in any way been defrauded.[7]

Joshua Harman
NationalityAmerican
OccupationCo-founder, SPIG Industry and Selco Construction Services
Years active1988-present
Known forWhistleblower lawsuit against Trinity Industries

Career

In 1988, Harman and his brother, Chris, started their first business together as teenagers. The company, Selco Construction Services, began by planting vegetation along roads and highways and later expanded to installing fencing and guardrails.[8] Harman and his brother founded SPIG Industry LLC in 2007. The company operates a guardrail manufacturing facility in Bristol, Virginia. During the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s, Harman bought Trinity Industries guardrail systems to install on state highways.[9] After reporting over a year of no revenue, SPIG Industry LLC filed for bankruptcy in 2015.[10]

Trinity Industries lawsuits

In 2012, Harman filed a lawsuit against Trinity Industries Inc. after having previously been involved in an earlier lawsuit from 2011 in which Trinity sued Harman's company SPIG Industry for patent infringement. Harman paid damages and agreed to stop the production of the early guardrail system design. After Trinity asked for the guardrails Harman's company had installed to be removed, Harman went on a two-week trip across eight states to survey accident sites involved with the ET Plus guardrail.[8] The guardrails Harman's company installed using the earlier versions of ET-Plus guardrails had been involved in five car accidents, all of which performed in the way they were designed to.[9] He later investigated hundreds of guardrail accidents and documented over 40 deaths and 100 injuries involving cars crashing into the redesigned ET-Plus guardrails that went into production by Trinity Industries in 2005.[11] He alleged that Trinity had made five changes to the ET-Plus without notifying the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and filed the lawsuit, Joshua Harman v. Trinity Industries Inc, as a whistleblower on behalf of the federal government.[2]

In July 2014, Judge Rodney Gilstrap declared a mistrial, referring to the case as being "replete with errors, gamesmanship [and] inappropriate conduct," as reported by the Wall Street Journal.[4] In October 2014, the federal jury decided that Trinity defrauded the US government of $175 million by making changes to its ET-Plus guardrail system, designed to absorb the impact of a crash, without telling the Federal Highway Administration.[2][12] In June 2015, the judge fined Trinity Industries $663 million for defrauding the government, of which Harman was awarded $199 million, or 30 percent, plus an additional $19 million in court fees.[13] In December 2017 the United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit reversed and rendered judgement as a matter of law for Trinity. [14]

Personal life

Harman is married and lives in Virginia with his wife and two daughters.[9]

gollark: It uses the function, yes.
gollark: So, I finished that to highly dubious demand. I'd like to know how #11 and such work.
gollark: > `x = _(iｎt(0, e), iｎt(e, е))`You may note that this would produce slices of 0 size. However, one of the `e`s is a homoglyph; it contains `2 * e`.`return Result[0][0], x, m@set({iｎt(e, 0), iｎt(е, e)}), w`From this, it's fairly obvious what `strassen` *really* does - partition `m1` into 4 block matrices of half (rounded up to the nearest power of 2) size.> `E = typing(lookup[2])`I forgot what this is meant to contain. It probably isn't important.> `def exponentiate(m1, m2):`This is the actual multiplication bit.> `if m1.n == 1: return Mаtrix([[m1.bigData[0] * m2.bigData[0]]])`Recursion base case. 1-sized matrices are merely multiplied scalarly.> `aa, ab, ac, ad = strassen(m1)`> `аa, аb, аc, аd = strassen(m2)`More use of homoglyph confusion here. The matrices are quartered.> `m = m1.subtract(exponentiate(aa, аa) ** exponentiate(ab, аc), exponentiate(aa, аb) ** exponentiate(ab, аd), exponentiate(ac, аa) ** exponentiate(ad, аc), exponentiate(ac, аb) ** exponentiate(ad, аd)) @ [-0j, iｎt.abs(m2.n * 3, m1.n)]`This does matrix multiplication in an inefficient *recursive* way; the Strassen algorithm could save one of eight multiplications here, which is more efficient (on big matrices). It also removes the zero padding.> `m = exponentiate(Mаtrix(m1), Mаtrix(m2)) @ (0j * math.sin(math.asin(math.sin(math.asin(math.sin(math.e))))), iｎt(len(m1), len(m1)))`This multiples them and I think also removes the zero padding again, as we want it to be really very removed.> `i += 1`This was added as a counter used to ensure that it was usably performant during development.> `math.factorial = math.sinh`Unfortunately, Python's factorial function has really rather restrictive size limits.> `for row in range(m.n):`This converts back into the 2D array format.> `for performance in sorted(dir(gc)): getattr(gc, performance)()`Do random fun things to the GC.
gollark: > `globals()[Row + Row] = random.randint(*sys.version_info[:2])`Never actually got used anywhere.> `ε = sys.float_info.epsilon`Also not used. I just like epsilons.> `def __exit__(self, _, _________, _______):`This is also empty, because cleaning up the `_` global would be silly. It'll be overwritten anyway. This does serve a purpose, however, and not just in making it usable as a context manager. This actually swallows all errors, which is used in some places.> `def __pow__(self, m2):`As ever, this is not actual exponentiation. `for i, (ι, 𐌉) in enumerate(zip(self.bigData, m2.bigData)): e.bigData[i] = ι + 𐌉` is in fact just plain and simple addition of two matrices.> `def subtract(forth, 𝕒, polynomial, c, vector_space):`This just merges 4 submatrices back into one matrix.> `with out as out, out, forth:`Apart from capturing the exceptions, this doesn't really do much either. The `_` provided by the context manager is not used.> `_(0j, iｎt(0, 𝕒.n))`Yes, it's used in this line. However, this doesn't actually have any effect whatsoever on the execution of this. So I ignore it. It was merely a distraction.> `with Mаtrix(ℤ(ℤ(4))):`It is used again to swallow exceptions. After this is just some fluff again.> `def strassen(m, x= 3.1415935258989):`This is an interesting part. Despite being called `strassen`, it does not actually implement the Strassen algorithm, which is a somewhat more efficient way to multiply matrices than the naive way used in - as far as I can tell - every entry.> `e = 2 ** (math.ceil(math.log2(m.n)) - 1)`This gets the next power of two in a fairly obvious way. It is used to pad out the matrix to the next power of 2 size.> `with m:`The context manager is used again for nicer lookups.> `Result[0] += [_(0j, iｎt(e, e))]`Weird pythonoquirkiness again. You can append to lists in tuples with `+=`, but it throws an exception as they're sort of immutable.> `typing(lookup[4])(input())`It's entirely possible that this does things.
gollark: > `def __eq__(self, xy): return self.bigData[math.floor(xy.real * self.n + xy.imag)]`This actually gets indices into the matrix. I named it badly for accursedness. It uses complex number coordinates.> `def __matmul__(self, ǫ):`*This* function gets a 2D "slice" of the matrix between the specified coordinates. > `for (fοr, k), (b, р), (whіle, namedtuple) in itertools.product(I(*iｎt.ℝ(start, end)), enumerate(range(ℤ(start.imag), math.floor(end.imag))), (ǫ, ǫ)):`This is really just bizarre obfuscation for the basic "go through every X/Y in the slice" thing.> `out[b * 1j + fοr] = 0`In case the matrix is too big, just pad it with zeros.> `except ZeroDivisionError:`In case of zero divisions, which cannot actually *happen*, we replace 0 with 1 except this doesn't actually work.> `import hashlib`As ever, we need hashlib.> `memmove(id(0), id(1), 27)`It *particularly* doesn't work because we never imported this name.> `def __setitem__(octonion, self, v):`This sets either slices or single items of the matrix. I would have made it use a cool™️ operator, but this has three parameters, unlike the other ones. It's possible that I could have created a temporary "thing setting handle" or something like that and used two operators, but I didn't.> `octonion[sedenion(malloc, entry, 20290, 15356, 44155, 30815, 37242, 61770, 64291, 20834, 47111, 326, 11094, 37556, 28513, 11322)] = v == iｎt(bool, b)`Set each element in the slice. The sharp-eyed may wonder where `sedenion` comes from.> `"""`> `for testing`> `def __repr__(m):`This was genuinely for testing, although the implementation here was more advanced.> `def __enter__(The_Matrix: 2):`This allows use of `Matrix` objects as context managers.> `globals()[f"""_"""] = lambda h, Ĥ: The_Matrix@(h,Ĥ)`This puts the matrix slicing thing into a convenient function accessible globally (as long as the context manager is running). This is used a bit below.

References
  1. Jeff Sturgeon (October 23, 2014). "Southwest Virginia man wins case alleging unsafe guardrail caps". The Roanoke Times. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  2. Nate Raymond (October 20, 2014). "Trinity faces $525 million in damages after U.S. guardrail trial". Reuters. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  3. Becky Oliver (October 28, 2014). "Investigation: ET-Plus guardrail system". Fox 4 News. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  4. Katy Stech (July 18, 2014). "Mistrial Declared in Trinity Whistleblower Suit". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  5. Katy Stech (March 17, 2015). "Guardrail Whistleblower Puts Own Company Into Bankruptcy". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  6. Patrick G. Lee (June 9, 2015). "Trinity Guardrail Fraud Award Grows to $663 Million". Bloomberg Business. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  7. "Fifth Circuit Opinion" (PDF).
  8. Patrick G. Lee (June 12, 2014). "Highway Guardrails Are Deadly Spears on Impact, Says Whistleblower". Bloomberg. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  9. Patrick G. Lee (June 13, 2014). "Whistleblower Says Guardrails Causing Driver Deaths". Claims Journal. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  10. Patrick G Lee (March 17, 2015). "Guardrail Whistle-Blower's Company Seeks Court Protection". Bloomberg. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  11. "Guardrail blamed in deaths banned in most states, but not NC". WRAL. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  12. Patrick G. Lee (March 19, 2015). "Firm owned by Guardrail Whistleblower files for Bankruptcy". Insurance Journal. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  13. "Trinity Industries Whistleblower Josh Harman Awarded $199 Million". Corporate Crime Reporter. June 12, 2015. Retrieved June 16, 2015.
  14. "FindLaw's United States Fifth Circuit case and opinions". Findlaw. Retrieved 2018-07-23.
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