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Communications IT Technology

IT and Natural Disasters 157

Posted by CowboyNeal from the bringing-people-together dept.
rikomatic writes "The Asian tsunami in December has dramatically shown how much SMS, email and the web are now indispensible parts of disaster recovery. The folks at the Digital Divide Network have organized a virtual conference on 'How New Media and the Internet are Reshaping Tsunami Relief Efforts' on Wednesday, Jan 12 at 10am, EST. Among the featured speakers will be Dina Mehta, co-founder of the Southeast Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog. In the hours following the tsunami, she and a group of South Asian bloggers created the volunteer-driven web portal for tsunami relief news and resources. Beyond using IT to coordinate post-disaster relief efforts, early warning is another critical need. Hopefully the UN's World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan later this month will address the IT infrastructure needed to make sure that people get advance warning before the next natural disaster strikes."
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IT and Natural Disasters More

IT and Natural Disasters

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  • SMS? That has got to be the slowest way to cordinate anything... EVER.

    • Re:SMS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by BaldGhoti ( 265981 )
      If you get only twenty seconds of network coverage a day, SMS is far superior to actually making a phonecall. One can only assume that a majority of the cell towers in the area were disabled or destroyed.

    • Re:SMS? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by svvampy ( 576225 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:31PM (#11316300)
      SMSs can make it over a patchy network when voice calls will not. It also allows easier cataloging and management of multiple nodes. Instead of having a person to speak to every remote outpost a computer can aggregate status reports, help requests and so on.
      • Actually, there's an unintended consequence of having ubiquitous mobile phone reception: it's much easier to locate bodies in piles of rubble.

        It sounds pretty strange, but friends/family constantly ringing your mobile phone to check that you're OK tends to lead rescuers straight to you. Morbidly, it's also much easier to recover corpses this way as well (still-charged phones attached to corpses).
    • The small screen and crappy interface don't help, either. I mean, the menus for phones are the WORST I have seen on almost any device. I could have designed a better menu than those people did.
      • Yet millions upon millions of teenagers (and young adults) seem to be able to use it every day - to very great abandon.

        Crappy interface or simplicity of use?

        ps. I'm talking Scandinavian markets especially here, but also other European and Australian. The US is way behind on use of SMS.
        • " I'm talking Scandinavian markets especially here, but also other European and Australian. The US is way behind on use of SMS."

          Yeah I guess so.

          What exactly IS sms?

    • Re:SMS? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Agret ( 752467 )
      NEED HLP FST PLZ SND ASAP!

    • Re:SMS? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuickFox ( 311231 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @11:07PM (#11317258)
      SMS? That has got to be the slowest way to cordinate anything... EVER.

      Cellphone network operators can broadcast one SMS simultaneously to all cellphones in an area. If they had broadcast a tsunami warning by SMS right after the earthquake, a huge number of people would have been saved. Not only rich people with cellphones would be saved, since they would spread the warning to people around them, and those in turn would spread the warning further.
      • I'm sure rich people would be far too elitist to assist their fellow man.
      • Is SMS more standard in that part of the world? Here in the US I don't even think you can send an SMS message from most cell network providers. Seems like having a warning system with a loud siren (similar to areas in the midwest where we have tornado warning sirens) in coastal areas would make more sense. You could even have it be triggered remotely from monitoring locations.
        • Here in the US I don't even think you can send an SMS message from most cell network providers.

          I believe this is one of the few areas where US lags behind Europe and some other regions. Here in Sweden SMS is taken for granted.

          Seems like having a warning system with a loud siren (similar to areas in the midwest where we have tornado warning sirens) in coastal areas would make more sense.

          Of course you wouldn't have just one warning system. You also need warnings by siren, radio, TV etc.

          The important ad

  • Geospatial support for natural disasters (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jim_Maryland ( 718224 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:27PM (#11316260)
    I'm sure this isn't the only Geospatial vendor but ESRI [esri.com] pretty much makes their software, technical support and data free to agencies supporting disasters. For the Indian Ocean disaster, check out this link [esri.com].
  • I'm sure there are people who need to look at that info more than we do.

  • MMM (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 )
    A US investment in "event specific" WiFi and VoIP deployments would both prepare the "Homeland" for disasters, natural and manmade, and put American companies at the forefront of the emerging Mobile Multimedia Millennium that's turning the WWW upside down. Our flexible media industry could take disasters in stride, offering lots of lucrative training during planned events that will reduce costs and increase lifesaving efficiency during emergencies. In the meantime, it would create jobs, taxable profits, and
    • "In the meantime, it would create jobs, taxable profits, and make the US a lot more fun.

      If it reaps benefits to America's industry of only a fraction of those from its involvement in the 2nd World War, then yes, you would indeed be onto a winner.

  • Without communication (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:30PM (#11316286) Homepage Journal
    All other efforts will be in vain. That was the real tragedy in the Tsunami- and it's the reason why a similar event won't cause this large loss of life in the Pacific. We've already got the instruments needed to detect an earthquake as it happens anywhere in the world- the next step is where we failed. There should have been a major warning given out to every government, every police station, every military installation in the area that an earthquake had already happened and to get people away from the seashore.

    • Re:Without communication (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dustinbarbour ( 721795 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:02PM (#11316511) Homepage
      And if the tsunami had been smaller than expected? All you;d hear is "Look at those idiots at the earthquak/tsunami warning center! They cost the government of "country here" $XXX dollars for no reason! They shall burn ni hell!"
      • And if the tsunami had been smaller than expected? All you;d hear is "Look at those idiots at the earthquak/tsunami warning center! They cost the government of "country here" $XXX dollars for no reason! They shall burn ni hell!"

        One of the many reasons to ignore COST when it comes to GOVENRMENT. Providing for the common welfare is often far more expensive than the greedy misers known as the rich would be willing to pay for. FAR better to cost several billion dollars of economic dislocation than lose a si
        • FAR better to cost several billion dollars of economic dislocation than lose a single human life...

          I disagree. Human life is valuable, yes: that means that it has a value. At $50,000/yr for 50 years, that's $2.5 million earned--you're saying that it's fine to incur thousands of times more than the average person earns (his earnings, of course, measure his economic contribution to society). That's insane, and a very quick way to go bankrupt.

          Building a tsunami readiness centre is like anything else: th

          • So, what's the value of a human life if you work for $.25 per hour? How do you calculate the life of the poor?

            I suppose under your logic that we should invest money in protecting golf courses, yachts, etc. -- where, one must admit, the wealthy are likely to be found. So much better to save the life of someone who earns $25 million per year than to save the life of someone who earns $50,000. True, the probability of something happening to a golf course or yachting club is very low, but hey, the cost bene

            • So, what's the value of a human life if you work for $.25 per hour?

              You should know the answer from the point of view of the corporations- human life is only worth the labor that it can produce, and should be paid for at as small a fraction of the value of that labor as possible.
            • I'm just pointing out that spending billions to save a life is stupid. Lives do have value--whatever it is. Yes, we're all children of God, and yes one shouldn't be able to just buy and sell lives--but it doesn't make sense to spend billions to save a single life. If that were true, cars would go no faster than 5 miles an hours and be protected with forty feet of pillows.
          • I disagree. Human life is valuable, yes: that means that it has a value. At $50,000/yr for 50 years, that's $2.5 million earned--you're saying that it's fine to incur thousands of times more than the average person earns (his earnings, of course, measure his economic contribution to society). That's insane, and a very quick way to go bankrupt.

            Money itself is largely mythological to begin with- it's a matter of morality, not economics. Economics is mythological, and cost is just a figment of your imaginat
            • Given the existance of Krakotoa, the probability of a tsunami happening in the Indian Ocean within 500 years was very close to 100%.

              How much would it cost to staff a tsunami centre for 500 years? How much would it cost to make every structure--even those which only last for a decade or two--tsunami-proof? Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?

              It'

              • How much would it cost to staff a tsunami centre for 500 years?

                Given the type of technology we have in the Pacific? Aproximately (given the lower wages there) $8,760,000/country. You only need ONE person on duty in these places after all.

                How much would it cost to make every structure--even those which only last for a decade or two--tsunami-proof?

                Why would that be neccessary for salvation of HUMAN LIFE? Evacuate the people when the warning comes in, and be done with it.

                Could that money be used fo
                • $8,760,000/country

                  How many countries involved? Half a dozen or so? So $52,560,000/year--$2,628,0000,000 over half a millennium in order to save 150,000 lives (let's imagine that they would all be saved, which is false): $175,000/person. That might actually be worthwhile, to tell the truth. Although I daresay a more in-depth analysis would probably reveal that the funds would be better allocated elsewhere.

                  Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000

                  • How many countries involved? Half a dozen or so? So $52,560,000/year--$2,628,0000,000 over half a millennium in order to save 150,000 lives (let's imagine that they would all be saved, which is false): $175,000/person. That might actually be worthwhile, to tell the truth. Although I daresay a more in-depth analysis would probably reveal that the funds would be better allocated elsewhere.

                    Not really- because given your original premise, that a person is only worth what they earn, most of those people over
          • At $50,000/yr for 50 years, that's $2.5 million earned--you're saying that it's fine to incur thousands of times more than the average person earns (his earnings, of course, measure his economic contribution to society).

            2nd reply, because I missed this apparently error-prone assumption. NO for-profit business EVER gives a person earnings equal to his economic contribution to society- it's usually at least an order of magnitude less, sometimes FAR less. That's how profit is made- the difference between w
      • As a survivor of 1985 earthquake in Mexico City (that officially killed "only" 6000, trustworthy accounts, of which the goverment of the day's was not one, put the figure in around 30000) I can tell you that you learn to trust the means available to you to prevent loss of human life.

        After the disaster in Mexico City it was implemented a seismic alert that gives you some valuable *seconds* (around a minute or there abouts) between the moment an earthquake happens (normally in the west coast of Mexico) and w
    • I am writing this message from a terminal of the central posko (dispensary and supply post) of the Red Cross in Banda Aceh. As a volunteer here, I can tell you that communication through cellphones and satellite phones have been a real pain with satellite signals always going on and off, and voice quality being very bad. GSM phones sometimes fare better. I am here mainly because I couldn't get in touch by phone with my contacts from the Dept of Foreign Affaires, with whom I was first supposed to work with.
      • And obviously, this was needed earlier- far earlier. Southeast asia is the home of small electronics- yet there was NO way for survivors on Sumatra to call Thailand during that first two hours and say "Hey, we just had a Tsunami here- better evacuate your coast".
  • The three French cell phone operators have joined forces to facilitate the collection of funds via SMS [zdnet.fr] (in French). An interesting initiative as well

  • Ham (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:31PM (#11316298)
    > Beyond using IT to coordinate post-disaster relief efforts,

    Ham Radio [arrl.org].

    Google for your country's equivalent to the ARRL.

    Hams were the only functional communication for many people after the Loma Prieta quake hit California. Hams ran the only functioning communications network on 9/11. And yes, hams were there for the tsunami victims too [arrl.org].

    If you need a technology that'll enable coordination of disaster relief -- or even just help out by offloading a few million "Yes, Mom, I'm OK, and I'll talk to you when I can" messages from overloaded communications channels, chances are you're going to be using ham radio.

    Better yet -- become a ham yourself. In most countries, it's cheap and easy. And if you're reading this, you're already geeky enough that it'll be a hell of a lot of fun no matter where you live.

    Another poster on this thread was talking about SMS. When you have no cellular towers, you're not going to get even 20 seconds a day of uptime.

    And that's when you'll be helped by a ham.

    • ...but what if everyone that has a cell phone had a Ham radio? What would that be like in the middle of a disaster? I don't see it working out too well...
      • 1) Ham radio requires a test to get a license. It involves some electronics theory. Not everyone who has a cell phone would get a license.

        2) Ham radio doesn't use central points for access (e.g. cell towers) so many users just means find a "free" frequency is more difficult. Emergency traffic gets priority anyway and emergency co-ordination is higher priority than health and wellbeing traffic ("I'm OK").

      • ...but what if everyone that has a cell phone had a Ham radio? What would that be like in the middle of a disaster? I don't see it working out too well...

        You do need to know more about Ham radio. Even if we put down license requirements for Amateur Radio, The number of avaialble bands and frequencies a Ham can use means that even in the most congested times after an emergency there is plenty of bandwidth to go around. If you add the fact that knowledge is required to be a ham and you do need a license

    • agreed, (Score:4, Informative)

      by Brigadier ( 12956 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:53PM (#11316445)

      My dad was into ham radios (jamaica) for a while and during hurricanes, and power outages he was still talking to people around the world. It's simple, and redundant (runs on a car battery) and most important it's proven. I'm sorry but the internet should never be relied upon for communications during a disaster it's just not reliable. It is also dependent on too many things. Electricity, phone lines, networks.
    • This is definitely cool. I'm actually looking into this for packet radio. Apparently you can actually hook up your computer to your radio and talk to other computers similarly connected...not necessarily FAST, but if you need to move data around in a crisis situation and all other communication links have failed, this would definitely do it. I've had e-mail sent via ham radio before, and I'm interested if someone can point me to the current state of the art here.

    • Re:Ham (Score:3, Funny)

      by QuickFox ( 311231 )
      > > Beyond using IT to coordinate post-disaster relief efforts,

      > Ham Radio.

      Sorry, no, that won't work. In large parts of the tsunami region, ham is taboo. They're Moslems.

    • Re:Ham (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by zymano ( 581466 )
      ham = radio. Big deal.

      It's old and not good enough anymore.

      Make Wifi inexpensive and have it connect to the net.

      • Re:Ham (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tylernt ( 581794 )
        "It's old and not good enough anymore."

        Not good enough to make contact with someone on the other side of the *planet* with a radio made of 1930s technology and 40 feet of wire? One of the advantages of ham is that it's simple. You could probably disassemble a random TV or VCR to make a transmitter, hook it up to your home's aluminum rain gutters and a car battery, and contact someone thousands of miles away (i.e., someone outside of the disaster area that can send help). Just try that with Wifi, where you'
        • Directional WiFi is not just a few miles. During the 9-11 terrorist attacks cellphones still worked. And there was an article on slash about new emergency temoporary cell phone towers. Trying to use HAM may work for a just a few but would be mess if you had to deal with massive numbers of people. So if we could establish satellite ,long distance mesh Wifi,a nd cellphone like wifi then that would be more useful in my opinion. Ham is good for limited use but not for the real world anymore. It's radio and ra
          • "It's radio and radio will be disappearing in the near future too."

            Uh... you do know that cell phones and WiFi are both radios, right?
            • My mistake. I meant radio broadcasting is going to go wifi someday. A wireless network .
              • My mistake. I meant radio broadcasting is going to go wifi someday. A wireless network .

                You do realize that Ham radio is not broadcasting... Or Amateur Radio is not commercial Broadcast Radio.

                Broadcasting: transmissions intended for reception by the general public, either direct or relayed; A one way communication from one source to many recipients.

                Transmitting: To send from one person, thing, or place to another; convey; To send (a signal), as by wire or radio.

                The rules governing broadcasting by

  • Videos (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If anyone wants to see any videos, there's a load on www.asiantsunamivideos.com.

    If you want to help mirror, please pop along to this thread:

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s= & th readid=359270

    and PM the thredstarter for info on how to get your mirror online.

    Currently there's ~15x100mbps boxes and an unmetered gigabit box mirroring the content, and we're still struggling.

    Any coders who could help modify the main script would also be welcome, as the central server is suffering under the
    • Maybe it's offtopic. MAYBE. But troll?

      It's pretty easy to understand, really. The moderator read a comment pointing out where people could see tsunami videos. He/she thought this to be in poor taste, or was disgusted by it, and thus marked the comment Troll.

      What disturbs me is that people think that watching video of the tsunami is somehow unethical. Are we supposed to shield ourselves from reality? Come on. As far as I'm concerned, it is the duty of every person who can stomache it to look once, just on

  • Don't forget privacy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by homer_ca ( 144738 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:40PM (#11316365)
    IT and communications are important to the rescue and recovery effort, but privacy is just as important. There have been reports of missing Swedes having their homes burglarized and the families of missing people being contacted by scammers. It's sick how these criminals would take advantage of other people's misery.

  • Just make sure ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:41PM (#11316369)
    ... when you lease multiple outside lines for redundancy, that the carriers actually do use separate paths all the way through, and don't go through a single point any way along the line.

    I once worked for a company who had multiple fiber-optic links for their WAN. For redundancy, we had two ISDN links to a remote site. Unfortunately, both links went down because they were both piggy-backed over 'virtual ISDN circuits' on a fibre-optic cable which happened to
    run over a bridge.

    Due to a flash floods the bridge collapsed, along with both ISDN circuits.
    • Where I once worked we had to manage some phone lines to call centre in the Highlands of Scotland somewhere so for 'redundancy' we bought lines off both BT and C&W.

      We looked at the exact setup and found that BT had just two lines to this place and C&W just used one of those BT lines for it's services and pointed this out to the people running the show. Unfortunately they didn't really seem to understand and kept saying "But if BT breaks down then we still have C&W" - "Not if is the BT line whic
      • Where I once worked we had to manage some phone lines to call centre in the Highlands of Scotland somewhere so for 'redundancy' we bought lines off both BT and C&W.

        Strangely enough, the bridge mentioned was the rail bridge that ran over the River Ness to Inverness, and was washed away on the 7th February 1989 - all the fibre optic cabling to Inverness ran over the one bridge. I happened to be in the Network Management Centre at the time, and saw both links go down simultaneously. Despite demands fr

  • Interesting... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `todhsals.nnamredyps'> on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:43PM (#11316391) Homepage Journal
    My first thought was: Maybe this disaster was needed to update disaster recovery around other areas of the world. But then I realized something: It's rather that mankind is shortsighted when dealing with new technologies, disasters (and everything else).

    Like, while the media and biz ppl were focused on porn sites, businesses, etc, the less favored countries couldn't get a chance to use this technology in their favor.

    Ironically, the internet was originally designed as a disaster-proof (specifically, nuke-proof) network.

  • IT is not the answer to this problem (Score:4, Interesting)

    by teneighty ( 671401 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:44PM (#11316396)

    I don't question the generosity of spirit behind this kind of effort, but lets focus on the reality here: many of the worst hit areas barely even have telephones, let alone IT infrastructure.

    What they really need is: Good government, education, sanitation and medical expertise, communication infrastructure and civil engineers - roughly in that order. Even with early warning systems, Aceh would have still been completely devasted - the water went roughly 9 MILES inland in some places. In any case, Sumatra was hit within minutes of the quake. Granted, Sri Lanka, India and Thialand would have benefited greatly from an early warning system (as illustrated by one family had one of their own - a 10 year old girl who paid attention to her geography lessons - story here [breaking.tcm.ie])


    • Maybe this is a good application for above-the-weather blimps that provide communication services.

      But as you say, there are a lot of other basic issues to be solved in those parts as well.

      Besides that, an evacuation alert might just cause more loss of life due to panic than the impending disaster - not to mention the inevitable hoaxes that might occur.

  • Old "MSM" Media twists disaster coverage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:48PM (#11316423)
    We all suspect that the BBC carries a heavy anti-American bias, and nowhere has this become more apparent than in the BBC coverage of the tsumnami disaster. The following excerpt from the Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk] gives the scoop:
    'Don't Mention the Navy' is the BBC's Line

    Last week we were subjected to one of the most extraordinary examples of one-sided news management of modern times, as most of our media, led by the BBC, studiously ignored what was by far the most effective and dramatic response to Asia's tsunami disaster. A mighty task force of more than 20 US Navy ships, led by a vast nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, and equipped with nearly 90 helicopters, landing craft and hovercraft, were carrying out a round-the-clock relief operation, providing food, water and medical supplies to hundreds of thousands of survivors.

    The BBC went out of its way not to report this. Only when one BBC reporter, Ben Brown, hitched a lift from one of the Abraham Lincoln's Sea Hawk helicopters to report from the Sumatran coast was there the faintest hint of the part that the Americans, aided by the Australian navy, were playing.

    Instead the BBC's coverage was dominated by the self-important vapourings of a stream of politicians, led by the UN's Kofi Annan; the EU's "three-minute silence"; the public's amazing response to fund-raising appeals; and a Unicef-inspired scare story about orphaned children being targeted by sex traffickers. The overall effect was to turn the whole drama into a heart-tugging soap opera.

    The real story of the week should thus have been the startling contrast between the impotence of the international organisations, the UN and the EU, and the remarkable efficiency of the US and Australian military on the ground. Here and there, news organisations have tried to report this, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Germany, and even the China News Agency, not to mention various weblogs, such as the wonderfully outspoken Diplomad, run undercover by members of the US State Department, and our own www.eureferendum.blogspot.com. But when even Communist China's news agency tells us more about what is really going on than the BBC, we see just how strange the world has become.

    One real lesson of this disaster, as of others before, is that all the international aid in the world is worthless unless one has the hardware and organisational know-how to deliver it. That is what the US and Australia have been showing, as the UN and the EU are powerless to do. But because, to the BBC, it is a case of "UN and EU good, US and military bad", the story is suppressed. The BBC's performance has become a national scandal.

    • I guess I really shouldn't respond to your troll but I do feel that this is a blatant mis-representation of the facts that you could have verified quickly. I just went to the BBC web site and searched for "tsunami us navy" and came up with a list of 68 stories which mention US military contributions to the relief effort such as this:

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4145 259.stm [bbc.co.uk]

      /Mark

    • You posted this in the BBC story comments earlier today. Nobody cared the first time, either.
    • Whatever AC, we are talking about The Daily Telegraph, the voice of the neo-conservatives light of the UK, whinning about the BBC (which has reported widely about US relief efforts as well as problems that have ensued in both Indonesia an Tamil controlled Sri Lanka).

      Quelle surprise.
    • That is blatantly not true. I was watching BBC News 24 for long periods following the Tsunami and there were constant reports about the US resorces being moved into the area, this included plenty of coverage of what those resources consisted of and how useful the helicopters would be to the relief effort.

      I don't know who Christopher Brooker ( the journalist ) is but I think he must have some axe to grind.

      Also I don't actually know anyone who thinks the BBC has any kind of Anti American bias.
  • Would be better if we if we had a high-speed wireless network using WiFi phones . An alternative to cellphones is needed. We could construct one if we could contsruct cheap broadcast towers . I am not sure on distance of WiFi though .
    • The problem with WiFi is that it's short range. To get coverage, you have to link many sites together. In a disaster, many of your sites go dead and suddenly you have holes in your routing infrastructure and you lose end-to-end connectivity. A long-range technology that can communicate to a disaster area, while itself being located outside of the disaster area, would probably be more effective.

      In fact, cellphones have longer range than WiFi. That makes cellphones better and WiFi worse in a disaster situati
      • WiFi can be longer range . Look up Mesh WiFi.

        A temporary WiFi like Cell tower could be very portable and doesn't have to be stationary but could be on a van.

        Ham , wifi and Cellphone are all just radio waves and all have different strengths but in my opinion the one that uses the airwaves most efficiently and can be setup fast and repaired quickly is probably WiFi.

  • It's not the internet that's important, it's communication. My question is, is all this mass communication helping us as a race or conditioning us to get our answers from outside ourselves, making us so dependent on it that we can no longer think for ourselves? Am I the only one who has noticed the decline in the quality of modern writing in contrast to the writings of, say, the 19th century?

  • The old quote still holds... (Score:4, Informative)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:59PM (#11316478)
    The internet views a block as an outage and routes around it.

    While working in Tokyo when the 'LGQ' (7.8) hit in the South, the only way people could get messages out was by the 'net - this was in the mid-90's.

  • Warning systems are useful... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheOriginalRevdoc ( 765542 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:01PM (#11316498) Journal
    ...but nowhere near as useful as educating people.

    For example, in the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, the earthquake that triggered the tsunami on December 26 just about flattened everything. Now, many people who live by the sea in earthquake-prone areas know that large eathquakes can trigger tsunami, so it's prudent to head for higher ground, warning or not. However, in Banda Aceh, that didn't occur to anybody, and when the tsunami hit, everybody was in town, cleaning up after the quake.

    So just explaining to people along the coast that they should head for higher ground after any major quake would save a lot more lives than a warning system.

    (Interestingly, the sea gypsies in the region suffered few casualties from the tsunami, because they knew from their folklore that when the sea suddenly receded a long way, it was going to come back, and fast. So at the first sign of the approaching tsunami, they headed for the hills.)
    • I saw a couple of videos on the news here that just serve to underline your point.

      One video was done by a German guy who was at the beach with his family (in Thailand, I think). The kid is splashing in the water, etc. All of a sudden, the water's gone, pulled back out to sea. The guy with the camera is amazed, and is talking about how fast the water went out, etc. He's actually walking around on the newly-uncovered beach talking about how interesting this phenomenon is. At this point, I was sorely tempted

  • There is no substitute for being there. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Strong local men who care and are willing to use their muscle to deliver the goods, clear the way. Talk about the merits of email in this endeavour are just silly.

  • Has anyone else thought about how hard it must be to look for someone after a disaster such as this? There are many blogs [blogspot.com] and other sites where people have posted messages, but AFAIK no attempt has been made to centralise and co-ordinate this.

    I can see one very good value-for-money project being to establish a universal people registry, using various characteristics (location, physical features, photo, DNA, itinery, etc.). There are lots of extensions to this people could think up, but the most important

    • thaivisa.com had a forum ( http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showforum= 57 )up and running very quickly which allowed people to post pictures and names of people who they could not contact and forum members in the area were able to attempt to help them. Also links to sites with data on injured or dead people set up by the government were posted as they came up. This has created a good resource for people searching for information on relatives or friends.
    • The problem with centralization is that it inspires turf wars and stomps on innovation (I guess that is a political philosophical statement, but I find it's mostly true in my view of the world).

      That's what's so great about a search engine (e.g., pick your favorite like google), they crawl the web so you can find the nooks and crannies like the blogs that have the messages you are talking about. Why create something new and a new bureaucracy (which after this crisis is over will search out totally random a

  • Ironic (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    isn't it Ironic that the IT world can do nothing more than create a "virtual conference" from "bloggers", neither of which most of the tsunami victims would ever know about, even before the disaster?

  • Another question (Score:2, Insightful)

    by adeydas ( 837049 )
    A bit offtopic but I would like to ask this question to fellow /. readers anyway. Technology no doubt has helped in the relief efforts but had technology really helped in preventing parts of the disaster. For instance, more lives could have been saved if the people in the coastal villages would have heard the warning issued by the government. Unfortnately, these poor people didn't have the money to buy a radio or TV. So isn't it economical reforms that should come first?!

  • Great idea!!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See, for the tsunami early warning system thing, we should just put a link up on the main page here.

    WE CAN /. THE TSUNAMI!

    That'll teach the bugger!

  • I thought that had something to do with Bush and Iraq...

  • WiFi Airship Hubs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They seem to be immune to most quake-related disasters. These could be dispatched where communication lines are down, and even in non-disaster areas they could be used as competition to the cable and phone lines.
    • A constellation of LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites would be operational all the time, there wouldn't be a lag time between disaster and deployment.

      Like say, Inmarsat or Iridium. :)
    • Of course, the base stations would be a bit vulnerable, but they will be less numerous in a airship scenario and therefore it will be cheaper to make the telecom infrastructure virtually indestrutible from acts of God.
  • Just thought I'd plug my company.

    I work for Intelsat, a satellite communications provider. They are providing free satellite service to the UN for establishing field offices.

  • Connecting families (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Midnight Warrior ( 32619 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @11:54PM (#11317535) Homepage

    In every distaster, be it a natural disaster like this one, or refuge camps from civil war, the NGOs which run the aid efforts must use some sort of software. The classic problem appears to be connecting families. If I were a relief worker (and I've never been one), I think the best software would provide:

    • Short video clip saying their name, village name, and names of parents and children (if any).
    • Local dialects spoken, unicode records of their names (I imagine most refuges are illiterate and workers must guess at their names), and any relatives whose names they can spell.
    • Also, GIS coordinates of their original home, if available, would be helpful. This really could be as simple as finding a village name and recording that, or if they gave you an address in a city.
    • Still frame, mug shot that facial recognition software could compare against photos provided by family members, if they become available. (hint: use facial recognition where false alarms don't get people arrested, but rather are welcomed)
    • Some sort of indexing system that could operate over low bandwidth, like what might be available over HAM radio. Treat the file on a refugee like a BitTorrent link and as one person at another site gets the records from other sites, cached copies start appearing around the mesh of camps speeding up the search process as time drags on.
    • Except for the video capture, don't have extensive hardware and software requirements (read high cost per terminal)
    • Give each person an RFID bracelet so that refuge workers can find people quickly. If the camp gets raided, people can tear off their bracelets, or if they get relocated, they just need to check in and their demographics are copied to the local camp.
    • Let a relative looking for the lost open a case and now it becomes a question of data mining and the application of existing tools.
    • Relatives looking for lost people could indicate the approximate location, the language the person(s) speak, and letter sequences known to be in the person's name]
    • People who lived there that could effectively communicate with aid workers could assist in correctly spelling names and addresses, making the need for translations to occur only once.

    Okay. I know I'm dreaming, but all this stuff can be done with real databases that support blobs, and torrent links aren't that hard to index. Drop facial recognition into a central facility (say the NGO headquarters) and they can issue recommendations for people to hook up. Heck, make it a Knoppix-like live-CD where the local HD is for cache and data acquisition, and building a reliable workstation is a piece of cake - distribute CDs and replace broken hardware quickly and efficiently.

    Have any NGOs really looked into starting open-source projects to do these kinds of things or do they already have adequate tools of their own? Anybody have any insight? (they're all probably in the Pacific right now)

    I say open-source because NGOs are not in competition for anything except money, and sometimes not even then. Given a uniform software base, they could work together and participate much more uniformly and thus speed the disaster relief efforts all that much more. Add the cost of running open-source and the myriad of commercial vendors looking for a piece of the action (not all will be as generous as ESRI is for now) will be numerous. Open source is the only way to keep the cost down, and the NGO could still pay someone to develop this software, but agree to keep the work in the open.

  • Not exactly new media or the Internet, however a friend of mine was in Phuket when the waves hit - fortunately he was located in a bungalow perched on a hill and witnessed the event unfold.

    Remembering a couple of his friends were in Krabbe, a little more to the east, he called them on their mobile. They fortunately answered and he warned them about some serious waves heading their direction. This gave his mates a few extra seconds to get their shit together before the connection was broken. They did surviv

  • I AM Alive and other victim registration systems (Score:3, Informative)

    by Raindeer ( 104129 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @03:01AM (#11318624) Homepage Journal
    One of the largest problems I currently see is in the area of victim and missing registration. I wrote twice about it in my blog [blogspot.com]. I first made the following analysis: Like everybody I am following the news on the tsunami and I noticed a couple of things that got me thinking. After a disaster there are generally two major questions that need to be answered. 1. Who survived, got injured, died, is missing? 2. What relief is needed, where and who provides it?

    To answer the first question there are two systems that I found with a bit of googling: A Japanese group has build a system.
    Their presentation to ETSI can be found here [etsi.org]. It has a great name: I Am Alive [iaa-alliance.net]. This system seems to be currently in use by the Thai governement and Red Cross.

    The Australian governement has a system which is described here [redcross.org.au]by the Red Cross which is using it. The system is called the National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS).

    I have seen the results of the the I Am Alive-system and it looks like an
    excellent system. It would be great if they could get some global support to further develop this system. At this moment it seems only Japan is working on this system and a quick search on Google didn't point too many English language pages on the system. I'll see if I can find some information on it.

    I imagine every ministery of Interior, or government emergency response organisation should have a copy always ready and available on a webserver. So whenever there is a disaster this system is already running and can be used to register all the countries nationals potentially involved and can then later be used to compare these data with the records of the country affected. Maybe the United Nations Reliefweb website could be used as a basis.

    The United Nations Reliefweb is also a great resource on all kinds of relief efforts and it gives good information on what kind of resources and people are nescessary.
  • Several organizations of the Sri Lankan IT industry, along with the Lanka Software Foundation [opensource.lk] and Lanka Linux User Group [linux.lk] have worked around the clock for the last couple of weeks to create a set of applications to manage the Tsunami recovery program (URL not given to avoid being slashdotted). We made them Free [gnu.org] and Open Source [opensource.org] from the beginning, and most of the code are already in SourceForge [sourceforge.net].
  • In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake telephone service went down but the InterNet stayed up for communication and exchange of seismic data. This quake was two orders of magnitude smaller and only killed fifty-some people, but was plenty scary to us caught in it.
    Fortunately Silicon Valley itself was in a seismic "dead spot" and its dangerous bay-fill soils did not collapse. Santa Cruz, right next to the hypocenter, experienced direct shaking damage. And parts of San Francisco and Oakland where at distances

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