popular logistics

Distributed Social Networking has immense potential as a disaster preparedness tool.  Particularly so if wireless mesh networks are part of our emergency communications systems - and if we assume that any likely emergency system in the United States will be, in most places, community-based rather than government-based. (There are, no question, some state and local governments which have effective systems in place. But FEMA: res ipsa loquitur). In that context we mention DiSo - a distributed social networking project which I found on Chris Messina’s site.

We think the formula - large network + actual local preparedness + redundant, resilient comms systems = equals network able to prepare, lobby, allocate resources and respond as needed. And, inevitably, build community en route.

Alexis Madrigal of ABCNews reports that Google - and its nonprofit branch, Google.org, will start tracking disease outbreaks.

A new website, HealthMap, addresses that challenge by siphoning up text from Google News, the World Health Organization and online discussion groups, then filtering it and boiling it down into mapped data that researchers — and the public — can use to track new disease outbreaks, region by region.

"There is so much information on the web about disease outbreaks but it’s obscured by garbage and noise," said John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of HealthMap.org. "The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one freely available resource."

The site’s free accessibility could be particularly important in the developing world, where poor public health infrastructure and lack of money has handicapped epidemiological efforts. That’s a problem because those regions are exactly where scientists predict new and dangerous diseases are likely to emerge.

HealthMap goes beyond the standard mashup and is more like a small-scale implementation of the long-awaited semantic web. The site, which the researchers describe in the latest issue of open access PLoS Medicine, creates machine-readable public health information from the text indexed by Google News, World Health Organization updates and online listserv discussions

Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money

Just read a remarkable piece on Network Weaving about hub-and-spoke networks. From Connected Customers:

[The author, Valdis Krebs, had discussed attending a professional conference at a hotel]. The only negative with the event was the conference hotel’s awful WiFi service — and their response to it.

Hotels are used to dealing with disconnected customers — hotel guests who do not know each other. They can tell these guests anything. Since most guests do not talk to each other, nothing is verified, no action is coordinated.  In terms of social network analysis: the hotel staff spans structural holes between the guests — occupying the power position in the network. Below is a network map of the situation. The centralized hotel staff are shown by the blue node in the middle, while hotel guests are represented by the green nodes. The green nodes only talk to the blue node and not to each other.

When INSNA arrived, the hotel guests were no longer disconnected — many people in INSNA know each other and after initial greetings started to talk.

The conversation soon went to the lack of connectivity in the hotel — no one could get a connection out of the hotel to the internet. Not only did everyone discover they were having the same bad experience, but they discovered they were receiving the same lie from the hotel staff — “everything is fine, no one else is complaining”. Being lied to made “being disconnected” all the more infuriating.

Soon “emergent clusters” of INSNA members went to the front desk as small groups and started demanding better service — after all we were being charged for WiFi. The front desk manager became overwhelmed by the coordinated action and soon went into hiding and refused to talk about the topic. A network illustration of the connected INSNA hotel guests looks different. Because the green nodes are talking to each other and coordinating a strategy, the big blue node is now more constrained in it’s response, and ability to act.

There are lots of differences between these two structures: the latter structure looks more like Paul Baran’s description of a resilient network: redundant, decentralized. The first structure is entirely vulnerable to attack of the central node - and, under the circumstances Krebs describes, was incapable both of self-diagnosis and self-repair.

My apologies for not having the Paul Baran citations at hand - perhaps I’ll get an update in later - but for the nonce, am happy to send interested readers to Network Weaving; the proprietors also run OrgNet, and make InFlow network analysis software.

I wonder, if we did a network analysis of survivors of, say Katrina, what connectedness characteristics matter.

Ben at MagnetBox - a keen observer of information arrays and streams - reports on Everyblock.com and its new special reports about more complex geographically-related data:

We’ve launched our first EveryBlock “special report” — an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation “Operation Crooked Code.”

As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We’ve been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we’ve been building the site, we’ve come across a number of types of information that don’t exactly fit the EveryBlock mold.

We’ll interrupt this excerpt here to point out that this tool might be of particular use to groups like the Disaster Accountability Project - particularly with decentralized efforts like its  Disaster Accountability Monitor and Blogger network.

For example, an architectural group named “Chicago 7 Most Endangered Buildings” in January. That’s geographically relevant news (i.e., if you live near one of those endangered buildings, you’d likely be interested in knowing about it), but because it’s such a “one-off” type of information, we haven’t done anything with it on EveryBlock. It didn’t make much sense to add such a relatively obscure type of information to our list of news types.

From the EveryBlock blog.

Via Magnetbox.

According to Science Daily,

Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other.

Clover plants can warn each other via a network of runners. (Credit: Image courtesy of Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research)

David Stephenson , who has done outstanding work on the issues which concern Popular Logistics, has noticed that in a report using 23 criterai to evaluate the Department of Homeland Security, GAO entirely omits the promotion and recruitment of citizen responders.

Here’s Stephenson’s post.  I’m now not sure if reading this particular GAO report is worth the candle.

I regret not earlier posting about Stephenson’s important piece, written with Eric Bonabeau, Expecting the Unexpected: : The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, published in the Homeland Security Affairs Journal.

Our position on citizen response is this - any plan that doesn’t regard citizen response as central might contain useful tactics - but we submit that no such plan conceivably constitutes a useful strategy. 

We’ve run across the blog of one Ryan Lanham - another guy smart enough that you’re happy he’s a good guy. Which he manifestly seems to be. We’ll describe him here as a nouvelle social scientist - because we don’t know which flavor of social scientist he is for formal purposes.

Here’s Ryan Lanham’s wikipedia entry .

And his blog, Identity Unknown

We came across Mr. Lanham’s blog because we’re looking at open-source software solutions for emergency management - and he’s part of - or connected to - the group that’s been developing Sahana, an open-source NGO emergency-management application.

There are automobiles - more than one model - that have been tested in New York as taxis and police cars. We’re perversely proud that our streets are too barbaric for civilized cars. (Is it just me that feels this way?)

We’re hoping, of course, that  Sahana won’t crumble under the pressure of hypothetical Brooklyn emergencies. But we’re going to test it -

as well as SUMA   - a similar (in purpose) open-source application which is available via the Pan American Health Organization.

The NPMS Public Viewer  generates maps of gas and “hazardous liquid” pipelines.

We’ve yet to sort out the definitions (precisely what “gas” and “hazardous liquid” mean), the map viewer (you see we haven’t provided a sample map), and what’s in the restricted access database (the main page provides for government and contractor login - it may just be for submissions).

Check back for more on this. Anyone who knows their way around .asp applications - and how we can export images - we’d be happy to have some assistance.

I’ve just stumbled on a site called Visual Complexity. About information design and networks. This may be further proof of Edward Tufte’s proposition that evidence, clearly and honestly arranged, ends up being beautiful.

This image was created by Valdis Krebs of Orgnet- via Visual Complexity

Careful readers may note - correctly - that I’ve yet to demonstrate the connection between our blog’s stated concerns and this post. Stay tuned.