popular logistics

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.

NYSERDA (the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) and the federal government have been testing a remote sensing system on Bridge 1027260. Like Jean Valjean, this bridge has no name. And you can tell that it’s not in New York City, because if it were here, the City Council, whose power is limited to the power to name public objects and thoroughfares - might have already named each lane and approach ramp.

Professor Kerop Janoyan and a team of graduate students from Clarkson University have been monitoring their equipment from a work barge near the bridge. (Since they seem to be working on an exposed, unheated barge, perhaps the bridge and its appurtenances should be named for them. Popular Logistics will send a correspondent in person to any naming ceremony).

We learned about this from Matthew Wald’s piece in the Times:

This suggests an exceptional organizational agility. Ellen Perlman of Governing.com has this piece, “Crazy Cool in L.A./A fire department taps into microblogging to keep itself on top of situations,” published in the November 2006 issues of Governing magazine.

Last May, Los Angeles firefighters had their hands full. A blaze was spreading through 800 acres of Griffith Park but they only knew what was happening from the side of the fire where their trucks were parked. To get a sense of the extent of the conflagration, firefighter Brian Humphrey sent messages to strangers on the other side of the fire — explaining who he was and asking them to call him right away.

How did he know whom to contact? Humphrey twitters.  

Laurence Gonzalez, the author of the new book Deep Survival, has a piece in the on-line edition of National Geographic Adventure. From “How to Survive (Almost) Anything,”

Accidents of all types used to be analyzed in terms of their physical or mechanical causes. When the cause was clearly human error, they were often written off as the result of foolishness or lack of training. But among those who investigate accidents, there is an increasing awareness that this type of analysis does not fully explain why otherwise rational people do what may seem irrational.

For example, in May 1989, Lynn Hill, the winner of more than 30 international rock-climbing titles, was preparing to climb what she called a “relatively easy” route in Buoux, France. She threaded her rope through her harness, but then, instead of tying her knot, she stopped to put on her shoes. While she was tying them, she talked with another climber, then returned to climb the rock face. “The thought occurred to me that there was something I needed to do before climbing,” she later recalled, but, “I dismissed this thought.” She climbed the wall, and when she leaned back to rappel to the ground, she fell 72 feet (22 meters), her life narrowly saved by tree branches. In her case, more training would not have helped. In fact, experience contributed to her accident. She had created a very efficient model for tying her rope to her harness. She could do it without thinking. So the act of tying her shoes may have been similar enough to tying her rope that it allowed her to reach the unconscious conclusion that her rope was tied, even while leaving a slight residue of doubt.