Author Archives: Jon

DiRT Wiki – (Digital Resource Tools)

Via Wide Aperture, we learn of the Digital Research Tools wiki. While the focus is for academics – the fact is that – apart from footnote style – everything else is has application outside academia.

Part of our mission is to develop/identify a “best practices” tool set for disaster planning – particularly community-based groups. So usability, interoperability, and price are critical variables. the DiRT Wiki is exceptionally well organized, and looks like a good place to look.

Thanks to Encyclopedia Braun for the link.

New Jersey Emergency Planning Advances, Incrementally

We’ll take incremental change over no change any time. And, to be fair, we don’t monitor state-level efforts consistently enough to track progress on a regular basis. Still, a “shout out” to the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management which has posted pdf maps for each county of local roads which lead to state roads which will be the principal routes for vehiclular evacuation. And which also points out that, at least in some communities, 911 can be reversed and used as an auto-dialer to phone and notify citizens. We don’t know how many calls it can make simultaneously – but since it’s digital – it’s likely to be scalable.

New Yorkers like to make fun of people “from Jersey” – but the fact is, our smaller neighbor is often an earlier innovator than the Empire State.

Access to "scholarly" articles without subscription

Via Academhack, a way around the “subscription walls” which sometimes appear to limit access to scholarly journals. GoogleSystem link here. We’re not talking about breaching the subscription wall – but copies of the same articles which have been placed in the public domain. We note that often these walls prevent the public from reading the results of research which has been supported or subsidized by public funds.

Academhacks is an outstanding site for software and information tools for students and educators – with a clear preference for low-cost/no-cost solutions. They’re probably radicals who believe in free public education.

MindMapping.org: mindmapping and other visual information tools

MindMapping.org tracks free, paid, online and desktop, mindmapping and information visualization tools (that, just about any visual representation other than GIS – geographic information systems). (SeeVisualComplexity for great examples of information visualization). Here’s their directory of available software, which I found extraordinarily easy to use.

We haven’t yet had a chance to test any of these, but we’ll certainly start at MindMapping.

CommunityPlanning.Net: promoting local involvement in environmental planning and management

Community Planning.net is an organization which promotes community planning not only for, but by communities. From their “about” page.

All over the world there is increasing demand from all sides for more local involvement in the planning and management of the environment. It is widely recognised that this is the only way that people will get the surroundings they want. And it is now seen as the best way of ensuring that communities become safer, stronger, wealthier and more sustainable.

But how should it be done? How can local people – wherever they live – best involve themselves in the complexities of architecture, planning and urban design? How can professionals best build on local knowledge and resources?

Over the past few decades, a wide range of methods has been pioneered in different countries. They include new ways of people interacting, new types of event, new types of organisation, new services and new support frameworks.

This website provides an overview of these new methods of community planning. It is aimed at everyone concerned with the built environment. Jargon is avoided and material is presented in a universally applicable, how-to-do-it style. Whether you are a resident wanting to improve the place where you live, a policy maker interested in improving general practice, or a development professional working on a specific project, you should quickly be able to find what you need.

We don’t know yet whether they view, as we do, environmental planning as the flip side of disaster risk reduction and mitigation, or how far outside of Europe they plan to operate. But they certainly seem to be an excellent resource.

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY IN SCOTLAND

Scotland has a large share of the EU’s not-as-yet captured wind, hydro, and tidal energy. Edinborough was the birthplace of Marine Current Turbines, MCT,

which develops turbines driven by tides and ocean currents. While it may seem counter-intuitive, Solar Hot Water heating works well despite the cloud cover. The Scottish Community and Householders Renewable Initiative, SCHRI, offers grants of up to 30% for installation of solar hot water heating systems. See also The Renewable Energy Centre and for a general laudatory discussion Renewable energy in Scotland – Wikipedia.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis on Social Networks

Excerpted from “Social Networks ,” by Nicholas Christakis on The Situationist Blog, which is a blog maintained by The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. The excerpt is long, but well worth reading. Let me first posit this question – why do some communities develop disaster-resilient networks and organizations – and others not?

In social networks, there is an interdigitation between the higher order structure and the lower order structure, which is remarkable, and which has been animating our research for the last five or ten years. I started by studying very simple dyadic networks. A pair of individuals is the simplest type of network one can imagine. And I became curious about networks and network effects in my capacity as a doctor who takes care of people who are terminally ill.

* * *

For example, one day I met with a pretty typical scenario: a woman who was dying and her daughter who was caring for her. The mother had been sick for quite a while and she had dementia. The daughter was exhausted from years of caring for her, and in the course of caring, she became so exhausted that her husband also became sick from his wife’s preoccupation with her mother. One day I got a call from the husband’s best friend, with his permission, to ask me about him. So here we have the following cascade: parent to daughter, daughter to husband, and husband to friend. That is four people — a cascade of effects through the network. And I became sort of obsessed with the notion that these little dyads of people could agglomerate to form larger structures.

Continue reading →

Adam Brown: political scientist/toolmaker

Entirely by happenstance – trying to find a WordPress plugin – we stumbled on the main website for Adam Brown, political scientist extraordinaire. For the geeks among our audience – he’s written WordPress plugins, a House (of representatives) elections predictor,  MediaWiki helper application, and more. Go look.

He’s also the creator of WikiSummary, the Social Science Summary Database, which summarizes academic political science publications.

Oh, and original research about voting, and other aspects of the political process. Interesting stuff.

Electric Vehicles – from EVAlbum.com

A fun visual reminder that electric vehicles, clearly an element of our clean energy future, are already a mature technology, both for those designed as electric vehicles  – and also for retrofits. Here’s a very small (and unreperesentative) sample grabbed from EVAlbum.com, which also has Classified ads , , FAQs and a generous set of categorized links – if you’re thinking about going electric, EVAlbum is a good place to start.

Sahana Talk – multidisciplinary blog

Sahana is an open-source disaster manament tool  – we’re hoping to get a copy on our servers for people to play with in short order. The link will be – sahana.popularlogistics.com (nb: we don’t even have a placeholder up yet).

In the meantime, however TalkSahana is a blog, heavy on user contributions – and just reading posts one can the attention to detail, complexity and difficulty of the database design problem they’ve undertaken.

Don’t Overpack

As S.L.A. Marshall observed shortly after the Second World War, minimizing the “soldier’s load” (literally what each individual soldier must carry) is a military technique which was learned – and sometimes forgotten and painfully re-learned as far back as the Roman Empire. From Army Field Manual 7-92, THE INFANTRY RECONNAISSANCE PLATOON AND SQUAD (AIRBORNE, AIR ASSAULT, LIGHT INFANTRY

), archived at  GlobalSecurity.org

, Section 8-8, Soldier’s Load:

8-8. SOLDIER’S LOAD

The soldier’s load is a crucial concern of the reconnaissance platoon leader. How much is carried, how far, and in what configuration are important mission considerations. The platoon leader should require soldiers to carry only mission-essential equipment. The reconnaissance platoon cannot be overloaded with equipment that covers all possible contingencies. The battalion supply system must be able to deliver contingency supplies. (For more information on load planning, calculating, and management, see FM 21-18.) (Techniques used to assist leaders and soldiers in organizing tactical loads to ensure safety and combat effective are discussed in Appendix D

.)

In other words, only so much can go in a go-bag. If you’re going to need more than that in a disaster, you need to plan further than the go-bag.

Aesthetically-pleasing anti-slip tape: Cool Tools

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools has spotted Aesthetically-pleasing anti-slip tape from Subhead Grip Stickers. While there are many brands of anti-slip tape, some variety in colors and some that also function as conspicuity tapes both bright and photoluminescent, Subhead makes them in cool colors and shapes. And if that makes more people use them where needed, it’ll make things safer and make the world a more beautiful place. Or make the world safer and moke some places and objects more attractive and at least a few worse. Because the possibilities with some of these shapes include aesthetic good and evil. Now it’s up to you.
From Subhead Premium Grip. Via Cool Tools.

Popular Logistics' Recommendations for Surgeon General, Secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Chief

Popular Logistics recommends that President Obama appoint Dr. Irwin Redlener as Surgeon Irwin Redlener, M.D.General, William Bratton as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Paul Maniscalco as the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We know all three to be men of intelligence and integrity. All three have strong records of leadership and delivering excellent service. Dr. Redlener and Chiefs Maniscalco and Bratton set a standard against which any nominee could be measured.

bill_bratton2.jpg

We urge that in regard to positions with national responsibility for disaster preparedness, comparison with the outgoing administration’s appointees – some with no experience at all – is useless. We’ve identified three experts with decades of experience taking responsibility for creating services where none existed, making dysfunctional systems Paul Maniscalcowork, and leading adequate organizations to excellence. We have no reservation entrusting our safety and welfare to any of them; indeed, we’re confident that, if appointed, America’s disaster and health prospects will be substantially improved.

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Daniel Bauen. "Instructables" – and the symbiosis of art and engineering

Given our cultural separations – “artists” in one place – “engineers” another – many of us – I’m guilty of this frequently – we forget how intertwined, and sometimes indistinguishable they are. Rather than make the general argument, check out Daniel Bauen, a young Atlanta-based maker and designer of things. You can look at his resume – and some brilliant pieces of work. If anyone thinks they can draw bright lines between the art and the engineering, we might have an interesting discussion. What’s beyond question is that he’s doing marvelous work. Beautiful, practical – and some so fun that I’m tempted to say that he’s a toymaker – who, in order to make what he makes – became an engineerand an artist in the process.

A motorized moving shade system for buildings – that is, roof-mounted solar panels move automatically in order to maximize shade and solar collection: (pictured left); A solar rock spinner – solar-powered when none one feels like pushing it around;

Bauen also – as a student – participated in the design of two bood-drawing devices one for pediatric and one for diabetics, designed to alleviate, if not  eliminate the pain of blood drawing.

There’s more at Daniel Bauen’a personal site and even more at his other site-  Engineerable. Continue reading →