The Longest Now

Everyone seems to think that developing tools around people’s daily
lives, on cleverly-designed platforms, is the Answer to lots of things
– the next iPod/computer/phone, new PCs for people in China’s urban
households, etc.

It doesn’t sound terribly innovative to me; am I just a stick in the
mud?  How can anyone get excited about a PC-like platform when
there’s some real innovation being done for $100 PCs that torally
rethinks many layers in the development and distribution of
computing?  Not that I think the $100 PC is the be-all or end-all
of what target consumers really need…  I’m foolish enough to
think that most things that end-users really need doesn’t get developed
at all.  A completely silly suggestion, I know.

Stewart Butterfield, asked about his role models, mentioned a few people who had inspired and guided him, including Wittgenstein, which philosophical bad boy was acrobatically allmost connected directly to Flickr. 
And to all you playboys and social barnacles out there : throwing fancy
dinner parties and making political connections will be the end of your
creativity and great ideas.  The audience was full of
Flickr’philes.

And Tracey Ho, as understated as she is hot, admits that despite believing she would spend her live in civil service
in Singapore, and doing just that after college, she came back around
to academia and was lured back to MIT and now Caltech.  It was
good to see the civil service come up as an important life-choice
option among these young stars.

The ‘late show with our moderator’ format didn’t work perfectly, but it
brought out a lighter side of the TR35 members and helped make the
awards ceremony more than just a show.

This afternoon’s panel on the resurgence of interest in Nuclear Power
got off to a quiet enough start; but climaxed in a few emotional
exchanges among its five panelists shortly before the end. 

An embarrassingly rough transcript (as usual, better
ones to come) is online.  A quick summary
: big power gorups are conflicted; both trying to support their existing
power investments and trying to pursue nuclear and other options
without taking on more risk than necessary.  Few energy activists
(or policy-makers in the right gov’t offices!) have the money or
authority to put their necks out, even when they feel they know the
right technical steps to make.

The big point that noone picked up was nuclear education :
how to educate the public about nuclear power; something which hasn’t
happened well.  This is also one place where Wikipedia-style
projects could help immensely… There wasn’t enough interest in the
panelist fesponses to tell how much if any they would care for such a
development.

I’m blogging from MIT’s Emerging Technology conference. Earlier today,
there were some great keynotes and a remarkable panel on innovation; a
full report on those to come. Up next: a panel on Nuclear-Power Comeback, featuring support from former opponent (and personal hero) Stewart Brand.

Blogging from the Emerging Tech conference @ MIT …

Presroi has a new section for notes on lexicons around the world : Category-lexika
He also recently gave a well-received talk to a group of European KM mavens… let me see if I can post a link to the presentation.

Lexica and you …

It’s better than talking down to people.  Short uninformative
announcements that avoid the real issues may work as patches to
problems, but they avoid the heart of matters

Safest… hmmm.  Everyone should go visit John Conwell on Valerie Street in Bellaire to see a little well-conceived safety. (via Dan Feldstein)

Schools to open again next Wednesday – what a long vacation! – and airports to start reopening by Sunday.

Startup school : Coming this October 15th to a Science Center near you.  Sign up early if you want to come in person!

More from the startup school collective …

Our persimmons in Houston
are heavy, and fall off in the slightest gust of wind. Any serious
storm is enough to ruin the year’s crop. None fell off this morning; it
was just like a strong thunderstorm. 
Elsewhere : sporadic trees and branches were down elsewhere in the
city, with a localized gust of 70mph; one high-rise lost a few windows; 300,000
are without electricity.

Galveston,
too, was largely untouched.  East Texas had it worst; but Beaumont
escaped destruction.  No towns were flattened, or even mauled;
though some houses lost roofs and some buildings suffered heavy damage.

On the other hand, there was extensive highway gridlock,
with people on the roads for over 24 hours; some deaths from
heatstroke, many people running out of gas b/c of the stalled traffic
and leaving on their A/C in the 100-degree heat. I wonder if people used up the breakdown lanes…  Yesterday at
6pm, there were still people stranded on the road w/o gas, despite many
locals (in addition to official FEMA efforts) making sorties to bring gas and food to those poor souls.  Here is a typical evac experience from Dwight.

The
unofficial evacuation orders were too broad (‘everyone in the hundred
year flood plain!’), too thorough (‘everyone get out of the city’
rather than ‘everyone get to higher ground’), and too individualist
(‘everyone to his/her own car!’).

The standard evac orders were fine — here is the canonical Galveston/Houston evacuation map.
Note that even the “C” evacuation zones, for Category 4/5 hurricanes,
only come into Houston as far as the East 610 Loop (to which point the
ship channel extends).  However,

• The orders were also amazingly persistent :  ‘ALTHOUGH
  TRAFFIC HAS BEEN HEAVY AS THE TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT PLAN HAS BEEN
  IMPLEMENTED…TRAFFIC MOVEMENT SHOULD ACCELERATE. DO NOT LET THE
  TRAFFIC DELAYS HALT YOUR EFFORTS TO EVACUATE.’ was repeated a few
  times, even after the originally hoped-for acceleration didn’t happen.
• Complementary orders were not given (if you are in the following safe zones, STAY OFF THE HIGHWAY)
• “Evacuation” was not well-defined.  Do you have to drive 3
  hours out of the city?  Is it enough to get to places within city
  limits, where there is much more highway space?
• Extra mandatory evacuation orders were made up on the fly. 
  Whoops!  The mayor has tried to write it off as a slip of the
  tongue, but many officials made it.   “If you live in a
  flood-prone area…” — Houston, Pearland, and others issued such
  warnings.  Since the 2001 flood affected many areas that had never
  flooded before, this worried many people who had nothing to fear from
  flooding thanks to Rita… the city had been parched for two weeks, and
  its bayous were empty.

When you tell people to stop trusting their own judgment and to
trust yours, you suddenly have an enormously greater responsibility to
care for them…

• Metasjases (Blogger)
• The longest now
• LiveJournal
• WordPress
• Metaprojects (wiki)
• Wikipdia (wiki)
• 2 more…

I am amazed by the number of people who think that a perfectly acceptable response to an emergency is disruptive, individual flight.  I can think of a number of positive responses to emergencies, but this is an entirely negative one. Roads jammed with uncoordinated traffic
and hotels overwhelmed in the absence of coordination; people
struggling alone to cope with traumatic decisions — what a gray joke.

A few positive alternatives:

• Individually : stay and
  prepare when at all possible.  Start preparing at the first sign
  of possible trouble — at the neighborhood level — if you’re one of
  those people who thinks this is possible.  If you are trained for
  emergency response, make sure the local response offices know how to
  reach you.  The well-prepared New Orleans residents on high ground
  who insisted on staying long after the whole city was evacuated —
  there should be more such people, not fewer.  This requires education and preparation ahead of time; teaching citizens how to preserve themselves and their things through a tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood, drought, heat wave, mud slide, or electrical/oil/water/food shortage. 
  Teaching citizens how to help their neighborhood in these events; what
  organizations to contact and how during the aftermath; how to identify
  and shelter affected survivors.  It would be worth a great deal
  for one family in each small neighborhood to be well and truly prepared
  to ride out a disaster.

  And this business of stores and people ‘running out’ of key supplies in
  the run-up to every disaster gets old fast.  In the first place,
  each neighborhood should maintain a decent supply of these
  staples.  In the second, if Wal*Mart can figure out how to alert
  their suppliers to up production every time there’s a sale, surely
  cities can find a way to alert the usual suspects every time there’s an
  impending disaster-alert.

• Gathering together for shared action;
  by block, neighborhood, or district.  Thursday and Friday are days
  off?  Great.  Have a local neighborhood meeting Wednesday
  night to discuss plans and options.  Where are the nearby bunkers
  and reinforced buildings?  Where would there be food, water, and
  shade for a week-long holdout?  Where can people bring cars and
  belongings that need better protection from the elements than their own
  rooms afford?  Oh, you don’t have a way to contact everyone in the
  neighborhod on short notice… noone responsible for maintaining
  contact numbers for everyone and organizing such meetings?  Better get on that then.

• Gathering together for shared flight.  Tell everyone to share vehicles; at least three to a car and six to a van.  Give direction,
  train citizens how to respond quickly and effectively.  Make
  contact with all neighbors; don’t bring more than two bags with you for
  safe-keeping — leave them with a protected depot, or secure them at
  home, depending on where you live.  Coordinate the use of large
  trucks, buses, and vans; reimburse owners for transporting
  people.  Promote central message-boards for ride-shares and shared
  floor-space in nearby cities.  Open nearby halls and other
  facilities for short-term emergency occupants.  Encourage people
  to stay as close-by as possible.  Expecting
  people to take refuge in hotels and find transport via rental cars and
  scheduled buslines in times of disaster is a disaster in itself.

• Helpful city responses.  Recruit
  a few thousand short-term staff from the ranks of the trained
  citizens.  Don’t have enough of those whom you trust?  Start
  a national emergency reserve program asap.   Offer safe, guarded repositories
  for belongings.  Provide guards for such repositories, and for
  sensitive or priceless areas such as hospitals and museums and those
  reinforced hotels/halls being used as shelters.  Do not double-book these guards; this
  is a full-time job.  Are people starved for food or water? 
  Set up ration lines.  This is one of your primary duties while
  people remain in the area.  Are half-destroyed stores and
  pharmacies vulnerable to looting?  Gather key goods in an orderly
  fashion, to distribute or preserve them.  Are there armed people
  wandering the streets?  Give them something useful to do, a
  partner, and proper gear.  No spare gear for such
  situations?  Better get on that, then.
  

In 1870, Indianola, Texas
was growing rapidly; a coastal town with 5,000 inhabitants.  Then
in 1975 it suffered the first of two massive storms, killing hundreds
and flattening the city.  It was rebuilt; but a second storm in
1886 caused residents to give it up altogether.  Today, thanks to
storm erosion, most of the original city is underwater.

In 1900, Galveston
had enjoyed even greater growth without disaster.  It had a
population of 42,000.  The city had worried about facing the same
fate as Indianola, but as decades passed without any serious storms at
all, some experts (including then-director of the Galveston Weather Bureau, Isaac Cline) suggested that hurricanes “could not” hit Galveston, for one reason or another.

That fall, an unnamed hurricane swept through town, killing around
8,000 people and flattening the city.  There were communication
problems back then… bridges and telegraph lines were cut, making it
hard to send messages to the mainland.  Once messengers did
arrive, they had a great deal of bureaucracy to negotiate, despite the
extraordinary damage.

When rescuers arrived, they found thousands dead, instead. 
Funeral pyres were set up all around the city, and burned for
weeks. 

Since then, over the following century, the city has built up a 17-foot
high seawall, and raised the city some 4-5 meters with dredged
sand.  The seawall itself has become a tourist attraction, and
hotels and other tourist sites have been built along its length…
buildings along the main Galveston Strand are marked to indicate they
survived the hurricane.  So far, this has sufficed…

Losing to nature

The pending storm produced by Hurricane Rita
boasts sea surges of over 30 feet (some have suggested 50), making the
seawall seem rather slender protection.  Galveston has built out
towards the water, not back away from it; and the whole city has fled
before the potential disaster. 

If history is any indicator, it will take another storm of similar size to change anyone’s habitation habits.  But perhaps architects and developers will learn to be more respectful to nature in laying out groundplans and designing seaside retreats.

The Galveston Hurricane of 2005 …

Hurricane Rita is apporaching the Gulf Coast, and will hit land somewhere between Texas’s Corpus Christi and New Orleans. 
Galveston, one of the country’s largest ports (New Orleans was the
largest), is the most vulnerable target, despite its protections
against normal storms.  Parts of Houston are also at risk, and the
early evacuation of Houston has lead to much of the clogging of roads
in southeast Texas.

The GFDL (an acronym for “Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory“),
is one of the key modern hurricane path-predicting models.  It is
a “limited-area baroclinic” model developed specifically for hurricane
prediction, including convective, radiative
and boundary layer parameterizations.  It makes special allowance
for
initializing the storm circulation.

GFDL is a ‘late‘ model, meaning that it is run with hard data, and not
with interpolations from earlier data… as of 10pm last night, the GFDL had Rita passing through central Houston and veering west once it comes level with Fort Worth.

GFDL places Rita directly over central Houston …

As of 6pm CST tonight, mandatory evacuations are in effect for “Zone A”
of Harris County.  Mandatory evacuations of Zones B and C will
follow as of 6am tomorrow. (notice)

Our house in Houston falls under the ‘suggested evacuation’ list, because it is in a low-lying area.

Rita is getting progressively stronger — currently
passing over a warm-water region that fed the last surge in Katrina’s
strength — and likely to exceed expectations of its strength.  See Jeff Master’s weather blog for more depressing coverage. 

And freenode is relocating, too; hopefully a temporary business.

Houston evacuation begins …

From Deborah Elizabeth Finn, encyclopedic thoughts and a rec for a non-profit banner-ad generator.

Finnish delight …

Boston is host to the New England KM Cluster;
the next gathering is two weeks from now in Waltham.  The lineup
this time around is heavy with Berkman regulars, including both
Weinberger (as mentioned the other day) and Bill Ives. 

For those of you missing the good old days : Cesar Brea will be there too…  And .LRN, the prodigal child of OpenACS, always on the lookout for more pseudopods to grow, is represented there by Al Essa, covering “The Future of IT and Knowledge Networks“. 

See the full speaker list
online… not listed : yours truly, who will be causing trouble from
the safety of the audience.  Thanks to organizer John Maloney for
tipping me off to the event.  What I still want to know : where
are all the great KM systems of 1998?  Maybe I’ll find out…

Clusters of Knowledge …

Timeless footage from last week: Keith Olbermann steps back from his normal perspective and delicately eviscerates federal leaders over their responses to Katrina.

And, crass but still almost as cathartic, here’s the ill will press on the subject. 

Every city needs its own wiki; a single repository
for community information on its history, culture, landmarks and
ongoing events.  Arlington, for instance, needs its own
wiki.  The existing “Arlington Wiki” is dormant, part of a top-down Live from Arlington site.  On the other hand, the Arlington mailing list is active and the town is full of tech-savvy (and history-loving) people.

I brought up the idea tonight at the monthly meeting of a technical
advisory group.  I hope I didn’t offend anyone by suggesting that
a push-only website wasn’t the perfect model for an information
portal.  The “Citizen Needs” section of the seven-section Needs
Assessment the tech advisors carried out this past summer was voided,
rolled into the Town Website group… people decided that any citizen
needs would be covered by improved website design. 

Other citizen needs I can imagine :

• the need for a place to post important citizen-to-citizen town announcements,
• the need for a way to send public comments
  to the town (that others can see, add to, comment on) — this is being
  taken care of via the selection of a “customer response management:”
  tool (is that the acronym?),
• the need for a collaborative, up-to-date city calendar
• the need for better, more accessible archives of town data – property, legislative, judicial, executive
• the need for public schedules and timelines
  for important ongoing tasks.  Example : the Arlington cemetery
  plots are expected to fill up in 10 years.  A number of
  representatives from the cemetery came to the Selectmen’s meeting on
  Monday to mention this, and point out that we should start thinking now
  about how to proceed in 5 years so we don’t run up against a real
  crunch.  This had apparently been brought up previosly, perhaps 5
  years ago, with no progress since… It is not enough
  to see a three-line summary of this request in the meeting minutes —
  there should be a timeline and suggestion-repository, updated whenever
  the relevant groups make progress towards the goal of finding a place
  to expand, which can be followed this year, next year, and for the
  coming decade… keeping track of each revision of any public documents
  and proposals involved.
• the need for a good collaborative annotated map of the city — both at the present time and at key moments in history.  (For inspiration, see the Wikipedia project on geographical coordinates.)

Note that in each of these cases — as, indeed, in the case of the town
website itself — the services and information above could be provided
by third parties, asking for information independently and sharing it
with the world; not officially on government servers or part of a
government project.    But it makes a lot of sense for
the town government to directly provide,  facilitate, or cheerlead
such efforts, if for no other reason than that they are an important
part of a thriving community.  .

Arlington Wiki …