sj's Longest Now [v.1]

The size of downloads has been increasing at a record clip. 
Downloads have been growing in size since the inception of the
concept… today I direct your attention to Wikipedia and Wikimedia
downloads.  Unavailable as torrents, but rather only via http, the
full downloads at 2+GB each are unwieldy even for people who run
downloads over their broadband connections at night while they
sleep.  Is WP dump size growing faster than avergae pipe
throughput to homes and workplaces?  (yes)  What can be done
about this? 

How about… shipping hard drives to people who want them?  Guaranteed 5-day delivery; for a reasonable fee (perhaps $80 for a drive + shipping + overhead?)…

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.

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.

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.
  

I suppose that should be refined to “as long as we can choose what routes our traffic
takes…” — that is, which peers, what types of lines and routers, perhaps even what
last-mile providers.    It should be possible to say “if
there’s no way to send the following content along routes I trust,
don’t send it.” 

You don’t have to be paranoid to want this.  You might distrust a
route because you expect it to attempt to reconstruct, alter, and
resend content; because you suspect it of not accepting content from
certain areas or sites, because you worry that it keeps track of what
you send when, without your permission…  You might not want to
send content through any router that doesn’t respect the “return
receipt” flag which sends back information on how your packets
travelled on their way to a destination. Or you might just not want to
support in any way certain traffic providers, explicitly asking to
patronize other providers whenever possible.

Implementing this would seem to take significantly more intelligent routers and middleware than currently exists.
   
For a great coverage of some of the topics brought up at the Web of Ideas discussion tonight, see Geoff Huston‘s killer essay on the finance of networks, with its diversity of options laid out in gory detail.

Standards are sexy.  Reuniting families is sexier.  PFIF is worth the time it takes to read it.
In use by the grassroots Katrina PeopleFinder project [Katrina help wiki | search for refugees here).

Public lists of “ways to help” with Katrina relief : a
retrospective.   Below are a collection of links from the
past weeks, and some public timelines.  How to do better next
time?  Is a “Disaster 2.0” effort the answer?

• A rather comprehensive list from Doxy.
• A remote analysis from WP.
• 35 different missing people sites… (Danny Sullivan, SEW)

Timelines: from TPM | from Wikipedia

Ray in Austin
is my favorite blogger at the moment.  He’s writing solely about NO; his anger is tangible and practical.  He
provides a recap of Walter Maestri’s work in predicting hurricane
damage and evangelizing for preparedness, apparently in vain.  An NPR story from last year describes how explicitly this very storm had been played out in the minds of people preparing for it.

Meanwhile, skilled volunteers are actively not being called in. 
Chains of command are still worrying about looking good to others,
while the “related deaths” toll is steadily soaring.  I’ve seen
this kind of careful negligence before, and cringe to observe it when
so much is at stake.  10,000 deaths doesn’t sound unlikely to me any more.  According to
some sources (the NYT?), we’re up to 250k refugees in Texas, far more
than the 100k I predicted last week.

Meanwhile, the Army relief forces seem to have dived into NO from a standpoint of total war:

… next up : you didn’t know what when???

There are an increasing number of articles and works published whichrefer to Wikipedia as an implicitly reliable source — often ininappropriate contexts.  As its quality improves, Wikipedia
seemsto be shirking a certain quiet
duty
to be modest; something which wasnot a problem back when none would
have mistaken it for a meticulouslyedited compilation. 

Example:  Ann Simmons, writing in the
LA Times on a matter of British peerage earlier this summer, used the
clause “according to Burke’s
and Wikipedia,”a snippet which should immediately give one pause.  For one
thing,the two references have nothing in common.  It seems that aneditor tacked on the clause, “,
an online encyclopedia,” in a vain effort at
clarification.  The full quote:

Please understand me; I will be the first to tell you that you can
find
articles and collections
on Wikipedia – including many
on peerage and
royalty
– which are among the
best overviews in the Englishlanguage; if only you know where to look, and how to check the latest
revisions in each
article’s history.  

(Update: quintupling of this post reverted.  Now how did that happen?  Rogue content editor alert…)

Shako Mukulu is one of those people I think of every month, though we have not spoken since my last visit to his hometown of Kibwezi
over 5 years ago.  He taught me many things while I stayed with
him, off and on, for two months.  Most importantly, after “never blow your nose on anything but tissue paper (or you’ll get sick),” was his maxim not to mistrust anyone without very good reason.

I once came home after a day of packed matatu rides
with a neat rip through my pants pocket and missing a 1000 KSh note
that had been there the day before – my luxurious budget for last week
in the country.  I worried that it had been stolen;
Shako reproved me roundly, saying “don’t think such things if you don’t
know.”  I checked through all of my belongings, and found I had
turned my pockets out into a small bag without remembering it. 

Trust is a funny beast, but it is in many communities the right
default.  This is a complex topic, worthy of a few chapters of a
book, but of particular relevance to travellers in strange lands with
professional pickpockets. 
Differentiating between these pros and everyday people, and the milieus
each group prefers, is the difference between prudence and prejudice.

My mother left behind a makeup case – stolen?  perhaps.  I
left behind a stack of newspapers and a baseball cap (the Sox… you
had to ask?), and retrieved both of them once I found the right people
to ask.