Wired Magazine expands on the story of Dan Wooley, an American filmmaker whose iPhone helped him survive 65 hours buried in a collapsed hotel in Haiti, even without a connection.

Wooley referred to a first-aid app on the phone to confirm how he should treat his injuries. He used the alarm clock to keep him awake lest he fall into shock. He used the focusing light to help him find a stable void in the hotel rubble where he could wait to be rescued. He also recorded voice notes to his family and listened to music.

“For people who pointed out I should’ve had a pocket first aid kit, the reason they’re wrong is I wouldn’t have it in my pocket,” he said. “How many people have gone out of their way to add one more thing to their pocket? What was valuable about the iPhone is it was already in my pocket.” – Dan Wooley quoted in WIRED

That’s the key point, I think. We can wish for folks to carry around extra gear in their pockets and special training in their heads, but for the most part that’s unrealistic. JIT training tools like that first aid and CPR app won’t save everyone, but they can help a lot of folks.

 

Slashdot highlights this story from the London Sun:

Desperate dad Leroy Smith resorted to Google with the request “how to deliver a baby” when his wife went into labour… Mr Smith called a midwife for advice but before she arrived Emma, 25, began having powerful contractions. So the 29-year-old grabbed hold of his BlackBerry, accessed the internet and sought help from search engine Google for step-by-step instructions. And after following the detailed guide on the internet’s wikiHow Emma safely gave birth to daughter 6lb 11oz Mahalia Merita Angela Smith.

The Sun has its tongue firmly planted in its editorial cheek, painting Mr. Smith as a clueless geek. But I see a practical example of network-centric emergency response.

We emergency professionals like to wag our fingers at the public for not embracing our priorities and training themselves ahead of time in how to deal with whatever exigency is on the tops of our minds. I understand the frustration, but it strikes me as a weak sort of professionalism. Even if we’re actually smarter than everyone else, that doesn’t really help get the job done, does it?

(Just for fun, let’s imagine for a moment that most grown-ups are actually fairly competent in budgeting their own attention, based on their own experiences and beliefs. In such a world, might repeated attempts to impose our own priorities seem presumptuous at best and abusive at worst? It’s just a thought.)

So if we can’t enforce a comprehensive personal preparedness curriculum on everyone, what’s second best? Well, for the Smiths it was having a handy pocket-sized digital reference to… well, to pretty much anything that might come up.

Anyone can dream up hypothetical scenarios in which Google or a Blackberry won’t be available, of course, but that misses the point. What matters is that a growing number of folks will have access to that sort of just-in-time learning tools. And in a disaster the people who can solve own problems will be that many fewer problems for us.

So let’s keep on training and educating and beating the drum about whatever hazard we’re funded for this week. But maybe we can also make practical just-in-time learning resources easy for folks to find and use when they decide they need them.

 

It’s been in the works for awhile, so I almost missed the formal announcement that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has adopted CAP as its recommendation X.1303:

Publication as an ITU-T Recommendation (X.1303) will help ensure that CAP is deployed worldwide giving technical compatibility for users across all countries. The goal of public warning is to reduce the damage and loss of life caused by a natural or man-made hazard event.

In the course of adopting CAP, the ITU added an important feature by specifying a bandwidth-efficient binary representation of CAP messages using the ASN.1 packed encoding. This alternate representation of the CAP data structure has been cross-adopted by OASIS, where the CAP standard originated.

 

Jonas Landgren’s blog takes a sharp look at the much-bandied notion of a Common Operational Picture:

The common operating picture is not in the map, but in the interactions where some form of common understanding is interpreted and negotiated.

It happened that I was back in D.C. last week, where I spent some time chatting with a GIS-oriented colleague about this very question. It’s closely related to another buzz-term we toss around with more vigor than rigor: “situational awareness.”

In both cases I’m afraid what used to be technical terms have been absorbed into marketing- and proposal-speak and have lost much of their actual meaning. (For folks interested in understanding what’s actually known about situational awareness… what it comprises, how it’s achieved and what it’s good for… I’ll recommend the writings of Dr. Mica Endsley, especially her book “Designing for Situational Awareness.” Turns out there’s a lot more to it than just projecting maps on a large screen.)

Underlying these particular bits of jargon is an error that’s bedeviled emergency management for many years, even before the current post-9/11 American militarismo: A tendency to confuse our tactics with our goals, our means with our ends.

Both “situational awareness” (SA) and “common operational picture” (COP) have become objects of this ends/means inversion. Neither SA nor a COP is an end in itself. What we’re really hoping to achieve is better decisions. The implicit assumption in much of the current homeland-security / emergency-management literature is that map-based COPs are the key to making improved decisions. But as Jonas’ article reminds us, that’s only an assumption.

The problem with the map-centered approach is that a lot of interesting parameters of use in the detection and management of emergencies aren’t geographic in dimensions. Many of them are much more appropriately charted against time, or proportionally, or against demographic or economic parameters, and so on.

For example, one of the most useful displays I saw on the giant video screens of Florida’s state EOC last year was a very simple line graph showing the volume of auto traffic crossing a single freeway sensor loop. It showed vividly the onset, peak and diminishment of evacuation traffic. In a glance it showed that, at the point I saw it, the majority of folks who were going to move had already done so. It would also have been useful to see that particular sensing location plotted on a map, but even without any geospatial information at all, it was highly meaningful in a way that a map depiction of current traffic at a particular point wouldn’t be.

My narrow point isn’t that maps are bad, but only that they aren’t the answer to every question. My broader point is that we need to resist the temptation to let particular solutions become ends in themselves and lose focus on our actual goals.

(And for folks interested in the wide range of ways visual presentations can support decisionmaking… including but going far beyond just maps… I’ll recommend the books of Edward Tufte, especially “The Visual Display of Quantative Information.” For a quick read-in on how life-safety critical this stuff can be, take a look at Tufte’s analysis of how a poorly-crafted PowerPoint presentation obscured critical information that might have prevented the Challenger space shuttle disaster.)

 

An item on physorg.com reports on some fascinating research at Rutgers-Camden:

The findings could have numerous applications – most obviously in treating hearing loss by artificially increasing the amount of noise in the cochlea of the inner ear, perhaps by an implanted device.

That resonates with a long-time speculation of mine about emergency public information systems: that while it’s useful up to a point to coordinate the messages sent to the public during an emergency, overdoing it can be counterproductive.

There’s a fairly obvious mechanical argument for this, having to do with the cost-of-perfect-information problem. At what point does the delay required to implement excessive message control become more harmful than the marginal errors or variances those measures might (or might not) prevent?

But the Rutgers work suggest a more subtle limit on the effectiveness of message discipline. Is it possible that at some point too much lock-step consistency… too little “noise”… actually can reduce message effectiveness?

My personal experience, including some time spent in relatively high-control cultures, suggests that there’s a point at which excessive consistency starts to suggest that the fix is in. At some point what purports to be corroboration among multiple sources begins to smell like an orchestrated campaign of propaganda. And when that happens, suspicion can undermine the whole process.

People understand noise. People don’t expect perfect consistency, and they don’t trust it when they see it. Nature isn’t made up of straight lines; it’s a complex of fractal curves. Like the visual symmetry in a Kubrick movie, perfect consistency imparts a meaning of its own: it suggests artificiality, immobility, death. A little bit of chaos is natural and healthy. Noise is the secret of life.

If I’m right about this, we may we need to temper our enthusiasm for Joint Information Systems and the elaborate message approval rituals so beloved of bureaucracies. It’s not that accuracy and consistency aren’t important. It’s just that anything carried to excess can become self-defeating.

- Art

 

Just a quick update… subsequent to a workshop on alerting standards in Geneva in October, the International Telecommunications Union has begun the process of adopting CAP as an ITU Recommendation:

http://www.incident.com/cap/ITU_CAP_Proposal.pdf

While CAP 1.1 is already an international standard through the OASIS process, the ITU is better known among folks in the communications field, so this will be a huge boost in global awareness. Special thanks to Eliot Christian and Elysa Jones for their hard work on this!

 

Yes, the WARN Act has cleared both the House and the Senate… but it sure isn’t the WARN Act we were expecting.

The enrolled version of H.R.4954, the “Security and Accountability For Every Port Act of 2006″ aka the “SAFE Port Act,” still includes as Title VI a section that says it may be cited as the “Warning, Alert and Response Network Act.” But the actual heading of that section has been changed to “Commercial Mobile Service Alerts.”

Gone is the proposed National Alert Office and its standards-based, multi-mode National Alert System; this bill is strictly about using cellphones for alerts. The role of public TV stations is merely “to enable the distribution of geographically targeted alerts by commercial mobile service providers.” Other warning technologies and their integration aren’t addressed at all.

(Also gone is the provision that would have allowed the federal government to apply federal resources to the restoration of “essential services” like telecommunications, power or water supply. In its place is a bland requirement that federal agencies, “unless exceptional circumstances apply,” must not “deny or impede access to the disaster site to an essential service provider whose access is necessary to restore and repair an essential service”. Since most access controls are implemented by local authorities rather than the feds, I don’t think I’d count on this to make a lot of difference, even in disasters that aren’t deemed “exceptional.”)

At first reading I’ll confess to a profound sense of disappointment. This looks like a giant leap backward from the integrated warning program of earlier versions, and a return to a “magic bullet” single-mode approach to public warning. Concerned as I was about the potential for a federal program to screw things up, at least it was a recognition that public warning is an integral function of our society, not just a technological afterthought.

Then again, given the massive last-minute changes and all the debate about the port security and (yes!) Internet gambling provisions of the final bill, I wonder how many of our legislators really knew what they were voting for in that last late-night push to their election recess.

 

In the half-decade since 9/11 changed “everything” there’s been lots of emphasis on large-scale and broad initiatives for improving public safety. But real progress often comes in relatively modest steps:

US Army Awards for Top 10 Inventions of 2005

What strikes me about these ten innovations is that they’re all relatively simple components that solve particular problems in straightforward ways.

Somebody… Voltare, I think… cautioned against letting the Best become the enemy of the Good. One form of that is the peculiar bureaucratic maneuver I call the “standing highjump.” This is a technique for avoiding a task one doesn’t want to undertake, but can’t actually say “no” to. The method is simplicity itself. Expand the unwanted task by pointing out that it would be inefficient or otherwise unwise to undertake it without also doing something much larger. Repeat this expansion until the “real” task becomes obviously too large or too complex to be feasible. Then make a token effort that nobody expects to succeed, and go home.

(Somebody else… or maybe it was Voltare again… said “never confuse motion with action.”)

One of the hallmarks of serious innovation is that it thinks globally but acts locally. That is, it has a solid foundation in theory, but modest near-term goals. This is the essence of the so-called “spiral” or “whirlpool” school of iterative development. It starts small, achieves something useful, and then builds from success to greater success.

And by the same token, one of the hallmarks of BS is a grandiose distain for the merely tactical. One of my old FEMA colleagues described a producer (in the TV sense) as “somebody who understands the inevitability of detail.”

So if anyone tries to tell you that “simple” is equivalent to “easy,” put your hand on your wallet and run.

 

Discovery

One of the many bright lights at this week’s ISCRAM-06 conference in Newark was a young social scientist and former Microsoftie named Shelly Farnham. Dr. Farnham’s paper was on applications of groupware in the Katrina response.

In the course of her presentation, I found myself thinking about one of the biggest shortcomings of the “interoperability fix everything” school of thought… the lack of emphasis on directory services and other “discovery” mechanisms. Shelly was talking about how heavily responders tended to rely on personal relationships and personal technology (cell phones, personal email, etc.) in the early stages of response while the formal structure of things was still very much in flux.

That matched my own experience. How many times have I called someone I knew, some number that happened to be in my cellphone, instead of taking time to find out what the formal channels were? Not because I wanted to subvert the process, but just because I didn’t trust my ability to discover the “right” routing quickly and accurately.

In the fast-growing and diverse response to a major event, how do we know who’s available? Or which role they’re playing? Or even which roles are in place, and where? Whether we’re talking about people or other kinds of resources, in either human or automated processes, the challenge of improving discovery mechanisms in disaster response strikes me as possibly one of the most productive areas for additional study.

 

This morning at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) conference in Newark, NJ our keynote speaker was the Chief Information Officer for New York City, Gino Menchini. Among a number of interesting observations from his experience in 9/11 and other disasters, he reported that NYC has re-centralized a number of critical departmental IT functions on grounds of disaster resilience.

Distributed-systems purists might dismiss this as mere bureaucratic opportunism on the part of a mainframe-and-Windows oriented IT department. However, Mr. Menchini offers a couple of salient justifications.

First, he said, the departmental servers and network infrastructures simply haven’t been built to the standards maintained at the central IT shop. And second, he reported, in severe emergencies like 9/11, physically getting the departmental sysops to all their various departmental centers to perform maintenance can become a problem.

(That latter reminds me of the problems several broadcast engineers in the Bay Area had getting to their transmitter sites after the Loma Prieta earthquake back in ‘89, and more recently in New Orleans after Katrina. In fact, almost every emergency that triggers access controls seems to spawn some sort of secondary problem like this.)

New York City is, of course, one of the ultimate examples of urbanization. I wonder whether this might be another indication of some basic differences between the emergency-management (and other) realities of urban centers and those of edge cities, suburbia and rural America. As in politics and many other aspects of our culture, there seem to be some basic differences between a pastoral, self-contained vision of agrarian society and a more interdependent, tightly meshed and highly connected urban style.

(Tags: , , )