I recently signed a book deal with Taylor & Francis Press. The book, which is tentatively titled “Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Disaster Response,” is slated to be published next year. The book will chart the rise of digital humanitarian response from the Haiti Earthquake to 2015, highlighting critical lessons learned and best practices. To this end, the book will draw on real-world examples of digital humanitarians in action to explain how they use new technologies and crowdsourcing to make sense of “Big (Crisis) Data”. In sum, the book will describe how digital humanitarians & humanitarian technologies are together reshaping the humanitarian space and what this means for the future of disaster response. The purpose of this book is to inspire and inform the next generation of (digital) humanitarians while serving as a guide for established humanitarian organizations & emergency management professionals who wish to take advantage of this transformation in humanitarian response.
Simply put, we have become an incredibly lazy society. We want to be spoon-fed historical facts in a movie or 30-second news clip. There is little, if any, time spent doing independent research. If a website posts absurd article about Obama taking away our guns half a dozen of my friends share it on their Facebook feed without checking into it at all. Our ignorance is a cancer and it is spreading.
The constellation of Earth-imaging satellites launched yesterday—28 individual sputniks, called “Doves,” each about the size of its namesake and weighing in at a svelte five kilograms—is on its way to the International Space Station. If all goes well, by the end of the month “Flock 1,” as the group is called, will distribute its nanosatellites in Earth orbit, the better to photograph the complete surface of the planet at high resolution 365 days a year. The satellites will provide near-continuous pictures of Earth’s surface at a resolution of three to five meters per pixel.
Planet Labs, the San Francisco start-up that built Flock 1, is one of a growing group of companies and governments launching very small satellites. As their cost and size have plummeted, partly in response to the availability of standardized off-the-shelf components, nanosatellites such as CubeSat, have opened up unprecedented opportunities in remote sensing. Unlike traditional Earth-imaging satellites, which cost millions to build and launch, each of Planet Labs’ diminutive sky cameras, which in its predeployed state resembles a child’s kaleidoscope, comes in at a fraction of that cost.
China is now the largest trading nation on Earth, and is on track to be the dominant economy, a trend that holds profound implications for the U.S. Here is a report. Clearly the vampire capitalism that has come to dominate the U.S. is not performing for anyone but the 1%.
Another consequence of climate change. Increased illness due to mosquitoes and ticks will be occurring world wide. We really aren't thinking this through, and our failure to deal rationally with what is happening is going to make us sicker, on top of everything else.
Charter schools, another privatization program by profit first business interests occasionally produce good results, kind of show villages, but, as in all profit first operations –prisons, libraries, schools — all too often become a racket. Until we decide as a people that national wellness, arising from! individual wellness is our social priority all of this will only get worse. As this report makes clear it is time we went back to creating high quality public schools.
In a kind of backhanded way this is good news of a sort. I have seen a number of these stories and discounted them, because the government denied that Fukushima played any role, but this one is well sourced and must be taken seriously. It's good news in that the system to get these doses out exists, and now they have the doses. But very bad news if it comes to pass that they are needed. ! That's the reality of the Fukushima disaster. We don't know… only that as long as radioactive waste pours in the sea, no good thing will arise. And that it will become increasingly planetary.
This report describes a probationary positive development on Climate Change. This may come to nothing; it's certain the Republicans in the Senate will largely try to block it. But this effort by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to get the Senate to engage seriously with climate change may happen. It's too early to tell whether this is mostly just an epiphenomenon, or the next importa! nt positive step in the Climate Change Trend. If the Senate seriously takes up climate change it will stimulate an extended national debate. The media won't be able to avoid it. I think the result of such a debate, where data and real life will converge, will result in a clear national mandate to become pro-active in climate change remediation.
As any day's news demonstrates, American cities are having a hard time. Here is some good news about a major American city. We can only hope that other cities are paying attention, and its citizens have not given their city governance over to the Theocratic Right.
The other day I said that I thought the markets were only understandable to insiders. I may have been too generous. Read this report and draw your own conclusions.
Canada has a Rightist government so no one should be surprised that they deny climate change and have energy interests that trump lesser agencies like fisheries. They don't like facts, so why not just get rid of them literally. This is the modern equivalent of book burning. This is a loss not just to Canada but to the whole world. These databases and reports they are describing constitute a significant part of humanity's understanding of Earth. It is straight out of the Dark Ages. An act of fanaticism as was its predecessor. Then it was Christianity. Today it is The Theology of Profit.
What this report describes should not be legal in a democracy, and would not be had the Supreme Court's conservative wing not opened the floodgates to gray and black money through Citizen's United, although the trend began earlier. No one should be allowed to dump $400 mi! llion dollars into the political process in an attempt to buy an outcome in an election.
