http://www.citizencommandcenter.org/quick/start The purpose of this site is to provide a central location to find resource status information for disaster zones and to help regions prepare for disaster.
Disaster Response
Disaster Preparedness
On-going Human Services
We aim to enter command & control information for regions IN ADVANCE of a disaster, AND immediately following, so as to help relief groups hit the ground running, and to help survivors immediately locate services and supplies in the event of a disaster in their region. This command & control information might be as simple as entering the name and cell phone for groups that are prepared to be first responders in a region. Or if a region's disaster community chooses, it can mean entering a list of disaster response units and/or facilities that are on “standby” for disaster response activity. There are many disaster response “command and control” systems in use by VOADs and EMA organizations. We hope to compliment what these established systems offer and we hope to offer unaffiliated groups a method for tracking their own needs and resources.
Extract from Conclusion in the Above: I have observed the World Game as a student-participant, and wish it well. I have also observed Bob Pickus's work, as a student-participant in Turn Toward Peace, and wish him well. There are still other alternatives, but whichever road leads us faster into a world without war, what I gain most from Pickus and Fuller is their sense of the Big Picture. No one else can match their indefatigable and comprehensive efforts to see the problem whole, and to steer the world's energy into a grand design of peace.
China-Burma: Construction of a high-speed rail link between China's southwestern province of Yunnan and Myanmar will begin in two months. The line will link Kunming, Yunnan's capital to Yangon (Rangoon), on the Indian Ocean, according to Wang Mengshu, an academic from the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Wang said a China-to-Cambodia high-speed rail connection is under discussion as well as a link between Yunnan and Vientiane, the capital of Laos. He said that all three rail connections are likely to be completed with 10 years. Wang said the project aims to boost cooperation between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors and foster the economic development of China's western regions.
China-Bangladesh: China is interested in increasing cooperation with Bangladesh in different sectors including agriculture technology, trade, commerce and communication, according to a report about the 21 November meeting between Lu Hao, leader of a visiting Chinese delegation and a member of the Communist Party of China and Bangladesh President Zillur Rahman, The Daily Star reported. Rahman called for more Chinese cooperation on socioeconomic development, adding that China is a great friend to Bangladesh. Lu said he hopes the new cooperation will strengthen bilateral relations.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: China is creating a sphere of influence that stretches from North Korea to Pakistan, and surrounds India. This is a threat to US interests as well as to the political independence of the states accepting Chinese aid. A rail line to the Burmese port of Rangoon would give China access to two Indian Ocean ports with direct rail links to China. The other will be Gwadar in western Pakistan which was built with Chinese investments and aid.
Rail links from China through the Karakoram Range to Pakistan Rail and then a spur to Gwadar are undergoing feasibility studies. The link to Rangoon is much more advanced.
Phi Beta Iota: We must disagree with our learned colleague whose analytic skills we greatly admire. China's building of infrastructure to the seas is not a threat to American the Beautiful as envisioned by our Founding Fathers–it is only a threat to a predatory imperialist out of control government stupid enough to spend $750 million dollars EACH on three fortresses in Baghdad, Kabul, and Islamabad, at the same time that US infrastructure and US economic competitiveness has been DESTROYED by a two-party tyranny that has sold the American public out–in a word, treason against the public interest. ENOUGH. It is time to shut down the Empire before the Empire shuts down America the Beautiful. Tomorrow we will post a review of Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities written in 1928. He nailed it. The US Government at the political level is NOT in “friendly” hands….certainly not friendly to the 90% that actually pay their taxes unmindful of how those taxes are funding fraud, waste, and abuse on a global scale. America desperately needs an honest President willing to sponsor Electoral Reform in February in time for the 4th of July recall of anyone who votes against it, and a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) who actually wants to create a Smart Nation and stop going along with $90 billion a year in fraud, waste, and abuse….[less the 4% that General Tony Zinni says is useful].
The International Council for Science (ICSU) is spearheading a consultative Visioning Process, in cooperation with the International Social Science Council (ISSC), to explore options and propose implementation steps for a holistic strategy on Earth system research. Five Grand Challenges were identified during step 1 of the process. If addressed in the next decade, these Grand Challenges will deliver knowledge to enable sustainable development, poverty eradication, and environmental protection in the face of global change.
The details of the Grand Challenges are contained in the document ‘Earth System Science for Global Sustainability: The Grand Challenges’, representing input from many individuals and institutions.
Science Article (2 Page PDF)
INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SCIENCE – PRESS RELEASE
Thursday 11 November 2010
Scientific Grand Challenges identified to address global sustainability
Paris, France—The international scientific community has identified five Grand Challenges that, if addressed in the next decade, will deliver knowledge to enable sustainable development, poverty eradication, and environmental protection in the face of global change. The Grand Challenges for Earth system science, published today, are the result of broad consultation as part of a visioning process spearheaded by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in cooperation with the International Social Science Council (ISSC).
The consultation highlighted the need for research that integrates our understanding of the functioning of the Earth system—and its critical thresholds—with global environmental change and socio-economic development.
The five Grand Challenges are:
Forecasting—Improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people.
Observing—Develop, enhance and integrate the observation systems needed to manage global and regional environmental change.
Confining—Determine how to anticipate, recognize, avoid and manage disruptive global environmental change.
Responding—Determine what institutional, economic and behavioural changes can enable effective steps toward global sustainability.
Innovating—Encourage innovation (coupled with sound mechanisms for evaluation) in developing technological, policy and social responses to achieve global sustainability.
Some people say Gandhi was about nonviolence. And he was.
But he is significant for something else that I believe is far more important:
He changed the game.
With no one's permission, he reconfigured the playing field of colonialism to a higher Game in which everything the British did in their smaller, narrower game backfired on them. Prisons, guns, threats and bureaucracies of control not only ceased to work like they used to, but actually generated more power for Gandhi's world-changing Game.
Gandhi's Game involved, in his words, “experiments in Truth” — a search for Truth, a bigger Truth, a common inclusive Truth, a win-win Truth in every situation. The British — and even many of Gandhi's compatriots — were not aligned to that Truth. They wanted victory, control, and righteousness. These things trapped them in their smaller game until, one by one, and sometimes wholesale, Gandhi's commitment to Truth won their hearts and minds — and Shift happened.
OAKLAND, CA — Building information modeling can be a valuable tool for architects, engineers and contractors that allows them to explore different design options, see what projects will look like and understand how a structure will perform long before it's built.
BIM, as it's known in the industry, also can help building owners and operators throughout a structure's lifecycle by providing visual context to performance-related data, retrofit plans and other projects intended increase energy efficiency.
Increased costs of energy, ongoing challenges posed by the economy and concerns about sustainability, market demands, occupany and eventual regulation of carbon output combine to make building owners, operators and managers increasingly aware of how their properties perform — and compare with others.
Those issues and the availability of state and federal incentives are powerful drivers to improve portfolios. “Not surprisingly, large multinational companies are getting their buildings in order,” Deodhar said.
Examples include Walmart, which will retrofit 500 buildings this year, Marriott, whose hotel chain includes 275 hotels that bear the Energy Star label, and Starbucks, which by the close of the year will begin to seek LEED certification for all new company-owned stores around the world.
Globally, buildings account for about 40 percent of energy consumption and more than 200 million buildings are candidates for efficiency improvements, Deodhar said. But optimizing a building's environmental performance requires incorporating interrelated factors, such as location, orientation, internal systems, how the building is used and other variables, into design.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the kind of project we had in mind for DIA/DO (Directorate of Open Sources & Methods). Apart from DoD being the biggest gorilla on the planet where any improvement can be measured in billions of dollars, this is the tip of the “true cost” iceberg and a success here could be immediately extended to every aspect of acquisition across all mobility, weapons, and other systems, over to the rest of the federal government, down to state and local, and out to the world. In the 21st Century design is intelligence, intelligence is design, and intelligent design, not weapons, is the influencer most likely to achieve the desired outcome.
