How do you value a life? (week 5 post)

This week as always was a very interesting class and give me what feels like way too much food for thought. One thing that particularly troubled me was that it seemed like a naive idea that the government agencies would work together. Also how some countries refuse to have humanitarian aid allowed in. This just flabbergast and astounds me. So many people loose their lives due to disasters and many loose their lives after the disasters themselves have occurred because response teams do not get to them in time. Help is not there soon enough which makes the death tools of disasters rise higher and higher. Now with all the technology we have that can streamline this process I feel like we are being told that it will never happen because it's more profitable to keep everything between agencies and organizations separate. That it would hurt business or the way things are run if the information were shared.

Are you effing kidding me. How are you going to sit there and talk to me about profit margins and that the information has more value at a later date not being shared when human beings are losing their lives when we have the technology and ability to save them. When a disaster happens and so many people are hurt as we have seen recently volunteer and NPO response has been high and commendable. People came together to work on mapping and on the sms project and translating. People also donated they tried to do a lot. Then I was given the Yates case study and I was really happy because I though that the government was getting in on it as well as some bigger business but alas that was a resounding no. They apparently only did it this once and don't want to do it again because no one wants to take responsibility or give away too much of their precious information.

 
When did we start living in a world where helping our fellow man isn't first. How long have I been blind to this. I mean I knew in the day to day business aspect of it, it was all about the bottom line and no one really gave a shit about me unless they could charge me more or get more money out of me and that was okay because that's how we live now. But even in times of disaster you are still going to be guarded you will literally let people die rather that collaborate to the fullest extent because it might affect your bottom line, it makes me want to throw up. What kind of world do we live in where the haves declare the have nots as bastard children and allow them to fend for themselves.

I really do not understand how America and Europe do not feel a responsibility for these lesser developed countries.If you don't collaborate out of the goodness of your heart at least collaborate out of a sense of responsibility for the plight these countries are in. Some of the poorest countries are often the hardest hit when it comes to  natural disasters and it also just so happens that most of these countries were at one time or another colonies to Britain the US or the other super powers of the ages. What did the super powers do; no too much just pillage these lands for raw resources and help keep them in the technological dark ages and not give them a fair wage for their work, only to see the finished products to these countries. So I can't imagine why they aren't up to snuff with the first world countries. Also if a leader will not allow his or her people help they should be removed from office. Their are basic unalienable human rights and one of them is the right to help. The only way we make it through life whether we like it or not is with each other so we better get our shit together quick. I leave you with Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth, and apparently it isn't much. Buffalo Springfield. Sorry if this post was off topic but man it really makes me mad when everyone is out for number 1 all the time especially the big organizations, businesses and countries.

How Many Friends do You Really Have (Personal Post 2)

After reading an article in Wired magazine I became even more disenfranchised with Facebook and social networking in general. Yes it is a great way to stay connected, follow your favorite celebrity and most importantly procrastinate on work, but is the new way we define friend a good one? Does it need to be defined by how many followers we have on Twitter or how many friends on Facebook? Are these really meaningful connections with people? Has social networking taken the social aspect out of networking? Is it just a way for lazy people to keep tabs on people they are supposedly friends with instead of trying to actually make time for someone? Is it friendship on our own time and not two people making time like they used to?

I do enjoy Facebook at times but overall less and less everyday. Through the article in Wired 19.08 I found there is a cap on friends and it's at 5,000. Can you really have 5,000 friends? Anthropologist Robin Dunbar does not seem to think so, according to her research we can only connect with 150 people at any given time, which I still believe is an impressive number. Come on I do not believe for a second that you have meaningful conversations with at least 90 percent of the people you are friends with and you see maybe 20 percent of them outside of class. I really don't think it is necessary to be friends with people you aren't that close with in general. If you only have a polite conversation you run into in real life you wouldn't consider them your friend but now as soon as you get home one of you is going to look the other up and boom Facebook friends.

Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst did a long term study that concluded in 2009 and found that over the course of 7 years we replace 48% of our friends with new ones. I find this to be very true and understandable. People grow apart it's a part of life. We all go our separate ways it will happen, it's sad at times but yes we all change and grow. So our of your circle of 150 people 65 of the will be different in seven years think about that. Think about how hard it is to maintain relationships and think about how hard Facebook can also make that. You can make the argument that it makes it easier but I do not believe it is easier, it is just more convenient to stay friends that way cause you can talk to them all hours of the night and leave a post asking how they are. How many people that you do that with do you see outside of class or off of Facebook, I am guessing not a lot.

Facebook takes the hard work out of friendships. The face to face talking and getting to know someone. There are times you assume one thing when you are reading a conversation versus having a conversation. I want to look someone in the eye, I was to hear their voice, I want to see their body language to truly get the feel and understanding of the person they are. You cannot do that on Facebook, sure there is Skype but the person to person connection is taking on a vastly different meaning that it has in the past and it's very disconcerting to me. It seems like we are being a rule because we have become more technology oriented.

Think of it this way. You can have all the friends in the world that want to talk to you on the internet or keep tabs on you but how many of them are going to be there for a phone call or to hang out when you are having the worst day ever because they care that much. That's true friendship and if they aren't on that list they shouldn't be on your Facebook list. Friend has become a diluted word and it really makes me sad and more nostalgic for when I was young because every weekend there was a group of two or three people I wanted to hang out with and we always would, they were great friends. Half the people on my Facebook friend list I have never hung out with after class or less than a handful of times. So I leave you with this parting shot, look at your friend list and ask yourself who is truly your friend. Now if you will excuse me I have some fat to trim from my own friend list. I hope we all wise up and get back to the art of person to person communication. I leave you with this link.

Agility and Disicpline (wax on wax off) (post week 4)

Technology is the be all end all, especially today. We rely so heavily on it that we may as well be the terminator. This is because humans are flawed and slow but technology is quick and reliable, except for when it's not. We learned about the definitions of discipline and agility as they pertain to the living lab study and I feel they are concepts we can apply to our everyday lives tech included. I think they are also fair warnings that just because we can do something doesn't mean it's good for us to do in the grand scheme of things.

Discipline is the ability to operate and we can all do it fairly well. Our bodies operate with individual muscles and organs. Nature operates with each individual species that lives in the world. Technology has many parts that all much work in order for a machine to operate. Everyone can operate and therefore we all have discipline. We all have the ability to form our own thoughts and actions and make our own decisions. We take in information and make a decision to act or not, how to act and go ahead and do it.

Agility is the interoperability of all of the pieces of an equation. A beating heart doesn't do you much good if your lungs don't work. Also being an animal does not help if you don't understand you place on the food chain. A machine is just the sum of it's working parts and programming implemented by humans. Machines are fallible because we ourselves create them. Whether it be that we have designed them wrong, utilized them for the wrong purpose or put a virus on them they fail because of our decisions. Humans also need interoperability to operate. A heart is no good without working lungs because you still will not be able to get oxygen to your body and you will die. We all act and have the ability to act but we must take into account the consequences that our actions will have on others.

We are complex creatures that have the ability to understand how to act we live in a civilized society that works in many parts. When things go well they go great, and our interoperability looks high. When the worst happens like Katrina you see the worst in people. We were bound hands tied by the rules of our society. We spend so much time trying to make sure everything is in its' proper spot and place that we don't realize how far apart we tear ourselves by compartmentalizing every little thing. Our inability to act during Katrina was partly because of individuals themselves not taking the proper precautions but the slow response times we due in large part to our ability to make a machine that works but does not work tongether. It just went to show that the government was like a computer that we were putting together piece by piece. You do need a motherboard (DHS), and you do need a hard drive (CIA), also ram (FBI) and insert whatever other three letter association and computer part you want to fill out the metaphor. A computer works because they all speak the same language we didn't work well in the case of Katrina because we didn't all speak the same language.

We had a bunch of parts of a computer that were not sharing information because they were not supposed to or it wasn't the proper sequence of events to make them too. Basically we blue screened when people needed us the most. Instead of looking state of the art we looked like and original home computer that could only work on a floppy drive of info when we needed to be able to compute and make sense of a terabyte. There are times when we need to say screw the formalities and the compartmentalized system and just go out there and do what needs to be done, laws be damned and procedure be damned. We had the ability to act we just didn't have the ability to communicate with each other. We need to get all of our files in one place, all of us be speaking the same language and all of us work together in order to make sure this never happens again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll I know all of these aren't recent or completely preventable but imagine what we could all do in working together to lower the response time and save more people. Interoperability is the future I hope and I am going to keep using this term like a businessman uses the word synergy

Trying to put down Global Roots

The grassroots movement talked about in a few of our articles this week has really hit me deep. I would like to believe that a grassroots movement can do something productive for the Humanitarian community and crisis response on a whole but I also believe we need the established crisis response still in tact. Humanitarian organizations and crisis response need to be re-structured I believe. This is just an idea I have, nothing more than a half hour of musing and a few good intentions. There has been no heavy research yet but I do believe that we can make the Humanitarian community a global community and the first of many with the advent of the technology we have all around us. If Haiti has taught us nothing else it is that people maybe not all or most but enough care and want to do whatever they can to help and the Humanitarian community needs to find a way to fit them in, safely and efficently.

I believe that this will make people feel more involved and have more of a vested interest in disaster and crisis relief. It will allow them to know their efforts are being put to good use and that they are doing something to help their fellow man. The right way I believe to go about this is through a grant of some sort ( I know it would be a big grant but until i have done further research it's the best idea I have). This would allow the Humanitarian organizations to come to different places across the world and begin teaching classes about what is needed during crisis response and how to go about the most efficient way of doing that. Also how they can make their information so it can fit in the system. This would then lead to a test to see if a person who wants to help and become a certified specialist (i.e. mapping, collecting and organizing data from social websites like Facebook and twitter, coordinate where to send relief, etc) has enough understanding to do so.

This would lead to a re-tooling of the Humanitarian and global community in hopefully such a way as you see below. Yes it is still a top down method but it is one where the everyday average Joe is involved which is great for morale of the individual and the global community. It will make everyone feel more invested in each other. Also with this hopefully there will be a re-purposing or re-distributing of tasks of Humanitarian and governmental disaster relief organizations to fit into this hierarchy.

The Red Cross could be in charge of water response, allow some of the volunteer and technical communities to work with some of the more well known Humanitarian organizations to help them re-purpose and have the UN OCHA oversee the whole process. I know not a one of these organizations is going to like this idea. People want to be involved though and I feel the best thing we can do is to try and find a way for them to be. It would as I have said bring us closer together as a global community but it would also raise awareness to how the system currently works for Humanitarian and relief efforts. Then hopefully the more people who want to be a part of this will also realize this is an out dated system and needs to be amended and some of these very specialist who we just helped train could be the ones that revamp the entire way things are done in disaster relief.

In conclusion yes this will not be a fix all, it is just a stop gap but a very important one that will hopefully increase public awareness of not only the short comings of the system in place but also of the fact that we are all part of one global community and we can do a lot more good by working together than being compartmentalized and competitive as we are now especially when peoples lives will be hanging in the balance. Also this system could open the door to many technological advances that will help Humanitarian organizations. By trying to get the Organizations, government organizations, and the UN all in one system they can hopefully put together one day their vast collective knowledge of crisis response in one place under the same format which will allow for endless possibilities I feel.

Any critiques or ideas on how I could better flesh this idea out are welcome, or if you want to tell me I'm bat shit crazy and talking like Miss America, that we will never work together as a global community feel free and tell me that too. As always thank you for your time. As always here is a pallet cleanser Captain Planet

To Boldy Go Where No Man Has Gone Before; Personal Post 1

Today is a happily historic day that I would like to bring your attention to. It is the franchise Star Trek's 45th birthday today and I would like to take this time to wish it a happy one and many more. I am a Treekie, I am not ashamed to admit it, in fact I am proud of it. I sadly was not born when the original came out but I sank my teeth and many family TV nights watching The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager and they taught me many things: how to be a decent human being, how to handle tough decisions and live with the consequences and most of all how cool space could hopefully be.

Let us take a second to talk about the captains and explore the complex decisions they have made. Captain Jame Tiberius Kirk headed out when space exploration was relatively new and it was still this wide open and mysterious place. He encountered many hardships but always tried to peacefully deal with other races and establish a good relationship with them if possible. (the Trouble with Tribbles is still one of the best episodes IMO) Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D (of which I have a model of) encountered the Borg for the first time and the attempt of a mass genocide on the Human species. Also confronted with many moral conflicts along the way about right and wrong, he spent his time trying to do what he thought was right. Captain Benjamin Sisko spent most of his time trying to protect his space station the the edge of the Gamma Quadrant and also uphold the law. In a place where rules were optional he spent his days trying to uphold some semblance of society and then the Dominion War struck and we found out what he was made of. Captain Janeway of the Starship Voyager who were jettisoned to the Delta quadrant via a wormhole and the series revolved around a long and arduous 75 year trip back home. She held her crew together through thick and thin and had to make many tough decisions along the way. We will not talk about Star Trek Enterprise because in my eyes that is a black spot on the history of the franchise. 

Now that I am done gushing over all of the series we can get back to the important matter of how these series relate to this class. In a class about crisis informatics it sure would be handy to have some of the tools that those in the Trek universe had. Teleporters! Communicators! Brilliant! Lets run some simulations in the holodeck so we can make sure we are prepared for any scenario. Unfortunately these technologies do not yet exist although we are getting close on teleporting... The Future    

What Star Trek can teach Humanity in general and Humanitarian Organizations is how to deal with an ever evolving and ever changing world. It can teach them to view change as an opportunity to grow and not something to be feared. That all people are equal which the Humanitarian organizations understand but I am not sure all people do and that we can never accomplish anything better than what we have without relying on and helping our fellow man. All of these captains went out of their way to help and try and understand all peoples and that is something I feel we don't do enough of this day in age. We live in a secretive world that is full of distrust and we need to get back to relying on our fellow man instead of so heavily on technology. Our reliance on technology is causing us to loose our humanity, people are interacting less on a face to face basis than ever before and this shows no signs of slowing up anytime soon with all of the "advances" we have been making.

Remember all life is precious and deserves our respect and help whenever they may need it. Live long and Prosper.

"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before." - Captain Jean-Luc Picard 

We can't get anywhere without each other which is why it is so important that we all work together to help our fellow man. Thank you Star Trek for teaching me how to be a decent human being.