Open Source Homeland

Here’s an amazingly clear-headed and complete list of things you should put in your car in case of an emergency. Snip:

For heating water inside your vehicle or on a car hood, you will need a metal container of “canned” heat, typically sold at grocery stores to keep food serving trays hot. If you have the space, keep several handy, but one should last several days and is reusable, thanks to an air-tight cap.

Milt Rosenberg has Stephen Flynn, author of The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

From Booklist

Homeland Security expert Flynn examines the vulnerability of the U.S. to disaster–natural and man-made–and what the nation must do to fortify its security. By exploring several well-documented and frightening scenarios, Flynn exposes our weaknesses and the consequences of our failure to adequately plan for disaster. Among the scenarios he explores: an avian flu outbreak in New York; destruction of a chemical plant in New Jersey; a San Francisco earthquake that compromises levees and leads to massive flooding. Flynn points to threats from our blithe disregard for the dangers all around us, including chemical plants and oil refineries operating in close proximity to crowded communities. We can’t plan for every disaster, but the nation can be better prepared, Flynn maintains, and he offers advice on how corporations and the government can reduce the risk of disaster. Among his suggestions: making sure energy management and public-health systems have enough resources and building more power-transmission lines to keep lights on when temperatures rise. Flynn’s book reads like a thriller but has the added punch of reality. Vanessa Bush

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Department of Homeland Security’s ADVISE program is under scrutiny: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff denies his agency wants to engage in data mining. If this is true, my question would be, “why not”?

Here’s some info on ADVISE from SourceWatch:

“At ADVISE’s core, semantic graphs are used to organize the data entities and their relationships. … A semantic graph organizes relational data by using nodes to represent entities and edges to connect related entities. Hidden relationships in the data are uncovered by examining the structure and properties of the semantic graph. Privacy and support policies are enforced by a security infrastructure. Several interfaces for browsing, querying, and viewing the results of queries are under development, including IN-SPIRE and Starlight, from the DHS National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC). The key to fusing disparate data from many sources in ADVISE is the exploitation of ‘precomputed’ relationship information by storing the data in a semantic graph. All nodes are related by the links between them on the graph.”

Sounds like a brilliant system. I hope that the research continues and doesn’t get knocked off its rocker like Policy Analysis Market– a brilliant idea disguised as a disgusting one. The search for bad guys (real ones, like the ones who knocked our buildings down, not fake ones, like the hanged Iraqi) requires using sophisticated tools to know the knowable. If that means we know some harmless secrets about people, so be it.

The next steps is to elect and keep in office a reasonable Executive Branch that doesn’t abuse power. Not simple, I know. But keeping ourselves dumb just because someone may hurt us when we’re smart is no way to live.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is fantastic. The kind of thing that can change everything. Mesh network, crank power, no-glare screen for outdoors. The kind of machine that can provide a ton of use in a no-electricity, post-disaster environment.

Pentagram has a look at the new user interface for the device– called “Sugar”:

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, and the designers are working in close collaboration with the OLPC development team, including president Walter Bender and designer Eben Eliason. Production on the laptops is scheduled for mid-2007.

Called Sugar, the interface uses a highly abstracted spatial navigation metaphor, an extension of the familiar desktop metaphor, for easy, intuitive navigation that makes the most of the laptop’s networking capabilities. Children can move through four levels of view—Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity—and connect with others in the network “mesh” formed by users.

CTA alerts is a rider-to-rider wireless notification utility that allows riders and Chicago Transit Authority officials to communicate status during service outages. I set up the service in August 2005. It has never gone down. I’d say that less than 3% of the posts are bogus or of the “hey what’s up ya’ll?” nature. Here are the components:

• Free public website, www.upoc.com
• Create group with the proper settins (anyone can post, anyone can invite)
• Publicize the site in the most relevant places. In this case, it’s at my brother’s CTA-focused weblog, CTA Tattler. This way, you get the critical mass of people posting and consuming
• Convince the entity with the highest quality information— in this case, the CTA— to participate as a member of the group. This ensures that the service gets all the standard info gets into your service
• Get publicity
• Maintain the group– boot the trolls and the useless types

That’s about it.

• Time spent setting up group: 20 minutes
• Cost to set up group: $0
• Time spent maintaining group: 1.5 hours/ year

The CTA said they were engaging a company to create a custom alerts system, and hired a company for $80,000 to do it. So far nothing has been released.

A fine example of Open Source Homeland— public/ private cooperation to make things better.