Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Cloudburst Mumbai
Cloudburst Mumbai offers current information on the Mumbai/Bombay flooding.
Plus, this entry is my first blog-to-blog link-- but in theory a blog with actual content.
Plus, this entry is my first blog-to-blog link-- but in theory a blog with actual content.
Costs of disaster management failure
Heard this one on NPR as well. Indian corporations are disappointed in the failure of disaster management in Bombay/Mumbai. When a city doesn't do enough-- or when the business community thinks they haven't done enough-- to prevent or mitigate a disaster, it can have long-term consequences to the city's reputation.
On the other hand, I'd expect disaster preparedness professionals, and would-be ones like me, to try to blow this story out of proportion, so watch for that.
On the other hand, I'd expect disaster preparedness professionals, and would-be ones like me, to try to blow this story out of proportion, so watch for that.
Agent-based disaster management
Penn State's Dr. John Yen and the other folks at the Laboratory for Intelligent Agents have come up with an interesting concept: using intelligent agents to improve team communication for high-pressure situations. The R-CAST system is designed to eliminate bottlenecks in information flow, according to the press release.
It's inspired by recognition-primed decision making (aka RPD), which at first glance looks interesting. RPD a way of modeling how people react to situations under stress. Basically, RPD figures that people try to fit the current situation into previously-experienced prototype situations by feature matching. If any anomalies come up, they try to fit it into another one.
It matches some of my observations of the mistakes we make under pressure: we inappropriately discard anomalies. The hardest part in the early stages of a disaster is recognizing the shape of a situation. People have a limited set of previous experiences that they can use for comparison. Since disasters are, pretty much by definition, exceptional events, we're not very good at recognizing them in the very early stages-- the times when intervention can do the most good.
It's inspired by recognition-primed decision making (aka RPD), which at first glance looks interesting. RPD a way of modeling how people react to situations under stress. Basically, RPD figures that people try to fit the current situation into previously-experienced prototype situations by feature matching. If any anomalies come up, they try to fit it into another one.
It matches some of my observations of the mistakes we make under pressure: we inappropriately discard anomalies. The hardest part in the early stages of a disaster is recognizing the shape of a situation. People have a limited set of previous experiences that they can use for comparison. Since disasters are, pretty much by definition, exceptional events, we're not very good at recognizing them in the very early stages-- the times when intervention can do the most good.
