Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi, Leader of the Coastal Oceanography Group at the School of Environmental Systems Engineering of the Australian National Facility for Ocean Gliders carried out a real-time analysis of the tsunami alerts and warnings around the Indian Ocean basin following the massive Bengkulu earthquakes off the coast of southern Sumatra, Indonesia on 12 September, 2007. In his paper, Pattiarachi discusses background for tsunami generation, the present status of the tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean, and the role of deep-water tsunameters in the detection of tsunamis on 12 September. For more details, see Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System: Example from the 12th September 2007 Tsunami.
We assume that the failure of the Hikkaduwa tower will be examined as part of the comprehensive review the Minister has called for. The important thing is to think about warning as a chain with many links. If one link breaks, the chain breaks. The conclusions are that one must minimize the number of links and ensure that each is link is robust. It appears from the story that a link in the Galle district failed.
The Minister is to be commended for initiating the review of the alert process that went from alert to evacuation in minutes. Sri Lanka News | Online edition of Daily News – Lakehouse Newspapers Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, called for an immediate review of the tsunami alert process that was put into operation on September 12 to learn from the experience and refine procedures the Disaster Management and Human Rights Ministry in a release said.He stated that the successful exercise could prove a platform for future improvements to the early warning process making it more effective and efficient.
The HazInfo paper titled “Last-Mile Hazard Warning in Sri Lanka: Performance of WorldSpace Satellite Radios for Emergency Alerts”, coauthored by Srinivasan Rangarajan, PhD (Senior Vice President Engineering, WorldSpace), Peter Anderson (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University), Gordon Gow, PhD (Assistant Professor, University of Alberta), and Nuwan Waidyanatha (Project Manager, LIRNEasia) was accepted for oral/poster presentation at the Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC) at The Birla Science and Technology Center in the heart of Jaipur, India, December 03 – 06, 2007. WorldSpace, a lead technology partner in the HazInfo research project, field tested 16 Addressable Radios for Emergency Alerts (AREAs) in the Sarvodaya Communities and 34 AREAs in the Sarvodaya District Centers. Although the AREA solutions lacked bi-directional communication and seemed the least effective, the AREA solution proved to be the most reliable that worked with utmost certainty and greatest efficiency even when GSM and CDMA cells were deactivated for over 2 months, at the beginning of this year, during military operations in the conflict prone North-East regions of Sri Lanka. The HazInfo research introduced a concept called “complementary redundancy”, where coupling the AREA addressable/broadcast technology with a GSM mobile phone or CDMA nomadic phone improves the overall performance (reliability and effectiveness) […]
Thailand’s response to Bengkulu was far superior to that of others. However, an excellent editorial in the Bangkok Post points out how they could do even better. The para below fits perfectly with our interest in developing a fast, reliable system for informing the media. Maybe I should send the letter we sent to the Sri Lanka DMC to Smith Dharmasarojana. Bangkok Post : General news As a first step, the Centre must immediately set up and use channels to all media within Thailand, domestic and foreign.
Sign of the times? No longer are universal service subsidies offered for bare bones basic service; broadband is being considered for subsidy. With massive amounts piling up in the USF, they need to be innovative to get it out. Of course, there is another option: reduce or eliminate the US levies. TRAI issues draft recommendations for broadband growth Dismayed by the poor penetration of broadband services, telecom regulator TRAI today brought out a new draft that recommends subsidising the service in remote and hilly areas.
AFP (via Google) Home to some 1.5 billion people, South Asia is paying a high price to access the Internet as service providers have been slow to deliver cheaper broadband connections, analysts say. The region has embraced telephones, mobile phones and computers and India has a flourishing software and outsourcing industry, noted industry watchers at the first South Asia Broadband Congress here earlier this month. But South Asia has lagged behind in hopping onto the broadband bandwagon, observed Sanjay Gupta of India’s Midas Communication Technology. Powered by ScribeFire.
This past weekend I spoke at the second Knowledge Forum for journalists organized by Sri Lanka Telecom Limited, Sri Lanka’s largest fixed and broadband service provider in Habarana. Over 40 journalists from print and electronic media participated in this two and a half day event. A majority of speakers were from within the Company, but they had invited 3-4 speakers including me to speak on related subjects. I made a presentation on Teleuse@BOP and also participated in an interesting discussion about congestion around the time of some form of “disaster” event, such as the recent false warning on a tsunami. In LIRNEasia’s thinking, the media play an extremely important role in policy and regulation, because they constitute the symbolic environment within which stakeholders act.
It has been a practice at LIRNEasia to write an assessment of the responses to potentially tsunamigenic events in the region. We commented on Nias and Pangandaran. Now that the discussion on the response is starting, here is our take: Lessons from the Sri Lanka tsunami warnings and evacuation of September 12-13, 2007 The tragedy of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the absence of any official warning. The September 12th Bengkulu earthquake shows that this is unlikely to be the case in the future. We have seen that the new institutions created since the 2004 tsunami have the will and the capacity to act.
The National Disaster Warning centre (NDWC) Thailand, has defended its decision not to issue an early tsunami alert after the 8.4-magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island on Wednesday evening. Instead, the NDWC made a broadcast three hours later telling people there was no cause for alarm. Centre chairman Smith Dharmasarojana said yesterday the delay was based on a thorough analysis of the situation. The NDWC decided against a sudden TV broadcast to warn people about a possible tsunami because it predicted the quake, which struck about 6.
It is unlikely that the thin-client vision can be realized in the developing world in the short term unless connectivity and power supplies get a lot better, fast. However, the basic concept may become operationalized through the mobile. For Networks, Thin Is In – New York Times A decade ago, the network computer — also called the thin-client computer — was promoted as a replacement for personal computers and desktop software. Thin clients have no hard drives to store desktop applications, like Microsoft’s Word or Excel, permanently. The leading supporters of the inexpensive, terminal-style machines were Microsoft’s archrivals at Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
BBC News| Technology Swedish company TerraNet has developed the idea using peer-to-peer technology that enables users to speak on its handsets without the need for a mobile phone base station. The technology is designed for remote areas of the countryside or desert where base stations are unfeasible. … The TerraNet technology works using handsets adapted to work as peers that can route data or calls for other phones in the network. The handsets also serve as nodes between other handsets, extending the reach of the entire system. Each handset has an effective range of about one kilometre.
Looks like some people can’t get out of the old habits of trying to regulate everything and anything. The license raj is not quite dead, sadly. Parents are best positioned to make these kinds of decisions, not blowhard Babus. The state should not try to micro-manage people’s lives. Leave the decisions to those best positioned to make them; don’t issue regulations that are impossible to enforce.
Business Telecom Analysts are of the view that even though government has imposed a 10 percent tax on usage over the existing 15 percent value added tax, the mobile companies are unlikely to increase prices. “I don’t think that the four major mobile companies in the country will go for a price hike as there is prospective competition with the arrival of Bharti Airtel by the beginning of the next year. Besides, the industry is growing” said former telecom regulator and industry analyst Professor Rohan Samarajeewa. He further said that this increase in tax might have a negative impact on people’s usage of mobile phones. “If the levy was imposed the way it was planned, the Rs.
The Secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, Mr P. D. Amarasinghe joined LIRNEasia on a visit to Mirissa South, one of the best performing villages in the HazInfo Last-Mile project on 11 September 2007. The visit was organized by the Sarvodaya Community Based Disaster Management Center. The Matara District Sarvodaya Office and the Mirissa Sarvodaya Society hosted us.