Digicel, on the other hand, is the country’s largest employer and taxpayer. The privately held company has invested $600 million in Haiti, making it by far the country’s largest foreign investor ever, and it has democratized communications with its strategy of selling low-price cellphones and services to the masses.

Mr. O’Brien has profited extensively from Haiti, which is Digicel’s largest market and accounts for roughly one-third of its 11.1 million subscribers.

“There is something that is two-way about this relationship,” Mr. Delatour said. “It is not only a story of what Digicel and Mr. O’Brien have done for Haiti, but also what Haiti has done for Digicel and Mr. O’Brien.”

For his part, Mr. O’Brien does not like to hear his work on behalf of the country or Digicel’s largess there described as corporate social responsibility. “If you make money in a poor country, you can’t just take it and disappear,” he said. “It would be bad business.”

Thus, Digicel unveiled plans in November to invest $45 million in a new 173-room hotel next door to its offices, to be run by Marriott. That announcement came at a forum sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank that drew 500 business people from 29 countries.

Witnesses in Chennai and Pondicherry said trees had been toppled, there had been power outages throughout the night and disruption to phone and internet services in some areas.

Hundreds of people from fishing communities along north Tamil Nadu’s coast, and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state, have moved to schools set up as relief centres until the weather system passes.

“Making relief efforts diffuclt, roads are blocked because of heavy rainfall, trains were canceled and international flights also canceled,” Al Jazeera’s Prerna Suri said.

“They had about 24 hours to prepare, unlike with other storms. So evacuation shelters are in place,” our correspondent said. “Eight teams from the disaster management force are deployed from New Delhi, with some 15,000 people put on high alert.”

But alongside the remembrance events, a report by the German news agency dpa caused concern, when respected meteorologist Smith Dharmasaroja warned that the tsunami warning system was essentially broken, and Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra agreed that disaster prevention needed a lot of work.

Another tsunami would be hard to detect in southern Thailand now, said Mr Smith.

“There was a regional tsunami warning system in place six years ago but now it doesn’t work,” dpa quoted Mr Smith, who warned the government about the risk of a tsunami striking the country years before.

Mr Smith, who was appointed chairman of the National Disaster Warning Administration in 2005 and assigned to put a warning system in place, said the system was no longer functioning properly. Warning buoys placed off Phuket in 2005 have not functioned reliably from a lack of replacement parts, he said.

“Even some of the warning towers don’t work,” said Mr Smith, who was attending a memorial service in Phuket when he talked to the dpa reporter.

“Just (Sunday) big waves hit the eastern coast of Thailand, flooding many houses, and there were no warnings of that storm,” Mr Smith said.

The cause of a tsunami is an earthquake or an underwater landslide. Earthquakes cause most tsunamis, though the pile of silt accumulated in the Bay of Bengal from the Ganga is a cause for concern. The science of detecting an underwater landslide/mudslide is not fully developed, so let us leave that aside for now. The science of detecting earthquakes as they occur (not predicting them) and calculating their tsunamigenic potential has advanced greatly since 2004.

In the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami earlier this year, both the Japanese and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) broke their previous best records. The distance between Japan and Hawai’i did not matter.

1. PTWC issued its preliminary earthquake message 4min 8s after origin (when the Earthquake started). This had a magnitude of 7.5.

2. Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued two warning bulletins, one in its capacity as the local tsunami warning center for Japan, and another in its capacity as the NWPTAC (Northwest Pacific Tsunami Advisory Center). The warning JMA issued as the NWPTAC was sent about 9mins after origin. By international agreement, since the earthquake fell in the NWPTAC’s area of responsibility PTWC waited until JMA issued the bulletin and used JMA’s parameters in its own bulletin to avoid confusion (at least for the first bulletin).

3. JMA, in its capacity as the national warning agency issued the warning in 4 minutes, at most, 8 seconds ahead of PTWC.

4. A better indication of how far tsunami detection and monitoring has come since 2004 is indicated by PTWC’s response to the Mentawai earthquake on Oct 25, 2010. PTWC issued a local watch/warning for Sumatra 6m 35s after the earthquake. BMG (Indonesia’s national warning agency) also issued a warning about 5m 30s after origin.

Other than for the “comfort” factor of having your own national capability, there is no real scientific rationale for national centers. All resources should be concentrated in two or three regional centers. We should focus our efforts on national systems for converting regional alerts into authoritative warnings and to ensure that the warnings actually reach the people in the path of the tsunami.

What is even more worrisome is the lack of knowledge among all the parties about the available modes of communicating early warnings. No mention of cell broadcasting that is capable of delivering location-specific tailored information to all mobile handsets within the range of a base transceiver station. The journalist has done a good job except for repeating misinformation about poor communication infrastructure and access in rural areas.

Pradeep Koddippilli, the DMC assistant director-in-charge of early warnings, told IPS that the centre had not received any warning from the meteorology department tasked with assessing dangerous weather events. “We kept contacting them repeatedly through the 25th, but there was no warning,” he said.

Despite the millions spent on setting up early warning towers and networks, a recent assessment by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in November said that the meteorology department, in fact, lacked the technical capacity to predict rainfall and fast moving weather patterns.

“The U.N. assessment confirms the technical capacity of the department of meteorology needs to be further developed in order to enable it to deliver reliable quantitative rain forecasts,” said the report titled ‘Disaster Response and Preparedness Assessment Mission to Sri Lanka’.

Experts told IPS that multiple dissemination systems are at the disposal of the DMC – ideal for a country where communication infrastructure is poor in rural areas.

In addition to the 67 warning towers set up island-wide, the DMC can also tap into the wide network of public officials at the village level, volunteers with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, secure satellite communications and, at least, one national mobile network to send out alerts.

“You cannot say what is the best system because each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is to have several systems to make sure vulnerable communities receive warnings in time,” Suranga Kahandawa, disaster management specialist at the World Bank, told IPS

The government’s own nationally and provincially representative Household Income and Expenditure Survey shows that more than 75 percent of households in the Southern Province (affected by the most recent early warning fiasco) have a telephone in the house (almost all being GSM and CDMA handsets capable of receiving cell broadcasts), clearly contradicting the claim of poor infrastructure in rural areas.

LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP4 research (representative of those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; but not at the level of Province) showed that urban households has slightly higher (7%) ownership of phones, but that when it came to access to a phone within the household there was no difference between urban and rural households.

But the Minister’s reaction is fully understandable. People died needlessly, because the agency that is mandated to warn our people of hazards that may harm them willfully neglected to do so. I was one of the first to tweet on Nov 27th that there appeared to have been a massive failure in communicating the early warning. The Minister in charge of disaster management (representing a Southern coastal district who should have been enraged by what happened) first said he’d launch an investigation and then said the Met Department had been “unable” to issue a warning and that it would be given more resources to do its job. But now, his Cabinet colleague has unequivocally refuted the claim of inability:

Fisheries Minister Dr Rajitha Senaratne in Parliament today blamed the Meteorology Department for failing to warn residents and fishermen along the souhern costal belt of incoming gale force winds despite being warned ahead by the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency (NARA).

The failure to issue an early warning led to the death of nearly 20 fishermen last month.

Dr Senaratne said that he had not previously revealed the fact of NARA warning the Met Department, Disaster Management Centre, Coast Guard Department and the Sri Lanka Navy of the impending danger a day ahead.

Chairman of the NARA Dr Hiran Jayawardena had sent SMS messages to the Navy and the Coast Guard of the gale force wind with the time it was expected to hit the Southern Coastal belt areas, the Minister said.

When the NARA officials had informed the Met Department of the information that there would be strong winds of larger magnitude, the Met Department officials had rubbished them saying that such event is not in their forecast so that could not be happened.

Basically what I understand the Minister as saying (I was watching the debate on TV) that internationally generated weather information will be sent directly to fishing vessels capable of receiving them by the National Aquatic Research Agency. This is a workaround. As long as NARA simply transmits the information without issuing warnings, we could safeguard the principle. But of course it is more important to safeguard lives than principles.

There are two paradigms to implementing speech-to-text software: 1) speaker-dependent and 2) speaker-independent. In 1) the users have to first train the system (also know as a voice recognition system), typically by training an artificial neural network software that learns to react to known patterns of words and pronunciations for a particular human voice. Then in 2) the software does not require any training and anyone can speak. It may be restricted to a domain with limited words to remove any uncertainties that may arise relative a fully open system.

Figure 1

To emulate the speaker-dependent and speaker-independent scenarios the research devised two methods incorporating the difficult percentage as the underlying measure.

Figure 1 shows results from a formal survey. The survey required the Freedom Fone users (n=51) to record the answer to a question from a list of possible answers (multiple choice type questionnaire). In this case, the voice quality Evaluators (m=3) had a sense of the answers and could predict even if there was some distortion. Thus, it mimics a trained system. For example, a question that asked “what was the hazard event type”. The possible answers would be: cyclone, tsunami, floods, landslide.

The results in Figure 2 were obtained with Freedom Fone users (n=41) submitting field observation reports pertaining to any incident of their choice. In this exercise, there were no predetermined answers to select from and were free to supply any pertinent information. The Evaluators (m=7) did not have a prior knowledge of the possible answers; thus, it mimics an untrained that may arise. For example, if the voice recording was heavily and only the first letter of the word could be heard, then “[ts]unami” could be mistaken for a “[c]yclone”.

Figure 2

The results show that with a speaker dependent system 95% of the information could be clearly deciphered opposed a speaker independent system that was only 70% clear (blue areas in Figure 1 and Figure 2). It is not surprising, the outcomes are intuitive. In our study reliability had two components, one was efficiency and the other was voice quality. The voice quality also took in to consideration the Mean Opinion Score and the Comparison Categorical Rating. The researchers wish to acknowledge that their may be disagreements in the  sample sizes and number of Evaluators. These results are not ideal for drawing a ‘for-all” kind of conclusion. However, at this realize stage of the research it provides a quick and easy method to draw initial conclusions.

Mr. Joseph told reporters here on Friday that the Centre should intervene immediately to save the life of 30 lakh people who lived under the threat of a dam breach. If the situation warrants it, he is willing to quit office to save the life of the people. He is willing to go on fast to invoke the conscience of the people of Tamil Nadu. Since leaders of the national parties in the two States have adopted different stance on the issue, their Central leaderships should clarify their position. It is not an issue affecting Kerala alone. It should be discussed in Parliament. The Dam Safety Authority should implead itself in the case pending before the Supreme Court. Political parties and MLAs in Tamil Nadu should reconsider their stance. He and Revenue Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan will go to New Delhi to apprise the Centre of the situation, Mr. Joseph said.

If the Mullaperiyar dam overflows, it will destroy the dams at Idukki, Cheruthoni, and Kulamavu and 30 lakh people will be wiped off. Any damage to the dam will also affect the farming activities in Theni, Madurai, Dindugal, Sivaganga, and Ramanathapuram districts in Tamil Nadu.

HIHO processing disaster incident info

CERT members call one of the four telephone numbers to access Freedom Fone; then press the “reporting” menu item number on their phone keypad to record a “field observation report”. That report is received and stored in the Freedom Fone inbox as an audio file (MP3) at Sarvodaya’s Hazard Information Hub (essentially the data center belonging to the Sarvodaya Community Disaster Management Center). Trained HIH Operators (HIHO) listen to those local language spoken incident field observations, then transform them in to English language text to feed in to the Sahana Eden, Emergency Data Exchange Language Situational Reporting (SITREP) application. This process is, essentially, crowd-sourcing, just like any other incident management system like Ushahidi; i.e. we need people to supply information and people to process them.

Time Series of HIHO tasks with durations

FF4EDXL research team observed the HIHO human action cycle and complexities of interaction sequence. The process began with the HIHO activating the CERT members with an alert message asking them to assess the situation. Thereafter, the HIHO would receive field observation reports from the CERT members. The figure to the right shows eleven tasks the HIHO had to perform between alerting and situational reporting.

Creating the Common Alerting Protocol message in Sahana Agasti, deciphering the field observation report, and creating the SITREP message in Sahana Eden were the most time consuming activities. The time series shows that the HIHO had some confusion with when they should upload the audio alert file (task no. 4) in Freedom Fone and issue the SMS text alert (task no 7); hence, the multiple instances of this task indicate the user revisiting this task and realizing that a prerequisite had not been completed. Despite the training and illustrating the streamlined processes in a quick reference guide, these mishaps were recurrent.

There are three recommendations that we draw from these exercises:

1) The user should be presented with a “single application” that has all the necessary functionality; where they don’t have to go between Freedom Fone, Sahana, Audacity, and other software to complete the process. Hence, Freedom Fone and a audio recording application would need to be embedded in to Sahana.

2) More automation is required to streamline and increase the efficiencies. Besides the 23 minute waiting time between issuing the alert and receiving the field reports, all tasks should be accomplished under 5 minutes. This requires better software functionality.

3) The HIHO volunteers must be trained and certified. Unlike other crowd sourcing applications that may be self-intuitive to get familiar with right away, this one is domain specific (i.e. for disaster management) and require some aptitude of skills and knowledge to engage. Sarvodaya should advocate such a program to ready their volunteer base to assist the HIH during a disaster.

The intent of FF4EDXL is to realize the design requirements to improve this system to enable Sarvodaya with emergency communication capabilities to better manage future disasters.

All things considered, their attitude towards using Freedom Fone (FF) for receiving alerts and sending situational reports are quite-good, quite-beneficial, quite-wise and quite-positive. We concatenated all the reasons the CERT had provided to create a wordle image on to the right. At a glance it reads like “FF system exchange information quickly … giving working people instructions … activities and tasks accurately”

Accountability is an important aspect Sarvodaya emergency coordinators keep stressing on; especially when communicating situation reports. The present day methods are informal and ad-hoc. They say “with the electronic voice recording system, we have a record telling our story, which otherwise, could go unheard and then turns in to a finger-pointing game.” They spent ~02:30 and ~3:00 on average to navigate through the interactive voice menus and to receive an alert or record a report, respectively.

This was their first exercise after the training. The blue shaded area represents those users who completed their alerting (42%) or reporting (43%) interactive voice procedures in a single attempt. The red shaded area depict those who made two attempts (Alerting= 37% and SitRep=46%). Impatience to hear the instructions and pressing the wrong menu option was the main obstacle.

The project introduced system makes use of the Freedom Fone interactive voice interface for activating Sarvodaya first responders and receiving field observation reports from the CERT members. The disaster information is managed with the Sahana Disaster Management System. Both applications: Sahana-Agasti Common Alerting Protocol enabled messaging module and the Sahana-Eden Situational Reporting enabled incident management module. They build on the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) interoperable content standards.

In the aftermath of the 2004-2005 hurricane season, when eight named storms caused a total of $15.5 million in customer losses from power outages, Florida embarked on a comprehensive reform preparing electric utilities for hurricanes. This effort included coordinated research through PURC on electric infrastructure and storm damage.

This research – funded by Florida’s utilities and done in collaboration with them – included an in-depth look at the economics of hardening the state’s electric system. A computer model developed for that purpose helps analyze the costs and benefits of undergrounding and other forms of hardening at a micro level. The research also included the deployment of an extensive network of weather monitoring devices to gather storm data and a companion software system for mapping the weather data to infrastructure damage.

In contrast, some bureaucrat in Japan accepted a harebrained proposal to build a wall to stop tsunamis. That collapsed in the tsunami that came with the Great Tohoku Earthquake. Now another wall is being built. I guess when you are spending other people’s money, it okay to repeat mistakes.

After three decades and nearly $1.6 billion, work on Kamaishi’s great tsunami breakwater was completed three years ago. A mile long, 207 feet deep and jutting nearly 20 feet above the water, the quake-resistant structure made it into the Guinness World Records last year and rekindled fading hopes of revival in this rusting former steel town.

But when a giant tsunami hit Japan’s northeast on March 11, the breakwater largely crumpled under the first 30-foot-high wave, leaving Kamaishi defenseless. Waves deflected from the breakwater are also strongly suspected of having contributed to the 60-foot waves that engulfed communities north of it.

Report.

Whereas 42% of disasters [in the first half of 2011] happened in Asia, 90% of total deaths and 73% of total people affected were from this continent. Moreover, Asia accounted for 83% of total economic damages brought by natural disasters.

As some of Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century bears down on Bangkok — submerging cities, industrial parks and ancient temples as it comes — experts in water management are blaming human activity for turning an unusually heavy monsoon season into a disaster.

The main factors, they say, are deforestation, overbuilding in catchment areas, the damming and diversion of natural waterways, urban sprawl, and the filling-in of canals, combined with bad planning. Warnings to the authorities, they say, have been in vain.

“I have tried to inform them many times, but they tell me I am a crazy man,” said Smith Dharmasaroja, former director general of the Thai Meteorological Department, who is famous here for predicting a major tsunami years before the one that devastated coastal towns in 2004.

Full report.

“Avoid Plaza Las Américas,” several people wrote, giving the location.

“There are gunmen,” wrote others, adding, “they’re not soldiers or marines, their faces are masked.”

These witness accounts have become common in Mexico over the past year, especially in violent cities where the news media have been compromised by corruption or killings.

These witness accounts have become common in Mexico over the past year, especially in violent cities where the news media have been compromised by corruption or killings. But the flurry of Twitter messages about the bodies arrived at a telling moment — on the same day that Veracruz’s State Assembly made it a crime to use Twitter and other social networks to undermine public order.

Of course, we need to think about what could go wrong. Could criminals wanting to clear an area use Twitter for their purposes?