Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The rest, as we say, is history.

What 9/11 was to the West, ‘the’ tsunami was to the South. Caught unaware, more than 225,000 lives in eleven countries were lost on that fateful Boxing Day of 2004 by a tsunami caused as a result of an earthquake with that reached 9.1 in the Richter scale, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand were the hardest hit.

The two were different. The tsunami was a natural disaster and 9/11 was man-made. 9/11 events took 3,000 lives – and tsunami nearly 75 times of that. The tsunami did not create a recession as in the aftermath of 9/11 though the misery that it caused to millions of families and individuals in Asia was immeasurable.

They were similar. Both were universal tragedies that had an impact far beyond national boundaries. Both were turning points of modern human history. Both made the entire world stand still with utter shock and grief.

Then the inevitable questions: Can we let these repeat? Can Homo sapiens think of their common future in the blue planet if they are not ready to face the increasing threat from disasters – be they natural or man-made? What can WE do? What can I do?

What LIRNEasia did can be best presented in the words of International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in one of their electronic newsletters entitled ‘Research that matters’:

IDRC’s lead research partner was LIRNEasia, a non-profit organization that aims to improve the lives of Asia’s people by using information and communication technologies (ICTs). LIRNEasia has had considerable experience on the use of ICTs in disaster situations. The project also drew upon the extensive networking resources of Sarvodaya, a large village-based self-help movement in Sri Lanka, and upon the disaster communication expertise of Buddhi Weerasinghe of TVE Asia Pacific, Peter Anderson of Simon Fraser University, and Gordon Gow of the University of Alberta, among other partners.

The pilot study had two broad objectives. First, it sought to evaluate the suitability of various configurations of five technical systems, each with unique capabilities, for reaching Sri Lankan local leaders in an emergency: (a) a stand-alone “remote alarm device” incorporating a radio, siren, and flashing lights; (b) versatile Java-enabled mobile phones set up to receive text alerts in English, Sinhala, and Tamil; (c) “addressable” satellite radio sets capable of remote activation and of issuing targeted messages to vulnerable areas; (d) a warning system based on Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) satellite technology that delivers pop-up screen alerts to personal computers; and (e) conventional fixed wireless telephones linked to the public network.

These options were tested for reliability under varying conditions, reaction time, bidirectionality (so that alerts can be confirmed and false warnings minimized), and degree of integration into daily life.

This last-mile system aims to complement and “amplify” the Sri Lankan government’s national alerting function, rather than to issue official public warnings. Project leaders hope that if they can demonstrate an efficient lastmile mechanism, the government will adopt it.

This goal may be advanced by pressure from Sri Lanka’s coastal villagers themselves. The project’s training exercises heightened their awareness of the importance of disaster preparedness, and many communities have demanded that such programs be continued and expanded. Many of the Sarvodaya villages have started emergency response committees to strengthen local disaster resilience.

Meanwhile, the technology and the training have been tested in an actual emergency situation. In September 2007 an earthquake triggered a government order for coastal areas to evacuate ahead of a possible tsunami. Most villages did so, but at least one community — thanks to links with the Colombo hub by satellite radio and Java-enabled phones — decided instead to monitor the situation. The emergency response coordinators observed the ocean before mobilizing the people to flee. In the end, the tsunami did not happen. The government order had been an overreaction, and so the system served to avoid a costly and needless evacuation.

This multi-faceted research endeavour has drawn attention to the many technical and people-centred problems that must be confronted if such hazard alert systems are to work.

(Full document can be downloaded from here or available at the IDRC site here.)

We know that research per se will not prevent the recurrence of 9/11 or a tsunami disaster. Still, we believe will help by allowing us to be more prepared. We are happy that we completed this research. And we are happy that our efforts have been recognized.

Municipal Wi-Fi | Reality bites | Economist.com

IT WAS supposed to democratise the internet and turn America’s city-dwellers into citizen-surfers. In 2004 the mayors of Philadelphia and San Francisco unveiled ambitious plans to provide free wireless-internet access to all residents using Wi-Fi, a technology commonly used to link computers to the internet in homes, offices, schools and coffee-shops. Across America, hundreds of cities followed suit. Yet many municipal Wi-Fi projects have since been hit by mounting costs, poor coverage and weak demand. This week Chicago became the first big city to abandon its plans for a city-wide network. “Everyone would like something for free,” says Chuck Haas of MetroFi, a supplier of municipal Wi-Fi systems. But the numbers do not add up.Most city governments did not want to build or run the Wi-Fi systems themselves, so they farmed the job out to specialist firms such as EarthLink and MetroFi. These companies initially agreed to bear all expenses, expecting to sign up 10-25% of each city’s population for a fee-based wireless service. In some places this was to have been supplemented by a free service at lower speed, or supported by advertising. Some cities also planned to subsidise access for poor residents.

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The Building Digital Communities session, chaired by Divakar, covered a wide-swathe of topics. In his opening remarks [PDF], he outlined on some of the issues that would be covered in the presentations and discussion to follow.

In his Keynote address, the Indonesian Minister of Communication & IT, Sofyan Djalil proposed that global equipment manufacturers should adopt a new business model where they share some of the investment risk with operators while deploying infrastructure in financially unviable areas in developing countries. He suggested that the current model where developing countries are only purchasers of high cost equipment and services, breeds dependency and is unsustainable in the long run. In the second Keynote address, the Hungarian Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Economy & Transport described Hungary as having a highly trained ICT workforce, extensive telecom infrastructure but very little digital communities. ICTs were more part of industry rather than society. He posed the puzzle as to why that was so and how to develop bottoms-up initiatives to create digital communities.

Panelists Les Hales, President of HK Knowledge Management Society, explored the various ways in which digital communities will impact how business is conducted, emphasizing how digital communities are transforming top-down industrial model into more bottoms-up and flexible models embodied by the open-source community; Rudd Smeulders, Innovation Manager at the Rabobank Group, Netherlands, gave the unique example of a digital community, Neunen that had community TV content developed by the residents of village delivered via fiber to every home; Heather Hudson, Director of Telecom Management & Policy program at Univ of San Francisco, demonstrated how broadband access in most of developing Asia was limited and prices were high, making the task of building digital communities challenging. The question and answer session that followed generated interesting discussion the most significant outcome being the number of new measures proposed by the Indonesian Minister to stimulate Internet growth in his country.

The video of the Building Digital Communities session can be downloaded here [138Mb!].

By JOHN MARKOFF,
SAN FRANCISCO,

In an effort to create a global wireless alternative to cable and telephone Internet service, Intel said on Monday that it would collaborate with Clearwire, a wireless broadband company, in developing and deploying the new technology. The companies said that Intel would make a "significant” investment in Clearwire, which has begun building long-range wireless data networks around the world. Clearwire, founded by Craig O. McCaw, a pioneer of the cellular industry, said in August that it had raised $160 million from 23 investors in a private stock transaction. The companies are betting that a new wireless technology called WiMax – which is intended to extend the reach of Wi-Fi wireless networks by permitting a single transceiver to connect hundreds or thousands of customers to the Internet over distances of many miles – will succeed where other long-range wireless data technologies have failed in the past.

Intel is spending $150 million to jumpstart WiMax technology by creating a series of new chips designed to support the WiMax standard. Clearwire recently began offering wireless Internet service in Jacksonville, Fla., for about $25 a month.

During a news conference on Monday, Mr. McCaw said that Clearwire was moving more quickly to deploy the service in major cities in Canada and Mexico and that it was also active in developing countries like Bangladesh. The company said that it could be in as many as 20 American markets next year, but Mr. McCaw said getting access to radio spectrum was more difficult in this country than in Canada and Mexico. He also said that Clearwire could succeed at offering high-speed wireless Internet access where others have failed, in part because it hoped to take advantage of Intel’s efforts to create a global technology standard. "We are tempered by the fact that everyone who has tried this has failed," Mr. McCaw said, "but we’re crossing the river on the backs of pioneers." During the 1990′s there were a number of efforts to provide Internet access wirelessly both in urban and rural areas in the United States, but they have all failed financially. Intel executives said on Monday that they believed that by creating a single global standard for WiMax technology, wireless access could become an alternative to digital subscriber lines and cable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/technology/26intel.html?ex=1099786570&ei=1&en=b1f3317f6ee75a58