‘Disaster Zone’ Practices Preparedness on Second Life (Pixels and Policy) “The Catastrophic Planning and Management Institute in cooperation with Linden Lab recently launched a new Second Life sim, an innovative disaster awareness project called the ‘The Disaster Zone,’” writes Sandy Demina in a guest piece on the Pixels and Policy website. The project has “14 collaborative islands … and one overarching goal: limiting deaths related to natural disasters.” The institute “plans to create an inworld disaster recreation and training program designed to educate users on the best way to avoid falling victim to hurricanes, earthquakes, and other common disasters.” [View post]

Mobile Phone Data Aid Crisis Mapping (Reuters AlertNet) “A new generation of Web sites that allow users to exchange data and information and help create quasi real-time maps through mobile phone technology will be the way forward in crisis mapping, [Patrick] Meier [co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers] said,” reports Reuters. “… This approach will allow a wider variety of actors to join forces in an emergency—such as survivors, donors, aid agencies and local media—to get their information onto maps in real time and distribute them rapidly among crises responders and beneficiaries.” [View article]

Radar Satellite Images Give Clear View During Storms Detailed images provided by advanced radar satellites offer a new and important source of up-to-date information for emergency response teams and coastal monitoring crews after destructive storms, such as hurricanes, according to an article in the Journal of Coastal Research. Without these satellite acquisitions, it can be difficult to get cloud-free radar images during tropical storms and hurricanes. [View article (758KB PDF)]

Soldiers Learn Anti-Terrorism Evasive Driving An Anti-Terrorism Evasive Driving “course offered via the Joint Multinational Training Command’s Combined Arms Training Center” is offered to “Soldiers tasked with driving and providing personal security to VIPs—generals, congressmen, diplomats, and dignitaries—throughout Europe and Northern Africa,” according to an article on the U.S. Army website. “… Not only do the Soldiers undergo rigorous safety exercises, like driving an out-of-control, fishtailing car on icy terrain and rollover drills at a Mercedes dealership, but they also learn methods for evading terrorist attacks on their convoys.” [View article]

Sandia Lab Uses Virtual Machines to Study Botnets Computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA, can now run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines, allowing cyber-security researchers to more effectively observe behavior found in malicious botnets, or networks of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes. [View press release]

New Drug Shields Against Radiation (Australian) “A medication that can protect people exposed to normally lethal doses of radiation from a nuclear or a ‘dirty’ bomb has been developed,” reports the Australian, citing a story in the Tel Aviv Hebrew newspaper Yediot Achronot. “… In tests involving” monkeys exposed to Chernobyl levels of radiation, almost all “the group given anti-radiation shots … survived and had no side effects. A test on humans not exposed to radiation showed none suffered side effects from the medication.… The medication has important implications in the treatment of cancer, the report said, since it permits use of more powerful radiation.” [View article]

Australia Will Use Twitter and Facebook for Bushfire Alerts (BBC) “Australia is to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to give people early warning of bushfires,” reports the British Broadcasting Corporation. “Residents of towns in Victoria state have said they had little or no warning of the devastating blazes that killed 173 people in February. The usual advice for homeowners to stay and defend their properties or to seek refuge elsewhere will be revised to put far more emphasis on leaving early.” [View article]

U. of Illinois Studies ‘Second Life’ for Emergency Training (Chicago Chi-Town Daily News) “The University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health is recruiting public health workers to participate in emergency preparedness training—in Second Life,” reports Chi-Town Daily News. The “study will gauge whether the popular virtual reality game can be used for simulations of life-and-death situations like terrorist attacks and epidemics.” [View article]

Photo courtesy of Eddie~S at Flickr

Blimps for Cellphone Relay and Surveillance (Global Post) “Governments around the world are using helium-filled airships as surveillance platforms to track enemies or spot smugglers,” reports the Global Post. “At the same time, commercial and university engineers are testing the potential for airships to serve as floating relay stations for broadband or cellular communications.” [View article]

Natl. Labs’ Research Benefits to Private Sector Uncertain, Says GAO (Government Computer News) “The Energy Department runs or funds 17 national laboratories, all of which produce scientific research that private industry and others use to develop new technologies,” reports Government Computer News. The department, “however, doesn’t have adequate reporting measures in place to quantify how much success it is actually having getting these findings put to commercial use, the Government Accountability Office” states. [View article] [View GAO summary]

Continuity-of-Operation Plans Have Non-Emergency Benefits (Federal Computer Week) “Especially during times of shrinking [information technology] budgets, technology managers are looking for ways to protect their resources in an emergency without paying for idle capacity that doesn’t contribute to daily operations,” reports Federal Computer Week. “IT managers and consultants say that with the right IT architectures in place, organizations can safely see their COOP resources perform multiple roles.… One of the most common ways of achieving dual goals is to modify traditional COOP data-center configurations. The time-tested approach is to support an active production facility with a backup failover site dedicated to COOP and activated only during an emergency. Now organizations can vary that theme by distributing everyday workloads between the two sites.” [View article]

Pentagon Wants Cyborg Insects to Detect Chemicals (Wired) “The Pentagon has handed researchers at Agiltron Corporation a contract to implant larvae with ‘high sensitivity micromechanical chemical sensors’ that run on electric power collected with an embedded ‘electromagnetic harvester,’” writes Wired “Danger Room” blogger Katie Drummond. “… the Pentagon is also backing research into an insect-mounted device powered by fuel cells … the military wants to hook them up with their own wireless network … project proposals reference ‘civilian and defense applications.’” [View blog]

FBI Utilizes Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Second Life (Federal Computer Week) The Federal Bureau of Investigation is using “social media programs [to] supplement other information technology tools the bureau has deployed in recent years to make it easier for people to submit tips and get news from the FBI,” reports Federal Computer Week. “… In addition to a Facebook page and tweets sent via Twitter, the bureau also has a YouTube page and is testing the usefulness of the virtual world Second Life.” It is using them to disseminate information “about fugitives, missing children, threats and scams.” [View article]

Antiterror Cameras Hunt Wild Golfers (Everett, WA, Herald) “Golf balls are bombarding the Port of Everett and anti-terrorism cameras are being trained on a residential neighborhood to hunt down the source,” reports the Herald. “Port officials believe [that] someone on Rucker Hill is whacking golf balls down the hill onto port property, endangering dozens of workers and millions of dollars worth of equipment and cargo.” [View article]

Google Flu Trends Tracks Virus in Mexico (New York Times) “Google has released a new version of its Flu Trends service that is tailored for Mexico in the hope of helping health officials and others track the spread of swine flu in that country,” reports the New York Times. “Google Flu Trends, which was first released in the United States, in November, tries to track the incidence of flu based on the ebb and flow of searches for keywords related to influenza. The company called its Flu Trends for Mexico experimental because unlike in the United States, it does not have historical surveillance data to validate that its search data correlates to actual infections.” [View article] [View Google Flu Trends]

7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs (Wired) Citing U.S. Operation Plowshare and the Russian “Program No. 7—Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy,” Wired looks at the ways nuclear weapons have been “used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes … tried or just proposed:”

1. Creating a harbor, or just a hole
2. Creating a new Panama Canal
3. Natural gas exploration
4. Mining oil shale
5. Disposing of nuclear waste (“What could possibly go wrong?” asks Wired science writer Alexis Madrigal)
6. Human spaceflight
7. Defending earth from an asteroid

Virtual Earth Displays Disasters for Relief Agencies (Wired) After the May 2008 earthquake in China, Ron Eguchi, “CEO of ImageCat, a risk-management company that uses satellite imagery and computer modeling to assess the impact of natural disasters and terrorist attacks,” used “Virtual Earth to display the quake zone as a set of zoomable images,” reports Wired. With help from “the UN and several international aid groups,” he “plans to have a coordinated relief-mapping system ready for use by midyear.” [View article]

Kentucky Uses Earthquake Plan to Cope With Ice Storm (Lexington [KY] Herald-Leader) Kentucky’s “worst natural disaster in years”—“a brutal winter storm” on January 27—“left a record 769,000 without electricity, killed 30 people and sent thousands to shelters,” reports the Associated Press. Brigadier General “John Heltzel, the head of Kentucky’s Division of Emergency Management,” used “statewide earthquake training held last March as a rescue blueprint for the ice storm, and credits that preparation with saving lives … Still, Heltzel says the state needs to upgrade some of its tools for dealing with statewide disasters. County emergency operation centers throughout the state should have satellite communication, a generator and a store room stocked with ready-to-eat meals, he said. The state also needs a statewide shelter plan, Heltzel said. And, the state’s emergency operations center—first-rate technology in the 1970s—could use some upgrades.” [View article]

Flood-Tolerant Rice Boosts Food Security in Asia (CNN) “Two-thirds of the diet of subsistence farmers in India and Bangladesh is made up entirely of rice,” reports CNN. And “as sea levels rise and world weather patterns worsen, flooding has become a major cause of rice crop loss. Scientists estimate [that] 4 million tons of rice are lost every year because of flooding. That’s enough rice to feed 30 million people.… Normal rice dies after three days of complete flooding. Researchers” now have generated “rice that could withstand being submerged in water for 17 days.” It’s been tested for three years “in Bangladesh and India. The subsequent rice harvests were a resounding success.” [View article]

Twitter Tweets in Emergencies (Government Technology) Twitter, “a real-time short messaging service through which users provide brief updates regarding themselves,” is being widely used by governments for “for emergency notification and public safety,” reports Government Technology. “Police can post crime updates, fire departments can inform citizens about local fires, and state departments of transportation can announce traffic alerts.” It’s being used by the Los Angeles Fire Department, the Peace Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency. [View article]

Redhorse: A Soft Side of the Air Force (Small Wars Journal) The Air Force can make big contributions in the war on terror, says Major John Bellflower in his article “The Soft Side of Airpower” in Small Wars Journal. “In remote areas of the world, particularly Africa, air transport may be the only means of contact to the outside world,” he writes. “The Air Force’s Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers (REDHORSE) could be airlifted into these locations” to rebuild or construct airfields to open an air supply route. The “airstrips, in turn, would act as conduits for supplying the region with food and healthcare. Construction units could also serve dual purposes in meeting economic and health interests”—drilling water wells and erecting needed facilities. With other Air Force construction units and local labor, REDHORSE could build “clinics, schools, police stations, community centers …” and “repair existing facilities” to provide electricity, water, and “other needed life support systems.” [View article (118KB PDF)]

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