Security and Risk Analysis

            In this post we are to explain why we think that Penn State Security and Risk Analysis students are well fitted to address issues in the integration of technology in crisis response. I believe that this is a great question to answer because it very well could be a question that a future employer would like to know in the hiring process. It is important that we as Penn State Security and Risk Analysis students are understood in the things that we do. This reigns true because the fact of the matter is that Security and Risk Analysis is a relatively new Major that up and coming students are taking an interest in as well as employers. But, because it is new, most people do not even know what it really means. I know this on a first hand basis because whenever people ask me what my major is and I tell them, almost ninety percent of the time, the follow up question is, “oh, what is that.” Security and Risk Analysis is not like the norm of a business degree where everyone knows what it is and everyone pretty much knows the core curriculum of what they students are going to do. Security and Risk Analysis is different because we are changing up our curriculum almost every year (or at least for the two years that I have been in it.)

            But to get to the point, Security and Risk Analysis and Information Science and Technology students are great for a job in Crisis Response. Ill tell you why. For one, a lot of the students in SRA have an interest in law enforcement and/or have a military history or future. Not only is this important, but we have at least a basic understand in technology and how to use it properly and sufficiently. And that is something that you do not get with a lot of the other more popular and older majors. The Penn State IST college really strives to challenge its students to the very best of their ability and this will pay off when we get out into the work environment. We also tend to do more hands on projects rather then just learn definitions and do paper work all semester. We get the skills that we need in order to succeed in the work force. I know that Penn State is not an Ivy League school, but I challenge that it will keep up if not surpass any other school in the country on this topic. Furthermore, Penn State has a wide variety of classes that help us. For example, we have a class that I am currently taking that is called Crisis Informatics. The cool part of this class is that it is only the second time that a class like this has been given in the whole world. Now can you say that about other majors or universities? All in all, Penn State gives us everything that we need in order to succeed and succeed we shall. 

Crisis Mapping

            This is also a make up post for blog post number eight. This week in class we had a great guest speaker named Patrick Meier. However, before this presentation we had about an hour of class time. During the time we had to opportunity for all of us to voice our interest in what we would like to do our final project on. For those of our viewing this blog that is not in our class, our final project is to make up a software, hardware, or device that we believe would be very useful to humanitarian efforts, law enforcement, the United Nations, Government agencies and also non government agencies. For me in particular, I voiced my opinion on how it would be nice to create a device that would provide a check in system for government agencies or anyone who it would be useful for that matter. See the point of it would a device that would show a google maps type of software that would be loaded with geotags to show their fellow colleagues were and what exactly they are doing. This would be useful for lets just say the police. If one responder is at a traffic stop or a domestic disturbance call, and things get a little out of hand and the officer needs backup, he is able to look really quickly as to were his nearest back up is and what they are doing so he can gage the situation and analyze what his actions need to be in order to handle the situation at hand appropriately.

            As for the second half of our class, our guest speaker, Patrick Meier presented to us over skype. This is not the first time that we had a presentation of the internet, but this one was different and better because it was a lot more clear and it was very easy for us to understand everything that he was saying. He spoke to us on crisis mapping and it was a very interesting talk. See, crisis mapping is very important because if we did not have it, then the humanitarian people that are on the ground trying to find out were places are what how long it will take them to get there would not be able too. Crisis mapping is a whole lot more complicated that it seems. There is a lot more too it them what meets the naked eye. It gets too complicated for me as barely even an amateur to try to explain to everyone but what I can speak about is just how important it is for everyone to use it to its highest degree. See the problem with mapping is that it is quickly out of style and technology is taking away for the original roots of it. I believe that it is important for us to stick to our roots and continue mapping because it is very useful and necessary. All in all this was a very great speaker and I look forward to looking into the research of Mr. Meier. 

humanitarianism

This is a make up post for the topic of humanitarianism. Before this class I had a pretty basic understanding of what humanitarianism was. But like most people I had a lot to learn about this topic. In my past I never really had an educated discussion about humanitarianism because the main topic of my studies was more on the terrorism side; so needless to say this class was interesting to me and brought new ideas and thoughts to my mind. At first I knew that humanitarianism had things to do with disaster relief and countries in time of need, but I was kind of taken back by the fact that the Red Cross actually started out by helping out both countries in a time of war by helping them with medical needs and helping to free prisoners. Another thing that I was extremely surprised about was the fact that they helped both sides of the war. I am not sure if this is just because I was naive, arrogant or just flat out oblivious but I just thought that the Red Cross was an American based and operated company that just helped us after hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, landslides and so on. But it was just mind boggling to me to find out that they helped out other countries as well.

            The next thing that I would like to talk about is the natural disaster of hurricane Katrina. Yes, we did have help from humanitarian efforts just as the Red Cross and FEMA, but I do believe that we fell short in the disaster relief. We were really not prepared at all for the effects of this disaster and it is my personal opinion that if we were more prepared for it, than more lives would have been saved. We should have done more things just as use twitter and other technologies in our response. But instead, we stuck to the old methods of disaster relief. This just doesn’t make sense to me because what good is technology if we are not going to use it when lives are on the line. This also doesn’t make sense to me because with out weather technologies we were able to predict the Hurricane days in advance. Now, wouldn’t it make sense to prepare everything we possibly could especially in a town that is below sea level? I just believe that there were so many things that the humanitarian efforts could have done so much better. They need to work on time efficiency, the common saying is that “time is money” but in this case “time is lives.” So, needless to say time efficiency is very important.

            All in all I learned so much about the humanitarian efforts in our country and even other countries around the world. There are things that I now have in my long term memory and not just my short term memory like I have for most of my other classes. I hope to see an improvement in our humanitarian efforts in the future so that we can avoid many of the mistakes that we have made. 

geo

Geo

In recent months there has been an explosion of people using the Internet to create, and assemble geographic information provided by volunteers. This would lead to sites such as Wikimapia and OpenStreepMap. Also, Google map is encouraging people to develop interesting applications using their own data. These are examples of VGI’s of Volunteered Geographic Information. An example of VGI is Wikimapia. This uses a lot of the ideas that wikipedia uses and applies them to this site. Anyone with an Internet connection can select an area on the earth’s surface and provide it with a description, including links to other sources. Anyone can edit entries, and volunteer reviews monitor the results by checking for accuracy and significance. This can range from entries as large as major cities to as small as a single building. It is defined by the ranges of longitude and latitude. You can also upload a hyperlink with pictures included.

Another example of a VGI is Misspronouncer. It was created by Jacki Johnson to help people pronounce some of the more distinctive Wisconsin place names. She developed a site that has an audio recording of the correct pronunciation of almost 2,000 places in the state.

Next there is Open Street Map. It’s an international effort to create a free source of map date via volunteer efforts. Which has a more elaborate focus on the earth’s surface.  For example a map of Dublin is incomplete with some street names present along with railroads and towns, but some minor street names missing. Dublin and other cities around the world lacks a cheap, readily available digital street map, so this volunteer effort can potentially fill a gap in the availability of digital geographic information.

Google also came out with redesigned software like this that was previously called Earthviewer. That would eventually be called Google earth. It was very successful because it was very straightforward. Google maps and Google earth popularize the term “mash-up”. Which is the ability to superimpose geographic information from sources distributed over the web. In some cases users could even edit the content created by others, which would become common among blogs and Wikis. The VGI would result in the growing range of interactions enabled by the evolving technology.

Next, Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) is a system that has been adopted for the geographic coordinates needed by many military agencies. It is basically a place name needed by normal people that provide the basis of geographic referencing. This is because very few people know the latitude and longitude of their house so it is essential to have tools that can identify the coordinates of locations on the earth surface. The most common of which is the GPS or global positioning systems.

Other tools used are geocoding and Geotag. Geocoding in the process of finding associated geographic coordinates from other geographic data such as street addresses or zip codes. A Geotag is a standardized code that can be inserted into information in order to note its appropriate geographic location. These have been inserted into many wikipedia entries when the content is related to specific location on the earth. For example, if there is a map of a country or state, there will be icons that you can click on that will bring you to the towns wikipedia description. 

Twitter

This week’s class began with a bang. For the first forty-five minutes our class took a trip down to the extreme even lab. Here they had four different sections with mac computers set up. In the front of the classroom were four flat screen high definition televisions. But that wasn’t event he coolest part. The coolest part was what was known as the cave. It was this huge projector screen that had three dimension capabilities. The professor that gave us the tour and or presentation of this room showed us all the different things that it could do. Two of the examples really sparked my interest. The first thing that he showed us was an United States military map of a town in Afghanistan. This at one time was classified information that only people who had clearance would see, but it eventually got declassified and was about to be viewed by the public. It was in three dimension and different parts of the map jumped out at us, when we were using our special glasses. The next part that really amazed me was the last part of it. Here we got to see an overlay of the United States and a picture of all the different flights that came in and out of LAX. This was really cool because it showed all the different flight patterns, and all the different airlines. It was really interesting to see how some parts of the United States were covered by flight patters, but others were completely untouched.

            The next part of class we had the students do their presentations. The main topic of these presentations was twitter usage during disaster relief and for humanitarian efforts. Today, there is big controversy among top official as to if twitter and facebook should be used as a source for disaster relief. The issues are that we do not know if the information that is posted is correct or if it is even important. It is very easy for people to lie or exaggerate the truth. But on the other hand, it poses a huge benefit as well. It is a great tool for emergency responders to use because a lot of the information is live and up to date. After all, like we discussed in an earlier class, survivors are in fact the first responders. So, with that being said, the information that they post is highly informative and important. As far as my opinion on the matter of should twitter be used as a tool for emergency responders? I believe it should be a tool, and that’s it. In other words, it should be used as a guiding device and not as a form of factual information. People should not rely on twitter or facebook but use it to their advantage. Twitter has been being used for longer than most people think because it is only recently that it has been popular but in all actuality it has been used for years in disasters. I think we need to learn from past events and move forward with our technology and our emergency response process.

Japan

Today’s class was very informative even know it was my shortest class this year. I had class during the first part of the class so I only was able to make the last fifty minutes. First and foremost, happy Halloween everyone. In today’s class we watched a documentary about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This documentary really had me shaking my head in disgust and sorrow. It showed numerous home videos of people filming the earthquake and tsunami as it was happening. It showed people running away from the buildings and homes. It also showed people driving out of the city and into the inland in order to get away from the shoreline where the tsunami was going to crash into. This earthquake caused this tsunami by the plates in the ocean moving and causing the plates to shift up a few meters and pushing up the water forming the giant waves that would come crashing into the mainland of Japan. It was unbelievable to see the people and how they reacted in the time of pure devastation. They showed one clip that stuck out in my mind. This was the tsunami as it was rushing into the mainland. After it came rushing over the shore, the water would just keep rushing inland because Japan is so flat. This water wiped away everything in its path including houses, cars, people, trees, and everything imaginable. The one thing that I was surprised at was the fact that the water was black. This surprised me because growing up all the floods and water disasters that I have seen; the water has always been brown and muddy. So this was the first time that I saw water look like this. Turns out that it is like that because it is just picked up so much debris that it just changes the water to be black and extremely toxic. Another clip they showed was compassion of the landscapes, before and after the tsunami. It was left barren and devastated. Everything that was unfortunate enough to be in the path of the tsunami was wiped away with no time to react and no chance of survival. The tsunami took no prisoners. Another fact that was very interesting to me was the fact that after this earthquake Japan as moved two meters out into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, earthquakes actually change the shape of the earth. So, the earth is not the same shape that it was three years ago which is unbelievable to me. Furthermore, since the earth is a different shape, it rotates differently, meaning that our days have actually become shorter then they once were. Fortunately for Japan, we had good disaster relief organizations in place and were able to get to Japan on a moments notice to help in the relief efforts. We had our military there instantaneously because we have a base on Okinawa, Japan. Hopefully we have learned new techniques in disaster response and we can incorporate them into future disasters. I give out my deepest sympathy to the Japanese victims and their family’s along with everyone involved.