"E.D.G." <edgrs...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:9jydndajlf5n1sdonz2dnuvz_oqdn...@earthlink.com...
A PROPOSED INTERNET-BASED DISASTER ANTICIPATION AND RESPONSE COMPUTER
PROGRAM
Posted by E.D.G. on April 27, 2014
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Disaster_Response_System.html
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Science_Organization.html
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/DSAT.html
TABLE OF CONTENTS
--- Information For Newsgroup Readers
--- Introductory Comments
--- A Proposed Internet-Based Disaster Anticipation And Response
Computer Program
--- How This Proposed Disaster Mitigation Program Would Work
--- Participation In This Effort
--- Additional Information For Newsgroup Posters
--- Final Comments
INFORMATION FOR NEWSGROUP READERS
It would be appreciated if you would forward copies of this report to
any government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, news services,
commercial and university computer programming groups, and individual
researchers that you feel might be interested in the subject matter.
It is recommended that people who would like to post a response to
this report should read the "ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR NEWSGROUP POSTERS"
section of the report before they post their responses.
The URLs in this report are indirect. They are often used in my
public notices in part in the hope that this will help reduce the amount of
spam mail that has to be dealt with each day. And indirect URLs also make
it possible to change the address of an actual web page without having to
circulate a notice letting everyone know about that. It is only necessary
to change the internal address in the indirect URL.
If those indirect URLs do not work with your Internet browser then if
you wish you can contact me by E-mail for direct addresses.
Webs.com is apparently posting advertisements to the bottoms of web
pages at my Freewebs.com site. I don't have any arrangement with Webs.com
for those advertisements to be there and would prefer that they were not
present. However, it is a free site. So it would not be fair to complain.
The statements in this report are expressions of personal opinion.
INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
Most of this report was written quite a while ago but never posted to
any newsgroups because other efforts have had a higher priority. While
watching news reports related to that recent deadly Korea area ship sinking
I decided to go looking in my files for the report, update it, and post it
to a number of computer language newsgroups.
This report discusses an effort to have a powerful and sophisticated
Internet-based computer program created that could be used by governments
and nongovernmental organizations such as hospitals around the world to
anticipate and more rapidly respond to health and life-threatening
situations such as that ship sinking. Those situations could range from
serious automobile traffic accidents up to major aircraft crashes, floods,
disease outbreaks, earthquakes, and hurricanes.
A PROPOSED INTERNET-BASED DISASTER ANTICIPATION AND RESPONSE COMPUTER
PROGRAM
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Disaster_Response_System.html
Professional and even amateur computer programmers around the world
might be some of the most important unsung heroes of modern times. They
develop and maintain the computer programs that are used by virtually every
government, nongovernmental organization, hospital, doctor, and independent
researcher around the world. The Internet itself is perhaps the most
extraordinary communications resource ever developed. And it could be
described as a complex, interlinking group of computer programs.
In spite of all of the extraordinary work they are doing and how
important their efforts are to everyone on the planet, computer programmers
probably rarely get any recognition outside of their own field. I can't
recall a Nobel Prize ever being awarded to a computer programmer.
The proposed Internet-based disaster anticipation and response
computer program discussed in this report is something that could
conceivably change that and provide programmers around the world with
something that they could point to and claim that they themselves were the
people who were responsible for the program's development, not some
government.
Government, university, private corporation, and even independent
programmers could take part in the development of this proposed disaster
mitigation program. However, the actual program might need to be run by
some independent organization such as the proposed science information
related nonprofit foundations discussed on the web page that the following
URL points to:
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Science_Organization.html
HOW THIS PROPOSED DISASTER MITIGATION PROGRAM WOULD WORK
Versions of the proposed disaster mitigation program would actually
be running at the same time on a number of Internet server computers and
other types of computers around the world. They would constantly interact
with and share data with one another. And if one got disabled by an event
such as an earthquake that destroyed important computers or damaged some
national or international fiber optics communications cable then one or more
of the other computers would start doing the work that the affected
computers etc. had been doing.
Information regarding events such as rainfall around the world would
be constantly fed into the system. And that way, devastating floods could
be anticipated.
Information regarding events such as aircraft crashes and even
serious automobile traffic accidents would also be constantly fed into the
system.
The Internet-based disaster mitigation computer program would monitor
events that were taking place around the world and generate a warning, for
example, when it determined that unusually large amounts of rain had fallen
in some area in a short period of time. And there was a reasonable
probability that there could be a destructive flood downstream from the
area.
As explained on my web page, when the disaster mitigation program
determined that there had been an aircraft crash in a large city the program
would instantly generate an initial disaster response plan and send versions
of the plan to the appropriate government agencies and hospitals etc. And
it would also contact specially trained disaster response workers in the
affected area and ask them to travel to certain locations and report on what
they were seeing or help with efforts to temporarily limit access to
selected major highways so that emergency response vehicles could travel
down them at a high rate of speed without risking hitting or being slowed by
other traffic on the highway.
The disaster mitigation program would have internal routines that
protected the privacy of individuals such as a person whose house had caught
fire. Information like that would not be circulated through the global
group of programs. It would be dealt with by the version of the program
that was running on just one or a few computers. And that information could
then be deleted from even those computers' files if desired.
My web page goes into sufficient detail regarding how the program
might work that it should not be necessary to discuss its operation any
further in this newsgroup report.
PARTICIPATION IN THIS EFFORT
I myself know enough about Internet server-based computer program
development that in theory I could develop this type of computer program.
However, my personal disaster mitigation efforts are more focused on
providing other researchers around the world with detailed plans for what
can be done to anticipate and respond to a variety of health and
life-threatening problems. For example, for a number of years I have been
running the informal earthquake forecasting program associated with the web
page pointed to by the following URL. And I am attempting to explain to
governments around the world how they themselves could run such a program.
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Data.html
For several other examples, the following website reports discuss
energy development related efforts:
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Energy-Islands.html
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/Nuclear-Energy.html
And as the following news report shows, one of those efforts related
to the development of human-shaped robots that could safely go into crippled
nuclear power plants and make repairs looks like it might now have been at
least partially successful:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-introduces-atlas-its-new-robo-sapien/
To understand why the U.S. Department of Energy would not be the
department developing those repair robots I believe that a person would need
to understand how energy politics work here in the U.S. and elsewhere.
I could provide at least some help with efforts to get this proposed
disaster mitigation program developed. For example, I can store additional
program details that people send me, on my disaster mitigation program web
page. However, I would not be able to take charge of the overall effort or
run the nonprofit foundation that might administer the disaster mitigation
computer program. Like everyone, there are limits to the amount of free
time that I have available.
Computer programming groups around the world such as university
computer programming departments could work with one another in order to get
this proposed disaster mitigation program developed. How they communicated
with one another regarding their efforts would be up to them. However, from
looking at different sites around the web it appears to me that the GitHub
website might be a good place to start.
https://github.com
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR NEWSGROUP POSTERS
Copies of or references to this report are being posted to quite a
few newsgroups including comp.lang.misc. It is recommended that people
posting newsgroup responses to this report post them to only their main
computer program language newsgroup plus the comp.lang.misc newsgroup, or
just comp.lang.misc by itself. The comp.lang.misc newsgroup appears to be
rarely used. And if copies of everyone's responses are posted there then
that should enable everyone to visit that single newsgroup and easily see
what is being discussed in all of the other newsgroups. They won't each get
filled with responses posted to all of the others.
FINAL COMMENTS
Question: If a major traffic accident or an aircraft related disaster were
to occur in your own city, what would type of response would there be?
Answer: In virtually every location on the planet the accident would likely
be responded to by local authorities using whatever resources they had in
that area. And during the time that it took them to determine exactly what
had happened and what needed to be done, lives could be lost that might have
been saved had their responses been faster and better organized. In the
case of a cataclysmic disaster such as a major earthquake, dramatically
reduced response times might make it possible to save tremendous number of
lives.
So, it is my opinion that this type of Internet-based disaster
mitigation computer program is needed by just about everyone on the planet.
There might be organizations such as FEMA here in the U.S. that are
already trying to get some type of organized disaster mitigation computer
program developed. However, a sizeable percentage of cities around the
world, large and small, are connected to the Internet. And if you live in
one of those cities where this type of coordinated disaster response system
is not available to you then it means that as far as you are concerned, it
doesn't yet exist.
The basic concept for the proposed program is relatively simple. And
it would not be that expensive to develop and run compared to the number of
lives and the amount of disaster response money that might be saved.
Two Questions
1. Why doesn't this type of globally useful program already exist?
2. Why did it take so long for the U.S. Government to get its "Affordable
Care Act" website fully operational?
Of all of the technologies that we have, computer programming is
likely one of the easiest to work with. If you have a good general
development plan then if you want to make faster progress you can just
divide your programming efforts into smaller and smaller parts and bring in
more computer programmers to work on the various parts.
Proposed Answers For Those Two Questions
A detailed discussion of why computer programs like this proposed
Internet-based disaster mitigation program and other important programs have
not yet been created or why existing programs took so long to get running
can be found in the report that the following URL points to:
http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/DSAT.html
DSAT in this case stands of "Department Of Science And Technology."
That above report contains a detailed description of proposed
government agencies that might help us solve or at least better manage many
of these "slow technical progress" problems.
At this point, a final appropriate question might be:
Would computer programmers around the world like to work together to
get the Internet-based disaster mitigation computer program described in
this report developed, and in the process get some much-deserved public
recognition for their efforts?
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