Disaster Mitigation Program - Apr. 27, 2014

[E.D.G.]

"E.D.G." <edgrsprj at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message 
news:9JydndajLf5n1sDOnZ2dnUVZ_oqdnZ2d at 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?