China and Japan stick it to floods, quakes and tsunamis Japan and China will use technology to prevent mass loss of life caused by natural disasters. Authorities in Tokyo are trialling an online portal designed to centralise more than 40 services in the event of a large-scale natural disaster of the type seen in Sendai in the north-east of the country in 2011. The portal, which is …
...or does that site look like yet another Japanese pr0n site?
But on a more serious note, any online service that purports to be useful after a major natural disaster needs one thing more than any other. It needs to be accessible to the people in the affected area or otherwise it's pretty much just disaster porn for the rest of the world. If you're sitting in the remains of your house after a tsunami or typhoon clutching a soggy mobile and no means of recharging it for a few weeks then a pretty govt site is fuck all use.
"But on a more serious note, any online service that purports to be useful after a major natural disaster needs one thing more than any other. It needs to be accessible to the people in the affected area or otherwise it's pretty much just disaster porn for the rest of the world. If you're sitting in the remains of your house after a tsunami or typhoon clutching a soggy mobile and no means of recharging it for a few weeks then a pretty govt site is fuck all use."
Mobile towers are easy to erect to provide signals across the affected area. Portable generators provide places that people can go to charge phones (as was provided after the tsunami). People need to go to a central point to collect water and food, they charge their phones at the same time.
All phones in Japan have email addresses and internet access. Also a significant proportion of internet traffic in Japan is via mobile already so people are used to it.
It may not be a good solution for every country at the moment, but for Japan it is a good solution.
There is a mass of data that could and arguably should be online in some form or other.
Here you can just about dredge up river levels - if the sensors are working . There is reasonable traffic monitoring. Thats about it.
If Japan had had a load of radiation sensors scattered around the place equipped with GPS and reporting back to Paranoia Central their population wouldn't have been as scared as they were.
Imagine every I phone being equipped with a humidity sensor, radiation sensor, and a temperature gauge. What a fabulous source of environmental data.
Or simply instead of relying on half a dozen weather stations at airports, make up little 3G equipped data stations to monitor whatever you want and stick them round the country.
Hi there,
This seems like a really interesting project and one that is timely and related to the project which I, myself work on which is Evidence Aid. The Evidence Aid project was established following the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004. It uses knowledge from Cochrane Reviews and other systematic reviews to provide reliable, up-to-date evidence on interventions that might be considered in the context of natural disasters and other major healthcare emergencies. Evidence Aid seeks to highlight which interventions work, which don’t work, which need more research, and which, no matter how well meaning, might be harmful; and to provide this information to agencies and people planning for, or responding to, disasters.
Evidence Aid has three main elements. The first provides an urgent response to the evidence needs that arise during and in the short-term after the event, by bundling together very brief summaries of the findings of systematic reviews of relevance to, for example, the management of injuries. The second provides a context specific resource for the evidence needs that arise during the subsequent weeks and months. These collections should also be useful as part of the planning for disaster risk reduction and alleviating the impact of a disaster. Finally, the third element is a process to gather information about the need for evidence and to seek to ensure that this need is met through up-to-date systematic reviews of the relevant research.
If you need more information or want to be in touch in relation to similar projects, please contact us through our website (www.evidenceaid.org), follow us on Twitter (@EvidenceAid) or join our Facebook Page (Evidence Aid).
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