Eric G. Frost

Exercise 24: Using Social Media for Crisis Response

Can populations self organize a crisis response? This is a field report on the first two efforts in a continuing series of exercises termed “Exercise24 or x24.” The first Exercise24 focused on Southern California, while the second (24 Europe) focused on the Balkan area of Eastern Europe. These exercises attempted to demonstrate that self-organizing groups can form and respond to a crisis using low-cost social media and other emerging web technologies. Over 10,000 people participated in X24 while X24 Europe had over 49,000 participants. X24 involved people from 79 nations while X24 Europe officially included participants from at least 92 countries. Exercise24 was organized by a team of workers centered at the SDSU Viz Center including significant support from the US Navy as well as other military and Federal organizations. Dr. George Bressler, Adjunct Faculty member at the Viz Center led both efforts. Major efforts from senior professionals EUCOM and NORTHCOM contributed significantly to the preparation for and success of both X24 and especially X24 Europe. This paper presents lessons learned and other experiences gained through the coordination and performance of Exercise24. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2788-8.ch015

Amos's Earthquake: An Extraordinary Middle East Seismic Event of 750 B.C.

Widely separated archaeological excavations in Israel and Jordan contain late Iron Age (Iron IIb) architecture bearing evidence of a great earthquake. Masonry walls best display the earthquake, especially walls with broken ashlars, walls with displaced rows of stones, walls still standing but leaning or bowed, and walls collapsed with large sections still lying course-on-course. Debris at six sites (Hazor, Deir ‘Alia, Gezer, Lachish, Tell Judeideh, and ‘En Haseva) is tightly confined stratigraphically to the middle of the eighth century B.C., with dating errors of ∼30 years. Biblical and post-biblical sources indicate a single, regionally extensive earthquake in the year 750 B.C. The epicenter was north of present-day Israel, probably in Lebanon, as indicated by the southward decrease in degree of damage at sites in Israel and Jordan. A large area of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah was shaken at Modified Mercalli Intensity 9 or higher. The distance from the epicenter (north of Israel) to isoseismal VIII (south of Israel) was at least 175 km, but could have been as much as 300 km. The earthquake was at least magnitude 7.8, but likely was 8.2, the magnitude being estimated by scaling of isoseismal radii relative to smaller historic earthquakes in Israel and Lebanon. The M1 ≈ 8.2 event of 750 B.C. appears to be the largest yet documented on the Dead Sea transform fault during the last four millennia. This severe geologic disaster has been linked historically to a speech delivered at the city of Bethel by a shepherd-farmer named Amos of Tekoa. Amoss earthquake was synchronous with the introduction of “seismic theophany” imagery into Hebrew literature, with the appearance of the “Day of the Lord” eschatological motif, and with the explosive emergence of “writing prophets” in Israel.

Building an OptIPlanet collaboratory to support microbial metagenomics

We describe early experiments in the adoption of the OptIPuter architecture to provide data-intensive capabilities to several remote users of a large-scale, multi-year effort to organize and make publicly available data describing a wide variety of marine microbial ecologies, their genomic content, and the local environments in which they live-marine microbial metagenomics. Microbial genomes are millions of base pairs in length, requiring both a global view of the genome and the ability to zoom into detail interactively, enabled by the OptIPortal. We describe the design of a scientific data and compute server, enhanced by OptIPuter technologies, and early examples of its use in support of high performance science applications in this emerging scientific field.

Achieving Electric Restoration Logistical Efficiencies During Critical Infrastructure Crisis Response: A Knowledge Management Analysis

The technology used in citizen-to-authority emergency calls is based on traditional telephony, that is, circuitswitched systems. However, new standards and protocols are being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to allow emergency communications over packet switched networks, such as the Internet. This architecture is known as Next Generation-9-1-1 (NG-911). In this paper, the authors present lessons learned from experiments on the IETF standard called Location to Service Translation protocol (LoST). LoST maps the user’s location to the address of the emergency call center that serves that location. After implementing the standards in a test-bed with real-world systems, spatial databases, and communication networks, the authors observed performance issues that users may experience. Based on their observations, the authors propose practical ideas to improve the performance of the NG-911 system and LoST protocol operation for mobile users. (e.g., 9-1-1, 1-1-2, etc). In order to better explain the context of this paper, next we provide a brief history of emergency calls, followed by a description of this paper’s motivation. A. A Brief History of Emergency Call Systems It was in 1937, in Great Britain, that the idea of a single emergency number was developed. DOI: 10.4018/jiscrm.2010070101 2 International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, 2(3), 1-24, July-September 2010 Copyright

Integrated social information engineering

Recognizing that a communitys capability to respond to and recover from disaster depends partly on the strength and effectiveness of its social networks, social network analysis (SNA) has risen to a field having important implications. In particular, many disaster and emergency recovery operations now consider the information provided by social networks to be one of their prime sources of data. The task of integrated social information engineering is to fuse that data to yield meaningful knowledge devoid of contradiction and provide a pathway for discovery of related information. Computing with Words represents an attempt to fuse linguistic information using possibilistic analysis. The approach entails machine learning that fuses contexts consisting of essentially symbolic information for the prediction of an appropriate action(s). SNA is facilitated because the method allows large contexts and crowd sourced approaches, consisting of distinct textual phrases, to be mapped to similar prior experiential knowledge. If this knowledge proves to be erroneous for any reason, then it is a simple matter to supply the correct knowledge for non monotonic learning to occur. The method also supplies an associated possibility, allows for proper responses to be forthcoming, and can be trained / run in parallel. In summary, the paper proper considers the burgeoning field of social information engineering and the automation of its integration by way of transformative reuse.

Observations on the Use of Landsat Tm and Spot Image Data in Tectonic Studies of the Southwestern United States

Regional and local geologic studies of arid regions can benefit from the use of optimally enhanced Landsat thematic mapper and SPOT satellite data. In the course of tectonic btudies of the southwestern U.S., we have developed a computationally simple, easy to interpret image display scheme which has proven valuable. An overview of the data processing techniques and significant geologic results are briefly reviewed here.