Engineering a New World

Scientology Volunteer Ministers, on arrival to Haiti, did an up-to-date & on the ground assessment of the area. Based on this, the most important and urgent needs were isolated.  If you’re planning on assisting with the relief efforts in any way, think with these as some of the core items needed:

These are:

VOLUNTEER MINISTERS AND VOLUNTEERS WITH THE FOLLOWING SKILLS OR DISASTER AREA EXPERIENCE:

Volunteers are needed with the following skills:

- Search and Rescue experience
- Anybody with skills in setting up communication lines
- Coordination skills
- Crowd control skills

Anyone with these skills or who wishes to be trained to help in this capacity, contact the Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response office, and they can get you free training for this. 

MATERIALS THAT ARE MOST URGENTLY NEEDED:

-Water (especially water sanitation equipment/materials)
- Medical supplies
- Non-perishable food supplies
- Other commodities such blankets, tents, sanitation materials (e.g. soap, toilette paper, Diapers, shampoo)

Your help is definitely wanted!  If you wish to help in any of these areas, contact the Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response office and they can direct you to the way you can best assist from your area, skills, and capacity to help.

You’d have to be living in a cave to not know by now that Haiti has suffered a 7.0 richter scale earthquake, and with an already-shot infrastructure, is now in a worst-case-scenario disaster as volunteer organizations struggle to coordinate their efforts and bring help to the millions that need it in Haiti. 

I’ve got a little 4-month-old, so I’m not in a position to go down there and pitch in with the Volunteer Ministers already on their way there, but what I can do is help get the word out. 

In coordination with the Scientology Volunteer Ministers of Washington, D.C., we now have a blog to give you the latest on what’s going on in Haiti, as well as a twitter account that will be kept up to date on how you can assist – or how you can get help if you or someone you know is in need.

Unfortunately, the wonderful Flickr map only lets you display as many points on the map (at a time) as you can fit in thumbnail photos across your screen.  So, for someone like me who meticulously geo-tags every photo taken (in the hopes I’ll one day be able to locate the ideal geo-data visualization app for my photos) the closest thing I can get to a good map is the Flickr Organizr.  Here’s a photo of how it looks:

I just ran across an awesome article while browsing ScientologyToday, an article in the Maritime Reporter & Engineering News which goes over the complete refit and restoration of the Scientology Motor Vessel Freewinds. 

From their pull quote:

In today’s “I need it yesterday” world, emphasis on quantity often overpowers quality, while the quick fix can supercede the correct one.  Step back, take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of a tremendous labor, a labor of love that resulted in the top-to-bottom renovation of a storied ship with a unique owner.  — Greg Trauthwein, Editor

The article then goes on at quite some length about the amazing attention to detail that was paid to every last piece of the restoration of the Freewinds, including before-and-after photos of a number of sections of the ship (something I had never even seen before).

In elucidating the incredible attention to detail demanded by the project managers and the Captain of the Freewinds, the editor of this article was also floored with the amount of responsibility the ship’s own crew was taking in the renovations project. 

Making the scope of the renovation all the more amazing: while the organization brought on a bevy of contractors to fulfill much of the heavy-duty fabrication and construction, it was the crew who was responsible for the intricate and laborious renewal and renovation, including a meticulous cleaning and rejuvenation of the engine room, the engine control room and the bridge (including the machining of the new stainless steel parts, overhauling the equipment, painting and polishing), all while the ship stayed in operation.

And I don’t doubt it.  The crew of the Freewinds are some of the most amazing people I have ever met.

This is a shorty for an ill-defined subject that I recently ran into when making a recent Bing Maps KML implementation.

When dealing with KML styles, the KML color space is defined differently than most web developers are used to.  Instead of being defined in normal RGB hex, they are ARGB, or RGB with Alpha Channel. 

In normal HTML color, one is used to hex representations like:

AABBCC

In KML, the first two octets are used to define the transparency or alpha channel, and then the next 6 are RGB in reverse order. 

So, if you’ve got a KML color of

50AABBCC

This would then translate to CCAABB in HTML.

Just a note, in case any one else has been infuriated or confused by such.

I was just doing some reading up & testing on the Google Maps API, and zoomed in to streetview only to find myself in the middle of a lillypad or a dirty fishbowl or something:

Supposedly, this is Missoula, Montana – though I think the locals would disagree with me.

Here’s the embedded version, which right now looks the same:

View Larger Map

Right now, if I use the UI to navigate out of it, I can re-enter the real world, but then I can’t go back to the “green fungus reality” unless I refresh the page.

Any ideas?

Youtube is down for maintenance?  Seems pretty unlikely that the world’s largest video platform, encompassing 20% of the world’s total Internet traffic, would just “go down for maintenance” in the middle of a Saturday. 

Is this the next in Google’s IT uptime issues?

When I was working on my last Bing Maps project for Webworld Technologies, my Microsoft rep told me, “…and as soon as you’re ready, let me know and I’ll give you a hack to disable that f’n birds-eye popup”.   I didn’t know that was the official inside term for it, but like so many internal naming conventions that stick with you, I felt it was appropriately named.  I think the Bing bird’s eye view is a fantastic way to visualize maps too, but the little “VIEW THIS IN THE COOL BIRDS EYE VIEW” popup that comes up every time you refresh the map is a bit far into the “annoying UI element” department.

To disable it, just do the following:  right after invoke your map.LoadMap, hide the popup element as follows:

   map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(38.865326, -77.074930), 12 ,’h’ ,false);
                // Suppress popup saying Bird’s Eye available
   document.getElementById("MSVE_obliqueNotification").style.visibility = "hidden";

That will get rid of that popup any time the map loads.

When watching a recent webcast on social media measurement, I got re-introduced to a nifty tool called Yahoo Pipes.   When the tool first came out, I thought it was semi-interesting, but didn’t know what the real-world use of it was.  Well, now I’m starting to see one.

Pipes is a tool that lets you take any number of different inputs (HTML, XML, RSS, CSV, etc) and then perform a set of dynamic transformations on the data, and then have it spit out whatever data you want in whatever format you want, on the fly.

If you’re trying to perform a task like measure social media response to a campaign you’re doing, you’ll sometimes want to be grabbing hold of a number of RSS feeds, and create a custom RSS feed that you can track on Google Reader or some other RSS reader that just shows you mentions of your recent campaign or keywords.

As an example of how this works, I took an example of something simple that I wanted an RSS feed for:  I’m listening to lectures by L. Ron Hubbard, and wanted to create a little RSS widget to show the most recent tracks on last.fm that I’ve marked as “loved tracks”, so that I can keep track of them.   But I only want the tracks by L. Ron Hubbard to appear in the RSS feed.  There is no such RSS feed on the site, so I used Yahoo Pipes to create one:

The UI to create such a feed really couldn’t be any easier to use.  You just specify an RSS source, then add a filter on the RSS source to filter by one specific RSS element, and create an RSS pipe output that contains that data.

I can then just link to an real-time RSS feed of such, and throw that onto my blog.

It’s a simple, simple example, but if, for example, you were trying to find a way around paying for a big-time social media measurement solution like Radian6 or WebTrends, you can do a little work in Pipes and build yourself a pretty neat dashboard of the data you want.

China is more Gov 2.0 than we are?

Astute readers may notice that the above Google Maps image is not actually Washington, D.C. but instead is Metro Shanghai in China.   To me, it’s an ideal picture of the irony that surrounds the fact that the Chinese government has a reputation for being one of the most data-opaque in history, with mystery shrouding its every move, and the world’s most massive Internet filters placed at its every data egress point.  However, in bizarre form, Shanghai’s new and state-of-the-art metro transit system (including an amazing 270mph mag-lev train to the airport) has been exposed in full to Google Transit, allowing anyone with an iPhone to easily navigate their way around the city. 

In stark contrast, Washington D.C., supposedly the very beacon of data transparency and the source of the Gov 2.0 movement, is really resembling another sort of “movement” altogether with respect to Metro system data transparency.   I first noted this a few months back in another blog post, when I tried to use my iPhone to show me how to get downtown from my new house.   Though I’m right down the street from a DC Metro station, the lack of data exposed to Google Transit made Google Maps send me nearly halfway across the state, so as to use a small commuter transit system that was exposed. 

I originally thought this was Google’s fault, claiming they had Google Transit in DC when in fact they didn’t.  However, this turned out to be the result of a disagreement WMATA had with releasing their transit information to Google.  Did they fear some sort of security concern?  Actually, no.  The problem was that they had just invested a bunch of money in their own wmata.com website, and didn’t want Google transit to draw attention away from their big investment.   The alleged quote is,

“…forming a partnership with Google was not in our best interest from a business perspective.” (ref)

Apparently DC isn’t alone in this bizarre blindness to Gov 2.0 principles, as Los Angeles’ Metro system is likewise not on Google Transit for the same reason.  And unfortunately, L.A. is a much more difficult city to get around than DC, if you don’t have a car – a place where an iPhone-friendly platform for public transit system navigation would be even more useful.

[also note that DC and LA are the two cities that constantly vie for the worst automobile traffic in North America.]

Gov 2.0 – How to Do it Right

Now, I recently had the privilege of attending the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. as a representative of Webworld Technologies.  This Expo was a fascinating showcase of applications from all different angles of Government/Citizen participation – from Open311 services that basically act as a “BugZilla” for potholes, to services that allow you to use your iPhone as a crime-reporting device, or the promise of augmented reality (AR) for tourism. 

But pertinent to this discussion was the “Government as a Partner” section of the conference, where the architect of the bart.gov site in San Francisco showed how true data transparency and Gov 2.0 principles can be used to foster an immense amount of creativity and problem-solving that benefits both the people and the organization at large.

See, instead of pursuing a strategy like DC or LA, where you close up the data and keep it for yourself, and hope that everyone will love your website, they instead focused on making their data broadly available, and fostered a community where people could make their own applications that then use this data.

Coming out from this was a community-created BART iPhone app, which took no internal development time or public moneys, and which BART then promoted for others to use.  Just look at the heading of that bart.gov page:  “See what others are creating with BART’s public data”.  That says it all, really.

One could argue that SF is the home of Silicon Valley, and that they are uniquely poised to take advantage of such transparent data.  However, that gets shot down pretty fast when you look at the fact that DC Metro is the biggest center for IT employment in the world, and is second only to silicon valley in terms of concentration of programmers. 

So, there’s no excuse!