Guerrilla Gardening and more.

http://www.designundersky.com/dus/2010/2/25/ludic-guerrilla-gardening-drone-warfare.html

“Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.”

A lot of issues here, from property acquisition to end use and ownership. At this stage, haven’t seen anything on depaving or soil remediation, which would add a whole new layer into what *could* be done within this kind of framework.

One of the potential dangers in this kind of redevelopment is the encouragement of semi-rural slums to replace the decaying neighborhoods – perhaps an improvement, but not much. On the other hand, this could lead to semi-planned resilient communities, and a wide variety of business opportunities, including large-scale reuse and recycling of construction materials.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/ap_on_bi_ge/us_downsizing_detroit

“We may not see millions of new factories in the short run, but I would bet we will see thousands.”

I don’t necessarily agree with everything he’s saying, but a lot of it makes great sense.

http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/03/web-souveniers-turning-the-web-into-physical-products/

“The study is the first work to document experimentally Fowler and Christakis’s earlier findings that social contagion travels in networks up to three degrees of separation, and the first to corroborate evidence from others’ observational studies on the spread of cooperation.

The contagious effect in the study was symmetric; uncooperative behavior also spread, but there was nothing to suggest that it spread any more or any less robustly than cooperative behavior, Fowler said.

From a scientific perspective, Fowler added, these findings suggest the fascinating possibility that the process of contagion may have contributed to the evolution of cooperation: Groups with altruists in them will be more altruistic as a whole and more likely to survive than selfish groups.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/uoc–if030510.php

“So they use 100 times less silicon to generate the same amount of electricity,” said Okandan. “Since they are much smaller and have fewer mechanical deformations for a given environment than the conventional cells, they may also be more reliable over the long term.”

via Glitter-sized solar photovoltaics produce competitive results – Sandia News Releases.

Interesting research.  As an evolutionary mechanism, it makes sense – if you need food *now*,  planting seeds is less attractive than eating them. More likely we will see this immediately tested in marketing. If you want to sell pie in the sky,  serve pie. If you want to have them take the immediate offer because it’s to your advantage to do so, serve celery and carrots. Or something like that

Conversely, having low energy (or low blood glucose levels) may make an individual focus more on the present. The finding that a diet soda drink increased the degree of future discounting suggests that artificial sweeteners may alarm the body of imminent caloric crisis, leading to increased impulsivity.

The authors conclude that if controlling blood glucose levels may affect our decisions for later versus current rewards, then “reducing the degree of fluctuation in blood glucose may offer a possible means for the treatment and intervention of some impulsive disorders, anorexia, drug addiction, and gambling addiction.”

Sweet future: Fluctuating blood glucose levels may affect decision making.

Regarding a discussion about pre-Westphalian history, bards, resiliency, open-source warfare, and more, I believe this summarizes my position. Note that the audience knows all the words, and are singing along. Just like they do in Athens, in Paris, in Prague, in San Francisco.

photo credit:
United Nations Development Programme

I posted my original  comment on disaster relief requirements approximately ONE HOUR before the quake hit Haiti . You can see yesterday’s  repost  here …. so what are the relevant notes from today’s news? (quotes compiled from multiple wire stories.)

“It’s because they’re so vulnerable, any event tips the balance,” said Cutter, director of the school’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. “They don’t have the kind of resiliency that other nations have.”

—- lack of resiliency – noted as the issue

“That vulnerability will be felt first in the water. In a major disaster, time is of the essence, and survivors will succumb to thirst and dehydration much faster than malnutrition. With drinking water distribution systems destroyed – and survivors crammed into camps without much sanitation – water supplies could quickly become contaminated..”

—- clean water, sanitation, and the problem of “relief camps” – noted

“That fear of disease is often overplayed,” says Dr. Demetrios Pyrros, the president of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine. “It’s going to be important to deal with people’s day to day injuries.”

— triage and disease prevention in “refugee” camps requirements – noted

“If you look at neighboring Cuba, they have a very good emergency management infrastructure,” Tierney said. “That’s partly because of the way they organize the country from the block upward.”

—- block level. block level. block level. noted.

Excuse the venting, please, but I am heartsick and furious. WE KNOW THIS STUFF. We’ve known it for YEARS. Resilience cannot be deferred for funding, for niceties, for a structured bureaucratic response.

All the money people like you are contributing right now isn’t going to do a damned thing for the people on the ground, because money is not real wealth, it’s potential wealth. They need reality, not potential, and they most certainly don’t need 25% or more going for “institutional overhead” and the delays of centralized “relief” providers, no matter how well-meaning they are. The $5 million the American Red Cross has raised in one day via texts could, I believe, pay for 2500 nodes. At one a block, at 100 people per block, that’s about 17 square miles and 250,000 people covered. Stretching it, you could easily double that. No waiting for fresh water to be shipped in. Reduced transportation of the injured. Less “refuge camp” bad sanitation and contagion. Emergency communications.

So here’s the deal – I am going to build it, one way or another, this year. I could use your help, if you’re willing to contribute to it. The governments won’t – the corporations won’t – the non-profits won’t. I would dearly love to be proven wrong on that, but I don’t see it. I’d fund it out of pocket, but I don’t have a grand, let alone 20. (For a comparison as to what 20k can get you in the Land of Money – 2-3 months of a project manager’s time. That’s it.)

I believe that a prototype full-resiliency node can be developed for less than $20,000 in total cost, in less than 6 months.

It’s “too small” for conventional funding, and has attracted zero interest from the venture community. So far – after talking about it for over a year – the only people interested in it are people in the field, not in the offices.

I don’t have a corporation or a non-profit. There’s just me and a paypal account – gregnburton@gmail.com. If you’d like to contribute, send what you can. A couple of grand will help to start, and at least let me focus on this project for some time.

Port Au Prince is just one set of slums. A billion people live in slums right now. Think about it – and if your response is “I’d rather invest to protect myself from refugees or offer them relief after the fact  than make sure they aren’t refugees to begin with” then so be it. It’s your choice, and I respect it either way.

Sincerely,
Greg

Interestingly, searches and news references for these two terms have been trending upwards since the fourth quarter of 2008. Both had been on generally downward trends from 2004. While it’ would be naive to assume this had something to do with Obama’s election, there may be some measure of truth there.

via Google Trends: apocolypse, armegeddon.