31–40 of 49 posts
This piece of code has been run for thousands of years and I see no reason why it shouldn't work now: do pray(); while (badThing); I accept PayPal.
I don't think that pseudocode would work, I'd be more inclined to use something moral and secure like Rust.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they might need to accelerate their efforts, I think a lot of people here look at them in a very negative light.
I'd love to see a CEO do for IBM what Satya did for Microsoft. A lot of OSS people thought they were the devil, and yet they've turned that around massively. Unfortunately it seems (from the outside) that IBM is just organisationally crippled from size bloat at this point. Maybe I'm being naive but what do their 350,000 employees actually do? That's nearly as much as Apple, Google and Microsoft combined.
I used to think it was "make chips", but they contracted that out a few years back. IT outsourcing is a big part of it, which tends to drive up staff numbers much faster than in-house projects. They're also still fairly big in business tech like POS systems, although I think that's been shrinking?
(I suppose the other answer is "IBM doesn't know either", given that they've made huge staff cuts to a lot of their older divisions.)
The things they're advertising here just aren't the things that disaster teams need. Nobody on a natural disaster has ever said, "you know what would make this so much easier? ...Blockchain."
The only part of the Camp Fire that would satisfy a tech boner would've been Alameda County's drone team. It turns out that they've been fostering a pretty good drone team and they were able to do flyovers of large sections of the disaster area, capturing imagery down to 1cm resolution and piping it back to a mobile GIS center that looked straight out of an episode of CSI. Their work was good enough to satisfy the requirements for a lot of insurance adjusters who would ordinarily have had to physically visit the site. It could've sped up the entire search and recovery operation by several days if it weren't for CalFire's insistence on redoing all of it with pen and paper.
The number one technological need for disaster work is communications, hands down. One of the first pieces of infrastructure that falls apart during a major disaster is communications, and it's also the most urgent tech problem to solve, every time, because you can't have teams out in a disaster area with bad comms. We really need some kind of reliable, fast-deploying, low-maintenance radio and cellular infrastructure, and nobody's figured that out yet.
Probably the next big pain point is GIS or data management. Our current GIS software is good enough in the hands of skilled operators, but getting data into and out of it is labor intensive and its dataviz isn't exactly cutting edge. A mobile app that interfaced well with it and allowed search teams to bring up a search segment with a limited amount of data through a text message or QR code would be badass.
On the data management side, every single event, item of interest, and squawk of radio traffic has to be logged. Every single one. For a big disaster, this turns into reams and reams of dense paperwork and hundreds of man-hours to compile it all. And when teams arrive at IC in the morning, they have to fill out information cards and receive printed packets every single time, because there's no state-level coordinated database of DSWs and no way to quickly organize them by skillsets. This slows down deployment by around 2 hours in the hands of a top-of-the-line management team, and by much more when the incident management team is less experienced.
If you're seriously interested in pursuing any of this, feel free to contact me at the email address in my profile.
We've already started inter-agency training events for this year's next wildland-urban-interface fire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they might need to accelerate their efforts, I think a lot of people here look at them in a very negative light.
I agree with you. IBM is late to the show and far behind in terms of Data Scientists using their tools and technologies. I myself ( statistician and data scientist) used IBM products for a short period of time in the context of a PoC. my experience is that, using python/R is much better in the long run than using proprietary software that costs 100k $/year in licencee fees, without forgetting the training /setup cost…
It does seem like IBM has been caught out by freely available alternatives which are simply better at most scales. It reminds me of what happened to companies selling compilers or corporate VOIP solutions; they didn't just fail to keep up with the market, their entire market was supplanted by open-source solutions and single features in much larger offerings.
IBM has made a fairly productive effort to avoid that, I think, via their consulting/outsourcing divisions and value-added things like cloud solutions. As a result, their data science products are still appealing in terms of ecosystem integration and strong support options for less-technical buyers. But that doesn't seem like a wonderful position to be in long term, since it puts them in competition with AWS/GCP on one end and free tools on the other.
Do people really think software is the element that's missing from current disaster prep & recovery efforts? I would've picked money or maybe leadership . Maybe I'm unimaginative.
I think autonomous systems and AI can greatly reduce the cost of disaster recovery. Search and rescue using drones for example, the NASA Autonomy Incubator was working on a system like that with MIT while I was there [1].
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that pseudocode would work, I'd be more inclined to use something moral and secure like Rust.
Surely we can encode morality in blockchain
Do people really think software is the element that's missing from current disaster prep & recovery efforts? I would've picked money or maybe leadership . Maybe I'm unimaginative.
Two examples that come to mind: Facebook developing their "check in as safe" feature for disasters, and Uber adding one-sided surge pricing so that they can respond to post-disaster demand without raising prices. Uber's move was mostly about fixing a prior oversight, but Facebook's has provided some fairly novel benefit. Basic mobile internet is both more widely available and more disaster-proof than other communications, so it's a welcome improvement on "people flood the phone system trying to call loved ones".
That said, the biggest opportunities here seem to be in disaster-awareness from developers of existing software. IBM's pitch of "come create novel software for disaster response" looks rather less convincing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that pseudocode would work, I'd be more inclined to use something moral and secure like Rust.
Surely we can encode morality in blockchain
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if they look so far ahead? Ie if insurance is just for a few years at a time at once? There's a paper that proposes long term property insurance, which makes it seem the one year contract is the standard? http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/J2010(JIR)_DJ,HK,...
Ahh. That makes sense. So insurance is more interested in the potential for a claim within the current policy cycle and not the long term risk.
If your neighborhood floods, that's a bunch of insurance claims, but if your city floods, that's potentially a bailout, bankruptcy, or contract exemption for the insurer. (In some cases, like sea level rise in Florida, there's already an understanding that the state is subsidizing insurance that wouldn't be available otherwise.)
So I could definitely imagine some value for a buyer-focused service that carries information about all known risk, not just covered/unsubsidized risk.
Oof. I've got some training and experience in disaster management, including being a part of the overhead team for the Camp Fire last year through my county's search and rescue team. The things they're advertising here just aren't the things that disaster teams need. Nobody on a natural disaster has ever said, "you know what would make this so much easier? ...Blockchain." The only part of the Camp Fire that would sat…
Thank you for such a detailed, informed and relevant comment. Merits tons of upvotes.