full posts
A history of Communications
Therese points out this very interesting timeline by Nathan Shedroff. It's a timeline of the history fo Communication from 35000 BC till 1998 AD. That is an impressive project. Therese asked why the timeline stopped after 1998:
"Apart from moving on to work on other things one reason seemed to be that the explosion of different media for communication made it extremely time-consuming to keep the timeline completely up to date."
I can see his point. Anyway, now I'm even more curious after his seminar that will start in one hour.
New Orleans - still a lack of help
Reading what Steve O'Keefe, vice-president of IAOC, hisexperience in New Orleans (his home town) isn't optimistic. I don't hear these kind of stories on CNN anymore.
Call center via Skype
Dina Mehta explains that she offers her help to the victims of Katrina by donating her time to recieve calls from people via Skype. What an excellent way to use Skype! It is cheap and a easy way to be able to help people out round the clock.
Preliminary research results - Interview with Anne Bartlett-Bragg
Check out the interview with Anne Bartlett-Bragg: Blogs help students think for themselves
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Katrina - from fiction to reality
The last two days I've watched the news with growing astonishment to what's happening in the States hit by Katrina right now. I don't get it, but who am I to judge? I live in a country half of which lies below see level, with the major cities right on the coast line. The maximum distance driving a car would be, somewhat like, 5 hours. I have got no idea what a hurricane looks and feels like. If somehow the sea would reclaim it's ground I wouldn't know what would happen. Would we be prepared? Could we evacuate everyone soon enough? Would we run out of gas? How soon could we supply food and water to people that were left behind? Would we be able to evacuate them quickly?
Being a resident of Enschede, I experienced our own disaster when the firework factory exploded over 5 years ago. I was amazed by the speed the fire troops, and medics arrived in the city. Every single person that felt he or she needed to do something, or thought could assist with anything, just jumped in their cars and came. German fire fighters saw the huge amount of smoke in the distance and just jumped on their trucks without knowing what was going on. But that was a relatively small scale disaster. The infrastructure of the city was intact. It was a disaster in an area that you could overlook.
The impact of Katrina is of a size I simply cannot imagine. I'm shocked to see what is happening to the people that are still in New Orleans, without food, without water. I'm not surprised how people are behaving. What would you do if you were hungry, angry, upset, sad, ill? The rules of society mean nothing when the circumstances change so drastically to survival of the fittest. Honestly, in such a situation I couldn't care less whether people were looting the stores. What I do find shocking is that a small group is making life for others even more miserable than it already is. The shooting, stories of rape and killing. After all it doesn't take much to turn Brin's Postman from fiction into reality.
I'm not in a position to judge the way the US government deals with the situation. Just read some opinions of other people:
- Michael Froomkin (lives in Florida)
- Dave Pollard (read the comments as well)
