Atomized Mk ii

Mod 1 Changes.

If you have arrived here I imagine you followed the trail across from the, at the moment, defunct Atomized Jr web log. Maybe from bing, or google, even sheer happenstance - I shouldn't presume. Bear with me as I take a moment to expand on the brief note I dropped (shoe-horned rather) in to the snake-pit coding that is a Radio Userland web log earlier today. About six months ago Userland announced that they were discontinuing the Radio Userland service. Ceasing any upkeep of the code and shutting down the servers that the whole thing ran on, at the end of 2009. At the time I wasn't concerned because the Radio Userland software and database live on the individual user's hard drive and I had always hosted the weblog itself on my University of Maryland server space.

I did not think this through. About three or four years ago I ran into a problem when the university shifted to requiring a secure File Transfer Protocol engine to upload files to "terpconnect". Radio Userland web logs do not do sFTP. After a couple of weeks of flailing around I saw a recommendation on a message board advising getting around a problem like this by simply turning off Radio's FTP-to-your-own-server option. allow it to write to Userland.com, at the same time turning on the "make local back-up" option. It's then a matter of uploading changed content to the server manually using Fugu or any similar sFTP program. This worked well enough that I ceased to worry about it. Until my current license expired. Also because the service is shutting down there are no renewels. At that point I lost permission to publish to the Userland servers, and I realized belated that turning FTP on was no longer an option since Radio's non secure FTP engine would not connect with the U.Md host. I expect there must be someway to make it think it is doing something, even if it isn't and therefore writing to the backup folder. I could move the weblog to a different host. I could switch to a WordPress web log.

In the meantime I have put this page together, a simulacrum of a web log, and named it Atomized Mkii (Mark II). Yeah, i'm just knocking down the door of originality here. Earlier I had touched up the original Atomized page from 1999 to serve this purpose, but it seemed to serve better to create a new page along the same lines (Though I kept the reply "form" from those days, I could repurpose that). The drawbacks are that this page has no RSS, no referer logs, no comments - though you can email me. The site meter hit counter is hooked up to Atomized jr and I recently prevailed upon Technorati to crawl Atomized jr again, which then broke. At least this gives me time to think. I can write things here and continue to ignore my facebook page.

Nature's way

Every time there is a great natural disaster in the world 2010 Haiti earthquake - Wikipedia many people succumb to a tendency to see agency in it somehow. To find someone or something praiseworthy or blameworthy in it all. This is human nature and quite understandable, I shouldn't quibble.

Neither God nor ideology are the piano tuners of earthquakes. I am of the school of thought that places God at a higher level of abstraction in existence, not a thunderbolt hurler as pantheists imagined Zeus. Haiti was not attacked by God or nature or some combination thereof. Nature doesn't "attack". Pat Robertson isn't God. We UCC Congregationalists are fond of saying "God is still speaking," but I imagine we believe that God speaks to humankind's hearts through a numaniscent awareness and the words of the gospel, a spirit that comes before and follows after - not by dropping buildings on them and crushing their bodies.

The location of nature in the natural world may be less obvious than thought. An earthquake is a natural process. No less a natural process than the volcanism and continental shifts that made this world habitable for life in the first place. Everything that we see and touch, that obeys the regular rules of time and space - the Newtonian and for good measure Einstienian world - is nature. Even as we draw distinctions between the living forces and the non biological forces. The real difference is between us and everything else. Our oasis world of reason and man-made environment, is equally against the crawling chaos of organic nature and obdurate resistance of material nature. The order of everyday is Man vs. Nature.

It is hard not to see how events like earthquakes and floods reveal much about the governance a polity has. Either strong and responsive (not always both) or broken and parasitical. Able to do little for the people without out side assistance. It was revealing that President Prevel didn't address the nation or let the people so much as catch sight of him for a week. Too busy trying to extract certain documents from his office and get his personal ducks in line Haiti's Icon of Power, Now Palace for Ghosts - NYTimes.com. State workers, particularly the police forces disappeared until international forces arrived and made things orderly enough to return. I read that in one instance citizens of Cite Soliel lynched escaped convicts trying to return to territories of their former rackets. Because law enforcement was not in evidence. At the same time it is true the quake was severe enough that places of work, supervisors and most telecommunication equipment were damaged or destroyed. The critical social and material mechanisms of Haiti were knocked off their foundation. Civilization, local constituted, was set back Destruction of schools in Haiti quake crushes hopes of a better future for many - washingtonpost.com.

There are those stray across this observational line into the realm of ideology. I saw a piece in the Foreign Policy magazine blog Haiti: Don't ignore the politics | FP Passport: on the David Brooks oped Op-Ed Columnist - The Underlying Tragedy - NYTimes.com (which I hadn't read earlier because I don't read Brooks anymore) which skirted the Lib-rall-ism caused the disaster line. What Brooks is actually saying is that old school macro economic development didn't seem to work, and the last ten years of micro-develpment has had little effect so he thinks there is a problem with international foreign aid. Somehow in all this China's economy becomes a paragon of laissez faire So I'm not completely convinced. Elliot Abrams had a opinion piece in the Washington Post that argued) agianst conventional wisdom Homeless Haitians Told Not to Flee to U.S. - NYTimes.com for a large diaspora of Haitians to first world economies who would then send remittances back to Haiti Elliott Abrams - What Haiti needs: A Haitian diaspora - washingtonpost.com . Still both these articles were more balanced and thoughtful than Seamus Milnes anti-American screed in the Guardian Haiti's suffering is a result of calculated impoverishment | Seumas Milne | The Guardian

What happened in Haiti was the effect of overwhelmed poverty. The consequences of an earthquake on a national capital. Especially on a nation where the capital is the largest city and dominates the next largest by population multiples. The sheer number and density of people affected. Now homeless and hungry in a place where the civil infrastructure has been utterly broken. Port au Prince has /several/ locations where one or two hundred thousand people who must now be feed and sheltered and sanitation provided for, exist within a square mile or so. The crush of Urban Density even in ordinary times was enough overwhelm any application of standards. Building codes to request rebar in the concrete. Let alone establish nominal living standards in the ubiquitous shanty towns that surround most third world cities.

Milnes made a clumsy nod in the direction of history. In History of Haiti. Marines come and go. The Haitians famously under Paul Robeson threw out the French and declared freedom and independence. The French later came back and made them pay a reparation for their revolution. A century of poverty and creole elites favored by outside forces followed. The US Marine corp moved during the first quarter of the twentieth century. During this period Haiti's constitution was rewritten to favor foreign ownership and investment. Some stability and prosperity followed. Dominican military ruler Truilljo initiated a brutal genocidal massacre over borderlands issues in 1937. A culmination of differing cultures language and values between revolutionary francophonic isolated and agricultural Haiti, and the Latin conservative and export-focused Dominican Republic. As the coming war in Europe refocused peoples attention The Marines came out and FDR turned US away from close involvement in Haiti. The Post War period was the era of Papa Doc, Baby Doc Duvalier and the Ton Ton Macute. Of populist and parasitical policies, development strategies that stagnate. A period of crytpo Industrial development, Sector transition stalled over ill-conceived projects that leave a still agricultural society urbanized and concentrated where their labor cannot produce a critical level of value. It was though the US that arrange for Baby Doc to go into exile when this all ended with near civil war. Despite living through the next period as a newspaper reading adult, it is still very hazy.

The priest Aristide comes to the fore. His demagogic populism frightens and threatens Haiti's elite they depose him. The US and international community impose sanctions until those who deposed Aristide relent and allow him to return to power. Aristide's increasing demagogic populism frightens and threatens US interests. With considerable unrest and turmoil he is removed from power by the US (military) and sent into exile (currently in South Africa). An associate of Arrested (but lacking his charisma quotient), Rene Prevail, becomes president presumably with the blessing of the military and business elites who would have formed a junta if he had not been available. Haiti resumes its key national enterprise: building the highest Gini index in the western hemisphere. The history of Haiti is an exercise in the other Powell Doctrine: You Break it, you bought it.

I found myself drawn to articles the logistics of relief and reconstruction. How do you organize and move in resources? How do you treat the injured, feed and house the people Aid Groups Focus on Haiti's Homeless - NYTimes.com? How do you prevent a second wave of death, how do you rebuild? How do you return their ability to labor for their own well being? These exist as question for me, because I don't know the answers and it makes it seem that much worse. I read them as reassurance that there are things that can be done. effort and progress that will proceed from donations BBC News - US troops fan out as Haiti aid efforts gain momentum.

There is also an ancient element in me - the element that the Navy trained as an Aerial photo interpreter so many years ago - that is fascinated by the role Aerial photography and Mapping Data have in these situations. Mostly the use of available and open source aerial photography to allow various organization to do damage assessment. The imagery in Google earth is in its higher quality variety capability of doing building by building assessments - of visible damage at least, It can also be used to identify ad-hoc concentrations of internal refugees. Google, of course, had to purchase and make available satellite imagery from after the earthquake and integrate it quickly into its Google Earth/Map Product. This was foreseen in the abstract. The intended purpose of GIS Keyhole software as it was developed, which became Google Earth .

Taking the concept a step further is layering partly self-organizing realtime information on this what is called Crisis Mapping Crisis mapping brings online tool to Haitian disaster relief effort - washingtonpost.com. Other applications of uniquely internet abilities is people locating (such as People-Finder) database utilities which form a self assembling roll call and access point New tech tools help Haiti quake relief - washingtonpost.com. Data concerning ground conditions obstructed roads, bridges, working /non working hospitals, fed to e-maps and GPS devices of rescue workers and governments AFP: Technology comes to the aid of Hait. A Creole-English dictionary app was quickly put together for the apparently ubiquitous iPhone.

This process is a partnership between like Google and all the crisis-map application and utility builders. As well with other larger enties like Cisco, Intel and the telecoms who are spreading an emergency internet network over Haiti ahead of the permanent one being rebuilt. Much this is in the name of unifying loosely connected bits, which could be said to be the internets trade. Also underscoring that earthquakes bring a lot of entropy to the table.

Friday, 22 January 2010 22:00 EST