Online Collaboration Helps Mumbai Attack Victims

GillBates0 writes "CNN has a nice story about how online collaboration swiftly helped form a centrally organized online disaster effort during Wednesday's Mumbai attacks. India accounts for almost one-fifth of the world's cell phone subscribers. At a time when chaos reigned, and voice calls were jammed, a loose collaboration of techies, laymen, and good samaritans quickly collaborated online via social media, Wikipedia, Google docs and other online resources to coordinate blood donors, assistance, rides, and other services to help the victims of the attack."

Comments

All Governments are Pretty Inept at Disasters

[haulbag]

Even here in the US, you shouldn't count on the government to get there in the nick of time to save you. There are also times when it is too dangerous for first responders to do much, since it might place them in just as great danger. It pays to be cautious and well prepared for disasters and emergencies. How many of us have 72 hour kits available? How many of us have a one-year supply of food, or even a 2 week supply of food? What about firearms and ammo (no flamebait or trolling intended). How many people know how to start a camp fire and cook all of your meals over it?

Re:All Governments are Pretty Inept at Disasters

[causality]

It pays to be cautious and well prepared for disasters and emergencies. How many of us have 72 hour kits available? How many of us have a one-year supply of food, or even a 2 week supply of food? What about firearms and ammo (no flamebait or trolling intended). How many people know how to start a camp fire and cook all of your meals over it?

Not many. For the rest, government tends to stand between them and natural selection. It's in government's interests to do that since they still pay taxes. The rest of us pay an untold social and financial cost for this, but the politicians are secluded and cloistered so they rarely feel it themselves.

You talk about no flamebait or trolling intended... I definitely know what you mean. It's an ugly truth but that's the truth. The thing is, we have modeled needless dependency and appalling lack of planning and preparation for so long that people no longer understand this. If something does happen, they are at the mercy of the likes of FEMA or equivalent. If you recall Hurricane Katrina, how'd that work out for them? Do we need multiple tragedies for people to get it, or is one sufficient? If people refuse to understand the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, why shouldn't we respect their decision? Any compassion you feel would be better put towards helping those who are at least trying to help themselves; the rest are quite incorrigible.

Disasters can happen anywhere. They absolutely do happen somewhere from time to time. To be completely unprepared for them is to assume a risk. Real adults -- by that I mean the kind who have enough personal responsibility that they don't cling to an image of victimhood -- understand that if you assume a major risk you just might get screwed. The rest wait passively for someone to rescue them and tell them what to do. When it comes to failing to look after themselves, failing to look after their families, and providing excuses to grow government, they are Satan's little helpers, cute and well-meaning though they may be.

Re:All Governments are Pretty Inept at Disasters

[causality]

Spoken like an idiot who wasted a lot of resources on redundant protections against things that he's already paid taxes to protect himself against.

No, what makes one an idiot is to adamantly insist that I must be mistaken and then have zero ability to articulate where I have made an error in my reasoning. None of my argument rests on what taxes I pay or the purpose to which they are applied. In the usual wrong-headed knee-jerk format, you are addressing arguments I never made and then declaring yourself the victor. In your imagination perhaps you are, but nowhere else. Everyone else just sees the emotional volatility of an impotent fool who cannot make his case.

Address my observation about the horrible fashion in which FEMA handled Hurricane Katrina. There you will find my answer to your worship of tax money. Of course you have already had opportunity to do that. You won't address it because you can't. You know it contradicts what you just said so you don't want to contend with me, you coward.

Having cleared that up, I have a revelation for you: your feelings about something do not determine the truth of that thing. When you accept this, you will be one step closer to real adulthood. Until such time, you can get as angry as you like and call me as many names as you like. In fact, I take it as a compliment that I affected you so much without even trying. I could only do that if my words rang true and that's what you really can't stand.

This is beneath you.

Re:Government is completely inept!

[causality]

It's common that during disasters, citizens take things into their own hands by looting anything that they may need or want, hoarding it rather than sharing it with their neighbors in need.

If you are actually prepared and have stored the essentials you need, you'll find yourself far less tempted to loot or steal anything from anyone. You may, in fact, have excess you are able to share with family, friends, and neighbors.

That is what self-sufficiency means. It doesn't mean lynching black people or busting store windows and stealing TVs, stereos, jewelry, gold, guns, and food. How you conflate these things is hard for me to understand. It leads me to suppose you already made up your mind that there is something wrong with preparedness and self-sufficiency (the real kind) and are clutching at straws to portray it in a negative light.

Especially the whole lynching deal... the founding fathers were clear about their belief that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be wrongly punished. That's why they set up a system in which police work is genuinely hard and those "pesky" civil rights make it hard. No matter what their citizenship or nationality I have a hard time considering someone a real American if they would reject this principle. They might technically be a citizen of the USA but they are devoid of any understanding of what this country is supposed to be about.

Re:Helps Mumbai Attack Victims

[causality]

No, as I pointed out this is an ambiguity built into the language. Yes, editors could have chosen a wording that's not ambiguous. But the context makes it clear, right in the summary - and in common sense.

I'm not going to reply in this subthread (replies to the current comment), because I'm interested in linguistics here - not in bashing Slashdot's editors. They've got plenty of faults, but that's offtopic to what I'm talking about.

Linguistics are only half of it. How skillfully you manage them (i.e. whether you avoid completely avoidable ambiguity) is the other half. You can pretend that natural languages are totally separate from the humans who use them, if you like. However, consider the vast multitude of words available and the grammatical structures that can be used. It should be self-evident that, from all these vaiables, the final diction that is chosen does boil down to how the language is used by the person using it. The writer is not merely an interchangable part in some industrial process because a different writer would word things differently.

I for one am glad that English makes no attempt to be completely idiot-proof. A language that tries to avoid every single potential ambiguity and misuse is also going to limit its own expressiveness. It is analogous to that Unix saying, that trying to prevent you from doing something stupid would also prevent you from doing something clever.

Also, while the wording of GP was a bit harsh, I cannot fault someone for expecting a paid professional to produce work meeting at least a minimal standard of quality. Would you want your doctor to practice medicine the same way these editors practice copy editing? I seriously doubt it, but if he/she did, maybe you'd enjoy answering a chorous of people who tell you to stop being so picky. The bottom line is that the professional could have acted like a professional and any "bashing" would have been stopped long before it started. Prevention is the very best and most superior way to handle these events. The cause-and-effect of this process is undeniable.