disaster

The Australian Outback isn't generally a place you go expecting cell phone reception. But a group of researchers has managed to get phones working in the remote wilderness Down Under using a new system that lets ordinary phones communicate without phone towers or satellites.

The three-person team, led by Flinders University's Paul Gardner-Stephen--he of the working Maxwell Smart-style shoe phone--headed into the remote, sparsely populated Arkaroola Sanctuary over the weekend to test their Serval Project with hacked Android phones. Results were promising, with Gardner-Stephen chatting with a colleague on another mobile phone several hundred meters (about … Read more

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON--His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former longtime Russian minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says, nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and … Read more

Dissatisfied with what he sees as tepid effort on behalf of oil giant BP to stop the flow of petroleum from an exploded well in the Gulf of Mexico, a New York-based video producer named Adam Quirk has started raising money for a stunt designed to irritate its executives to no end with vuvuzelas--those buzzing horns that have been everywhere at the World Cup soccer confab in South Africa (and, by proxy, the Internet) this summer.

"In order to put a bit of public pressure on them, we plan to buy 100 vuvuzelas and hire 100 vuvuzela players off … Read more

When you've gone and polluted so much that a lot of birds are ill, baby, ill, you really have to be careful with your words. However, BP seems to have fallen into the hands of those who defend wordsmithing politicians, rather than those whose emphasis might start with the potential reactions of real people, who use the Web to keep up with the world.

Having assigned itself to a political consulting company called Purple Strategies, BP wheeled out its CEO, a gentleman who claimed, perhaps injudiciously: "I'd like my life back."

In a TV spot that … Read more

Typically, natural disasters come with little advance notice. But after a massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, much of the Pacific coast, including Hawaii, came under tsunami watch over the course of the day. That makes this was one time when the news media is poised to catch it all on film.

It may, in fact, be the first time that the developments leading to a potential natural disaster has been broadcast live in this way.

Of course, these days that means streaming on the Web, too; searching live-streaming site Ustream for "tsunami" will bring up … Read more

What kinds of tech gadgets should you have in your emergency kits? We give you some ideas and take some from the audience.

REDMOND, Wash.--The ground-level conference room in Building 25 doesn't look much different than many others in buildings across Microsoft's sprawling campus.

It has a window, though most of the view is obscured by a large bush. It has the usual array of outlets and Ethernet jacks, screens, and projectors. During earthquakes and floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, though, this room is ground zero for Microsoft's emergency response effort.

Even then though, it can be hard to tell that somewhere halfway around the world, disaster has struck. That's because Microsoft's disaster team is a virtual one, … Read more

While many people have jobs at Microsoft that aim to avoid disasters, Gisli Olafsson's job is getting through them.

As a full-time disaster management specialist for the software maker, Olafsson works with the United Nations and other agencies to prepare before devastation hits and also to coordinate efforts once it does. Olafsson has been sent across the globe to deal with the aftermath of earthquakes and hurricanes, offering help in rebuilding the infrastructure that nature has wiped away.

But, that's only part of the reason Olafsson so often finds himself on the scene of natural calamities. A native … Read more

In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, Twitter has been serving as a major hub of information, the Nielsen Company reports. Nielsen refers to preliminary analysis of data indicating that Twitter posts are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs, and other social media.

Although most online consumers still rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are apparently turning to Twitter to share information, react to the situation, and rally support. Sysomos, an analytics firm in Toronto, estimated that nearly 150,000 posts containing both “Haiti” and “… Read more