Technological Progress

For those interested in technological progress, there are some interesting comparisons between the response to the Californian earthquake in 1906 and to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Speaking on BBC radio the other day, Simon Winchester (geologist and author of a recent book on the 1906 earthquake) asserted that the response from Washington was faster and better organized in 1906 than in 2005.

So much for a hundred years of communication technology then!

Of course, Winchester's comparison should not be taken as a simple case of "1906 good, 2005 bad". Some right-wing American commentators (e.g. Donald Luskin) have talked about some of the coordination failures in 1906.

And there are many other differences between 1906 and 2005, including the significant (some might say pernicious) influence of the legal system.

There are clearly some important lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina about the management of complex sociotechnical systems of systems, and I have been talking about some of these on my Architecture blog (see especially posts on Efficiency and Robustness).

But the technological question still remains, if there is anyone prepared to do the research and tease apart the various threads of explanation. To the extent that the US Government is less capable in any respect than a hundred years ago, what are the reasons for this, and how can this finding be reconciled with an optimistic view of the benefits of technology?

Wash Out 2

The Biblical symbolism of the New Orleans flood is becoming unmissable.

• 40 days for the floodwater to subside (BBC News)
• Widow's Mite: ThinkProgress via Backwards City.
• Intelligent Design: "Security thinking is based on the intelligent design model". (Security Nerd via One Raindrop)

From a security thinking perspective, Hurricane Katrina apparently provides an excellent proof of Intelligent Design. Surely only the most wise and angry God could find a way to destroy such well-engineered flood protection.

The Intelligent Design model assumes that we can build effective security by a top-down process. But the actual state of hurricane-readiness in New Orleans was not determined by a simple top-down process, but by a complex emergent process including large quantities of development in the surrounding area.

Security thinking also assumes symmetry between threat and defence. But Acts of God are often asymmetric. As Security Nerd indicates, there is no competition between an imperfect city and a perfect storm.

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Wash Out

"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

Omar Khayyam

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James Governer asks: What happened to IEM's plan for New Orleans?

In June 2004, the private firm Innovative Emergency Management Inc won a large contract from the US Department of Homeland Security to develop an emergency hurricane plan for New Orleans. IEM produced a press release, which was posted on its website.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. A curious side-effect of this devastation was that the press release seems to have disappeared from IEM's website. Unfortunately for IEM, a politically motivated blog called Lenin's Tomb captured (and has now published) the before-and-after, which can also be found on other internet archives.

Difficult to delete or hide stuff on the Internet, isn't it?

You have to be smarter than that to erase a memory, as Professor Slughorn found in one of the Harry Potter novels. Internet archives are unforgiving and implacable (when you want to forget something), although they can also be hopelessly muddled (when you want to find something). But I still think it's a bit rich for Leninists (of all people) to complain about a bit of innocent and clumsy airbrushing.