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PPT-Part 1

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PPT-Part 2

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Landscapes Jigsaw

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Australian Landscapes video

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Mapping Task

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News Article - Birrarung Marr

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WHEN eight hectares of inner-city rail yard and roadway were reconfigured into the first significant park to be built in central Melbourne in more than 100 years, hopes were high for a radical rethink of what we want from a municipal garden in the 21st century.

Melbourne's last wave of urban park creation started around 1850, when such spaces featured exotics, lawns and rotundas. Until Birrarung Marr was opened in 2002, the most recent sizeable new park in central Melbourne was the Alexandra Gardens, completed just in time for a visit from the Duke of York in 1901.

Birrarung Marr, by contrast, was always to be a place for our times. Its designers took their inspiration not from traditional parks but from active, busy places such as Southbank Promenade and St Kilda Beach. Exotic landscapes fashioned from Australian plants were favoured over straight-up exotic plants.

Public activity was to be celebrated with wondrous stretches of space and sky there for the taking but also densely forested places where we could escape from the city. Or escape back into earlier times, given the park was designed to refer to both the natural history of the area (think a meandering Yarra with billabongs and lagoons) and its more recent history (this being a site of cleared rail yards).

Almost a decade on, however, much of the designers' plan has not been realised. Landscape designer Paul Thompson says the design team has been disappointed, even annoyed, by the way the park has developed. He says the public has never been allowed to understand what the original intent was because aspects of the park were either not constructed or allowed to morph into something else. ''I am one of the few people who knows what would have been,'' he says.

The design team, which included then City of Melbourne landscape architects Ronald Jones and Helena Piha, and consultants Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Paul Thompson, had progressive ideas for a park that was flexible enough to handle a variety of events and a changing line-up of artworks. There was always to remain, however, enough unprogrammed space for people to find a way to use the park for themselves.

Jones, who was pivotal in developing the park's concept plan, says the park has ''gone off the rails'' by being turned into a showgrounds and run as an event space with everything ''nailed down''. Although it was first envisaged as a playful, innovative expanse, it is now frequently filled with marquees for private functions and other conventional ''stuff'', with the installation of permanent artworks further reducing flexibility.

Thompson also has concerns about the plantings, which he says have either not followed the original design or suffered from the lack of a suitable management plan.

Stage two of the project, for example, was to forest Birrarung Marr's upper and middle terraces so the park would provide quiet, tree-filled spaces as well as active open areas. Thompson says the forest, which has not been planted, was crucial to the design and Jones says it would have provided a place for city workers to visit at lunchtime in the same way they use the Flagstaff and Treasury gardens.

Jones is not without hope that even now the park can be adapted into something more in line with his original vision and says the City of Melbourne is looking at plans for the next stages of Birrarung Marr.

''I essentially see it as a work in progress. Public open space is usually the poor cousin to building works, and money was tight compared with the ambition for the park,'' he says.

''Landscapes are pretty dynamic and plantings can be added and re-jigged over time, but the important thing is to have a clear sense of the role of the space. Is it a showgrounds that's next to the CBD or is it a real public space that sets the scene for more spontaneous activity and that people can claim for themselves?''

Jones says Birrarung Marr, with its riverside locale and views to surrounding landmarks and high-rise office buildings, is still an opportunity to explore new ideas about what a public park on the edges of the CBD might be. ''It takes time for people to work out how to use a park. The way people use the Botanic Gardens isn't something that was invented overnight.''

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WHEN eight hectares of inner-city rail yard and roadway were reconfigured into the first significant park to be built in central Melbourne in more than 100 years, hopes were high for a radical rethink of what we want from a municipal garden in the 21st century.

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Mapping Task

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Google Earth Engine (Timelapse)

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Explore the dynamics of our changing planet over the past three and a half decades.

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Significant Australian Landforms Table

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Compass Rose Graphic Organiser

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CASE Chart

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UNESCO Criteria

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Data Chart

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Coal Infopack

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Articles
Hunter Valley:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-05/controversial-coal-mine-sale-spooks-hunter-valley-horse-breeders/8499920

http://accsr.com.au/in-australia-coal-mining-comes-with-controversy/

Carmichael Mine:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-40168437

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/04/28/political-fury-as-australias-second-largest-bank-refuses-to-fun_a_22059145/

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PMI: Urban Living+video

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Jigsaw

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Articles:
Pollution: http://theconversation.com/we-cant-ignore-the-air-pollution-crisis-in-africas-fast-growing-megacities-46305
Sanitation: http://www.wateraid.org/news/news/overflowing-cities-the-impact-of-poor-sanitation-in-urban-areas
Food Security: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2012/food-security-aging-urbanization.aspx

Transportation: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21693577-get-worlds-biggest-cities-moving-stop-subsidising-driving-jam-today

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Vocabulary chart

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Time-lapse satellite images
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/21/timelapse-satellite-images-china-fastest-growing-cities

https://newrepublic.com/article/115610/science-reports-time-lapse-maps-deforestation

Urbanization article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/china-mega-airport-symbol-flight-agriculture-urbanisation
Deforestation article: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/september/farmland-cutting-forests-090210.html

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Advertisements

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Videos of Pitches

Pitch 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEZ-dCeu7MI
Pitch 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YYj1JViWAQ

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Plate tectonics

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How North America got its shape - Peter J. Haproff

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Tectonic plates

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Geomorphological hazards

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Research Question Sheet

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Mount St Helens map

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Mount St Helens Topographic Map

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Lesson 17 Mount St Helens Topographic map

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Example of Different Types of Volcanoes Fact Sheet

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Lesson 18 Example of Different Types of Volcanoes Fact Sheet

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Building a Volcano Instructions

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Making a volcano is an ideal science experiment, home school or school project or just something to get the kids to do on a rainy day. Even the adults can have some fun making these, if you include the activity as a party game. This...

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Drawing a Topographic Map From A Model Activity

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1. Show students map images and introduce the activity.
Display the images of topographic, or contour, maps. Make sure students understand that contour maps, though 2-dimensional, use contour lines to show elevation above sea level. Point out the flattest and steepest areas on the Crater Lake map. Ask students to describe how the map uses contour lines to show which terrain is steep and which is flat. Then tell students that they are going to make their own contour maps with DOGSTAILS. Divide students into pairs. Provide each pair with the following supplies: two sheets of drawing paper, a ball of clay, markers of different colors, several feet of fishing line, and a pencil.

2. Have pairs draw orientation lines on the drawing paper.
Have pairs draw orientation lines on the drawing paper. Tell students to draw a straight vertical line and then a straight horizontal line intersecting it to create four equal quadrants. Explain that the peak of the mountain will line up with the intersection, so that each mountain appears to be divided into four quadrants.
3. Have pairs of students work together to make clay mountains.
Have pairs shape their clay into a mountain on the drawing paper and mark its peak with a dot. Ask students to line up the dot with the intersection of the two lines, and draw the lines across the mountain so the clay mountain is clearly divided into the four quadrants.

4. Have pairs cut layers out of the mountains.
Next, have pairs use their pencils to mark three rings on their clay mountains to indicate different elevations. The first ring should be a quarter of the way down from the peak; the next should be halfway down; and the third should be three-quarters of the way down. Then have students hold the fishing line very taut and use it to slice all the way through the clay along the rings. When they finish, each student should have four separate layers.

5. Have pairs use the clay layers to draw contour lines.
Have pairs re-draw orientation lines on the second sheet of drawing paper. Ask pairs to put the bottom layer of clay on the second piece of drawing paper and outline it. Then have students remove the bottom layer of clay and place the next largest layer of clay within the first outline. Have students outline this layer and repeat the process with the top two layers. Make sure students realize they have drawn contour lines for a topographic map.

6. Have pairs complete the contour maps with DOGSTAILS.
Tell pairs to assume that the base of the mountain is at sea level, or 0 feet of elevation. Have students label the base of the mountain on the contour map with 0 feet and then assign consistent elevations to the other levels using an elevation range of 100 feet per line. Tell students they will color each layer-the space between each contour line-a different color, and create a map key to show what elevations each color represents. Explain that they can use any color but blue, because blue represents water on contour maps. Have students color and create their keys. Finally, have students add any missing DOGSTAILS information:

Date: when the map was made
Orientation: direction (north arrow or compass rose)
Grid: lines that cross to form squares
Scale: map distance
Title: what, where, and when
Author: who made the map
Index: the part of the grid where specific information can be located
Legend: what the symbols mean
S ources: who provided information for the map
7. Have a whole-class discussion about the images of contour maps from Step 1.
As a class, revisit the contour map images. Have students look at the elevations and details. Ask students to describe the differences in elevation that they see in the map images. Address any questions they may have about topographic maps.

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1. Show students map images and introduce the activity. Display the images of topographic, or contour, maps. Make sure students understand that contour maps, though 2-dimensional, use contour lines to show elevation above sea level. Point out the flattest and steepest areas on the Crater Lake map.

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Graphic Organizer

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News Article- Indian Ocean Tsunami

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Posted December 25, 2014 07:34:34

Months after the Boxing Day tsunami hit Aceh, journalist Christopher Zinn and others on a fellowship from the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre met one devastated couple and tried to make a difference.
The official Aceh tsunami 10th commemoration singles out just three words to try to give some meaning to the loss of 166,000 of its citizens: reflection, appreciation and awakening.

There will be varied interpretations and feelings about the event for those involved - for victims, NGOs who aimed to "build back better", donors, particularly from Australia, and the many orphans.

For me, returning to this poor Indonesian province after almost 10 years away made these words resonate, particularly around issues with the fallout and recovery from the great wave.

The story begins a few months after the devastation when 10 of us on an Asia Pacific Journalism Centre fellowship went to Aceh on western Sumatra island to report on the recovery.

We had stopped because of a ragged Indonesian flag fixed alongside a tarpaulin-covered tent and I wanted to get some pictures. We spent no longer than 15 minutes there.

We had interviewed many survivors and in this context Umar Ali and Rusnah's story was perversely unremarkable: their house had been torn apart, their two daughters swept away before them and they had nothing left but each other.

The couple had nothing left but each other

They had no photos of their children nor even their bodies. Their textile and tailoring business and other family members were all gone.

Yet Umar Ali in his yellow t-shirt and Rusnah's smile and concern for our wellbeing in this trying place were hard to get out of my mind. Good job we got their email address.

As a journalist I had been to trouble spots before and published people's stories in the vague hope the publicity might in some way and in some time eventually bring some benefit to them: the anti-Marcos riots in early-1980s Manila, another tsunami in Papua New Guinea in 1998, the East Timor crisis in 1999.

All had possible candidates but it was too hard to do anything meaningful.

Here, perhaps, on a dusty road in Aceh, was a chance. Umar Ali and Rusnah were educated people who could re-establish a business and employ others, and with the right story and photo to elicit compassion and donations.

Was it fair when there were so many other deserving causes and experts in aid on the ground already to intervene in this way? Perhaps not, but it was at least something, one little way we could connect with what was left of an otherwise ordinary family.

On return to Australia and with others we started a "give direct" campaign to help out Umar Ali and Rusnah with 100 per cent of donations going straight to them. We did not need too much.

An interview on ABC Radio National's Life Matters program brought in $1,000 from one listener moved by their plight and who wanted to bypass charities. A City to Surf fundraiser and other efforts raised almost $10,000.

Then came the issue of how to securely deliver the funds. Fortunately I got a job making some one-year-on recovery videos for the reconstruction agency in Aceh and met the couple again in December 2005 to give them the money.

Since then I had left mainstream journalism and contact with the couple grew sporadic, until the email address failed to get any answers.

But I was confident they would have made a go of it and so I parked the whole "give direct" idea.

Witnessing the resilience of locals, 10 years on

Then came a call from the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre inviting us back for the 10th anniversary.

In December, three of the original 10 from the 2005 visit were back in Aceh witnessing the resilience of the locals; the widespread reconstruction and the preparations to mitigate the effects of any other tsunami.

We wondered what had happened to Umar Ali and Rusnah? Was the "give direct" campaign justified and what did it achieve? And after all these years would we be able to find them?

With only their names but no address I, and our fixer Hotli, were giving up hope of ever finding the couple again. At a meeting with some younger journalists, who the APJC exists to train, I sought advice.

One offered to put their picture and my request on Facebook. In five minutes we had a number. In three days we were together.

Umar Ali met me outside a mosque. We drove in his car to Rusnah and their home where a lavish and spicy Achenese feast was laid out. It was an emotional reunion. He is now 58 and has been unwell but we learned the money had set them and their business up for the future.

They had been given a simple NGO-built house, but Rusnah cried too much with all the memories, so they moved to another area. They have few pictures but one on their wall is from when we first met them outside their tent.

Much has changed for them and for Aceh, and there is widespread appreciation of how the generosity of others made so much possible.

Umar Ali and Rusnah made me promise to come and stay with my family when I am next in Aceh. Until then, they and the whole Aceh experience over the years has given me much on which to reflect and appreciate.

This Boxing Day I shall think of them fondly and wish them strength. Every year on December 26 they go down to a mass grave in Ulee Lheue where they believe their daughters are interred along with 16,000 others, and they pray.

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A story of survival: Revisiting an Aceh family helped by Australian donations

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Posted December 25, 2014 07:34:34 Months after the Boxing Day tsunami hit Aceh, journalist Christopher Zinn and others on a fellowship from the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre met one devastated couple and tried to make a difference.

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Indian Ocean Satellite Images

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Images above: Tsunami Destroys Lhoknga, Indonesia: The Indonesian province of Aceh was hit hardest by the earthquake and tsunamis of December 26, 2004. Aceh is located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. The largest waves struck the northwestern coast of Sumatra.

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News Article- Japanese Tsunami

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TOKYO - Rescuers struggled to reach survivors on Saturday morning as Japan reeled after an earthquake and a tsunami struck in deadly tandem. The 8.9-magnitude earthquake set off a devastating tsunami that sent walls of water washing over coastal cities in the north. Concerns mounted over possible radiation leaks from two nuclear plants near the earthquake zone.

The death toll from the tsunami and earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in Japan, was in the hundreds, but Japanese news media quoted government officials as saying that it would almost certainly rise to more than 1,000. About 200 to 300 bodies were found along the waterline in Sendai, a port city in northeastern Japan and the closest major city to the epicenter.

Thousands of homes were destroyed, many roads were impassable, trains and buses were not running, and power and cellphones remained down. On Saturday morning, the JR rail company said that there were three trains missing in parts of two northern prefectures.

While the loss of life and property may yet be considerable, many lives were certainly saved by Japan's extensive disaster preparedness and strict construction codes. Japan's economy was spared a more devastating blow because the earthquake hit far from its industrial heartland.

Japanese officials on Saturday issued broad evacuation orders for people living in the vicinity of two separate nuclear power plants that had experienced breakdowns in their cooling systems as a result of the earthquake, and they warned that small amounts of radiation could leak from both plants.

On Friday, at 2:46 p.m. Tokyo time, the quake struck. First came the roar and rumble of the temblor, shaking skyscrapers, toppling furniture and buckling highways. Then waves as high as 30 feet rushed onto shore, whisking away cars and carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields and highways.

By Saturday morning, Japan was filled with scenes of desperation, as stranded survivors called for help and rescuers searched for people buried in the rubble. Kazushige Itabashi, an official in Natori City, one of the areas hit hardest by the tsunami, said several districts in an area near Sendai's airport were annihilated.

Rescuers found 870 people in one elementary school on Saturday morning and were trying to reach 1,200 people in the junior high school, closer to the water. There was no electricity and no water for people in shelters. According to a newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, about 600 people were on the roof of a public grade school, in Sendai City. By Saturday morning, Japan's Self-Defense Forces and firefighters had evacuated about 150 of them.

On the rooftop of Chuo Hospital in the city of Iwanuma, doctors and nurses were waving white flags and pink umbrellas, according to TV Asahi. On the floor of the roof, they wrote "Help" in English, and "Food" in Japanese. The reporter, observing the scene from a helicopter, said, "If anyone in the City Hall office is watching, please help them."

The station also showed scenes of people stranded on a bridge, cut off by water on both sides near the mouth of the Abukuma River in Miyagi Prefecture.

People were frantically searching for their relatives. Fumiaki Yamato, 70, was in his second home in a mountain village outside of Sendai when the earthquake struck. He spoke from his car as he was driving toward Sendai trying to find the rest of his family. While it usually takes about an hour to drive to the city, parts of the road were impassable. "I'm getting worried," he said as he pulled over to take a reporter's call. "I don't know how many hours it's going to take."

Japanese, accustomed to frequent earthquakes, were stunned by this one's magnitude and the more than 100 aftershocks, many equivalent to major quakes.

"I never experienced such a strong earthquake in my life," said Toshiaki Takahashi, 49, an official at Sendai City Hall. "I thought it would stop, but it just kept shaking and shaking, and getting stronger."

Train service was shut down across central and northern Japan, including Tokyo, and air travel was severely disrupted.

On Friday, television images showed waves of more than 12 feet roaring inland in Japan. The floodwaters, thick with floating debris shoved inland, pushed aside heavy trucks as if they were toys. The spectacle was all the more remarkable for being carried live on television, even as the waves engulfed flat farmland that offered no resistance. The tsunami could be seen scooping up every vessel in the ocean off Sendai, and churning everything inland. The gigantic wave swept up a ship carrying more than 100 people, Kyodo News reported.

Vasily V. Titov, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the center of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. "In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis," he said. "But it's still not enough time."

Complicating the issue, he added, is that the flat terrain in the area would have made it difficult for people to reach higher, and thus safer, ground. On Friday, NHK television showed images of a huge fire sweeping across Kesennuma, a city of more than 70,000 people in the northeast. Whole blocks appeared to be ablaze. NHK also showed aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing the Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof. The runway was partly submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks.

Even in Tokyo, far from the epicenter, the quake struck hard. William M. Tsutsui, a professor of Japanese business and economic history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was traveling in Tokyo with a business delegation when the ground began to shake. "What was scariest was to look up at the skyscrapers all around," he said. "They were swaying like trees in the breeze."

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the quake and tsunami caused major damage across wide areas.

The United States Geological Survey said the quake was the most severe worldwide since an 8.8-magnitude quake off the coast of Chile a little more than a year ago that killed more than 400. It was less powerful than the 9.1-magnitude quake that struck off Northern Sumatra in late 2004. That quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

The survey said that Friday's quake was centered off the coast of Honshu, the most populous of the Japanese islands, at a point about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo and a depth of about 15 miles below the earth's surface.

President Obama said the United States "stands ready to help" Japan deal with the aftermath. "Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to the people of Japan," he said in a statement. He later spoke with Mr. Kan and offered assistance.

American military airfields in Japan began accepting civilian flights diverted from airports that suffered damage, American officials said early Friday.

A spokesman for the American Seventh Fleet in Japan said Naval Air Field Atsugi had received several commercial passenger planes that could not land at Narita airport outside Tokyo. Officials said Yokota Air Base also received civilian flights. Three American warships in Southeast Asia will be ordered out to sea to reposition themselves in case they need to provide assistance, a fleet spokesman said.

The tsunami assaulted Hawaii with seven-foot waves, although it caused little damage. Powerful surges that hit the West Coast of the United States caused boats to sink in Santa Cruz Harbor. The Coast Guard reported that one person was swept to sea near McKinleyville, Calif., while trying to take pictures of the waves, and a search had begun.

In Japan, the Tokyo subways emptied, and airports were closed. Many residents set off on epic journeys home, walking for miles across a vast metropolitan area. As late as Saturday morning, 18 hours after the earthquake, thousands of people in dark suits were still trudging home from the central business district. In a video posted on YouTube, rumbles shook a supermarket as shopkeepers rushed to steady toppling wares and a classical music soundtrack played.

On Twitter, a person who used the name sinonosama said that students at an agricultural high school in Miyagi Prefecture were fine, but had to take refuge on the third floor after the tsunami flooded the first two floors.

The quake occurred in what is called a subduction zone, where one of the Earth's tectonic plates is sliding beneath another. In this case, the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the North American plate at a rate of about three inches a year. The earthquake occurred at a depth of about 15 miles, which while relatively shallow by global standards is about normal for quakes in this zone, said Emily So, an engineer with the United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.

When such quakes set off a tsunami, the devastation often comes from a succession of waves, which can cross oceans at 500 miles per hour or more.

Reporting was contributed by Yasuko Kamiizumi from Tokyo; Ken Belson, Maria Newman and Henry Fountain from New York; Daniel Krieger from Osaka, Japan; Kevin Drew and Bettina Wassener from Hong Kong; Alan Cowell and Richard Berry from Paris; Michael Schwirtz from Moscow; Thom Shanker from Washington; Mike Hale from Honolulu; and Elisabeth Bumiller from Brussels.

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Powerful Quake and Tsunami Devastate Northern Japan

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TOKYO - Rescuers struggled to reach survivors on Saturday morning as Japan reeled after an earthquake and a tsunami struck in deadly tandem. The 8.9-magnitude earthquake set off a devastating tsunami that sent walls of water washing over coastal cities in the north. Concerns mounted over possible radiation leaks from two nuclear plants near the earthquake zone.

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Japanese Tsunami Satellite Images

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Crisis Mapping after the 2010 Haiti earthquake

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To map the world, is to know it. To map the world live is to change it before it's too late.
The National Geographic Society has a long history of crisis mapping disasters. But what happened in Haiti on January 12, 2010 would forever change the very concept of a crisis map. A devastating earthquake struck the country's capital that Tuesday afternoon. I was overwhelmed with emotions when I heard the news just an hour later. Over 100,000 people were feared dead. Some very close friends of mine were doing research in Port-au-Prince at the time and I had no idea whether they had survived the earthquake. So I launched a live crisis map of Haiti. But this was an emotional reaction rather than a calculated plan with a detailed strategy. I was in shock and felt the need to do something, anything. It was only after midnight that I finally got an SMS reply from my friends. They had narrowly escaped a collapsing building. But many, many others were not near as lucky. I continued mapping.

Sourcing the Map

This is what the map looked liked after midnight on January 13th. What was I mapping exactly? Tweets. I had found a dozen Haitians tweeting live from Port-au-Prince shortly after the earthquake. They were describing scenes of devastation but also hope as this tweet shows:

I was using the Ushahidi platform, a free and open source mapping technology from Africa. Think of Ushahidi, which means "witness" in Swahili, as a multi-media inbox connected to a live map. I added these Twitter users to my inbox and began mapping the most urgent Tweets (those that had enough geographic information to be mapped). The following night, several friends joined me in the living room of my dorm to help map Haiti's needs.

Volunteers to the Rescue

But within a couple days, we couldn't keep up with the vast amount of information being reported via both social media and mainstream media. So I reached out to friends at The Fletcher School (Tufts University) where I was doing my PhD. By the end of the week, we had trained over 100 graduate and undergraduate students on how to monitor social and mainstream media for relevant, mappable content. These "digital humanitarians" began to manually monitor hundreds and hundreds of online sources for information on Haiti almost 24/7. The Ushahidi Haiti Crisis Map became a live map with some 2,000 individual reports added during the entire project.

Using Satellite Imagery

But mapping this content became more and more challenging because Port-au-Prince was half missing on the the Google Map of Haiti. The city and roads had not been fully mapped by Google Inc. So some colleagues at OpenStreetMap crowdsourced the most detailed roadmap of Haiti ever produced in just a matter of days. They used satellite imagery provided by the World Bank to carefully trace the road network onto an OpenStreetMap of Haiti. In fact, hundreds of volunteers from all around the world collaborated in these efforts. The following video is an animation of this tracing in action. Over 1.4 million edits/traces (flashes of light in the video) were made to the map in just a matter of weeks.

Crowdsourcing via SMS

Just hours after launching the crisis map, we also set up an international SMS number that members of the Haitian Diaspora could text important reports for us to map. The next day, my colleague Josh Nesbit from Medic Mobile started looking for local SMS options to support our Ushahidi Haiti Project:

Incredibly, someone following his Twitter feed in Cameroon put him in touch with a colleague who was working at Digicel, the largest telecommunications company in Haiti. Within days, we had secured a toll-free SMS number (4636) that allowed anyone in Haiti to text in their most urgent needs and location. This was made possible thanks to multiple groups: Thomson-Reuters Foundation, InSTEDD, US State Department and of course Digicel. In the days that followed, colleagues in Port-au-Prince got the word out about this SMS number by visiting several local community radio stations. They also explained that this was only an information service, not a humanitarian hotline.

Translating Needs

Soon enough, we began receiving thousands of text messages. As expected, these SMS's were written in Haitian Creole rather than English. So my Ushahidi colleague Brian Herbert pulled an all-nighter to customize a web-based interface which was hosted at http://4636.Ushahidi.com [no longer online]. The purpose of this second platform was to enable Haitian-Creole speaking volunteers to translate and geo-locate text messages sent to the SMS number. In effect, the platform was designed to enable the crowdsourced translation and geo-location of incoming text messages specifically for the Ushahidi Haiti Project. Many volunteers from the Haitian Diaspora joined the cause after hearing about the need for volunteers via Facebook.

Some Concerns

During this time, we contacted severals lawyers in Boston to determine whether we could even map these text messages from a privacy standpoint. They opined that we had implicit consent. Two seasoned humanitarian colleagues were also consulted for their feedback. They noted that Haiti was a particularly low risk situation. In other words, the possible harm that could come to local populations was minimal. Do No Harm is a standard principle for anyone operating in a humanitarian crisis or recovery context. The principle is important because it recognizes there is a risk to any intervention. And what is critical in deciding whether a certain course of action is ethical is to consider whether it could potentially cause harm to the local population. Given this feedback, we collectively decided that making the data open in this case was of minimal risk.

Meanwhile, back on the World Wide Web, several hundred volunteers logged on to Ushahidi's translation platform and reportedly translated some 80,000 10,000 text messages during the first few weeks. Most of these, however, were either not relevant, actionable or mappable. So volunteers at The Fletcher School triaged the translated messages and only mapped the most important life and death messages, i.e., less than 2% of all SMS's, a very small percentage indeed.

Engaging the Diaspora

Since a number of these SMS's required more precise geo-location before they could be added to the map, we worked closely with many members of the Haitian Diaspora in Boston who obviously knew their country far better than any of us did. A number of our Haitian friends actually joined us (often for long hours on end) in our make-shift "Situation Room" at The Fletcher School (picture below).

Operational Response

On January 19th, just a week after the earthquake, someone from the US Coast Guard emailed us with the following question: "I am compiling reports from Haiti for the US Coast Guard and Joint Task Force Command Center. Is there someone I can speak with about how better to use the information in Ushahidi?" Several days later, we set up a dedicate Skype chat with the Coast Guard to fast-forward the most urgent (and actionable) content that was being added to the live Haiti Crisis Map. We were also contacted by an American Search and Rescue team in Port-au-Prince who urgently needed GPS coordinators for the locations of trapped individuals. More on this incredible story here.

On January 22nd, the US Marine Corps got in touch with us via email:

"I am with the US Marine Corps. I am stateside assisting the 22 MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit] coming off the USS Bataan [on the Haitian Coast]. We want to use your data to bring aid to the people Haiti right now. The USMC is focusing on Leogane, Grand Goave, and Petit Goave. Is there a way to import your data into Google Earth or GIS? We want to make this work for the people of Haiti...please let me know ASAP"

Needless to say, we replied ASAP. On the same day, FEMA's Administrator Craig Fugate, shared the following on his Twitter feed:

Five days later, the same contact from the US Marine Corps shared the following by email (which we got permission to make public):

"I can not overemphasize to you what the work of the Ushahidi/Haiti has provided. It is saving lives every day. I wish I had time to document to you every example, but there are too many and our operation is moving too fast. Here is one from the 22 MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit]: 'We had data on an area outside of Grand Goave needing help. Today, we sent an assessment team out there to validate their needs and everything checked out. While the team was out there, they found two old women and a young girl with serious injuries from the earthquake; one of the women had critical respiratory issues. They were evacuated.'

Your site saved these people's lives. I say with confidence that there are 100s of these kind of stories. The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most. We did have a tech barrier that we had to surmount. The Marines downrange have Google Earth and your site does not work on the ship for them. So, I had Georgia Tech create a bridge from your site to Google Earth.

But it is YOUR data and YOUR work that is putting aid and assistance directly on the target and saving lives. Our big gap right now is locating NGOs and where they are working. Your site is helping with that. Keep up the good work!! You are making the biggest difference of anything I have seen out there in the open source world."

At the end of this 2 month operation in Haiti, the Crisis Map looked like this:

Onwards

These incredible efforts following the Haiti earthquake demonstrated a huge potential for the future of humanitarian response. Student volunteers in Boston working online with the Diaspora using free mapping technology from Africa could help save lives in another country thousands of miles away without ever setting foot in said country. In time, these reactive and organic volunteer-driven efforts in Haiti, and those that followed that same year in Chile, Pakistan and Russia, led to the launch of the award-winning Standby Volunteer Task Force ( SBTF), a global network of 850+ volunteers in more than 80 countries around the world who use their live mapping skills to support humanitarian, human rights, development and media organizations .

The purpose of the SBTF is to create a network of already trained volunteers so we don't have to scramble again like in Haiti. SBTF volunteers (or Mapsters as they are called) have since partnered with multiple organizations in dozens of deployments around the world. The SBTF is now also part of the Digital Humanitarian Network ( DHNetwork), a new consortium of volunteer networks who support humanitarian organizations.

For my next blog post in this series on Crisis Mapping, I'll share an equally remarkable story about the United Nations, Genghis Khan, Satellite Imagery, Somalia and National Geographic. Yes, they're all connected in an intriguing way. Stay tuned to find out how! And remember, to map the world is to know it. But to map the world live is to change it before it's too late.

Patrick Meier is a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for positive social change. He currently serves as Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation's Computing Research Institute (QCRI). Patrick also authors the widely respected iRevolution blog and tweets at @patrickmeier.

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To map the world, is to know it. To map the world live is to change it before it's too late. The National Geographic Society has a long history of crisis mapping disasters. But what happened in Haiti on January 12, 2010 would forever change the very concept of a crisis map.

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How Facebook is Transforming Disaster Response

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David Moran was all set to go out that Saturday night. He thought he might hit Parliament House, Orlando's oldest gay nightclub, or maybe make it over to Pulse, another mainstay. But after he and a friend ended their shift at the restaurant where they both worked, car trouble kept them marooned in the parking lot for an hour. So Moran went home and fell asleep watching Bob's Burgers on Netflix instead.

He was awakened just before 5 am by the sound of his phone buzzing next to him on his bed. He fished it out from between the covers and found a text message asking if he had heard the news about Pulse. "Mass shooting," said the message that arrived next. Now wide awake, Moran instinctively thumbed his way to Facebook.

His feed was already lit up with a barrage of messages and updates. He found frantic notes asking if he was OK. And like nearly everyone else who was up at that hour trying to make sense of what was happening at Pulse, he found the eight terrifying words that the nightclub had posted to its own Facebook page at 2:09 am: "Everyone get out of pulse and keep running."

Moran, 33, had spent several nights a week at Pulse throughout his twenties, in the time just after he came out as gay. "It was my place," he says. Now he could think of dozens of people he knew who might be there. So Moran dove in and joined the frenzied relay of messages. He toggled between Facebook and a local news station's live feed, where at one point he saw his friend Drew Leinonen's mother waiting outside a hospital in tears. After a while he found it unbearable to process so much chaos in a quiet apartment, so he walked the dark streets over to the nearby IHOP-the Gay Hop, people called it, because on a normal night the club crowd would take over the restaurant in the predawn hours.

Moran had just arrived at the diner when an unusual Facebook message arrived from his friend Marcus. "Are you OK?" it read. "It looks like you're in the area affected by The Shooting in Orlando, Florida. Let friends know that you're safe." The message led Moran to a page with two buttons: a green one marked with the words "I'm Safe" and a white one that read "I'm Not in the Area." Moran tapped the "I'm Safe" button and another message appeared, suggesting he reach out to other people and listing all his Facebook connections in the area. Moran invited scores of people to check in as safe. And then he found himself on a page headlined "The Shooting in Orlando Florida." The words "Facebook Safety Check" hung just below.

Moran could only vaguely recall having heard of Safety Check before. But as friends began marking themselves as safe, he kept returning to the page. For other Pulse regulars too, that Safety Check portal became the source of news they cared about most. Alex Wall, a graduate of the University of Central Florida who had moved to Brooklyn, sat awake through the early morning hours glued to her Safety Check page in her New York apartment. Alex Schnier, an Orlando barista, was getting ready to work an early shift at a Disney World Starbucks; he obsessively refreshed his Safety Check page as he drove to the theme park that morning. "I didn't care that I was on my phone while driving," he says. "I needed to know."

As it happened, that night last June was the first time Facebook had ever deployed its Safety Check tool for an event on American soil. The company debuted the service after Typhoon Ruby hit the Philippines in late 2014 ¹; since then its notifications have appeared in the feeds of more than a billion people worldwide, about 14 percent of the humans on earth. According to Patrick Meier, an expert on humanitarian crises and technology, Safety Check has already come to serve a fundamental need in disaster zones-giving people answers about the specific individuals they care about in a mass event-at a scale and speed that was never possible before. But Facebook is getting ready to turn Safety Check into something much bigger.

Facebook's crisis hub promises to defragment the barrage of information that flies around and out of a disaster zone.

Think of the way Moran, Wall, and Schnier spent that Sunday morning, watching Safety Check as if it were a personalized breaking-news service-one whose flow of information was narrowly focused on the fate of their friends. In its next move Facebook is going to open the valve a little further. Safety Check product lead Katherine Woo says the company aims to fold the service into what it's calling a crisis hub: a live, centralized repository for information and media about any given disaster, where people can not only check on the safety of individuals but also coordinate ways of responding in the physical world, follow news and chatter, and perhaps monitor all the live video pouring in from the scene. "All this happens on Facebook anyway," Woo says. But soon it will be powerfully organized by the company's algorithms into a single stream, automatically generated almost as soon as people start talking about a crisis.

This gets at a real problem. For years now, social media has been where people go to find out what's happening during a crisis; even aid agencies and emergency managers have come to rely on hashtags and live video to form a picture of how an event is playing out on the ground. But the hail of updates can be rapid and incoherent. As disaster sociologist Jeannette Sutton points out, for example, there was no consistent hashtag to follow through the Boston Marathon bombings. Facebook's crisis hub promises to defragment the barrage of information that flies around and out of a disaster zone.

Of course, sometimes there's no information coming out of a disaster zone-because the internet has gone down, as happened in large parts of New York and New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy landed in 2012. This is another fundamental problem that Facebook is, almost by coincidence, working to solve. For the past two and a half years, the company has been developing a program to deliver the internet via drone to parts of the world that don't have it. The business reason for this fanciful-sounding project is pretty straightforward: It will speed up Facebook's efforts to expand globally and serve ads to even more people in what is already the world's largest audience. But the team has always had the idea that the same technology could be vitally important in, say, an earthquake zone.

The upshot of all this is that Facebook-that place where you watch clips from American Ninja Warrior -is fast becoming one of the world's most important emergency response institutions. This development has taken even the company itself somewhat by surprise. The story of how it happened is partly one of sheer scale-about 23 percent of the global population is on Facebook, and people naturally turn to the platform en masse when disaster strikes-and partly one of rapid, ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants adaptation. "In some cases," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me on a recent afternoon, sitting in the glass bubble of his conference room, "we don't realize how useful things are going to be."

When Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines in November 2013, Sharon Zeng was in Northern California, working for the Facebook payments team-the unit that fashions tools for shuttling money across the social network. In response, Zeng's team built a service that collected Red Cross donations for typhoon relief. A while later, almost as an aside, her boss asked if there was anything else the company could have done.

Zeng didn't have an answer, but the question stayed with her. The company was gearing up for its next hackathon-a quarterly tradition whereby employees load up on Chinese takeout and then stay up until all hours, working in small teams to build prototypes of software ideas that aren't directly relevant to anyone's day job. And Zeng needed an idea. At one point she remembered a makeshift disaster message board that a group of Tokyo Facebookers had built after the Japanese earthquake two years earlier, trying to accelerate communication among the more than 12.5 million people affected by the quake and the tsunami that followed. "What if you could do that for every disaster?" she thought.

Zeng wasn't a coder, though; she needed someone who could actually hack the thing together, so she asked a Facebook ad engineer named Peter Cottle. "He was this guy who would say hi to me in the hallways," she tells me-by way of explaining "how ad hoc some of this is." Cottle agreed, and over the 72-hour hackathon he, Zeng, and a few other engineers built the very first version of Safety Check (they called it Crisis Center). Eventually the prototype reached Zuckerberg's desk.

In October 2014, Facebook formally unveiled Safety Check under the aegis of a new division of the company called Social Good; it described the feature as "a simple and easy way to say you're safe and check on others" during times of emergency. Over the next year, the team deployed the service a handful of times around the world, always during natural disasters: earthquakes in Afghanistan, Chile, and Nepal; Tropical Cyclone Pam in the South Pacific; Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines.

But then the company changed tack. In November 2015 the Social Good division turned the service on after a team of ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris attacked a string of cafés, a stadium, a music hall, and other public venues, leaving 130 people dead. It was the first time Facebook had deployed Safety Check for something other than a natural disaster-and the decision proved surprisingly controversial.

The system is driven by Facebook algorithms first and then by the choices and behavior of people on the ground.

Paris, as it happened, wasn't the only city that saw attacks that weekend. A double suicide bombing had hit Beirut the previous day, killing 43 people. And on the same day as the Paris assault, 26 people were killed by a pair of bombs in Baghdad. The assaults on all three cities were carried out by ISIS. But only one event-the attack in Paris-instantly received massive amounts of attention worldwide. Because Facebook had turned on Safety Check in one city and not the other two, it was accused of being just another media organization showing its Western bias.

Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged the complaints, saying the company would "work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can." This turned out not to be a hollow promise: On the night of the attack in Orlando, Facebook tested a new version of the service-one that didn't rely on the case-by-case discretion of the company's engineers.

This new incarnation of Safety Check begins with an algorithm that monitors an emergency newswire-a third-party program that aggregates information directly from police departments, weather services, and the like. Then another Safety Check algorithm begins looking for people in the area who are discussing the event on Facebook. If enough people are talking about the event, the system automatically sends those people messages inviting them to check in as safe-and asks them if they want to check the safety of other people as well. In other words, the system is driven by Facebook algorithms first, and then it's driven by the choices and behavior-and white-knuckle worries-of people on the ground.

In Orlando, Facebook's algorithms automatically turned on Safety Check at 3:47 am, 11 minutes before police officially announced that there had been a shooting at Pulse.

at the IHOP, David Moran kept monitoring the news on his phone. By now the police had identified the shooter as Omar Mateen, a Floridian who had pledged allegiance to ISIS. But what mattered most to Moran was that 183 of his friends had checked in as safe-each bringing a new wave of relief.

At the same time, the process of elimination focused his anxieties on the dwindling list of people he knew who hadn't yet checked in. One of them was Drew Leinonen, the friend whose mother Moran had seen crying on video earlier that morning. Through the grapevine he heard that Leinonen's boyfriend, Juan Guerrero, was in the hospital; but no one had heard from Leinonen.

He was someone everyone in the Orlando gay community seemed to know, a guy who was both sharp-witted and silly, who could talk foreign films as easily as he could dance through the night at a club. Wall, the former Pulse regular in Brooklyn, and Schnier, the one who was working at Disney World, had both tried to check on him as well. "He was the friendliest guy in the world," Wall says. "We ran into him everywhere we went."

Finally Moran decided to get out of IHOP and head over to the Orlando LGBT Center, a few blocks away, where he knew he'd find people in a similar state of mind. He had sat at the all-night diner for an hour and a half with a breakfast getting cold in front of him-pancakes, eggs, bacon. When he left, he took it to go but tossed the whole thing, uneaten, into a roadside trash can. At the LGBT Center, Moran sat down with a group in the corner trying to organize a response; in practice they did little more than juggle information on Facebook and other social media services. "They were trying to post updates about how to donate blood, how to get information about someone who was missing, how to help," he says.

Facebook is cagey about what its crisis hubs will look like, but Facebook Live will play a part.

In the future, Facebook says, this is the kind of thing that will become easier to do through its new crisis hubs. To Sutton, the disaster sociologist, the idea is powerful because such a critical mass of aid agencies and people affected by crises is already using Facebook. Groups like the Red Cross already coordinate donations and relief efforts as best they can on the social network; at the same time, when disaster victims can grab just a few minutes on the internet, they often spend them on Facebook. The crisis hub will help channel them all into the same space. Facebook itself is cagey about what its crisis hubs will look like-as usual, it's figuring things out as it goes along-but Woo does let on that Facebook Live will play a part.

In the beginning, Facebook Live was for celebrities-a way for people like Kevin Hart, Gordon Ramsay, and Deepak Chopra to send real-time video to their fans. Then in April, Facebook expanded the service to everyone. For a time, the medium's most notable hit was a video of BuzzFeed employees blowing up a watermelon by wrapping it in rubber bands. But the real power of the service didn't become clear until a couple of months later, when a woman named Diamond Reynolds turned on Facebook Live moments after police shot her boyfriend, Philando Castile, in Falcon Heights, a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota-letting the rest of the world watch as the scene played out. That was not something the company anticipated, says Fidji Simo, director of product for Facebook Live, but it now sees that kind of video-a raw feed from an unfolding event-as the way forward.

Disaster response professionals are already starting to use Facebook Live and other real-time video services to get "eyes on the ground" and decide where to send resources. "As a situational awareness tool, I think it's absolutely huge," says Don Campbell, an emergency manager in North Carolina. Compared to even the most strongly worded public advisory message, live video is a much more powerful way to warn members of the public away from danger. "You can hear a report that I-40 is closed," Campbell says, "but until you see the giant picture of the sinkhole, it doesn't really hit home for a lot of people." News organizations have begun using the same services to cover fast-developing stories.

In a world where all those videofeeds are organized together into one of Facebook's crisis hubs, they could become an even more powerful tool for emergency responders. It's also likely these one-stop crisis hubs will further sideline the traditional media organizations that report on these kinds of events. But of course, all of that is moot if the internet goes dark.

Connecting Flight

As part of Facebook's efforts to develop signaling equipment that can deliver internet access from the air, it conducted a test in October using an antenna mounted to a two-seater airplane. Damon Casarez

A sister antenna was perched on a roof in Woodland Hills, California. Damon Casarez

After some trial and error while circling over the San Fernando Valley, the Cessna's antenna was able to exchange data with its rooftop counterpart. Damon Casarez

Abhishek Tiwari, a Facebook engineer, is standing on the roof of a three-story building in Woodland Hills, California, in between Los Angeles and the coastal mountains of Malibu. The roof is flat, and beside him, a white bathtub-sized dish antenna sits atop a rotating robotic arm. Nearby there's a small network of PCs, flat-panel displays, and other electronic gear. Facebook employees designed much of this stuff during hackathons, Tiwari says.

We can't see it from here, but the dish antenna on this roof is locked in a staring contest with a sister antenna perched somewhere on one of those Malibu mountains, about 8 miles away. The two antennas are trading data at a rate of 19 Gbps, about 400 times faster than your home internet connection, an unprecedented speed for equipment so small, light, and energy-efficient.

To demonstrate how quickly and precisely the antennas can aim at each other, Tiwari tells another Facebook engineer to push the dish down toward the concrete roof. "We're going to mis-point it," he tells me. When they do, the robotic arm automatically swivels the dish back into position-a move with an infinitesimal margin of error, given the distance and the size of the targets.

This is the Southern California outpost of the Facebook Connectivity Lab, the research operation that's building the company's massive internet-dispensing drone, Aquila. Today these two antennas send data between the roof and a nearby mountaintop, but in the future, if all goes well, they'll transmit data from a station on the ground like this one to a flying drone on the other side of the country. Then the drone will beam the signal down, like a flying cell tower, to people's devices on the ground below.

Getting two stationary antennas to lock eyes across a single area code might seem like a far cry from that final goal, but Facebook is making progress. Three weeks later Tiwari and his team attach an antenna to the underbelly of a two-seat Cessna for a first stab at trading data with a moving target. With a Facebook engineer riding shotgun, the plane does several circles over the San Fernando Valley. It takes a while, but the airborne antenna eventually establishes a connection to the ground station in Woodland Hills, sending and receiving relatively modest amounts of data-for now.

If a hurricane or an earthquake or a terrorist attack knocks out communications, one of Facebook's drones could be deployed relatively quickly.

Zuckerberg created the Connectivity Lab in 2014, with the vague idea that he wanted to build new ways of delivering the internet to unconnected parts of the world. He organized the lab around an employee named Yael Maguire, a physicist who had helped oversee the company's recent sweeping effort to rebuild all the hardware that underpins its social network. At first Zuckerberg and Maguire thought they'd use satellites for the internet project. But one afternoon in 2013, an engineer on Maguire's team had come across the records of an old Defense Department project called Darpa Vulture that proposed to build a high-altitude, solar-powered drone that could stay in the air for months. One of many applications that Darpa envisioned was that the drone might fly over the eye of a hurricane and drop in a swarm of sensors to study the inner dynamics of the storm.

Inspired in large part by that program, Facebook set out to build a drone that looks very much like the one imagined by Darpa. The company completed a prototype of the aircraft-a solar-powered V-shaped prop, with a wingspan greater than that of a Boeing 737 and the weight of a grand piano-earlier this year. And while delivering internet access to chronically underserved areas is still the company's primary aim, the idea that these drones might be useful in natural disasters never left the engineers' minds. Maguire says the company has already discussed the possibility with telecom companies in island nations vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Facebook isn't alone in thinking this way. Google, which is already relatively far along in a project to deliver the internet to remote places via high-altitude balloons, is also exploring ways to deliver cellular signals in disaster areas. According to the International Federation of the Red Cross, information networks are just as important as food, water, and shelter in a disaster zone-and the lack of them can be just as catastrophic. If a hurricane or an earthquake or a terrorist attack knocks out communications, one of Facebook's drones could be deployed relatively quickly. "The plane can move," Maguire says.

People who work in disaster response instinctively worry about the idea that one major company might control access to the internet in the field. But Facebook plans to open source its antenna and drone designs, so that anyone-from the United Nations and the Red Cross to government agencies and providers like Verizon or AT&T-will be able to build and operate the same hardware. The idea is that hundreds or even thousands of these drones will be in the sky at any given time, forming a high-altitude web of internet transmission.

That alone sounds futuristic, but there's more: As time goes on, Facebook Live and Safety Check will generate an unprecedented amount of data about disasters. Along with the hours of video that Facebook Live can deliver from inside a crisis zone, Safety Check could provide a map of who is safe and where and perhaps why. Meier, whose recent book, Digital Humanitarians, discusses the challenges of dealing with what he calls "big crisis data," believes these services will eventually generate far too much data for humans to hunt through and understand manually. His hope is that modern machine learning-the kind of technology that has already proven so useful at recognizing faces in photos and finding what's relevant in internet data-will start to discern important patterns in crises too. And of course Facebook, along with Google and a few others, is at the forefront of machine learning research. Zuckerberg didn't seem to have any specifics, but he went out of his way to tell me he thought artificial intelligence was going to play a big role in identifying moments of crisis on the network.

Cell Tower in the Sky

As daylight spread across the sky on that Sunday morning in June, millions of Central Floridians who slept peacefully through the night woke up to the news that Orlando had become the site of the worst mass shooting in American history. For Moran, it was surreal to watch as thousands upon thousands of people checked in as safe-people in the suburbs, many of whom had probably never even heard of Pulse. People who had never really been in danger.

For Moran, the flood of check-ins was especially hard to take given that he was still waiting to hear about Drew Leinonen. Facebook can do a lot to speed up the information that ripples through a social network, but it can't do anything to speed up a crime scene investigation. It wasn't until Monday afternoon-roughly 36 hours after the shooting started-that the city of Orlando said Leinonen was among those shot and killed by the gunman.

There is plenty more uneasiness to come as Facebook continues to feel out its role in mass emergencies. Already, for instance, people are starting to consider the psychological toll that graphic live videofeeds can take on viewers. And there are other concerns as well.

This fall, after police shot Keith Scott, an African American man in Charlotte, North Carolina, a number of protests broke out in the city, and some became violent. The demonstrations, predominantly by African Americans, were fairly localized, and the violence was even more so, but the live video that streamed out from the scene gave a different impression. "When you start seeing a lot of video showing the same types of protest, it gives the impression that the entire city is engulfed," says Campbell, the emergency manager in North Carolina. At a certain point, Facebook's algorithms turned on Safety Check because the number of people talking about the event had reached a critical mass. But the particular makeup of the alarmed community in this "community-driven" version of Safety Check became uncomfortably clear as a sea of white people from the suburbs began checking themselves in as safe.

"If you believe something must be fully perfect just to get started," Zuckerberg says, "a lot of the time you'll never get started."

While the new version of Safety Check may be superior to the one that relied solely on Facebook's corporate discretion, Meier argues that it's not enough to put out products that are purely "community-driven." There needs to be someone with experience at the helm-preferably experience with disasters, civil unrest, and conflict ³. But that kind of person is scarce in Silicon Valley. "You don't have experts in-house who have worked in disaster response, crisis response, conflict zones," he says. "You have policy folks, privacy folks, and engineers." That's starting to change a little: Tech companies are beginning to consult with people from the humanitarian aid world. Meier himself has consulted for Facebook. But the company, by nature, still has a strong bias toward crowdsourced knowledge; Naomi Gleit, the vice president who oversees the Social Good team ², says she's skeptical that any one social scientist or disaster expert could know better than the community.

For Zuckerberg, the only way to find the optimal formula is to keep pushing services into the world and then watch what happens. "If you believe that something must be fully perfect just to get started," he says, "a lot of the time you'll never get started." The company's guiding philosophy is that it should draw the line where the community wants it drawn. "Our job is to learn-as quickly as we can-what we can do for the community."

At the same time, the community is learning as well. Facebook turned Safety Check on once again in Orlando in October when Hurricane Matthew buzzed Florida's eastern coast. As the edge of the storm moved over the city, Moran saw a friend check in as safe on Facebook. It was uncanny to see that notification again. Memories flooded back. But Moran knew what to do. Without anyone having to ask him his status, he navigated over and checked himself in as safe.

Inside Facebook's Internet-by-Air Tech
Senior writer Cade Metz (@CadeMetz) wrote about Google's Go-playing artificial-intelligence system Alpha Go in issue 24.06. This article appears in the December issue. Subscribe now. ¹ Correction appended [10:00 am, 11-10-2016]: Facebook first deployed Safety Check after Typhoon Ruby in 2014, not the Nepal earthquake in 2015 as previously stated. ² Correction appended [10:00 am, 11-10-2016]: Naomi Gleit is the vice president of Facebook's Social Good team, not its director as previously stated. ³ Correction appended [12:40 pm, 11-11-2016]: This paragraph has been updated to clarify Meier's remarks.

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How Facebook Is Transforming Disaster Response

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David Moran was all set to go out that Saturday night. He thought he might hit Parliament House, Orlando's oldest gay nightclub, or maybe make it over to Pulse, another mainstay. But after he and a friend ended their shift at the restaurant where they both worked, car trouble kept them marooned in the parking lot for an hour.

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Plus Minus Interesting Graphic Organizer

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Lesson 21 Plus Minus Interesting Graphic Organizer

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Good/Bad Presentations

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Oral Presentation Tips

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Audience Criteria Sheet

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Lesson 24 and 25 Audience Criteria Sheet