At the crossroads of innovation and experimentation there is also the risk of opportunistic discourses, that sometime touch on a desire to develop an idea no matter how well suited it might be for a variety of uses. The "Individual Lifting Vehicle (ILV)" not only explored the desire to develop a personal flying machine, but was also being introduced to help with border control, military operations, search and rescue missions, or its use by private citizens for leisure or to allow them to evacuate disaster prone areas.

Disaster simulation and scenario planning constitute a critical practice to help understand the consequences of catastrophic events, and to be better prepared for them. Lucas Roebuck picked up some of my early work around the uses of SimCity in urban simulation, planning, and city culture to consider if "SimDisasters" could help us be prepared for the real thing." Roebuck argues that some of the things done at SimCity provide lessons that can be applied on the real world. However, like I proposed in "A City is not a Toy"(PDF 1MB) I believe that SimCity offers little value other than as cultural stimulation and interpretation, and that its uses as a simulator are not only limited but counter productive. Disaster simulation is progressing in much more useful and challenging fronts. SimCity does offer interesting insights but they are not related significantly to disaster preparedness.

The Media Future Now is an informal and dedicated group that aims to generate conversations for Washington DC area professionals, focused on finding ways to keep media-centric businesses agile, innovative and future-focused. Looking at the meet up focused on mobile media, Andrew Mirsky asks two questions related to the emergence and usefulness of mobile media applications and social networks:

• What is the true community utility of mobile technology?

• If mobile technology increasingly enables non-traditional communications behavior and non-traditional media consumption, are we in the middle of or looking at the end-product of where is this going?

I think I can try to add to the debate around the topics looking at some of my personal use, and then at some of the ramifications that disaster prevention and response are offering.

The fourth Monday of July marks the traditional start of hurricane season in the Virgin Islands. Hurricane Supplication Day is in fact celebrated as an official holiday in the U.S. part of the archipelago with dedicated services and praying around the idea of hurricanes landing on the islands. Deeply interwoven with religion, the day helps to ingrain a common notion of risk, and a community desire to be avoid the damages that a hurricane may carry. In short, the holiday may operate as a popular day in disaster preparedness.

A 6.1 quake was reported hitting Iceland some 30 miles from the capital Reykjavik at 15.45PM local time. A few specialized news outlets picked up the event, which I reached some two hours after it happened. Minimal reference to the event was received in mainstream media outlets, and while not enormous a 6+ level event typically qualifies as strong with the potential to severely damage population and structures in a 100KM radius. It would only be much later that a brief snippet of the event would clarify the "minimal" effect of the damage. Two critical factors played an important role in giving it such a low profile: small population, and high wealth. The trouble is that relatively small poor populations may also be as a result of their size outside of the alert systems, something only fixable through proactive local preparedness.

Today the biggest news emerging regarding the Shichuan earthquake were the declarations of actress Sharon Stone. It would be easy to blame her for her unfortunate remarks regarding the tragedy as a possible "loss of karma" caused by the Chinese. However, the fact that the tangential declarations of a celebrity become the top feature around such a critical and complex topic resonates as deeply troubling. In this context, the interest would seem to reside not on the tragedy but on the celebrity. This symptom points to a common skewed cultural pattern, which utilizes the events surrounding a disaster eliminating critical thinking and attempting to isolate essential issues from their public exposure. I have commented elsewhere in depth how the critical abuses in Tibet are used to gloss over other equally if not more serious issues within China. This media attention hints at a similar distraction.

Another twist in the apparent media bias treating the disasters of China compared to that of Myanmar is the current push to question the value of the 3 days of mourning called by the dictatorship for the losses of Cyclone Nargis. While it is true that it follows late, and is second to the 3 days called for the Sichuan earthquake, this amount of questioning was absent when the Chinese authorities made their announcement.