At the beginning of this week’s class we were surprised with an exciting event instead of simply listening to student presentations for the entire class. Within five minutes after the beginning of class we were off to the extreme events lab in the Information Science and Technology building in order to see a very interesting 3D presentation. I walked into this room and was amazed to see how cool this was. We were all given 3D glasses to wear for this presentation and it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. One day when I am rich from my awesome career I would like to have a room in my house specifically designed for this purpose for both work and play.
I think that the coolest thing the professor showed us during the presentation was the 3D map of flights out of the LAX airport in California. The patterns that the planes flew were very interesting because you could see the elevations, different flight, and also different flight patterns. I also wish to see the other room the professor was talking about that has all four walls and the floor all as screens to give the true 3D effect. Overall, I believe that this invention is a great tool to be used at Penn State and anywhere else for that matter. This room is awesome and I think that any students able should take advantage of doing a project in this room.
The second half of the class consisted of student presentations by Jen, Tony, and so on. All of these presentations were all revolved around the topic of using Twitter for disaster relief and Humanitarian efforts. A study was done on Facebook during school shootings such as Virginia Tech where students were putting information online about the events before the police and news crews would even figure out what was going on. I think it’s really cool that his was happening even back then because we have been talking about this all semester. Later, as social networking became more prevalent, people began to use it more and more when disasters struck such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Another example of social networking being used was for wildfires and floods. Wildfires were harder to predict than floods and Tweeting actually worked better for geo-locations with the floods instead of the wildfires.
I think that the articles that we went over in class today was kind of a review of the articles and class periods that we have been talking about all semester, but it reinforced the information very well. I happened to find an interesting video on YouTube involving Twitter’s effect on disaster relief. The video is titled “Talking Twitter Hash tags In Crisis Communication/ Atlanta Flood 2009”. The link can be found below:
I agree with your post. The beggining of this weeks class was very interesting and a new experience for me as well as a lot of kids in our class. It was really cool to see a highly technological room that was used for a purpose that our class is based off of. It was nice to see what we as crisis informatics students could possibly be working with in the future and it gave us great insight of its capabilities. On the twitter topic that was discussed during class and was presented to us by our classmates, it raised good points. It showed us how twitter is becoming more and more prevalent to emergency response and humanitarian efforts. I believe that it is a good thing that people are using twitter more and more often. It is a great tool that we can use that is given to us live at the spot of the disaster. We really got a taste of how much twitter is used in a disaster when this whole Penn State scandal went down. Both twitter and facebook were flooded with people talking about it and giving information about it. Now, if this was for example a natural disaster, this would have proven to be a very good tool that disaster responders could use. This is especially key because like some people may have noticed that during the rally and or riot on penn states campus this week, the cell phone towers were very slow if not completely overloaded so that would make SMS or text messaging very difficult. Which is another reason why twitter is extremely valuable. All in all, this was a great week of class and may have been my favorite so far.
ReplyDeleteHey Jesse,
ReplyDeleteThe beginning of class was super interesting although I’m still having difficultly imagining why audio-enabled maps will assist. I can understand why visual maps like the one we saw are needed (and yes, the airport one was by far the coolest) and it’s impressive how laying an event down in a visual context rather than one that is linear and text-based may have surprising effects on how you interpret the event. But audio, smell, etc—while they are engaging the different senses, it’s more difficult to see how that could help in interpretation, but this is probably because not much has been done in this area to provide a thorough analysis? Not really sure. I agree that a lot of the information we’re learning now seems to be the same materials we’ve been discussing all throughout the semester. I guess the only difference is the location of applying these various tools like Twitter—after all, the individual case-by-case basis and different kinds of responses are what changes. The application of the tool itself and even the problems with the tool seems to be pretty constant.
Jesse DelRosso
ReplyDeleteThe beginning of class was very surprising with the presentation in the Extreme Events lab. I have been in there before but it was for a little meeting for the capstone project we took part in during SRA 231 with Col Graham. I enjoyed it because it was a different experience that not many IST and SRA students get to experience. It displayed the power of 3D technology to show different kinds of data sets in different styles all using 3D. Your dream of having an awesome room in your house like the extreme events lab is one that I too want to have in my own house sometime.
Just how the LAX demonstration was presented it seemed to be my favorite one. It showed information you could have gotten on a table but in map form with an overlay. It also used different styles of visual analytics like we have learned in SRA 468 with the different symbols and colors to use and how they are used. I actually felt like I learned something besides ArcGIS in SRA 468 during the presentation. I think it would be really neat if we could actually get a hands on training with using the extreme events lab which would give PSU SRA students an upper hand over other graduates from across the country.
I agree with your comment about how these articles that were gone over last Monday were just another review of previous classes. It was boring and dry probably due to how much we just talk about Twitter and Facebook and SMS and these same events. I just want something different to go over in class.
The Extreme Events Lab, the mythical black curtain and we got to go behind it to see the inner workings. It was really neat to finally get to go into that room. I found the way they use the mapping interesting even if it does look a bit out dated it is still really neat to see what you can do mapping wise in 3-d. Also it was really neat to hear how they use the speakers and the music. I really enjoyed the fact that they listen to music while they work and it can signal to them that something is going on in their research. Also they can use music to see if their is a correlation between different types of data.
ReplyDeleteThe twitter thing I wasn't quite sold on it being useful but in hindsight it can be good for communicating data like who what when and where in bare minimums. It can show what you need to delve deeper in and it's almost immediate as the events of the past week have shown us which I found to be most impressive. I believe there is a place for micro-blogging and social media in response but we must find a way to make it reliable and understand the data better. If not we will end up with and overload and a potentially useful tool will go to waste.