Orchid Project

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26614051 Gopal

People often argue that Twitter is unreliable, but when tweets are looked at in the aggregate they can confirm important events before traditional news sources do – http://gigaom.com/2014/03/16/how-twitter-confirmed-the-explosion-in-harlem-before-the-news-did/

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens 2 hours after take-off on Saturday 8th March 2014. The Boeing 777 was travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board when it vanished. It’s assumed that the plane has crashed into the ocean, but so far no trace of it has been found. […]

 Having built four future scenarios in our last workshop with ORCHID team members, Victoria and I went back to Building 32 to brainstorm possible disasters that could emerge from each of them. Working with Alex Rogers, Gopal Ramchum, Trung Dong Huynh and Victor Naroditskiy, we established a framework for thinking about disasters that borrowed equally […]

New Forest cicada is named one of country’s most endangered creatures by Species Recovery Trust :  http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/11067255.New_Forest_creature_named_one_of_country_s_most_endangered_species/

Bayesian search theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_search_theory) was applied by a company called Metron (http://www.sarapp.com/about_us.html) to help recover the flight recorders in the Air France Flight 447 disaster of 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447). Read more at: https://www.informs.org/ORMS-Today/Public-Articles/August-Volume-38-Number-4/In-Search-of-Air-France-Flight-447

Let’s say the big one has happened. The global accident has emerged, there is panic and disruption all over the world. Civil wars rage, nation-states crumble and corporations implode. Who is in charge? A good case could be made to say that it’s the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). […]

What will the Global Accident look like? Ex-White House staffer Richard Clarke thinks that coordinated hack attacks by China could bring the USA to bankruptcy and social disaster within 15 minutes. But it’s not necessary to posit a cyber-war in order to imagine disaster engulfing the world within a very short time frame. The complex […]

When US President Barack Obama declared in 2009 that the North American digital infrastructure was a ‘strategic national asset’, it was the signal for the Pentagon to set up a Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Maryland. Military strategy was quick to adapt itself to the logic of ‘full-spectrum dominance’. Here was official acceptance that future […]

See this article on how they are using crowdsourced reports of temperature, weather, and snow to understand the weather and make predictions: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/02/26/crowdsourcing-as-the-future-of-weather-forecasting/ The US Meteorological services have launched this app to help you do this too: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/ping/ Gopal