Remote Engineering

Administrator — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:15:16 +0000

For the first time ever, engineers from around the world, including 131 organizations from 23 countries, cooperated online and assessed the damage situation following Haiti’s earthquake disaster. They tagged 10,797 heavily damaged and collapsed buildings. In fact, public viewing of satellite imagery through Microsoft’s Virtual Earth product tagged 4,391 buildings in one day. (Engineering News-Record, 2/15/10)

The social networking of engineers and organizations could be useful in accessing engineering talent globally, much the way “solution sites” such as Innocentive access global scientists for specific challenges. Although tagging and describing destroyed structures may be rather simplistic, increasingly sophisticated engineering work will be available on a remote basis.

Charles Hess

Earthshaking?

Administrator — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:17:17 +0000

In the past two weeks, more than 100 small earthquakes have hit Yellowstone National Park, putting seismologists on alert. During January, not only was Haiti hit by a devastating earthquake with significant tremors around the region, but the Solomon Islands suffered a tsunami wave, triggered by an earthquake (7.2 on the Richter scale) in the Pacific Ocean off Papua New Guinea. Also in January, the Sichuan province of China – which is still recovering from a devastating May 2008 earthquake (8.0) – was hit by an earthquake (5.2). An earthquake (5.1) in Tajikistan left 20,000 people homeless and another quake (5.1) off the coast of Guatemala caused no major damage on the mainland but sent people scurrying from their homes. (New York Times, 1/19/10 and 2/1/10; Australia Network News, 1/31/10; New Scientist, 1/9/10; Guardian Weekly, 1/8/10)

Is there a bigger story here?

Ken Hey

The IF Blog » Haiti

Remote Engineering

Earthshaking?