Category Archives: Public Service

11-Year-Old Raises Money For Gulf Birds With Art

by Editor | 4 Comments

This is a nice kid. She’s Olivia Bouler and she’s an artist with a great love for birds. She is offering her art for sale to help the birds in the BP Gulf Oil Disaster. The money goes to organizations that can help out like the National Audubon Society.

Here’s a Facebook page that Olivia’s parents set up for the project.

Surgeons Offer a BP Oil Spill Plug Idea Based on Blood Vessel Plugs

by Editor

A pair of surgeons who specialize in stopping uncontrolled bleeding from blood vessels have offered their solution for plugging the Gulf oil leak. It uses basic technology that shuts off high pressure leaks inside the human body.

Watch the film below, then watch the idea I presented on May 27th below that. The two ideas are very close and share a heavy top weight concept connecting to an extending narrow pipe. The surgeons have added the concept of tapering the extending pipe. Fascinating. I think that the real solution to plugging the oil gusher will be something very close to these ideas.

The idea from the surgeons:

My idea:

Kids Demonstrate BP Oil Disaster Plug Idea

by Editor

This is a good demonstration of an idea for helping in the Gulf BP disaster. I don’t know if the blowout preventer could withstand the downward force exerted upon it by the plug however. But there are certainly adaptations of this idea that might work if the blowout preventer were removed from the equation. The main point though is that kids are engaging in logical thinking about the problem. At this very moment, I would be willing to bet that the complete solution to the BP oil disaster is already available. It has been thought of and put somewhere. For sure. It simply needs to be found now.

Crisis Camps: Computer Techies Helping Response for Haiti

by Editor

Computer programmers and other technical people are building valuable tools for helping the people of Haiti after the devastating earthquake on January 12. Crisis Camps have been set up for volunteers to develop applications that help with damage assessment, mapping, locating of survivors, locating first aid stations, translation, radio communications, food and water deliveries, free phone services, and many more.  At the root of the effort is the basic understanding that good data must be given to and easily shared between all of the aid organizations, both public and private, helping with aid and rescue in Haiti. Some of the earliest volunteers for Crisis Camp came from Google, NASA, the United Nations, the American Red Cross and the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

Google developed an online tool to help people locate missing persons in Haiti.  The technical effort has a Wiki page at Crisis Commons Wiki, that gathers resources, updates on projects, and calls for volunteers in specific areas.

The Crisis Camp volunteer approach is building something very powerful that will have a huge impact on disaster response in the future.  This is the internet and tech world at its very best.