I used TImeline JS to chart Phil Jackson’s career as one of the most legendary coaches in the history of the NBA.
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Three years have passed since the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami which killed more than 18,000 residents of Tohoku region in northern Japan.
On a day before the memorial day for this big disaster, Japanese Prime Minister Abe made announcement at the Budget Committee of the Upper House of the Diet in Japan that he is positive about revision of the government led plan to construct giant seawalls along the coast line of the area, and will respect the intention of the local governments.
You might wonder why the government is not constructing the giant seawalls to save the lives of people in a hurry.
But stop and think. Would giant seawall, massive monolith of concrete solve everything? Let’s see what was planned, what happened to the seawalls on March 11th, and what people think now.
What is seawall
A seawall is a form of coastal defense constructed to protect inhabited areas .
At least 43 percent of Japan’s 18,594miles (29,751 km ) coastline is lined with concrete seawalls or other structures designed to protect the country against high waves, typhoons or even tsunamis. The average height of seawall is between 14.7feet to 25.6feet above the low water level.
What happened to the seawalls in Tohoku region –some survived and some not
Tohoku region has experienced 3 big Tsunamis during last 100 years, including the one in 2011. One of them came all the way from Chilean Coast (1960 Valdivia earthquake) and killed 147 people in Japan.
So they knew the importance of seawall.
There were two significant seawalls.
Fudai Village in Iwate Prefecture experienced Tsunami caused by 1896 Sanriku earthquake. The height of Tsunami was 50 feet high and killed (including missing) 1,010 villagers. In 1933, another Tsunami hit the village and took the life of six hundred people. After WW2, a village mayor insisted on construction of big seawall which is high enough to protect the village from Tsunami as high as the one in 1896. A giant seawall and lock gate was constructed spending 36 million dollar.
(Above:Left side area is the Fudai port hit by Tsunami. The village behind the wall was not damaged)
In 2011, 50 feet Tsunami hit the village. The fishing port and surrounding buildings which were out side of the seawalls were completely devastated. Tsunami was about 3 feet higher than the wall and water came into the village. But no houses nor lives within the wall was damaged.
Fudai village’s case was a lucky one. In 2011, 80% of seawalls in the area were damaged.
In Kamaishi City in Miyagi Prefecture, they had super giant seawalls. They were meant to protect both city and port and constructed at the bay entrance part. It’s seawalls were about 18 feet above sea level and its underwater parts were 200 feet depth. They costed 1.2 billion dollar and took 30 years to build. It was recorded in Guiness Book as “Super Seawall”. On March 11 of 2011, these giant walls seemed to stand fast against pushing power of Tsunami but could not resist its pulling power. Eventually 80% of the walls were broken and allowed Tsunami to hit the city center.
(Above Top: Super Seawalls at the mouth of Kamaishi bay /Above next: Seawall tore into pieces by Tsunami)
Government led project with huge budget
After the Earthquake of 2011, Jqpanese government together with 3 local governments of Tohoku region proposed Disaster Restoration Projects to build giant seawalls of 50 feet high, which are as high as 4-storied building. The total extention of seawalls would be 188 mile and the initial cost would be 10 billion dollar.
It seemed to be welcomed by people at the beginning. But as time passed by, people started to ask if they want to live near a huge wall where you cannot even see the color of the sea. No one can tell that the next Tsunami will never exceed 50 feet.
The towns near the coast line started to rebuild community on the hill, which left the areas on the shore deserted. Do we need expensive seawall to protect the place where no one lives
Two big industries in Tohoku area are fishing and sightseeing. People in the city of Kesennuma started to ask themselves “Would people come to visit the city surrounded by huge seawalls, where all you can see is huge mass of concrete?”
The Risk of Dependence on Seawalls.
It is pointed out that such hardened coastlines can also provide a false sense of security to property owners and local residents as evident in this situation. People narrowly missed being hit by Tsunami said, “I thought my house was safe because we had seawalls.” Many volunteer firefighters rushed to the coast line to close the lock gate and lost their lives.
Kiyotaka Abe, 90 year old retired teacher, survived three Tsunami in his life time.”Just run up the hill as high as you can. Do not trust the words, << It only came as high as this level in the past.>>.Unexpected things do happen.”
For Whom the Wall will be built
Then media reported that there is a plan to build giant seawalls even around the uninhabited island. Municipal office of Shiogama City explained that they are meant to protect rice paddies on the island, which are not cultivated more than 10 years.
Why such a meaningless plan can easily presented.
Procedure for Disaster Restoration Projects is different from usual public undertaking.
In case of public undertaking, the verification of the cost-effectiveness,environmental assessment and some time for consensus building with local residents are required. Disaster Restoration Projects are not required to do all these things thoroughly.
Who pays for the giant seawalls?
Most of the cost for the Projects is covered by budget for reconstruction. Japanese government raised corporation tax, income tax,and residents’ tax to cover the budget.It seems only the construction plan for giant seawalls was moving fast and talked in a loud voice. One cannot but speculate that it is because it brings huge money to the construction industry
The future image of the community in Tohoku area is not clear. There are voices that the younger generation should participate more for the reconstruction of the areas. Because they are the people who will manage the future and keep paying tax for them.
The movements among the citizen started to understand the meaning of giant seawalls and to talk about what kind of community they want in the future.The voices of young generation are gathered.High School student, Naoko Matsuda looks back the experience of Tsunami and said .”Our sea betrayed us by destroying our town. But I also have all my good memories with sea.I cannot hate it.The adults are arguing about the height of the wall.But height is not the matter. I think most important thing is that we all should know that you have to protect your own life by yourself”.
Kevin and I are working on a project called FOLD, which borrows the accordion metaphor for understanding the news that Ethan described last class, and tries to anticipate the reader’s contextual needs.
FOLD allows you to expand and contract elements of a story (to get more or less detail), and associates a context bar to each section of the story. A context bar can include many elements, including historical background, maps, photographs, citizen media, videos, or technical descriptions.
From observing many people consume news, we recognize that readers spend significant time acquiring contextual information in additional browser tabs, taking their attention away from the story at hand. FOLD offers journalists a way to provide readers with a curated “tangent.”
We decided to use the FOLD prototype to create an explainer of the current situation in Ukraine and Crimea. We chose this story because historical context is very important for understanding the political, economic, and social dynamics at play in the region.
The FOLD prototype is live at fold.meteor.com (works best in Chrome for now).
Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of invading a region bordering Crimea and vowed to use “all necessary measures” to repel an attack that came on the eve of the Black Sea peninsula’s breakaway vote.
The invasion reported by the Ukrainian foreign ministry was small in scale and concerned a region that lies just off the northeast coast of Crimea called the Arabat Spit.
The dramatic escalation of the most serious East-West crisis since the Cold War set a tense stage for Sunday’s referendum on Crimea’s secession from Ukraine in favour of Kremlin rule — a vote denounced by both the international community and Kiev.
The predominantly Russian-speaking region of two million people was overrun by Kremlin-backed troops days after the February 22 fall in Kiev of a Moscow-backed regime and the rise of nationalist leaders who favour closer ties with the West.
President Vladimir Putin has defended Moscow’s decision to flex its military muscle arguing that ethnic Russians in Ukraine needed “protection” from violent ultranationalists — even though Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told US Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday that Moscow had no plans “to invade the southeast region of Ukraine.”
But the Ukrainian foreign ministry said 80 Russian military personnel had seized a village on the Arabat Spit called Strilkove with the support of four military helicopters and three armoured personnel carriers.
The ministry in a statement demanded that “the Russian side immediately withdraw its military forces from the territory of Ukraine.”
“Ukraine reserves the right to use all necessary measures to stop the military invasion by Russia.”
Footage released…. read more
I have spent quite some time, trying to explain the physics and science behind how a plane gets to the sky. I initially tried to do this using an animation and got to the point where , I just had the 3 d model of the plane. Unfortunately , I realized that I was just a third of the process of doing the entire animation. So I decided to do an Xkcd style explainer similar to the one on rockets but one for planes. I hope this is easy enough. At times Physics is just that Physics, finding other words can be challenging.
Here is the link
The Somerville Happiness Project tried to assess how happy the city’s residents are
Groups of 3-4 people. You have 40 minutes to explore data from the Somerville Happiness Project. Use that time to:
Data and Resources:
Yesterday evening, a fire broke out in an apartment building under construction in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, near AT&T park. The fire eventually escalated to a 6-alarm rating, and nearly half of the city’s firefighters were eventually called in to battle the blaze. Using twXplorer, Keepr, and Storify‘s built-in social media navigator, I found and curated a series of tweets, Vines, and YouTube videos to tell the story:
http://storify.com/s2tephen/mission-bay-fire-sffire
With close ties with Afghan Taliban, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has been engaged in terrorism and insurgency inside Pakistan since 2007. The TTP has been responsible for thousands of deaths in Pakistan. On Jan. 30, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced the initiation of formal peace talks with the TTP, saying Pakistan would pursue peace talks with militants despite terrorist attacks that have hobbled Pakistan’s peace efforts.
Storify link: here
SXSW is a hot word at the Media Lab. So when asked to report on a story we “can’t report on in person,” I took the opportunity to learn more about an event I didn’t know much about, but still wanted to be at.
Like others, I used Storify in this assignment: http://storify.com/kzh/sxsw-startup-hatchery-and-battleground. Storify is a fantastic resource and was surprisingly seamless. SXSW is all over social media also, so finding sources was not a problem.
However, my initial goal of covering all of SXSW was quickly blown to pieces — there is just too much going on. I narrowed down the problem to covering start-ups at SXSW, which still turned out to be a problem in curating content from an ocean of Tweets. Furthermore, I found that it was difficult to find multiple perspectives of the SXSW start-up scene on social media. I’ve heard in person that it encourages a narrow, pitch-able view onto start-ups, and encourages this view through press and awards. But I wasn’t able to find much online sharing this same idea.
http://www.pinterest.com/alex1sh0pe/what-the-world-ate-for-breakfast/
I wanted to do a story on what the world eats for breakfast, pieced together by posts from popular social networking tools in various countries. However, many social networks required in-country mobile phone numbers to join (e.g. Mixi in Japan), or had strict privacy settings to interact with other users (e.g. Line) and so I could not pull content from them.
My process involved finding a colloquial term for breakfast in the language of a variety of locations, and then trying to find a geo-tagged post with a picture of breakfast that I thought might be interesting, surprising, or just tasty looking. I was able to retrieve photos from Weibo, Instagram, Twitter, and Google Plus. I tried to find breakfast photos that looked more-or-less home-cooked, as opposed to photos from restaurants.
Once I found the photos, I put them on a Pinterest map. Take a tour of breakfast!
Fun facts:
Breakfast in German = Frühstück
Portuguese = “pequeno-almoço”
Russian = “завтрак”
Japanese = “朝食”
Turkish = “kahvaltı”