The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
collaboration technologies optimized for telemedicine, teleradiology, and perhaps telesurgery, along with remote sensing mechanisms to facilitate remote physical examinations. Effective use of these tools requires not only bandwidth and security, but also effective shared environments for communicating and working collaboratively with information about patients and resources. There is a strong overlap between this application need and crisis management, where the expertise and equipment for health care delivery may be damaged or remote from the crisis location.
NOTES
1.
The Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications component of the federal High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative was formed in 1994 to promote research and development of technologies for a broadly accessible national information infrastructure. The Digital Libraries Initiative discussed in this chapter funds a range of projects related to information storage, discovery, integration, and retrieval.
2.
The distinction between military and civilian crises does not necessarily extend to the mix of participants in a crisis response. For example, military personnel are frequently called upon to provide relief from natural disasters, and civilian relief organizations may be present in low-intensity military conflicts.
3.
Sometimes mitigation is included by crisis managers as another stage of crisis management. Mitigation involves efforts to lessen the impact disasters have on people and property. Examples of mitigation include using zoning to keep homes away from floodplains, engineering bridges to withstand earthquakes, and enforcing effective building codes to protect property from hurricanes. Successful mitigation has the effect of reducing the impact of a crisis and perhaps keeping a situation from becoming a crisis. For a detailed case study, see FEMA (1993).
4.
For further discussion of information technology costs, training needs, and usage patterns in civilian crisis management organizations, see Drabek (1991).
5.
For detailed discussions of the importance of deployment and feedback from actual users in the design and development of information technologies, see Landauer (1995) and CSTB (1994a, pp. 181-184).
6.
NCS is the primary agency responsible for communications functions in the Federal Response Plan for disasters. The study was conducted as part of a review of needs for a new service, the Emergency Response Link (ERLink), that the NCS is developing.
Whereas in a single organization it might be possible to dictate standards for interoperability, achieving agreement on standards is much more difficult when resources are owned and controlled by different organizations. This circumstance is increasingly common in many national-scale applications.
11.
An interesting note on the impact of the regulatory policy environment on scientific experimentation is illustrated by the fact, reported by Egill Hauksson at Workshop II, that the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was unable to deploy an experimental earthquake network for all of California, rather than just Southern California, because the network service donor, Pacific Bell, was unable to carry communications between the two halves of the state on its own networks. It would have to hand off the communications to a long-distance carrier, which as Hauksson noted, could have less direct incentive to support a public need in California than would a local firm such as Pacific Bell.
Items in cart [1]
