New First Aid Smartphone app

Last month the American Red Cross launched its official first aid app, putting free and simple lifesaving information right in the hands of smart phone users.  It gives instant access to information on how to handle the most common first aid situations, and includes videos and interactive quizzes. Users who take quizzes can earn badges they can share with friends through social media to show off their lifesaving knowledge.

“The American Red Cross First Aid app is a free and easy way to get lifesaving first aid instruction and disaster preparedness information anytime, anywhere,” said Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council chair Dr. David Markenson. “Everyone should load this onto their smart phone as an important first step in learning what to do for medical emergencies and in creating a family preparedness plan.”

App features include:

• Simple step-by-step instructions for everyday first aid scenarios;
• Prioritized steps to take during an emergency, with 9-1-1 call button;
• Sharable badges to be unlocked through interactive quizzes;
• Videos and animations to make learning first aid fun and easy;
• Safety and preparedness tips for a range of conditions including severe winter weather, hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes;
• Preloaded content that gives instant access to all safety information at any time.

Find the app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store for Android by searching for American Red Cross

The webpage from beyond the grave

I've heard stories of high end cemeteries like Beverly Hills whereby you can embed a computer screen in your headstone that plays a video of you upon request. Sounds like science fiction but very doable (the hardest part would be power and weather proofing).

A much simpler solution of leaving a message that survives you is Facebook and other social networking sites where your personal page might remain long after your death. For some this is comforting, for others disturbing. Family members will sometimes ask Facebook for the password of a deceased loved-one so they can update the page with a death notice. Facebook does not have to comply with this request. Ditto for personal websites hosted by Google. There are few laws about passwords and death.

Our helpful government at USA.gov offers some suggestions: add a social media section to your will  (you do have a will, right?)

• appoint someone you trust as an online executor
• State how you would like your profiles to be handled. You may want to completely cancel your profile or keep it up for friends and family to visit. Some sites allow users to create a memorial profile where other users can still see your profile but can’t post anything new.
• Give the social media executor a document that lists all the websites where you have a profile, along with your usernames and passwords.
• Stipulate in your will that the online executor should have a copy of your death certificate. The online executor may need this as proof in order for websites to take any actions on your behalf.

Taxes!

It's getting near the time that taxes are due. I just submitted mine with e-Filing and wanted to give a shout out to Connecticut. As a resident of NY but working in CT I get to pleasure of filing two state taxes. However all the tax softwares charge extra for a second state and I spend enough on the "Delux" version to get a single state.

Fortunately CT has an amazingly easy to use system online that let me file my CT taxes in about 15 minutes with just a few numbers from my Federal Tax return. And it's free!

I love good technology.

Online Education: Coursera

I've written before about online education sites like Khan Academy and MIT online. While very good, most sites present recorded lectures for you to watch (or not watch) at any time. Presently I'm using a site that offers instruction in a more "real-time" fashion.

It's called Coursera and is offering free classes from professors at University of Michgan, Stanford, and U. of California, Berkeley. You enroll (along with about 100,000 other students) and get a certificate if you pass the class (no college credit - sorry). Classes last 6 to 10 weeks with new videos each week. Typically there's about two-weeks time to watch the 3 hours of new lectures and take an online test or programming assignment. There are online forums where you can post comments, ask questions, get into debates, catch every error made by the professor, and argue if a quiz question was graded right or wrong. There are also online "study groups" which I've not used.

Several classes are into their 2nd week now so it's not too late to join. Most are computer based but not your common programming class but rather

• Natural Language Process (how does google do searches?)
• Game Theory (multi-player scenarios)
• Probabilistic Graphic Models (too strange to explain)
• Cryptography (what makes a good encryption or breaks one?)
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms  (what's the fastest search method?)

Bottom Line

Check them out. And if you don't care about the cert, just watch for fun and check out the discussions. But time is limited. I'm not sure what will happen to the course material when the classes end.

Free Online Education

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own.
And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go.”
- Dr. Seuss

The blog, Marc and Angel Hack Life, Practical Tips for Production Living, list over 100 Internet sites that offer free classes, lectures, books, or research materials online.
http://www.marcandangel.com/2010/11/15/12-dozen-places-to-self-educate-yourself-online/

 I've used a few of them

MIT OpenCourseWare – MIT OpenCourseWare is a free web-based publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

<amazing amount of subjects and I still learned something after 20 years in the computer science.>

Khan Academy – Over 1200 videos lessons covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, and biology.

<aimed at High School and Undergraduate level>

The USGenWeb Project – Free genealogy and family history resources online.

One Minute Languages – Learn a new language via podcasts that are updated regularly.

TED – Motivational and educational lectures from noteworthy professionals around the world.

Project Gutenberg – More than 20,000 free books from the first producer of free e-books.

Weather Channel – You can learn about weather all over the world, but the Weather Channel also offers dynamic content based upon seasons and special conditions and a special multimedia and education section.

Bottom Line

Many of our greatest men were self taught, Lincoln, Thoreau, DaVinci, Einstein, Newton. Many are considered genius but they became that way because they read and studied on their own time and of their own passion.

The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".

“In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the
score.”
-Ralph Richardson (English actor)

Early this year I posted about Punctuation with Quotations in which I discussed the American rules of punctuating quotations. I'd like to revisit the topic since Slate.com claims the "punctuation paradigm is shifting".

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, [...] —almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines.

But people are realizing that the American rules are unnatural. A sentence ends with a period, not period-quote mark. The British style puts punctuation outside of quotes and it is beginning to dominate on message boards, blogs, tweets, etc. And no wonder. Since at least the 1960s a common name for the British style has been "logical punctuation."

According to Slate,

If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations. According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA [Modern Language Association], it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)."

Bottom Line

Personally as one who favors logic, I'll stop feeling guilty about following the British Style.

P.S.
Happy Birthday to my Sister!

Is your phone spying on you?

And (I always feel like)
(Somebody's watching me)
And I have no privacy
- lyrics, Rockwell, "Somebody's Watching Me"

The Guardian.Co.UK reports that,

"Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program"

And this is apparently legal. Near of end of the iTunes license (which no one reads), is a paragraph that grants permission for "location-based services."

"Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services."

So far only the iPhone is known to keep a location record on the device itself. However all cell phones leave a history of your travels as you move from one cell tower to another. We trust the cell phone companies to keep that information private and only release it to the police with a court order.

Bottom Line

In the modern world, total privacy is impossible unless you give up credit cards, ATM machines, cell phones, Internet and just about every other modern convenience. Still it is important to know what information about yourself is being collected and how it is being used. This is why I recently advised my father not to use Facebook. It has a history of violating privacy protocols or enabling vendors to violate privacy with your information. Facebook is fun to use but you must be very careful with what you share and expect that anything you post may leak out. For my part I "blur" the data I post by moving my birthday a few days or picking the town next door as my residence. Close enough for friends but incorrect for identity theft.

Smart-phone Apps

"O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
Shakespeare's, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1

I love the information explosion that modern technology makes possible. Twenty years ago I bought reference works, maps, etc to gather facts. Now it's all at my fingertips on the Internet.

On the flip side, I hate spending lots of money on technology. So I wait for prices to come down which can mean waiting several years. For example, my phone is NOT a smart phone. They look fun and perhaps will be within my budget soon. My cellphone contract expires this month so who knows what I'll get as the upgrade.

If you have a smart-phone you may appreciate this article by the Christian Science Monitor,
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2011/0201/The-10-weirdest-uses-for-a-smartphone/

"The current generation of iPhones and Android phones have processors that are about 500 times faster than the computer onboard the Apollo Lunar Module (with the added benefit of not weighing 70 pounds). All this computing power can be used to tackle ... humanity's most vexing problems:"

10. Solving a Rubik’s Cube

9. Creating fine art (the May 2009 cover of the New Yorker was made on a smart phone)

8. Avoiding police speed traps

7. Performing live music on the subway

6. Piloting an augmented-reality drone quadricopter

5. Monitoring earthquakes

"Researchers at Berkeley have developed an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone to measure the intensity of an earthquake."

4. Solving Sudoku puzzles

3. Annoying teenagers
 An iPhone app named "Annoy-a-Teen" emits frequencies above 16 kHz that only children can hear.

2. Piloting a satellite
British researchers have developed an 8-pound satellite with a smartphone as its brain: The STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator).

1. Blowing out a candle
 The app "Blower" uses the smart phone speaker to create a very weak fan effect.

Bottom Line

What new uses have you discovered for a smart phone?

Check out http://gizmodo.com/#!5781077/the-apps-you-need-to-prepare-yourself-for-a-disaster for low cost apps that give emergency & First Aid advice.

Communicating with the Internet

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
-Eric Schmidt

On January 25 the Egyptian government shut down the Internet in Egypt in response to massive revolt and riots. This has led to much speculation in America and elsewhere - could this happen to us?

This has also led to discussion on what to do if the Internet goes down. For example Wired.com has a great article entitled Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet.  It covers:

• Back up information (like phone lists) that you store online.
• Public radio like CB, HAM and others
• Phone trees
• FAX
• Dial up and other alternatives to your ISP company.
• Satellite access

Bottom Line

I love the Internet. But be careful that you don't rely on it 100% and have backup options in place. It just takes a power outage to lose the Internet.

Golden Rules for Scam Prevention

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
- Abraham Lincoln (attributed)

Most of us want to trust people so it's not so hard to be fooled by a scammer. Here are The 10 Golden Rules of Scam Prevention from MoneyTalksNews.com.

Rule Number 1: Don't Trust the Testimonials of Stranger
The only testimonial worth believing comes from people you both personally know and totally trust. The testimonials you see from strangers on TV or in online reviews may be lies or paid for. Ignore all testimonials in ads, websites, and infomercials.

Rule Number 2: “Documented proof” is not proof
Anyone willing to rip you off can create fake checks, letters, or anything else to back up their claim. And even if they have valid proof of past success, that is no promise of future success.
- Markets are cyclical so last year's top performing stock may be this year's biggest loser.
- Don't forget that Ponzi schemes and Pyramid Marketing pay off the early contributors to lure in a larger number of fish. 
- Ads often cite the most extreme success stories - not everyone will lose 100 pounds on this diet.

Rule Number 3: Guarantees are only as good as the company behind them
A common scam is that the results are “guaranteed, or your money back!!!” But what if the company refuses to honor the guarantee? Are you prepared to take them to court? Many fraudulent companies use post office boxes so they cannot be located by courts of law. Or they may flee the country or change the company name to hide from lawsuits.

Rule Number 4: It’s not fine to ignore the fine print
Virtually every deal that goes bad is the result of people listening to the sales pitch without reading the fine print in the contract. It is your responsibility to know that your mortgage payment will go up after three years, or that your credit card interest will jump from 9 percent to 29 percent if you miss a payment or that mutual funds are risky. If you don’t understand the fine print, ask a friend to explain it to you.

Rule Number 5: Haste makes waste
The only people who can wisely make snap decisions regarding a purchase are those who are experts at what they’re buying and make such decisions frequently. For everyone else, take your time when buying a house, a car, stocks, getting married, etc. The bigger the cost, the more time you need to examine it. An offer that is "too good" to wait for will usually leave you burned.

Rule Number 6: Use the Internet to Verify Claims
Consider this scam, an ad asks for $400 to help you get a government grant for your small business. If you go to the Internet and type “government grants for small business” into Google or other search engine, you'll quickly find a government website which says that the federal government does not provide grants for starting and expanding a business. So the ad was a rip-off. The Internet can also expose frauds where the information is free online that someone is offering to sell to you.

Rule Number 7: Check Online for Fraud
Use a search engine to search for a company or product and add the words “review” and “ripoff.” You will be directed to sites that specialize in consumer reviews. This is a twist on rule #1 about strangers. Never trust product endorsements from strangers, but if many strangers call a product a fraud you ought to listen carefully. Do they have an axe to grind or is there a real problem?

Rule Number 8: Use the help you’ve already paid for
Your tax dollars fund agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, that publish advice on how to avoid rip-offs.

Rule Number 9: Getting something free? You might be the product, not the customer.
Most free content is paid for by advertising that is trying to catch your eye or ear. Other sites survive by collecting and selling information about your and your online habits. Consider the motivation of those offering free content and how they are using you.

Rule Number 10: If it sounds too good to be true…
"The best way to avoid getting ripped off is to simply ignore people and companies who promise simple solutions to complex problems. They don’t exist. Nobody is going to show you how to buy a house for $398, nobody is going to provide a consistent 12 percent return without risk, and nobody knows how to make big bucks with little effort at home in their spare time. Think about it: If these claims were true, why would the people making them share that information with you?"

Bottom Line
You don’t have to remember all the above rules to protect yourself from con artists. Just following a few will help. Imagine a product without the money-back guarantee and the testimonials. Would you still buy it?

Update

The Consumerist has this quote by an author on Amazon,

I've purchased my own book, Wealth Hazards, close to 200 times now. I wrote 42 customer reviews and voted on them 108 times. Not once was a review or vote rejected by Amazon. It took about 45 days to move the book up to #1, but after it got there I didn't feel it was appropriate to promote it - so I have not profited from it. I continue to buy 2 or 3 copies a day, write reviews and vote on the reviews and wait for Amazon to notice. They haven't.

Email Etiquette

"Diamonds are forever. E-mail comes close." - June Kronholz

Website TheOatmeal.com takes a humorous look at email etiquette.  My only fear is that the message is too subtle - some people may have no clue what is wrong with each example.

The title is "If you do this in email, I hate you." Here's a summary of the errors displayed.

1. Clinging to old technology and not using the power of the Internet. Why fax anything anymore? At my company we each sign (and fax to HR) a one page document agreeing that our email signature will be legally binding. Now no more faxes, our email response is sufficient.

2. Asking for a resend of information instead of searching your own email archives.

3. Chain letters to dozens of friends. Personally I find it very sad when persons forward a chain mail and don't clean it up - instead leaving the history of every previous person it was ever sent to.

4. Super long automatic email signatures or using graphics in your signature. This make the email unnecessary large and takes up space.

5. Besides a fax response (see cartoon #1) the 5th cartoon seems to be more a dig at non-disclosure agreements in general.

6. Email != FTP (File Transfer Protocol) - don't send giant files by email. They are slow to download and fill up the mail box space.

7. Email != Collaborative Editing Software. Note all the Re: Re: ... in the title showing how many times this email has been bounced back and forth. I would be guilty of using email this way since I've never worked with collaborative editing software. The closest I suppose is using source control software and Change Tracking to see who edited what. Source control are programs that let you "check out" a file, modify it, then check it back in. A checked-out file is locked and no one else can change it while you own it.

8. Unsubscribe - just like the cartoonist, I hate it when I have to sign in to unsubscribe because I may have no clue what my account ID and password are. A good unsubscribe knows who you are.

9. Don't overly decorate your email with background wall paper, and added art elements, etc. Again this added to the size of the email file.

Bottom Line

Email etiquette is interesting. Should it be as formal as snail mail or as informal as twitter? Should you use abbreviations like LOL, FYI, etc? Is it OK to spam your friends? What do you think?

Google Earth

The letter A

"I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company."
-Coca Cola ad song from 1971

If you like maps, you'll love the web application, Google Earth. It allows you a bird's eye view of much of the planet from various heights (some regions are more detailed than others.) The app has been put to many uses.

• Searching the earth for items that look like letters of the alphabet (so you can spell with geography?)
  (in Australia) (Netherlands) (British hedgerows)
• A cousin of my commented on Facebook about using Google Earth flight simulator to "fly" through canyons. Not easy, he said.
• The town of Riverhead in Long Island uses Google Earth to locate residents who have pools but have not paid for a pool permit. They have collected $75,000 in fees so far.
• Looking for undiscovered meteor craters (like deep in the Sahara Desert).

Bottom Line

As with all technology, it can be used for good or evil. Security officials fear that terrorists will use Google Earth to scout out a location and plan an attack with accurate images. For this reason some locations on Earth are deliberately blurred by Google Earth.

Stolen Checks

"I don't have a bank account, because I don't know my mother's maiden name". - Paula Poundstone 

My wife has discovered the joy of online payments and online banking but a story from the Consumerist make me nervous. Some banking sites scan your checks and allow you to view the images online. These images may be stored on a 3rd party server by an independent image storage company whose security rules are not quite as strict as your bank's.

Russian crooks have broken into three sites that store archival check images, stolen the account information, and written over $9 million in phony checks against over 1,200 accounts. The security company that discovered this attack has notified the affected sites but it is not making their names public.

To avoid getting caught, the Russian crooks used "money mules".  Here's the story of an unwitting money mule:

A man found her "work wanted" ad online and contracted her to become a virtual assistant. He said that he was associated with the reputable international fashion marketing firm Mandi Lennard. The jobs started simple: buy this exact kind of ink and paper and perform various tasks. Soon he had her sending money for him to help one of the "photographers" purchase some alcohol. When she asked why he needed her to send the funds, he said "because i am very busy and you are my assistant."

Then she was instructed to print out a check for $1,300, deposit it in her account, and write a check off her account and mail it to her handler.

But when she did, the bank said it would be held for seven days while they investigated it for fraud. She soon received a call from a woman in Atlanta. It was her account the $1,300 check was drawn from, and the caller she was pissed and ready to press felony charges against her!

Bottom Line

Never, never agree to cash a check to your account and then offer some or all of the funds from your account (by check, cash, or wire service) to the person supplying the check. This is a very common scan and you're the one breaking the law by cashing a check that will bounce or one that is using stolen account information.

Truth & the Internet

"You can't handle the truth!" – from the movie “A Few Good Men”

If you do any shopping on the internet like Amazon or eBay, chances are you look at the reviews of fellow users to judge quality of a product. Sometimes the reviews are helpful and posted by real users – but other times the reviewer has a hidden bias. Perhaps they work for the company or its ad agency. Perhaps they work for a competitor and want to trash the product. How can you tell the difference?

Check out the Consumerist story, 30 Ways You Can Spot Fake Online Reviews.
Here are some of the techniques listed:

• Normal people do not write in marketing speak. They rarely spell out the full product name, “I loved the ABC Widget 3000X”, or faithfully follow the company guidelines for product capitalization or spelling.
• They give a discount code or tell you where to go to buy the product.
• There's "only a few reviews, all overwhelmingly positive."
• The review predates the product release. In the case of books this could be early drafts given to friends and fans to (positively) review .

Bottom Line

I love the internet but you have to take everything online with a grain of salt. There are lots of lies and deceptions out there. Just this week there was a scam ad on Facebook that fooled tens of thousands into providing personal information for a free $1000 gift certificate that will never arrive.

I recently saw an ad that said, “No joke, you really are the 10 millionth visitor. Click here for a prize.” Then I saw the same ad on a second site. Wow what are the odds of being # 10,000,000 on two sites at the same time?

Last night I encountered an ad with audio – “You’ve won a mystery prize! Click here!” It’s annoying when ads flash but I really hate it when they cover the screen or talk to me. Or worse yet when an ad starts a video playing.

The State of the Internet

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”-Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

http://www.focus.com/ has published a beautiful series of graphs called the State of the Internet. Here is a summary of the results

- An equal number of men and women use the Internet (74%)

- Age matters. 93% of young adults 18-29 use the Internet while only 38% of senior citizens do.

- Income matters. Those with more money have faster Internet access.

- Education matters. Users without a high school education: only 39% while 94% of college graduates use the Internet.

- The most surprising graphic to me was the frequency of Internet use, pictured above. Only 38% of those surveyed say they use the Internet several times a day. %21 once a day. The majority are infrequent users. This explains my sister who does not check her email very often.

- Laptops are now in 46% of all homes.

- Scandinavia has the best Internet penetration into homes. Nothing else to do in the dark, cold, winter perhaps? The US is #5 after Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Netherlands.

- The US is horribly behind in Internet speed. Appx 5 mbps vs 61 mbps in Japan. (mbps = megabits per second)

Bottom Line

I’ve been an Internet user since the 1980’s when my college, Michigan State, gave everyone access. Then AOL in the early 1990’s, then Netscape and now mostly IE. I consider it one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

I used to buy reference books or seek out information at reference sections of libraries. But informational books can quickly become dated. Now I take for granted the easy access to global information on any subject – for example, yesterday I was looking for vendors of Pinewood Derby tracks for Cub Scouts and the costs. Did you know tracks come in wood, plastic and metal with laser controlled times on the finish line?

For more interesting Internet facts check out http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/08/15-fantastic-firsts-on-the-internet/ which describes 15 firsts like the first email, first spam, first web site, etc.

Flash Crowds

"Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more. They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more."- A. Lou Vickery (American business author)

Have you ever been stuck in traffic only to learn that it was caused by rubber-neckers slowing to observe an accident in traffic going the other way? People love to gawk.

In 1973, Larry Niven wrote a novella called "Flash Crowd" that describes the impact of having free and instantaneous teleport machines. When something novel occurs, say a skyscraper building fire, tens of thousands of gawkers would appear from around the world to watch. Criminal pickpockets, taking advantage of a crowd, would join them. Naturally authorities were not amused as the instant crowd hampers rescue efforts and causes additional problems.

In the real world we may lack star-trek transporters but we do have the Internet. If you are a small blog (like mine) and get linked to by one of the “big guys”, the effects of an instant crowd can be overwhelming. Being Slashdotted may cause an Instalanche on your Web server or put you into higher fees with your service provider for exceeding a volume limit.

Interestingly the effects of Flash Crowds are no longer limited to imaginary worlds and virtual worlds. With the Social Networking of Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberries, instant events can be announced and hordes appear at the designated site. This idea was used on TV to conceal a murder in CSI: Miami "Murder in a Flash".

The Flash Crowd effect was also observed recently in Big Bear Valley of Highland, California. Roads to this ski resort area were closed for days by a big snowfall. No deliveries were possible and residents & guests got by with stocks on hand. When the roads reopened, supply trucks were hampered by thousands of skiers and snowboarders clogging the roads, hoping to be first on the virgin snow. When resorts ran dangerously low on fuel and food, officials took the unusual step of closing the roads to tourists, allowing only delivery trucks and emergency vehicles until the resorts were restocked.

Bottom Line

Crowds can be exhilarating but they can also be dangerous. I recommend keeping a safe distance away. When driving for example, my wife & I try to avoid driving within a cluster of cars. We’ll pull ahead or drop behind to avoid the pack.

On the other hand, a crowd may be responding to something you’re not aware of. Find out the reason for the crowd. Cartoonist/author James Thurber wrote a story called “The Day the Dam Broke”. A man is running and muttering, “damn, damn.” Someone overhears and begins running also. When asked why, this second person responds, “I’m running for my life. The dam has broke.” So others start running, spreading the rumor and soon the whole town is running in panic from a non-existent tidal wave.

On a more serious note, on 9/11 in New York City, my workplace at Rockefeller Center was evacuated as a possible target site and everyone was told to go home. On my way to Grand Central train station, I’m the only person walking south. Hundreds of people are walking north. Despite feeling like a salmon going upstream, I never stopped to ask why so many people were headed north. Later I learned that the Mayor declared a mandatory evacuation of lower Manhattan. Some 300,000-500,000 people moved themselves to safer locations.

Recommended Books

"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it." ~James Bryce

The SurvivalBlog has posted a list of reader recommended survival & preparedness books at ...

www.survivalblog.com/2009/07/survey_results_your_favorite_b.html

The readers' favorite book is The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery. It sells for $18-20 on Amazon and is described as, "invaluable practical advice on all aspects of growing and preparing food. ... how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, catch a pig, make soap, work with bees and more."

Many of the books in the list cover gardening and farming. The rest are a mix of general principals, health (dentistry, first aid), guns, religion (bible), food storage, and cooking.

Bottom Line

While I love the internet and all the information that is available, I would not count on it to be working after a major emergency. First - many disasters knock out the electricity. Second, that might be a break in your phone line or cable. Third, if you do have power and a working line, the servers may be overwhelmed or just incredibly slow.

Do yourself a favor and buy a few good books:

• first aid
• old fashioned cooking skills (e.g. Joy of Cooking, 1965 edition)
• general survival guide
• farming/gardening (if you have the land)

How to Do Anything

“Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”

An amazing resource to know about is the web site, How to Make Anything.com. The site contains "GigaBytes of data collected from all over the world" with detailed instructions on how to do just about anything. Items include:

UNDERSTANDING CEREAL CROPS I-WHEAT, OATS, BARLEY, AND RYE
How to Dehorn Cattle
Raising Yaks (a Yak is pictured above)
Cheese making
Donkey work made easy
Snail farming
Making Yoghurt
and more like all types of stoves, making bricks, making Ox carts, sanitation, medicine, education, etc.

Bottom Line
Sites like How to Make Anything.com are amazing and fun to read. But they are not much use after a disaster that knocks out electricity. Or if the site is popular and well know, the server may become overloaded by too much traffic under emergency conditions. You need to prepare in advance to make this site useful:
1. Print out topics of interest and create your own survival manual this way
2. Buy some good survival books
3. You could download useful topics to your PC or flash drive and when the internet and power is down use an UPS (backup power supply) to access the topics (warning - the UPS won't last long).
4. For those technically inclined, it's possible for a bicycle to create power to run a laptop (but not enough for a PC) http://science.howstuffworks.com/question658.htm
Here's one product that claims it can charge batteries via bike: http://www.econvergence.net/electro.htm