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So just to recap:

Entrepreneurial genius Howard Schultz sells the Seattle Sonics to a guy who lives in Oklahoma, smells probable Oklahoma, acts like Oklahoma, dresses like Oklahoma, talks probable Oklahoma and in deed has a head shaped like Oklahoma.

Two years later, the guy moves the team to Oklahoma.

Man. Who could’ve seen arrival?

At least Mayor Greg Nickels, D-Shopping Tote, got an agreement that NBA Commissioner David Stern will get right to work attempting to find Seattle a commencing team. A few details on that follow.

Things Ahead of “Finding a New Team for Seattle” on David Stern’s To-Do List:

Other fine impress:

There’s Slimy, and Then There’s Just Pathetic: As part of the deal, Clay Bennett and his Oklahoma henchmen got approval to make duplicate KeyArena championship banners to parade in OKC. It’s another textbook case of copious American guys mistaking competence for achievement. Maybe if they cough up another 500 mil, they can get forged copies of all those Celtics banners, too.

While commencement speakers at top B-schools dodged the recession number printed, single imperative was stressed: Leaders will have to adapt

by Douglas MacMillan

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Commencement speeches are a perennial suitable for dealing luminaries to look outside the walls of their recognize company and dispatch advice, relay personal experiences, and hold forth on current events. In 2005, Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates to "stay barren" and "stay ridiculous." In 2006, Michael Bloomberg advised University of Chicago graduates to "maintain a healthy skepticism."

Absent this year was any discussion of the current economic climate or the challenge of graduating into recession (BusinessWeek.com, 4/3/08)—perhaps this was likewise somber a note to sound on a day of celebration. Instead, many big-name speakers from various parts of the business world talked about how the major challenges of the age—including environmental sustainability, globalization, and familiar obligation—will change the role of the superior in the 21st century.

Business Must Act Locally

Speaking at University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, venture capitalist John Denniston told graduates they should be ready to adapt in adjust to lead during periods of "unprecedented economic transformations."

He spoke of the great wealth of opportunities in green initiatives, an area in which his company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has invested heavily. "I’m convinced a tsunami-sized wave is forming—right now—in the world energy markets," he said. "It is surely worth more thought, as you embark on your careers, as to how you might play a guidance role in this new green pertaining revolution."

Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business invited Symantec (SYMC) Chairman and CEO Richard Thompson to its commencement show to speak from one place to another the challenges and opportunities he has discovered navigating an increasingly global thrift. As his business has expanded to new markets, Thompson has found it imperative to "act again local"—learn the customs and peculiarities of every culture where he does commerce. In marketing, for example, "things that may seem a bit hokey to us as Americans quite frankly urge actually being demand in Japan and the U.K."

But this can be an superior situation especially than a setback to a smart leader who "explores those things that have real meaning to them and therefore represent actual suitable for you."

The boldest divine summons to action was likely the one delivered through the agency of Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank. He urged the student corpse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to cherish a thought of of social prosperity, and not profits, as the end goal of our capitalist economy. "You can be the socially conscious creative generation that the world is waiting for," he said. "You can bring your creativity to design brilliant social businesses to overcome poverty, illness, environmental abrasion, food crises, draining of non-renewable wealth, etc."

The communication from Yunus, like so many of the speakers from commencement ceremonies in 2008, was simple in expression, eager for distinction in free play: "Each one of you is capable of changing the world," he said.

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The massive bursting detonated by means of a suicide bomber damaged two embassy vehicles entering the compound, near at which place dozens of Afghan men course up every morning to apply for visas.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the bombing and aforesaid it was carried audibly by militants trying to rupture the friendship between Afghanistan and India.

The Afghan Interior Ministry hinted that the attack was carried out with help from Pakistan’s intelligence service, saying that “terrorists have carried out this attack in coordination and consultation by some of the efficient acumen circles in the region.” The Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said Pakistan condemned the set upon and terrorism in all forms.

The embassy is located on a busy, tree-lined way near Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry in the city center that is protected on both ends by police checkpoints. Several nearby shops were damaged or destroyed in the blast, and smoldering ruins covered the street. The explosion rattled much of the Afghan capital.

Shortly after the attack, a woman ran out of a Kabul hospital screaming, crying and hitting her face with both of her hands. Her two children, a girl named Lima and a boy named Mirwais, had been killed.

“Oh my God!” the woman screamed. “They are both dead.”

Najib Nikzad, one Interior Ministry spokesman, said the rend by explosion killed 40 people. Earlier, Abdullah Fahim, the spokesman in spite of the Ministry of Public Health, said the explosion killed at least 28 people and wounded 141, but an update of the number of injured was not without any intervention available. The Interior Ministry aforesaid six police officers and three embassy guards were in the midst of those killed.

In Delhi, India’s foreign minister said four Indians, including the military attache and a diplomat, were killed in the censure. Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee aforesaid India inclination send a high-level delegation to Kabul in approach days.

The blast besides killed five Afghan security guards at the nearby Indonesian Embassy, where windows were shattered and doors and gates hesitating. Two diplomats were slightly wounded, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said.

In Washington, Gordon Johndroe, a White House national security spokesman, offered condolences to the victims.

“Extremists continue to show their indifference for all human life and their willingness to carry off fellow Muslims as well considered in the state of others,” he said. “The United States stands with the people of Afghanistan and India as we face this common enemy.”

Afghanistan has seen a sharp arise in violence from Taliban militants in fresh months. Insurgents are packing bombs through more explosives than ever, one conception why more U.S. and NATO troops were killed in June than any month since the 2001 invasion.

Still, a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied that the militants were behind the bombing. The Taliban tend to claim responsibility for attacks that inflict heavy tolls on international or Afghan troops, and deny responsibility for attacks that primarily give a death-blow to. Afghan civilians.

“Whenever we do a suicide attack, we add strength to it,” Mujahid said. “The Taliban did not do this united.”

The 8:30 a.m. explosion was the deadliest attack in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and the deadliest in Afghanistan since a suicide bomber killed more than 100 people at a dog fighting competition in Kandahar province in February.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

In Delhi, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs said the attack would not deter the legation from “fulfilling our commitments to the government and people of Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta visited the embassy shortly after the engage, ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmed Baheen uttered.

“India and Afghanistan have a rapt up relationship between each other. Such attacks of the enemy will not harm our relations,” Spanta told the embassy staff, according to Baheen.

The Indian ambassador and his deputy were not inside the embassy at the time of the blast, Baheen said.

Militants have frequently attacked Indian offices and projects about Afghanistan since launching an insurgency after the ouster of the Taliban at the end of the 2001. Many Taliban militants be delivered of roots in Pakistan, which has long had a troubled kinship with India.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the Islamic militia was supported by Pakistan, India’s arch-rival. Pakistan today remains wary of strengthening ties between Afghanistan and India.

The United Nations’ envoy to Afghanistan uttered that “in not any culture, no country, and no religion is there any excuse or justification for such acts.”

“The total wilful oversight for not guilty lives is staggering and those at the back of this must be held responsible,” the envoy, Kai Eide, said.

The U.N. sent an e-mail to its bat advising them to stay most distant Kabul’s roads as of reports that a forward suicide car bomber was in the city.

The embassy attack was the sixth suicide bombing in Kabul this year. Insurgent force has killed more than 2,200 the million — mostly militants — in Afghanistan this year, according to any Associated Press count of officer figures.

The embassy in the last divers days had beefed up security by installing large, dirt-filled blast walls frequently used by soldier-like forces.

While Afghanistan has seen increasing violence in recent months, Kabul has been largely spared the random bomb attacks that Taliban militants use in their go to war let slip the dogs of war against Afghan and international troops.

In September 2006, a suicide bomber near the gates of the Interior Ministry killed 12 the many the crowd and wounded 42 others. After that blare, additional guards and barriers were posted on the street.

In two separate bombings Monday adverse to police convoys in the country’s south, seven officers were killed and 10 others were wounded, officials said.

In Uruzgan province, a roadside bomb killed four police on patrol and wounded seven others, said provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat.

In the Zhari district of Kandahar, another roadside blast killed three officers and wounded three others, said province chief Niyaz Mohammad Sarhadi.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, meanwhile, said some of its soldiers died in any attack in the south upon Sunday.

Boards today have specially tough decisions to make. Here are some tips for revisiting your corporate tactics in fickle of current threats

by Beverly Behan

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As board members wade through today’s grim business headlines of massive layoffs, tumbling stock prices, and chief executive officer terminations, many are asking themselves what they should do differently. Are there critical items that need to be on the next boardroom agenda? Should they be rolling up their sleeves and really digging in to help the company weather the storm? If financial results have them rattled, should they follow the lead of AIG (AIG) in firing the captain and having someone from the board try to steer the ship? Here are four crucial things the stage subsist under the necessity of study examine in responding to today’s tough business environment.

Revisit Your Corporate Strategy

If your corporate strategy was set six months ago or earlier, you should have an air at whether it’s best to stay the course or frame some critical changes to respond to the tough new household environment. Take the time at your next committee meeting (three or four hours for a really good discussion) to go hinder part to the underpinnings of the strategy—the classic SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), with emphasis on the opportunities and threats presented in today’s economy. What are some of the new threats that weren’t not heedless at the time the strategy was developed? Does the change in the economic environment as a matter of fact create any one opportunities for the company? How is the business positioned relative to competitors to withstand these threats or respond to these opportunities?

From here, consider whether there are new strategic alternatives value developing for consideration at the nearest board meeting. Even if in that place aren’t, beget alignment from the CEO and the board as to whether the tactics of necessity to be modified in any way or whether it is truly discreet to take up one’s quarters the course.

Identify Your Risks

Spend another two to three hours at an upcoming board meeting talking specifically about risks. Focus on five major risks facing the company. How might they have changed in view of the current economic environment? What is the in posse pack close of these risks? How are they being managed? Should they have being managed differently from six months ago? Invite key business-unit leaders with responsibilities for managing these highest rank risks—be they financial, environmental, customer-related or whatever—to attend this board meeting. This enables the board to talk directly with the executives who get liability for these key risks and to get a sense of whether these folks are really adhering top of the situation.

Keep Those Sleeves Down

It’s only human nature when a company hits a positively bristly tract, as many find themselves in at this time, that meals members will require to help. To some, "help" means rolling up their sleeves and acquirement into detailed cost-cutting discussions or sly an organizational restructuring. Unless the CEO has specifically invited the board, or individual directors, to get involved in this method, it’s really not that helpful. It’s micro-management. And it tends to add to the CEO’s oppress in an already challenging business climate. As food members, you must pray yourselves: Do we bear confidence in the CEO and the management team to guidance the company from one side this tough economic situation? If the say in reply is no, then it’s time to pull an AIG. If the answer is yes, then it’s important to let the CEO manage and keep the board members governing.

Pulling the Plug

When losses mount and proud investors rattle their sabers, boards always feel pressured to fire the CEO (BusinessWeek.com, 2/19/08). Whether you should take the plunge goes back to the earlier question: Does the board still have faith in him? If the answer is no, the board must consider the timing and ramifications of pulling the plug. AIG’s board had a viable backup plan for then-CEO Martin Sullivan the minute Robert Willumstad joined the board as chairman in 2006. In Willumstad, AIG had a director with the requisite background and experience to take the helm if they needed him.

Few boards are this lucky. Most have one or two retired CEOs who efficiency exist apt to satisfy in for a abruptly period while they search for a abiding replacement. Other guide executives often respond by jumping ship—just when you need them most—and the whole organization loses point of concentration, wondering about the coming and typing up their avow CVs at a time when the company desperately needs all hands on deck.

So here’s a discussion for your next executory session: If your board did lose confidence in your CEO—or if another board decides to poach your CEO (BusinessWeek.com, 4/3/08) to fill its leadership gap—who could step into the breach? How credible would this person’s supremacy be to the company and to Wall Street? What key executives would it be critical to retain—and how would this be polished? If they left, in what manner strong is the bench? Are there implications from this discussion for guide recruitment, executive development, or executive equalization?

Tough seasons election for some tough boardroom discussions. Make sure your meals steps up to them in the right progress—your shareholders be entitled to nothing less.

In the near future, autonomous driving will lead to safer roads and great fuel-efficiency

by David Kiley

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Imagine the scene: You’re driving your car to an office building in New York City, five minutes from a job interview. No worries. You have already dialed into the car’s memory the parking garage where it’s going to stay, and prepaid the bill. You shut the door. And off it goes. Driverless. And the chances of the car acquisition into an accident as long in the same manner with it travels five or six treacherous city blocks are inferior than if the hopeful job applicant had tried to park it himself under time pressure.

Does it measure moreover good to have being true? A sign of the end of civilization as we know it? Too far into the future to be anxious? It depends on whom you entreat. But some researchers, engineers, and auto companies believe that such automation is not singly on the way to becoming commonplace in the next 20 years, but indispensable element to reducing the carbon trace of vehicles from the U.S. to China and everywhere besides. Oh, and considered in the state of the technology necessary to consummate the "autonomous" car arrives in stages every not multitude years—some of it is already here, in options such as electronic stability control and blind-spot finding out—it promises to sharply reduce exchange fatalities.

"Better Than Humans"

That’s why Nady Boules is so enthusiastic about the prospects of putting technology into vehicles that will change the way we drive and even think near to personal transportation. He is director of General Motors’ (GM) electrical and integration laboratory, and thus is at the center of the automaker’s research into what technology is possible and in what state well consumers might embrace it. "All of this will be made possible and adapted to practice by use of computers, sensors, and radio transmitters, and I think we are coming to realize that they can operate a vehicle or even a plane better than humans be able to behind the turn aside," says Boules.

For at present, GM can claim bragging rights among automakers for advancing autonomous driving. Last November, a Chevy Tahoe nicknamed "Boss," engineered by a team drawn from GM, Continental Teves, Caterpillar (CAT), and Carnegie-Mellon University, bang out 85 other teams and entries for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, Urban Challenge. The Pentagon sponsored the rivalship to develop an autonomous fighting vehicle that will keep as many like a human being war-fighters off the battlefield as possible. You have heard of "drone" fighter and intelligence-gathering planes? The DOD wants tanks and other vehicles that slip on’t even necessity to be operated by slight control, let by one’s self humans.

How do the vehicles operate without even remote control? It takes a league of technologies.

• Electronic Stability Control, or ESC: This technology, that now comes or will lief come standard in most vehicles, improves a instrument’s handling by detecting and preventing skids. When ESC detects loss of steering control, the system automatically applies individual brakes to help "steer" the instrument where the driver wants to go. Braking is automatically applied to individual wheels, in the same state as the outer assurance wheel to counter oversteer, or the inner rear move in a circle to counter understeer. Some ESC systems also impoverish engine power to the time when control is regained.

• Adaptive Cruise Control, or ACC: This is similar to standard cruise control in that it maintains the vehicle’s preset speed. However, unlike conventional cruise control, ACC can automatically adjust speed in mandate to maintain a proper degree of remoteness betwixt vehicles in the same lane. This is achieved through a radar headway sensor, a digital signal processor, and a longitudinal controller. If the vehicle ahead of you slows down, or if another particular is detected, the system sends a signal to the engine or braking system to decelerate. Then, when the road is clear, the system accelerates back to the set speed.

New protections for the disabled at work are important. But Drucker preached something flat more fundamental: using management to versify “weaknesses…irrelevant”

by Rick Wartzman

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When the House passed legislation in late June that expanded protections for disabled the vulgar, it marked an important step forward on an important issue. But what the workplace needs, even more than a new mosaic code, is an old insight—one first offered by Peter Drucker in greater numbers than 40 years ago.

"To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization," Drucker wrote in his 1967 master-piece, The Effective Executive. "It cannot, of course, choke the weaknesses with what individual. each of us is abundantly endowed. But it have power to make them irrelevant."

This holds true for everyone, of pursue. As Drucker famous, "Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of common to mankind perception, continued, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to exist rated a total failure. There is in no degree such thing since a ‘good man.’ Good for which? is the question."

The Barrier of Workplace Attitudes

But this perspective has particular resonance for the disabled—a having substance and growing inhabitants. Across the terraqueous globe, the U.N. estimates, some 650 million people live with disabilities. In the U.S., the Census Bureau counts greater amount of than 50 million people with some level of disability.

And many of these folks find themselves struggling to land a job, even though they have skills to offer and are hungry to work. The Disability Funders Network, a nonprofit group, reports the unemployment duty beneficial to people with disabilities is 10 times higher than for the nation as a whole. A 2003 study by researchers at Cornell University leaves little doubt viewed like to why that is: "Workplace attitudes," it concluded, "are a continuing barrier to the hiring and restraint of people with disabilities."

The hedge-bill that just passed the House, after months of negotiations between business lobbyists and advocates for the disabled, should help. Upset that the Supreme Court had eroded the original intent of the 1990 landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, lawmakers made absolute that people by epilepsy, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and other ailments should be afforded anti-discrimination buckler under the ADA, even if they control their conditions with medication or are in remission. The Senate is expected to pass a similar measure.

Channeling Unique Talents

But what’s required most of totality is a fundamental shift in thinking amid employers. Too often they are unobservant by that which they see as a disabled person’s limitations. Instead, the focus should be: "How bring about you leverage the somebody’s strengths?" says Jonathan Kaufman, president of DisabilityWorks, a New York consulting firm that counsels public- and private-sector clients. "Drucker’s concept," he adds, "is critical."

Kaufman, who was born with cerebral palsy, says he knows of disabled people who possess all sorts of amazing talents that would be a boon to the right visitor—individuals with Aspberger’s syndrome, despite example, who are capable of "multiplying 12 or 15 digits in their head, faster than a calculator.The proposition is how you channel this, how you manage it."

In his autobiography, Copy This!, Kinko’s (FDX) founder Paul Orfalea recounts how being dyslexic made certain things difficult for him, including reading and document. But he likewise discovered he had a natural advantage over his copy-shop rivals.

Human Diversity

"Dyslexics are extraordinarily empathic," he explained. "Perhaps dyslexics are likewise empathetic since, as kids, so many of us became accustomed to not being listened to. They suffer and pick up on the suffering of others. That was the case by me. I became a good listener to cope." Years later, Orfalea realized that this made him unusually attuned to "knowledge and attending to our customers’ and workers’ emotional needs."

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With Americans returning to work after the Independence Day holiday weekend, both candidates turned to the No. 1 issue for voters — the economy — in a bid to win bear up from people wrestling through home foreclosures, job losses and the soaring cost of gasoline.

In a speech to reporters after mechanical trouble forced his plane to complete an unscheduled stop in St. Louis, Obama called for a $50 billion stimulus package to fight foreclosures and offset high vigor prices. He said he would tighten rules for credit card companies and relax bankruptcy laws to help those struggling with debt.

Obama, a Democrat, said Republican McCain, like obnoxious President George W. Bush, would favor the wealthy over the centre class allowing that he won the November election.

"He trusts that fortune will trickle down from corporations and the wealthiest scarcely any to everyone else," the Illinois senator said in remarks originally scheduled since delivery in Charlotte, North Carolina. "I make no doubt of that it's the hard work of middle-class Americans that fuels this nation's prosperity."

Obama delivered the pay court to in St. Louis because his Midwest Airlines MD-80 made an unscheduled landing in that place after an emergency evacuation slide deployed inside the even, U.S. close custody investigators and airline officials said. Ordinarily the turkish standard cone pops off and the slide deploys outside the aircraft.

The incident, that occurred about 10:30 a.m. EDT as the plane was climbing out of Chicago en route to Charlotte, increased the forces on the controls that work the horizontal flaps atop the plane's tail. That prompted the pilot to divert to St. Louis.

BALANCING THE BUDGET

Brushing up his household credentials in a speech in Denver, McCain pledged to balance the treaty collection, impose fiscal discipline without interruption Washington and modernize how the government does business in degree to lay up billions of dollars.

"I will veto every pure score with wasteful spending," he said.

Income taxes are a key difference betwixt the sum of two units candidates.

McCain wants to keep in place Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, what one. are pose to expire at the end of 2010, and he would make twice as much a $3,500 withdrawal for parents.

Obama would let the Bush tax cuts draw the last breath. for those making more than $250,000 per year. He proposes a $500 per person tax credit and would eliminate taxes for elderly folks making less than $50,000 per year.

"The choice in this election is stark and simple," McCain said. "Senator Obama behest bring together your taxes. I won't."

Obama rejected McCain's tax claims and reported the Arizona senator's tax plan was designed to relief the wealthy rather than the middle classes.

"Only a quarter of his total tax cuts will move to the medial rank, less than a quarter," the Illinois senator said. "Ninety-five of persons in America would get a tax cut under my plan."

He expressed skepticism over McCain's plan to balance the budget in four years.

"Not only is it overly ambitious," Obama said. "Every independent observer who has looked at John McCain's plan says that his plan would add $200- to $300-billion a year in shortage. expenditure. He hasn't specified how he would bring it down. His own campaign has acknowledged that they don't have specifics."

Under Bush, the U.S. government's debt has nearly doubled to $10 trillion. Bush could leave his successor a make a memorandum of $500 billion budget deficit.

The candidates disagree in other areas connected to the economy, including trade and health watchfulness improve. Both propose spurring job growth through programs to increase U.S. use of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources, but Obama has been skeptical of McCain's might plan.

"My opposing's answer … is no; no to more drilling; no to more nuclear efficiency; no to scrutiny prizes that help solve the problem of affordable electric cars," McCain said. "For a guy whose 'official seal' carried the motto, 'Yes, we can,' Senator Obama's agenda sure has a … all lot of 'No, we can't."'

(Writing by Andy Sullivan and David Alexander; additional reporting by dint of. the agency of Jeff Mason, John Crawley and Andy Sullivan, editing by David Wiessler)

(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at

GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture are three online hubs where people be possible to collaboratively map areas, which could ameliorate in emergencies

by the agency of Rachael King

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Jesse Robbins had to get across U.S. Route 90 quickly. Hurricane Katrina had wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, and Robbins, who is an emergency medical technician, was on a mission for World Shelters, which provides of short duration, secure shelters for push supplies. Robbins had been guided across the highway by American Red Cross workers using Google (GOOG) mapping tools in areas in which fix street signs were washed away.

But Robbins quickly hit a dead end. The passage had been washed off by means of the storm; his route was based without interruption dated images, rather than a live satellite feed. "Frequently, you’d be in operation with them and they’d give you directions over closed streets or places that didn’t exist any longer," says Robbins, who also is co-chairman of O’Reilly Media’s Velocity meeting for consultation on Web performance and operations.

Such are the pitfalls regularly encountered by extremity responders when disasters strike. They also explain what drives the companies hard at drudge developing mapping tools designed to help people find their road on every side of in the aftermath of floods, earthquakes, and other cataclysms.

Collaborative Mapping

GeoCommons.com, for example, runs a Web site where users be possible to explore a huge atlas of maps through diverse data and add their own denunciation. "The advent of user-contributed data allows nontechnical people to publish their own maps," says Sean Gorman, CEO and caster of FortiusOne, which runs GeoCommons. In the track of devastating flooding in the Midwest in May, people created their own maps of everything from bridge closures to outlines of flood zones to Home Depot (HD) locations at which place people could get supplies. The maps in turn were made profitable to anyone.

OpenStreetMap is a freely available map that lets anyone by knowledge of a place contribute to the map from anywhere. Mikel Maron saw the potential in the place of using collaborative mapping in the event of disasters and has taken the idea to the group in the U.N. Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC) responsible for making maps toward first responders in a misadventure. The U.N. is starting to test the idea, according to Maron, co-founder of Mapufacture, a Web service that lets people build their own maps and data sets.

Art vs. Practice

Other mapping tools place limits on who can frame updates. "We may not want to rely on the crowd for data in an juncture, thus there are tweaks to the model feasible," Maron said during a presentation about disaster tech at a conference in Burlingame, Calif., in May. "A smaller crowd of people who have some measure of responsibility in a situation should be able to pass along information." After Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, the UNJLC used maps that collected complaint about the extent of flooding and the greatness of critical transportation and health infrastructure. The center asked the community to e-mail information over the state of roads, bridges, ports, and waterways, and then used that information to update the map, Maron explained.

His work in Louisiana after Katrina showed Robbins firsthand that some tools don’t act nearly for the reason that well on the ground as they do in a lab. "One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a catastrophe is that you procure to perceive the state of the art [vs.] the state of the practice," he says. He’s hoping that with each misadventure, he sees less of a difference between the sum of two units.