texting, they deal with visual manual. but the real issue is texting, which is not addressed. the second point that relates to that is how do you deal with it? you get them in a room. what david suggested at the beginning, instead of talking about doing it, we do it. we find ways to use technology to combat a problem. we can't go through an exercise in prohibition that's going to fail. we have to find a way to channel it so it's done safely. >> that would be getting everybody in all the different halls that you will see together to coordinate tablets, iphones, cars, everything. it's gradually sort of coming together. i wanted to wrap things up. i wanted to thank you folks very, very much today for the panel discussion. i think it was really helpful. i think it's always helpful because it's getting toward a common goal. i want to thank everybody for coming today. a lot more days left. thanks very much. [ applause ]

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now a discussion on federal science policy and the use of simulation to address national threats. dimitri kusnezov is the chief scientist for the nugsal nuclear scientist energy and an adviser. he addresses the university of tennessee howard baker center for public policy in knoxville. this is about an hour. [ applause ] >> that was an overly generous introduction. thank you, again. i think the hospitality here at the baker center and the university of tennessee has been remarkable. it's a wonderful place. i'm happy to be here.

as an academic who ended up in washington for some reason, i wanted to give you my personal take on computational science, what we do and kind of how i view this. i think it's an interesting story. i hope you will find it interesting, too. as a beta tester, this can fail and be successful as part of your learning. we can look at it that way. so i have, i guess, some framing thoughts on computational science. i guess i should project this. let's see. here we go. so there are just a few topics i'd like to talk to today. tell you a little bit how i think about it, where i see the

challenges. some examples of what we have done and how we use it. and where we're headed. depending on time, i will cover some of these in different ways. i think there is no even or simple way to explain how we apply simulation these days. certainly, from popular culture we have a sense that simulation can do remarkable things. you know, you only have to go to the theater or look at all the context out there where we're virtualization is part of almost anything you see these days. but when you have to temper it in reality and make decisions and there are consequences, it's different. i wanted to tell you about that

world. the degree of trust in simulation is still emergent. there is not a unique way to characterize how well we think we are predicting something and how much we trust it. there's a lot of work to be done there. there's some places we do it by statute. and there are other places where you really need champions and advocates at the right time to say, these tools could be brought to bare. here are experts that can help. i hope to give you a few examples of that. really trust -- there isn't an easy way to explain whether -- why you trust simulation or why you don't. i think for everybody it's somewhat experimental. there is a personal aspect to that. you see it among scientists. i see it in washington among scientists. there's some that believe it and there are some that don't. again, you can trace this back in many ways.

you can trace it back 500 years to dick heart and bacon and deductive and indicative reasoning and different ways to approach the world, either you believe that until you test it and do the experiment, you can't take the next step or you believe that you can deduce things and that you can set up some type of intuitively derived set of premises and from that you can build your understanding. those are two lines of thought that exist today. you will find a collection of scientists some will say, unless you do the experiments, i don't believe anything you predict. so it's, again, the whole idea of trust and when you call upon simulation to help you is still deeply rooted in personal issues that are hard to capture. and i hope you keep that in mind as we go through some of the examples today. i will try and cover a collection of different topics

and try and show you some of the common i' commonality of what's behind these. i hope you find it interesting. prediction is part of our everyday life. you deal with it whether you are trying to figure out what's going to happen in march and the ncaa tournament or the world cup in rio or the gold medal count in the olympics. you know, prediction comes in many places. you predict things by yourself. i would say that among all the predictions you do, the consequences are probably fairly limited. the consequences of making a bad prediction are typically not severe. maybe you will get wet because you didn't expect it to rain. maybe you didn't fill out your bracket in march very well and you didn't win the pool. but i would say that is not a

high consequence type of decision. but today we're turning to simulation quite a bit more to help us -- i'm sorry about that -- in understanding a number of types of more serious problems. more society problems and i view them as being in two categories. you know, as an academic, i resonate -- certainly i resonated in my previous career on the class of let me call for no better name, output baseds simulation. this is the kind of problem a scientist poses. you know what to measure in scientific parlance, you know the degrees of freedom. you know what to measure. you have a theory. you are trying to solve the theory. and it's then an exercise in

mathematics, in controlling your approximations to solve that. and you have something you want to measure. maybe you are studying confirmation. you can pick your quantity. but it is scientifically precise. you know the degrees typically, it's a matter of controlling approximation when you put it on the computer. it also has the benefit that you are the specialist. when you solve that kind of problem, you are the master of that domain. and you control it. the other class of problems that i see -- let me call outcome based are the ones that i find more interesting these days. these are the ones that are technically imprecise. they are societally based. they are things that impact people. you want to know why things are going to happen and why they're

important to you. often, you don't know what the degrees of freedom are. you don't know where to start. you might not be able to control the models or the approximations. you don't know how precise your answer is. but that's the place where we need the most help. typically, these are multi-disciplinary-type problems where you have to work with other people. you have to ask questions outside your comfort zone. and they are hard. i think discovery lies there in general. and this is the class of problems i would like to illustrate today. you know, in the second class of outcome-based problems, we don't ask scientifically precise questions. but the things we care about is what do you have to do and when. you know, what is your confidence that you can actually help here? what does it mean? what does it mean to you? what happened? what are the risks? what are the risks that might

happen again? and the question is, how do you bring science into answering questions that are not scientifically precise? where do you start? how do you do that quickly? what tools do you have at your disposal to help inform that? often, you don't know if you are asking the right questions. it's often -- you have to ask, are the right people asking the right questions. in ni caany case, are you in pon to answer them? when you think about societal issues -- i will talk a little bit about few coukushima, oil s collections s of things that impacted people that science helped with the decisions to be made. real problems, real issues, often time urgent. but the quality of the question

you want to answer through simulation is like that. that is not precise. what is the measure of what does it mean? because the average person wants to know what it means to them, how it will impact their life. you know, whether you will have electricity or whether you can get gas or groceries or is your lifestyle impacted. that's the issue that you are concerned about. so how do you manage the interface of science, which is typically precise questions and methods with the imprecise needs of questions of this quality? i want to mention maybe one additional quick digression. we have a changing world. there was a nice little piece a couple years ago -- i remember

they compared the ipad 2 to the super computers. these days, with the iphone and the emergency of computing you carry in your pocket, it's remarkab remarkable. usa project out ten or 15 years, the kind of time scales that departments have to think about for planning big infrastructure, what is the fur we'ture we're thinking about? how do we work through there so the country can be responsive to answer these kinds of questions? today, there's a growing set of issues we worry about, whether energy or security or climate. health, critical infrastructure. there's places where we think there's a role for computational science to inform us in decisions, because many of these things can't be tested or done before it happens. so these are places where virtualization is an important step in characterizing the risks and decisions that we might have to make.

among the kinds of problems we have, there are two categories. data rich and data poor. i want to distinguish those to keep that in the back of your mind. there's some problems, sensor data, weather data, places where you have nothing but data and your problem with simulation is to figure out what does it mean, what are causes and affects, what are simply just, you know, correlated signals or what are causative. and that's not always easy. solving the inverse problem from a rich set of data is a very hard problem in trying to figure out what really impacts what. there are problems that are data poor. certainly, nuclear weapons program is an example. i will give other. i would say that the super nova work is data poor.

tony would love to instrument the next super nova beforehand and get all the data you want, but you can't do that. if you get data, you will be happy. but you can only get what you -- very limited set of measurements and making sense of that is really model dependent. so among the classes, it's not just simulation broadly. there are different qualities of questions we ask. there are different kinds of data and different assumptions we make on the models we need. a sense of some of the things that we have turned to simulation for in the past few years. certainly while i have been in washington, i thought it might be a little illuminating. i would be remiss being an oak ridge, also with y-12 and the place where certainly the

department invests heavily and the nuclear security mission, not to say a little bit of the nuclear weapons program. i think it's an interesting tour de force of simulation. i want to capture a couple of things there for you. just for that reason. in the bottom corner there, it's just kind of a cartoon illustration of the kind of complexity. in understanding how we do understand weapons now without testing them, we stopped testing in 1992. the record year this country did 98 nuclear tests. the integrated amount is 1,054 tests over our history, kind of our legacy. but the problem scientifically is really multi-scale. it starts at the nuclear scale,

at the scale of nuclear interactions for fiction and fusion processes. it spans the size of the weapon, the meter size and beyond. it's more than a 15 order of magnitude problem. for those in washington, what i say is, you can think about it in terms of the federal budget. which is about $3.5 trillion. it's like managing the federal budget at the 0.3 cent level. making sense of the scales and understanding cause and affect across 15 orders of magnitude is non-trivial. there have to be assumptions in there. ho you do you qualify the trusts in the predictions you make at the different scales at the 0.3 cent scale, all the way to the trillion dollar scale to say i have confidence that i can tell you where it's going to be next year? it's a very tough and challenging problem. but it's a place where the laboratories have certainly excelled in doing that.

anyway, there are a lot of questions we ask these days just at the bottom of that slide. we want to know whether there are safer, if we have more options to make them more secure. we need to know what other people are doing. we worry about terrorism and proliferation. and there are very broad questions that we are starting to turn these tools to. but i think in view of time, let me go perhaps to more interesting things, at least that you might find more interesting. i remember february 1, 2003. i hadn't been in government very long. it was a saturday morning. i was returning from a conference in san diego. i was at the terminal there saturday morning kind of at the end of the terminal. there's a round area that has the gates. in the middle was a bar. i looked over at the television

sets. i was watching the reentry of the space shuttle. i couldn't make sense. i was looking at that knowing that the shuttle was passing overhead at the time. there were three or so bright lights coming down. i couldn't tell what that was. it was the shuttle breaking up on reentry. but it was kind of a moment that's etched in my mind as one of those things where you think you know what you're looking at and you have no idea what you are seeing. on monday after that pshgs t, t laboratory was in touch with nasa to ask, what is it we can do to help with the tools that are available, is there something we could do to assist in understanding this problem? it's a a useuseful thing to do. nasa understand, as you can see in the video, that foam had come

off. so they took some high resolution movies. let's see if i can get this. and they were able to see the foam coming off. if you calculate the relative speed, it's about at 700 feet per second that this block of foam maybe a cubic foot or so came off and struck the shuttle. at the time, they had a tool. they had a tool called crater. you can read about it. there's a very good report columbia accident investigation board study, the commission that went through this. very thoughtful and detailed report. one of the things they found, the model, the tool that they had crater, which was really had its genesis in micrometeorite impacting -- impacts in the '60s, grew into their tool of choice in the late '70s and early '80s, but it was used

outside of its domain of validity. one of these codes where people are retired. those that understand where you could use it were no longer there. there wasn't a sense of how predickive it was. it was the viewed as a conservative tool. it told you that there wasn't a problem. the shuttle was on its 28th flight. so it was known that the foam hit it. it was viewed that this was not a problem. we had a look at the problem. nasa certainly reached out to a number of places to do the analysis. one of the things that they found is that the strength properties of the front end of the wing -- what i have there in blue, it's a picture of the simulation of the reinforced carbon front ends of the wings that were used to understand what happened.

anyway, they started a detailed analysis of failure modes. the question is, what went wrong? what is the failure mode? so you are re-entering the at not fear. you a it's a challenging place to understand. you are trying to figure out what could have happened. an important part of the analysis was to get a piece of aged reinforced carbon carbon material. what they found is that the age properties depended on the number of reentries, that the strength is degraded each time you re-enter. this one -- 41 of the 44 tiles on the shuttle were original to the shuttle. each time they re-enter, oxygen penetrates and it changes -- reduces the strength properties. so they started to

characterize -- they managed to get small amounts of aged reinforced carbon carbon and characterized the stress and strength properties and started to do some analyses of what failure modes could have happened. in the end, what they found is that a cubic feet -- a cubic foot of foam roughly hitting at 700 feet per second would break through and cause these to fail. they discovered this finally in march. so march of 2003. and it wasn't until july of 2003 that the experiments were done at southwestern research institute, which demonstrated then. the thing that got news attention was this. i remember seeing this on cnn. in my mind, yeah, we solved this a few months ago.

but for those who are empirically driven, this is when the answer was obtained. it demonstrated then -- you could see a picture of the simulation at the same time of the foam hitting the wing and the experiment. it demonstrated that this was a failure mode. as the shuttle started the reentry -- to re-enter, the hot gas entered the wheel well and started to melt the inside of the wing. and it caused the catastrophic failure of the shuttle. it was a place again where simulation tested the different scenarios. it showed that it wasn't the wheel well problem which was originally thought as the primary cause of failure that had happened through the foam hitting the wings. had y you had to characterize the material. it was a complex set of simulations. what you are asking is how did it fail. you are not sure what to

measure. in 2006, we launched a satellite. it basically never made orbit. it was in kind of a cold tumbling state for a couple of years. we were approached to try and understand what we can do about this. it was a classified project now declassified. the code name was called burnt frost. the issue with what confidence could we provide the president that one could shoot this thing down? what were the modelling confidences of the scenario in which you could shoot this out of the sky? the issue here was a large tank

of toxic material. it was a one meter tank. it was frozen. this was -- it's not a hard calculation to see that -- from the thermal considerations, that it wouldn't melt upon reentry. it would simply -- it would pass through reentry. being uncontrolled, you can't steer it into the ocean. it goes wherever it goes. we were asked to try and understand this. it was an interesting project over a couple of months. there was a movie here i will run. i'm not playing the music. i don't like it. the team put this together as kind of an homage to their effort. it has a couple of nice pictures in there. so i clipped it and put it in there. you might recall that in 2007, i think, the chinese shot down or

hit one of their own satellites. and it was in a fairly high orbit. as a consequence, there's still over 2,000 pieces of debris at 540 miles up that we worry about. the question here is whether we could shoot down this satellite at a low enough point so that there wouldn't be debris left, that you would hit the tank. the problem is as the satellite is coming in in an uncontrolled way, you know, it kind of skips over the atmosphere. you don't know where it's finally going to hit. as it hits and starts to change its trajectory, it accelerates dramatically. if you wait too long, it is going to fast. if you hit too high, you leave debris in orbit. there's a small window you have to guess at -- do more than guess to try and understand whether there's a kill shot for the satellite.

it was decided at 153 miles up that one could do that. at first, the simulations gave about 80% confidence that this could be done in the window of time. i think the satellite made about 16 revolutions per day. so you had a couple of tries to do it before it was too late. basically, the satellite looked like a tank and then something that looks like a coke can and then it has a solar panel. if you hit the coke can part, it would be like a bullet through paper. you would have no impact. you had to hit the tank and you had to predict the telemetry. it was done when the shot was done it matched exactly what the predictions were. it was known to be a kill shot. it was a place where, again, the

initial estimate was 80% confidence. the decision at the top at the time was that's not good enough. let's continue working on this. when it could be done with 595% confidence, then it was done. it was a remarkable missile shot done from this egis cruiser. but, again, it was kind of a time urgent problem. it came out by surprise. we have tools. we have people who understand satellites. we have people who understand thermal mechanics, that understand failure in characterization and codes. you have to grab all of this, put it together and try and see, you can actually address this question. fukushima was a problem of this quality.

i remember again this pretty viv vividly. we were watching it on tv in the office that morning trying to figure out what this meant without having a sense of the reaction tor reactir reactor facilities itself. one of the things that the department is nuclear emergency response. so it's a place where we have the ability to send things, robots into very harsh radioactive environments. it's a place where we can do air sampling, something born out of the old nuclear testing days is atmospheric modelling. we cared quite a bit about where radiation goes. so there are still many resident skills, a center at livermore can be used to monitor.

we brought -- we were brought into this in a couple of ways. one, for emergency response, including teams here at oak ridge who were called to task to help. but the questions that arose that came to us in part were the following. you know, what is the danger? how bad can it get? at any given time, there are about five to 6,000 student visas for u.s. students in japan. every year there are, i think, five to 600,000 u.s. tourists there. u.s. military on bases. so there's a large u.s. population there. a question that comes up is, do we evacuate u.s. citizens? there was going to be a mid-day meeting in tokyo which meant a meeting in the middle of the night. we had little more than an hour to figure out, what can we add to this conversation? so the call went out in the middle of the night to the

livermore director to mobilize the center. one of the issues are what are the initial conditions? you can say you want to model it and you have great atmospheric models, perhaps. but you have to try and capture what is coming out of it and how much. and the initial conditions, i would say, were not well-known at the time. the questions were significant. because if you decide to evacuate u.s. citizens, it's a logistics problem. how do you get all the people out? how many airplanes, whose airplanes? it's not a simple thing to do if you decide that there are citizens at risk. people also wanted to know, well, what does it mean to people on the west coast of the united states? for specific u.s. interests, there were a lot of questions that we cared about quite a bit. what are dose rates, things of higher degree refinement. the initial estimate was from the simulations that were done,

were that tokyo was not at risk. and we did not have to worry about that. but i have to say, it's not easy to do these kinds of scientific problems through the conventional way of peer review. you can't pull together the team of your best people in the middle of the night and say, hey, you haven't met each other before but why don't you work together and answer this question in an hour. so the question is, how do we do that? how do we become more responsive to harnessing the skills that we have in this country in a way that can address these questions which seem to come up almost annually? there's always something that comes up where science can likely inform. i think this was a case where we did quite a bit of air sampling and air modelling. we did really quite a bit of support for japan. i think there was a very

positive story that came out of this. understanding, again, what happened at the site and what it means to japan and then what it means to u.s. citizens as well or to the continental united states. there are other places. we had been working for a good year or so on trying to look at governance models. how many agencies can come and partner with us at our national laboratories to solve some of their interesting problems. what is the way we can engage other agencies to answer their strategic questions using the tools we have like at oak ridge or other national laboratories? we had had a conversation with

janet napolitano saying a partnership model as part of our effort to develop stronger strategic relationships between agencies which turned out to be timely in a number of ways. one week later, on december 25, 2009, there was an underwear bomber stopped from igniting his petn that he kept in his underwear in the flight. it started a relationship between the department of energy and the department of homeland security and aviation security to try and answer some of these questions of how do we protect against this? could this happen again? what are the risks of this happening? it was an interesting problem. it's really, for this particular

type of issue, it's a competition of different affects going on of all the elastic energy stored in the airplane and whether you can dissipate it whether before it goes through the ribs of the aircraft. we worked on this with them for some time. i would have to say, it has been a valuable thing. i can't say too much more about this other than there are a lot of interesting issues in aircraft security here. there was quite a bit learned from this. but it was a place where, again, we had to become aviation experts to answer a number of these questions, because it was time urgent to figure out what the risks are out there. and do we have to protect against different kinds of threats than we expected on

airplanes? i have a few other examples. but let me perhaps go towards simulation. you know, i want to say a couple of things about the tools here before i get to some summary points. the tools we use are -- we talk about simulation as something simple. but those certainly here at the laboratories that program on these, it's a tour de force. a computer is maybe 100 or 200 racks of system, each rack weighing more than a car. they suck up remarkable amounts of energy. they have millions of processors that you have to somehow work across to solve a single problem. it takes teams of experts and people to attack these from across a broad set of

disciplines, non-trivial to deliver any of these kinds of simulations or products. really champions. these systems take megawatts of power. i remember when we were starting up the white super computer, it runs at about 4.7 megawatts when it's working. when it's idling, it's about 2.5. and so when they were running the first simulation, run the first benchmark, something that jack likes very much, the lynnpack benchmark that his organization tracks annually and has done for many years, so imprei someone pressed return and there was a spike in the power grid. there was a call from the local power company trying to figure

out what was going on, because someone started a calculation. these are not just computers. i mean, they are very complex things that you really have to think about in different ways. when we had the first large system up there in the top corner, 10,000 processors, it was about the size of a basketball court. it can now -- there was a chip by intel which has the same computational power -- a picture of a colleague there holding this back in 2011. the equivalent power from this machine in 1996. we're looking ahead at the technology, keeping in mind that portable electronics and basically 600-plus billion dollar portable electronics market can't be steered very much by federal investment.

but perhaps strategic investment at the margins can derive quality computers for the problems that we need to solve in the years to come. it's a challenge. it's what the department is struggling with right now. the system we're looking at would probably be in the best case 20 megawatt-type of system, ten to the 18 calculations operations per second. we need them to be functionally useful. let's see. i think since -- i have a tendency to talk a little bit too long. let me go to thinking a little bit about the future.

so going back to where i started, you know, there isn't a natural place where anyone stops to say, what is simulation? what can it do for us? who should be working on this? often we enter up at crises and we end in places where we are responding to something and doing the best we can with what we have. it's important to start looking ahead and asking, where could we add value? i just picked a couple of things that the president has mentioned. the climate action plan, his nuclear security agenda from a number of speeches and the nuclear review. places where you could imagine there could be a role for simulation in a substantive way. the question is, how do we do that? who is going to do it? it's one thing to say that. the question is, who does what. if there isn't a central place to think about this, it's incumbent on people, on those

invested in the outcomes to think about that and try and make things happen. decisions are typically not made by scientists. i don't say that is good or bad. i simply observe that the kinds of questions we're faced with often are not scientific. and the problems are often not well defined. we want to know what it means to people, we want to know what it means to the economy. we want to know very big societally-based questions. when you try and dissect these, they typically cover a number of different disciplines, skills. many fields of special ti. rallying the right people to try and address them cannot non-trivial. it can be somewhat unnatural. it doesn't overlie on university structures very well either. there isn't a natural place to go to try and address some of these questions.

peer review is typically not available. you don't have time to sit back with your team of experts and get your panel together and go through and figure out whether what you have done is right. if you are trying to understand whether you need to evacuate people, you know, you just don't have time for that. the question is, how do you build in a sense of pedigree of quality of prediction so we don't end up doing something foolish? that is very non-trivial. it's a real problem. it requires scientific attention. because we typically stop at error bars on a number of interests to us. it doesn't translate to the average person and to the kind of questions that are emerging now. simulation is certainly showing its value. we find it in more and more places. largely because there are champions out there who pull it

along and know whether to inject it. but it isn't still a natural place to go. many of the problems we get, we don't have oil spill simulation experts that we call on for underwater crises. we don't have the experts for pick your topic. we can't afford to constitute them for every problem we have. so we have to figure out, how to create a more responsive infrastructure from the tools and people we have. so i think there's a lot to offer. i think there is a lot of promise. but we're going to have to figure out, again, how to transmit the degree of confidence in anything we do. perhaps understanding how we can be more responsive. you know, there are washington

issues there, i'm sure. but there are places where a university could see themselves, there are places national labs could see themselves. when you know when to inject this into a conversation and how you do it. even asking, are these the right questions to be asking. progress here, success against the next set of threats, of urgencies, i think will require communication and greater partnership among the different entities among a broader set of scientists from social scientists to health to physical and mathematics. certainly, industry, labs and government. i don't see the number of issues diminishing. i see them growing. i see the complexity increasing. i see the kinds of things that we are expecting people to answer becoming a little more

refined. and i think we have to be prepared for that. but i think there's a very positive story on what this country does in simulation and how we turn it to these problems. and i hope i've made at least some impression that this is of interest. thank you again for your time. i'm happy to take questions. [ applause ] >> we are recording these presentations. we would like the question and answers to be done through the microphones. we have microphones we can pass around. we're going to have a reception after the question and answer period. you can ask dimitri questions at the reception if you like. if you have a question -- anybody want to go first? tony? do you have a question? any questions?

please. >> i enjoyed the presentation, especially the nasa thing since i was working there. do you think we could have saved "columbia"? a lot of people thought we could have. >> i wouldn't consider myself qualified to answer that. i think even if we had in a timely way discovered what the issue was, mitigation is an entirely different problem. i couldn't answer that with any confidence. i did think about that question though. i thought, this is the right next question to ask. but i don't have anything in there that's good to help you with that. >> question. so coming back to the nasa example, i think one of the interesting pieces there was you talked about the crater code

being used outside of its valid parameter set. but you also raised the point there was a human factor piece associated with that in that the skill set or knowledge or the depth of knowledge least of wha actually in that code and how it was developed was lost. as we move now into a realm where we are no longer talking about codes that are thousands of lines long but codes that are millions, if not trillions of lines long, how do we deal with that problem? >> this is really at the heart, the field of uncertainty quantification. there isn't a good answer. it is a place -- we are working with universities, you know exaround the country to try and understand. certainly, there's work in our laboratories but your agencies actually right. i think an experienced code writer maybe will remember where all the right punk situation is

in the code for maybe 50,000 lines of code but when you have 100 million lines of code, it is harder to figure out what is really in there. all kinds of things in a code, from data to assumptions and models to places were there is a mix of impir cism and calibration and there is no methodology to propagate uncertainty through the entire spectrum of sources of uncertainty. and i think even qualifying all the potential sources of uncertainty is hard. it is place we need work, i don't think there is a good answer for that but where we

have to look. ultimately, if someone is going to make a decision, you have to have a simple, distilled amount of information on the degree of trust you have and what came out. you know, some of these simulations look convincing, with great color maps and great details and meshes and so forth. but you know, it's cartoon and so the question is to what extent is there confidence and knowledge behind it? i would say that's still an open scientific question, a problem that needs to be worked on in years to come. it's really at the heart of complex simulation. >> dimitri, you said something earlier that affected me, i'm sure everyone here, where you said these things have an ann l annual, so obviously, there's a pressing need to look ahead. so, with regard to how we set things up to better prepare to

respond, you know, as opposed to calling up, the director in the middle of the night and harnessing a team, what are your thoughts on that? i mean, how can we set up a better framework to respond to these things given that, as you said, we can expect these things to.happen unfortunately yearly? >> yeah, that is -- that's an important question. building in a responsiveness is hard because of how we support people and fund people. everyone is busy. it requires people who want to be involved in this. so, we need to know who is out there and whether they are willing, you know, at the ready to help. and when something urgent happens, you go to the short list, you know, who comes to

your mind? it's kind of a human nature, well, who do we have? we have to get a little bit better than that and think broadly about the tools resident, expert resident in this country and there is probably a next step there in understanding what that means, whether there are barriers in funding or regulations that we would have to change. i don't know. you know, with the oil spill, the lab director from sandiya, tom hunter, left his job for four months. together with -- we had laboratory people for months doing only that. you know, it was a non-trivial commitment. the question is would you be ready to leave what you're doing today if we say we really need you? can you afford that? you know, it's not for

everybody. and so, finding the subset of those inclined to dedicate themselves to some of those problems which might be short or long term is part of that. the asset is another. we need a bit of an inventory so we can be more responsive and understand whether there are barriers that have to be changed through any legislation or policy changes or simply communication. wikileaks was another great example, didn't go into it, i skipped over it, but also a nice place where suddenly, there's a massive data set, you know, million -- less than a million kind of mixed media things and what's in there? you know, aside from doing a keyword search, you know, is my name in there? is our department in there? there's something a little more sophisticated could you do and there are graph analysis methods and things we looked the, you

know what is the content? what is the knowledge involved? you know, what are the relationships of information? what you distill from this when you look at it in its entirety. they are very interesting and complex problems there, so, sometimes, you need material science people. sometimes you need algorithms and graph people. you know, ultimately though you need the computer people. so, there's kind of a core base but then it's a mix of things that you would need at the ready for any of these. >> actually, take the microphone for a sec for a follow-on comment that i hope you could ewill be a woulder rate on. i know good year worked with san deya at length to model the next generation tire and it reminds me that when we need these computer folks forever, the jacks, tonys, and greg of the world, increasingly with corporate engagement strategies

and corporate partners with oakridge, many of our corporate partners are coming to simulate experiments ahead of expanding time and energy and money actually confirming the experiments. and so we are seeing a ground swell of interest in that and it speaks to the fact that although this will not be commonplace it will be more routine in the future. do you see that coming in that realm within the r&d enterprise? >> i hope so. you know, we have a few examples of where things like that have worked, where the partnerships with businesses have worked. my personal characterization of the good year story was it required the company to be in crisis before it forced adoption as a new paradigm for tire development. in the end it led to the top-selling tire in germany. you know, there -- they are really marquee product. i think the president of north american tire was the one who

finally championed this in 2004 when good year was against, you know, the ropes, we have found in talking with different companies, you often find the people doing simulation and those engaged in thinking about this world this way often not having the top cover from their leadership. you know, there isn't the pull from the top, from the management, from the leadership saying, you know, i want you to inject this new way of think nothing our business model. typically what we hear is, you know, they don't care, you're too expensive, you know, what have you done for me now. you know, we need this by next quarter. the good year story was decadal. it started in 1993 and it showed value in 2004. it saved the company. which was the last global u.s. tire company. but it took that long, beyond thinking through quarterly

profits and so that is hard to do. when companies are at risk, there are a few stories out there, that's when leadership looks at all the options on the table and they are following change the model dramatically and i don't know of too many examples where it's happened when things were going well. >> hopefully that will change. >> well, yeah, capturing the roi is something that we need to do more of. >> i think we have time for one more question. >> yeah, thank you for a very stimulating, thought-provoking presentation. >> thank you. and you talked much about how to prepare in terms of the people and the science. now i think also data, you talked about, you know, assumptions, how much can we trust or believe in the data and the outcome of the model, but the imp put is very important, of course, you can't trust the data that we have and, of

course, you need to draw on data that is in the public sector, in the private sector and academic sector. can we do more in preparing in terms of validating existing data sets and really documenting them well enough as a computer code, as you mentioned in the crater code, that it was not applied for what it originally was intended for and we didn't know about the limitations, so the nation hasn't been very successful, i think, in implementing meta data standards and i think could be done more of -- what do you think could be done in terms of getting the data sets more useful because we can trust them better? >> so i think one of the things that, you know, one way to address that is we need to do what is useful to do in the

first place. i don't think we should have standing armies on the ready for, you know, trying to anticipate things that might happen because we will never get it right and we will waste money and you don't want people idled. so, given that you can't anticipate what's going to happen, the move toward simply doing what we are doing better for what we need to do anyway is probably what we should be doing, if there are places that we can improve standards, if we can improve the quality of what we think we're doing, the methodologies, that should be something that we do and we try and capture. but the only other thing we can do is structure ourselves so that we can then be responsive to draw upon what we've learned, to throw at the next crisis.

>> before we wrap up and thank dimitri for his excellent presentation. i want to make a few comments. we have a number of guests from various organizations external to the university here. we have guests from the department of energy, from the national nuclear security administration and the y-12 facility, guests here from oakridge national labs, so, i'm delighted that our friends in the community were able to join us today. i may have overlooked some guests, please excuse me if i've done that i will catch up with you at the reception. we will have a reception shortly. i'm very blessed with the fact that i have a wonderful colleague of mine, susan ballantine, who helps me organize these things and this actual conversation today was co-hosted by the baker center and howard hall's institute for nuclear security and grateful to matt and nisa and their help with this. thank you all for that and thank you for coming on a very, very cold day that's recall with aing up and if you had add like to join us after this for some refreshments and more questions with dimitri, that would be

great, but please help me thank dimitri for his time here and we want to give a very small token of our appreciation to dimitri. >> $35. you know. the congressional hispanic caucus continues its conference here in washington, d.c. today with a focus on immigration policy. speakers include labor secretary, thomas perez, congressman javier becerra and immigration attorney who represents the unaccompanied immigrant minors. you can see that live starting at 3:15 eastern on c-span. and the wilson center will host a discussion on russia under the leadership of president vladimir putin. author karen dawisha talk about her book, including you putin's rise to power and why he enjoys such possible larity with the people, at 3:30 eastern on c-span2. on c-span3 tonight, a special

presentation of the 2014 new york ideas festival, speakers include the founders of kickstarter, chobani yogurt, donors choose.org and former congresswoman, gabby giffords and efforts to cure cancer, discussion on the origins of the universe and future of finance. that's tonight, starting at 8 eastern here on c-span3. our campaign 2014 debate coverage continues tonight at 8:00 on c-span, live coverage of the minnesota debate, between mark dayton, jeff johnson and hannah nicollet. and the oklahoma governor's debate between joe dornan and mary fallin. also on thursday at 8 p.m. on c-span2, the nebraska governor's debate between democrat chuck has brook and pete rick et cetera. saturday night on c-span at 8

p.m. eastern, live coverage of the montana u.s. house debate between democrat john lewis and former state senator ryan zincky. c-span campaign 2014, more than 100 debates for the control of congress. up next, a discussion on the use of technology in disaster relief, including finding lost airliners and people. it was hosted by the new america foundation and mod rated by author and cnn aviation analyst, jeff wise, who reported on the disappearance of malaysia airline flight 370. this is about an hour 10 minutes. >> thank you very much. well, welcome, everybody, thanks for coming out. we're here to talk about technology and so many -- so much of the time, we tend to turn to technology to solve our problems. and we have gotten so good at it that a lot of times, the technology solves those problems

before we really had a chance to think about whether the problems are really entirely problems or maybe there's something that we're losing in the process as well. maybe that thing that we solved also was beneficial to us in some ways. and so tonight, we're going to talk about, the way that technology has made our lives better, maybe it has taken something away from our lives. my name is jeff wise, as you have heard. i'm a science journalist and i recently have been writing a lot about mh-370, the missing malaysian airliner. a lot of people have been baffled by the case, because people say to me, if i lose my iphone, i can find that. how come we can't find this 200-foot long plane with 239 people aboard? how is that even possible? but before that, i was -- i've been very interested in the idea of being lost.

i was a travel writer originally. and i saw a lot of value in that sensation of being lost and so i'm on two parts of this question, and i think from our panelist, you'll see kind of a divide here, are we in favor of getting lost or are we against getting lost? so let me introduce the panel that's here with us tonight. here we have wendy harmon. i will read this off so i don't get it wrong. she is the director of information management and situational awareness for disaster services of the american red cross. and maybe she can tell us a little more about herself as we dive into this topic. next to her is clarence ordell who is research scientist, alphabetically, i'm sure it stands for a lot. and martin post, he a veteran world traveller, wrote for many

years the frugal traveler column at the "new york times," and he's an expert at getting lost everywhere. and he also, in fact, did an eight-part series for the times about specifically trying to get lost. so he's in favor of getting lost. he's going to tell you how to do it. but anyway, so, maybe just to kick it -- because really, these people have fascinating opinions about this topic, i don't want to monopolize the mic here, but getting lost, people say get lost, buddy, or, you know, lost at sea, it's a terrible problem. nobody wants to get lost. but there was kind of a positive aspect to it. you think of the chet baker

song, "let's get lost", or lost horizons, there's a desire for a feeling of getting disconnected, to find yourself apart from the world you're normally connected to and feel obligated to. and in the last 120 years, say since the turn of the century, we find ourselves in a world in which we're all, any adult is presumed to have a smartphone. not only instant communications access to the whole world, but they know where they are, they've got the gps right there in their pocket. and the authorities know where you are too, if you dial 911, they know where you are so they can come help you, so that's a great thing, that you can get help wherever you are or wherever you need it. and here we open it up. and is there a problem in that? have we lost something in that we no longer venture out into the world with this question looming in the back of our brain, where am i? am i going to be able to get back to where i started from? so maybe i could open this up and talk about some of the positive aspects of getting lost.

wendy, you work for the american red cross? >> i do. >> how has -- so how do you help people who are lost? in what sort of situations? >> well, part of the mission of the red cross is really to reconnect family to each other after a disaster as happened. whether that's after a war, through the national rnc arm of the red cross, or here domestically, we have a whole system called safe and well, which after a disaster, we encourage people to register themselves so friends and family can find them. i don't want to get too deep right away, but how many of you know what google person finder is? nobody? that's something that google came up with that's an entirely open system of checking and looking for people. ours is kind of like a legacy system that's antiquated, but has all these safety measures in it so you have to actually know lots of things about a person before you can find them. >> how would this affect you or

me? we are in new york, a tsunami hits, and people get swept out to sea, is that the kind of situation you're talking about. >> that and being unexpectedly displaced and not having been at work or something and a disaster happens and you end up at a shelter or some other location. >> and your cell phone doesn't work? >> which frequently happens after disasters. >> katrina is where it happened? >> yes, and it happens in most significant disaster events where there are families that get separated from each other. >> is this a convenience or is it life threatening? >> it's less about life threatening and more about much -- when you're feeling lost, you just want to reconnect

with your family, so having the tools to be able to do that and i think honestly, it probably is more of a demand on is side of people looking for their lost people than it is the people who are lost. >> you know, i did research for an article about search and rescue. and 20 years ago, most search and rescue operations were initiated because someone hadn't shown up at the appointed time and place and their relatives or their friends called the search and rescue center and said, you know, joe blow wasn't here, can you go find him? nowadays, most search and rescue operations are initiated by the person who's lost. they call up and they say, come find me, i'm in a canyon somewhere, i can't figure out where i am. and i mean this is -- and part of compounding this problem is that because people have this power, this immense power in their pocket, they will go off into the wilderness without having first looked at a map. so they kind of -- >> kind of overreliance. >> overreliance, overconfidence.

maybe something we can talk about is the difference between information, like knowing that your phone is telling you to go north and then turn left after 300 yards, to actually understand it, where you are. if you look at a map, you have to understand, okay, the lake is over here, the mountain is over here, i understand the environment. you don't have to have any understanding when you've got a phone. and so being lost can take on a whole new meaning, because if you're lost on a map, at least you know what the map is. there was a case a few years back, and this kind of thing has happened recurringly, where a couple got into their car, they wanted to go to vegas, they were in canada and they plugged in destination vegas and they said shortest route, instead of fastest route. easy oversight, right? they went on logging roads and they wound up in a canyon and the guy wandered off and died. i forgot to ask you more about k

your sort of background, but clarence, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you do and how information and -- >> sure, sure. i guess actually i owe kind of what i do in part to wendy. i have been at cna, safety and security team, for about five years now so we do a lot of work on disaster response and preparedness issues, law enforcement issues, we do a lot of work for fema, doj and some state and local governments. shortly after i got there in 2009, there was the haiti earthquake. that was the first time where it came into popular consciousness about the power of text messaging and these new technologies to aid folks after a disaster. so kind of since then, you know, i ran across -- wendy had this crisis data conference at the red cross, and it was the first time you saw the technologists come together with the first

responders and you started looking to the issues. since then, i have been interested looking at the intersection of that space on a couple of levels, one is in terms of emergency responders, like the people who are charged with finding us if we get lost. how are they taking to these new technologies, right? so there's, as you say, you may make a phone call, when you're lost, but disasters as well, they did some great work on, you know, people sending out tweets or facebook posts after a disaster. and i know the first earthquake i actually experienced was in virginia a couple of years ago, and you couldn't get any texts or anything out. and i actually didn't know anything about earthquakes. so i checked out the twitter feed, is this an earthquake. >> there was an earthquake in new york a couple of years ago, do you remember this, and i was like what the heck was that. and a friend of mine 30 seconds ago had said earthquake. so in haiti, do people have cell phones at the density that they

have here? >> definitely. i think you see them in the developing world, if you will, as -- not smartphones actually, but phones, penetration is probably be more than america, i would venture, not smartphones, though, so text messaging becomes a very good way for folks communicating all types of information, in terms of connecting after a disaster. people are putting this information out there, so a lot of the work that i have been doing is understanding how can we use this information to actually understand people's behaviors better, but also understand kind of movements and how can emergency managers use that information to find people, if you will, after a disaster. there's been some, i started to do some work on this, but a whole host of contents with complications and research around that how can we use this data or crowd sourcing, if you will, for locating people in a disaster situation. >> i think we have a real life

example here. i want to ask the audience, how many heard a screeching from their phone about 3:00 this afternoon? yeah? and a buzzing. i guess it can manifest in different ways, but this is an example of what clarence is talking about. this happened to me, i happened to have gotten my cell phone in los angeles 15 years ago, and i still have the area code 323. yet my phone was telling me about flash flooding in this area. so, clearly, they knew where i was. i don't know how accurately. but this is a great benefit, potentially a little bit weird and scary. you know, and clarence and i were talking on the phone a couple of days ago, i asked him, can they find -- if they're expecting some kind of natural disaster trouble in a certain area, they can find everyone who's in that area? wendy's saying yes? how accurate is that?

>> it's pretty accurate, i think. i don't know all to the technical specs for doing it. but it's based on cell tower pings. so all the people that that cell tower is serving could get located. >> if there was an occupy wall street type of think, could they say everyone with a cell phone in this campsite? >> i don't think so. >> as far as i know. >> we're talking about the incredible usefulness of saving lives and important things like that. but i do want to look at the nuances of this and the potential cost. matt, do you travel, do you have a smartphone in your pocket at all times when you travel? you were telling me you were traveling for fun and for work. >> oh, yeah, who doesn't have a smartphone in their possibility pocket all the time. but there's two kinds of travel, i travel with my family on vacation and it's practical to

know how to get from point a to point b. we were at a pool party in suburban new jersey this weekend. and my wife and my kids wouldn't have appreciated it if i had thrown my phone out the window and tried to finding my way. we went out to ridgewood, is that the town? yeah, ridgewood. but then there's the travel for travel stories, and specifically, the travel stories at "the times" was the getting lost series, where i decided that after years of sort of intensive attention that i had paid to all these new technologies on my phone, on the internet, that had sort of trained me in becoming a very astute and capable research-intensive traveler, i was just higher than that stuff. and i kept thinking back to these great times earlier in my travels, when i was in my early

20s or when i was almost 8 years old and i got lost in the tivoli amusement park in denmark, when the world had seemed so much more -- >> that was not a terrifying experience? >> getting lost when you're 7 years old is terrifying, but there's also a moment where you learn what you're capable of. you learn how you react in a situation that you're absolutely unprepared for. and how -- what you do with those really determines the course of your life in some ways, it shows you who you are, it teaches you hopefully that you're capable of dealing with the situation. >> or you set out to intentionally get lost for your column. >> yes. >> what was the lostest that you got? >> oh. well, i quickly realized that there were different ways of defining lostness. lostness is quickly -- well, sort of getting lost series, i have to say, what i would do is

pick a destination and i would go there with no hotel reservation, no plans, no contacts, no guide book, no map, no looking at my phone, at google maps, just show up, be there for a week or so and see what happens. get off the plane and i really have no idea where i'm going to go or what i'm going to do. and so what i realized is -- the problem for getting lost for me, on the basic level, is that i have a really good sense of direction. i can look at the sun and know which direction i'm heading. >> every man thinks they have a great sense of direction. but you really do? >> it's pretty good. the first place i went was tangier in morocco. there's all these twisty turny alleyways with no signs, and you sort of theoretically don't know where you're going, but as i walked through the medina, i realized, oh, it's on a hill, and the hill slopes down toward

the sea. if i'm going downhill, i'm going towards the sea and if i'm going uphill, i'm going away from the sea. it's hard to turn those instinctual things off. i kept trying to turn them off, to not think about where i was going. and one day, i met a young woman who was interning at this art center in tangier, and she wanted to take me to some far-flung cafe. so all i did was talk to her and follow her. so i paid no attention. completely under her care. you know, and that was great. i sort of almost was capable of not realizing where i was. >> that's the key is not paying attention, that's how you get lost. i grew up in a town where i left the town when i was 16 years old. all i knew about driving around town was sitting in the passenger's seat. i new absolutely nothing about

how to get from point a to point b. and i think smartphones do something similarly. i want to ask you about your stuff, but i also want to ask wendy about, have you seen a downside in terms of disaster preparedness or emergency relief in terms of people being too dependent on their phones and lacking a kind of situational awareness? >> sure. as a little bit of background about me, i started to develop the social media program at the red cross so i sort of had a front row seat to all these changes that have gone on since 2006. >> 2006 was when you started? was that myspace? >> myspace and blogs. yeah. so i actually am a professional stalker for the american red cross. i read, i mean, i used to read 5,000 plus conversations about the organization every single day so i have a really good

sense of how people feel about it, positively and negatively. but yeah, in that role, i was all about exploiting every single possibility for aiding people when they're in an emergency situation or to have more resilience or have coping mechanisms and built a whole digital volunteer program where we actually invite the public to get trained to actually provide emotional support people who are going through disaster situations. so we tried to exploit the technology for the most positive reasons. and now that i'm on the disaster program side, certainly our reservations arrange allowing -- not allowing, but like the trend of people to be overly reliant on their smart phones for things as simple as a telephone number or how to get down the street. >> people drop their cell phone in the water and not at home, they don't know how to call

their wife? >> and also there's a shift away from calling 911 to what you should do if you're in an emergency situation. there's stories that if you go to an event and hear a facebook person talk, saying these two teenaged girls fell in one of those street well -- sewer well things, and were maybe they were in there and they didn't want their parents to know. they didn't call 911, but they posted something on facebook to their friends that would come and get them. if you have friends that would do that. >> they didn't call their friends? >> yay. >> it was like a facebook posting, hey, if anyone's reading this, come and get me. >> did they do it as an event? >> i invite you -- >> i think to your point and you were even saying you tried to get rid of those cues when you were out, just the technology becomes so reliant that we don't

know how to pull in those cues anymore. i did it myself when i was with my sister in north carolina this weekend. and we're driving to a restaurant and it's only like five minutes from her place. as soon as she gets in her car, and she punches in the gps coordinates. so i think you become so so i think you become so reliant on technology, that we just immunize ourselves from picking up on those clues. i don't know anybody's phone number by heart quite honestly anymore. you just go through the phone. but i think, kind of how that ties back to these emergency situations, the article that wendy sent to us, you mentioned in theory, we can call 911 from our cell phones and they can locate us. but the article was talking about in d.c., apparently

upwards of 90% of the callers actually don't have accurate locations, so you're spending this time on the phone in a distressed situation where the operators haven't asked you well where are you located? >> is it the fault of the system or the phones? >> the carrier is supposed to provide this information right now. >> is this just checking the cell phone triangulation or there's a gps chip in the phone? >> a thing called stage two which is the gps information. i guess it's failing more frequently than -- >> when you buy a new phone, ever since some year recently, your phone is supposed to have this capability, but -- >> it's the system that's failing or the phone? >> it depends on how you define system or phone. kind of interconnected. so that's one of the things the 911 dispatchers having -- actually, a "washington post" article that was published last week, having a harder time, having increased instances of ptsd because they have to be on

the phone with people while they die because the emergency vehicle is searching around for them, because it's using a mobile phone to call 911, it's not as location accurate. >> are people not aware of where they are? all they know is they took a left? >> there's a language barrier, if you don't speak english and the operator only speaks english, you can't tell where you are. if you're calling from a land line, it's automatically attached to a physical address. so those are just some of the struggles that we're having. also we were talking earlier, about the fact that social media, there's a new start up, and probably lots of them called geophelia. it is very geo specific. you cannot tell people where you

are, which is a drawback for us when we're looking for valuable actionable information. so some companies have come up with ways to capture, so you can actually draw a circle around the area that you're looking at and trying to finding actionable information of people affected in that zone and we were going to try it out and they were saying, actually only 3% of people or something like that at that time have geo location turned on. so you're getting 3% of the tweets from in here, and maybe you advocate that everybody turns on their geo location. i was like that makes me feel a little weird. i'm not sure i want to be responsible for people getting kidnapped or murdered. >> we have this weird kind of dual way of thinking about privacy and people knowing where we are. on the one hand, people seem to post all kinds of crazy stuff about themselves on facebook. and yet when facebook changes the settings where they are more

permissive automatically, people get really bent out of shape about that. matt, i wanted to ask you, when you published this in the "new york times," how did people respond to it? did they say yeah, i feel that too, i just want to get lost. >> there were people who say on the one hand, oh, my god, why would you ever want to get lost? it sounds terrible, why would you ever want to do this? and other people get it, this is the path to discovery. it's sort of putting yourself in a place where you don't know what you're going to do next and that's where actually everything really starts in terms of having a great experience. >> so i imagine it's kind of probably a tiny minority of people who have willingly put themselves in that uncomfortable place where -- >> i think it's a minority of one. i have not met people who want to do the extreme things that i was doing, putting it all the way. but i was doing that to sort of,

you know, to prove a point, you could do this, you could get rid of everything that we developed in the last 20 years and still have a meaningful, enjoyable kind of experience. if i can get people to put their phones away for a while, to not use gps and to learn to rely on themselves, to learn the cues of the sun or understanding smells on the wind, like a boy scout. i don't have any training in this other than just having been around. if i can get people to do that more, then i think people are going to have a better time traveling. >> yeah. yeah. >> i want people to be able to ignore me, i want to put myself out of business as a travel writer. people don't need to read other people to find out where to go and what to do. figure this stuff out yourself. >> just go out there and find it.

>> viva la revolution. >> didn't work yet. >> but you had people getting lost intentionally while you had this thing in your pocket, you could always make that emergency call. so, in this day and age, you can go -- and people do all kinds of crazy adventures, they paddle their bathtub across the atlantic and whatever, which is dangerous except for the fact that they have got this emergency satellite transmitter. so you can have an emergency exit from your getting lost. so it's not quite the -- >> i used it once. >> did you? >> you asked before what was the most lost i got. that was probably the most lost that i got. >> what was the most lost you got? >> i was in chongqing, and it's a huge megacity. it's about half the size of switzer land technically, with 33 or 34 million people. and it's like if you -- if you expanded san francisco.

bigger hills, a couple of bridges, construction and tens of millions of chinese migrants down the middle of it. complete chaos. i showed up and had a fantastic afternoon and had to find a hotel. and i found the closest place that seemed okay and it just turned out to be miserable. it was like rich businessmen and their prostitutes playing mahjong night. and i was trying to find people to hang out with, not at the hotel, but in the sort of bar section of the city, and all the bars were just loud, expensive places where you couldn't speak to anyone. it was just miserable. and i was on a bus to pick up a suitcase that i had left at a locker at the airport. i was like, i just can't take this anymore. this is going to be a total failure, i can't connect with

anyone here. what the hell am i going to do? and i realized that i had made these rules for myself and that i could break the rules. you know, and so i went on my phone and i looked up -- i figured if i want to meet people in this city of, you know, 34 million people, i should go to a hostel. and is i googled hostel. just as soon as they finished building it, nobody knows where anything is, it's a total chaotic place. >> did you feel disappointed or did you feel liberated? >> both. i had broken these great rules that i had set up for myself but i also ended up making great friends.

i realized that these things are useful. google came to my rescue at that point. it it hadn't worked out, i probably would have booked a flight to hong kong and gone to hang out with people here. but instead i went to this hostel and met some great friends there. >> there's so much interesting handles on this topic. i would love to open it up to the audience just a little bit early, because i feel like you all look intelligent, probably more intelligent than me, probably ask better questions than me. but i would like to invite wendy and clarence to throw in, is there anything to do -- >> i would say maybe have a conversation about this. when i got invited to this panel, a, why am i invited to it? but one of the first things that

kind of came to my mind was this little darko challenge in 2011. i don't know if any of you heard of this. but it was called the red balloon challenge. and so they put up ten red balloons around the country, and there was a $40,000 prize for the first team to locate the exact location of these balloons. and so they gave a date for it, see the ability of crowd sourcing for contestants to see the ability of the media to help find these objects. so there was a team from m.i.t. that ended up winning, they found about nine hours in the scheme they set up was this social incentive scheme. so the person who found the

balloon got like $2,000. >> so these balloons went drifting across the united states. they landed, each one landed in somebody's yard or in the middle of a street, so each balloon would only be seen by one or two or possibly no people. so how do you connect to nine random people within a matter of hours? >> right, yeah, so they prepositioned these ten balloons all across the united states. so there were only a few people in a particular space. so they set up the scheme, $2,000 for the person who found found it. $1,000 for the person who referred the person who found it. so they found these balloons in about nine hours. >> so the financial incentives are causing people to put up postings on their facebook page, saying, hey, all my friends, if you see a red balloon, repost this? >> right. >> and it was kind of creating this trees of connectivity. >> exactly. so that worked pretty well. some insightful stuff that came from it. one of the things that came from that is that there was actually a lot of gamesmanship within it. there was a lot of disinformation that was out there. so that's another piece that consider within it. so there was all these teams

competing for $40,000. one example may be a terrorist situation, where if we're trying to location bombers, locate victims, i think there was an example in mumbai, where disinformation was intentionally being put out there. a few years later, the state department actually ran a similar campaign, it was called tag. and the idea was to find five individuals, who are now moving targets across the world. it was the guy who was on that previous m.i.t. team, uc san diego. but they won again, but they only had to finding three out of five people. >> where's that guy now? >> i don't know. >> but in that situation, it was -- i just think that type of stuff is interesting in terms of this kind of collective action, the ability to narrow in on folks in a really fast way.

>> so for me or the red cross, the golden ticket is resilience, so it turns out that being lost is probably a really fine balance between being resilient or not resilient. one of the key indicators of resiliency or ability to cope with the unexpected is how connected you are to your community and your neighbors, it's not about how much water you have in your closet or how your emergencies preparedness kit, although you still have them. it's really how well connected are you? and so we want to do as much as we can as an organization to say we're developing all of these aps and really encouraging that connection, but also on the other side, you know, cautioning, actually, you should memorize a few phone numbers, you should be able to live and be resilient without access to technology, if that's the situation that you find yourself in so that you can cope very well with that situation, too. and so i think it's a fine balance that has all sorts of pros and cons. >> do you think there's a negative correlation between

people who stockpile stuff in their basement and people who are connected with their neighbors. >> preppers are -- that's one of the struggles that we want, because that's not an aspiration, nobody wants to be like the crazy stockpiler. i don't want to be that either, i actually enjoy being lost and all that jazz. but i think, yeah, there is a negative correlation to being prepared. and so, that's just my two cents is that be connected where we can be connected and know how to live without being connected if you're not. >> and before i open up, is there advice that you guys would offer -- let me -- you can offer a piece of advice? this is how to survive. what would you have?

i mean, your buddies in social media, what would you have to encourage people to do? >> so actually one of the easiest things you can do is connect with the emergency management and police departments, just in case anything would happen, then you have access to those fools and they're at your fingertips. download the red cross apps. >> what apps does to red cross have? >> we have lots of them. they're hazard specific. if you're in a tornado, we have lots of tips about what to do in that scenario, right. yeah, just having that connected community. so i'll give you one quick example, which is actually in tornadoes now, hundreds of times, i have been sitting there while tornado sirens and warnings are going off across the midwest for example and i'll start to see literally thousands of people use the hashtag bathtub, because they're all sitting in their bathtub right next to each other and feeling

really alone. one of the things we have done is just start connecting them to each other saying you're not really alone, if you do these three things, and you stay there in that the bathtub, you're doing all the things you need too do in that moment. but after the tornado goes through, sometimes the connectivity is not there anymore. so it's both being able to reach out in that time of need and maybe you would prefer to be able to reach out after the tornado is through, but if you can't, knowing exactly what to do and how to handle it. >> fantastic. clarence? >> i don't know. i like this idea of, i'm actually going to go into anti the position that you said. i like the idea of getting lost in your own city. and so kind of beyond using the international stuff, back to this piece of like, don't necessarily just hop in your car and pull out your phone to figure out the story. when i first moved to atlanta, i remember distinctly just getting in my car and just spend like an

hour driving around the city, not really having a destination in mind, just getting a lay of the land and i did not do that when i came to d.c., and now complete reliance on the phone. for general emergency preparedness, knowing the lay of the land, where you're at. >> or just where the high ground is. >> look at that, seriously? no way. >> flash flood warning. >> everybody stay put. have another glass. >> avoid flood areas. check local media. >> wow. >> with that, i feel like you have maybe -- >> i don't know if i'm supposed to be giving advice about getting lost and not getting lost. i mean, follow your own curiosity. one of the things that i do, just driving around randomly and exploring is, i -- if i'm curious about what's down that street, i will go down that street. if i want to know what's in that shop, if i want to know who that strange person is in a foreign

city, go and ask them. you know, it's sort of getting over yourself. part of breaking free of the reliance on the smartphones and guides and as far as travel writer, is a shyness factor, being willing to just go and talk, put yourself out there. >> well, i think social media has enabled a new kind of traveler. we're talking about airbnb and all the different ways that you can find yourself trusting strangers who before, you might never have had any contact with. and it's always easy to go to the holiday inn express. but because of these forms of media, it seems -- i agree with matt, i think we have very similar travel philosophies and we come into the world that's full of mysteries, and the two sources of mystery are first the world, we don't know what's in the world, and secondly, we don't know what's in ourselves.

and it's only when you go out into the world and finding yourself dealing with situations that you have never encountered before that you live your life. i do feel that we live in a world that everything can be found out beforehand, everything can be planned beforehand, we're very efficient. we're never surprised by ourselves. but having said that, you know, it's a little early, but i would love to open up the floor. we have a procedure here where there's a mic and we have a -- and we have a mic bearer who will bring it. so if anybody has -- okay. >> hi, i have one question and it seems that it's very focused on being not lost, having power actually. so in the moment, where, like, sandy, there was no power, you

relied on your cell phone until it died and i knew where it was, but i think the catastrophe is basically the limit, and instinctively, i would fully agree with you about the importance of learning how to orient yourself to know where you are and to be very conscious about where you are and i think the connection to your environment, to me, is the most important. maybe i just belong to a different generation. >> i think everyone who's above the age of 12 feels like they're in a different generation. you hit some really interesting point, one of which, in disasters now, people -- you know, you go ten hours or whatever, your cell phone hasn't been charged, you're all of a sudden helpless, you don't know how to do anything anymore. is that a problem? >> yes, i think we're preparing to see it more frequently. and on the sort of meeting needs side, almost as important as food and water and shelter now is access to information.

and so we've shifted our offerings a little bit to make sure is that -- or at least try to make sure that we're able to provide real-time information or even work with telecom and other kinds of companies to ensure that we're getting those infrastructures about for power and connectivity back up as quickly as we can. certainly, the red cross isn't taking credit for that, but the whole emergency management community, that's one of the shifts that the 21st century has brought that people need that almost as much as they need water. >> wow. so this is part of the emergency preparedness, making sure that people don't have to live without their cell phones? that's when the crisis has gone literally ballistic. >> can i ask a question? >> sure. >> elderly people who don't have cell phones, who are perhaps just not even going to look on the internet anyway for information, how do you reach out to them? how do you not -- how do you avoid neglecting them in a disaster?

>> the technology stuff is all fairly supplemental to the core thing that we do as a response organization, so it's the same way that it has always been done. but when you're an elderly person, i have heard of lots of neighborhood groups preparing by saying, the woman on the corner who's wheelchair bound is our meeting point. so wherever she is, that's where we're going to go huddle around, and make sure that she's okay because she's the most important one because she's the vulnerable one. it's sort of up to your resilience is very much dependent on your connection to your neighbors if you're not technologically literal. >> are there still old people who don't have cell phones? >> probably, yeah. >> i feel like my parents are more on e-mail than anybody. i don't know anybody who doesn't have a cell phone at all.

>> i have an editor who doesn't have a cell phone. >> i think it's a dwindling minority. >> the malaysian airliner tragedy really struck home for me. i actually lived in sri lanka for a number of years and used to look south out toward the indian ocean and realizing there wasn't much between there and antarctica. people ever knew just how remote that stretch where they think the jet went down. and not only remote in terms of how far apart, you know, it was from land mass, but also how really gnarly those oceanic conditions and even the sea floor topography. i mean,, we're talking 15,000 feet deep with huge canyons and mountains. and it led me to think that is

this going to be a catalyst for somehow reviving school curricula around geography and particularly maritime geography? really pretty educated people d of being indignant, how could that plane be lost? you know, i can find my iphone in a jet liner so big. but we're talking land, you know, oceanic, you know, just huge amounts of space that just were fathomless and wide. just thinking, cnn, did you get any kind of inquiries of people looking at developing some kind of educational program around that? >> i mean, it's -- you raise a great point. i mean, this plane chose the worst place, or the best place if you look at it. >> you couldn't calculate a better place to go, the to

purposefully lose that thing. >> no. and i mean, we know -- there have been a lot of calls for it. not about education, but about we should change the air traffic system, we should mandate changes to the equipment that planes carry the procedures they should follow. and unfortunately, we still have no idea why this plane went missing. and so it's hard to figure out how you should make sure it doesn't happen again. we don't know how it happened. we don't have a single scrap of evidence. the entire, for those who maybe have lost interest and aren't following it as avidly as i am. the authorities expect to spend a year mapping this very remote seabed and then scanning it with sonars and other kinds of equipment. based on entirely one -- well, you could say seven pieces of

electronic data that were obtained from these satellite communications transmissions. of which amount to parts per billion of a frequency shift. and i've been spending a lot of the last few weeks in communication with these experts scattered around the world trying to make sense of how does the frequency shift relate to the timing data that creates. the frequency, it gets a little bit boring pretty quick if you're not really into it. the point is, it doesn't really match up very well. so the assumption had been at one point that the plane diverted from its course to beijing and went west and it was lost for malaysian radar. at some point soon thereafter flew south and a straight line at some point in this mysterious ill-mapped ocean. turns out that doesn't work, the electronic data doesn't support that. somehow either the plane circled

for 50 odd minutes or took off and landed again. the mystery is as baffling as ever. and so, kind of rambling here. but, i mean, the question is about, like, people don't understand how easy it is still to get lost in this world. if you've ever driven from coast to coast, which i've done a couple of times. the country is big. and imagine all of that. imagine just you're driving -- imagine an endless nebraska of water. nothing after nothing after nothing. and, you know, and it's winter down there. it's thousands of miles from the nearest port. i mean, it's insane. and so, yeah, no, we're -- nobody's -- and no, nobody called for more geographical education. better gps. but great question. thank you. >> i do wonder if you open street map the movement of sort of digital volunteers mapping,

you know, third world places that don't, that aren't well mapped unlike the united states, but i wonder if there will be an emergence of open ocean mapping. >> wouldn't it be cool? i mean, ultimately if you roll forward hundreds of years or something, you can imagine kind of a google street view. >> right. >> of everywhere. you could be on the bottom of the ocean, the top of the ocean. >> right. >> and that's probably -- if this plane is in the bottom of the indian ocean, probably it's going to be like 2348, some google robot is looking around. but then, you know, maybe that would be really sad. i take a kind of comfort in knowing that there is some mountain lurking in the eternal darkness of the southern indian ocean that nobody's ever seen and it's completely -- i like to have some mysteries in the world. it's a little bit scary to me if everything was in a data base somewhere. >> there's things left to discover. >> yeah, you know. let's open it up again, does

anybody -- how about over here? >> i'm curious, if you could check out the consequences of it or the ability to do something. >> i'm a guy wandering the world on my own. i suppose i have less to fear about getting lost or winding up in a strange place than women might. but that's a ridiculous thing to say. i have met so many women doing crazy strange things in strange parts of the world. i've met women who hitchhike across turkey. women who drive land rovers. you are limited in some ways

only by how you think about how you're limited. >> what about in terms of getting messages out to people or encouraging certain behaviors in people? we all know that men, i mean here, i would much rather drive around in a circle for an hour than stop and ask somebody where i went wrong. >> yeah. i mean, i don't have great insight into this. i don't think about the gender divide very often when it comes to getting lost. so, you know, completely uneducated pontificating here. but i think we certainly women are probably make up much more than half of the followers of the red cross on facebook anyway. they seem to be the ones who are much more interested in connecting with the safety or community than maybe men are at a broad glance. and so that could have ramifications in being lost or not being lost. >> do you do any demographic

targeting in your social media outreach? you could say here's information for women 25 to 45. >> yeah, we do. >> thanks, i'm mark, i live in new york, i'm scottish. i've traveled a fair bit. i think as you're talking, i wondered if it's more about the future of serendipity. because the further technology takes us, it doesn't result in us losing our fallibility of human beings. we still make mistakes. got hopelessly lost using gps. we don't pay attention. and we don't react fast enough.

and what's interesting, what you talked about is serendipity of meeting people. whether you're connected or not connected, what's really interesting is where technology takes us. whether you're using the sun or traveling through the empty quarter or wherever it is. you meet people. you meet people through happen chance. i think that's interesting rather than just about the idea of getting lost. >> absolutely. one of the great things i like about the word lost and getting lost is just all the sort of english language phrases above the word getting lost, you get lost, you are lost. you get lost in a moment. there are ways it lends itself to all these types of certain dipty. i've been involved in this project at bon appetit where we've been working with ibm on a recipe developing piece of

software where you give it, it's been trained, you give it ingredient and a type of dish and a theme. and it will come up with like quintillions of combinations. >> doesn't actually make it. >> that's the thing. it's this amazing piece of technology that finds things for you that you would otherwise never have imagined for yourself. then it's up to you to cook it. >> it's essentially like sp spodify. but things to discover. >> it does come down to, as mark said, actually doing it yourself. following the directions or not following directions. and meeting people or not meeting people. what happens then is up to us to pay attention or not pay attention to what they're telling us. >> i love the idea of serendipity, you're open to the unexpected.

>> and of course, where serendipity comes from a piece of literature. something like the sands of serendib. an imaginary place that doesn't exist and is searched for. that's where we get serendipity. >> that's great to know. okay. how about right here? >> not sure this is relevant, but i don't understand how those 200 girls in africa have been lost for three months and no one can find them and the people who took them are using technology and i don't know why they can't be found. >> yeah, that's a great question. i think there's a potentially similar angle with the malaysian airliner, if people are trying to make you get lost. if human ingenuity is working at cross p