【推荐1】The Daily News

By Robert Woodhouse Monday, 27 December 2004

The most powerful earthquake in the past 40 years caused a tsunami(海啸)that crashed into coastlines across Asia yesterday, killing more than 6,500 people in Indonesia, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and at least four other countries. Fishermen, tourists, hotels, homes, and cars were swept away by huge waves caused by the strong earthquake that reached a magnitude of 9.0. The undersea quake struck around 7:00 a.m., Sunday off the west coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island. In that area alone, at least 1,870 people were killed.

In Sri Lanka, some 1,600 kilometres west of the quake centre, the number of deaths stood at 2,498, and one million more were affected by the tsunami, government officials said. Indian officials said as many as 1,900 had been killed along the southern coast. Another 254 were found dead in Thailand and 54 in three other countries. In southern Thailand, 1,900 people were hurt and many more were missing, local officials said. “I was having breakfast with my three children when water started filling my home. We had to leave everything and run to safety,” said Chandra Theeravit, a local Thai woman.

Thousands of people are still missing, and the number of deaths is expected to grow even higher over the next few days. Foreign aid is being organised for the tsunami-hit countries. However, dangerous conditions and damaged roads will make it difficult to deliver food and supplies.

【推荐2】The worst outbreak of desert locusts (蝗虫) in decades is presently underway in the Horn of Africa. It is the biggest of its kind in 25 years for Ethiopia and Somalia — and the worst Kenya has seen for 70 years.

What we are seeing in East Africa today is unlike anything we’ve seen in a very long time. Its destructive potential is enormous, and it’s taking place in a region where farmers need every gram of food to feed themselves and their families. Most of the countries hardest hit are those where millions of people are already vulnerable (脆弱的) or in serious humanitarian need, as they endure the impact of violence, drought, and floods.

We have acted quickly to respond to this outbreak. The primary method of battling locusts is the aerial spraying of pesticides (杀虫剂). FAO’s “Locust Watch” service explains that “although giant nets, flamethrowers, lasers, and huge vacuums have been proposed in the past, these are not in use for locust control. People and birds often eat locusts but usually not enough to significantly reduce population levels over large areas.”

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has released $10 million from its Central Emergency Relief Fund to fund a huge scale-up in aerial operations to manage the outbreak.

But the window to contain this crisis is closing fast. We only have until the beginning of March to bring this infestation under control as that is when the rain and planting season begins. If left unchecked — and with expected additional rains — locust numbers in East Africa could increase 500 times by June.

We must act now to avoid a full-blown catastrophe. And we will. At the same time, we need to pay attention to a bigger picture. This is not the first time the Greater Horn of Africa has seen locust outbreak approach this scale, but the current situation is the worst in decades. This is linked to climate change. Warmer seas mean more tropical storms, generating the perfect breeding conditions for locusts.

【推荐3】The start of the U.S. Atlantic hurricane season is just over two weeks away and forecasters are expecting particularly high activity this year. With warmer than usual conditions expected in the North Atlantic this summer, meteorologists have predicted that the season could produce eight or more hurricanes.

While forecasters cannot predict how many hurricanes — if any — will make landfall, the potential for dangerous storms to strike the southern and eastern coasts brings an additional problem for authorities already struggling with the COVID-19.

Experts say that the COVID-19 is affecting the capabilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other organizations involved in responding to natural disasters.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Jeffrey Talley, who now leads global efforts on disaster management at IBM’s Center for the Business of Government, said that with FEMA and other authorities engaged with responding to the COVID-19, resources will be limited if a hurricane strikes.

“When we look at a disaster... I think of it in terms of how we prepare for, respond to and recover from those types of events,” Talley said. “Right now we’re in the middle of the response of COVID-19. None of us are really sure how long it’s going to last and how the response to disasters is going to be different, say, two months from now, six months from now, so on and so forth,” he said.

According to Talley, the COVID-19 could complicate the response to a hurricane by interrupting the flow of emergency supplies to areas where they are urgently needed at crucial moments.

Social distancing and stay-at-home orders will also force authorities along the south and east coast to rethink how they manage people who must leave their homes in the event of a disaster. While many states are already lifting some lockdown restrictions, social distancing will still be important for many months to come.

【推荐1】Cities such as New York, Washington, Boston and San Francisco have launched bike-share programs to ease traffic jam, improve public health, and cut carbon emissions (排放). Cyclists in those cities tend to choose bike-sharing to make their trips to office or home faster, cheaper, and more fun. Last year, U.S. bike-share riders completed nearly 46 million trips—more than twice as many trips from the previous year.

Yet despite these programs’ advantages and popularity, there are still huge challenges. Take, for instance, the distribution (分布) of bikes. The living area face shortages of bicycles in the morning rush, while business districts do not have enough bikes in the evening. What’s more, parking places can be full at certain hours, making it difficult for riders to return the bikes once they’ve reached their destinations.

Solving this problem is not easy. David B. Shmoys and his colleagues set out to develop complex algorithms(算法) and advanced analytics(逻辑法) to solve the challenges of bike-share operations.

One area in which the methods were applied was the Bike Angels program. As part of the program, cyclists can be rewarded with points by renting or returning bikes at certain high-need stations. Today, Bike Angels accounts for roughly 30 percent of bike rebalancing in New York City. It has greatly improved customer satisfaction which, in turn, has more riders. And more importantly, this form of rebalancing comes with a much less carbon emissions, because less box trucks are needed to move the bikes!

David B. Shmoys and his colleagues applied algorithms and analytics to solve other problems, too. However, they can not solve every new transportation problem. They have many limitations, including incomplete information. That is, David B. Shmoys and his colleagues only observe the realized rentals (returns) at stations at which bikes were available, not those that were blocked due to the imbalance of the system.

【推荐3】The name sounds funny but the idea is no joke: it’s a personal toilet called the pee-pool, Anders Wilhelmson, a Swedish architect, is the inventor of the pee-pool.

He became interested in the idea of sanitation(卫生设施) after taking part in a research project on the social and political development of cities. One of the most common problems he found in developing countries was the lack of toilets. He wanted to do something to help. So working with others, he started the project in 2005, and the next year started a company called Peepoolple.

The toilet is a single—use bag made of environmentally friendly plastics. The inside is treated with urea(尿素), a chemical commonly used as fertilizer. The hotter the weather, the more quickly the waste turns into what is needed by plants. The sanitation process can be as soon as a couple of hours or as long as two to four weeks. You can just bury it in a pot and grow whatever you like.

The company expects to start selling the bags in August in Kenya and Bangladesh, but it is just beginning production and sales in Nairobi now. Full production could reach about half a million bags a day and people may be able to buy the pee-pool in countries Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc.

The United Nations says more than two and a half billion people around the world do not have good sanitation. Many have no choice but to use the outdoors, which is not only bad for the environment, but also harmful to people’s health. Each year, poor sanitation leads to three fifths of those people getting an infectious disease which on average causes one out of 1,000 patients to die.

Jack Smith, the founder of the World Toilet Organization, says “This is quite an unacceptable situation given the fact that we are living in the modern world. And strangely, many of them own televisions, phones but have no toilet.”