Drupal is BIG

Yesterday we launched a Request For Proposal to redesign one of our Drupal-based websites. We published it in the corresponding website, also in drupal.org and we send it to a couple of contacts. In just two days we’ve got about fifty different people interested in the project. Wow.

I don’t know about the quality of the responses we’ll get, but so far we cannot complain! Drupal is going to be a lot of fun in the following months.

Straight to the map

OK, this is pretty cool:

Yesterday I went to watch Ironman and on my way back home I decided to take some crappy pictures every 5 minutes to test the mobile’s GPS. The map above is the result (click to get the actual one): the trail starts at the cinema in the top-right region, and finishes in my place at the bottom-left.

To get the map I didn’t have to do anything special. Just uploaded the photos to Picasa and you’re done (I couldn’t make it work with Flickr yet). You get a map with your photos georeferenced, and a automatic KML in case you prefer using the Google Earth imagery.

During the last months at the office we’ve spent a considerable amount of work georeferencing our data and putting it on maps. A problem we’ve detected is that workers in the field do not have the necessary devices (software, GPS) to enhance the data-collecting or the post-processing. I can’t wait to see this technologies reaching the field.

The Dangers of the Deltas

Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath, on the other hand, provide a vivid study in how poverty and insufficient government investment can turn a natural disaster into an outsize human tragedy, said Debarati Guha-Sapir, the director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Research on Disaster Epidemiology, in Brussels.

“The villages are in such levels of desperation — housing quality, nutritional status, roads, bridges, dams — that losses were more determined by their condition rather than the force of the cyclone,” she said.

The Dangers of the Deltas @ The New York Times.

In the media: The educated guesswork of estimating Darfur deaths

Fortunately our reports get (biiig) media attention from time to time. Several days ago I promised I was going to speak a little more about the things we’re doing here, so I’ll start linking some of these articles from now on. I’m gonna start with this one published yesterday by Agence France-Presse (AFP), titled “The educated guesswork of estimating Darfur deaths“:

When a top UN official released a new estimated death toll of 300,000 for Darfur this week, he reignited a lively debate about just how accurate such statistics are. [...] In an Op-Ed to the Financial Times in 2005, Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir, head of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and a professor of epidemiology at Louvain’s Catholic University in Brussels, warned that “sensational numbers do not help the Darfur cause.”

The full article is here.

Other selected articles from this year:

• Les bilans des morts de guerres, enjeux politiques (11 April 2008).

• Congo’s Death Rate Unchanged Since War Ended (23 January 2008).

Update: En français.

Update 2: Suffering lost in a numbers game — “While the UN and Khartoum disagree over exactly how many people have died in Darfur, the long-term outlook remains grim.”

Until further notice

• If you get an e-mail from my Hotmail account (azugaldia@youknowwhat.com), it is not me. The account has been hijacked probably as a collateral effect of what happened the other day and, as I don’t use it that much, I didn’t find it out until yesterday (thanks Mar!). I’ve already contacted the Hotmail technical support so hopefully everything will be back to normal soon. In any case, I’ll be in Skype as usual.
• I’m in Rome! Yep, starting today. I’ll be participating in a conference in la capitale next week (did I say I love my job?). By the way, I realize I don’t speak too much about what I do professionally. Well, it’s on purpose. But in the next weeks I’ll try to change that and give some informations as IMHO we’re doing some cool things you may like to see and provide feedback.

OK, I have a flight to take. Take care.

Update: I have recovered my hotmail.com account, the support team has responded quickly and efficiently, many thanks!