Broadening my Deepwater Horizons
<p>I&#8217;ve gotten used to being cited in computer science and software engineering papers over the last decade, but here&#8217;s a new one.  Today I read a draft in which I and the GPSD project get cited a bunch of times and it&#8217;s &#8211; er &#8211; <em>not</em> about open source.  It&#8217;s about Marine AIS in disaster management.  Broadening my deepwater horizons, as it were.   </p>
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<p>You can read a PDF of <a href="http://vislab-ccom.unh.edu/~schwehr/papers/2011-schwehr-ushydro-dwh.pdf">Vessel Tracking Using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) During Emergency Response: Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon Incident</a>, but be warned that it&#8217;s pretty heavy going unless you&#8217;re deep into AIS or have a thing for disaster-management porn.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s nevertheless interesting on several levels.  Kurt Schwehr, the author, writes well for an academic and manages to make the bureaucratically-clogged portions of the narrative less deadly boring than they might have been.  Both the low-comedy aspects of government reaction to the disaster and the heroic attempts to cope with the clusterfuck-in-motion come through pretty clearly.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m only a supporting player in this story, but the paper does illustrate one point I&#8217;ve been hammering on for years.  Making standards for life-critical systems proprietary is not just stupid, it&#8217;s <a href ="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=888">evil</a>.  Kurt reports that some work I and the GPSD project guys did helped prevent that from being a problem in his part of the Deepwater Horizon response, and I&#8217;m pleased about that.  Next time, though, we might not get so lucky.</p>
<p>Unanswered question: was GPSD running in any of the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1934">robot submarines</a> they sent in to try to plug the gusher?  Inquiring minds want to know&#8230;</p>
