Massachusetts Institute of Technology creates PLUM Disaster Simulation System

The MIT media lab has an experimental consortium on News in the Future. Part of the research is done by a group which has created PLUM that takes a disaster (flood, earthquake, typhoon) story and augments the facts in it to explain the flood/disaster in terms of the readers' home town. PLUM has taken the information from our home page of several articles including Kevin Sullivan's story in the Washington Post. One can click on various facts he mentions in the story and the reader receives the data as it would apply to his/her home town.

For example if you click on the 500,000 homeless people and then click your home town (i.e. Boston, Helsinki) you would learn that everyone in the city would be homeless, etc.

Plum is at: http://www.media.mit.edu/people/elo/north-korea.html


[ Back to Letters ] [ Send Email ] [ Return to Homepage ]