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I am interested in the Macro scale and the macro effects evident at a city-scale level. I remember visiting New Orleans in 2016 and vividly remember seeing several signs with a large 'No' symbol drawn and the text  "neighbors not tourists" printed on the sign. Recently, as part of my research into New Orleans, I stumbled on this piece by the Guardian on how short-term rentals through platforms such as Airbnb are leading to gentrification in New Orleans. Highlighted in the article is how several Airbnb hosts do not reside on the listed premises. I remember the place we stayed, as we were a large party, having a 617 prefix number.  The prefix stood out as I knew the code 617 represented Boston and was curious what someone with ties to Boston doing in New Orleans as a host. In a similar vein, the article also highlights the problem of absentee hosts, hosts who acquire property for the sole purpose of setting up the property as an Airbnb site.

To tackle the problem, one councilwoman passed a law that required any Airbnb hosts in residential zones to have a homestead exemption verifying they live on site. In this case, a city-wide measure was taken and passed into law affecting the micro. It is common to have one host having several properties in different residential areas in New Orleans. From a technical standpoint, it could be viewed that Airbnb as technology is developed and presented as a scalable product. With no limits to reproducibility. Meanwhile, real-life discontinuities exist in the form of such homestead laws. It is impossible to live in more than one homestead at the same time. In other words, the concept of the human is not scalable.
Likewise, neither is cultural heritage. The city of New Orleans positions its self as a city with great cultural heritage. It is through this heritage that they seek to draw more and more tourists. How do cities think of scaling up successful initiatives and how do they navigate the political, social, ecological, or economic entanglements. At what point is downscaling necessary? Is culture scalable?

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/13/new-orleans-airbnb-trem…

I am currently a Ph.D. student interested in exploring the entanglements of scale, especially in the context of environmental sensing.  My primary research seeks to engage in discourse around the value of scalability that is presented as inherent in computation. While the term scale-up is almost synonymous with computation, sustainability; on the other hand, is known as a problem of scale. Take for example, the discourse on climate change where the actions required to combat climate change requires interventions at different scales. In this context, demanding changes at individual scales while no corresponding changes happen at larger scales would not yield much.

In looking at New Orleans, I came across a video on IoT cameras developed by Cisco, the networking giant. What struck me other than the apparent rise of surveillance capitalism was the narrative of one of the police officers highlighted in the video. The officer mentions that it is not feasible for the city to place police officers on every corner. In the context of scale, the police officer is implying that cameras are useful as they extend the police officer's ability to surveil the city. In other words, cameras and the networks help scale up the police officer, making it possible for them to cover a larger scale than before.

One of the police officers, in the video, also mentions that New Orleans is a tourist and hospitable town. Which brings up the question at any given period, what scale of visitors can New Orleans support without stretching the city's resources? Several other cities in the world have made efforts to limit visitors, in order not stretch city resources. The recent crisis at Mount Everest is an excellent example of what happens when resources are stretched to accommodate the increasing number of local visitors. How could something of this nature similarly impact New Orleans?

At the communication center where the video feed is analyzed, the IT manager provides reasons as to why they chose Cisco as their vendor. One of the reasons he gives was that the system is easily expandable, allowing the ability to scale out/up the network.

As many of these systems are relatively new, and not particularly effective, there appears not to be other apps modeled off of these systems. The only similarities are within the apps themselves, suggesting that the company We-Consent developing many of these apps is using a similar format for each of them.

Users enter basic information, such as their name, age, area (where they live). Their biggest concern regarding their mental health and how they heard about their app, past mental history is also added as well as payment information if required.

The family followed during most of the film was able to get several members out of Liberia during the Ebola crisis, I was under the impression that travel across the border of affected nations was prohibited. The CDC webpage was able to confirm that travel bans were imposed to and from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis. Travel to and from these places was only permitted for health officials and aid worked, and required a 21 day quarantine upon returning to the US. However, several cases in surrounding countries were reported and it is known that people would first travel to a different country before attempting to fly to the United States.

I was also interested in how health care workers and emergency responders kept themselves safe while working with such a dangerous virus, the CDC webpage was also able to clarify the PPE used when dealing with suspected or confirmed cases of Ebola, including gloves, gowns, respiratory protection and boots. Protocols also exist for training responders in the proper methods of donning and doffing PPE to protect themselves.

As a portion of the film focused on the public outrage concerning the quarantine, I read an article “Encouraging Compliance with Quarantine: A Proposal to Provide Job Security an Income Replacement” by Mark A. Rothstein which explains in greater detail the effectiveness but also challenges posed by a quarantine, and how this directly effects the infected and uninfected individuals inside.

This policy was created in response to attacks against non-police first responders, the effort to enable the responders to carry firearms was in part motivated by a 911 call where the caller faked a medical emergency and then took the firefighters hostage when they arrived. He later stated that he had chosen a medical emergency because he knew they wouldn’t be armed. This, and other incidents, began to affect patient care as paramedics no longer felt safe entering buildings without police.

The program is funded by the IAEA

The article mentioned a database the Times was using to track the location of firefighters throughout the incident, I looked at that system. It is not publicly available but was interesting in that it entirely depended on the news footage, personal videos and eyewitness accounts.

The article mentioned helicopters were being considered for rooftop evacuation, which surprised me due to the smoke. I looked into the visibility in the airspace directly surrounding the World Trade Center, while the smoke was so severe as to be captured by the International Space Station the wind did clear the smoke sufficiently for a clear line of sight between the helicopters and portions of the towers.

The firefighters were climbing the stairs, and reportedly would take hours to reach the top. The article also mentioned several groups of resting firefighters, so I researched the weight each firefighter would have been carrying which added up to 45 pounds of gear and at least an additional 20-30 pounds of tools.

The stakeholders that are described/portrayed in the film was the fate of Japan, the nuclear disasters in th past that shaked Japan, preventing the same thing from happening. The kinds of decisions they had to grapple with before the aftermath is the powerfailure, the lack of generators, and the affect the water had on the plant, and the future of the fuel rods. During the event they had to figure out how to stop the meltdown, how to restore power to the plant, how to help the engineers who had no choice but to be stuck inside, how to save Japan from nuclear fallout,etc. The aftermath was how to get the plant up and running again, the future of nuclear power in Japan, how to clean up and prevent further contamination of the land surrounding the plant. Also the health,safety and preperation of further nuclear power plant endeavors.

The study was perfomed by taking three groups of people from a diverse hospital in Brooklyn-patients, administrators and physicsans and asks them the same ballpark set of question about cultural competence. And how it affects a patient-physician relationship. This is not a new way of studying issues, case studies are quite a common way (in group questioning) to determine how "populations" feel about a topic.