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Seattle: Smart Cities: Critical Infrastructure Protection — Opportunities and Challenges

Cameras, sensors, data and "censors" will abound.

If you are here in the Pacific Northwest, you might want to register for Smart Cities: Critical Infrastructure Protection — Opportunities and Challenges. This is being put on by Northeastern University (not in Boston) but here in Seattle. You can register at the link.

There is about to be a big debate that will be coming to us one court case at a time. It will be over data and privacy. For instance, should you be able to catch a cold case murderer by using DNA from his or her relatives — without their consent?  

Today, lots of data already exists and there will be more and more data coming within the public and private sectors. 

Yes, technology will be with us until we die. Even then, maybe we could use tech. For instance:
Given it is almost Halloween, I read this once, on where terms come from — might be a myth ...

Back in the day, it might be possible for someone to be presumed dead and be buried — still alive. So one of the techniques used was to attach a string into the casket tied up through the soil to a bell hung over the grave. In the cemetery someone would be stationed to listen for "the bell." If the bell was rung, they had a "Dead Ringer." The people stationed to listen staffed the "Grave Yard Watch."

Now in our brave new world, we can digitize that function and eliminate a position (FTE) just by being texted should someone not be dead. Or, we can just shoot them full of embalming fluid and that should do it!

I can't resist — nothing to do with technology, more about being scared out of one's wits should this have happened to me: 

OK, one more story from a former emergency manager. As he told it, he worked part time in a mortuary. He could be there in the evening and there could be bodies that had been brought in and not yet embalmed. He said he was in such a room when "a body sat up" on the table. I guess it was from rigor mortis. That would be "heart check" for me!

 

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Smart Cities
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.