The Progress Report: Japan’s Tsunami Tech Saves Lives

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Zachary: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my illustrious co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network, and this is our weekly progress report where we look at news that you can use, well, not really. We look at news that you would’ve missed news that we all miss because news is bad news.

And in a world swimming in a sea of bad news or floating in the ether of bad news, or pick your metaphor, suffused with bad news. Wow, that’s almost like a little beginning of a rhyming haiku. There is a lot of news that is good, except it’s never news because it’s not as kinetic and it’s not as dramatic, and it doesn’t lead people to outrage.

It just is and it is why we are living on the planet that we’re living in. The aspects of it that we all celebrate, the fact that there’s more longevity and better health and whatever the ills of social media, of which there are many, and we all know what they are and we increasingly concerned about them and whatever the threats of ai, which we all know and are increasingly concerned about them, we also have these little.

Pocket computers that carry the entire corpus of human knowledge in our pockets every day that we can access. And even if we use it for cat videos on TikTok or reels about baking, actually reels about baking is great news. I mean, it helps us all be creative and eat interesting things. That we live in a world where there’s a lot of things that are going on that to are to be celebrated.

And so we try in this progress report and we try at The Progress Network and we try with What Could Go Right? in the newsletter and all the things that we do to highlight those things in the belief that if you lose sight of all that is going well and all that. Incredible human beings are doing to make the future a better place.

It’s easy to fall into the pit of despair, the MA of anxiety and the concatenation of crisis. And so on that note, Emma Varvaloucas, what good news do you have for us this week?

Emma: Call Canton Nation. Huh? That’s a new one.

That’s a new one.

Zachary: Look it up in that little pocket computer you have.

Emma: I will look it up in that little pocket computer. I also learned a new word the other day, which was Prolix, which I hadn’t heard before.

Zachary: That’s good.

Emma: So here we are. Two words in one week. Anyway, I forgot what we were talking about. I was so distracted by the vocabulary. What am I here for?

Zachary: My name?

Emma: Yeah, not sure. So let’s start with something that’s very much in the news right now, which is Japan and tsunamis traveling all over the world.

I’m sure people have not missed the news that a, I think it was 8.8 magnitude earthquake.

Zachary: That is, that might be the largest earthquake ever measured, someone said.

Emma: Oh, really? I know it’s definitely the largest since 2011, but I don’t know about largest ever. But anyway, a really big earthquake occurred this week in Japan and they were able to evacuate basically the whole coast of the country. There was large evacuations in Hawaii and other places, and it was a really interesting timing for me because I had just read this article all about how Japan had just finished its cutting edge, best in class, early warning system for earthquakes and tsunamis, which I’m gonna assume was very much so in play here.

So they have actually wired the ocean with thousands of sensors all connected through fiber optic cables so that they can monitor the subduction zones in the ocean in real time. Essentially where the tectonic plates are meeting, they have been able to monitor seismic activity on land for quite a while.

Monitoring the ocean activity in real time is new. It’s a project that they started, I think it was after 2011, that massive earthquake that struck that and tsunami that caused a lot of devastation. They just finished, completing the entire network in June, so in time for this massive earthquake.

And they have now a 20 second warning for earthquakes, which doesn’t sound like very long. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s not very long. But it’s a critical amount of time to say like, stop your trains and get people out of danger situations. And they now have a 20 minute warning for tsunamis.

So I’m hoping that there are some news organizations out there that are going to delve more into how the early warning system and its completion played into what happened this week, but I haven’t seen much of anything yet.

Zachary: And Japan again did this presumably after Fukushima and, well, I mean after centuries of having to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis,

Emma: Essentially started this post millennium. Like all of this tech is relatively new at this expanded system they started to build after 2011, and they just finished it in June.

Zachary: Moving on. I mean, not earthquake, kind of moving on, but moving on.

Emma: Moving on. Let’s talk about Ghana. I thought this was super interesting. I feel like people in kind of rich societies are very used to amber alerts and things blaring on their phones. Very used to having an organized system with the police to look for missing persons. Although of course it is nowhere near perfect.

Learned very recently that Ghana. Formed a missing person’s unit in their police system only four years ago. And the reason why this is in the news now is because there is actually an Amber alert system that functions using meta like the META’S properties. So over Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram, which I did not know.

I’ve never seen it. Greece is actually a part of it, and Ghana just became the 36th country to join the program. So they have successfully, you know, found over 300 people since the formation of this missing unit. Missing persons unit four years ago. They have the addition of the Facebook program now. And again, it’s one of those things where because it’s not really used in more rich countries, you don’t hear about it.

The, some of the good these tech companies are doing. And I’m not saying that this gets meta, you know, out of all of its things that has been complicit throughout the years, that neither are saying that it’s a net positive. I’m just saying there are some things that they do that are helpful in particular for countries where the tech and the organization and the infrastructure, social infrastructure isn’t quite where it is, for instance, say in the United States or in Europe. 

Zachary: Yeah it’s also good. Good to remember that. For all. As you just said, the critique of meta and privacy and how it’s functioned or not functioned in the political world or the news and information ecosystem still does some really good things. It is a platform on which many people do many good things, whether or not you like it as a company and.

Has become completely lost in the fray. Right? At first, Facebook was, wow, this is great. It connects families and it gives, it allows for greater virtual communities that would’ve been hard to form and coalesce. And then for years it was, wow, this is great. It allows for more voices and democracy. I remember the whole Arab spraying, I mean, Facebook was only part of the social media nexus.

Then Twitter was as well, and in the past, let’s say five to seven to 10 years, we have completely done. The 180 of these are destructive and harmful and they’re just greedy tech bros who care only about some utopian vision of the world that will leave a lot of people behind. And look, the utopian vision was excessive and the dystopian vision is equally excessive.

So it’s good to remember that there is some mid ground there.

Emma: Yeah I also like topoint out stuff that Google does around wildfires and like the live wildfire tracking, which has been very personally useful to me in Greece. I use it on Google Maps, so there’s lots of things that are affecting our lives positively from social media for sure. Final one for today, I’m sure people have not been following with great interest, the development of birth control pills for men, but actually the industry has some legs. There is a gel. They’ve just finished their phase two clinical trial, but the one I wanna talk about today is a hormone free pill that has just passed its safety trial. So they haven’t done efficacy trials yet. Those are next. But the fact that it is passed a safety trial.

And again these are small trials just to make sure that like it’s not gonna harm you. Now we gotta check to see if they work. But it is a landmark in and of itself because it’s the first birth control pill that has ever passed a safety trial. There are lots of other things in development, but this pill and the gel that I mentioned before are the two that are furthest along and they’re both hormone free young men out there.

They essentially temporarily stops for production. If anyone’s curious how that works.

Zachary: How do we know it’s temporary?

Emma: Well, that’s what they’re doing the safety trial for.

There does seem to be interest though, and I don’t know, maybe these are like industry led surveys or something like that, but in the article that I’ve read about it, there does seem to be a willingness.

Zachary: I would think so.

Emma: Younger generations. Yeah.

Zachary: Yeah, there’s absolutely no reason for there not to be, and that is definitely good news. We’re recording this during the week when the Trump administration is reportedly destroying $10 million worth of contraception that was supposed to be distributed by USAID and is not. So the push and pull, ha, no pun intended there of these issues obviously continues.

Emma: There’s nothing that I can add. Gonna let that stand.

Zachary: And on that wah wah note we will be back with you next week. Please send us your own ideas, stories, things that you have noticed in the news that deserve to be underscored and highlighted. Send it to hello@theprogressnetwork.org and we will try to highlight it if we are able to, and if Emma thinks that it deserves highlighting, and where highlighting came from. But there you go. Hope you’re enjoying a warm, restful summer week wherever this podcast finds you.