proposal abstract

[dr_tectonic]

So I just spent all evening writing a huge long summary of what we're planning to do for this grant proposal, which I then condensed down to a little over a page as the first pass at the abstract of the proposal, and when I went back and re-read it, I think it actually didn't suck. So yay, I think. Let's hope the other people involved also think it doesn't suck; their turn to edit now. [We want money to model people's hurricane evacuation decisions, BTW.]

I also did a bunch of estimating of what, exactly, I was planning to do for my contribution to it all and how much time it is likely to take. I used the best-worst-most likely estimation thingy, and I think I have a number that's not totally fake. And I remembered to include a temporal overhead factor in my estimate, so maybe it's actually even vaguely in the right ballpark.

Big grant proposal. Eek. Here's hoping it won't suck too much...

Comments

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

You can have money to model my hurricane evacuation decisions!

Good luck with it. If there's one thing I know from working with you on projects in the past, it's that you excel at composing clear and concise prose and especially at boiling writing down to its essentials. I'm sure it's great.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Easy!

Do you live in Colorado? (Yes) -> Do not evacuate.

Check plz!

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you folks probably have even less worry about hurricanes than we do. We at least get the tail ends of the biggies.

[Then again, you get avalanches sometimes.]

Good luck. I think that my recent award means I don't have to apply for any grants for 3 or 4 years. Phew.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Then again, you get avalanches sometimes.

But not where anybody lives, really.

Our big hazards round here are flash floods, wildfire, and drought.
(Well, and tornadoes, but they're mostly out in the flatland.)

When you do get the tail end of a hurricane, what does it do? Anything besides dumping lots and lots of rain?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

That's mostly it. They do sometimes spawn tornadoes, but the real consequence is flood.

[dpolicar]

So, just out of cynical curiosity -- is your expectation that, having modelled people's hurricane evacuation decisions, we'll actually be able to design systems that cause people to evacuate from the paths of hurricanes in useful ways? Or that, having decided that people's behavior in these cases is ineluctably stupid, we'll wash our hands of the whole thing and let the dumb bastards drown?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Our hope is that the model will be useful for figuring out what factors the evacuation decision is most sensitive to. So people can at least attempt to pull on the right levers when they try to come up with policies that will improve the usefulness of people's responses.

The answer might turn out to be "you can't affect the things that matter most". It's a widely-accepted fact in the community that a certain fraction of people will always evacuate, and a certain fraction simply will not, no matter what.

But we're hoping that we'll have some insight into the dynamics of things like shadow evacuation and the Katrina Effect (where people who would have been safer staying at home evacuated for hurricane Rita because they were freaked out by all the Katrina coverage.)

[dpolicar]

you should write a wikipedia entry for "shadow evacuation"