Yeah those are in development. In fact we're part of a project led by the group at NASA that just got an award within the last few days to work on really developing and doing a better job testing those kind of indicators. I mean after Puerto Rico that team has been experimenting with different measures. And you can do some simple things with the relatively raw data, but trying to get calibrated measures of power differences is going to take a little more to work to have something that certainly the scientists help interpret in an appropriate way. And linking that to the existing baseline population data, housing data, trying to differentiate residential and non-residential, urban and rural areas. There's a lot of issues with interpreting that data, so unfortunately it's not done now, but part of the objective of the project is to develop that kind of near real-time service.
Getting a good census in the U.S. and around the world is definitely really important need. It provides kind of the core reference data that the whole community uses. Now there is an emerging set of alternative sources of data that people are starting to explore. One is on the remote sensing side. We now can use radar, night-time lights, high resolution remote sensing and others to do a better job of detecting settlements down to the individual building. Linking that to population, you could start using cell phone data, internet site traffic and other kinds of measures. And we have been looking into it, but certainly there is some big issues about people who might be as well connected or active internet users and so forth. So there is certainly a real danger of leaving people behind; missing people if you don't conduct a census. Certainly the transition from the seminal census, which has been trimming the number of questions and shifting to this tool called the American Community Survey that many of you are probably familiar with, has some challenges, but obviously that is one of the ways you have to adapt and think about ways of computing the better data you have some regions to other areas where you may use some of these alternative indicators to try to guess what's there. But that's still an evolving science.
Well I think the data itself is useful for a range of decision making, being both in disaster long-term mitigation as well as response. In New York as you may know there is efforts to develop green roofs and swales to absorb water better and increase not only the greenness but the drainage. So this kind of data can certainly be useful in trying to look at where the need is high for that type of approaches that will have multiple benefits both for flood potential but also for general urban environmental improvement and that sort of thing. So yeah these data can be useful. I'm kind of interested certainly from an emergency management viewpoint. What would be high priority things to try to bring in, and if you did, how would they have to look to be useful for any particular decisions. We're data providers. We're looking at the multiple uses of these kinds of data if made available in say near real time as services but one question is, "How often do they have to be updated, what's the resolution that would be desirable, how do you couple data of this type with other ancillary information that may be more useful?"