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ensuring our future. More and more transparency and objective reasoning on
environmental issues must be organized.
It seems that continuous individual care and reports on health evaluation are the
only promising way to verify “safety”. So, data-centric approaches with transparent
evaluation procedures are the key to overcome the chaos, which is suggesting a
necessity for new paradigm on our society as well as sciences. It is a challenge to
make our society thoughtful and tough.
8.4
International Collaboration
from the Fukushima Accident
Big Earthquake, Big Tsunami and Big Accident, which may happen once in a
millennium, have forced us to reconfirm the weakness of our modern society
mainly supported by oil and also the weakness of our technology before the nature.
Our history to apply mechanics is just 500 years, our history to apply the thermo-
dynamics to learn the earth and technology “cooling based on theory” is just
200 years in age, and our history to use nuclear energy is just half a century.
Valuable lessons learned during and after the TMI and Chernobyl accidents
should be reevaluated in order to prepare a set of remedies for Fukushima with
different time scales and different radiation exposures, in particular paying atten-
tion to socio-psychological aspects. We now have a variety of information chan-
nels and contents that must be used to maximum advantage. The dissemination of
data and knowledge is far faster and wider than when TMI and Chernobyl
occurred, which has various unexpected side effects as well as benefits. The
accuracy, timing, and context of the disseminated data must be observed carefully,
and advice for timely improvements will become lessons for the future. What
general public and active people can add is an analysis of reaction of people to
disaster and behavior in critical situation. Reaction and behavior of Japanese
people and international friendships and sympathy on disaster of 11 March and
Fukushima accidents are to be studied and lessons used around world as an
example of peoples behavior. Supports from socio-psychologists are necessary.
And it is important to observe that a new feature of the society where we have
increased number of sensors, increased number of data sources, meta-language/
knowledge/infrastructure for data sharing and exchange, evaluation of data
reliability in an era of real-time and near real-time observation and reporting.
Diffusion of data, quality of data, semantics of data and contexts of data are
interacting each other far more dynamically in our information society that
makes changes in public behavior and perceptions.
We are now observing data-driven-real-time-immediate effects on people in
emergency situations, which requires us a very careful and deep consideration on
its path for the future. A part of the tragedy is some of the media reports, which are
somewhat unnecessarily and essentially articulate the fears of the “unknown” and
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