Ukrainians teach lifesaving self-reliance to all
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Surviving in Ukraine -- or any crisis -- requires seeing, and preparing for, what's beyond the horizon.
That is, to endure and then thrive, people need to see beyond the horizon for problems coming their way, and what solutions are available – or that have yet to be created that require innovation. And as a famous basketball coach noted, “The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” And winning against Russia and its use of “winter as a weapon” in Ukraine will require self-reliance on Ukrainians doing lifesaving measures before crises become too urgent and too late.
But in order to prepare, people have to perform during, but preferably before an emergency – that is, they must be able to start, persevere, and finish these lifesaving measures, procedures, and safety checklists to get themselves the essentials of heat, electricity, and the maintaining of health and communications this winter. In addition, there are those less visible, even invisible, issues that haven't yet been solved for those in Ukraine and those in need around the world. This has led to crucial discoveries from our Ukraine team as well in safety for individuals and also for the globe, as both climate disasters seem to be worsening and also he threat of major war (including with nuclear fallout or attacks on energy grids). We will be explaining the innovations related to these discoveries further below.
This performing of these checklists needs to be done by people, so simply put, it requires human performance, which enables people to understand the problem, find effective solutions, and then make sure that those solutions can be put in place and with high reliability.
Another complicating factor is that, given the time urgency and delivery delays, based on our experience delivering protective wear, smartphones, and various electric generators to Ukraine (including by an HROC member who went to Kyiv), we have found that survival and safety in Ukraine are only feasible through self-reliance of Ukrainians to make do-it-yourself (DIY) solutions. However, our research shows self-reliance is dependent on human performance.
HROC Objectives for Mission
HROC is helping people in this preparation, both by improving Ukrainians’ health and safety in shelters by explaining to key leaders the upcoming problems and creating checklists we are converting to videos to help people be more self-reliant, not just with DIY solutions, but even more importantly, how to improve human performance.
Beyond shelters, it is helping when people can't reach an adequate shelter in time (which is over 80% of the time, based on the circumstances of one city which grew dramatically after the Cold War ended, so after shelters were thought to be obsolete) and need to create their own “in-house safety area” (IHSA), as well as create their own evacuation kit (our HROC EvacPac checklists and procedures) during their journeys to their destinations when displaced – an ever-increasing likelihood for cities like Kyiv and the areas around it that are planning evacuations if the power grid, which is running out of replacement parts, eventually collapses, or if there is another invasion of Kyiv and its northern suburbs attempted this winter, given the troop buildups in Belarus.
Our first major project to showcase to Ukraine and the world is in Irpin, a city of 100,000 people in its metro are (and the fastest growing city in Ukraine since 2000) which sustained brutality and torture early in the war. We have teamed with the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Markushyn (who garners significant attention around Kyiv as he is a war hero, as is also our Ukraine office’s team leader, Douglas Busby, who was awarded a medal of valor in helping defend Irpin in March) to help his city, and then apply to what we develop into helping the vulnerable areas of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The project focuses on the pending problems the mayor faces with his shelters, including simply not having enough adequate, reachable ones for up to 80% of his residents (given the city’s growth occurred after the Cold War, when bomb shelters were considered no longer necessary). We informed and persuaded the mayor on the unexpected dangers of what we term “suboptimal air composition” (SAC) in his shelters and at homes during a time of crisis that will adversely affect both health and human performance through the winter and in the event of Russian escalation, including nuclear, which he himself, in the interview he gave us, voiced as a significant concern.
Our team also discovered the unexpected benefit beyond direct survival and health from addressing SAC, which is the hidden problem that we can solve as well: Poor reliability in civil defense measures, inability to achieve self-reliance, a rise in harmful or catastrophic errors, and a drop in overall human performance – and that will likely cause preventable deaths.
Your contributions to this Public Safety Scientific Study Mission to Ukraine will not only help a Ukrainian team that faces life-threatening hardships and inability to do their regular jobs (given Ukraine’s economy is down by 30%, worse than any recession or depression the U.S. has faced) to get income. But in spite of these hardships, this team with their colleagues in the U.S. is still making discoveries, even in the shelters where they try and withstand constant attacks. And these discoveries can help all not only Ukrainians, but also people all over the world, especially in the areas of human performance improvement for resilience and survival in any disaster or crisis that people may face in their lives. And they will make videos to show how.
HROC Researchers’ Experience, including in Ukraine
Reducing preventable deaths is an area of intense study for HROC, and where we have proven expertise. Our team of scientists and former military changed U.S. Defense Department policy in High Reliability relating to task saturation and cognitive overload, proving a reduction of 87% in preventable deaths at the Air Force Base specialized in human performance for the U.S. Military (which is Wright-Patterson AFB), becoming the cover story of a peer reviewed journal based on these results, and also winning a U.S. Military innovation award for safety. The key to the solution was increasing cognitive bandwidth (i.e., the thinking capacity available, above current load and below the capacity limit). This acquired expertise, some of it from research our team pioneered, is also what we have been contributing to Ukraine through our office there to help get attention of key figures such as the mayor of Irpin.
How did HROC's team get to what they have calculated as feasible solutions for survival and safety in Ukraine? By learning what can work and what won't, given the limitations and threats people confront in the nation. Our office in Kyiv opened in May 2022 upon our team’s first visit, and then was registered in October 2022 (registration # in Ukraine: 44840272). Our own preparation for our mission to improve the preparation process for all Ukrainians is based on guidance from our Ukraine team’s efforts – as shown below in the links to video and pictures. They include:
1. Shipments of multiple items, including protective wear delivery (for logistics, and also to help for blast protection), delivery of crank generator and smartphones for tests, and their challenges (e.g., lithium batteries are very difficult to ship and creating more delays):
2. Understanding the challenge of Irpin’s shelters:
3. The request from Irpin’s mayor:
4. Our prediction that electricity generation would become critical, so we delivered and tested solar generators and hand-crank generator charging of smartphones -- only reliable source of power 2 of our team members have, they noted:
5. Making portable heating safer: Rocket stove to increase fuel options (i.e., wood burning stoves, for that subset of homes in Ukraine that have them, are not safe to burn) -- and reduces carbon monoxide risk given the air coming from under the combustion area:
6. Checklist and Procedures for Survival Essentials (Draft -- to be verified upon HROC’s Chief Scientist's arrival in Ukraine for DIY feasibility there) for people to download to their smartphones:
7. The biggest problem we uncovered, and greatest contribution we can make can be found in this document (with the 2 most important figures from the document being placed directly below):
Figure 1. Cognitive bandwidth is critical to giving people the means to start, persevere, and finish survival procedures and safety checklists, as well as do problem-solving.
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Figure 2. What our goal is in our Public Safety Scientific Study Mission to Ukraine – find ways to increase cognitive bandwidth, narrowing in Ukraine due to stress, cold, and other factors.
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As Plato so aptly put it, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Inventions and innovations are at least one silver lining in the dark clouds of war hovering over Ukraine, because there is a lot of necessity. We believe Ukrainians and their allies could also get more inventions by adding cognitive bandwidth after necessity.
Our team is identifying and helping teach how to not only better survive their catastrophe, but also for the rest of the world to survive disasters (whether man-made or natural), and to reduce crises already existing, such as disease, poverty, fraying social cohesion, and the rise of greenhouse gases. We believe (as one might assume from the name of our nonprofit NGO) that what is most important is that which enables self-reliance and ensures high reliability in achieving these goals.
The famous Pennsylvanian and a Founding Father of America, Benjamin Franklin, stated that “Early to bed and early to rise makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wise.” What other factor (besides sleep schedules) does this? Based on our research, including in Ukraine, it turns out everything related to human performance – and human performance relies on cognitive bandwidth. Thus, the only real solutions, based on our Defense research, are: 1. Raise capacity limits (i.e., the mind’s tipping point), 2. Lower cognitive load (e.g., from anxiety and checklist overload), or 3. Do both #1 and #2, which is our highest priority in our Ukraine mission.
Our first key discovery from Ukraine was that self-reliance requires human performance to help see ahead, prepare better, and be ready for problems or for opportunities that lie ahead.
However, the second key discovery (and perhaps most immediate value for a quick win, and most important long-term for the planet’s climate change crisis) is how suboptimal air composition is a rising threat in Ukraine, and also for the world, not just due to health and climate effects, but also for resilience, thinking capacity, and human performance effects.
One example that had gotten us thinking was that our team has said that even with just the regular pollution monitoring mechanisms (not the detailed sensors, such as low-level carbon monoxide detectors and carbon dioxide levels), their newsfeeds in Kyiv constantly indicate days of poor air quality. And on these poor days, the levels of depression, anxiety, and tenacity, they have observed, are indeed impacted. Clearly, there could be other confounding variables (e.g., missile strikes that create fires and their carbon-based emission while also depressing people), but research on suboptimal air found drops in cognitive function even in controlled environments (and where there was no war). Thus, it may be a key cause of at least some of the “paralysis” that sufficient preparation confronts that they have witnessed, including at times, with themselves – and by changing it, we could perhaps give greater resilience and reliability. We believe it at least warrants a scientific study and tests HROC’s Chief Scientist will be performing on himself to assess the level of impact (e.g., reaction times, calculation capabilities, and memory recall) from moving to optimal from suboptimal air compositions.
What are the consequences or “downstream effects” of this drop in cognitive bandwidth? Lack of bandwidth also puts people at much greater risk later. How? As Figure 1 shows, it can make even starting a survival procedure seem too daunting, thus demotivating people. Then even if one starts the procedure, it can lead to misremembering a key item if you don’t have the procedure on your phone or a piece of paper and have to rely on memory (i.e., it makes recall harder), or it leads to misinterpretation of an instruction. This leads to errors, some of which can be catastrophic Finally, consider our DIY survival procedure (or any government procedures, etc.). They assume a certain set of resources. However, what if not all of them are available, and a substitute must be used, or a workaround needs to be created? Then that procedure will require some level of "resourcefulness" (i.e., using what you have available to you at the moment) by the person, and thus some ability to put pieces together / connect the dots in one's head (i.e., problem-solving creativity and synthesizing). Without cognitive bandwidth, this becomes much more difficult, and perhaps not possible when a person faces a “panic” situation (not necessarily an “emotional” or “frantic” panic, but rather a task saturation panic, so more like a “brain freeze”). So even if preparation is started, it does not get completed adequately and thus more errors. In any of these cases, the result is the same – a preventable problem, perhaps even a preventable catastrophe.
How about an example of the downstream benefits to thinking ahead and preparing? One is from our team members in Ukraine, Dasha and her husband (who is also a volunteer for HROC). Because of HROC’s prediction from thinking ahead of energy grid strains, and thus the future need for electricity generation, HROC-USA sent her a crank generator (seen in one of the video links above charging a phone) in preparation for the winter. In November, they commented it was the only reliable power they have for their smartphones, given the unpredictable and extended electrical blackouts they face. It also led to our creative problem-solving “DIY survival essential procedure” for creating electricity at a rapid and large scale for the entire nation this winter, which is our method that can use wrecked cars’ alternators, or instead damaged appliances (e.g., refrigerators, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners and blenders, using the electric motors inside, many of which enable getting electricity for not only phones but even drones at sufficient wattage, to create a crank-based generator). This is to make the same types of generators that we have already proved are highly effective in Ukraine.
Solution for “Changing the Way People Think” on Carbon Emissions and Human Performance
HROC-Ukraine's public safety R&D team is testing what we call a "hyper-localized carbon capture" (HCC) method to capture carbon near or at its source or where it may pose its greatest risk. The process is based on one of the most abundant and lowest cost materials in the Earth's crust. That substance is limestone (which is comprised mostly of calcium carbonate) and its derivatives.
HCC can be used also as a "technique" to enable storing energy (though not nearly as powerful as lithium batteries, but not nearly as scarce nor costly either), then generate heat, and finally capture carbon in the form of carbon dioxide. This last point means that other harmful carbon-based compounds, like carbon monoxide or methane, must first be oxidized into carbon dioxide. However, our team focused on this mission has factored that into the solution as well.
Or it can be automated into a "technology" that is encapsulated by a machine we term a QCHEIM Micro-Energy Plants™, or MEPs. HROC Ukraine plans to manufacture in our Ukraine office these MEPs in order to help rebuild Ukraine's economy, as an example of discoveries and innovations that Ukraine was able to help create with its partners in the U.S. as a result of the war.
Inventions like these techniques and technologies are similar to how during World War 2, the inventions like radar, penicillin, computers, and atomic energy were all pioneered – as a result of necessity.
Ultimately, this helps not only Ukraine -- and the world -- better survive the war effort and the energy and carbon emission havoc the war has unleased, but also help create jobs in Ukraine and in the U.S. from the devices, and create additional tax base, such as from the 10% in royalties from the invented machine's patent pending licensed design that the Ukraine office will generate from sales of the machines.
Manufacture of these machines will be done through our nonprofit NGO (in Irpin, Pittsburgh, and Kviv, which are the regions where HROC’s current offices are located), in order to create jobs in local communities, where DIY versions can even be done at people's homes for themselves, or to sell as units to others. Given its DIY-capable nature, it is also the fastest way to make it more ubiquitous, and thus fastest way to help society and the planet.
But it also can help the local communities where they are created (including DIY) in other ways, such as to improve physical and mental health, and, with the greater cognitive function, education as well, as well as business productivity, and societal issues like adherence to laws (i.e., reduce crime, similar to the Lead-Crime Hypothesis of why crime started to fall once the toxin lead was removed from the atmosphere with the use of unleaded gas), and other benefits that help any indoor locations in cities suffering from a "CO2 dome" (which form because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and tends to hover in place, especially in valleys or where there is insufficient wind).
Toward the war effort -- or, more aptly, given the history of terrorism and war fueled by petrostate dollars, the "maintaining peace" effort -- the Micro-Energy Plants could then become part of a global "Energy Victory Gardens" effort to have alternatives to fossil fuels, thus reducing dependence on unpredictable and dangerous petrostates, but also helping neutralize carbon emissions when fossil fuels are the only realistic (and sometimes humane, when energy is desperately needed and there are shortages or extreme price inflation) option and must have carbon emissions converted at the point of combustion (given that, in the U.S., over 80% of its energy needs require something to be burned).
India's former leader and legendary peace activist, Mahatma Gandhi, was quoted as saying, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Our discovery in Ukraine of personalizing the value of reducing carbon-based gases, as part of the way to increase cognitive bandwidth, can allow everyone to be part of the change many people want to see and that the planet needs in terms of reduced carbon emissions – but for many different reasons and benefits now, not just one (i.e., the planet and its climate). It can also be for the individual humans that impact the planet in so many different ways, in terms of their health and productivity, which have personal economic benefits as well.
It can even be the change in society as it leads to people that think better, improving education, reducing crime, and making them more resilient to protect themselves and others, as it is a society less susceptible to misinformation and irrationality – both of which are all parts of Russia's broader war that includes "information warfare" – so as not to be misled by Russian disinformation campaigns that are meant to stoke hate and division meant to undermine the free world. In short, carbon capture, and other techniques and technologies being pioneered in Ukraine will help that nation and can help the rest of the world at the same time. In addition, for society, teaching self-reliance via human performance is what can make people better and safer, not just happier. Changing the way people think to not only address greenhouse gases and climate change, but to also add social cohesion by broadening of minds (i.e., giving people more mental space to think and solve problems and understand other people better) is simply one more unexpected benefit learned from working with Ukrainians focused on their survival. As another Greek philosopher, Aristotle, pointed out, often you do indeed “derive wisdom through suffering.”
The most immediate benefit offered by this set of inventions from HROC-Ukraine's work is that it could increase the carbon capture capability all over the world – as it expands and personalizes the reasons to do carbon capture and optimize air composition beyond climate change to improve lives more quickly and tangibly by reducing carbon-based gases in the air we breathe down to an individual's level, impacting immunity, physiology, and cognitive function (impacting each of those items by 50% or more), enabling Ukrainians and the rest of the free world to prepare better for the long arduous winter ahead (e.g., more energy independence), but also enabling people all over the world to become more "healthy, wealthy, and wise" – giving them a reason to think of Ukraine long into the future for the contributions they are making. The cognitive bandwidth benefits including greater initiative, better remembering, and more problem-solving creativity, help enable and ensure greater self-reliance for everyone, and not just during disasters, but also for when people need to overcome any crisis they may face now – or most importantly, as they now have the thinking capacity to think ahead, that they want to prevent problems that are beyond the horizon.
Project Plan
Irpin is where our project will initially focus to then attempt to scale up by spiraling out to Kyiv and the rest of the nation, via our public service announcement / training videos for the techniques to improve human performance and also our safety checklists.
The nature of HROC Chief Scientist Terry Rajasenan’s mission to Ukraine in January has several dimensions. The first is to deliver the sensors, test them, get readings at different locations and circumstances, then use the electronic sensor products as baselines for the self-reliant DIY solutions that people can create.
For example, his own experimental testing and research on standard carbon monoxide (CO) detectors showed that it takes at least 4 minutes for the detectors to trigger -- even when deadly levels of CO. This means that many people (especially those with cardiac conditions, the elderly, etc.) may pass out, collapse, and get fatal levels of the deadly gas before they can even be warned.
Our Ukraine-office team has designed two solutions with the help of our chief scientist, one more "reactive" that uses a health-based symptom checklist, and the other more "proactive" that uses "chromophore" tool based on household items that may be possible for people in Ukraine to make. The proactive solution offers the ability warn earlier at the source of the risk, or near the people who may be asleep (carbon monoxide is called a "silent killer" where people basically fall asleep before dying -- but it is especially a risk when people are sleeping, since they don't realize the symptoms when asleep). These solutions allow more people to have the capabilities of a carbon monoxide detector (a device they may not currently have, or be able to realistically find and afford). Then there needed to be an approach to reduce carbon monoxide levels without the need for the metal platinum, which is scarce in Ukraine, and costly anywhere (and hence why catalytic converter thefts are increasing).
But this also applies to the rest of the world too, where CO poisonings happen -- and at a 9 times greater rate during disasters when many people are using portable generators, burning wet wood, or trying to conserve heat and fuel by burning indoors.
The second part of the mission is to train the public, including how to better learn and follow through on the "survival essentials" training we are trying to instill in the at-risk Ukrainian population. How will we best serve the estimated 10 million or more Ukrainians that will likely be under attack or displaced this winter? The well-known proverb of "give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." In other words, our goal is to educate through the power of video, and also the power of personalities, in this case, heroic defenders of Ukraine who not only want to save the people of Ukraine, but also who want to the people of Ukraine to help save each other, relying on one another and performing at a higher level to save their families and fellow citizens.
Budget for Personnel
To accomplish these objectives of showcasing and raising awareness of these human performance methods in this Ukraine Winter Initiative of HROC, there is a budget of $21,100 is for the 5-person team (2 of whom are volunteering) for the 2-month winter initiative, with the following itemization:
$2,000 for the delivery of the equipment, sensors, and other tools needed for the mission done to cover the expenses of Terry Rajasenan, who is volunteering as HROC’s Chief Scientist pro bono to spend the time also training the team on all of the deliveries once he arrives and doing the testing and verification of the innovations.
$10,000 budget for the paid team (3 people for $1,250 per month each for 2 months, for a subtotal of $7,000, with the remaining 3,000 for purchases of supplies, fuel for travel, and misc. expenses, or to be shifted to the additional work in the event more can be done and the team needs the extra pay). This will be for producing as many videos as can be made in that time, but at least 20 Ukrainian and English videos by the end of the 2-month project, with the highest impact ones frontloaded in order to maximize the lives saved or significantly improved during the depths of the winter. The team will also be assisting and supporting the Chief Scientist on his evaluation and refinement on the minimum of 8 DIY innovation subprojects they are testing, refining, and verifying inside Ukraine, that they have designed and researched and tested outside Ukraine, and where they intend to have at least one if not more breakthroughs by the end of his travel to Ukraine. Note that this $10,000 is also humanitarian in nature, since it is very difficult for them to get new work at this time, and this would provide the team enough money to survive the winter, and in a more “relevant” yet still valuable job of showing how our lifesaving techniques and DIY methods can help save their lives, so others can learn from them using these Ukraine-produced videos by an experienced video production team and the award-winning documentary filmmaker leading our Ukraine office.
$5,000 budget for equipment and sensors (estimated $2,000), and other tools / license purchases and technical support (estimated $3,000) to be able to have set up the office as a full HROC lab, our team’s van as a mobile lab, and both office and van as a mission control for the shelters and eventually the IHSAs. This includes the high reliability technologies and geolocation maps used in Defense projects (i.e., the one that changed U.S. Defense Department policy in High Reliability due to a reduction of preventable deaths by 87% in its flagship study) from the partner organizations, which are contributing at severely discounted rates on most items, and no-cost on other items. Examples of the equipment include a low-level carbon monoxide detector, hygrometer, pulse oximeter / other vital sign and diagnostic devices
$2,000 is for any specialized consultants that may be needed in the project, such as accounting and legal expenses
$1,000 is for overhead and miscellaneous items including supplies and services
$1,100 is for fees needed by PayPal Giving Fund to process donations, and 2.5% for interest expenses to advance funds on the delays associated with receiving the donated funds and other fees associated with the transfer and distribution of the money inside Ukraine
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$21,100 Total to optimally implement the 2-month project
Thank you for any support you can give to our HROC-Ukraine team’s mission.
Organizer
Terry Rajasenan
Organizer
Ellwood City, PA
High Reliability Organization Council
Registered nonprofit
Donations are typically 100% tax deductible in the US.
