911 Moving To P2P
BBC – Cool idea at the University of Maryland –
“The 911 telephone system functions effectively when there are traffic accidents, health emergencies or small fires, but when large numbers of people are involved it does not handle the capacity,” said Professor Shneiderman.
Citizens could leave text, video and photos on the site of emergencies, natural disasters and terror attacks.
“Citizen reporters would report to a centralised authority who will take care of emergency response coordination and allocate scarce resources of police fire and medical services,” said Professor Shneiderman.
Moving to community based resiliency is great – but if we take on more of the burden we should be able to keep, on a per-contribution basis, a portion of our payment (taxes) right?
More On Prizes
NYT – Looks like the VC’s are struggling with this –
Prizes may be of limited value to venture capitalists, who ultimately are less interested in groundbreaking science than they are in concrete and market-ready technologies, according to some technology investors and academics.
“There’s no market merit to any of this,” said Paul S. Kedrosky, executive director of the William J. von Liebig Center, which studies venture capital trends. He argues that the prizes might be good for generating press, or buttressing the egos of donors and winners, but not particularly valuable at leading to profit-capable companies.
Particularly when trying to create the next massive payoff –
Yet Mr. Raffel, echoing concerns of other venture capitalists, has some concerns about whether more ambitious and costlier prizes make sense. His wariness is that if prizes rise into the millions, venture capitalists are going to want some guarantee that they will have an option to invest in the winner. And if a lot of venture capitalists wind up donating prize money to the same pot, that could create conflicts over who has the right to sign up the winner.
Afghanistan + Opium
WaTimes also connects the dots –
The spring opium harvest will soon begin in Afghanistan. So will a murderous spring offensive by the Taliban and its allies against U.S. and coalition troops. The two events are directly related, for the Taliban and the warlords are funded by the billions of dollars deriving from the massive, illegal opium trade.
But the solution outlined in the piece is flawed. And this misjudgment of the situation stems from this perspective on current policy regarding the opium trade –
Our anti-narcotics policy has long been hobbled by conflicting views and bureaucratic battles between the various players, including the Departments of Defense and State, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and other U.S. agencies, along with our NATO allies, especially the British. There is little prospect these long-entrenched divisions will be reconciled by themselves.
By blaming the current inability to combat the opium trade on interagency conflict the House Foreign Affairs Committee (of which the author is the ranking member) is attempting to “build a better mousetrap” instead of innovating. Real solutions – cooption, medical use, buy and store – exist, but it doesn’t look like they will get any traction.
High Return Rocket Investment
Times – The Taliban leverages 107mm rockets to disrupt hydroelectic operations –
It took the Taleban only 14 cheap rockets to bring to a halt one of Afghanistan’s most prestigious reconstruction projects.
Hours after Royal Marines in Kajaki staged a dramatic mission to clear insurgents from positions north of a strategic dam, contractors responsible for its reconstruction were ordered to evacuate after the rockets were fired.
The clear signal of defiance from the Taleban caused little consternation among either the Marines or Afghan engineers working at the dam’s hydroelectric station near by.
However, two foreign contractors overseeing rebuilding, an American and an Australian, were evacuated on the first available helicopter. Until they return Kajaki’s hydroelectric reconstruction is stalled.
Rewarding Failure
NYT –
Last June, Douglas J. Feith, a former top Pentagon official involved in planning the Iraq war, was hired by a Defense Department graduate school for military officers and diplomats, with a four-year contract that was to pay him half a million dollars, Pentagon records show.
And the job did not last long; the contract was terminated about a month later, records show.
The process by which he got the job –
[In his resume] He concluded, “I have the experience to meet and perform the government’s statement of work,” and he listed his salary requirement for an initial year and three option years as $501,774.
A month later, he was awarded the contract for the precise amount, according to Defense Department documents, which give no indication that anyone else had been considered. The initial payment, covering July to September of last year, was specified at $37,375. Mr. Thomas, the university spokesman, said he received no payments.
Great that this thing fell through, bizarre that it happened in the first place.