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Government

On “keeping America competitive”…

Norman Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp. and lead author of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited:
Rapidly Approaching Category 5, appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box last Friday:

From the report’s description:

So where does America stand relative to its position of five years ago when the Gathering Storm book was prepared? The unanimous view of the authors is that our nation’s outlook has worsened. The present volume, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited, explores the tipping point America now faces. Addressing America’s competitiveness challenge will require many years if not decades; however, the requisite federal funding of much of that effort is about to terminate.

Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited provides a snapshot of the work of the government and the private sector in the past five years, analyzing how the original recommendations have or have not been acted upon, what consequences this may have on future competitiveness, and priorities going forward. In addition, readers will find a series of thought- and discussion-provoking factoids–many of them alarming–about the state of science and innovation in America.

Funding for cancelled Moon program continues

Discovery News reports on a provision snuck into the recent Afghanistan war funding bill:

“A provision in a bill passed by Congress this week that allots $59 billion to amp-up the war in Afghanistan contains orders for NASA to not cancel any contracts in its embattled Constellation moon (sic) program.

An independent review board convened by the White House determined the program, which aimed to land astronauts on the moon (sic) by 2020, had no chance of reaching its goal because the government failed to fund it properly. The Obama administration wants to end the program and invest in new technologies and commercial spaceflight instead. Bills pending in the House and Senate kill Constellation in name, but keep some of its programs, including a capsule known as Orion.”

Read the full story at Discovery News.

Government / Technology — No Comments
29
Jul 10

Google, CIA invest in future of Web monitoring

Wired’s Danger Room looks into investments by Google and the CIA’s investment arm into a company that is developing non-obvious relationship awareness with large data sets on the Internet … supposedly to thwart terrorism:

“The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine ‘goes beyond search’ by ‘looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.’”

Fair use: Essential for future culture generation

In light of the Library of Congress‘ decision to allow a number of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including jailbreaking (unlocking) iPhones, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an opinion piece for Read Write Web on the importance of protecting fair use rights is important for the future of a culture that relies more-and-more on media artifacts:

“It’s a value-added, remixed, platform-built economy these days. That’s a whole new channel opening up for innovation, the democratization of the economy and for revenue creation. Does it cannibalize the old economy? Not if the experience of two of history’s fastest-growing platform dynamos (iPhone and Facebook) are any indication. This digital economy could be called post-scarcity not because scarcity is no longer realistic or valuable, but because it’s no longer a precondition for the creation of value. In fact, scarcity may produce less total value in the future than the ecosystem of augmentation, annotation, remixing and fair use of the items formerly considered scarce will.”

Read the full article at Read Write Web.

Environment / Government — No Comments
26
Jul 10

Designing greener cities: An urban design toolkit

From the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment:

The Urban Design Toolkit is a compendium of tools that can be used to facilitate high-quality urban design. For some, the Toolkit will provide an important resource, assisting them in the application of quality urban design projects. For others, the Toolkit may provide increased insight into the breadth and depth of urban design and a starting point in identifying how to achieve quality design.

Read the full Ministry for the Environment report (pdf).