Technologists look to a new White House to reverse decade-long slide in R&D
By Gary Anthes, ComputerWorld, October 21, 2008
By most measures, the U.S. is in a decade-long decline in global technological competitiveness. The reasons are many and complex, but central among them is the country's retreat from long-term basic research in science and technology, coupled with a surge in R&D by countries such as China.
Phi Beta Iota: This ties in perfectly with US secret intelligence fraud, waste, and abuse (hand-outs to corporations for vapor-ware, see our quick study 2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam); and also with Chuck Spinney's long-standing concerns about the plans-reality mismatch and the criminal insanity of raising two generations of engineers who know nothing but “government specification cost plus” production.
Using lasers to blind quantum cryptography photon detectors, Norwegian computer scientists were able to obtain a copy of a secure key without leaving any trace of their presence.
Norwegian computer scientists have perfected a laser-based attack against quantum cryptography systems that allows them to eavesdrop on communications without revealing their presence.
Phi Beta Iota: Clever Norwegians. We have zero sympathy. The US secret community, at $75 billion a year and climbin, is beyond waste, fraud, and abuse and heavily into betrayal of the public trust as well as high crimes and misdemeanors. It should be scaled back to $25 billion or less and the savings redirected to education & research. The reality is that what the US taxpayer–and all other citizens everywhere need–are transparent governments that create trust, enjoy legitimacy, and can deliver value.
Radical management: what to do when your customer is the government
One constraint on implementing radical management is that the customer is on a different path altogether. A frequent example is where your customer is a government bureaucracy. You are aspiring to delight your client, and your client is saying, “Don’t bother with me such questions. Just deliver what the specifications ask for.”
. . . . . .
…realistically, most government organizations are not even trying to practice radical management. One way of understanding how they function is to recognize that organizations operate at three levels, using a schema proposed by Ranjay Gulati in Reorganize For Resilience: Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business(Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009)
Level 1: “You take what we make.”
Level 2: “We believe that our offerings will be useful to you.”
Level 3: “We seek to understand and solve your problems with our offerings”
While radical management is operating at level 3, most government organizations are still stranded at level 1. They are paying scant attention to their stakeholders. Often they have not even taken any decision as to who their primary stakeholders are. As a result, no one really knows what the purpose of the organization is. The managers in such organizations typically follow rules and procedures, rather than systematically consider: how could we deliver more value sooner? These organizations are the quintessential bureaucracy, and the management is quintessentially Dilbertian.
Phi Beta Iota: The government is full of good people trapped in a bad system. We've decided that in addition to educating the five billion poor one cell call at a time, we have to give government employees an easy to use cell tether to a World Brain that helps them evolve the consciousness of government from the bottom up.
America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue of American Spectator
EXTRACT 1: They [the bi-opoly two parties] think, look, and act as a class.
EXTRACT 2: The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
Smackdown of Obama by Supreme Court may be inevitable
Full Story Online
According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government, a smackdown of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable.
Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues. Critics have complained that much if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.
Phi Beta Iota: Our Contributing Editor received the entire story via email but without a date from a Colonel serving in Afghanistan. This story is evidently circulating among military personnel and for that reason we take note. However, we note that it was originally posted9 July 2010, and have linked to that original post rather than post the entire email. We would observe that ever since Dick Cheney was Chief of Staff in the White House, Executive disrespect for the Constitution and Congress has been growing, and that Newt Gingrich was the one who led Congress to its practice of abdicating its Article 1 role in the Constitution, instead playing foot-soldier to a party president. We reiterate, there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by Electoral Reform.
WASHINGTON — When Lt. Col. Dave Wilson took command of a battalion of the 4th Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, the unit had just returned to Texas from 14 months traveling some of Iraq's most dangerous roads as part of a logistics mission.
What he found, he said, was a unit far more damaged than the single death it had suffered in its two deployments to Iraq.
Nearly 70 soldiers in his 1,163-member battalion had tested positive for drugs: methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana. Others were abusing prescription drugs. Troops were passing around a tape of a female lieutenant having sex with five soldiers from the unit. Seven soldiers in the brigade died from drug overdoses and traffic accidents when they returned to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, after their first deployment.
“The inmates were running the prison,” Wilson said.
The Ile de Batz is one of three dedicated ships that Alcatel-Lucent uses to lay the submarine fiber-optic cables that carry broadband connectivity across the oceans.
The ship is usually based in Calais, France, but made a stop recently in Greenwich, England, to pick up components from Alcatel-Lucent's factory. The telecommunications infrastructure company invited ZDNet UK to see the factory and the ship, and have a look at a vital part of the global Internet that's normally hidden by miles of water.
The Ile de Batz usually spends between 30 and 40 days at sea on each voyage. It can lay up to 200 kilometers (120 miles) of cable per day, in normal conditions, to a depth of about 8km. That cable and its components are expected to have a lifespan of about 25 years.
