Innovators are being asked to friend Uncle Sam as the next good ideas for the government are being sought through social networks.
By Emily Badger
Anil Dash sums up the power of crowdsourcing with a simple question he put to his Twitter feed a few months back. It was time for a new cell phone, he announced. What should he get?
“Somebody I don’t even really know said, ‘Here’s a list of the most popular handsets in America ranked by how much radiation they put out,’” Dash recalled.
Now he had an info stream he hadn’t even thought to consider. And if social media could better inform his relatively small cell phone conundrum, imagine what it could do for the big-picture questions we really want to get right — the questions government answers on behalf of us all.
“We have this disconnect where, as a private citizen, I can ask for my friends’ opinions on something on Twitter or Facebook,” Dash said. “But yet, someone can be making decisions that affect all of us” — a government official, that is — “but not have that ability.”
Six months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti on 12th January 2010, this report describes the evolution of MSF’s work during what is the organisation’s largest ever rapid emergency response. It attempts to explain the scope of the medical and material aid provided to Haiti by MSF since the catastrophe, but also to set out the considerable challenges and dilemmas faced by the organisation. It acknowledges that whilst the overall relief effort has kept many people alive, it is still not easing some of their greatest suffering.
Before the Osborne, Lee designed the Intel 8080 based “SOL”[1] computer from Processor Technology, the PennyWhistle[2][3]modem, and other early “S-100 bus” era designs. His shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers. Many of his designs were leaders in reducing costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology and was influenced by the philosophy of Ivan Illich. Felsenstein was the engineer for the Community Memory project, one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in public places to facilitate social interactions among individuals, in the era before the Internet.
Lee Felsenstein was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, which formed in 1975 in response to the appearance of the Altair 8800 computer kit. With a handy yard stick, Lee “moderated” meetings at the SLAC Auditorium. He was less a chair than a keeper of chaos. In this heyday of the development of the first personal computers, Lee designed the Intel 8080 based “SOL”[1] computer from Processor Technology, the PennyWhistle[2]modem, and other early “S-100 bus” era designs. These existed in a market space with early generation hobbyist microcomputers from Altair, IMSAI, Morrow Designs, Cromemco, and other vendors. Felsenstein's shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers.
In 1998, Lee Felsenstein founded the Free Speech Movement Archives as an online repository of historical information relating to that event, its antecedents and successors.
Dave Warner is a Medical Neuroscientist and the Director of Medical Intelligence at MindTel. His interests include interventional informatics, medical communications, distributed medical intelligence, biosensors, quantitative human performance, expressional interface systems and physio-informatics. He has been engaged in humanitarian assistance and information and communication technologies (ICT) applications for a number of years, with recent activity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, and Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Dr. Warner graduated from San Diego State University in 1988, with a degree in Physical Science. He then entered the combined MD/PhD program at Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC). His passion as an undergraduate was human expression. Specifically, he sought to learn how a thought becomes an intention for expression and then how the physiology of the body facilitates that expression through some medium. The medium he chose was information systems: informatics. At LLUMC Dr. Warner’s doctoral research was in the Department of Neurophysiology. He also founded MindTel in May 1997 to commercialize intelligent communication products for healthcare, education, and recreation. An initial focus is the development of hardware and software products that can be deployed cost-effectively so that disabled computer users can more effectively express themselves through the World Wide Web. The hardware products include sensors, transducers, and computer interface modules. The associated NeatTools software comprises a highly versatile visual programming environment for interfacing hardware and software modules. MindTel is also actively engaged in consulting activities in telemedicine and Web-based communication systems.
FINDING REGARDING PUBLIC SAFETY INFORMATION
Pursuant to Section 7(d) of the National Construction Safety Team Act, I hereby find that the disclosure of the information described below, received by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”), in connection with its investigation of the technical causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11,2001, might jeopardize public safety. Therefore, NIST shall not release the following information:
1. All input and results files of the ANSYS 16-story collapse initiation model with detailed connection models that were used to analyze the structural response to thermal loads, break element source code, ANSYS script files for the break elements, custom executable ANSYS file, and all Excel spreadsheets and other supporting calculations used to develop floor connection failure modes and capacities.
2. All input files with connection material properties and all results files of the LS-DYNA 47-story global collapse model that were used to simulate sequential structural failures leading to collapse, and all Excel spreadsheets and other supporting calculations used to develop floor connection failure modes and capacities.
~
Patrick Gallagher Director National Institute of Standards and Technology
Dated: JUL 09 2009
For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, July 10, 2010
Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”
Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
