A medley of extemporanea

Open-source intel is gaining space in the government's agenda, rightly so, I think, as the trick is not only to collect information, but to make sense of it. Meanwhile, car-patrols aren't nearly as effective as foot-patrols, a fact that some in the US Army are beginning to understand and apply in Iraq, that -as all fourth generation conflicts- is neither war nor policing, but a mixture of both.

Oh, and Latin America is vulnerable to climate change, but we all knew that already. Considering that the region is pretty much near an energy crisis today, I don't think the prospect for the coming decades is very good, despite the relative wealth of natural resources.

What I've been doing. Plus, killer robots.

Startup work, mostly; as fun as it is to talk about the future, it's much more fun to work on it. But I plan to pay more attention to this blog, if nothing else, as a sort of scrapbook for interesting bits.

Like the fact that relatively cheap remotelly controlled warfighting robots have already made it to the CNN. I don't think you can do effective counterinsurgency or nation building with those, but that has seldom stopped military procurement systems in the near past.

Hat tip to the IEET

As seen in Batman Beyond

DARPA is asking Honeywell to develop a way to monitoring analysts' brainwaves to speed up intelligence analysis, an old idea that seems to be getting closer to application. Don't underestimate this and similar efforts: analysing information is the name of the game, be it military intel, market movements, biological data sets, or anything else. There are huge strategic and financial returns on finding out better ways to do these things, and whoever fails to keep up in the effort to understand more data more quickly is going to be at a serious disadvantage.

CPU meters for your head

From Ares: DARPA has developed useful sensors to determine in cognitive state in real-time. I want one.

Tracking soldiers but not votes

While the Pentagon is looking at RFID implants for tracking soldiers' physiological parameters, Senate Democrats are backpedaling on a push to ban e-voting machines without paper trails for the '08 election. There's a bit of a disconnect there, unless you realize that an electoral system only has to look good enough for there not to be a legitimacy crisis, and apparently the US public still hasn't quite grasped how much e-voting machines suck; military organizations succeed or fail on their logistics - of men, material, and information.

I'm not very concerned about the privacy implications, given the facts of military life. I'd say that being ordered to jump into a firefight is as dangerous to body integrity as being ordered to insert a chip under your skin, and data self-ownership in a military context is almost a paradoxical idea. An estimated five years before human testing does seem a bit too long, though, considering the current state of the art.