Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Inspectors: Millions in Iraq Aid Wasted | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

Inspectors: Millions in Iraq Aid Wasted | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited: "The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war. "

Managment skills have long been critical to military endeavors. The Sysadmin phase of operations needs these skills even more. The article referenced shows some of the failures of our current Iraqi operations.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Walrus-an 800 foot plane



Walrus is distinct from the earlier airship era
vehicles. It will operate heavier-than-air and will
seek to achieve the operating utility of modern
military transport aircraft. It will carry greater
payload, have unimproved landing site capability,
and will provide better transport efficiency. Walrus
will be largest single aircraft ever developed. As
you might imagine, there are numerous challenges
to turning this vision into reality. How will we
construct such an aircraft? What materials and
structures will we use to build it? At over 800 feet
long, how will we control this behemoth?


The writer speaks of pods of Walrus able to carry large numbers of troops and equipment from 'fort to fight' in seven days.

A Peek Inside DARPA

A Peek Inside DARPA: "Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to “automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.” "

DARPA is working on automating the management process itself. They seem to plan for this to be online in 2009.

Language Translation and the Military

DARPA’s speech technology has been deployed in nine locations, and it can translate with about 50% accuracy — “good enough to see if public sentiment is going a certain way,” Holland says. By 2009, that’s expected to reach 90%, which is as good as human translators.

In parallel, the program is working on “distillation” technology designed to remove irrelevant and redundant information from masses of translated text. The goal is to go from 30% to 110% of human ability in the next few years.

Translating documents automatically within two years is terribly exciting, but a program that could reduce redundant information would be even more useful.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

DailyTech - Lockeed Martin Tests Centralized UAV Controller

DailyTech - Lockeed Martin Tests Centralized UAV Controller

Lockheed Martin is proud to announce it has successfully tested a new centralized controller device for unmanned vehicles. The successful tests enable the military to further expand the deployment of unmanned vehicles with less input from personnel.

This is just an intermediate step. At some point we will obviously want to have the personnel running the laptop replaced. These machines are inevitable but they are not good for democracy. They will allow a small group with large resources to build an operation that most of humanity will find very difficult to resist. This technology is similiar to an armored knight. Most of us will be similiar to peasants but much less useful.