Tag Archives: military research

US Dept. of Defense and children; applied science and Haiti

As I cover scientific research and the military from time to time and have long been interested in children and science, this news item from Cliff Kuang at Fast Company titled, Is DARPA’s Kids’ Initiative Funding Tomorrow’s Mathletes or “Terminator 5: Recess?”, caught my eye. For anyone not familiar with DARPA, it stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and it is part of the US Dept. of Defense. From the news item,

Anytime you hear news of government sponsored cyborg beetles or shape-shifting robotic blobs, it’s almost certain that Darpa is behind it. As the Pentagon’s skunk research programs, their sole aim is to fund research so far out and cutting edge that it isn’t yet on private industry’s radar. And now they’ve aimed their sights on a squishier but no less intractable problem: Getting more kids interested in technology careers.

Darpa’s RFP is barely written in English, but it contains some pretty sharp-eyed critiques of the current system. Darpa notes that even though there are plenty of sciency programs out there such as space camp, geared at middle-schoolers. But there’s not much else. The challenge is to create a continuum of activities that engage students all along the path from middle-school to college.

Kuang also mentions that the Time-Warner corporation is dedicating $100M US to a science mentorship program called, Connect a Million Minds.

From a purely pragmatic perspective, much of the consumer technology (e.g. television and the internet) we are familiar with was developed from military research. I was too outraged (youth and idealism) to finish reading the book  but as I recall, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy makes much the same point in its opening chapters. In contrast to Kuang’s assertion (“… research so far out and cutting edge that it isn’t yet on private industry’s radar,” Bruce Mau’s 2004 design show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Massive Change, suggested that the process is being reversed and that the cutting edge technology is being developed for consumer use first and then making its way into military research labs.

I find both the timing for the DARPA and Time-Warner initiatives to be interesting in light of the Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 (released last week) where an alarm abut the state of science and technology research and innovation in the US  has been sounded. The indicators were previously mentioned (by me) here.

In all the talk about science and technology and their importance (real and/or imagined) for economic welfare, it can be easy to forget that there are other reasons to encourage it. This morning I saw a news item on physorg.com about the science and technology aspect (in this case, software-related) of the relief efforts for Haiti. From the news item,

Tim Schwartz, a 28-year-old artist and programmer in San Diego, feared that with an array of , crucial information about Haitian quake victims would “go everywhere on the Internet and it would be very hard to actually find people – and get back to their loved ones,” he said. So Schwartz quickly e-mailed “all the developers I’d ever worked with.”

In a few hours, he and 10 others had built http://www.haitianquake.com , an online lost-and-found to help Haitians in and out of the country locate missing relatives.

The database, which anyone can update, was online less than 24 hours after the quake struck, with more than 6,000 entries because Schwartz and his colleagues wrote an “scraper” that gathered data from a Red Cross site.

The speed in getting the site up was incredible then later, other people joined the party.

The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and others launched similar efforts. And two days later, had a similar tool running, PersonFinder, that the State Department promoted on its own Web site and Twitter. PersonFinder grew out of missing-persons technology developed after ravaged New Orleans in 2005.

This is where the story gets good.

Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advocated online for consolidating all such tools into the Google version so the information wouldn’t be stuck in competing projects. He considers PersonFinder, which can be embedded in any Web site and as of Tuesday had more than 32,000 records, a triumph because it “greatly increases the chances that Haitians in Haiti and abroad will be able to find each other.”

Schwartz agreed and folded his database into PersonFinder, which he thinks will become “THE application for missing people for this disaster and all disasters in the future.”

Yup, there’s more than one reason to encourage science and technology research and bravo to Schwartz for agreeing to consolidate his tool with Google’s PersonFinder.