Evidence was brought forward at a property tribunal in Dubai that the World islands development may be sinking into the sea. Penguin Marine, the boat operator for the mostly uninhabited luxury development composed of 300 manmade islands, said erosion and deterioration is causing the islands to "fall into the sea".
The tribunal was set up in 2009 to hear cases from the restructuring of the state-owned project developer Nakheel. They deny the islands are sinking and the tribunal found in Nakheel's favour, providing no reasoning for doing so.
A proposed unmanned floating airship surveillance system is being hailed by city officials in Ogden, Utah as one way to fight crime in its neighborhoods...
One person will be able to operate the system but it will also function on its own with programming directives... Officials say the cigar-shaped blimp, powered by electric batteries, can fly for four to six hours before needing to be recharged.
This is award-worthy satire on an issue that is almost completely invisible in Canadian and US media. The very identification of the challenge in this language is impressive and necessary, as is the discussion of those, like Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein, who work to "conserve" the man-made "Wonder" and their precarious privilege.
The Onion should win another Peabody Award, then all of humanity needs to start work on destroying this massive gap.
PARIS—At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," describing the global wealth divide as the "most colossal and enduring of mankind's creations."
"Of all the epic structures the human race has devised, none is more staggering or imposing than the Gap Between Rich and Poor," committee chairman Henri Jean-Baptiste said. "It is a tremendous, millennia-old expanse that fills us with both wonder and humility."
"And thanks to careful maintenance through the ages, this massive relic survives intact, instilling in each new generation a sense of awe," Jean- Baptiste added.
The vast chasm of wealth, which stretches across most of the inhabited world, attracts millions of stunned observers each year, many of whom have found its immensity too overwhelming even to contemplate. By far the largest man-made structure on Earth, it is readily visible from locations as far-flung as Eastern Europe, China, Africa, and Brazil, as well as all 50 U.S. states.
US Customs and Border Protection is using a General Atomics MQ-9 (commonly Predator B or Reaper) unmanned aerial drone to monitor the US-Canada border from Washington to Minnesota. Flying for up to 20 hours at a time, at about 6,000 metres, officials say it used to monitor illicit border crossings related to marijuana and drug trade.
Quan reports that the long-term plan is to have the unmanned drones, now common in Iraq, Afghanistan and along the US-Mexico border, to be flying the entire length of the US-Canada border.
Canadian officials were approached for comment:
Supt. Warren Coons, director of the RCMP Integrated Border Enforcement Team, said Wednesday he has not received information about the surveillance program's effectiveness and declined to offer a personal opinion.
Coons said there are no plans to adopt such technology in Canada, but he wouldn't discount it, either. He noted Canadian authorities use other forms of visible and covert technology — he declined to say what — at points of entry and in remote sections along the border. Improved communication between U.S. and Canadian authorities has helped to identify vulnerable areas, he said.
Progressive-Conservative Manitoba MLA Clifford Grayson said he's not aware of any arrests linked to the Predators. Grayson also added that US state legislators have told him the robots have had mechanical and performance issues, especially in bad weather.
"Teams of quadrotors autonomously build tower-like cubic structures from modular parts. Work done by Quentin Lindsey, Daniel Mellinger, and Vijay Kumar at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania."
The author of the upcoming Bond novel, Carte Blanche, says the Gulf city-state will be the backdrop for 007's new adventures.
Jeffery Deaver told reporters on Monday he was attracted by Dubai's "exotic" mix of gleaming towers and desert. But Deaver did not divulge any story lines in the novel, scheduled to be released in May.
Deaver, who has published more than two dozen novels, was commissioned to write the book by the estate of Bond creator Ian Fleming.
Matt Yglesias has written a post proposing a new US military force that operates in foreign and domestic urban environments. It is truly a Foucauldian Boomerang: he proposes a police/security force to meet foreign adversaries in non-US cities that can then be transplanted to "high-crime jurisdictions" in the US for domestic "surges", then back to the colonies again.
The beginning of the framework is that we should reduce the scale of our economic commitment to the military, which over time means not just fiddling with procurement but actually doing less and having a smaller force structure. Less what? In particular, I think we should actually move away from the COIN/MOOTW paradigm and focus on the idea of deterring and defeating military attacks on the United States and sundry allies. It should be possible to do that without representing 50 percent of global defense expenditures, especially when the allies in question are generally the richest countries on earth. []
What we need, I think, is some form of American gendarmerie—a quasi-military federal organization specialized in police/security functions rather than finding and killing bad guys per se. Such a force would, unlike today’s military, have a valuable peacetime domestic role to play as a flexible auxiliary police force that could assist high-crime jurisdictions with the kind of temporary infusion of extra personnel that can help push crime rates down to a lower equilibrium. A “surge” if you will. But it would also be prepared to deploy abroad in the case of contingencies. The regular military would be big enough to beat an adversary (i.e., a lot smaller than the regular one) but it would need to call on the gendarmes (who naturally would need a less French name) to conduct an occupation. This means we wouldn’t be caught lacking capacity in a real emergency, but since the gendarmes would be performing a useful peacetime domestic service politicians would (appropriately) feel that initiating situations that require their mobilization is high cost situation that ought to be avoided if possible.
The US military plans to deploy a new intelligence drone in Afghanistan, which military experts say will allow US troops to monitor much larger operational theaters than before, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
The newspaper said the airborne surveillance system is called Gorgon Stare and will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.
The system consists of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, which can can transmit up to 65 live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements, the paper said.
By contrast, current Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a narrow area the size of a building or two, The Post noted.
“Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at,and we can see everything,” the paper quoted [an Air Force spokesperson].“
The imperial sky robots see all: First in Afghanistan, with inevitable deployments for mega-events and everyday use in NATO-bloc cities.
The choice of Gorgonas a moniker is a bit disturbing, which is the intent.
The results should prompt more urgent action on adaptation and mitigation responses.
The study confirms other findings that C02-induced climate change is "largely irreversible" in human timescales, with changes to continue for centuries after emissions cease. Global mean temperatures would remain roughly constant after a full cessation of emissions in 2100, but regional changes in temperature and precipitation will continue.
The simulation shows a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet by the year 3000, leading to a global sea level rise of 3 to 4 metres.
Other findings reinforce data projecting a cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, a warming of the Southern Hemisphere, and delayed and ongoing ocean warming despite no further carbon emissions.
They conclude, grimly,
Geoengineering by stratospheric aerosol injection has been proposed as a response measure in the event of a rapid melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Our results indicate that if such a melting were driven by ocean warming at intermediate depths, as is thought likely, a geoengineering response would be ineffective for several centuries owing to the long delay associated with subsurface ocean warming.
The public good of available affordable broadband may need to be supplied by some municipalities in much the same way that some municipalities supply some other utilities But the brief municipal WiFi history suggests that municipal governments are not going to be the builders of the network in most American cities.
This comes from a new article by Harvey Jassem in the Journal of Urban Technology, one he calls a coda for municipal WiFi. It's an interesting story and he pulls out several cases, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York City, to illustrate the problems of municipal WiFi provision during the mid-2000s.
Still, Jassem argues there is a place for cities in broadband provision and that US cities should want to speed up the deployment of broadband.
His suggestions for cities include:
"encourage spectrum efficiencies by the use of smart radios/transmitters";
"encourage more spectrum be set aside for broadband... when scarcity is reduced, so are prices. The more WiMAX, the more use of “white spaces,” the more 3G and 4G, etc., the better";
"encourage competition in the alternative broadband technologies, network neutrality, Carterfone-like open network philosophies, and require or incentivize low-cost broadband availability when firms look to use licensed spectrum or when they seek antitrust waivers or other such gifts from the government."
Jassem is not specific as to how cities should encourage these changes. In Vancouver, procurement is a helpful carrot, which could apply here, too.
Continuing, Jassem writes:
Policies should incentivize and permit open architecture and shared networks that spur innovation and competition. Cities must support the use of broadband in schools and should consider expanding access to the networks that the municipalities build or contract for themselves wherever possible.
In the Vancouver case, the city has long been an advocate on issues that don't normally fall into the municipal domain. There is a space here for Canadian cities to push the federal government on a robust and open national broadband strategy as they continue to do on climate, energy, jobs, and infrastructure.
But let's hope cities have more success with the fed on the broadband issue than they've had so far on climate, jobs, energy or infrastructure.
