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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 03:34pm May 16, 2002 EST (#2246 of 2251)

lchic 5/16/02 2:55pm -- the model surely needs to be connected to capabilities that permit communication and decision making that needs to be done. Interactions with staffed organizations are a part of that. To "cover the bases" on what is done is complicated - but if we do it clearly - and sort out problems -- we may be able to get closure on problems that have been intractable before.

lchic 5/16/02 3:16pm asks

How better could world bodies assist in creating better situations in their homeland countries to lessen displacement.

The task is complicated - but we can deal with the complications involved better now than we used to.

in MD2229 rshow55 5/15/02 9:36am there's this:

Lchic and I did a 2 hour, 70 post session on negotiation in the middle east that I think summarizes a good deal about new opportunities in conflict resolution made possible by the internet . . . The session goes from http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.eea14e1/1253 to http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.eea14e1/1318 . It includes many links to this NYT Missile Defense thread. The suggestions are directed, by way of example, to Friedman and Fisk, but are flexible, general, and inexpensive. I believe that if the staffed organizations of Europe, the US, and other countries thought about these opportunities, and adapted them their needs and responsibilities, the good things being talked about and hoped for about the "end of the cold war" could become real, in realistic, nutsy-boltsy, comfortable human ways.

A friend of mine who is an IT professional looked at http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.eea14e1/1253 to http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.eea14e1/1318 and made comments that I thought were very helpful. He's John Mark Heumann of Houston Tx. I'm taking the liberty of posting an outline he wrote - both because it illustrates how complex things are -- what tools are available -- and how little chance there is for a "meeting of the minds" in a short meeting.

rshow55 - 03:39pm May 16, 2002 EST (#2247 of 2251)

Analysis of Web Thread

As far as the use of the Web goes, I want to break that up into issues:

1. Purposes
2. Capabilities/Intentions
3. Desires
4. Dangers
5. Infrastructure

• Facilitate negotiations
  • Where details matter a great deal
  • Where many different levels of focus must be accommodated
• Facilitate communications

• Present, collate, summarize, cross-reference, and illustrate positions
• Collect and annotate what has already been said; provide a record for reference
• Provide a record of disagreements
• Reduce redundancy
• [Counter error and redundancy with links to accurate, succinct information]
• Compare positions
• Track positions
• Handle multiple positions/points of view
• Provide multi-dimensional (non- sequential) access to information
• Provide search capability
• Provide "redundant" "checklists" [?]
• Provide many views of the same data
• [Modeling conflict? what-if scenarios?]

Jon Udell's Practical Internet Groupware (O'Reilly, 1999) "tells users, programmers, IS managers, and system administrators how to build Internet groupware applications that organize the casual and chaotic transmission of online information into useful, disciplined, and documented data." I need to work through it

A few years ago, Microsoft was promoting a decision support system called the "Digital Dashboard." It was an active PC Desktop that would deliver information customized for the user: for example,

• A selection of graphs of sales data drawn from a transaction database
• A ticker of commodity prices drawn from an internet website.

Note that the interpretation of data is built into the desktop (the construction of the graphs, for instance). The data itself is reliable because it is the product of independent processes (such as actual sales).

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