Tales from the Technoverse

Commentary on social networking, technology, movies, society, and random musings

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American’s Belief (or non-belief) In Evolution

December 31st, 2013 · politics, popular culture

I read a column in the Post that noted that Republicans (not me) are growing more skeptical about evolution while Democrats are increasing in their belief, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/12/30/republicans-growing-more-skeptical-about-evolution/.

I then went and read the source Pew Research Center poll which was the basis for the column, http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/. This poll had a lot of interesting data.

The actual question being asked was whether humans had existed in their present form or had evolved, 60 percent of American’s believed that humans have evolved over time. HOWEVER of that 60 percent, barely half again (32 percent of the total) believed in evolution, while the rest believed in a version of ‘intelligent design’, that is any changes were guided by a Supreme being of some sort. Thus less than a third of American’s actually believe in a version of Darwinian evolution which is an interesting statistic.

The reason a minority of Republicans believe in human change seems to be caused by the growing importance of Protestant evangelicals in the party, you can look up the data if you are interested.

When I reported all of this to Ellen, she asked the question if there was a gender difference. It turned out that over 60% of men believe humans have changed while around 55% of women believe that. Ellen’s response was that the most likely reason is that women had to live with and around men …

For once I had not good response.

 

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How Is Counterinsurgency Like the Way the Human Body Fights Disease?

December 24th, 2013 · cyber-security

Last week, I attended a Brookings Institute event, which focused on analogies between the human body, and how it reacts to disease and how nations react to insurgency.

The speakers were General Stanley McChrystal, formerly commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and now a senior fellow at Yale University, and Kristina Talbert-Slagle, an associate research scientist at Yale Global Health leadership Institute. The session was moderated by Brookings Senior Fellow, Michael O’Hanlon.

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Federal Cloud Computing Summit – Slides and Media Notes

December 23rd, 2013 · General

For those interested, the Federal Cloud Computing Summit web-site has been updated with the slides posted and a series of links listed detailing media coverage of the event, http://www.cloudfedsummit.com/winter2013/

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Federal Cloud Computing Summit – Great Fun

December 19th, 2013 · amarc, cloud computing

The Federal Cloud Computing Summit, held earlier this week, was a rousing success; great attendance and interesting panels. It was an honor for the Advanced Mobility Academic Research Center, AMARC, to host the Summit.

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90% of the Cells in the Human Body Are, In Fact, Non-Human

December 16th, 2013 · cyber-security

No, this is not a reference to the latest Zombie movie and is not a typo.

I was reading the latest issue of Science magazine which listed its top science subjects for 2013 (it is that season for lists). Their top subject was Microbiome.

If my daughters were still in high school, microbiome would immediately be put down as an SAT word and added to the study list. From Wikipedia a microbiome is “the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share out body space”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiome. The word was created by Joshua Lederberg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Lederberg.

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Standards-Driven Application Development for Workforce Mobility

December 11th, 2013 · afcea, amarc, mobility

Tomorrow’s Bethesda AFCEA Breakfast meeting, https://www.signup4.net/Public/ap.aspx?EID=NOVE97E&TID=xhh5zkXBjYekK9OB0rp3Kw%3d%3d, is about application development within the Federal Government, a very relevant topic.

We are finding that the amount of reach-out to AMARC, www.amarcedu.org, from the Government relating to the creation and utilization of app-stores for Government utilization continues to increase.

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Implementing Innovation in Government

December 11th, 2013 · innovation

<This blog post was originally published on Powertek Corporation’s website:

 http://www.powertekcorporation.com/index.php/blog-article,

and is republished here with their permission>

 

The issue of achieving innovation in Government is a pretty hot topic right now. In this blog entry, I talk about how well the Government is doing in being more innovative; explore some of the reasons why they have trouble doing so; and look at one agency that is doing significant innovative work with mobile technology to see what lessons we can learn from them. The current administration has done a good job of emphasizing the importance of innovation. Some examples of their action steps include:

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Federal Cloud Computing Summit

December 10th, 2013 · amarc, government 2.0

AMARC, www.amarcedu.org, is hosting our next Federal Cloud Computing Summit, http://www.cloudfedsummit.com/, December 17 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC.

We will have panels on Innovation Today, Cloud Acquisition Solutions, Security Harmonization, and one I will moderate about Cloud Computing futures. In addition, we will have a presentation from Mitre of their Cloud Collaboration Sessions being held the afternoon before. They are looking at four government challenges:

  • Interoperability & Portability
  • End-to-End Service Delivery
  • Federal-Wide Standards for Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  • Cyber Security

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Jumping the Shark

October 9th, 2013 · family

Tonight I went to and had a great time at the Bethesda Young AFCEA Fiscal New Year Networking Event.

It was good to see long-time and newly initiated friends and be reminded that the current partial government shutdown will eventually come to some kind of resolution (eventually).

In addition, it is always great to go to something that touches either of the two greatest daughters that ever were. In this case, my younger, Tamar, is the President of the Bethesda Young AFCEA chapter, so she was very active at the event.

Having said that I came to the conclusion that tonight in the Federal IT field I clearly had jumped, or am in the process of  jumping, the shark. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to the episode or timeframe that a TV show passes its time of greatest creativity.

Over the last couple of years we have gone from where Tamar was known as Dan Mintz’s daughter by the vast majority of people either of us ran into to where I am known as Tamar Mintz’s dad by the VAST majority of people.

I could not be more proud.

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A Wonderful Nobel Peace Prize Candidate

October 8th, 2013 · art, movies, popular culture

Evidently the winner or winners of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced this Friday. This award, which at least in my opinion, does always recognize someone who has taken personal risks to demonstrate their commitment to peace and fundamental human rights, this year if awarded to Malala Yousafzai, would be given to someone who truly deserves it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/taliban-renews-threat-against-pakistani-teen-malala-yousafzai-as-nobel-decision-nears/2013/10/08/cb8f58d4-3030-11e3-9ddd-bdd3022f66ee_story.html?hpid=z4

The fact that the Taliban feels compelled to issue a threat to harm her if this were to happen says too much about the Taliban. And the fact that the expected reaction in Pakistan is, as the article indicates, likely to be ‘muted’ says a lot about Pakistani society too unfortunately.

I have said for many years that, again only in my opinion, how women are treated in a society is the proverbial canary in the coal mine telling you how open or fair that society is. Societies that treat women as second class citizens  hurts the society at large. It is not a coincidence that those countries that have better treatment of women tend to have more vibrant economies.

In that vein, a truly wonderful film which I have mentioned before which talks about the place of women in such societies which I would highly, highly recommend seeing is Wadjda, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wadjda_2013/. Quoting from Red Tomatoes, the “first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia’ AND the first feature film made by a female Saudi filmmaker. It is remarkable how a story about a girl who wants to buy and ride a bike has such wonderful life lessons to impart.

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