Pauls musings and tidbits

NASA Ares I Moon Rocket - Open-Source Contract With Boeing - Via Popular Mechanics :

The “brains” of the Ares I rocket that will send four astronauts back to the moon sometime in the next 12 years will be built by Boeing, NASA announced today—but the specifications will be open-source and non-proprietary, so that other companies can bid on future contracts. The avionics unit will provide guidance, navigation and control for the launch rocket, which will carry the Orion crew vehicle into Earth orbit.

“The combined Ares I and Orion will replace the Space Shuttle and become the workhorse that takes astronauts into space for journeys to the Space Station, the Moon and Mars,” said Doug Cooke, a official with NASA’s Exploration Systems division. The Shuttle is currently slated for retirement in 2010.

The $800 million avionics deal is the last one in a series of four Ares I contracts issued in the past five months, totaling $5 billion. Pratt & Whitney is building the engine for $1.2 billion, Alliant Techsystems is building the first-stage solid rocket booster for $1.8 billion, and Boeing had earlier won the $1.125 billion upper-stage contract.

NASA’s Constellation program, which aims to return humans to the moon by 2020, will use the Ares I rocket to launch Orion into orbit. A larger Ares V rocket, which will be developed based on the Ares I design beginning early in the next decade, will rendezvous with Orion in orbit and provide the extra units needed to escape Earth’s orbit. But that doesn’t mean that Boeing can count on billions of dollars of contracts for the Ares V, noted Ares project manager Steve Cook. The specifications for the Ares I design are “open-source and non-proprietary,” he said, ensuring that future contracts will have full competition.

Preliminary work on Ares I has already involved 3500 hours of wind-tunnel testing, and last month the team field-tested an enormous parachute that will allow the rocket’s first-stage boosters to be recovered and reused. A 42,000-pound dead weight was dropped from a U.S. Air Force C-17 from 16,500 feet above the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, and it safely floated to the ground under a 2000-pound, 150-ft.-diameter parachute—the biggest chute of its type ever to be tested.

With all the contracts in place, the Ares team is now headed for a preliminary design review next year. The team hopes to fire up its first development motor in April 2009, Cook said, and continue meeting the benchmarks leading to a 2020 moon voyage.

“I don’t think there’s any magic here,” Beoing vice-president Brewster Shaw said. “We all have a lot of hard work ahead of us over the coming years.”

(Read Original Article - Via Popular Mechanics.)

New York City Puts Hospital Error Data Online: “The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation is to begin publicly releasing data on infection and death rates at its 11 hospitals.”

(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Health.)

Papers Reveal Pentagon Funding of Boeing’s Psychic Research: “ESP, meditation, parapsychology … nothing’s too paranormal for a military contract.

[…]

Boeing researchers don’t just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks.  They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late ’60s. 

This study, New Correlation Between a
Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator, conducted in 1967, "tentatively conclude[s]" that people can basically will particular numbers to appear. 

According to the Boeing-ites, there "exists a weak but significant
correlation" between the experiment’s "statistical processes" (that would be the generation of random numbers, "connected to four lamps and four corresponding pushbuttons") and "the experimenter who initiates the processes" ("the human subjects, asked to press the buttons… with the objective in mind of obtaining a high number of coincidences").   

There’s no mention of follow-up studies.  But this Boeing experiment is one of a number of fringe and alternative science projects we found after a quick dig through the online archives of the Defense Technical Information Center.  You’ll get a kick out of the others.  So keep reading…

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Sunlight Foundation Lets You Visualize Federal Earmarks: “

The Sunlight Foundation, a D.C.-based group that uses information technology to educate the public about the political process, has been turning earmarks into art. The group has mapped federal disbursements by state and agency, creating spangled almost Miro-esque charts of where the money (er, pork) winds up. No surprise, the Defense Department crushes all other agencies with $9.319 billion in 2005 earmarks. The Department of Transportation is a distant second with $3.174 billion.

More intriguing is the chart that maps to which states the money flows. Although California and Pennsylvania get the most total money from 2005 earmarks with $1.634 billion and $1.08 billion, respectively, Alaska is the per capita king with $1,053 dollars coming in from earmarks for each resident. Well done Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska). Well done, indeed.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

CDT Urges Congress to Make CRS Reports Available: “CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris today urged lawmakers to make the unclassified, taxpayer-funded reports produced by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) available to the public over the Internet. Harris joined other open-government advocates at an event on Capitol Hill to unveil the recommendations of the Open House Project, a collaborative effort launched earlier this year by the Sunlight Foundation to make the House of Representatives more readily accessible to ordinary citizens on the Web. CDT created OpenCRS.com in 2005 to increase the public availability of CRS reports and has long advocated for Congress to make the reports fully available to the public online.”

(Read Original Article - Via Center for Democracy and Technology.)

“Verschärfte Vernehmung” is German for “enhanced interrogation”: “The phrase “Verschärfte Vernehmung” is German for “enhanced interrogation”. Other translations include “intensified interrogation” or “sharpened interrogation”. It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.

[…]

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture - “enhanced interrogation techniques” - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”

(Read Original Article - Via .)

QDN: You should do your research before coining a euphemism for torture: “Andrew Sullivan has an entry over at The Atlantic Online that defies adequate excerpting — it’s a look at the Bush administration’s use of the term “enhanced interrogation” to describe the we-don’t-torture methods our country is using to extract information from the people we’ve rounded up and classified as terrorists. Most importantly, it’s also a historical look at how Nazi Germany coined the exact same (translated) term, to defend what turn out to be many of the exact same practices. And not to jump right to the punchline, the final paragraph of the piece is the anchor:”

(Read Original Article - Via q.queso.com .)

Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims | the Daily Mail: “Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history ‘as a vehicle for promoting political correctness’.

The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into ‘emotive and controversial’ history teaching in primary and secondary schools.

It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting ‘anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils’.

It added: ‘In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

‘But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques.’

A third school found itself ’strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination’.

The report concluded: ‘In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.’”

(Read Original Article - Via the Daily Mail .)

Web Video: A PoliticsTV Retrospective: “

“

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years - Yahoo! News: “PARIS (AFP) - France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

‘It is a world first,’ said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of ‘non-identified aerospatial phenomena.’

Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption.

‘Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper’ are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.

But many others involving multiple sightings — in at least one case involving thousands of people across France — and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.”

[…] Other countries collect data more or less systematically about unidentified flying objects, notably in Britain and in the United States, where information can be requested on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act. “But we decided to do it the other way around and made everything available to the public,” Patenet said. The aim was to make it easier for scientists and other UFO buffs to access the data for research. The website itself — which crashed host servers hours after it was unveiled due to heavy traffic — is extremely well organized and complete, even including scanned copies of police reports. To visit the website: www.cnes-geipan.fr.