By James Hutchinson – [Australia] A Liberal-dominated Senate select committee on the National Broadband Network (NBN) has echoed existing calls from the Opposition to scrap the Federal Government’s $43 billion project in its final report.
The final report also focuses on recommendations stated by economists Henry Ergas and Mark Harrison that the government release the underlying assumptions behind the NBN Implementation Study. more> http://bwbx.io/E7Be
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NSF – The Earth is often characterized as “dynamic” because its systems are variable over space and time, and they can respond rapidly to multiple perturbations. The goals of the Frontiers in Earth-System Dynamics (FESD) program are to: (1) foster an inter-disciplinary and multi-scale understanding of the interplay among and within the various sub-systems of the Earth, (2) catalyze research in areas poised for a major advance, (3) improve data resolution and modeling capabilities to more realistically simulate complex processes and forecast disruptive or threshold events, and (4) improve knowledge of the resilience of the Earth and its subsystems.
Preliminary Proposal Due Date: October 01, 2010
more> http://tinyurl.com/2ce6hgh
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NSF – Robert Twilley and Guerry Holm of Louisiana State University (LSU) are investigating the degree to which two delta wetland characteristics may help mitigate oil contamination.
Fresh water head, as it’s called, the slope of the water’s surface from a river delta to the sea, and residence time of river-mouth wetlands, the time it takes water to move through a wetland at a river’s mouth, are important to understanding how delta wetlands will respond to the oil spill, say the researchers.
“Since the Mississippi River is currently at a relatively high stage, we expect the river’s high volume of freshwater to act as a hydrologic barrier, keeping oil from moving into the Wax Lake Delta from the sea,” says Twilley. more> http://bwbx.io/kibv
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By Matthew Lasar – If you’re looking for the Armageddon version of net neutrality analysis, search no further than a new study released by New York Law School’s Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute. The assessment, titled Net Neutrality, Investment & Jobs, damns the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed net neutrality rules as “destabilizing” and suggests they could “place the nation’s economy at even greater risk.”
The paper claims that wireless and wireline broadband could suffer huge investment losses as a consequence of the rules. A ten percent drop in investment could rob the United States of 502,000 jobs with a $62 billion impact on its Gross Domestic Product. Three times that decline could punish the economy with a loss of 604,000 jobs and $80 billion in GDP loss. more> http://bwbx.io/QSQo
By Grant Gross – “There is no doubt that we are not prepared to address a major cyberattack today. If we end up in a serious conflict with five or 10 very sophisticated countries, we will be attacked, and we will not know how to respond,” Stewart Baker, a partner in the Steptoe & Johnson law firm and former assistant secretary for policy at DHS.
The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the DHS division with responsibility for defending federal civilian agencies against cyberattack, is understaffed and has had four directors in five years, Thompson said. Contractors at US-CERT outnumber federal employees by a ratio of about three to one. more> http://bwbx.io/dwr3
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