Views from the Solar System (40)

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SPACE WATCH

Broken Sea
NASA – The partially broken sea ice pack below NASA’s ER-2 can be clearly seen through the pilot’s cockpit viewing sight during one of the MABEL laser altimeter validation flights.

After an almost 10 and one-half hour transit flight from its deployment base in Keflavik, Iceland, NASA ER-2 pilot Stu Broce landed ER-2 806 April 27 at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif. The lengthy flight from Iceland included data collection by the MABEL instrument over a portion of broadleaf deciduous forest in Wisconsin. The ground support and science crew that supported the flights returned several days later.

The star of this high-altitude show was a small, boxy instrument — the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL) — tucked snugly inside the aircraft’s nose. In an effort led by the instrument team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., MABEL made five flights last month to measure surface elevation over a series of targets across the U.S. Southwest.

The ER-2 flew more than 100 hours on 16 flights in the MABEL validation campaign, including 14 data collection flights over Greenland and surrounding sea ice areas and two transit flights between Keflavik and its home base in Palmdale. Several of the flights were conducted concurrently and on the same flight tracks as flights of other NASA environmental science aircraft involved in the Arctic IceBridge campaign in order to compare data being recorded by the MABEL with instruments on the other aircraft. more> http://is.gd/yuZx4V

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A Clunky Cyberstrategy

Washington Preaches Internet Freedom
But Practices Surveillance

By Rebecca MacKinnon – On Monday (Apr 23, 2012), President Barack Obama said of the Internet and mobile technologies that they, “should be in place to empower citizens, not suppress them.”

In the Internet age, it is technically trivial for corporations and governments to gain access to people’s private communications and track their movements. The Obama administration recognizes that online freedom requires not only an open and uncensored Internet, but also one on which government and corporate surveillance powers are appropriately constrained, so that citizens are protected against abuse, and abusers are held accountable.

Even as the White House clamps down in Iran and Syria, other parts of the U.S. government are driving the development of policies, regulatory norms, and business practices that make a mockery of Washington’s well-meaning efforts to expand Internet freedom abroad.

But, the U.S. global Internet freedom agenda will only succeed in the long run if the United States can find a way to live up to its own values. more> http://is.gd/BAEYtk

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Austerity and the End of the European Model

By Abraham Newman – Europe’s recent economic troubles have taken three different forms.

• Some countries, such as Greece, face an old-fashioned debt crisis: Governments borrowed too much money during the boom and have no viable means of repaying it.
• In other countries, such as Ireland, the financial crisis forced governments to bail out the banking sector and absorb its debts.
• Still other countries, such as Spain, suffered a crisis of liquidity after bond purchasers demanded higher interest rates on government debt.

In the latter two, markets, not governments, were the primary culprits. But that has not stopped politicians in Germany and the Netherlands from singling out government — inefficient, bloated, and profligate — as the problem. The government in Athens has become the poster child of the austerity movement, but it only speaks to one of the causes of Europe’s current woes.

Austerity politics in Europe is not simply a short-term fight between the surplus countries in the center and the deficit countries on the periphery. It is a long-term political agenda that privileges lenders over debtors and capital over labor and, as such, should be seen through the lens of partisan politics. more> http://is.gd/SIXgFt

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Phase-change breakthrough could transform memory media

R&D Mag – This research focused on an inexpensive phase-change memory alloy composed of germanium, antimony and tellurium, called GST for short. The material is already used in rewritable optical media, including CD-RW and DVD-RW discs.

“This phase-change memory is more stable than the material used in the current flash drives. It works 100 times faster and is rewritable about 100,000 times,” said the study’s lead author, Ming Xu, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering. “Within about five years, it could also be used to replace hard drives in computers and give them more memory.”

GST is called a phase-change material because, when exposed to heat, areas of GST can change from an amorphous state, in which the atoms lack an ordered arrangement, to a crystalline state, in which the atoms are neatly lined up in a long-range order. In its amorphous state, GST is more resistant to electric current. In its crystalline state, it is less resistant. more> http://is.gd/7eQ0sh

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Hottest IT Skill? Cybersecurity

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan – The need for cybersecurity experts spans all industries, from financial services, manufacturing and utilities to healthcare and retail. Among the major U.S. companies trying to fill cybersecurity-related positions are Boeing, Baylor Health Care System, Verisign and Office Depot.

Cybersecurity jobs also are plentiful in the U.S. federal government market.

Most of these high-paying cybersecurity jobs are not for recent computer science graduates; instead companies are looking to hire IT professionals with five to 15 years of experience with security systems and processes as well as related certifications. more> http://is.gd/IXtATW

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