Soap Bubble, by Irfan Mirza

 Facebook went public on Friday, May 18, 2012. Trading for FB opened at $42.025 per share, giving the company a market capitalization of $72.76 Billion. However, Facebook closed it’s first day as a publicly traded stock down 9.3% at $38.105 per share. On it’s second day, Monday, May 21, it opened at $36.53 per share and closed at $34.03 per share, dropping another 6.8%, and 19% from the opening price. It’s sliding is raising eyebrows in the financial media (Business Week, Chicago Tribune, Reuters).

Bubble Pop, by Richard Heeks

But the question may be less “Why is Facebook’s stock price dropping?” or “Who’s to blame?” than “What should be it’s price?“

GMO‘s Jeremy Grantham talks about “Reversion to the Mean.” The mean, however, for a stock with 2 days of history is not statistically meaningful. So I compared it to Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, pulling data off of the Internet at Finance.Google.Com after the close of trading on Monday, May 21, 2012.

(Image Links: Soap Bubble & Bubble Pop)

I looked at the two key financial ratios: Debt to Asset and Net Profit Margin. In terms of Profit Margin, Facebook, is roughly equivalent to Apple, Google, and Oracle. It is higher than IBM and lower then Microsoft. Facebook’s Debt to Asset ratio is about the same as Microsoft’s. It’s lower then IBM’s and Oracle’s, higher than Google’s. Apple has no debt, it’s Debt to Asset ratio is zero. This is described in Table 1, “Financial Ratios.” (Definitions are on “Investopedia.”)

A reasonable interpretation of these data could be that Facebook is a strong company. However, the stock price and market valuation is another story.

FB’s Earnings Per Share is 0.31; meaning the company earns $0.31 per share. It’s P/E ratio, the patio of price of a share to earnings is 108.92. Each share of stock is priced at 108.92 times the money that Facebook earns for that share. In comparison, Google’s P/E is 19: each share of Google is priced at less than 20 times earnings of a share of stock. IBM’s is 15. Oracle and Apple are at 14. Microsoft’s P/E is 11. This is described in Table 2, “EPS & P/E.”

Put another way, If Facebook had the same P/E as Apple, 14, each share of Facebook would cost $4.27, not $34. If Apple had the same P/E as Facebook, 108.92, each share of Apple would cost $4,468.90. This is described in Table 3, “Comparative Pricing.”

Personally, I think this suggests that Facebook is overvalued. However, the “Business Social Network,” Linked In, LNKD, with Earnings per Share of $0.16 and a stock price of $98.84 per share, has a Price Earnings ratio of 599. Compared to Linked In, Facebook is drastically undervalued.

Table 4 shows the Current Price, 52 Week Range and Market Capitalizations of these companies, including Linked In.

Facebook has earnings, and something like 1 Billion users. That’s One out of Seven people.  So there is something there. But while there’s something there, zero of those 1,000,000,000 users PAY FaceBook to USE the SERVICE. It’s not the NY Times or NPR. There’s no subscription fee. However I would value Facebook, based on its earnings, between $7.0 and $10 Billion, not $72 Billion. This valuation would consequently price each share somewhere between $3.75 and $6.00, not between $34.00 and $42.00 (unless there’s a 1 for 10 reverse split).

As noted Facebook is not the NY Times or NPR. Facebook is a social network with about 1 Billion members. Facebook’s “News” for each of those 1.0 Billion people is “What are my friends doing?” not “All the News that’s fit to print.” Facebook‘s upside would be huge if they figure out how to “monetize” the membership. And even if they don’t figure out how to monetize membership, Facebook’s existential and historical value, in helping midwife the Arab Spring (altho that was more Twitter than Facebook) is tremendous.

Disclosure: I am long on Apple and IBM.

What is/are the relationship(s) between the technologies pictured here? We’re not trying to be unfair, so we’ll explain that one image is of a pilot climbing into an F-16, and the other is of a whistle.

[Show as slideshow]

They differences, of course, are intuitive: The F-16, while still being manufactured for export to selected countries, is no longer being purchased by the United States military, but those still in service are intended to remain in service until 2025, which speaks volumes about the complexity of military aircraft design and the consequent length of the design cycle. The F-16 is unquestionably a weapons system or platform: there are many cofigurations of armament, electronic countermeasure, complex IFF systems (“Identify Friend or Foe,” an automated means of reducing friendly fire incidents on the one hand, and thereby permitting faster action by pilots who are, by using IFF, at less risk of accidentally attacking an ally, a colleague, perhaps even a friend and comrade); training is complex and demanding; because of its complexity and maneuvering ability, the F-16 is unforgiving of error.

The whistle, the WW-3 Res-Q™ Whistle, has a single function: to call for help and direct help towards the signaler (so perhaps two related functions), and its characteristics include:

• Loud, shrill, dual tone audible from great distance
• Unique flat design prevents holding water
• Required by SOLAS 83
• Meets USCG/SOLAS requirements
• Aids in land or sea rescues
• Use on life jackets, vests, foul weather gear, ring buoys, rafts, keychains, etc.
• Developed for the U.S. Navy; used by NASA, major airlines and shipping companies
• Complete with 18-inch (45.5 cm) lanyard

Its only safety defect is its greatest virtue: users and persons near them may experience discomfort or transient hearing loss because it is so loud. It’s simple to operate; as Lauren Bacall said in the film Key Largo,

“If you want me just whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”

Lauren Bacall, The Complete Films of Humphrey Bogart; found at  Lauren Bacall Quotes Page, via GoodReads.com

So what do they have in common?

1. The same parent company, Cobham plc, makes both components and subsystems for the F-16 and other very complicated pieces of tech costing millions of dollars, as well as the Res-Q-Whistle, which often retails for under $3 USD. It’s hard to imagine that there’s much of an economic motive for Cobham in selling these whistles, but we’re glad they have them on the market.
2. The pilot stepping into the F-16 probably has the Res-Q-Whistle in his survival gear which, because its most likely use is after ejection and parachuting and consequently has carefully rationed space, says something about the perceived value of the whistle. Insofar as we know, the $2 whistle must be purchased separately, and is not included in the price of the more expensive F-16 subsystems and accessories.

Thanks to RFCafe.com for providing the link which led to this piece.

In one of those amazing discoveries that makes one appreciate  the thousands of years of human information (and other) technology that have led us to the internet, which, admittedly has its share of chaff, it also has some golden wheat: in this case RF Cafe, an amazing reference website which will be of great use to neophyte and expert alike, from experienced had operators to Make: Magazine readers and confirmed addicts of Instructables, by one very smart and when you’re not looking very funny electrical engineer named Kirk Blattenberger. How many bloggers can get Marconi, Johns Hopkins (he scientist, not the university named after him) onto one page and quote Chico Marx without it being a non sequitur?

Two. Us, because we told you about him, and the other is Mr. Blattenberger. For those who aren’t sure, “RF” in this context means “radio frequency.” Which  can refer to many things, depending on the context, but is the over-arching category which includes wireless communications, garage-door openers, shock collars for dogs (which, in our experience. are only rarely a good idea, but as a philosophical matter, we believe in positive reinforcement training of dogs and children and even some adults, but that’s a longer conversation for another day), two-way radios which carry voice, data, medical data, help manage air traffic control, help rescue people in all manner of situations, and even provide entertainment and education and news in more languages than we can count. Plus all manner of serious and cool remote control from Predator drones to remote control toy boats. Mr. Blattenberger has well-researched information on these topics and more, and has also written software on related topics.

He’s also got a job board;

Pages (multiple) about renewable energy resources; one generally about green energy;

another principally about photovoltaic energy (think solar turned into electricity, rather than, say, heating water);

And one entitled “Solar Power/Energy Websites;” to use Mr. Blattenberger’s own words,

Solar energy is the radiant light and heat from the Sun that has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar radiation along with secondary solar resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass account for most of the available renewable energy on Earth. Only a minuscule fraction of the available solar energy is used.

Solar energy is the radiant light and heat from the Sun that has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar radiation along with secondary solar resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass account for most of the available renewable energy on Earth. Only a minuscule fraction of the available solar energy is used.

RFCafe is an outstanding resource;  as we try to build our own knowledge of RF technologies and to make useful information available here on Popular Logistics, we’ll try to resist actual plagiarism and instead properly credit Mr. Blattenberger. Which may mean naming any “Radio Communications” reference pages after him.

An unfortunate reminder that in counterterrorism and response preparations, we need to focus on more than just commercial aviation:

ROME (Reuters) – A bomb exploded in front of a school in southern Italy on Saturday, killing a 16 year-old girl and wounding at least six others, two seriously, authorities said on Saturday.

The explosion, near the entrance of a girls’ school named after the wife of murdered anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, occurred as pupils were preparing to enter the school at the start of the school day, which in Italy includes Saturdays.

French trashcan design to deter bombing by making contents visible

Authorities said two gas canisters appear to have been placed in rubbish containers at the school, which local media said was located near the main court in Brindisi, a port city located in Apulia, on the “heel” of Italy.

“This is a tragedy,” Mimmo Consales, the mayor of Brindisi, told SkyTG24 news television, saying that two of the injured were in a “desperate condition” while four others were less seriously hurt.A surgeon told local TV Telenorba that one of the injured girls was currently undergoing a complicated surgery.

There was no claim of responsibility and no indication of who had placed the bomb but initial suspicions were directed at the mafia.

Consales noted that the incident occurred just a few days before the 20th anniversary of the murder of Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, by a bomb in Sicily on May 23, 1992. An anti-mafia march had been planned later in the day.

“You can understand the symbolism of this and what it all signifies,” he said.

Television shots of the scene showed a cement wall blackened by fire next to the school’s entrance gate on a sunny spring day.

Schools in the region were closed and President Giorgio Napolitano issued a statement condemning the attack. A group of investigators, including the region’s top anti-mafia prosecutor, will meet later on Saturday to discuss the probe.

Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri announced plans several days ago to step up security around sensitive targets including official buildings after a series of threats against tax officials.

Italy’s main tax and fine collection agency, Equitalia, has been targeted by a series of small explosive devices amid a growing wave of public anger over the high taxes imposed to shore up public finances and combat the economic crisis.

The head of Ansaldo Nucleare, a nuclear engineering company owned by defence technology group Finmeccanica, was shot in the leg in an attack claimed by an anarchist group, adding to concerns that extremist groups may try to exploit the public anger.

via Blast at School in Southern Italy Kills One and Injures Six – NYTimes.com.

Hydraulic Fracturing 1, Schematic Drawing

The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, on May 3, 2012 issued a brief but unequivocal statement regarding the health implications of hydraulic fracturing here, and reproduced in it’s entirety below.

CDC / ATSDR Hydraulic Fracturing Statement:

CDC and ATSDR do not have enough information to say with certainty whether natural gas extraction and production activities including hydraulic fracturing pose a threat to public health. We believe that further study is warranted to fully understand potential public health impacts.

Frakking 2, Tap Water with Various Impurities

The CDC, in its 47-word statement said, “We don’t know the public health implications of hydraulic fracturing, aka ‘fracking’ or ‘frakking.’ We need to study the issue.” Perhaps the decision makers at the CDC should watch Gasland. But consider the CDC statement on hydraulic fracturing in light of picture 2 and the “Precautionary Principle,”

The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.

The Precautionary Principle is described in more detail on Commonweal (here) and Science & Environmental Health Network, SEHN (here).  Burning fuel for heat requires obtaining the fuel and releases various materials into the biosphere. We must understand the consequences and side-effects before we embark on any project. The questions in re hydraulic fracturing are:

• Are these pictures real or imagined?
• What are the implications for the water supply and the biosphere?
  
• What are the liability insurance requirements? and
• What are the alternatives?
  

This argument is similar in structure to Pascal’s wager, in which Pascal argued that in the absence proof of God’s existence, one should behave as though God exists and live a moral and ethical life. If God is found out later to have existed, and assuming God rewards good works and punishes evil, the post-life consequences are good; if God does not exist, no harm can be sustained after death.

Pascal’s wager is also described at the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here, at the UTM Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here, and at SecularWeb, aka Infidels.org, here.

With respect to hydraulic fracturing, the Precautionary Principle isn’t difficult to apply: if “fracking” goes badly, here are some of the consequences:

1. Contamination of the water table; because fracking involves lateral pressures which may meet resistance from geological formations, and rearranging underground gas and oil worst-case outcomes include fouling of the water table at relatively great distances – certainly distant from the leased properties; seismic shifts, risk releases of oil and gas into water tables, and shifts in the landscape;
2. these undesirable effects, if and when they occur, may affect many people and wide geographic ranges, which suggest that (a) many such bad outcomes which might have to do with fracking may require litigation and very expensive fact-finding in order to to establish claims; (b) if presumed effects present themselves in dispersed patterns,  the cost of investigation and proof may mean that legitimate claims don’t come to the attention to the courts;
3. Like the asbestos cases which have become a substantial public health and judicial problem, actual damages and discovery of those damages may not occur for many years;
4. We don’t know a lot about the effects of current fracking technologies.

So the CDC’s expression of concern and endorsement of research – all well and good. There is no question that more information is needed. The question is whether or not a prudent society or a prudent government would want that information – the question is whether or not testing and research come before proceeding with hydraulic fracturing, a more cautious approach, or whether we go ahead – and passively note the risk and find out what happens, if anything, after it happens.

We could, for instance, do small-scale trials in conjunction with widely spaced data gathering which would permit us to more precisely assess the risk. The energy shortfall(s) in the meantime can be covered with a combination of aggressive energy-efficiency measures, and investments in renewable resources. Here is the other side of the Precautionary Principle:if fracking turns out to be entirely without risk, we’ll still have those underground resources to exploit, we’ll need less energy (conservation), and we’ll have more available (renewable resources). So if and when the perfectly-safe “fracked” hydrocarbon fuel products hit the market, these other measures will still provide downward pressure on prices, and place less stress on the ecosystem.

This is the first in a planned series on hydraulic fracturing. Additional posts will explore the long term ramifications including the insurance limits and questions of liability.

Bell Curve showing Mean, μ & Standard Deviation, σ.

“The child who receives a hammer for Christmas will discover that everything needs pounding.”

One of my friends asked about “Six Sigma,” famously used by General Electric and Motorola to enhance the quality on their production lines, and famously used by Home Depot and 3M for short term gain and long term failure, (see “Six Sigma, So Yesterday,” on Business Week OnLine, here).

“I understand that Six Sigma means a very high quality system – with only 3.4 errors per million units,” my friend said. “What I don’t understand,” he added, “is the definition in terms of Standard Deviation and Normal Distribution. 99.99966% of the values will fall within 6 Standard Deviations of the Mean, compared to 99.73% of the values falling within 3 Standard Deviations of the Mean. What’s a standard deviation? And what’s a normal distribution?”

Before I get to the good stuff – the numbers – consider that “Six Sigma” is a tool. Jerry Weinberg in “The Secrets of Consulting,” (Dorset 1986, ISBN: 978-093-263301-9 / blog) explains “The Law of the Hammer.” “The child who receives a hammer for Christmas will discover that everything needs pounding.” When people find a tool that works very well some of the time they may begin to believe that it works terrifically well all of the time.  Six Sigma is such a tool. It may work very well some of the time – on assembly lines and in logistics. But it is not applicable in all situations, and clearly not well suited for areas where creativity and customer service drive value.

This may explain the failures of Six Sigma by Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, James McNerney at 3M, and Anne Fudge at Young & Rubicam.  Nardelli, McNerney and Fudge were GE alumni.  I imagine that they understood Six Sigma.  What they appear not to have understood is that a given tool, no matter how useful in some situations, is not useful in other situations.

Now, on to the numbers -

The first thing to remember is that the Greek letter Sigma, σ, is used by statisticians to represent “Standard Deviation.” This of course, raises the question, “What’s a standard deviation?”

Sigma, σ, or Standard Deviation, measures whether the data are clustered around the mean or spread out, and how tightly clustered or how widespread.

“Six Sigma,” sometimes written as 6σ, means “Six Standard Deviations,” or more technically, “within six standard deviations above and below the mean.” As noted above, 99.99966% of the data within a data set are within six standard deviations from the mean.  Standard Deviation, Variance, to which it is related (Standard Deviation is the square root of the Variance) and other statistical values are properties of sets of data. They are meaningful when evaluating large sets of data – thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of data points, or more.

(Since Standard Deviation is the square root of Variance, the next questions are”What is Variance?” and “How do we calculate Variance?” Glad you asked. Variance is defined as the average of the squared differences of each data point from the mean. You get it by adding up the values of the data points and dividing the sum by the number of items, to find the arithmetic Mean. Then you square the difference of each data point and mean, add these values together, divide by number of data points, and that’s the Variance. Take the square root of the Variance, and you have the Standard Deviation. A lower Variance and Standard Deviation means the data are clustered together. Higher Variance and Standard Deviation means the data are spread out. (see Math Is Fun ) That may be interesting, but it’s not germane to the topic of Standard Deviation in terms of Six Sigma as a measure of quality.

What is relevant is that Standard Deviation measures the variation from the Mean. Most data sets in the real world are “Normally Distributed, that is, they form bell shaped curves, as pictured above. Most of the data are clustered around the arithmetic mean, with 68.25% of the data falling within one Standard Deviation, 95.46% within two, 99.73% within three, and 99.99966% within six Standard deviations, six sigmas.

In plain English, this means that in any given a production run, with quality to 3.0 sigma, then 99.73% will be acceptable, but 0.27 will be defective. If you raise the quality to Six Sigma, then 99.99966% will be acceptable and only 0.00034% will be defective. A 3 Sigma run of 1.0 million widgets will have 2,700 defects. A Six Sigma run of 1.0 million widgets will have 3.4 defects.  If the cost per defect is $500, then the defect related cost of 3 Sigma production is $1.35 million. (This is 2,700 defects multiplied by $500.) The cost of defects at Six Sigma is only $200. If the cost of moving to Six Sigma is $1.0 Million, then the cost of defects at Six Sigma is $1,000,200 – and the enterprise saves money by going to Six Sigma.  The savings are greater with larger production runs or with higher costs of defects.

As noted above, GE is the most famous successful Six Sigma company. 3M and Home Depot, however, were spectacular failures. Six Sigma did not save them money. In fact it cost them. Where efficiency works on an assembly line and in logistics, it doesn’t work in a product development environment or a service environment.according to Bolman and Deal, in “Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership,” (C 2008, Jossey Bass, ISBN 978-0-7879-8799-2),

“In the short run, McNerney’s strategy paid off. Indicators of productivity improved, costs were trimmed, and the stock price soared. But Six Sigma’s standardization began to intrude on 3M’s historical emphasis on innovation. Prior to McNerney’s Arrival [from GE] new ideas were accorded almost unlimited time and funding to get started. Fifteen percent of employees’ on the clock time was devoted to developing groundbreaking products – with little accountability. This approach had given birth to legendary products like Scotch Tape and Post-It Notes.

“Six Sigma systematized the research and development process. Sketchy, blue-sky projects gave way to scheduled, incremental development. Funds carried an expiration date, and progress thru a planned pipeline was measured and charted. Development of new products began to wane. “The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, [the more] it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation,” says Vijay Govinarajan, a management professor at Dartmouth.”

If manufacturing process can be made more efficient by looking at events within the Six Sigma, then emergency preparedness we need to focus on outliers – events beyond the Six Sigma.  Events like Hurricanes Katrina and Irene, like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico of April to July 2010, and the Kingston, Tennessee coal ash spill of December, 2008, like the Earthquake / Tsunami system that hit Japan and triggered melt-downs at three of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ichi.

Disclosures:

Neither Mr. Nardelli, Mr. McNerney, nor Ms. Fudge were contacted prior to publication. However, they are welcome to contact me.

I am not long on any of the companies mentioned in this post, but I think GE and 3M are interesting. I like CEO Jeff Immelt’s focus on “EcoImagination,” and I shop at Home Depot. Mr. Immelt was also not contacted for this blog post, but is welcome to contact me.

Reframing Organizations, Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, by Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal, is required reading for the Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability. It’s a great book, and a great MBA program. While I contacted Lee Bolman on an unrelated matter back in 2009 after reading his book, I did not contact him or Terrence Deal for this blog post. They are, of course, welcome to contact me.

Jerry Weinberg‘s”The Secrets of Consulting,“is not required reading for the the Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability. However, I heartily recommend it.  However, I did not contact Jerry Weinberg for this blog post. He is, of course, welcome to contact me.

Germs on the Hand. Courtesy Talk is Cheap

5% of hospital patients develop an infection. And the majority of those infections are acquired from the hands of Health Care Providers.

Medicare pays 40% of the nation’s hospital bills. (This, in and of itself, is an argument for a single payer system – one single payer already pays 40% of hospital bills. And it’s the Government.) However, Medicare does not reimburse hospitals for their mistakes. It shouldn’t. If I borrow your car, and run out of gas, it’s my fault, not yours. Note that this is an example of the government doing something right.

Because of this policy decision, medical accidents went from being a source of hospital revenue to a massive financial drain. Medical institutions were forced into the business of disease prevention, at least once people were in their care.

According to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths statistics, (PDF) hospital acquired infections kill more people in America than AIDS, Breast Cancer and Auto Accidents combined. What is worse is that 5% of the patients in hospitals acquire infections in the hospital, and the vast majority of the patients that acquire such infections in hospitals get them from the hands of health care providers.

More details after the click.

in Moving Through Hospitals: Designing Handwashing and Designing Handwashing Part 2: Diverse Nudges in a Hospital, by Rachel Lehrer, a designer, dancer, and student at the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons, and excerpted below.

In October, 2008, Medicare—the United States’ government program that pays 40% of the nation’s hospital bills—decided to stop covering hospital failures. This meant that a litany of preventable mistakes, including treatments resulting from surgical errors, patient accidents and infections, were now the financial responsibility of the hospital. As a result, medical accidents went from being a source of hospital revenue to a massive financial drain. The good news is that medical institutions were finally forced into the business of disease prevention, at least once people were in their care.

What can be done to prevent costly medical mistakes? The hospital reform with the greatest potential is also the easiest to implement, at least in theory. According to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths statistics, hospital acquired infections kill more people in America than AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined. Furthermore, the vast majority of the patients that acquire such infections in hospitals—and more than 5 percent of patients do—get them from the hands of health care providers. Thankfully, hospitals have become increasingly concerned with hand hygiene. The dirty hands of doctors and nurses aren’t just gross—they are an extremely expensive and potentially fatal act of carelessness. Hospital staffers, in order to follow protocol, need to wash their hands hundreds of times a day. Their failure to follow protocol perfectly is their personal responsibility but non-compliance on such a broad scale is also a failure of the medical system that creates the rules and environment that lead non-compliance.

The medical industry’s acknowledgment of hand hygiene as a systemic problem has led to the establishment and growing influence of Infection Control and Prevention Units. For Infection Control and Prevention, solving handwashing takes the form of cheeky posters of doctors reminding everyone to wash their hands, developing inane training videos demonstrating how to properly wash your hands and implementing incentive programs where health care workers reward each other with certificates when they observe a co-workers consistent compliance. In the hospital where I have focused my research, these certificates were returned unused.

One increasingly popular but misguided program has to been to implement paternalistic monitoring of nurses and other providers, who are forced to undergo increasing levels of surveillance. Whether it is video monitoring systems borrowed from meat manufacturing plants or sensor systems that read the alcohol content on hands, staff are cajoled into changing their behavior by receiving real time feedback combined with their fear that their personal compliance level is now public knowledge. There is no carrot—there is only a stick.

via Moving Through Hospitals: Designing Handwashing – Core77.

Rachel Lehrer is a designer, dancer and student of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons. Her work centers around the question: how can we optimize our body’s intelligence to improve performance? Through years of movement, choreographic and improvisational practice she’s gained expertise in physical learning, tacit knowledge, movement analysis, movement scripting and conducting deeply felt research that vacillates between being highly structured and improvisatory. Rachel also likes writing, rehearsing and making videos about people, ideas and designs that matter to her. Follow her on twitter @rachielehrer.  Core77.

The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths was founded by Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D. in 2004. McCaughey was Lt. Governor of New York from 1995 thru 1998, during Gov. Pataki’s first term. Lt. Gov. McCaughey was not contacted for this post.

An urban garden in Brooklyn, NY

The Brooklyn Food Coalition presents the Brooklyn Food Conference, May 12, 2012, from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. It will be a day of Workshops, Expo, Youth Summit Policy Roundtable, Demos, Music, Art, Meetups – and good HEALTHY food.

Where? Brooklyn Tech, 29 Fort Greene Place, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Admission is free.

Over 5,000 people are expected to attend this free, all day event filled with keynotes from notable food activists, workshops, panel discussions, food demos, family programming, art and much more. The 2012 Conference will help strengthen the cooperative effort of individuals, groups and organizations fighting everyday for a healthy, sustainable and fair food system. Food activists, local farmers, academics, restaurateurs and health advocates and all those interested in food justice will gather to discuss the global food economy and its impact on our lives.

Speakers include Vandana Shiva, via video.  Physicist, Environmental Activist, Shiva’s work highlights the fundamental connection between human rights and the protection of the environment. Dr.Shiva offers solutions to some of the most critical problems posed by the effects of globalization and climate change on the poorest and most populous nations. She founded an international organization, Navdanya, which is a network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 16 states in India, and is leading author and voice in the anti-globalization movement.

While this is alarming, please bear in mind that this is a discussion of a military technology which, with respect to one feature (GPS), used a civilian-grade component. That the entire system can be easily jammed would, we think, be an unreasonable inference based on the data at hand. By Bob Brewin, writing on NextGov.com:

Korea’s jamming of Global Positioning System signals on the Korean Peninsula this week illustrates a “life-threatening” vulnerability of the Army’s Rifleman Radio, which is equipped with a nonmilitary GPS chip, a former top Defense Department official told Nextgov. The Army plans to test the hand-held radio this month at its semiannual Network Integration Evaluation exercise at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., which began Tuesday.

GPS satellites broadcast jam-resistant military signals as well as civil signals susceptible to blocking. Jules McNeff, who spent 20 years in the Air Force working on GPS, said the Army evidently decided to use a chip that receives only civil GPS signals as a “cheap and expedient” way to incorporate location information into the Rifleman Radio.

McNeff, now vice president for strategies and programs at Overlook Systems Technologies Inc., a GPS engineering firm in Vienna, Va., said any time a jamming incident occurs, “it calls into question why we are using [civil chips] in the Rifleman Radio.”

The Army plans to field 5,900 short range Rifleman Radios to infantry squads in seven brigade combat teams over the next year.

Army Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess Jr., director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee in February that North Korea has mounted high-powered Russian-made jamming devices on vehicles near the border — 40 miles north of Seoul, the South Korean capital — which can disrupt GPS signals within a 30-to-60 mile range. He added North Korea has started to develop its own GPS jammer with a greater range.

John Merrill, position, navigation and timing program manager for the Homeland Security Department, said small, inexpensive GPS jammers widely sold on the Web have proved difficult to locate. In a presentation to attendees at a National Institute of Standards conference in March, Merrill said it took DHS, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration from November 2009 to April 2011 to locate one GPS jammer in a truck traveling the New Jersey Turnpike and knocking out GPS signals at the Newark, N.J., airport. [emphasis added]

The Army has billed the Network Integration Evaluation, which runs through June, as a “real-world” exercise and McNeff said the service should include “navigation warfare” maneuvers to test the vulnerability of the Rifleman Radio and other systems to jamming.

via North Korean GPS jamming shows vulnerability of Army radios – Defense – Nextgov – Nextgov.com.