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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 08:27am Sep 6, 2002 EST (# 4205 of 4216)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002F4E6-8CF7-1D49-90FB809EC5880000&catID=2 is a wonderful piece.

Shermer was much influenced by Robert Sternberg.

Sternberg, R.J. INTELLIGENCE, INFORMATION PROCESSING, AND ANALOGICAL REASONING: The Componential Analysis of Human Abilities Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J. 1977 .... is a wonderful book !

If you look at the statistical knowledge people have about the separably measurable components of human abilities - - it is impressive!

Is there something basic about how people differ from machines? If so, everybody knows it already, in some sense. So here's a cliche - something everybody knows - that I think, and a lot of other people think, is worth attention.

The human mind is a superb pattern recognizer - and amazingly able to associate things.

On the other hand, logic at the conscious level is derivative, fuzzy, and weak.

If you read Piaget - or look at the observations in a huge corpus of experimental pschology, or spend much time in a classroom - you're likely to wonder - - "how can people be so stupid and so illogical?"

But at the same time - if you look at what people can do - WOW! - - the level of sophistication in pattern recognition that everybody has watching television is astonishingly more advanced than anything that can be done by machine.

But at the level of logic, by machine standards we're astonishingly weak and unreliable.

And checking facts against observable reality is hard for us - emotionally, logically, and in many ways.

It makes enronation easy - - too easy.

Arguments about MD, even easy ones like the ones in 4131 rshow55 9/2/02 12:39pm . . are hard for people. That makes it easy to mislead people into wasting billions of dollars -- that the nation needs elsewhere.

Piaget and communication models:
4129 lchic 9/2/02 11:24am - - logic comes hard - and comes late - and for all of us - only comes imperfectly. We have to check, to avoid serious mistakes. And that is a basic piece of information that is not now an adequately emphasized part of our culture.

lchic - 09:42am Sep 6, 2002 EST (# 4206 of 4216)

Iraq

"" As US Vice-President Dick Cheney drums up public support, backroom strategists are honing plans to oust Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Options are weighed; little is left to chance. Except, it seems, one crucial detail: after Saddam, what then? Who would lead Iraq? Another military dictator or a bold democrat? Would Iraq fall into chaos, even disintegrate? "What everybody knows in Washington is that there's no end game plan. Who's going to replace Saddam? They don't have the slightest idea," says a former CIA Iraq hand. Four Corners meets an array of aspiring Iraqi leaders living in exile and waiting for Saddam to fall, each trying to make his voice heard. Reporter Peter George scrutinises their records and some of their powerful US backers, and asks if anyone can bring peace and democracy to Iraq, a place where neither has been allowed to take root under Saddam Hussein.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/archives/2002b_Monday2September2002.htm T R A N S C R I P T http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s665247.htm

lchic - 02:32pm Sep 6, 2002 EST (# 4207 of 4216)

Process (2) process innovation process-innovation

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=process

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=innovation

http://dictionary.directhit.com/dictionary/search.php?src=thesarus&qry=process%20innovation

lchic - 05:31pm Sep 6, 2002 EST (# 4208 of 4216)

Process (3) Impact of IT on Process Innovation

Automational
[ Eliminating human labor from a process ]

Informational
[ Capturing process information for purposes of understanding ]

Sequential
[ Changing process sequence, or enabling parallelism ]

Tracking
[ Closely monitoring process status and objects ]

Analytical
[ Improving analysis of information in decision making ]

Geographical
[ Coordinating process across distances ]

Integrative
[ Coordinatinon between tasks and processes ]

Intellectual
[ Capturing and distributing intellectual assets ]

Disintermediating
[ Eliminating intermediaries from process ]

see Davenport,HT (1993)ProcessInnovation

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