Free Republic

Note: The following text is a quote: Mullen Stresses Precision, Innovation to Graduates By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service FORT LESLEY J. MCNAIR, Washington, D.C., June 10, 2010 – The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff today told graduates of the National Defense University here that their careers will be dominated by their understanding of the precise application of military force and national power. NDU’s National War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces graduated 603 people from the armed services, civilian agencies and many foreign countries. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and King Abdullah of...

Climate change has faced a perfect storm in the first months of 2010. Revelations about climate science coincided with an unusually cold winter in the northern hemisphere and the uncertain outcome to the global summit in Copenhagen. We and our colleagues in the Global Climate Network of think tanks stand squarely behind the overwhelming scientific evidence which points to the heavy hand of humans in climatic changes that we can already see. In the Global Climate Network study suggests that more than 20 million new employment opportunities can be created between now and 2020 just in low-carbon energy industries across...

BP's engineers can't stop the gushing oil spill, but a young genius from Long Island says she found the solution in less time than it takes most people to finish a crossword puzzle. Since the "top kill," "junk shot" and "top hat" techniques failed to end the environmental nightmare, Alia Sabur -- who started her engineering Ph.D. at age 14 -- is pushing for a more radical idea. The Northport native, who started reading before she could walk and who at 18 broke a 300-year-old record to become the youngest-ever college professor, proposes surrounding a pipe with deflated automobile tires,...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-press-secretary-a-new-beginning-presidential-summit-entrepreneurship Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release March 05, 2010 Statement by the Press Secretary on A New Beginning: Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship President Obama, together with the Department of State and the Department of Commerce, will host the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., on April 26 and 27. Participants from over 40 countries on 5 continents have been invited to participate. The Summit will highlight the role entrepreneurship can play in addressing...

Note: The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-presidents-council-advisors-science-and-technology Home • Briefing Room • Presidential Actions • Executive Orders The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release April 21, 2010 Executive Order -- President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to establish an advisory council on science, technology, and innovation, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Establishment. The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is hereby established. The PCAST...

When I was a kid in the 1960s and we came back from a visit to my grandmother’s, my mother used to call my grandmother, let the phone ring twice, and then hang up. It was important for my grandmother to know that we’d arrived home safely, but long-distance telephone calls were too expensive to indulge in unnecessarily. When I entered Vanderbilt University in 1971, my parents had to decide whether to pay for a telephone in my dorm room. They decided to do so, but most of the thoroughly upper-middle-class students on my floor did not have phones. Phones...

Pick up a box of cereal or other packaged food at the grocery store, and chances are you’re looking at a genetically modified product. The Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit organization that seeks sustainable alternatives to harmful methods of food production technologies, estimates that more than 70 percent of the processed foods in U.S. grocery stores contain some genetically modified ingredients — mostly corn or soy. But, in most cases, these modified foods have received only limited testing. For example, take the three genetically modified corn varieties already being sold by Monsanto that are the subject of new analysis...

he Competitive Enterprise Institute, a leading free-market think tank, will celebrate the Second Annual “Human Achievement Hour” between 8:30pm and 9:30pm on Saturday, March 27, 2010. The one-hour celebration coincides with “Earth Hour,” an hour in which governments, individuals, and corporations will dim or shut off lights to symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology. “Earth Hour’s creators suggest that human inventions and technology are a problem, but we see the ability to create and innovate as the ultimate resource,” says Human Achievement Hour founder and CEI Policy Analyst Michelle Minton. “Environmental challenges will not be solved by turning...

A dire warning from Bay State medical-device companies that a new sales tax in the federal health-care law could force their plants - and thousands of jobs - out of the country has rattled Gov. Deval Patrick, a staunch backer of the law and pal President Obama. “This bill is a jobs killer,” said Ernie Whiton, chief financial officer of Chelmsford’s Zoll Medical Corp., which employs about 650 people in Massachusetts. Many of those employees work in Zoll’s local manufacturing facility making heart defibrillators. “We could be forced to (move) manufacturing overseas if we can’t pass along these costs to...

What economic crisis? After a blip last winter, China is growing at more than 8% a year, and the scale and speed at which the country is building a modern infrastructure are mind-boggling. But once you've absorbed the metrics -- the size of its trade surplus, the thousands of miles of high-speed railways, the new ports and highways -- a nagging question comes into focus: Sure, China can grow, but can its companies innovate? Can they build products that will compete in the global marketplace? At first sight, it seems a ridiculous question. China's universities are turning out hundreds of...

America Must Innovate Or Die As China Scientist Lead The World In Research Growth Economics / Technology Feb 04, 2010 - 12:44 PM By: Gordon T Long US innovation is plummeting faster than our Financial Markets did during the 2008 financial crisis! The future of America is presently in peril, not just because of the “banksters’’ shadowy ways, but because of a sputtering Innovation Engine that has had the fuel “choked off’. It has now gone “critical” and can no longer be left to only the carping of the academic community. The chart to the right from the Financial Times:...

AS they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter. Some people take joy in Microsoft’s struggles, as the popular view in recent years paints the company as an...

Pilot Felix Baumgartner will announce today at 9 a.m. EST his intention to expand the boundaries of aerospace exploration by attempting to become the first person ever to break the speed of sound with the human body. Baumgartner hopes to ascend in a capsule lifted by a helium balloon to the upper reaches of the stratosphere to at least 120,000 feet and, protected by a full-pressure “space suit,” launch a freefall jump that could exceed Mach 1.0 – more than 690 miles per hour – before parachuting to Earth. If successful, the Red Bull Stratos mission hopes to establish four...

Before you write off the American economy, consider this remark from Nathan Myhrvold, the ex-Microsoft genius who now runs an idea factory called Intellectual Ventures: “For the last few decades I’ve bought Japanese or German cars but no Japanese or German software. Only the United States can handle the thinking speed of the software field.” We live in a country where makers of high-value-added software are hounded as antitrust outlaws, while the smoke-belching industry of making money-losing cars is lavished with government bailouts, but never mind that. US business ingenuity is so robust that not even the government can kill...

On September 9, the giant data storage hardware and software company EMC announced it would spend $1.5 billion to further develop its R&D capabilities in India. A new research facility will employ 2,000 engineers and scientists with the potential for an additional 1,500. A day earlier, EMC announced a R&D alliance with the Indian Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore, one of a constellation of Indian research universities equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, albeit with harder admissions requirements. Such announcements are usually met with despair and anger. The decision to domicile those jobs in India nails yet another in the...

A new report finds that medical innovation boosts life expectancy, but doesn't cost more "About half of all growth in health care spending in the past several decades was associated with changes in medical care made possible by advances in technology," declared(pdf) a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report last year. "Health care economists attribute about 50 percent of the annual increase of health costs to new technologies or to the intensified use of old ones," writes bioethicist Daniel Callahan in his new book, Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System. Conventional wisdom holds...

Israel’s Friends with Benefits By Norma Zager “See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore He would give to your fathers—to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and to their descendants after them.” Deuteronomy 1:8 (New International Version) If the Lord closed the deal thousands of years ago, why is Israel still looking for a cosigner? Israel must survive but American Jews are “over it.” AIPAC sold out for a glass of lemonade in the Oval Office and J Street is as pro-Israel as David Duke. It is time to wake up...

Space and health, seemingly disconnected, join to provide important lessons about the nation. (In violation of a longtime columnar stricture against the first-person singular - in this age of the rat-trap of me, a stricture violated in columns and blogs and on television every day before breakfast - today's column includes some personal references.) Many in their 50s and older recall vividly where they were when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. My wife and I and our 6-month-old son spent the night at a vacationing neighbor's house that had a color TV and ours didn't. Because of the...

The Israel Test by: Alana Goodman, July 31, 2009 How do you view the material success of others? Do you see it as a product of classist exploitation—a selfish triumph that one attains at the expense of his neighbors—or do you see it as an inspiring achievement that enriches the community as a whole? If you chose the latter, then you have passed “The Israel Test,” the title of a new book by David Gilder that examines the fundamental differences in how cultures view achievement. “The essence of the Israel test [is to] avoid envy and give way to...

Would you be happy to hear that advances that could save your or your loved ones lives are being deliberately held back, in order to satisfy governmental demands to reduce spending on the care we all receive?