Must-read piece in Business Week on reviving American research

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then another 10 million to spark demand over the next decade. That's 15 million to 17 million new jobs. In the 1990s, the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs (a rate of 2.2 million per year), so we know it can be done. Between 2000 and the end of 2007 (the beginning of the current recession), however, the economy created new jobs at a rate of 900,000 a year, so we know it isn't doing it now. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key source of fuel—critical mass, basic scientific research...

I don't exactly buy his precise prescriptions, but he's surely right about both the nature of the problem and the magnitude of response that is needed.

I've left SPARTA, Inc., doing business as Cobham Analytic Solutions.

I've parted amicably from SPARTA, and am preparing to join Advanced Elemental Technologies. No, I can't tell you yet what AET does, but I can say that I'm excited about the opportunity.

CIA agent: Beware mixing votes and electrons

An interesting story by Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers on testimony by CIA agent Steven Stigall to the US Election Assistance Commission.

Basically what I'm saying, you heard the old adage, follow the money. Here I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that's an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to get into the system and tamper with the vote count or make bad things happen...

One thing I was continuously reminded of in looking at this, if you look at that very bottom bullet there, I'm not so much looking at shenanigans on election day as I am all of the things that foreign actors try to do to try to effect the outcome of the election long before election day...

Any computer hooked up to the Internet either through a wire or through a wireless connection is a porthole for hackers. You heard that. I'm here to confirm it very simply...

Bottom line is all the countries I've looked at, yeah, about 36, 37 countries, all the scenarios by which they use electronic voting, they produce a paper ballot receipt, and it's part of the social contract that they have...

Now, again, what I said, traditionally in a traditional voting scheme, the greatest opportunity for fraud that we've seen in other countries is at the local level. When you introduce computers into the equation, you're moving that fraud upstream, and you're allowing a single point, electronic single-point failure. Meaning the potential for mischief can occur higher up the food chain electronically, much faster, and affect a lot more people in terms of the vote count than would be the case if fraud occurred at an individual level, where, again, you're talking about the classic scenario where ballot boxes get thrown in the river or fraudulent ballots get produced. Here it's electronic...

See also Michael Richardson's story for Boston Progressive Examiner