Skip to main content

CyberWarriors and Disruptive Technologies

NPR Headlines "All Things Considered" has Tech on their minds lately.

Great government doublespeak of the day: This plan is "predecisional".

The government is estimating that the need is about 30k to 40k people. And as a country, there are maybe 1000, total.  I don't know what qualifications they are talking about, or training or job duties.  They just need to hire a bunch of people that don't exist for threats they are not sure about to keep America "safe" in a future that nobody can predict.

Immediately after, NPR turns to Apple falling behind in the world market.  Cellphones are the actual wave of the future.  Of the entire world.  (Not just nerdy Americans in Brooklyn.  And wannabes.)




The Chinese market is growing.  India. Africa.  The numbers will be going after innovation.  The quickest, easiest smartphones that can deliver quick bits and bites (and bytes) of info.  The device has got to be inexpensive, smooth and work impeccably more than 95% of the time.

Mashing these issues together, it seems that the American government needs to hire tech-savvy people to imagine all sorts of possibilities for the future.  Not just for Apple, but for any American government organization.

Even I can predict that it WILL involve Social Media monitoring (including Linguistic Analysis) and guerilla UX techniques all the way up to the most sophisticated UX research, with as many numbers as possible.  These two needs are a great example of blowing up the perspective to include high-level metrics, while also leaving room for plenty of qualitative situations.  The next Disruptive Technology, the next terrorist cyber-attack will come from a single mind, but will be implemented on a large scale and can influence the world.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Henry David Thoreau is Alive and Well, Despite All the Murderers

Despite his famous grave at Sleepy Hollow, HDT is alive and well. There are countless books, events, plays being read, written, performed and published about him every year. The "interpretations" take on various permutations.  Live-action humans who lead educational programs, or people who write books for children.  Or, theater which extends the documented & literary materials into personal immediacy (not that I am biased, but this is what I do). Lately, there has also been a video game created about Walden. And a young graphic designer who wants to "update" Thoreau's words for the modern age.  Something about "how dated the language is" and the "inaccessibility" of its ideas.  (I can't bear to include a link, or even the designer's name for fear of adding to publicity, and thereby adding "support") The last example is the slippery slope.  At what point does he need to be repackaged, yet again? Instead of taki...
Post a Comment
Read more

Easy Moments

There are moments in everyday life when you want to tell someone something. I was on a shuttle bus and wanted to apologize to someone sitting in front of me. It would have been easy to tell him when I first got on, but I was distracted finding a seat. It would have been easy to get up at the first traffic light, when the bus was stopped. Or at the second.  Things were quiet enough for conversation too. We were about to head into the countryside, so I knew there were not many more moments. When I approached him, it was not the person I thought it was. I did feel better that I had tried. And that there was one more traffic light than I had expected.
Post a Comment
Read more

Mark Twain in the Azores

I've been doing some research on Twain's visit to the Azores. He stopped in Horta on his way to Palestine-a series of correspondences that would become his book,  Innocents Abroad. Most of what he wrote about the Azores in that book was not kind, he was trying to create jokes-and also created a cynical sense of the superiority of the American traveler. He made himself the joke of an ugly American-especially viewed from the perspective of today. In the Book about the Dabneys, there is evidence that he was in their house. Below is a quote from one of the female residents. “At 10 the parlor was quite full….One young man had his note-book out all the time and remarked as I gave him some verbena,’I am taking notes as I am a correspondent of a paper’.  ‘Horrors;, writes CPD, “how we may appear in print,’
Post a Comment
Read more