Biden's Campaign Speech on Foreign Policy

Hello, folks. How are you? It’s great to be with you all. (Applause.) What a great introduction. I just said I hope she remembers me when she’s President of the United States of America.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s great to be before such a distinguished audience at a great university. I want to start off by doing what the Ambassador will tell you you should never do, apologizing. It’s all Jack Lew’s fault I’m late. (Laughter.) No, some of you students don't know that the President’s Chief of Staff was the CFO here at NYU, and also taught a public policy course, and so that's the only reason he got the job as Chief of Staff. He figured if he could deal with this great university, he can deal with the country.

And it’s great to see one of the great, great patriots, one of the finest generals I’ve ever in my 39 years of working in foreign policy and national security ever met, General Wesley Clark. Great to see you, General.

I want to just state parenthetically that you know I ran -- not you know, but I ran for the United States Senate when I was 28 years old, and no one in my family on my dad’s side had ever been involved in public life. And as one of my colleagues said, I’m the first United States Senator I ever knew.

And I ran at the time because I thought the policy we had in Vietnam, I didn't argue it as immoral, but I thought it just didn't make sense, the notion of dominoes and so on and so forth.

And I came to Washington as a 29-year-old kid. I got elected. Before I was eligible to serve, I had to literally wait to be sworn in because I wasn’t eligible under the Constitution. You must be 30 years old. And my image of the military commanders at the time was, if you ever saw that old movie, if you ever rented it, where Slim Pickens is on the back of an atom bomb, dropping out of an aircraft, yelling, Yippe, Kiyay. (Laughter.) And “Dr. Strangelove” was the movie.

But I have to tell you after all the time I’ve served in public office, if you asked me who the most impressive women and men that I have met in government in the last 40 years, six of them would be men or women wearing a uniform. It’s a different military. This guy was not only a great warrior -- I mean literally a warrior, but this guy is a diplomat. This guy is an incredibly bright man, extremely well educated. He understands the role of the military within our system, and he understands the Constitution.

And there are -- Thank God, there’s others like him that are still around today. Wes, thanks for being one of those many folks who changed my impression from my younger years. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Folks, over the last -- the past months, I’ve given on behalf of the campaign a series of speeches on major issues in this campaign laying down the markers, at least from our perspective, of the President and mine, the distinguishing differences between the President [sic] and us on a series of issues -- issues that we believe affect the middle class and our country’s future.

I’ve spoken about the rescue of the American automobile industry in Toledo, Ohio. I’ve spoken about retirement security down in Florida, about leading the world again in manufacturing in the Quad Cities area, and about the tax system and the unfairness of it and how to make fair up in New Hampshire.

Today, I will -- this is the fifth in the series of those speeches, and I want to talk about an American President’s single most important responsibility -- single most important responsibility -- and that's keeping our fellow citizens safe and our nation secure, particularly at a time of such extraordinary challenge and change. The poet William Butler Yeats writing about his Ireland in the year 1916 in a poem called Easter Sunday 1916, said, “all’s changed, changed utterly; a terrible beauty has been born.”

The world has utterly changed during your young life and your early adulthood. It’s not the world it was in 1990 and -- even as recently as 1990. And the question is: How are we going to deal with this beautiful -- this beautiful -- change that also has with its -- fraught with so many potential difficulties.

On this fundamental issue, foreign policy, keeping America safe, the contrast between President Obama, his record, and Governor Romney, and his rhetoric, in my view cannot be greater.

Three and a half years ago, when President Obama and I took office, and stepped into that Oval Office, our nation had been engaged in two wars for the better part of a decade. Al Qaeda was resurgent and Osama bin Laden was at large. Our alliances were dangerously frayed. And our economy -– the foundation of our national security -– was on the precipice of a new depression.

President Obama began to act immediately. He set in motion a policy to end the war in Iraq responsibly. He set a clear strategy and an end date for the war in Afghanistan, which has been going on for close to a decade. He cut in half the number of Americans who are literally serving in harm’s way. He decimated al Qaeda’s senior leadership. He repaired our alliances and restored America’s standing in the world and he saved our economy. He saved our economy from collapse with some very unpopular but bold decisions that have turned out to be right, including the rescue of the automobile industry, all of which has made us much stronger not only at home but abroad.

If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.

Governor Romney’s national security policies, in our view, would return us to a past we’ve worked so hard to move beyond. And, in this regard, there is no difference in what Governor Romney says and what he has proposed for our economy than he has done in foreign policy. In every instance, in our view, he takes us back to the failed policies that got us into the mess that President Obama has dug us out of, and the mess that got us into this in the first place.

Governor Romney, I think, is counting on collective amnesia of the American people. Americans know -- American know that we can’t go back to the future, back to a foreign policy that would have America go it alone -- shout to the world you’re either with us or against us, lash out first and ask the hard questions later, if they get asked at all, isolate America instead of isolating our enemies, waste hundreds of billions of dollars and risk thousands of Americans’ lives on a war that’s unnecessary -- and see the world through a Cold War prism that is totally out of touch with the realities of the 21st century.

VA tests iPhone EHR app for summer rollout

Clinicians at the Washington, D.C., veterans’ medical center have developed an electronic health record application for the Apple iPhone that the Veterans Affairs Department hopes to begin rolling out this summer.

VA is distributing a limited number, up to 1,000, of mobile devices, starting with the Apple iPhone and iPad, when there is a business case for them, such as at the D.C. VA medical center.

It is one of the examples of how VA is demonstrating that it is incorporating up-to-date technology in its operations, said Roger Baker, VA CIO.

The “clinic in hand” mobile app enables a physician to have on his or her handheld device information about the patients to be seen that day, be able to review that information when the clinician wants to, and to use it while visiting patients. A number of clinicians at the D.C. facility conduct their rounds with the app, which uses encryption to protect personal data, to prove it out, Baker said at an April 25 tele-briefing with reporters.

“The EHR app is really powerful. It is reported to be a significant time saver, and I would use the phrase morale improver, but primarily it makes it clear that we’re using the latest technology at the VA again and not just older technology,” he said.

VA anticipates the app being deployed once a more robust mobile device manager (MDM) is in place this summer than the current one. The more robust MDM will be able to manage and secure up to 100,000 mobile devices across the department as they are acquired, he said. Over time, VA will add other mobile platforms, such as the Android system.

Other technology that VA is putting in place is enhanced Wi-Fi capabilities across all VA campuses. So far, VA has deployed it at about one-third of VA facilities and will complete it at the remainder of facilities over the next two or three years. VA network access will be kept separate from Wi-Fi access available to patients to safeguard personal information.

Wi-Fi will be used as the backbone for VA’s real-time location system (RTLS) to track equipment and even patients and augment it in in certain cases where more specific location is required, Baker said.

For example, Wi-Fi is good up to a certain point for identifying where a device is. A surgeon wants to know that everything that is needed to perform surgery is in the room before starting. A different technology to do that kind of RTLS than Wi-Fi is needed “because Wi-Fi sees through the walls and can’t tell you whether it’s room A or B. So we’ll augment the WiFi, which will be our general signal, and do the backbone of our work with some fine-grained capabilities that will help us on the medical side,” he said.

Location-based services I’d like to see on my smartphone and tablet

Adding GPS to smartphones opened them up to all sorts of location-based services (LBS). The promise when the sector took off was how much easier our lives would become with our phones offering different functionality based on knowing where we were. While services like Foursquare are popular, it doesn’t add that much value to users.

There are some LBS that could add that missing value to smartphones and even wirelessly connected tablets. If properly implemented they would perform useful tasks for us, beyond just checking us in places to earn badges.

I would like to see my phone check me in for appointments automatically. Imagine arriving for your dental appointment and your phone magically tells the staff you are here. No dinging the bell to get their attention, no waiting in line to sign in on a little form. You arrive and you are checked in.

The same thing could easily be done with doctor appointments. No muss, no fuss.

I currently use my phone to pay for beverages in Starbucks which is a great feature. Why can’t my phone tell the Starbucks staff when I arrive and automatically order my usual? That wouldn’t be hard to do, it wouldn’t intrude on my safety or privacy as an opt-in feature. They could begin making my drink as soon as I pull into a parking space.

Local restaurants have programs that let regular customers sign up for specials. They often include a free meal or treat on your birthday. These would be perfect cases for the automatic checkin. You arrive and the staff knows it even before you hit the door.

They know you are a regular customer, and in the case of your special day they know about it before you even approach the host/hostess. Carry this further and if you pull out your wireless tablet it can offer you the menu for perusal. Once you decide what you want go ahead and order it.

Say you are on the way to a meeting with one of your contacts. Why doesn’t your phone ping them when you arrive at the venue? They would know to look for you. Some navigation apps already do this, but rather than have to use those what if your phone did this on its own?

This type of LBS technology is already possible, it just needs to be implemented. The savvy smartphone owner would get a real benefit from it, and it would improve service at the establishments that participate. Everyone would win, with little downside. Of course the user should be able to control this on a per-establishment basis.

M2M in healthcare: wellness connected

Advocates of machine-to-machine (M2M) enabling technologies are always ready to talk up the kinds of application it could benefit. Typically, M2M can be seen in a range of applications - security and surveillance, building automation, supply chains and logistics management - however, it is healthcare that is best placed to progress beyond proof-of-concept stage when it comes to the ‘device shall speak unto device’ model.In short, the M2M model uses wired or wireless connectivity to exchange information and communications between Web-connected devices without the need for human intervention.

The benefits are numerous for patients, carers and clinicians alike, and particularly if a migration from conventional to M2M is worked into planned technology upgrade cycles. Given that M2M can use a lot of mainstream ICT, its costs can be diffused and aligned with those IT lifecycles common to PC and Internet-connected medical devices, rather than very expensive specialist hardware and software. This benefits both physicians and healthcare finance offices.

Definitions of what M2M means for the healthcare sector vary between sources. Some benefits extend from established telemedicine systems; others are only practical using an M2M model and the assumption that patients have local access to broadband connection. M2M can, in theory, provide real-time statistics, faster responses and ongoing revenues throughout product lifetime.

The potential to automate healthcare procedures - freeing up staff and only involving doctors when they are actually required - is compelling for a healthcare sector looking to make best use of its available resources. Data regarding patients’ conditions can be more easily monitored, and can be fed into ‘big-picture’ data sets to be analysed for wide-scale trends. Applications can be more easily changed or upgraded. M2M also provides patients with more control over their treatment regime.

According to Vodafone’s mHealth programme, the need for technological intervention in the delivery of healthcare services is due to the kind of shifts in healthcare demand that are evident around the world: ageing demographics, a rise in chronic diseases (such as diabetes), allied to an increasingly technically-savvy patient population, are affecting the type and intensity of care required to the point where established healthcare models are becoming unsustainable.

Generically, the M2M model begins with a remote sensor gathering source data (blood pressure, heart rate, blood levels, say), and transferring it via a conventional Internet link through the public network, then routed to a controlling server; the data is then analysed and acted upon by host systems which can be hosted by a medical facility, or a cloud service provider, for example.

M2M is associated with telemedicine, a technology that has been around in various forms for some years. Telemedicine is the use of telecommunications and IT in order to provide clinical health care remotely, overcoming distance barriers, and providing access to medical support that might otherwise not be so accessible. Telemedicine can also be part of the life-saving equipment used in critical care and emergency situations. The interface between healthcare and IT is always growing and already starting to infiltrate the social dependency between individuals, community group members, and social media, as well as what might be termed ‘personal ICT’. A recent report from Carers UK highlights how this trend should play a key role in bringing advance healthcare to an ageing population as unsustainable demands are made on health organisations’ resources.

Traditional telemedicine has mostly relied on special dedicated communication channels involving human supervision, whereas in the M2M context, much of the monitoring, data gathering and analysis occurs automatically between the connected devices. Different M2M telemedicine solutions developers are looking at different architectural models. A typical example of M2M communications is road traffic control.

The system connects to the sensor monitors and sends information on volume and speed characteristics; this is sent to specialised software that controls the traffic devices, including traffic lights and information signs. The incoming data is then manipulated to control the traffic flow.

State agencies are already on the case. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has begun investigating ways to deploy M2M healthcare. The government has challenged the NHS to find 20bn worth of efficiency savings by 2015; M2M is viewed as one way that this can be achieved. One of the first areas for M2M applications is patient monitoring. The aim is to use M2M technology to bring better compliance with prescribed treatments, faster reaction times to medical emergencies, and generally better outcomes for patients.

A computer

Three years ago, 100 Parisians volunteered to wear a wristband with a sensor in it. The sensors measured air and noise pollution as the wearers made their way around the city, transmitting that data back to an online platform that created a virtual map of the city’s pollution levels, which anyone with an Internet connection could take a look at.

It was simple, elegant, effective — and a peek at the urban future, when “smart cities” will collect data of all kinds (in all kinds of ways) and use it to make themselves better places to live. The Paris wristband project shows how these efforts are already taking place, as urbanites conceive of solutions to their cities’ problems through creative uses of technology. It’s urban resourcefulness at its finest.

But it may not last. The smart-city movement is at a crossroads. With the market projected to be worth $16 billion by the end of the decade, big companies like IBM and Cisco have much grander — and more profitable — ambitions than these small-scale projects. They’re going all-in on smart cities, with designs that supposedly do everything from end traffic jams to prevent disease outbreaks to eliminate litter. “Almost anything — any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small — can become digitally aware and networked,” said IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano at the 2010 SmarterCities forum in Shanghai. “Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and instrumented things —cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines …”

Indeed, the goal of these companies is not just to participate in the evolution of smart cities, but to connect and control virtually everything with massive operating systems that will run these cities in their entirety. “Everybody wants to be the architects of these systems because then you own them forever,” says Greg Lindsay, author of “Aerotropolis” and an urban-technology reporter for Fast Company. “You could say it’s sort of a land grab.”

Which of these futures should smart cities shoot for — the bottom-up model or the top-down version? A few weeks ago, Lindsay and Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future debated just that question. It’s easy to feel a knee-jerk reaction against the top-down, evil-corporate-overlord schema, but it has some things going for it. Rio de Janeiro is perhaps the closest thing the world currently has to a top-down smart city. Two years ago, IBM built an enormous, Mission Control-like facility for Rio, from which emergency services, transit, traffic, air quality, weather, contagious disease outbreaks, landslides and just about everything else is now monitored and managed. “Eighty interchangeable digital panels project live video feeds from 450 cameras,” is how the Daily Beast described it, “plus a dizzying array of tricked-out Google Maps of schools and hospitals, car accidents … and close to 10,000 GPS-tracked buses and ambulances.”

It’s an undeniably nimble and efficient method (assuming the system doesn’t crash), and will come in handy when Rio hosts both the Olympics and the World Cup in the next four years. But it also consolidates power in the executive branch and creates an unsettling scope of surveillance. Its greatest novelty, however, may be that the system effectively puts a corporation, IBM, partially at the helm of a city of 6 million people.

“It has something like 70 different city departments under it,” says Lindsay of Rio’s system. “You create this entanglement where IBM almost becomes part of the city government. You couldn’t untangle it if you wanted to.”

Not to mention the fact that IBM is a computer company, not an urban planning consultancy. In his debate with Lindsay, Townsend asserted that the companies vying for smart-city dominance “know nothing about cities.” In fact, he said, despite having one of the biggest smart-city divisions in the IT world, IBM just hired its first urban planner last year. Why so little interest in what makes cities tick? “That’s probably the whole arrogance of the technology culture,” said Lindsay. “I think the software industry sees urban government as having failed.” Their attitude is: “‘We will come into your city and we will fix it.’”

Greg Mankiw doesn't understand competitio?n for investment

Greg Mankiw's column inSunday's New York Times makesthe case that competition between governments is a good thing, thatit makes them more efficient in the same way that competition amongfirms does. He paints it as also being about choosingredistributionist policies or not, with Brad DeLong and Harold Pollack both ably making the case that of course governments shouldengage in redistribution.

As author of Competing for Capital, however, I am more interested in the question of whether government competition for investment leads to more efficient outcomes. The answer, in short, is that it does not. Indeed, competition forinvestment leads to economic inefficiency, heightened incomeinequality, and rent-seeking behavior by firms.

Mankiw doesn't stop to think about what this competition looks like in the real world. To attract mobile capital, immobile governments offer a dizzying array of fiscal, financial, and regulatory incentives to companies in sums that have been growing over time for U.S. state and local governments, as I document in Competing for Capital and Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital. His discussion centers on the reduction of corporate income tax rates, which is surely a part of the competition, but which is no longer an issue when an individual firm is negotiating with an individual government.

At that level, the issues then become more concrete: Can we keep our employees' state withholding tax? Can we get out of paying taxes every other company has to pay? Will you give us a cash grant? The list goes on and on. As governments make varying concessions on these issues, you then begin to see the consequences: discrimination among firms; overuse and mis-location of capital as subsidies distort investment decisions; a more unequal post-tax, post-subsidy distribution of income than would have existed in the absence of incentive use; and at times the subsidization of environmentally harmful projects. Moreover, many location incentives are actually relocation incentives, paying companies at times over $100 million to move across a state line while staying in the same metropolitan area, with no economic benefit for the region or the country as a whole .

Once upon a time, about 50 years ago in this country, companies made their investment decisions based on their best estimate of the economic case for various locations without requesting subsidies. On the rare occasion when a company did ask for government support, it was at levels that would appear quaint today. For example, when Chrysler built its Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant in the early 1960s, it asked for the city to run a sewer line out to the facility--and it even lent the city the money to do it.

Today, companies have learned that the site location decision is a great opportunity to extract rents from immobile governments, and invest considerable resources into doing just that. An entire industry has sprung up to take advantage of businesses' informational advantages over governments--and, indeed, intensify that asymmetry--to make rent extraction as effective (not "efficient"!) as possible.

Finally, let's reflect on the force that makes this process happen, capital mobility. The fact that capital has far greater ability to move geographically than labor does, and that governments of course are geographically bound to one place, is a source of power for owners of capital. Modern economists, especially conservatives and libertarians, often have great difficulty acknowledging the role of power in market transactions, though their ostensible hero, Adam Smith, did not. To treat this power as a natural phenomenon rather than a social one, as Mankiw does, is dangerously close to saying that might makes right. But that's not the way things are supposed to work in a democratic society, or a moral one.

High-Speed Collusion

However, the foundation for this success — a competitive market for high-speed Internet access — is in serious jeopardy. That’s because of a steady and unmistakable march away from competition and toward higher and higher levels of concentration in the market.

In the past seven years we’ve witnessed rampant consolidation. Sprint bought Nextel. AT&T merged first with Cingular and then with BellSouth. Verizon gobbled up Alltel. Comcast absorbed NBCUniversal. This trend finally paused when the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile.

The consolidation we’re experiencing isn’t a natural result of free-market forces. Rather, it’s the outcome of the FCC’s policy decisions, which discourage competition and place a disproportionate amount of the nation’s most valuable spectrum into the hands of just two companies: AT&T and Verizon.

Now one of these behemoths has asked the government to bless yet another unholy union. Verizon announced late last year that it intends to team up with a coalition of cable companies. In this deal, Verizon has agreed to stop competing with cable in exchange for the opportunity to buy a valuable chunk of “wireless spectrum” — the industry’s term for the public airwaves over which wireless traffic moves.

This latest deal to divvy up the market for high-speed Internet access would hurt consumers. We’d wind up with fewer options for broadband in our communities, higher prices, and increasingly unfair terms and conditions.

Verizon would control even more of the nation’s valuable mobile broadband spectrum, and it would cement AT&T’s and Verizon’s dominance in the wireless market.

Put simply, since Verizon controls more spectrum than any of its competitors, it doesn’t need this deal to meet growing consumer data demand. But it is the best way for Verizon to ensure that another wireless company cannot compete by using that spectrum to offer higher-quality services at lower prices.

The spectrum sale alone should be enough to tilt this transaction against the public interest. But the most stunning part of these deals is a series of cartel-like side agreements between Verizon and the cabal of cable companies — former competitors — to resell each other’s products. If all goes according to plan, you’ll be able to buy Verizon Wireless service from your local cable company, or get cable modem and cable TV service from the Verizon Wireless retailer around the corner.

That proposition would put an end to any hope for nationwide competition between truly high-speed Internet service providers. Competition benefits consumers when companies try to win subscribers from their competitors through better service and lower prices — not when they offer to sign up their own customers for their rivals’ services.

These agreements simply represent a pact between these companies to stay out of each other’s way, forever. They put former rivals on the path toward collusion rather than competition.

Consumers are already feeling the impact of the lack of competition as they get locked in to more expensive long-term contracts and bundles while alternatives are locked out of the marketplace.

There’s no reason this pattern of consolidation and consumer harm has to continue. The FCC and the Justice Department should protect consumers by stopping this deal. If the decision to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger was the down payment on future competition, preventing Verizon’s deal with the cable cartel should be the next installment.

Fuel management for Asian offshore ships

The system was sold by Royston’s Singapore agent, Can Traders, to the Swiber Carina. It is being used to provide real-time fuel consumption details on board and simultaneously in the head office. In separate trials an enginei system has enabled users to achieve fuel savings of up to 20% and Swiber management is now hoping that similar savings will prove possible with its new support vessel.

The Swiber Carina was launched last year as the first in a building plan for 11-vessels that will provide oilfield support services around the Malaysian Peninsula. It is powered by two Cummins KT38 engines and the company management is hoping that the enginei system will enable its crew to operate them more fuel efficiently by maintaining a closer control of speed and power. It should also help the operations management deploy the ship in a way that avoids imposing instructions that adversely influence fuel demand.

The Royston enginei system can be applied to any diesel-powered vessel and works by accurately measuring fuel flow and matching the data with its GPS location. This makes it possible for the operator to continuously calculate a vessel’s ‘miles per gallon’ and to correlate the information with its activity and speed. Enginei is basically a measurement system that does not impose itself upon the vessel’s control systems in any way. However, by providing a simple bridge display it enables masters to be continuously aware of their fuel consumption. They are then able and to use their own judgment in setting their priorities and achieve an optimum balance between their speed and fuel consumed.

Data from the enginei system are made available to operations managers ashore who are provided with a more sophisticated display that makes it easier to deploy vessels in a timely and cost effective way. The data being used on the vessel, along with its GPS location, are relayed ashore where a satellite map display provides the ship’s superintendent with a real-time presentation of each vessel’s location and fuel consumption. Superintendents benefit from a graphic overlay that shows the amount of fuel being consumed at any point along its track. This enables them to deploy their vessels more efficiently and to avoid issuing instructions that might lead to unnecessary fuel consumption. It is also expected to prove attractive to ship operators in the region where fuel theft can be a problem.

Alem suicide highlights sponsorship system’s flaws

Alem Dechasa-Desisa left Ethiopia the day after Christmas last year. She headed for Lebanon, where she planned to make enough money to support her two children.

Within three months, she was dead, the victim of an apparent suicide. Even before her death, Alem had become something of a cause célèbre in some parts of Lebanese society and her case drew international attention.

Abused outside her own consulate in a videotaped incident, Alem was forced by a man later identified as Ali Mahfouz into a car as she lay screaming on the ground outside a place that was supposed to keep her safe.

At 33, Alem was one of 200,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. That her case has garnered notice makes it an anomaly, but what happened to her is not.

Nearly every step of her journey from Burayu, her home outside Addis Ababa, to her eventual death in a psychiatric hospital in the Lebanese mountains is indicative of a failure in the haphazard Lebanese system that deals with the women who come to work in the homes and care for the children of many in this country.

Alem’s husband, Lamesa, told The Daily Star that he and his wife borrowed more than 4,500 Ethiopian Birr, around $260, to facilitate her travel. That’s about three months salary of the country’s average national income, and most of it went to a local broker.

He also said she was expected to pay the first two months of her salary to agents in Ethiopia.

Three years ago, Ethiopia imposed a ban on its citizens going to Lebanon to work as domestics. So Alem went through Yemen. Ethiopia’s consul general in Lebanon, Asaminew Debelie Bonssa, has estimated that there are between 60,000 and 80,000 Ethiopians in Lebanon, only 43,000 legally, having come before the ban.

That makes women like her especially vulnerable to human trafficking. Ghada Jabbour, head of KAFA’s Trafficking and Exploitation Unit, said that Alem was “seemingly a victim of trafficking. Not only had she incurred debts to come to Lebanon, but also she was smuggled outside Ethiopia because of the current ban. In addition, the sponsorship system in Lebanon tied her to a specific employer and did not grant her the freedom to decide her future.”

Trafficking is a tough crime to prove, and despite an anti-trafficking law passed in Lebanon last summer, not much has been done in the way of implementation. And women continue to come, trafficked or otherwise. In large part, this is due to financial imbalances. Even paltry salaries – several workers told The Daily Star of wages around $200 a month for fulltime work – can amount to a great deal in struggling home countries.

Lebanese authorities still grant visas to people from countries with deployment bans, and so Alem arrived, technically “undocumented” but very much part of the Lebanese “kafala” (sponsorship) system where work and residency is tied to a specific employer, even before she made it to the airport.

Because she was in the country illegally, Bonssa said she and others like her are hard to keep track of. Activists say even documented women are often afraid or unable to contact their embassies if they need help.

According to Hicham Borji, president of the union of workers’ recruitment agencies, there are around 450 licensed agencies in Lebanon. An optimistic estimate, he says, is that 100 of these agencies – that act as go-betweens between workers and employers – actually conform to the terms of their licenses. These include a stable location, a land line and a so-called “safe room” for domestic workers who may need to stay at the agency.

Alem’s agency – which was supposed to care for her when she was not with an employer, sent her to two homes. Both sent her back. Chadi Mahfouz, the agency’s director, delegated his brother Ali Mahfouz to deal with Alem after she returned from the second house.

Chadi Mahfouz told The Daily Star that his brother, now charged with contributing to and causing Alem’s death, is not an employee of the agency he directs. This means the agency was acting illegally – but it has not lost its license, in fact it has since become a member of the union.

After what he said were two suicide attempts – both after her removal from the second house – Ali Mahfouz brought Alem to the consulate, where he told staff she was mentally ill. Bonssa, who has since expressed regret at trusting Mahfouz, told him to take her to a hospital. It was outside the consulate, a place that ought to have been a refuge, that the beating took place.

Aging transit systems grapple with repair backlog

Driven by high gas prices and an uncertain economy, Americans are turning to trains and buses to get around in greater numbers than ever before. But the aging transit systems they're riding face an $80 billion maintenance backlog that jeopardizes service just when it's most in demand.

The boost in ridership comes as pain at the gas pump and the sluggish economic recovery combine with a migration of young adults to cities and new technology that makes transit faster and friendlier than in the past. The number of transit trips over a 12-month period will likely set a new record later this month or next, say Federal Transit Administration officials. The current peak is 10.3 billion trips over a year, set in December 2008.

But decades of deferred repairs and modernization projects also have many transit agencies scrambling to keep trains and buses in operation. The transit administration estimated in 2010 that it would take $78 billion to get transit systems into shape, and officials say the backlog has grown since then. In some places, workers search the Internet for spare parts that are no longer manufactured. In others, trains operate using equipment designed, literally, in the horse-and-buggy era.

In Philadelphia, for example, commuters ride trains over rusty steel bridges, some of them dating back to the 19th century. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority - which operates subway, trolley, bus and commuter rail systems - is responsible for 346 bridges that are on average 80 years old. Officials said they may be forced to slow trains or even stop them from crossing one bridge that's 1,000 feet long and 90 feet above the ground if it deteriorates further, leaving stations on the other side without service.

A key power substation relies on electrical equipment manufactured in 1926. There's no hope for acquiring spare parts, so workers try to open the boxes housing the equipment as infrequently as possible to prevent damage from exposure to the environment.

"We're operating on a prayer on that line," Joseph Casey, the transportation authority's general manager, said in an interview. "If that fails, half of our commuter rail system would shut down." The system carries 125,000 passengers on weekdays.

The transportation authority doesn't have enough money to replace the bridges or outdated electrical equipment, Casey said. In recent years, the authority has spent $600 million on renovating elevated portions of a subway line that dates back to 1905, and $100 million to install a federally required rail safety system. Another $327 million was spent on new rail cars to replace 72 cars built in 1964. Some of the older cars - nearly 40 of which are still in service - are in such disrepair that passengers get soaked from leaks when it rains.

And yet passengers made 334 million trips on the transit system last year, the most in 22 years, despite a 9 percent fare hike. So far this year, ridership is up 3 percent, Casey said.

San Francisco's subway system, Bay Area Rapid Transit, faces many similar problems. Opened in 1972, BART was at that time the most automated subway system in the nation. But circuit boards and other electronic components for 449 original train cars - out of the system's total of 669 cars - are now 40 years old, no longer manufactured and often impossible to replace.

BART employees regularly scour eBay and other websites in search of after-market dealers who might stock the parts, said Tamar Allen, manager of BART's mechanical operations. When they find a dealer, they buy every useable part until "the well runs dry," she said.

And that's still not enough. Some cars have been cannibalized for parts in order to keep other cars working. Cars whose parts have been removed are still in use, but only when they can be sandwiched between other cars, Allen said. In some cases, employees have re-engineered parts when no replacements could be found, but it's a difficult process because there is no margin for error, she said.

BART plans to buy 775 new cars by 2023 at an estimated cost of $3.2 billion, but so far the agency has identified only about a third of the money - enough for the first phase of 200 cars, James Allison, a BART spokesman, said. Where will the rest come from? "We're working on that," he said.

Hunterdon Art Museum showcases handcrafted efforts of female artists

“Yeon Jin Kim: Spaceship Grocery Store” would seem, at first, to be more a product of technology than craft. It’s a video (you can call it up on YouTube), created by a Korean artist (born in Seoul in 1978), who got her master’s from Hunter College and did a fellowship at Yaddo in 2009.

The video follows an alien — it looks like two boomboxes and a VCR on legs — as it walks through an urban street, stopping by a store, passing through a bombed-out neighborhood and finally boarding a bus. The alien, the backgrounds and various 3-D props are drawn on paper or cardboard with a pencil, but the backdrop is actually a long scroll that the figures, pinned on Mylar fishing line, move past as the artist pulls them along.

That’s interesting, but hardly new — the “South Park” pilot created a remarkable illusionism with just bits of construction paper, so minimalist animation is pretty mainstream these days. But what is new is that Kim shoots her entire eight-minute movie in one take. Any glitch, like a figure getting hung up on a knot in the fishing line, means starting over. It’s as if every Kim movie is one of those long tracking shots John Frankenheimer made for “The Train,” which a film critic once described as “several minutes of action looking for a mistake.”

Kim has set up her apparatus — the little house models, the bus, the characters and other 3-D elements — in the small second-floor gallery where the video is displayed. The long scroll that forms the backdrop is there, too. No more than knee-high, the scroll is arranged around the walls of the room like a Chinese ink painting, which Kim says was her inspiration.

“Spaceship Grocery Store” is animation, but it’s also a hand-drawn landscape and cut-out figures — does that make them sculpture? — that take part in a sustained performance. The simplicity and childlike obviousness of Kim’s devices is evidently intended to remind us of her low-tech ingenuity. This is not “Wallace and Gromit” on a shoestring (or on a fish string), but a kind of parody of professionally rendered, smoothly coordinated animation. Most of which, as we all know, is made in Korean sweatshops these days.

In contrast, “Kirsten Hassenfeld: Cabin Fever” is immediately identifiable as handcraft: Hassenfeld deliberately refers to the pioneer crafts of quilting and making hook rugs with her work, which is assembled from scraps collected from of her daily life, such as straws, bottle caps, bills and envelopes, all of it filled out with reams of vintage wrapping paper. She finds the pre-“Mad Men” era wrapping paper on eBay; it is printed in pale greens and oranges, with cartoony little bunnies, deer, snowflakes and kittens.

Hassenfeld has split the first-floor gallery at Hunterdon into two spaces, with a wall of backlit wrapping paper punctured by a door in the middle. What you first see is a sort of polygonal chandelier shaped by plastic tubes and papered over with all sorts of commonplace ephemera. When you pass through the door, the walls are lined with flat collages made of tightly folded printed papers, receipts, etc; that she makes into bars and assembles into patterns that are at least a bit reminiscent of those on the old wrapping paper.

There’s a lace doily, almost 19th-century-wedding-cake feel to a lot of Hassenfeld, like there is to Kara Walker’s silhouettes. Her meticulously crafted chandeliers take on a stacked-volume shape that echoes Victorian lathe-turned furniture, and she’s fond of keepsake-like framing devices and hints of traditional embroidery, scrollwork decoration and cameos. Hunterdon has done many shows that speak to handcraft’s descent from the “women’s work” of a century ago, and this show fits into the series neatly.

Many female artists have seized on making art out of the detritus of daily life, in a puckish poke at consumerism and cheerful banality, but “Cabin Fever” seems more formal than that, as if it were more concerned with styles than it is with materials. Hassenfeld graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Arizona, and she’s been shown at a number of prestigious venues lately, but this is her first solo show in a museum.

Villagers in Almondsbury take legal action to keep access road open

A LEGAL battle is being waged by disgruntled villagers in Almondsbury after parish councillors put the only access road to their homes up for sale without warning.

Woodhouse Close residents first discovered that the lane and field at the back of their properties were up for auction when 'for sale' signs appeared on their street in March.

Alarmed Jean Cowan, Becky Chaplain and Brooke Stevenson immediately contacted the parish council, which owns the plot of land and path, appealing to members to grant them right of way on the road they drive on every day after the sale.

But, as their pleas fell on deaf ears, the dispute escalated and they felt they were left with no alternative but to take action and hire solicitors.

The group, who have shelled out 1,500 so far in legal fees, insisted that all councillors needed to do to put a stop to their nightmare was add a clause in the sale contract binding the buyer to allow them access.

Last Tuesday they turned up at a meeting of Almondsbury Parish Council begging councillors to hear them out.

Mother-of-two Mrs Chaplain, 32, called on members one last time to agree to a compromise before a sale went ahead.

She said: "What grounds have you for not putting a clause in the contract when it is causing so much distress to residents? We would pay for it, you would not have to spend any money."

Her neighbour Mrs Stevenson, 29, added: "You are meant to represent the people of Almondsbury and be our voice. We have always had access to that lane. We have no front access to our homes. What are we supposed to do? We are all worried sick."

Chairman Cllr Diane Wilson cut them short, saying the matter was now in the hands of solicitors.

She said: "You have not got a legal right to use it. You have had access free gratis as long as I can remember. This council has never charged you a penny for the use of that lane. You can get to your properties. You are exaggerating."

South Gloucestershire Councillor for Almondsbury and former parish council chairman Sheila Cook said she was "appalled" at the members' behaviour.

She said: "I’m very supportive of the residents’ case and I’m disappointed that the parish council are refusing to engage with them, which is why residents feel that they have no alternative but to go down the legal route – a route that will cost both the residents and the parish council."

Along with the residents, she set up a petition demanding that the sale, which was held on Tuesday evening, April 10, be postponed.

Yet, despite collecting 89 signatures, the auction went ahead and the land and lane were sold off for 74,000.

Girls Around Me App Is a Wake-Up Call

As far as I can tell, the app "Girls Around Me" wasn't violating any laws. But it was high on the creepy scale when, according to reports, women's identity, photographs and location were being revealed to strangers, even though the women never opted into the service. Although the developer, Moscow-based I-Free, hardly deserves any awards, the app's a good wake-up call for people to use the privacy settings of legitimate social networking and location services.

The app mashed together information people posted about themselves publicly on Foursquare and Facebook and created a map showing the location and photographs of nearby women. On its website, the company brags that the app can be used to "Browse photos of lovely local ladies and tap their thumbnail to find out more about them." It's offered for those "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand." An image that resembles a radar screen with a silhouette of an apparently naked woman adorns the home page.

Late last month Foursquare cut off access to the app so that it can no longer collect the company's publicly accessible data. In a statement, Foursquare said "This is a violation of our API (application programming interface)." Apple subsequently removed the app from its app store.

Foursquare is a location service typically used to share information about restaurants and other places people visit. It's common for people to use Foursquare to "check-in" to a location and share that information with their friends. Restaurant-goers often use it to recommend specific meals; and it's possible to use the service to let friends locate you in real-time, perhaps to stop by to say hello or share a drink or a meal.

Foursquare users can connect their account to Facebook and, when they do, they are asked to specify who can see their information. When I checked, it was set to "Friends." But you can also set it to Public, which means anyone can see it, or "only me," which hides it from everyone but yourself. It's also possible to link Foursquare with Twitter. Although it's possible to limit who can see your tweets, the default setting -- which very few Twitter users change -- is for tweets to be public.

The fracas behind the Girls Around Me app is a reminder that we all have a responsibility to protect our own privacy. I'm not condoning their tasteless and tacky service, but from everything I can tell, the company didn't hack into any servers or tap into anyone's private information. Everything it did was based on information people posted for public consumption.

Let this be yet another reminder for people to think about over-sharing. To me, it's obvious that connecting your Foursquare account with Twitter is tantamount to broadcasting your whereabouts. I've done that, but I did so knowingly. But it never hurts to remind people to put thought into whether they really want to publicly share where they are and, by implication, where they're not. And parents, this is yet another good opportunity to share a bit of digital literacy with your kids. "What's important in the 'Girls Around Me' story for parents and kids to consider together is that an app was using people's publicly available information without their knowledge," wrote my ConnectSafely.org co-director Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews. And, considering the number of mobile apps being created all the time, "this is not the last time that will happen," she added.

Aside from safety and privacy concerns, location can also be embarrassing, as I realized a few years ago when I went to a particular holiday party instead of another party that some people thought I "should" have gone to. Without thinking, I used Facebook to "check-in" to the party and then realized that my would-be hosts from the other party might see it. To save face, I quickly jumped in my car and drove 35 miles to put in an appearance at the other party.

Belton’s EOC gets first real test during flood

The heavy rains that rolled through Central Texas last week caused more of its share of concerns for Belton citizens and city officials alike.

Because of the rain, Nolan Creek swelled over its banks and brought memories of the devastating flood of September 2010, where numerous homes and businesses were damaged by the flooding of the creek through Downtown Belton.

As rain continued to fall and Nolan Creek began to rise, Belton city officials got a real-time test of their Emergency Operations Center located at the Belton Police Department.

"We did an action report after the last flood and we saw a lot of problems," City Manager Sam Listi said. "It was not a very effective operation. We didn't have any communication equipment and we decided, as a result of that, that we needed to do something different. The decision was made to invest a little bit of money at the Police Department to get a first class EOC set up, so we would be ready for the next time."

During the flood event on March 20, city officals (including Listi, BPD Chief Gene Ellis, BFD Chief Francisco Corona and Interim Fire Chief Bruce Pritchard) met at the EOC around 3 a.m. and began the process of assessing the situation.

"We were pretty nervous about it because we weren't sure how much rain was going to come, but from my standpoint, it seemed to flow a lot better," Listi said. "Having good and adequate communication was important."

Within a matter of minutes, 196 residences and businesses located in the Nolan Creek flood plain were notified of the potential danger through the First Call system and officials were able to direct the appropriate responses to flooded roads and evacuations.

"Even though the flood wasn't quite as bad, we were ready," Listi said.

Because of the 2010 flood, improvements were made to the BPD building for the creation of Belton's own EOC.

An area that used to contain a copy room and conference room was converted into the EOC, equipped with two televisions, a mobile data terminal, wireless capabilities and a specially designed hub (run off of the department's generator system) with ports for telephone access and Internet access.

Cameras were also added to the Police Department's mobile crime scene unit to give those in the EOC a view of what was happening outside.

"It's hard without the ability to see things," Listi said. "We faced that in the 2010 flood where we just couldn't really see what was going on.

"We had the eyes and ears (this time). We didn't feel deficient in terms of the information flow like we had in the past."

Ellis said the Police Department was a natural location for the EOC.

"The radio operations were already in the building and we had some of the infrastructure already in place," Ellis said. "We felt like we could adapt the building."

Ellis said the thought of a local EOC originally came about during the shooting attack at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009.

"We identified the need for an EOC Nov. 5, 2009," Ellis said. "The thought had always been that Belton would just use the EOC at the Bell County Communications Center, but the problem is when a disaster is regional, it's overloaded. For a local response, we had to have our own"

With the investments that have been made, city officials can almost instantaneously send information to people possibly affected by a disaster or emergency.

Although the EOC has proved effective in its first test, Ellis said citizens still have a responsibility to stay informed during a time of disaster or emergency.

App aims to help mariners avoid rare whales

Now, a new app for the iPad or iPhone aims to help mariners avoid the rare whales so they don’t strike them.

The Whale Alert app takes information from underwater microphones to locate the whales in real time, which helps ships in New England waters avoid the species’ estimated 550 remaining whales.

The app also uses the GPS feature on iPads or iPhones to alert mariners if they’re entering areas where right whales were spotted, or are known to frequent, along their migratory route from Florida to Maine. Those zones have mandatory or voluntary speed restrictions.

Preventing even one fatal ship strike can have a lasting effect on the right whale population.

“Right whales are being run over by large ships and killed, but we can save them,” said Patrick Ramage of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which led the app’s development.

The North Atlantic right whale was hunted to near extinction in the late 18th century and has struggled since.

The animal, which can grow to 55 feet in length, is vulnerable to ship strikes because it can be difficult to see as it feeds on plankton slicks near the surface. It’s also oblivious to its surroundings while eating. Since the 1970s, an average of two North Atlantic right whales have been killed annually by ship strikes, though there has been one death in each of the past two years, said Greg Silber, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Whale Alert aims to make it easier for navigators to be aware of the various whale restrictions.

Previously, ships often received that information via clunky technologies such as fax machines, VHF transmission, or not at all because their equipment was outdated.

But vessels with the app are alerted when they enter areas with right whale restrictions (with a whale song sound effect).

For now, the app can only locate the whales’ real-time location off New England because it’s the only region where special acoustic buoys are installed.

“The whales now have a voice,” said Christopher Clark, a Cornell University scientist who led development of the acoustic monitoring system and worked on the app. “We are eavesdropping on the social network of whales.”

The multimillion-dollar acoustic system has been in operation for several years. But before the app, when Cornell researchers confirmed a right whale had been detected, they had let any liquefied natural gas tankers in the area know by phone, Clark said. Now, vessels from container ships to pleasure boats can know quickly through the app.

The app is free, but the cost for vessels is about $600 to $700 for the iPad and the equipment to receive the needed wireless signal.

Some cruise lines and other vessels have committed to the app, but its effectiveness depends on broad use.

“This is no good, unless the maritime community knows it exists,” said Dave Wiley of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, who worked on the app.

Kathy Metcalf of the Chamber of Shipping of America, a shipping industry group that wasn’t involved in the project, called the app fantastic, and said she “can’t imagine a reason” why any mariner or boat owner wouldn’t want it.

The cost is “beans,” Metcalf said, and the benefits are substantial. By locating where whales are, and detailing any restrictions in effect to protect the animals, the app enhances a mariner’s general awareness of the situation at sea, she said.

Cybersecurity reboot: Two game-changing ideas

Current computer and network technologies were built to help process and move data quickly from one site to another. Unfortunately, until recently, efforts to protect that infrastructure played second fiddle to business needs.

Consequently, cybersecurity has been implemented in an ad hoc and often slapdash fashion, leading to the current mess of firewalls and other devices backed by inadequate identification and authentication protocols and inhibited by piecemeal policies and fragmented responsibilities.

That state of affairs has meant job security to the hackers who want to damage networks or steal data from them. As organized criminals and well-funded nation-state actors have joined their ranks, it has become clear that existing security regimes can’t stem the tide. Attacks on military and other government systems continue to grow and are increasingly successful.

Government and industry are now trying to jump-start a new era of innovation in cybersecurity, one in which security is a design and policy priority rather than an afterthought.

Such goals have been recognized as a priority for basic research in the Obama administration’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal, with millions of extra dollars requested for research and development at the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And in December 2011, the White House published a strategic plan for the next few years of cybersecurity R&D.

There are many ideas on the table. The following are two examples of future approaches that are gaining attention, support and most importantly, funding. One is a technology plan that makes computer systems a moving target to stymie hackers, the other a policy approach that provides a more coordinated defense against attacks. Officials hope that ideas such as these can lead to game-changing solutions that tip the balance back in favor of the good guys, but like anything to do with cybersecurity, it won’t be easy.

Current cyber defenses are designed to protect systems that operate in relatively static configurations for long periods of time. That is also a major weakness. Attackers can spend an equally long time looking for a single vulnerability in a key system, assessing how the system’s security would respond and planning attacks accordingly.

Defenders, on the other hand, have to try to plug the security holes in all their systems and keep them plugged, which soaks up a lot of resources and time. Given the complexity of most agency IT infrastructures, it’s an almost impossible task.

Pothole tracking software puts repair work on fast track

Even before the onset of monsoon, the hi-tech pothole tracking software of the civic administration — which allows citizens to upload pothole complaints — has displayed at least 440 pothole locations in the city. These potholes have been reported over January, February and March by citizens and a team of civic officials.

After these pothole locations are uploaded on the BMC website, the ward map starts displaying a red dot that is visible to all those visiting the website, including civic officials. This dot’s location is then found out and the pothole repair process is started. Officials said this process has helped them keep a track of the potholes that have to be repaired.

The online geographical information system (GIS)-based software enables citizens and officials to upload photographs of pothole locations on a map through Android phones.

Additional Municipal Commissioner Aseem Gupta said, “We have begun the process of repairing these potholes. The data we receive is updated as soon as the pothole is repaired. Of the 440 potholes reported, some are on the property of other agencies and the repair process will take some time.” So far, over 90 pothole locations have been repaired, said officials.

To expedite the process, officials of the areas and wards that still display a pothole mark at the end of a week will be asked to directly report to the head of the road department.

The BMC had launched the hi-tech pothole tracking software costing Rs 60 lakh to help real-time detection of potholes last November. While initially the software had received a poor response, it is now increasingly being used by citizens and officials, said a civic official from the road department.

The proposal to instal the software had met with opposition initially as only Android mobile handsets can be used to click pictures of potholes and upload it on the site. The civic administration is soon planning to upgrade the software for BlackBerry users.

New iOS App Helps Ship Captains Avoid Whale Collisions

We can do a lot more with mobile software than guess our friends’ less-than-artistic drawings or launch menacing birds at unsuspecting pigs. Whale Alerts, a new iOS app released today, is designed to help mariners avoid collisions with endangered North Atlantic right whales by displaying whale locations on a real-time, digital map.

There are only around 400 North Atlantic right whales left in the world today, according to International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), one of the collaborators on the app. With such a small population, the right whales are one of the rarest large animals and are close to extinction. Collisions with ships is currently the leading cause of death for these remaining whales.

To prevent ships from striking whales, Whale Alerts works by linking near-real-time acoustic buoys that listen for whale calls to an iOS device in a ship’s bridge. Using these whale calls, a GPS system and a vessel’s Automatic Identification System (AIS), the app displays a whale’s location in relation to a ship’s location on a digital nautical chart. The app also sends alerts with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conservation measures when a ship enters a conservation area.

Prior to this technology, ship pilots who asked to receive whale conservation data relied on radio, e-mails, and even faxes of whale sighting locations. Even if mariners opted to receive whale sighting information, the process of plotting the whale’s location in relation to the ship’s location was a time-consuming task.

“The app that we unveiled today integrates all of this information and puts it in real time,” Global Whale Program Director for IFAW Patrick Ramage told Wired. “iPad technology is changing ‘I can’t’ to ‘I can.’ As of today, the mariner is able to save whales.”

Whale Alerts is targeted to cruise and shipping vessels that travel along the East Coast of North America, where the right whales live. IFAW has already worked with a dozen mariners in the area, providing them with iPads and the Whale Alerts app, to pilot the program. According to Ramage, there were 502 unique vessels that made more than 2,400 transits to and from the Boston Harbor this past year.

More than a dozen government agencies, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and private groups led by scientists at NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary worked on Whale Alerts for the past 18 months. While the app is designed for the maritime industry, it is available for free to anyone on Apple’s App Store. The technology itself costs around $1,000 to install on a ship.