The scandal over treatment of outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center has focused attention on the Army’s decision to privatize the facilities support workforce at the hospital, a move commanders say left the building maintenance staff undermanned. Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned the decision to hire IAP Worldwide Services, a contractor with connections to the Bush administration and to KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary. Last year, IAP won a $120 million contract to maintain and operate Walter Reed facilities. The decision reversed a 2004 finding by the Army that it would be more cost-effective to keep the work in-house. After IAP protested, Army auditors ruled that the cost estimates offered by in-house federal workers were too low. They had to submit a new bid, which added 23 employees and $16 million to their cost, according to the Army. Yesterday, the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers union, blamed pressure on the Army from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for the decision to privatize its civilian workforce. ‘Left to its own devices, the Army would likely have suspended this privatization effort,’ John Gage, president of the organization, said in a statement. […]
Global warming would be substantially worse right now if not for an international agreement in the 1980s that banned the use of ozone-destroying chemicals, a new study finds. Nations around the world signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to control the production and use of substances that deplete the ozone layer, which shields the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. While these chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (formerly used in air conditioners), eat up ozone, they also act as greenhouse gases. By curbing their use, the pact has also cut in half the amount of greenhouse warming that would have occurred by 2010 had these substances continued to build unabated in Earth’s atmosphere, according to the study published in the this week’s online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The amount of warming that was avoided is equivalent to 7 to12 years of an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. ‘The participants in the Montreal Protocol have done something very good for our climate,’ says study author and NOAA scientist David Fahey. ‘While addressing ozone depletion, they also provided an early start on slowing climate change.’ The quantity of greenhouse […]
If the idea of robot ethics sounds like something out of science fiction, think again, writes Dylan Evans. Scientists are already beginning to think seriously about the new ethical problems posed by current developments in robotics. This week, experts in South Korea said they were drawing up an ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa. And, a group of leading roboticists called the European Robotics Network (Euron) has even started lobbying governments for legislation. At the top of their list of concerns is safety. Robots were once confined to specialist applications in industry and the military, where users received extensive training on their use, but they are increasingly being used by ordinary people. Robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers are already in many homes, and robotic toys are increasingly popular with children. As these robots become more intelligent, it will become harder to decide who is responsible if they injure someone. Is the designer to blame, or the user, or the robot itself? Decisions Software robots – basically, just complicated computer programmes – already make important financial decisions. Whose fault is it if they make a bad investment? Isaac […]
Activists ready to risk their lives could not prevent Japan from harpooning whales in the Antarctic. But a fire that crippled the fleet’s factory ship has forced the country to cut short its annual whaling operation for the first time in 20 years. The fire aboard the 8,000-tonne Nisshin Maru two weeks ago killed a crew member and left the ship stranded in the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean. It restarted its engines last weekend and can now sail under its own power, but Japan’s Fisheries Agency said yesterday that damage to equipment would make it difficult to continue the hunt. The announcement was greeted with glee by anti-whaling groups, including Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, which had been stalking the fleet before the fire and trying to disrupt its activities. Japan suffered the indignity of a Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza, offering to tow the Nisshin Maru out of the area. It declined the offer. Takahide Naruko, head of the agency’s Far Seas Division, said: ‘This is the first time in 20 years that we’ve had to cancel our research. We are very disappointed.’ Commercial whaling has been banned since 1986, but Japan has continued to hunt […]
WASHINGTON — The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the agency requirement that two employees going to international meetings on the Arctic not discuss climate change, saying diplomatic protocol limited employees to an agreed-on agenda. Two memorandums written about a week ago and reported by The New York Times and the Web site of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Thursday set strict parameters for what the two employees could and could not discuss at meetings in Norway and Russia. The stipulations that the employees ‘will not be speaking on or responding to’ questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice are ‘consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries to talk about only what’s on the agenda,’ said the director of the agency, H. Dale Hall. One of the two employees, Janet E. Hohn, is scheduled to accompany a delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants. Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, parent of the wildlife service, said the memorandum did not prohibit Ms. Hahn from talking about climate change ‘over a beer’ but indicated that climate […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
