Some of the groundbreaking technologies touched upon included crisis mapping, a technology that is still in its infancy, and the era of big data. The possibilities of how healthcare and humanitarian aid will be transformed by the convergence of ideas and technologies were evident in the poster session; humanitarian technology applications showed refugee camps in Kenya being monitored using satellite imagery and a humanitarian field software kit called joekit. Of the talks demonstrating real world examples, a talk by Isabella Panunzi on teleradiology proved to be immensely inspiring.

Isabella’s talk on her experience of applying teleradiology to improve diagnosis of tuberculosis in Thyolo District Hospital, Malawi showcased humanitarian innovation at its best. X-rays are taken at the Malawi hospital and the images are then sent to radiologists in the USA to interpret the images. As a result teleradiology has reduced critical delays and missed diagnosis of TB. This example of digital humanitarianism symbolises a small fraction of what can be potentially achieved in transforming our world. It opens up new possibilities in the transfer of technology and knowledge to the developing world. It also highlights the need for a different approach to modelling the strategic challenges of medical humanitarian aid and international development, and this is where complexity thinking and science can bring together different parts of problems and solutions to construct true holistic solutions.

A talk by Jonathan Smith, lecturer in Global Health and Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University, brought together the disciplines of the arts and sciences as he gave an inventive take on using research in the digital age. Visually documenting disease and connecting the ‘emotional component to epidemiological data’ is extremely powerful to create change in global health observed Jonathon, as he showed part of a documentary film he is directing, ‘They Go to Die’, a film about,

four former migrant gold minework­ers in South Africa and Swazi­land who have contracted drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) and HIV while working at the gold mine. When the miners fail to improve their TB status at the mining hospital, they are sent home to rural areas of South Africa often with no continuation of care or means for treatment. This practice is often referred to as “sending them home to die” by leading health officials. The film raises concerns of disease and human rights violations uniquely though the context of life, love, and family; unlike traditional health films, it focuses on relationships and bonding, not death and disease. It is a film of uniting across cultures and paints a portrait of common humanity.

Jonathon is spearheading the Visual Epidemiology Project, a really exciting project ‘that will integrate sensory engagement (film, artistry) with academic discourse’ and ‘produce future academically valid documentaries on other global health issues.’

I feel like picking up a film camera.

The topical of austerity reminds me of an opinion I blogged on a crisis in the Obama administration last August on national debt in the light of striking comments from foreign figureheads amid the storm from the ‘Tea Party Taliban’. I share with you for to see if anyone cares to comment on an operandi of living like parasites off the global economy:

Living Like Parasites Off The Global Economy, originally written 3 Aug 2011:

With the US in turmoil over its national debt, and held to ransom by a ‘Tea Party Taliban’, last week China publicly mocked American democracy. Yesterday, the world witnessed the humbling of America after a trillion-dollar deal marked the end of an era for the US. The US now faces a shift in its relations with creditor nations, and it was not all too surprising to hear Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, yesterday accusing Americans of living “like parasites off the global economy”. If America had defaulted on its international debt obligations, that is exactly what it would be. While America continues to service it’s debt, it is quite the opposite — for now at least- as is perpetually paying interest to its creditors.

However, one needs to look at the bigger picture. In 1980, the size of US debt was $1 Trillion. It stabilized in 1995 at $5 Trillion until 9/11 after which the gross military spending on combating dubious wars saw it rise to where it is now — $15 Trillion and rising rapidly out of control. An 11th hour rescue deal that was far less than the Obama administration wished for sees its debt ceiling rise further, though perhaps finally brought to account.

The US debt is the largest in the world. Purchasers of Treasury bills still reasonably expect the US economy to recover enough to pay them back and foreign investors like China and Japan, the US is such a large customer it is allowed to run a huge tab so it will keep buying exports. The debt is 95% of GDP, and interest alone on the debt was $414 billion in Fiscal Year 2010. One wonders when the US is going to pay it all back. It is reasonable to anticipate that sooner or later, an 11th hour rescue package, like the one negotiated with The Tea Party Taliban this week, will not be there to save the US from defaulting on its debt, at which point the US will have proven itself to be a parasite on the world stage — one that borrows and declines to pay you back.

The alternative scenario paints a parasitic picture of only a different hue — if the US government and similars do eventually pay back all their borrowings in recent decades via raised taxes and spending cuts, we are in a situation where ones children have to collect the invoice for the excessive indulgences of today. A falsis principiis proficisci…

The OpenOffice situation has been a mess for many years. Sun didn’t foster a community of developers around their work. In fact, they didn’t listen to the community when it told them what to do. So about 18 months ago, after Oracle purchased Sun and made the situation worse, the LibreOffice fork was created with most of the best outside developers. LibreOffice quickly became the version embraced by the Linux community as many of the outside developers were funded by the Linux distros themselves. After realizing their mess and watching LibreOffice take off within the free software community, Oracle decided to fire all their engineers (50) and hand the trademark and a copy of the code over to IBM / Apache.

Now it would be natural to imagine that this should be handed over to LibreOffice, and have all interested parties join up with this effort. But that is not what is happening. There are employees out there whose job it is to help Linux, but they are actually hurting it. You can read more details on a Linux blog article I wrote here. I also post this message as a reminder about how working together efficiently is critical to have faster progress on complicated things.

It is only recently that the Voyager probes provided us with some idea of the nature of the boundary of our solar system with what is commonly referred to as the local fluff, The Local Interstellar Cloud, through which we have been travelling for the past 100,000 years or so, and which we will continue to travel through for another 10,000 or 20,000 years yet. The cloud has a temperate of about 6000°C — albeit very tenuous.

We are protected by the effects of the local fluff by the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field, the front between the two just beyond the termination shock where the solar wind slows to subsonic velocities. Here, in the heliosheath, the solar wind becomes turbulent by its interaction with the interstellar medium, and keeping the interstellar medium at bay from the inners of the solar system, the region currently under study by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. It has been hypothesised that there may be a hydrogen wall further out between the bow shock and the heliopause composed of ISM interacting with the edge of the heliosphere, another obstacle to consider with interstellar travel.

The short end of the stick is that what many consider ‘open space’ to traverse once we get beyond the Kuiper belt may in fact be many more mission-threatening obstacles to traverse to reach beyond our solar system. Opinions welcome. I am not an expert on this.

In 2006, the underpinnings of the American financial system began to crack from a speculative bubble in the country’s housing market.  Fueled by irrational exuberance in which homeowners believed their home prices would rise forever, this was made worse by Main Street and Wall Street, both of whom repackaged mortgage loans for sale to everyday investors through a process called securitization.  That’s right, this was a multipronged problem, not the hell-bent desires of a few financial fat cats, as Occupy Wall Street would have you believe.

When the bubble burst and home prices began to decline, this not only hurt the original lender, but also every investor that held a piece of a mortgage-backed asset.  Imagine this process like a moldy pie that no one realizes is bad.  Originally, the entire pie is held by one bank.  Next, pieces of this pie are sold to other banks, pension funds, hedge funds, and anyone else that has an appetite.  Soon enough, however, everyone holding this pie has gotten sick.  Well, this happens with all kinds of assets, including car loans, credit cards and student loans.  The benefit of securitization is that it allows organizations to grant more loans to people like you and me, but the downside is that it exposes the entire economy to the financial woes of an individual market.  Without securitization, what happened in the housing market would have likely stayed in the housing market.

Six years later, many people are crying that the same thing will happen to the student loan market.  While disbelievers can claim that these are just ‘cynics’ whose views are skewed by the world’s ongoing economic turmoil, a basic investigation into the matter yields some worrying results.

1. A college education has more in common with a house than you would think.  Currently, the average cost of a single-family home in the United States is just above $150,000, while the average tuition of a private institution’s four-year degree program is around $130,000.  Moreover, it is common practice for students to employ the use of debt to cover 20 to 50 percent of their costs, depending on the state.  Just as homeowners once expected home prices to rise every year into infinity, students are undertaking loans with a shared expectation of a future income that exceeds the value of the loan.  Unfortunately, historically high rates of unemployment have made this a pipe dream for an increasing number of students.  In fact, the latest nationwide student default rates stand at 9 percent, up two percentage points from the previous year.

2. The student loan bubble has been growing faster than the housing bubble. According to a recent study by the New York Fed, the volume of student loans in the American economy has increased 500 percent over the past decade to a current value of $1 trillion.  While this amount is less than the value of the mortgage volume peak before the recession, the growth rate is twice as high.

3. SLABS may be this crisis’s nuclear bomb.  The acronym SLABS stands for student loan asset backed securities.  In many ways, they are similar to the mortgage backed securities that played a hand in breaking the financial system in 2008.  It is estimated that there are over $250 billion worth of SLABS in the markets today.  This is a whopping 1,000 times the amount of SLABS in the American economy 20 years ago.  More troubling, these investments have been viewed as the safest asset backed security in the post-recession era.  While securitizes backed by mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards have been cut in half over the past few years, SLABS activity has continued to grow.  In fact, they are marketed to individual investors, pension funds, and anyone else seeking an economic safety net.

4. Student loan debt is unforgivable.  This ‘safety net’ belief is held partly because student loans are currently the only form of debt that is unforgivable even in bankruptcy.  From investors’ eyes, this is good news because their return is generated from students making their loan payments.  From a broader perspective, though, this spells bad news for the American economy.  See, students can still default on their loans, which simply means that they are unable to make payments. Unlike mortgage debt, however, students who default are not given the option of leniency in the form of principal or interest rate reduction.

Instead, defaulting students are economically punished, as they are unable to receive any IRS tax refunds or federal benefits.  Moreover, the government is entitled to take up to 15 percent of a student’s disposable income, and may even sue in some cases.  In a world teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession, all of these actions would only make the situation shoddier.  In fact, the worst thing that can happen to a mortgage defaulter is the loss of their home, but they can move on, economically speaking.  Students who default on their loans, however, are not offered the same route.  Moreover, this incentivizes lenders to offer loans to any and all students since there is no risk of payment loss in the long run.  Tell me, do we trust our lending institutions enough to think that this would not be the case?  Of course not; besides, it is arguably up to the government to provide an economic structure for banks to follow.  If businesses are profit maximizing, which we’ve all learned in school that they are, then they are not to blame for taking advantage of this situation.

5. Unlike all other debt holders, students are not classified based on their ability to repay. Okay, most lending institutions look at the credit worthiness of a student’s parents, but this is insufficient.  What lenders should be doing is rating students based on the probability that they can repay after graduation.  Whether we like it or not, the only way to do this is to classify students based on their future earnings potential.  Think about it – a student with an Engineering degree will be entering a field where the median salary is $90,681.  Moreover, the unemployment rate in this field is around 2 percent.  Compare this with a student majoring in English.  This student is only expected to earn around $40,000 in a field with 7 percent unemployment.

Clearly, the student with the lower expected salary entering the riskier field should be granted a lower amount of student loans.  While some may argue that this disincentives students to follow their dreams, it is common sense economics.  Moreover, a student rating system would likely improve the U.S.’s fallback in the global Math and Science race, in which the country is currently ranked 23^rd and 31^st respectively.  As college students would realize that they could only attend the best institutions if they chose the highest-earning majors, this problem could be corrected over the next decade.  Now, doubters may cry that the most affluent students would not be subject to this plan, but this is an advantage that persists in any scenario.  In fact, the implementation of this system could reduce a growing wealth gap, as a higher percentage of lower-income students shifted to the most fruitful career fields.

But it cannot be overlooked that this conference comes in response to the highly controversial NATO anti-ballistic missile deployments in Eastern Europe.  These seriously destabilizing, nuclear defenses are pretexted as a defense against a non-nuclear Iran.  In reality, the western moves of anti-missile systems into Poland and Romania create a de facto nuclear first-strike capability for NATO, and they vacate a series of Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties with the Russians that go back forty years.

Deeply distrustful of these new US and NATO nuclear first-strike capabilities, the Russians announced they will not attend NATO’s planned deterrence summit in Chicago this month. Instead, they are testing Western intentions with a proposal for cooperative project for near-space mapping, surveillance, and defense against Earth-crossing asteroids and other dangerous space objects.

The Russians have invited NATO members as well as forward-thinking space powers to a conference in June in Petrograd.  The agenda:  Planetary defense against incursions by objects from space.  It would be a way of making cooperative plowshares from the space technologies of hair-trigger nuclear terror (2 minutes warning, or less, in the case of the Eastern European ABMs).

It’s an offer the US and other space powers should accept.