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Source: http://www.berteloot.com/2012/12/12/senior-business-travel-consultant-travel-weekly-uk-7/
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Dec. 12, 2012 ? NASA's Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO) Program recently completed an important System Requirements Review/System Definition Review (SRR/SDR) as part of planning for future operations at the agency's Kennedy Space Center. The reviews help establish the groundwork needed to launch NASA's Orion spacecraft atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket beginning in 2017.
The SRR/SDR began July 11, with a kickoff meeting in which GSDO presented a summary of its program planning, requirements, architecture and operations documentation required for the milestone. The goal was to determine the center's infrastructure needs for future programs and establish work plans for the preliminary design phase.
"This GSDO team has done superb work in achieving this important milestone," said Pepper Phillips, program manager of Kennedy's GSDO Program Office. "This thorough review has validated that our baseline architecture is sound and aligns with the agency's exploration objectives."
The GSDO Program is determining what systems and facilities will be required to support launching SLS with Orion atop it from Kennedy. Orion is NASA's multi-purpose crew vehicle that will provide a new capability for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. SLS is a powerful new rocket in development that will take astronauts farther into space than ever before.
"Our mission is to ensure we can process and launch the next generation of launch vehicles and spacecraft," said Tammy Annis, SRR/SDR lead in GSDO. "To meet this goal we need to develop the ground systems, infrastructure and operational approaches to sustain that mission."
The 37-member board reviewed reports on products such as Kennedy's future infrastructure needs, including estimates on cost, schedule and technical data.
"The teams have developed 42 products of which 16 were reviewed during the SRR/SDR process," said Greg Horvath, division chief in GSDO Program Integration.
"These reports included studies by teams that focused on program-level integration, vehicle integration and functional program requirements," he said.
The review board includes representatives from NASA Headquarters, the SLS and Orion Programs, mission operations, the astronaut office and Kennedy intuitional organizations.
GSDO teams specialize in multiple areas of development and operations at Kennedy. The current focus is on establishing program requirements, architectures and operations planning.
The Vehicle Integration and Launch team researches the equipment, management and operations required to safely attach a spacecraft to a rocket, move the launch vehicle to the pad and successfully send it into space.
The Offline Processing and Integration Team is developing ways to process the Orion spacecraft, rocket stages and the launch abort system before they are assembled into one vehicle.
Another group is modernizing the Command, Control, Communications and Range Systems involved in launching astronauts into space. In addition to bringing computers, tracking systems and other networks up-to-date, the team is creating systems that can manage several different kinds of spacecraft and rockets.
Unlike previous work focusing on a single kind of launch vehicle, such as the Saturn V rocket or space shuttle, engineers and managers in GSDO are preparing infrastructure to support several different kinds of spacecraft and rockets that are in development.
"Our focus on this review is the ground infrastructure of Orion and SLS," Horvath said. "However, we are continuing to evaluate strategic investment opportunities that will enable us to best align the unique capabilities of the Kennedy Space Center with commercial space pursuits as those plans mature."
Horvath explained that is important for the GSDO, SLS and Orion Programs to work closely together so that they all get to the planned first launch in 2017.
"We're focusing on building ground systems with interfaces to flight vehicles," he said. "Orion's systems are reasonably mature, with hardware already here at Kennedy. The SLS design is less mature at this stage, so we have to continue discussions with the people in Flight Systems as we design the integration facilities and mobile launcher umbilical connecting points between ground systems and the rocket."
Tim Honeycutt, the Technical Management branch chief in GSDO Program Integration, says that he is pleased with progress so far.
"We've determined what the issues are and we're developing a good strategy to mitigate them," he said. "It positions us well as we move forward." The next step, the Preliminary Design Review, begins in November 2013.
"That review will allow us to evaluate preliminary designs of new systems here at Kennedy and better establish where we need to make prudent modifications to existing systems," Honeycutt said.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/XbZeKOEDJe4/121212165654.htm
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What's the number of unread emails?right now, at this moment, without changing anything?in your inbox? That would be 3,487 in the case of Jen here; 1 in the case of Rebecca. More about what that means in a second, but first, a bit of backstory: The New Yorker's Silvia Killingsworth has embarked on an exploration into the subject of what she dubs in her headline as "Zero Dark Inbox," or having absolutely zero unread emails in one's inbox. She writes, "I have four e-mails in my inbox right now, but I?m aiming for that number to be zero. ...
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-explains-cause-massive-gmail-chrome-outages-000701104.html
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Around this time last year, the Swivl iPhone dock launched, allowing users to record videos of themselves with a motion-tracking camera stand. The device, which was created by a startup called Satarii and originally backed through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, is now getting an upgrade. There are now two new versions of the Swivl available for users to check out.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/WWhGGpqFr84/
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We love the holidays in our home! But we also try to not over-book ourselves. We need relaxation ? it?s fun to hang as a family!
Last week we came home to unexpected guests. It was fine. I had a Costco chicken in the fridge and I always have Bush?s Beans in the pantry.
So I whipped up a pot of chili, inspired from Bush?s Chicken Chili Bean Chowder recipe.
Chicken Chili is a stand-by ?a family favorite?and a crowd-pleasing recipe. It?s a perfect food that satisfies our winter cravings for comfort food. Don?t you agree that chili just makes you feel warm and toasty, like you could sit by a fire and just chill with good friends?
So one thing I?ve learned over the years (almost 22 years of entertaining) is that you can make even last minute entertaining fun and creative, warm and comfy.
It doesn?t have to be fancy.
People don?t really expect fancy.
Think about what you?re serving, and what condiments would make it better, and then present it in a fun and festive way!
In my case, I pulled out 6 ramekins to put the hot chili in.
Sliced up lime. Chopped cilantro. Added a bowl of sour cream. Crunched up some organic chips in my pantry.
Put the holiday napkins and spoons in a container. And we were ready to eat!
Weeknights can be so simple, and if your guests can bring the wine and dessert ? you?re set.
For this night I served the entire meal, but it was light and easy.
Not perfect. But really good.
Oh, and by the way, with ?last-minute? entertaining, you really don?t have time to worry about the state of your home ?
When?s the last time you served last-minute guests, or do you freak out when you know you have to think of something quickly?
Summary: Quick and easy chili; best made with mango peach salsa.
Preparation time: 10 minute(s)
Cooking time: 20 minute(s)
Number of servings (yield): 8
More chili recipes from my friends:
Turkey Chili
Classic Beef and Bean Chili
Smokey White Bean Chicken Chili
Confetti Chili
Cowgirl Elk Chili
Smokey Black Bean and Corn Chili
Weeknight Black Bean Chili
Hearty Vegetable Quinoa Chili
One-Pot Citrus Chicken Chili
This post is sponsored by Bush?s Beans; but as always, all opinions are my own.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Source: http://reluctantentertainer.com/2012/12/last-minute-entertaining-for-six-chili-recipes/
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The US State Department designated the Jabhat al-Nusra militia fighting Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria a foreign terrorist organization today.
The speed with which the US government moved to designate a fairly new group that has never attacked US interests and is engaged in fighting a regime that successive administrations have demonized is evidence of the strange bedfellows and overlapping agendas that make the Syrian civil war so explosive.
The State Department says Jabhat al-Nusra (or the "Nusra Front") is essentially a wing of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the jihadi group that flourished in Anbar Province after the US invaded to topple the Baathist regime of secular dictator Saddam Hussein. During the Iraq war, Sunni Arab tribesmen living along the Euphrates in eastern Syria flocked to fight with the friends and relatives in the towns along the Euphrates river in Anbar Province.
Think you know the Middle East? Take our geography quiz!
The terrain, both actual and human, is similar on both sides of that border, and the rat lines that kept foreign fighters and money flowing into Iraq from Syria work just as well in reverse. Now, the jihadis who fought and largely lost against the Shiite political ascendancy in Iraq are flocking to eastern Syria to repay a debt of gratitude in a battle that looks more likely to succeed every day.
The Nusra Front has gone from victory to victory in eastern Syria and has shown signs of both significant funding and greater military prowess than the average citizens' militia, with veterans of fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya among its numbers.
The US of course aided the fight in Libya to bring down Muammar Qaddafi. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the chance to fight and kill Americans was the major drawing card.
In Iraq, the US toppled a Baathist dictatorship dominated by Sunni Arabs, opening the door for the political dominance of Iraq's Shiite Arab majority and the fury of the country's Sunni jihadis. In Syria, a Baathist regime dominated by the tiny Alawite sect (a long-ago offshoot of Shiite Islam) risks being brought down by the Sunni majority. Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is in the odd position of now rooting for a Baathist regime to survive, frightened that a religiously inspired Sunni regime may replace Assad and potentially destabilize parts of his country from Haditha in Anbar's far west to the northern city of Mosul.
For the US, the situation is more complicated still. The Obama administration appears eager for Assad to fall, but is also afraid of what might replace him, not least because of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. If the regime collapses, the aftermath is sure to be chaotic, much as it was in Libya, where arms stores were looted throughout the country. The presence of VX and sarin nerve gas, and the fear of Al Qaeda aligned militants getting their hands on it, has the US considering sending in troops to secure the weapons.
That's the context in which today's designation was made ? part of an overall effort to shape the Syrian opposition to US liking, and hopefully have influence in the political outcome if and when Assad's regime collapses. But while the US has been trying to find a government or leadership in waiting among Syrian exiles, Nusra has been going from strength to strength. Aaron Zelin, who tracks jihadi groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that 20 out of the 48 "martyrdom" notices posted on Al Qaeda forums for the Syria war were made by people claiming to be members of Nusra.
Zelin writes that it's highly unusual for the US to designate as a terrorist group anyone who hasn't attempted an attack on the US. In fact, the US only designated the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan, which had been involved in attacks on US troops there for over a decade, this September.
His guess as to why the US took such an unusual step?
The U.S. administration, in designating Jabhat al-Nusra, is likely to argue that the group is an outgrowth of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). While there is not much open-source evidence of this, classified material may offer proof -- and there is certainly circumstantial evidence that Jabhat al-Nusra operates as a branch of the ISI.
Getting Syria's rebels to disavow Jabhat al-Nusra may not be an easy task, however. As in Iraq, jihadists have been some of the most effective and audacious fighters against the Assad regime, garnering respect from other rebel groups in the process. Jabhat al-Nusra seems to have learned from the mistakes of al Qaeda in Iraq: It has not attacked civilians randomly, nor has it shown wanton disregard for human life by publicizing videos showing the beheading of its enemies. Even if its views are extreme, it is getting the benefit of the doubt from other insurgents due to its prowess on the battlefield.
Will it hurt the group's support inside Syria? It's hard to see how. The US hasn't formally explained its logic yet, but it's hard to see how that will matter either. The rebellion against Assad has raged for almost two years now and the country's fighters are eager for victory, and revenge. The US has done little to militarily assist the rebellion, and fighters have been happy to take support where they can get it.
Most of the money or weapons flowing into the country for rebels has come from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and some of that support, of course, has ended up in the hands of Islamist militias like Nusra.
Usually the US doesn't like support flowing to its designated terrorist organizations, and leans on countries like Saudi Arabia to cut off support. But in this case, a doctrinaire enforcement of its will could look like helping Assad (who has insisted everyone fighting his government is a terrorist since long before Nusra even existed).
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-designates-syrias-jabhat-al-nusra-front-terrorist-222557608.html
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By Walter Shapiro
A quarter century ago, in 1988, World War II veterans George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole battled for the Republican presidential nomination. Now Bush and Dole are in their late 80s and mostly confined to wheelchairs, as was evident when Dole appeared on the Senate floor last week.
The men who won World War II have long since departed the corridors of power in Washington. But without trumpets or fanfare, another generation is leaving as well: the men and women whose worldview was shaped by Vietnam.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is a prime example ? a woman who in the early1960s was a Goldwater girl from the Chicago suburbs but who ended the decade a passionately antiwar commencement speaker at Wellesley College.
Barack Obama was in 8th grade in? Hawaii in 1975 when South Vietnam fell to the Communists, so he may not instinctively place a premium on Vietnam experience when choosing his second-term national security team. But I believe such experience is an important factor to consider, especially in an administration with a post-Vietnam president.
This is particularly true at the State Department, where Clinton is expected to step down soon. The leading contenders to replace her are Susan Rice, an Obama contemporary from the post-Vietnam generation, and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, whose career was forged by his experience as a Navy Swift Boat captain in Vietnam and later, his anti-war advocacy.
Most of the discussion of the backstairs battle for State has pivoted around the over-wrought Republican reaction to Rice?s mid-September comments on circumstances behind the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi. And some Democrats fear a Kerry appointment to State would open up his Senate seat to Scott Brown, a Republican who lost re-election this year.
Lost in the shuffle over the politics of Benghazi and Massachusetts are the unique credentials that Kerry would bring to the job.
In 1971, after his return from Vietnam, Kerry addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the folly of the decade-long war in Southeast Asia. Today, Kerry chairs that committee.
Kerry?s words that day are almost as searing today as they were four decades ago, ?How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake??
Others in the Obama administration have first-hand memories of Vietnam. Vice President Joe Biden was already a young senator from Delaware when Saigon fell, while Defense Secretary Leon Panetta -- expected to depart from the second-term Cabinet along with Clinton ?- served in Army intelligence during the mid-1960s. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon was a college student during the war?s tumultuous final years.
But there are few in the senior ranks of the Obama administration who remember first-hand the Tet offensive and the secret bombing of Cambodia. As the president mulls a new secretary of state and a new Pentagon chief, it is worth asking: Does Vietnam still matter? And how important will it be during an international crisis to have someone in power who vividly recalls America?s most tragic war?
One can argue that Vietnam has become almost irrelevant to contemporary American security concerns. The inequitable draft that provided most of the war?s manpower has long been replaced by a professional military. The Cold War is over and the nominal Communists who rule Vietnam are now ardent capitalists.
But I still staunchly believe that Vietnam holds enduring lessons for the Obama administration and future presidencies. (I will concede that my viewpoint may be partially shaped by my own 1960s antiwar heritage).
Vietnam was a Democratic war.? It had its roots in the muscular foreign policy of John Kennedy?s administration, which inspired David Halberstam?s bitterly ironic book title, ?The Best and the Brightest.?
Vietnam is forever associated with Lyndon Johnson, the president who also gave the nation gave the nation landmark civil-rights legislation and Medicare. The march of folly that produced Vietnam is not something that can be fobbed off solely on the escalation and bombing campaigns of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Democrats can easily point to Republican responsibility for another ill-conceived war: the Iraq invasion of 2004. Vice President Dick Cheney, who took several deferments to keep from serving in Vietnam, worked with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to persuade their boss, President George W. Bush, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction despite all evidence to the contrary.
The Iraq war -- which Kerry, Clinton and Biden all voted to authorize in the the Senate -- lasted more than 8 years and took the lives of more than 3,500 service members.
The Iraq conflict instructs us about the disasters that flow from a lethal mixture of faulty intelligence, rigid ideology and American hubris. But the messages from Vietnam are not so easily cubby-holed.
There never was a single triggering event, never a moment when a president decided that Vietnam was worth the lives of more than 58,000 Americans.
Virtually every troop escalation, every expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, every bombing campaign against Hanoi was regarded as a final step -- an action that would pave the way to victory or at least bludgeon North Vietnam into a negotiated settlement. No president wanted to be the one to lose a war and, as a result of this refusal to withdraw, they all lost Vietnam.
During the early stages of his 2004 race for the presidency, Kerry often spoke passionately about the antiwar movement that had toppled Lyndon Johnson. Standing in a back yard in Londonderry, N.H., Kerry talked about the insurgent political army in 1968 that ?sent the president of the United States a message that he couldn?t continue to be president of the United States and wage that war.?
John Kerry remains a complicated political figure, but his lesson about how a once-popular president was driven from office by his stubborn refusal to abandon an ill-considered war is an integral part of his personal experience and public persona.
During the next four years -- as Obama deals with threats ranging from Iran?s nuclear program to the shakiness of the Pakistan government ? I want someone at the table in the White House Situation Room who knows how quickly things can go wrong in foreign policy and military interventions. That?s why Kerry embodies for me the best sadder-but-wiser choice for Secretary of State.
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