Last Friday, December 13, Google announced its acquisition of Boston Dynamics, a prominent robotics manufacturer. Boston Dynamics is most famous for producing robots resembling animal-like quadrapeds and bipeds with remarkable agility and balance. Despite a streak of other robotics company acquisitions in the past half year, Google’s purchase of Boston Dynamics is significant in that […]
In an effort to speed up the “formal verification”—the process of checking whether a design or model adheres to a certain set of requirements—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants you to play online games. DARPA’s Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) project, as per their website, “seeks to replace the intensive work done by […]
A couple of months ago I attended DARC, the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference, at New York University. The conference brought together a mishmash of computer nerds, drone aficionados, engineers, policy wonks and a handful of (mostly friendly) robots. One of the strangest debates—one that is playing itself out among the American public and policymakers […]
Should those (mostly women) who do not participate in the labor market, instead remaining at home to look after the house and raise children, receive compensation for their work? It’s a thorny issue which is as divisive as it is complex. In the final referendum of 2013, Swiss voters were asked to share their opinion […]
Photo Credit: Village Earth Press The world just commemorated World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 2013: the 26th World AIDS Day. As we observed events unfold, from Kuala Lumpur, to London, Washington, D.C. and Cape Town, one common thread was apparent: partnership. If there is to be a common denominator in each thriving battle against […]
For a large number of refugees fleeing Syria, life in the place they end up is no less a struggle. Many Syrians looking to escape the ravages of war in their home country have made their way to Bulgaria (via Turkey) — the country I now call home. The problem is that the influx has […]
Hosted by Sarwar Kashmeri, the Foreign Policy Association’s Great Decisions podcast series will headline issues together with the leaders whose decisions today will mold the foreign policy of tomorrow. Each podcast will tackle a different Great Decisions topic in the 2014 series, a list of which can be found here. The Great Decisions podcasts can also […]
In my update on Thailand and Maldives a few weeks ago, both countries were on the precipice of making decisions that would determine the direction of their democracies, or lack thereof. Let’s see how things turned out. Thailand On Monday, Nov. 11, 2013, Thailand’s senate made a strong statement against former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who […]
Why the Slow Moving Emergency is Resetting the U.S. National Security Conversation Has climate destabilization already hijacked the national security conversation? Well, not yet – but it should and it will. To help make my point for dramatic change in national security thought, let’s recall the old frog in boiling water ancedote. If you put […]
It is a volcano jumping between dormant and active stages and last month, it erupted again, spitting a litany of condemning editorials across global opinion pages that set ablaze United Nations’ inexcusable, uncompromising policy in Haiti, where the cholera epidemic, now entering its fourth year, killed more than 8,300 people and sickened another 650,000. […]
AP Photo: David Guttenfelder With the official death toll from Typhoon Haiyan topping 4,000 on Wednesday, nations from around the world are ramping up their efforts to help the Philippines deal with over 1,600 missing persons, 700,000 damaged houses and the nearly 10 million people affected. Australia, Britain and the U.S. have so far each […]
In 1900 we lived to be only 32 years on average. Today the global average life expectancy is 69 years and in 2050 we will live to be 76 years. For every month you live, you add one week to your life expectancy. In a new TED talk, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center […]
The annual Assembly of State Parties of the ICC (ASP) kicked off yesterday to discuss the management of the court and possible changes to the Rome Statute. While several issues are on this year’s agenda, including victim compensation and progress on ratifying amendments to define the crime of aggression, chief among the concerns of the […]
On Friday, we will look back on the 50 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and how that tragic event in Dallas changed history. Also, on Friday, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI will pay a state visit to Washington, D.C. and meet with President Barack Obama to look forward at how both our nations […]
