The Bewilderness

Gurkhas excite Real Labour's conscience

Another day, another storm. Broon faced strong questions at PMQs as he tried to defend the tower to injustice that his officials built on the backs of the Gurkhas. They are back to the days of jumping into every pit. Political nous should have been sufficient. Who expects New Labour to have a conscience?

Good news on MRI scanning

An astonishing advance in MRI scanning that increases resolution by x1000, using parahydrogen to scan and replacing more dangerous radioactive materials.

Writing in Science, they describe how they boosted MRI sensitivity by manipulating the fuel parahydrogen.

The technique increased the sensitivity of the scans by 1,000 times, and hugely speeded up the process of taking a scan, potentially reducing the cost of the procedure too.

It would take the standard method 100 hours to obtain the same amount of information the new technique generates in one second.

The technique works by interacting parahydrogen with a specially designed molecular field to create molecules that can be very easily detected by MRI scans.

Good news.

The after action cycle

Good ideas for improving organisation and embedding continuous improvement can come from many sources, especially if your organisation has reached that critical mass where formality exceeds informality. A good one is imported from the military: the BAR and the AAR: the Before Action Review and the After Action Review. It sets a bar, creates a consensus and institutionalises improvements.

Some businesses take a more regimented approach, adopting a practice from the military. The U.S. Army is famous for its rigorous debriefings, known as after-action reviews, or AARs. To borrow the Army's definition, an AAR is "a professional discussion of an event, focused on performance standards, that enables soldiers to discover for themselves what happened, why it happened, and how to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses."

Charles Parry, a partner at Signet Research & Consulting who teaches after-action reviewing to corporate clients, prefers the term action review cycle. That's because the process wraps around an entire "action," which might be as simple as a client meeting or as elaborate as a yearlong business-development project.

It provides a better process for dealing with clients and projects.

Typealyzed: A Thinker and a Scientist

A site called the Typealyzer will analyse your personality type based upon your blogging. Some lighthearted fun, circling around the Myers Brigg personality types, that indicates your style.

Looks like I am a thinker and a scientist. This is not a group blog...

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone. 

Scanning precision impacts mental health

There is an improvement in the construction and implementation of clinical trials for mental health.

In a workshop on biomarkers, pharmacogenetics, and pharmacogenomics, Michael Henry, MD, of Caritas St Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston, indicated that technological improvements in scanner design, along with increasing understanding of neuropathophysiology, “offer an unprecedented opportunity for utilizing brain imaging techniques to improve the precision of clinical trials.”

Henry foresees the application of technologies such as MRI, PET, and single photon emission CT to reduce diagnostic variability in study populations, measure drug penetration of target sites, and establish biomarkers of therapeutic efficacy. Although imaging in clinical trials is most common in cardiology and oncology, Henry noted its recent use in trials of agents for dementia, depression, and psychosis.

This is good news, illustrating the continuous improvement and positive feedback between scanning technology and genetics. The conference highlighted a number of promising research programmes resulting in more accurate and precise diagnosis and drug treatment..

Robots in Afghanistan

Foxnews story on how Afghanistan is becoming a cockpit of development for robots and UAVs. The two examples described are BigDog, a prototype packhorse that can carry loads up to four miles per hour for troops, and K-MAX, a unmanned robotic helicopter programmed to carry heavy loads to soldiers inaccessible by road..

Limited threat transforming into Taliban power play

Pakistan is now attacking the Taliban after they moved into the district of Dir, west of the Swat valley. They have been denounced by the radical clerics for breaking the Swat agreement, whereby a truce was declared and Shariah law replaced that of Pakistan. This is the type of agreement where the Taliban expands without limit and Pakistan contracts without a fight.

An alternative view of the deal from the Asian Times downplays any existential threat to Pakistan and provides a backdrop for the Taliban, detailing two strands:

The major regional players, including Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Mullah Bradar, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Anwarul Haq Mujahid, have never wanted to create instability in Pakistan. Islamabad believes that if tomorrow foreign armies were to leave Afghanistan, these people would dominate.

The minor groups, the Pakistani establishment analyzes, are not anti-Pakistan in the sense that they want to seize the state of Pakistan; they simply want to end Pakistan's collaboration with the US on the terror front.

These include Dr Ismail in Bajaur Agency, Mullah Nazir and his Ahmadzai Wazir tribe in South Waziristan and Hafiz Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan. The establishment wants to make ceasefire deals with these militants through direct and indirect tribal and non-tribal channels.

This would leave a small segment of militants, namely the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, including Baitullah Mehsud, Mullah Fazlullah of Swat, Abdul Hakeem Mehsud in Orakzai, Punjabi militants and Uzbek warlords. They aim to bring chaos to Pakistan over the "war on terror". .

The two pictures: existential threat versus limited terrorist aims, are not mutually exclusive. The neo-Taliban have realised their common aims, downplaying any differences between the two strands. However, there may be other pressures: the unilateral acts of local jihadists testing the patience and power of the Pakistani state structures to expand and take control of adjacent districts, with the resulting change in attitude as the neo-Taliban realise that they now govern more territory.

With more power and territory, the Taliban move from minor irritant, to making a play for the role of Leviathan.

Pakistan PM meets the crucible of error

Why did the Crucible of Error visit Afghanistan and Pakistan? He did not reveal any awareness of the danger that Pakistan faces and intoned some drivel on the 'crucible of terror'. Was it a photo-opportunity or an escape hidden behind some self-justified excuse to support the troops? All he managed to achieve was a snub.

You cannot say that there is a danger here and then blithely ignore the steps that need to be taken. If this threat is as dangerous as you make out, then we should contribute more troops. If it isn't, then why are we there?

If the Taliban take over Pakistan, this will be a moot point for historians. We will be in a hot war with Talibanistan, and Brown's crafted strategy of presentable contributions and starving defence will be revealed in its bloodthirsty hypocrisy. 
 

The Information Exploitation Group

The British Army has been criticised for complacency in counter-insurgency tactics. The story that has been told since the Iraqi war is one of transposing lessons learned in Northern Ireland to Iraq with limited and counter-productive consequences. At the beginning, the British Army may have avoided 'hard hats' and bullet dodging in Basra, but eventually lost control of the city to violent militias.

It is not clear how far reversals in Iraq were due to a failure to learn from conditions on the ground. Factoring in the lack of resources and the politics leave a muddied picture. Therefore, it is heartening to report that the Royal Marines have innovated in the gathering and deployment of intelligence in Afghanistan leading to their successful victories in Helmand.

Using a system known as the Information Exploitation Group, the Marines co-ordinate intellgence from all sources (humint, elint and local forces). These are then evaluated and assessed by the Brigade's intelligence and electronic warfare sections:

The IE group was broken down into four major elements. The first was the Brigade Reconnaissance Force, a British Army combat unit that conducted aggressive offensives and patrolling against terrorist havens. The Afghan Territorial Force (ATF) was the Afghan National Army element working alongside the Marines, helping to better engage the local population and to gather intelligence. Any intelligence gathered was then sent to the Intelligence Section and Y Squadron, a group of electronic warfare experts and intelligence officers who then processed the information and told the Brigade Reconnaissance Force which tips to act on, based on credibility.

The methodology does not privilege any source of intelligence, uses all available resources, and, I suspect, allows improvements in situational understanding of the locality, to perfect the assessment of the enemy. Will this be rolled out?

Iran dances to 24 hours from Islamabad

President Ahdeminejad of Iran is reported as stating that he will support any decision that the Palestinian people come to. The Telegraph reports this in the context of the two state solution, and should could be interpreted as a softening of the Iranian position. Any references to the Palestinian people on the part of Iran needs to be balanced against its continued support for Hamas, an eliminationist party that does not recognise the right of Israel to exist.

So why is there a softening of Iran's rhetoric. One is the forthcoming elections where the President cannot be assured of clerical support due to his economic mismanagement. The other, and more important development, is the potential Taliban regime in Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons. Whatever difficulties Iran may have with the West, it finds that strategic strength is now bedevilled by the weaknesses of its neighbour.

The Taliban reached sixty miles to Islamabad with its takeover of Buner, a district next to the Swat Valley. Under US pressure, the Pakistani authorities have now struck back against the militias. However, this is too little, too late. The structure of the Pakistani state is falling away, to be replaced by parallel institutions, based upon Islamic courts and militia rule.

The slow erosion of Pakistan's institutions continues without strong resistance from its democratic leaders or armed forces. Hypnotised by the snake, they are slowly swallowed.

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