SAO PAULO — It’s called the Big Worm — a 2.2 mile-long elevated highway that wiggles through the center of South America’s largest city , curving feet from bedroom windows of once-elegant art deco buildings and carrying 80,000 noisy cars through a wide swath of cityscape each day. Urban planners say that the 40-year-old concrete monster has no place in Sao Paulo and that flattening it should be on the city’s to-do list if this sprawling metropolis is to modernize. This city, Brazil’s economic heart, has to revamp the kind of out-of-date infrastructure embodied by the Worm, those planners say, if Brazil is to maintain the strong growth that has transformed the economy into one of the world’s most vibrant. Read full article > >

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Sao Paulo’s ‘Big Worm,’ an elevated highway, must go, urban planners say

Sweeping away homes and infrastructure

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Typhoon hits Japan

ROCK ISLAND, Ill. — President Obama plans to make a major speech in early September laying out new proposals for job creation and taming the federal debt, according to the White House. Obama is expected to make fresh proposals, possibly including tax cuts and new infrastructure spending, to spur hiring. The president will also lay out a plan to trim far more from the federal debt than the $1.5 trillion target of a congressional “supercommittee” that is supposed to issue a proposal for Congress by Thanksgiving, the White House said. The plan is likely to include proposals for an overhaul of the tax code and entitlements. Read full article > >

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Obama to issue new proposals on job creation, debt reduction

Will propose tax cuts, infrastructure spending.

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Obama Plans Major Jobs Speech

The state of Maryland has agreed to pay $74 million in infrastructure improvements to settle a condemnation lawsuit with the developers of one of the largest proposed mixed-use projects in Prince George’s, according to county officials.

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Md. to pay for infrastructure improvements in settlement with Konterra developers

The state of Maryland has agreed to pay $74 million in infrastructure improvements to settle a condemnation lawsuit with the developers of one of the largest proposed mixed-use projects in Prince George’s, according to county officials.

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Md. to pay for infrastructure improvements in settlement with Konterra developers

A former WikiLeaks staffer who left the organization to start a rival website “damaged” WikiLeaks infrastructure and “stole material,” WikiLeaks said as the defector prepared to launch a new book.

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WikiLeaks defector blasts Assange

Power cuts hit seven states in Brazil, raising fears about the country’s energy infrastructure ahead of the 2014 World Cup.

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Blackouts hit Brazil’s north-east

Shortly after three senators, including Joe Lieberman, introduced a bill to give the president sweeping powers during a “cyber emergency,” Egypt’s government pulled the country off the Internet. The Egyptian move highlighted just how fragile our networks can be when a central government decides to undermine them. Today, the legislators tried to fight back against the perception that their handiwork would give the president such authority. Whatever the senators’ wishes, from the description CNET’s Declan McCullagh provides below, it’s hard to see how such legislation doesn’t require incredible faith in our government’s benevolence. Their so-dubbed “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” would hand the president power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyber emergency” and prohibit review by the court system. CNET reported last week that it will be reintroduced in the new Congress. If the president declares a “cyber emergency,” according to a summary prepared by Lieberman’s committee, the Department of Homeland Security could “issue mandatory emergency measures necessary to preserve the reliable operation of covered critical infrastructure.” Although the term “kill switch” appears nowhere in the legislation, those “mandatory” measures could include ordering “critical” computers, networks, or Web sites disconnected from the Internet. It also includes controversial new language–which did not appear in the initial version introduced last summer–saying that the federal government’s designation of vital Internet or other computer systems “shall not be subject to judicial review.” Perhaps more than any other section of the legislation, that part has drawn significant criticism from industry representatives and civil libertarians. Read the full story at CNET .

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Does the President Need Special Powers During a ‘Cyber Emergency’?

by Bruce J. Holmes In President Obama’s recent State of the Union Address, he made the assertion that “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” Therefore, we need “to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race.” By doing so, “we will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.” I ask myself: Is the idea of a “Sputnik moment” a timely one? For me, the context for the answer to this question includes my recollections from the 1957 Sputnik event. I remember, as a youth living in the Chicagoland suburbs, saving the front page of the Chicago Tribune when the headline read something like “Russian Satellite Orbits Earth.” At the time, I was an aspiring pilot with, as yet, no clear aspirations for aerospace engineering, aeronautics and space research, which would later become my career. I was just a pre-teen already passionate about the liberty afforded by access to an airplane and a local airport. My reason for saving the newspaper was not all that clear in my young mind. I also saved the issues of National Geographic with stories and pictures of the X-15 rocket plane and Mad Magazine, which had nothing to do with aeronautics. But the Sputnik event seemed compelling in ways that would have meaning later in life. Looking back, I realize that my reaction to Sputnik was something to the effect of “…how cool is that!” The “that” being the concept of flight beyond what I understood from my own experience, and the gadgetry of the whole idea — radios far exceeding the capabilities of my home-built crystal sets, and propulsion chemistry beyond the comprehension afforded by my home chemistry lab set and match-head-powered aluminum foil rockets. Between then and now (marriage, family raised, parents and friends passed, careers started, ended, and restarted), my adult mind developed an understanding of the Sputnik Event effect on the world of politics, cold war, technology trajectories, educational system directions, and national motivations. For me, the act of creating NASA in1959 (on the shoulders of the NACA giants of the previous five decades), was clearly government at its best: the nurturing of the commons in such a way as to stimulate the emergence of a new industrial capacity, new markets and consumers, and new products and services — a new economic identity. The result virally catalyzed the entrepreneurial spirit among the nation’s innovators in ways that fomented the transformation from the agricultural and industrial ages into the age of space and computers and the Internet. And, along the way, we went to the Moon. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times last November 9 (“Crossroads Nation”), David Brooks shared a thought that “…nobody is clear about what sort of country America is going to be in 2030 or 2050. Nobody has quite defined America’s coming economic identity.” What we can know is that catalytic (Sputnik) moments can motivate us to make the investments and take the kinds of risks that create the foundations for the next epoch, for a new economic identity. Certainly, the field of my passion, aeronautics, aviation and aerospace, is vitally in need of “Sputnik-moment-inspired” transformation in ways that contribute to our nation’s next economic identity. We are a society slowing down and serving fewer cities, in spite of faster airplanes and better navigation technology. The current air transportation enterprise, made up of airports, airspace, aircraft, regulation, finance, and business models developed for the 20th century markets, is vital to our economic system. However, the current enterprise and infrastructure, developed for 20th century markets, will not be the likely source of a new life cycle of game-changing innovations in air mobility for the 21st century. The time-tested lessons from Clayton Christensen’s The Innovators Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997) teach the reasons for that reality and illuminate the strategic framework needed to stimulate new innovation life cycles. The lost opportunities in quality of life and economic opportunity, from diminished mobility or mobility not realized, need to be understood as a threat to our future standard of living. Faster, more predictable, economical air access to more communities seems a logical part of the way forward. More on that in another blog. It seems to me that one of the features of our economic-political system is that it is most effective in making big changes only in response to big impetus. So, do we need a big change? Looking forward to a future of a nation moving slower to fewer places by air makes me think so. Can the President’s Sputnik moment claim do the trick? I for one — cheering from the aviation bleachers — hope the idea goes viral. Bruce J. Holmes, retired from his NASA career in public sector entrepreneurialism, is now practicing the art in the private sector as CEO, NextGen AeroSciences

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Sputnik Moments

Well, this is more annoying — what the Pepco ” outage map ” has shown about electric supply in the nation’s capital for the past eight twelve hours now: ______ ______ I can see the map, or see that there’s no map, because I’ve left our house in DC to check into a hotel in Arlington, so I have electricity — and heat! — to finish an article. I know this storm is an Act of God, I know it is force majeure, I know a warmer climate overall is making for colder and harsher winters in the US Northeast, I know that DC has a lot of lush and beautiful trees that cause hellacious problems during storms because they drape over power lines, I know that brave and beleaguered crews are out there in the cold and dark. I know that weather in some place you aren’t is inherently boring. And I know that people have problems 1000x worse than this. But — not even the outage map? This is a version of another “here’s how to make people feel out of control and anxious” strategy: the Amtrak policy, in NYC’s Penn Station, of making everyone stand around in a big herd and stare at the departure board, waiting for the last-minute announcement of which track a train will be on so they can all rush toward it, rather than announcing it earlier and letting people form a line.  Earlier Pepco showed a shrewder PR approach with the map. It gave an estimated outage time of about 100 hours for much of DC and suburban Maryland — and then improved it to 48 hours for a number of areas, making two nights without lights or heat seem like reason to rejoice. Back to work. But, c’mon. Even a phony map would give us some little illusion of control. And I won’t even get into my “collapsing American infrastructure” riff.

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What Is More Annoying Than a Pepco Map Saying Power Will Be Out For At Least 100 Hours?

President Obama is focusing on five major themes: innovation in energy and technology, improving education, building better infrastructure, reforming government and reducing deficits.

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The Caucus: Live Blogging the President’s Speech

President Obama will take a stand against budget-cutting Republicans in his State of the Union address, people familiar with the speech say. He’s expected to call for new investment in education, research, and infrastructure, particularly in building a…

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Obama to Call for New Investment

The Knight Foundation released a report today detailing how technology was employed in the aftermath of last year’s earthquake in Haiti. The infographic above summarizes some of the key areas, but there’s a full report available , too. They left one effort, though, that I was personally involved in creating: Haiti ReWired , a site dedicated to technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti. That community dazzled me. Using the social networking site Ning, people self-organized around a variety of topics and projects. For example, we were able to organize the crowdsourced translation and adaptation of an earthquake-resistant construction booklet for use in Haiti thanks to hard work of dozens of volunteers. What the crisis in Haiti showed was that the tools we’d played with could be used to do real work in the world. SMS wasn’t just for telling people about parties; it could be used to let first responders know where injured people were trapped. Crowdsourcing wasn’t just for making t-shirts on Threadless; Haitians across the globe could come together to do difficult technical translations. It’s the work of Ushahidi and groups like them that should make us wary of those who would say that all Internet-organized social activity is frivolous. Because in one of the most humanitarian crises in recent memory, that just wasn’t true. Of course, the technology didn’t do the work on its own. It took real humans pulling the levers and doing the hard stuff. But the actions the technology enabled, though they could not mitigate all the horrors of that time, did help.

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The Tech Used to Help in Haiti’s Earthquake Recovery