While the media environment is evolving rapidly, television continues to be the dominant medium used by the American public. TV advertising is therefore still a core component of most major public service campaigns, on topics such as childhood obesity, drunk driving, or cancer prevention. To help inform the work of non-profits seeking to communicate with the public, the Kaiser Family Foundation is releasing a new, updated study that examines the extent and nature of public service advertising (PSA) on both broadcast and cable television.

The report – Shouting To Be Heard (2): Public Service Advertising in a Changing Television World – found that broadcast and cable stations in the study donated an average of 17 seconds an hour to PSAs – totaling one-half of one percent of all TV airtime. The most frequent time period for PSAs to air was between midnight and 6 a.m., accounting for 46% of donated PSAs across all stations in the study; looking only at broadcast stations, 60% of donated PSAs ran overnight. The time period with the fewest donated PSAs was during prime time (8-11 p.m.), with 13% of all donated PSAs.

The most common issue among donated PSAs was health (26% of all donated PSAs), followed by fundraising (23%), family and social concerns (12%), community organizations or events (8%), and volunteerism (6%).

Shouting to be Heard: Public Service Advertising in a Changing Television World

What factors should influence the design of a complex system? And what is the impact of choices on both product and organizational performance? These issues are of particular importance in the field of software given how software is developed: Rarely do software projects start from scratch. The authors analyzed the evolution of a commercial software product from first release to its current design, looking specifically at 6 major versions released at varying periods over a 15-year period. These results have important implications for managers, highlighting the impact of design decisions made today on both the evolution and the maintainability of a design in subsequent years. Key concepts include:

* Data show strong support for the existence of a relationship between component modularity and design evolution.
* Tightly coupled components have a higher probability of survival as a design evolves compared with loosely coupled components.
* Tightly coupled components are also harder to augment, in that the mix of new components added in each version is significantly more modular than the legacy design.

The Impact of Component Modularity on Design Evolution: Evidence from the Software Industry

Charleston Mayor Danny Jones had a problem as he tried to get through the security gate at a California airport: He had misplaced his driver's license, and the expired one in his wallet wouldn't do.

The guards at John Wayne Airport in Orange County searched his bag.

Then he remembered picking up a copy of Charleston Magazine while on his way to the West Coast for a little rest and relaxation.

Inside was a photograph of him standing in downtown Charleston and an article Jones had written as mayor welcoming visitors to the state capital.

Only then was he allowed to board his flight home.

W.Va. mayor uses magazine to prove ID

As we enter 2008, what we call the long-term fiscal challenge is not in the distant future. Already the first members of the baby boom generation have filed for early Social Security retirement benefits—and will be eligible for Medicare in only 3 years. Simulations by GAO, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and others all show that despite a 3-year decline in the budget deficit, we still face large and growing structural deficits driven primarily by rising health care costs and known demographic trends. Under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an imprudent and unsustainable path.

Rapidly rising health care costs are not simply a federal budget problem; they are our nation’s number one fiscal challenge. Growth in health-related spending is the primary driver of the fiscal challenges facing the state and local governments. Unsustainable growth in health care spending is a systemwide challenge that also threatens to erode the ability of employers to provide coverage to their workers and undercut our ability to compete in a global marketplace. Addressing the unsustainability of health care costs is a societal challenge that calls for us as a nation to fundamentally rethink how we define, deliver, and finance health care in both the public and the private sectors.
The passage of time has only worsened the situation: the size of the challenge has grown and the time to address it has shrunk. The longer we wait the more painful and difficult the choices will become, and the greater the risk of a very serious economic disruption.

It is understandable that the Congress and the administration are focused on the need for a short-term fiscal stimulus. However, our long-term challenge increases the importance of careful design of any stimulus package—it should be timely, targeted, and temporary. At the same time, creating a capable and credible commission to make recommendations to the next Congress and the next president for action on our longer-range and looming fiscal imbalance is called for.

See also Saving Our Future Requires Tough Choices Today.

Action Is Needed to Avoid the Possibility of a Serious Economic Disruption in the Future

John Hagel and John Seely Brown, in Business Week:

What the risk-taking, big-wave-surfing community has to teach executives about finding new ideas and riding the curl of growth

Catching the Innovation Wave

A few days old, but no one mentioned it, did they?

Abu Laith al-Libi, a wanted al Qaeda terrorist, was killed in Pakistan by a CIA airstrike, three U.S. officials told CNN Thursday.

From the archive:

High Qaeda Aide Retracted Claim of Link With Iraq

The Man in the Snow White Cell

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim

Transcripts of Interviews of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Faraj al-Libi, & Ramzi Binalshibh

CIA kills top al Qaeda terrorist in Pakistan

Bush's 2008 State of the Union address, annotated by The Atlantic's James Fallows

Better late than never ...

State of the Union: Post Mortem

It's all about the incentives ...

Quality problems have caused cost overruns, schedule delays, and reduced weapon system availability on the 11 DOD weapon systems we reviewed. ... the Wideband Global SATCOM communications satellite’s initial operating capability date was delayed by 18 months because a supplier had installed some fasteners incorrectly and 1,500 fasteners on each of the first three satellites had to be reinspected. ... Prime contractors’ poor practices related to systems engineering, manufacturing, and supplier quality contributed to these problems.

... leading commercial companies ... apply more discipline and ... set well-defined product requirements and performed appropriate testing, which are critical systems engineering practices.

DOD’s acquisition environment does not provide incentives to prime contractors to use best practices to efficiently build high-quality weapon systems. The department faces challenges setting achievable requirements for systems development and providing effective oversight during the development process. In conducting systems development, DOD generally pays the allowable costs incurred for the contractor’s best efforts and accepts most of the financial risks associated with development because of technical uncertainties. However, DOD and its contractors often enter into development contracts before requirements have been analyzed with disciplined systems engineering practices. This introduces significant cost and schedule risk to a development program, risk that is not borne by the prime contractor, but by DOD. Contractors have little incentive to utilize the best systems engineering, manufacturing, and supplier quality practices to control costs ...

The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics has identified several initiatives DOD recently started that might eventually help improve weapon system quality. Some of its new initiatives address problems we noted in this report, such as placing greater emphasis on setting achievable requirements before starting development. However, DOD has not taken actions that would address problems related to prime contractor systems engineering, manufacturing, and supplier quality practices we found in our review of the 11 weapon systems.

We are making recommendations that the Secretary of Defense improve weapons system quality by setting achievable requirements at the start of weapon system development, overseeing and expanding initiatives that could improve quality, and using data to assess prime contractor performance and weapon system quality.

Increased Focus on Requirements and Oversight Needed to Improve DOD’s Acquisition Environment and Weapon System Quality

The human brain responds to recognizable signals for sex and for rewarding drugs of abuse by activation of limbic reward circuitry. Does the brain respond in similar way to such reward signals even when they are “unseen”, i.e., presented in a way that prevents their conscious recognition? Can the brain response to “unseen” reward cues predict the future affective response to recognizable versions of such cues, revealing a link between affective/motivational processes inside and outside awareness?

We exploited the fast temporal resolution of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test the brain response to “unseen” (backward-masked) cocaine, sexual, aversive and neutral cues of 33 milliseconds duration in male cocaine patients (n = 22). Two days after scanning, the affective valence for visible versions of each cue type was determined using an affective bias (priming) task. We demonstrate, for the first time, limbic brain activation by “unseen” drug and sexual cues of only 33 msec duration. Importantly, increased activity in an large interconnected ventral pallidum/amygdala cluster to the “unseen” cocaine cues strongly predicted future positive affect to visible versions of the same cues in subsequent off-magnet testing, pointing both to the functional significance of the rapid brain response, and to shared brain substrates for appetitive motivation within and outside awareness.

These findings represent the first evidence that brain reward circuitry responds to drug and sexual cues presented outside awareness. The results underscore the sensitivity of the brain to “unseen” reward signals and may represent the brain's primordial signature for desire. The limbic brain response to reward cues outside awareness may represent a potential vulnerability in disorders (e.g., the addictions) for whom poorly-controlled appetitive motivation is a central feature.

See also:

Using a brain imaging technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have discovered that cocaine-related images trigger the emotional centers of the brains of patients addicted to drugs — even when the subjects are unaware they've seen anything. The study, published Jan. 30 in the journal PLoS One, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr. Anna Rose Childress and Dr. Charles O'Brien, showed cocaine patients photos of drug-related cues like crack pipes and chunks of cocaine. The images flashed by in just 33 milliseconds — so quickly that the patients were not consciously aware of seeing them. Nonetheless, the unseen images stimulated activity in the limbic system, a brain network involved in emotion and reward, which has been implicated in drug-seeking and craving.

"This is the first evidence that cues outside one's awareness can trigger rapid activation of the circuits driving drug-seeking behavior," said NIDA director Dr. Nora Volkow. "Patients often can't pinpoint when or why they start craving drugs. Understanding how the brain initiates that overwhelming desire for drugs is essential to treating addiction."

Prelude to Passion: Limbic Activation by “Unseen” Drug and Sexual Cues

John Markoff:

Cisco Systems plans on Monday to introduce a network switch for corporations grappling with rapidly growing Internet data transfers and the increased use of applications that draw on remote data storage, known as cloud computing.

The switch, called the Nexus 7000, will provide a sharp increase in traffic capacity over the company’s current products, to 15 trillion bits of data a second.

Cisco has made a significant bet on the rapidly expanding data demands of the consumer Internet. Its Nexus system, which will eventually replace a product line that represents about a third of its $35 billion business, has required roughly $1 billion in research and development costs and the efforts of more than 500 engineers in the last four years, the company said.

Cisco sees the market for the product as corporate computing operations and Internet service providers now struggling to keep up with the torrent of data being produced by a broad range of new online services including movie downloads and Internet video games.

Industry analysts said the system is likely to have a notable impact on the way companies design data centers, and represents the possible dominance of a new version of the Ethernet networking standard that Cisco is designing to handle torrents of digital data.

It's interesting to see Cisco playing up the backplane capacity angle. In practice this is not (only) what providers are really "grappling" with.

Cisco to Sell Faster Switch for Flood of Remote Data