KnowledgeMap: Blog by Azamat Abdymomunov

Yesterday Richard K. Lester, Japan Steel Industry Professor and Head of MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering lead the discussion on events at the Fukushima nuclear reactors.

In his email announcing the panel he stressed the fact  that “… reliable technical information about the crisis affecting the nuclear reactors is hard to identify in the media reports, but the demand to know what is happening is understandably very great.” He then continued that “As a service to our students and the MIT community NSE [Nuclear Science and Engineering] will be sponsoring an information session at which we will discuss the technical facts of the current situation, as best we understand them.”

The tragic events that are unfolding in Japan draw great deal of attention around MIT campus.  The auditorium at MIT’s landmark Building 10 under the Great Dome overlooking Killian Court was full of  students, faculty and members of the community.

Here is full video of the session from MIT TechTV:

For more information I recommend you to visit MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub maintained by students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. Here is also good background reading on Mark I and Mark II Boiling Water Reactors.

How can US and its partners make better use of science diplomacy?

Diplomacy is a process of international engagement for the purpose of pursuing and securing national interests. Thus, in my opinion, science diplomacy is a process in which scientific collaboration is a mechanism of pursuing nation’s security and variety of other interests.

As long as national interests are clearly defined, communicated to America’s partners and linked to specific science and technology priorities, science diplomacy will be a valid and to some extend effective form of diplomacy. Clarity and directness is appreciated because very often partners have shared national interests that could be achieved through collaboration.

Let us assume that US national interests are coupled with science and technology priorities on the international stage. In such case, one can argue that one dollar spent on science diplomacy can save the US hundreds of dollars in avoiding military, security, humanitarian or environmental crisis in the long term.

This brings us to my next point, possibility of having global science and technology priorities. I do not rule out possibility of  group of countries having shared, regional or global science and technology priorities. During this workshop we have heard about some of them – research of Antarctica, deep sea bed, climate change, epidemiology, water issues, etc.

What make a process confusing, at least for me, is the mismatch between America’s internal science, technology and innovation priorities and external science and technology priorities.  Again, it is natural for any nation to have its own national priorities. At the end of the day it is national competitiveness that nations are measured against. I would go one step further arguing that nation’s internal STI priorities are economically driven, whereas external ST priorities are politically driven.  I believe that clarity in defining and differentiating these two sets of priorities may help cooperation to be more productive.

Perhaps such gap could be somehow narrowed by process of coopetition, a process where parties shared cost without fear of loosing competitive advantage.  As budget austerity measures becoming as global phenomena as climate change, transparent and honest dialog between different scientific communities across the globe is needed to understand what ST and STI programs and projects could continue to move ahead.

Originally from http://socialmedia.mit.edu

Hello everyone,

Tomorrow is our last day of ESD.942 class and we are trying to summarize what we have learn during this week.

I would like to make several comments regarding building your blog. Especially if you do not have your personal mit.edu or .com domain.

As I was saying in the first class, blogging is addictive and sometimes painful process. As a social media pessimist I would like to share ten simple rules you may chose to follow.

1. Take your time and think about the goal of your blog. You may choose to have specific field, language, etc. Or you may just start sharing your thoughts without constraining yourself into specific tags and topics.

2. Ask yourself if you want to go public from day one? In my personal experience, I just started to write and generate different content first. Moreover, for the first four months, my blog was private. Only when I felt comfortable I opened it for public to read.

3. Think about your audience. Who are these people – your friends, classmates, potential employees, potential business partners. Why do they care?

4. Most important advise is focus on your content. You can spend as much time on the design. But design is an iterative and time consuming process.
After your fourth and fifth posts you will get a better idea how your blog should look like. But please do not waste your time on that. Most dissatisfaction with the design and absence/necessity of specific plug ins may disappear as you start writing. Very often your blog may require simplicity and different design features are just fancy distractions for your and your readers.

5. Take a minute to review your old notes on creative writing. Most of them are applicable to your new blog (Clearly I did not follow this rule myself).

6. After several weeks review the name of your blog and ask yourself – “Does your name actually reflect its content”. At an early stage do not constrain yourself with consistency in topics. These will allow you to re-shape your blog as you become more comfortable in this environment.

7. Combine blog writing with some other activities in your life – writing reflection paper for your classes, general emails to your friends, book reviews, op-ed, announcements on upcoming events or short reports on these events.

8. If you are more visual person and do not have time to write long posts – there are micro-blogging platform such as http://www.tumblr.com . It has simple and intuitive user interface that can save you from pain of writing “original” ideas. If you have 10 minutes to integrate your platforms, I would spend them on setting your Blognetworks http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/ interface. This will let your blogpost appear on your Facebook page.

9. If you decide to get your own domain – ask yourself how much money are you ready to spend ANNUALLY on maintaining this domain. If you start using mit.edu domain – ask yourself what would be the eventual transition cost from mit.edu domain to some other domain when you leave MIT.

10. If you remember one thing from this post remember this – platforms will come and go. Last year it was LifeJournal, yesterday it was WordPress and Facebook, today it is Twitter and Tumblr. Tomorrow it will be something else. You can be everywhere or you can be just in one place. That is not important. What matters is your name. Your name should be connected to correct information about you, as well as content created by you or about you.

Best,

Azamat Abdymomunov

Russia releases the transcript between Russian military air traffic controllers in Smolensk and the Polish Presidential Airplane 1-0-1 before the crash in April 2010 (in Russian).

From the transcripts it seems that Russian military air traffic controllers had fragmented information and were in some degree of stress. Their communication network and navigation of the airbase were clearly outdated. No wonder the Polish side got upset when the Official report did not mention these factors.

Open mic in the tower: http://www.mak.ru/russian/investigations/2010/files/tu154m_101/open_micr.pdf

Radio: http://www.mak.ru/russian/investigations/2010/files/tu154m_101/ukv.pdf

10:23:30 First contact of the 101 with the tower.

10:40:33 Last contact of the 101 with the tower.

10:40:53 Tower says “Horizon, 101”.

Telephone conversations: http://www.mak.ru/russian/investigations/2010/files/tu154m_101/tel_per.pdf

Portion of the scrip was publish by Russia Today channel later today (at 2.11).

Russia’s version of the accident. Simulation of CIS International Aviation Committee (MAK) Рейс P-L-F 101:

The public release of recorded conversations between the Russian air traffic controllers and the crew of the crashed Polish presidential plane is unprecedented.

All along, there has been agreement that the Polish pilots’ decision to land the plane in heavy fog was a key reason for the crash. Yet Polish authorities have reacted with anger to the Russian report for putting all the blame on Poles; they believe Russian air traffic controllers and the state of the airport – which lacked sophisticated navigation equipment – must have played a role too.

Many in Poland believe Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who faces national elections this autumn, has been too soft in his dealings with Moscow over the crash.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/emp/external/player.swf

I would like to share with you my initial experience with the Development Venture Lab.

Development Venture is an exploratory development entrepreneurship class on founding, financing, and building viable ventures in developing nations and emerging regions and for underserved customers everywhere.

MIT Media Lab is a fascinating place. The place where you meet interesting people, share your ideas and most importantly get energized with enthusiasm of this very unique crowd of people. The diversity, expertise, experience, cultural backgrounds – all come together in one place – D-Lab.

Starting today we will be using Barter platform to connect, share ideas and start our group projects.

Barter has been designed as a platform inside an organizational boundary for matching problems to solutions. Our goal is to apply better theories to creating and managing a knowledge market in order to improve organizational desgin, generate information at higher rates, and track the gains in productivity that should result.

Here is a Flip-video interview of Joost Paul Bonsen at the event.

watch?v=6YrwpO99pc8&feature=youtube_gdata

Just received by email and reading new report by Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes called “Bear Traps: Can Russia Avoid the Pitfalls on the Road to Sustainable Economic Growth?”.   The report was prepared by the Center for Research on International Financial and Energy Security (Brookings Institution and Pennsylvania State University). As it happened with Clifford’s book (The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold), I think the latest research will be subject of many heated discussions in the russian speaking domain of the internet.

There are several chapters that will require particular attention given my research thesis:

2.7 Machinery and Equipment

3.2 Cost of Cold

3.3.1 Siberia and the GULAG

4.1.1 Decentralization versus Federalism

4.6.1 Federalism versus Efficiency

Clifford and I discussed related topics this spring when I visited him in DC. I am looking forward to further discussion this fall.

For more info please see Barry W. Ickes’ blog, http://ickmansblog.blogspot.com/

WELCOME TO MY NEW WEBSITE

One year after I started my blog on abdimom.wordpress.com I made my decision to build and migrate to my own website. What started as innocent collection of System architecture principles (thank you Professor Edward Crawley), have become full-time hobby.

I am very disorganized person, who lives very much in the present. Around late January 2010, as I gained pace and habit of collecting my system architecture principles, I started to realize that my blog can be the place for both collecting what I’ve learned in the past and what I will [and need to] learn in the future.

Building and maintaing your own blog is very time consuming and often painful endeavor, but I hope it will payback in the long term.  Special thanks to Rafael Maranon at http://rafaelmaranon.mit.edu/ for his help and support, thanks to Leyla Abdimomunova (no blog reference for now, but she is next) for her patience and tolerance to my addiction. Special thanks to Lois Slavin, Communications Director at MIT System Design and Management program for motivation and support, as well as for linking my blog to http://sdm-blog.mit.edu/.

PS: I also started to put together my thesis (for now just Chapter 1), which I would like to share with you.