Darpa’s New Plans: Crowdsource Intel, Edit DNA

[The Straight Story]

Darpa’s New Plans: Crowdsource Intel, Edit DNA

The Pentagon’s mad science agency has big plans for next year: crowdsourcing military intelligence, creating an “immune system” for Defense Department networks, and even research that might one day lead to editing a soldier’s DNA.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, just released its budget for the upcoming year. And, as you might expect from the Pentagon’s way-out science and technology division, there are some wild, new projects on tap.

Military analysts are already overwhelmed by too much information. Instead of training more analysts or handing data over to computers, Darpa wants to improve how the military uses its intelligence info, by turning it into an open call for contribution. The $13 million dollar project, called “Deep ISR Processing by Crowds,” looks “to harness the unique cognitive and creative abilities of large numbers of people to enhance dramatically the knowledge derived from ISR systems.”

Crowdsourcing is already used among businesses and other government agencies, to generate more innovative ideas that draw on as many sources as possible. Darpa wants that innovation to take over individual analysis and decision-making:

...


Editing DNA could have widespread implications, but Darpa seems most interested in two: microchip implants that restore senses and movement in traumatic injury patients, and the ongoing Darpa goal of boosting troop performance in the field:



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/darpas-new-plans-crowdsource-intel-immunize-nets-edit-dna/#ixzz0eQN8LSVU

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

1. US DoD funds a lot of the world's trauma medicine research

All the boondoggles aside, their medical research programs practically invented modern trauma medicine. They also spend a lot of money on tissue regeneration research. A small fraction of their research expenditure but an important one for civilian applications.

More inexplicably, they spend money on cures for diseases like multiple sclerosis while the civilian research agencies do not. Go figure.

[MadHound]

2. US DoD funds a lot of the world's trauma

Sorry, but the trade off between people killed and injured and the ancillary benefits like trauma research is just too steep.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

3. My point was that there is some good mixed in with the bad

It isn't an all or nothing proposition.

And that aside, military research (good or bad) doesn't kill people, the politicians sending soldiers hither and yon kills people.