On the Floods of 2008: No worries here on the personal front, as my family is holding the high ground. Still, thoughts, prayers and donations to the American Red Cross and other relief agencies are, no doubt, always appreciated.

On ways to incentivize (bad, business-jargony word, but the only one at hand) research, I'm still liking the X-Prize kind of model. Once again, Wired.com's Sharon Weinburger is apparently monitoring my brain waves, given her article on "More Prizes for Homeland Security Ideas", in which she states:

It's interesting to watch the proliferation of "prizes" in national security, seen in these cases, as well as in DARPA's Grand Challenge. It's become apparently an effective way to generate widespread interest, leverage private sector funding and generate publicity.
I don't know whether I've stated it clearly in past conversations, but my interest in this area relates to the generation of lessons-learned (in a small-wars context, 'natch). I figure that if Family Handyman or Better Homes and Gardens (full-disclosure, I'm the former editor of a couple of Better Homes-brand special-interest publications) will give you a couple of bucks for household hints, there might be a similar model for soliciting lessons-learned.

Something for future talk, or perhaps eventually a separate thread ...