How's UN Security Council Doing re: Kids in Wars?
.... The overall objective of this study will be to assess the measures the United Nations Security Council has taken to bring the persistent violators named in the reports of the Secretary General, the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, the Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict the Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism, and/or country mandates to account. This will include:

2.1 An assessment of the extent to which individuals or groups named these reports or resolutions have been subject to United Nations Security Council targeted measures, a description of the measures recommended and/or imposed, and the extent to which these have been carried out.

2.2 An assessment of the cases where the Security Council has failed to take action against persistent violators named in these reports, including a determination of the reasons for this failure to act.

2.2 An assessment of any other measures taken by the Security Council to bring violators named in these reports to account, which may include briefings, Arria Formula meetings, or other activities....

Anti-virals for military, national public health agency
....It is intended to award a contract to GlaxoSmithKline Inc., Mississauga, Ontario, for the purchase of the antiviral zanamivir, as they are the only known manufacturer of a product currently licensed for use in Canada. Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available to provide the goods described herein, may submit a statement of capabilities in writing to the contact person identified in this notice on or before the closing date. The statement of capabilities must clearly demonstrate how the supplier meets the advertised requirements.

Shelf-life: Minimum shelf life of 4 years at date of delivery.

Quantity:
Required quantity:
800,000 doses for Public Health Agency of Canada
40,000 doses for Department Of National Defence....

How do teams train, learn, work together?
.... The Collaborative Performance and Learning Section (CPL Section) of Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), Toronto, ON is developing a Science and Technology capability in the cognitive and social sciences domain with an emphasis on team and training research. The military scope for the research is targeted to both operational and training environments at all levels (tactical, operational, and strategic). Specific topics would include – but not be limited to – theoretical, predictive, and empirical analyses of cognitive, socio-cultural, and organizational processes of collaborative behaviour; training issues in these contexts; decision making in distributed and networked teams; multi-environment, multi-agency and multi-national planning and decision making; moral and ethical reasoning, the role of command intent, advice, and leadership in planning and decision making. As a result the CPL section requires a Task Authorization contract for research support for research on the Human Dimensions of Collaborative Performance and Learning. The support may take the form of, but is not limited to: conducting reviews of literature; statistical analysis; analysis of processes and activities; provision of military subject matter experts (SME); provision of academic SMEs; collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data; development educational and training approaches; and preparation of reports and journal articles on results of research and studies and presentation of results of studies to military, DRDC and academic audiences....

More "How Teams Work Under Stress" Stuff ("dismounted soldiers and small unit (ops)")
....In support of the Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) Toronto Applied Research Project on Stress and Small Team performance, DRDC has a need to develop statistical, behavioural, and neuro-cognitive models of the impact of multiple operational environmental stresses on the performance of dismounted soldiers and small unit operations. In support of this model development there is a need to integrate data collection, modeling, simulation, and visualization technologies. The proposed research addresses the need to develop and integrate these technologies. The scope of the proposed work is to develop the technologies to rapidly implement, analyze, and display models based on (i) literature data, (ii) experimental data collected from individuals and small teams exposed to multiple stresses in simulated and actual environments, (iii) high-level simulations of human behaviour and performance in complex environments, and (iv) simulation of neural processing and neuro-cognitive architectures exposed to environmental moderators at the cellular level....

How do you test clothing, equipment before troops get them?
.... Development of protective clothing and equipment for soldiers is a complex process. It begins with development of a comprehensive Statement of Requirements, followed by an iterative design and test process to ensure that systems, subsystems and components meet all of the operational and functional requirements. In simple terms, the equipment must protect soldiers while still permitting them to carry out their tasks correctly and efficiently .... while field trials generally provide good subjective data on the suitability of equipment, the quality of objective data collected in the field is often inferior to similar data collected in the laboratory under rigorously controlled conditions. In fact, the most practical, logical and cost effective approach to equipment development is to conduct extensive laboratory tests early in the cycle and reserve field trials and user evaluations for later in the process .... Defence R&D Canada – Toronto (DRDC Toronto) is looking to develop a set of novel tools that can be used to measure more of the biomechanical properties objectively, both in the laboratory and in the field. The objective data would be more reproducible, more sensitive to design features, less costly to obtain, and would validate the subjective data that we currently collect....