Information Disorder Machines

Weaponized narrative is an attack that seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will. By generating confusion, complexity, and political and social schisms, it confounds response on the part of the defender. A fast-moving information deluge is an ideal environment for this kind of adversarial attack. A firehose of narrative attacks gives the targeted populace little time to process and evaluate. It is cognitively disorienting and confusing – especially if the opponents barely realize what’s occurring. Opportunities abound for emotional manipulation undermining the opponent’s will to resist. The following report captures the goals, subject matter expert inputs, raw data, and findings of Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab Workshop exploring the future of Weaponized Narrative. The findings exposed multiple threat areas and the coming of information disorder machines (IDMs) that could harm individuals, organizations, and even the entire United States of America. To empower people and organizations to disrupt, mitigate and recover from these potential threats the findings in this report identify not only specific threats but also provide recommendations through which organizations and individuals can disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the future of effects of IDMs.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1038/thumbnail.jp

Material Loss

Our science fiction prototype will take us into the future...the year 2041. Nothing seems to be out of order on the world stage. Same old problems, just a different day. However, the globe has embraced a wide range of emerging disruptive technologies that today seem to be in the realm of science fiction. And, as it has always been thought-out history, any technology that can be used to better the world, can also be used to do harm to people. In our future, nefarious actors have figured out ways to use these technologies to disrupt the entire world order.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1045/thumbnail.jp

The Future of Work

Welcome to the future, where technology will transform every aspect of how and where we work. But what kind of future will it be? What will physical spaces look like where we live, work, and play? How will we work side by side with robots? What jobs will people do and will they be meaningful? How do we make sure that the future involves everyone? In this collaboration with CISCO, all these questions and more are addressed, and contended with.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1032/thumbnail.jp

Threatcasting: a framework and process to model future operating enviornments

Threatcasting, a new foresight methodology, draws from futures studies and military strategic thinking to provide a novel method to model the future. The methodology fills gaps in existing military futures thinking and provides a process to specify actionable steps as well as progress indicators. Threatcasting also provides an ability to anticipate future threats and develop strategies to reduce the impact of any event. This technical note provides a detailed explanation of the Threatcasting methodology. It provides the reader with its connections to the current body of work within the foresight community and then explains the four phase methodology through the use of a real-life example.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1040/thumbnail.jp

A study of the effects of micro-gravity on seed germination

This study will identify characteristics of seed germination dependent upon gravity. To accomplish this objective, four different seed types will be germinated in space and then be compared to a control group germinated on Earth. Both the experimental and control groups will be analyzed on the cellular level for the size of cells, structural anomalies, and gravitational effects. The experiment will be conducted in a Get Away Special Canister (GAS Can no. 608) owned by the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and designed for students. The GAS Can will remain in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle with minimal astronaut interaction

Information Warfare and the Future of Conflict

The goal of the Future of Information Warfare Threatcasting Project was to explore the coming decade’s emerging technological and cultural trends and envision plausible future threats from multiple perspectives. The project sought to illuminate emerging areas of strategic threat and potential investment, particularly relating to the proliferation of emerging intelligences, technologies, and systems that could considerably change the nature of the battlefield by 2028 and beyond. In three Threatcasting Workshops a select group of practitioners from across multiple domains (security, academia, media, and technology) worked to envision these futures and explore what actions should be taken now to counter future IW threats. The final goal was to operationalize the finding for the Army and to determine what actions could be taken to disrupt, mitigate, and recover from these future threats.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1039/thumbnail.jp

The Super-Earth Opportunity - Search for Habitable Exoplanets in the 2020s

The recent discovery of a staggering diversity of planets beyond the Solar System has brought with it a greatly expanded search space for habitable worlds. The Kepler exoplanet survey has revealed that most planets in our interstellar neighborhood are larger than Earth and smaller than Neptune. Collectively termed super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, some of these planets may have the conditions to support liquid water oceans, and thus Earth-like biology, despite differing in many ways from our own planet. In addition to their quantitative abundance, super-Earths are relatively large and are thus more easily detected than true Earth twins. As a result, super-Earths represent a uniquely powerful opportunity to discover and explore a panoply of fascinating and potentially habitable planets in 2020 - 2030 and beyond.Comment: Science white paper submitted to the 2020 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Surve

The Super-Earth Opportunity - Search for Habitable Exoplanets in the 2020s

The recent discovery of a staggering diversity of planets beyond the Solar System has brought with it a greatly expanded search space for habitable worlds. The Kepler exoplanet survey has revealed that most planets in our interstellar neighborhood are larger than Earth and smaller than Neptune. Collectively termed super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, some of these planets may have the conditions to support liquid water oceans, and thus Earth-like biology, despite differing in many ways from our own planet. In addition to their quantitative abundance, super-Earths are relatively large and are thus more easily detected than true Earth twins. As a result, super-Earths represent a uniquely powerful opportunity to discover and explore a panoply of fascinating and potentially habitable planets in 2020 - 2030 and beyond

MAPK pathway activation in pilocytic astrocytoma

Pilocytic astrocytoma (PA) is the most common tumor of the pediatric central nervous system (CNS). A body of research over recent years has demonstrated a key role for mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway signaling in the development and behavior of PAs. Several mechanisms lead to activation of this pathway in PA, mostly in a mutually exclusive manner, with constitutive BRAF kinase activation subsequent to gene fusion being the most frequent. The high specificity of this fusion to PA when compared with other CNS tumors has diagnostic utility. In addition, the frequency of alteration of this key pathway provides an opportunity for molecularly targeted therapy in this tumor. Here, we review the current knowledge on mechanisms of MAPK activation in PA and some of the downstream consequences of this activation, which are now starting to be elucidated both in vitro and in vivo, as well as clinical considerations and possible future directions