Daily Archives: March 27, 2012

Will mystery of Amelia Earhart be solved?

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Will mystery of Amelia Earhart be solved? – CNN.com.

There are several “sidebar” videos to watch if you click the link above. 

Editor’s note: Susan Butler is the author of “East to Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart,” the basis of the movie “Amelia,” starring Hilary Swank. She was inspired by her mother, who was one of the few women pilots in the 1930s and a member of the Ninety Nines, the women’s flying organization founded by Earhart. Butler also wrote “My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin.”

(CNN) — Many people think Amelia Earhart’s fame rests on her dramatic disappearance in 1937. I don’t think so. I think her life has been overshadowed by her death. I think that when her Electra aircraft is finally found, the focus will return to her life and her remarkable accomplishments. She will become even more famous than she is today.

A new, privately funded investigation into one of the most famous missing persons cases in history will start this summer, carried out by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. It will be headed by Ric Gillespie. The group has mounted 10 previous expeditions to Gardner Island, also known as Nikumaroro, in the Pacific. I wish him well, but my experience leads me to believe Gillespie will come up empty again.

Earhart started flying in the 1920s. Her first plane was powered by one of the first — and still unproven — air-cooled engines ever made. But Earhart possessed more than guts and a passion for flying. She was blessed with good looks and intelligence. She thrived on publicity, charmed men and set as her mission in life the empowerment of women.

She went on the lecture circuit to finance her flights and became wildly popular, the Oprah Winfrey of her day. Earhart helped create and lead the Ninety Nines, the women’s flying organization that promoted women fliers, and was idolized by her flying peers as much because she was fun as because she was efficient.

She married a successful publisher, George Putnam, who looked like a stand-in for Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent. He devoted his life to her. In a time when planes were being perfected and aviators were the superstars of the day, she matched the men.

Earhart’s most daring achievement was that five years to the day after Charles Lindbergh’s flight, she took off from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, and safely landed her red single-engine Lockheed Vega in a farmer’s field in Derry, Ireland. After a harrowing flight replete with equipment malfunctions and bad weather, she became the first woman and the second pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. The world went crazy.

After the flight, she was elevated to almost mythic status. “Forget Garbo, forget Jackie, she was in a realm beyond stardom,” recalled Gore Vidal, who knew her well.

She set countless speed, long-distance and altitude records.

She was on what she planned as her last record-breaking flight in 1937 when she went missing, flying around the world at the equator, which had never before been done. She had always flown solo, but on this last flight, she took along a navigator, Fred Noonan.

She was on the last, most dangerous leg of the flight, taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, for Howland Island, a dot in the middle of the Pacific a bit north of the equator and 2,556 miles away. She was landing there to refuel the Electra before flying on to Hawaii. When she failed to appear, the Itasca, a U.S. Coast guard vessel waiting at Howland Island to guide her in, radioed the world.

The final resting place of her plane has never been ascertained, but most fliers and history buffs, including me, think that the plane rests on the ocean floor somewhere in the vicinity of her destination of Howland Island, rather than Gardner Island, 400 miles away. But the ocean is 17,500 feet deep around Howland, a mile deeper than the resting place of the Titanic. Only recently has technology allowed the construction of underwater vehicles that can endure such extreme pressure.

In 2009, I was on the second leg of the R/V Seward Johnson’s search for Earhart. The Seward Johnson is a 204-foot research vessel that set out from American Samoa to search the ocean floor to the west of Howland Island. Ted Waitt, founder of Gateway Computer and creator Waitt Institute for Discovery, was behind the expedition. A great admirer of Earhart, he was also the impetus behind the recent movie, “Amelia.”

There were 29 of us aboard the Seward Johnson: scientists, oceanographers, technicians, computer experts and ordinary seamen. Autonomous underwater vehicles, bright yellow sonar subs 12 feet long, did the searching. For 46 days, the AUVs looked for the plane round the clock. Going on the assumption that headwinds had slowed the plane down more than Noonan realized, the subs were deployed to survey to the west of Howland Island.

The AUVs work by pinging the ocean floor as they travel just above it, sending up signals that are displayed on computer screens as dots that change color as the subs ping over different surfaces. The softest surface, sand, transmits as blue dots; hard stone and metal transmit as red dots that blend off into green. The Electra, as a metal object, would show up red. Once an AUV pinged a large metal object: It turned out to be a 55-gallon steel drum. Other than that, the ocean floor was as barren as the moon.

In the past 16 or so years, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has come back with all sorts of artifacts that Gillespie was sure would prove to have belonged to Earhart. Nothing has held up to scrutiny. While his hunches have led him to concentrate on this island, Gardner was one of the first islands searched, five days after Earhart went missing.

At that time, three planes catapulted from the battleship USS Colorado searched the area. If one of the three pilots had sighted anything even slightly promising, the pilot would have reported it. The pilot who sighted the plane would instantly have been the hero of the hour.

Such a sighting was never made. At President Franklin Roosevelt‘s bidding, the Colorado was within days joined by a fleet of nine ships of the U.S. Navy, including an aircraft carrier that held 62 planes, to look for Earhart. The ships and the planes then conducted a search they estimated as covering 150,000 square miles.

The Seward Johnson only searched the ocean floor to the west of Howland Island. It is my best guess that the plane rests on the ocean floor to the east, waiting to be found by the next expedition.

Whoever finds Earhart and her Electra will deservedly become famous. I agree with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has said the search itself is inspirational. It will be wonderful news when one day our lost heroine is found.

In the meantime, Earhart remains an icon, revered by young women, remembered by many for her signal accomplishments, remembered by all because of her dramatic end. She is 39 forever.

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To fix government, call in the geeks

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To fix government, call in the geeks – CNN.com.

Click link to watch video.

Editor’s note: Jennifer Pahlka is the founder, executive director and board chairwoman of Code for America, a nonprofit organization that provides fellowships for technology experts to work in city government. She spoke at the TED2012 conference in February. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to “Ideas worth spreading,” through talks which it makes available on its website.

(CNN) — A couple of years ago I started a program to try to get rock-star tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they’re supposed to hate — government. It’s called Code for America, and it’s a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks.

We select a few fellows every year, and we have them work with city governments. Instead of sending them off into the Third World, we send them into the wilds of City Hall. And there they make great apps and work with city staffers. But really what they’re doing is showing what’s possible with technology today.

Watch Jennifer Pahlka’s TED Talk

One of the applications the Code for America fellows wrote last year is called Adopt-a-Hydrant. It lets Bostonians sign up to dig out fire hydrants when they’re covered in snow.

Coding a better government

This is a modest little app, probably the smallest of the 21 apps the fellows built. But it’s doing something that very few government technologies are doing: It’s spreading virally. It’s open-source, so anyone can take the code.

Forest Frizzell in the IT department of the City of Honolulu found it and realized he could use it to recruit citizens to check on the tsunami sirens in his city to make sure they’re functioning.

Seattle is planning to use it to get citizens to clear clogged storm drains. Chicago has rolled it out to let people sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows. There are now nine cities we know of looking to use this app, and it’s happening organically, frictionlessly.

TED.com: Being young and making an impact

This app invites us to think a little differently about government. This is not how government normally procures software; that’s generally a multi-year process. One of our teams of fellows built a web app for parents trying to find the right public school for their kids. The project took two fellows about two-and-a-half months. We were told that if it had gone through normal government channels, it would have taken two years and cost over $2 million.

So an app that takes just a few days to write and spreads virally is a shot across the bow to the institution of government. It suggests how government might work more like the Internet itself: permissionless, open, generative.

But what’s more important is how a new generation is tackling the problem of government, not as the problem of an ossified institution, but as a problem of collective action. This is good news, because it turns out we have actually gotten very good at enabling collective action with digital technology. And when we can put aside all the emotional baggage we all carry about government, government is simply what we do together.

If you’ve given up on government, I would ask you to reconsider — because government is changing. Technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government by being a platform for citizens to help themselves and help others.

Adopt-a-hydrant is a small example of government as a platform, but the story of the possums in Boston adds another element. Many cities now have a 311 line, where citizens can report issues. But some of them also have Web and mobile apps that do the same thing, and there’s a difference. When you call in, it’s person-to-person communication. If you use the app, your service request is public. One day, on Boston’s 311 app, a resident reported a possum in her trash can, wondering if it was alive, and asked for help from the city in getting it removed. But because it was public, a neighbor saw it, and commented:

“Walked over to West Ninth Street. Located trash can. Possum? Check. Living? Yep. Turned the trash can on its side. Good night, sweet possum.”

In this case, a citizen helped another citizen, but government had a critical role: It connected them, and it could have connected them to government services if they’d been needed. But a neighbor helping a neighbor strengthens a community. Sending out Animal Control just costs money!

TED.com: Paul Romer’s radical idea — charter cities

We have this opportunity to reframe government in very promising ways, but “we the people” are going to have to do few things differently if we want this to work.

For one, we need to understand that government is not the same thing as politics, and that voting can’t be our only input into the system of government.

How often have we elected a new political leader and then expected everything to change? That doesn’t work, because government is like a vast ocean, and politics is like the 6-inch layer on top. What’s under that is bureaucracy. And the contempt that most people have for that word disempowers us. It allows a system that we own, and we pay for, to forever be something that works against us.

People seem to think politics is sexy, but if we want this institution to work for us, we’re going to have to make bureaucracy sexy — because that’s where the real work of government happens. We can’t do without government, but we do need it to be more effective.

Secondly, we need to remember that we’re not just consumers. We’re citizens. And we are not going to fix government if we don’t also fix citizenship.

TED.com: Make data more human

The good news is there’s a generation that has grown up on the Internet and knows that it’s not that hard to do things together. Members of this generation have grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted. They have dozens of channels where they can express their opinions about any topic, so when they’re faced with the problem of government, they don’t care as much about using their voices. They’re using their hands.

They’re using their hands to write applications that make government work better, but they’re also writing apps that let us use our hands to make our communities work better: shoveling out a fire hydrant, pulling a weed, or turning over a garbage can for a neighbor.

So, when it comes to the big important things we need to do together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we also going to be a crowd of hands?