jcasebolt@csis.org's blog

With tonight's premiere of the latest Star Trek film, I find it very interesting to see Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, holding what looks to be the prototype of Dr. McCoy's tricorder.  Immelt announced that GE is planning to invest $6 billion to develop low cost health care equipment by 2015.

The recent bout of the A(H1N1) virus, also known as the dreaded Swine Flu, has many people worried about massive infections and fatalities worldwide. The news even made V.P. Biden a bit apprehensive.

Recently I listened as Salar Ghahramani explained the state of the world's economy to a group of interns and young professionals at CSIS. As a listened, I was reminded of the time value of money. With any long range scenario, the best time to make a correction would be yesterday (and the worst time would be tomorrow). Mr.

I recently had the opportunity to meet Greg Allgood, the Director of Proctor and Gamble's Safe Drinking Water Progam. Mr. Allgood spoke at the SAIS Year of Water: Water and Agriculture conference in D.C. and demonstrated the effectiveness of P&G’s PUR packets to purify water for drinking, hand washing and cooking.

When we think of the National Guard in conjunction with the Seven Revolutions, we tend to think of "conflict". I recently learned that the modern National Guard is also very well suited to deal with the topic of "resource management".

Yasmina Zaidman spoke at SAIS's Water and Agriculture: Implications for Development and Growth event on March 30, 2009. Yasmina is the director of knowledge and communications for the Acumen Fund which works with developing communities to bring self-sufficiency to those who are forgotten.

Next week, GSI will host some of the best and brightest from Southeast Missouri State University for the Third Annual SEMO Global Trends Seminar. I attended last year as a junior and participated in a four day whirlwind of speakers and simulations. This year I am an intern at GSI and will be helping out with the activities.

"Where the streets have no names" was only one of the phrases that caught my ear. Another was, "We don't have to have all of the answers, but we'd better get the right people to the table." And the final one, "We are about to go out of business in Angola." These were the words of Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the World Food Program.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting George DeBakey from ePals, the "internet based classroom tool of the future." ePals was founded on the idea of modernizing the traditional conception of a "pen pal" (something I did as a student back in the last millennium thanks to my teacher's subscription to a magazine from Scholastic).

Today at CSIS, the Scholl Chair in International Business hosted a roundtable discussion on the 838 billion dollar economic package approved by the Senate this afternoon. You can listen to highlights from the "Smart Stimulus" event here. I went to listen and left after a few minutes. Not because I was bored or uninterested. I left as a symbol of what is going on with many people in our nation today.