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I work at a branch of a large medical provider, the kind that doctors send specimens to for evaluation. This summer, we were approached by corporate to re-label ourselves to a specific group of clients with a new brand and logo for what we already do. We were going to brand this “new” line to this new client group as the "Something-Something Institute".
Well, this got presented to the most senior doctor at our office, and to be candid, he tweaked. The clientele that we are extending our services to are considered outside the circle in which we normally practice by the medical staff where I work. But we have profit guidance to meet, and it’s a perfectly reasonable market to go after. Part of the point of the rebranding is to separate out our services for the new client type from the branding and services we provide for our existing client type—even though our piece of it is effectively the same services.
I say “our piece” because with this new product line, we have to offer several other testing options in conjuction in order be considered to have a complete and competitive product line in the eyes of the new clients. This new client type is notoriously fickle; if the full gamut of tests they expect to be available is not, they tend to go elsewhere and in a hurry.
So, all over the country, the company has experts in all of these various tests that fall outside of the expertese of our facility . Experts. Guys that have been looking at pus for 15 years of their lives. At our facility, the docs are the best at our piece of this larger puzzle.
What set off the senior doctor at our facility was this: in his mind an “Institute” is a building, brick and mortar with a lobby and pretty offices, and nothing else will classify. It was an utter shock to my system when he had calmed down enough to explain this to us.
You see, to me and my peers, nothing is centralized, and we don’t expect it to be. So long as the tech involved can bring everyone together in short order, the idea of virtual centralization is more than enough. But to this doctor who frequently swears a blue streak at his fast, modern, and fully functional PC, an Institute is one facility, where meetings of the minds are when both brains are in the same room together.
So here’s how it breaks down. The defense department has a provision to reward outstanding civilian achievement. In this case, DARPA has created a conduit to allow for a specified amount of money to be granted to the winning entrant of the Network Challenge.
The Challenge is this. Ten red weather balloons will be launched, but still anchored to the ground, in ten unannounced locations around the US. What we need is the actual mapped coordinates of those locations.
Standing in the way of this is the space that needs covered, some 3.5 million square miles. With about 40,000 zip codes in the country, every new member, every multiple of 40,000 gets us that much closer. Ultimately, all the locations of all the balloons have to be routed through one person as a single entry--you submit your location to TBC and TBC submits its combined data to DARPA. Also an obstacle are trouble makers that DARPA is aware of that will be out and about, pretending to be official balloon sites. As a precaution, DARPA will have officials at the base of every balloon and they have been instructed to show their credentials when asked.
So how do we get all of our submissions together? That will be done via secure means with an "Entry" link that will appear on this site. I will gather all the entries, cross check them with other sightings and bundle them up for the final DARPA entry.