Feral Jundi

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Cool Stuff: DynCorp Employee James Boyd Honored For Heroic Efforts In Afghanistan

Filed under: Afghanistan,Cool Stuff,Industry Talk,War Art — Tags: , , , , , , — Matt @ 9:19 AM

     James’s portrait is not up yet on this website, but when it does come up I will put the word out.  If you follow the link below for the ‘100 Faces of War Experience’, you will see what these portraits are all about.  To have a DynCorp guy being represented on this website is really cool and an honor for the company and this industry.  –Matt

DynCorp Employee Honored for Heroic Efforts in Afghanistan

By John Adams

December 29, 2010

DynCorp International police trainer James Boyd will be recognized in the “100 Faces of War Experience” portrait in honor of his actions during an insurgent attack on his outpost in Afghanistan earlier this year.

While embedded with the U.S. military, Boyd’s outpost came under fire from a group of insurgents. Boyd repeatedly braved bullets and bombs, scrambling back-and-forth across the compound  to get medical bags and stretchers, lend aid and supported the team working to keep the enemy from breaching the compound wall.

According to the firm, “Boyd has supported efforts to train the Afghan border police under DI’s contract with the Department of State’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) since Nov. 2009.”

“The civilian police mentors and trainers that we have working in Afghanistan and around the world exhibit quiet acts of heroism every day,” said Don Ryder, DI vice president of the company’s training, mentoring and security programs. “James’ dedication to the mission and to helping others is a great example of the selfless contributions being made by those deployed overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is fitting that he will be honored in this exhibit.”

“A lot of people have asked about my efforts that day,” Boyd said. “I’m a trained police officer and when something like this happens, while most people react by running away from danger, we are trained to run toward it and see how we can help. That is what I did.”

(more…)

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Cool Stuff: The PMSC Observer, By David Isenberg

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Industry Talk — Tags: , , , , , , — Matt @ 9:43 AM

     This is great.  I am glad to see that David created a blog purely dedicated to everything PMSC, and it is really cool to see him have his own site to play around with.  This blog is on my RSS reader and it will be fun to see what he digs up in the future for everyone’s reading pleasure.

     His archives will be a great resources as well because of all the industry related work he has done over the years. Check it out and feel free to drop him a comment, or do a search to get any questions answered. –Matt

The PMSC Observer

David Isenberg has over 20 years experience analyzing U.S. defense, foreign policy, national and international security issues. He has written for print (both for general public and specialist readers), television and radio, and run Internet websites and mailing lists. He has testified before Congress and lectured to the military. Areas of expertise include U.S. military force structure, defense budgeting, WMD proliferation, terrorism, homeland security, counterdrug, peace operations, intelligence policy, international arms trade, small arms proliferation, operations other than war, information warfare, private military companies, biological weapons, and general arms control issues.

Link to website here.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Cool Stuff: Green Boots–Koevoet

Filed under: Africa,Cool Stuff,Law Enforcement,Music,South Africa,Video — Tags: , , , , , , , — Matt @ 11:05 AM

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Job Tips: Close Protection PSD Jobs Widget

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Job Tips,Jobs — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 10:37 AM

     This is a treat. I stumbled upon this blog recently and it is filled with tons of jobs that the author has found over the last year or so.  It is a basic blog format and it has RSS and a Feedburner subscription. So you have those two options for getting the latest scoop on jobs.

     Also, as a service to the readership here, I have made a widget out of this blog and you can find it with the other widgets below and to the right. This will be an excellent addition to FJ and be sure to check in on it from time to time.

    The other thing I wanted to mention is that authors of sites like this put in a lot of effort to collect this information and post it for all to read. Be sure to reward them by either thanking them in the comments section, forwarding their blog link to friends or on Facebook, or by clicking on their Adsense ads. All of these are an excellent way to show your appreciation, and especially if you got one of those nice paying jobs they posted. –Matt

Close Protection PSD Jobs blog here.

 

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Cool Stuff: Principal-Agent Theory

Filed under: Africa,Cool Stuff — Tags: , , , , , , , — Matt @ 10:53 AM

     I wanted to do a quick post on a little bit of knowledge that everyone would be wise to study.  If you want to know why contractors are paid as much as they are paid then definitely wrap your brain around the concept of Principal-Agent Theory and what it all means. It all boils down to ‘ensuring the provision of appropriate incentives so agents act in the way principals wish’.

    By the way, I picked up on this thing while reading a paper that David Isenberg commented on in a blog post. The paper was about Security Sector Reform (SSR) and the author mentioned Principal-Agent Theory towards the end of it. The author did a study on DynCorp/PAE’s SSR mission for DoS in Liberia, and it was an interesting read. Check it out. –Matt

     In political science and economics, the problem of motivating a party to act on behalf of another is known as ‘the principal–agent problem’. The principal–agent problem arises when a principal compensates an agent for performing certain acts that are useful to the principal and costly to the agent, and where there are elements of the performance that are costly to observe. This is the case to some extent for all contracts that are written in a world of information asymmetry, uncertainty and risk.

     Here, principals do not know enough about whether (or to what extent) a contract has been satisfied. The solution to this information problem — closely related to the moral hazard problem — is to ensure the provision of appropriate incentives so agents act in the way principals wish.

     In terms of game theory, it involves changing the rules of the game so that the self-interested rational choices of the agent coincide with what the principal desires. Even in the limited arena of employment contracts, the difficulty of doing this in practice is reflected in a multitude of compensation mechanisms (‘the carrot’) and supervisory schemes (‘the stick’), as well as in critique of such mechanisms as e.g., Deming (1986) expresses in his Seven Deadly Diseases of management. A distinct and relatively new meaning of the principal–agent problem describes the landlord-tenant relationship as a barrier to energy savings.

     This use of the term is described below in the section on the principal–agent problem in energy efficiency. The problem is also discussed in terms of “agency theory”.

Wikipedia for Principal-Agent Theory here.

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