Mr. Grode said he saw a few Han civilians being harassed by Uighurs. Rumors of Uighurs attacking Han Chinese spread quickly through parts of Urumqi, adding to the panic. A worker at the Texas Restaurant, a few hundred yards from the site of the rioting, said her manager had urged the restaurant workers to stay inside. Xinhua reported few details of the riot on Sunday night. It said that “an unknown number of people gathered Sunday afternoon” in Urumqi, “attacking passers-by and setting fire to vehicles.”

Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang but are a minority in Urumqi, where Han Chinese make up more than 70 percent of the population of two million or so. The Chinese government has encouraged Han migration to the city and other parts of Xinjiang, fueling resentment among the Uighurs. Urumqi is a deeply segregated city, with Han Chinese there rarely venturing into the Uighur quarter.

Even as competition provides access to these kinds of technologies, though, development paths won’t be identical. Some societies may be especially welcoming to biotech boosts; others may prefer to use digital tools. Some may readily adopt collaborative approaches; others may focus on individual enhancement. And around the world, many societies will reject the use of intelligence-enhancement technology entirely, or adopt a cautious wait-and-see posture.

The bad news is that these divergent paths may exacerbate cultural divides created by already divergent languages and beliefs. National rivalries often emphasize cultural differences, but for now we’re all still standard human beings. What happens when different groups quite literally think in very, very different ways?

The good news, though, is that this diversity of thought can also be a strength. Coping with the various world-histori­cal dangers we face will require the greatest possible insight, creativity, and innovation. Our ability to build the future that we want—not just a future we can survive—depends on our capacity to understand the complex relationships of the world’s systems, to take advantage of the diversity of knowledge and experience our civilization embodies, and to fully appreciate the implications of our choices. Such an ability is increasingly within our grasp. The Nöocene awaits.

Yet in one sense, the age of the cyborg and the super-genius has already arrived. It just involves external information and communication devices instead of implants and genetic modification. The bioethicist James Hughes of Trinity College refers to all of this as “exo­cortical technology,” but you can just think of it as “stuff you already own.” Increasingly, we buttress our cognitive functions with our computing systems, no matter that the connections are mediated by simple typing and pointing. These tools enable our brains to do things that would once have been almost unimaginable:

• powerful simulations and massive data sets allow physicists to visualize, understand, and debate models of an 11‑dimension universe;

• real-time data from satellites, global environmental databases, and high-resolution models allow geophysicists to recognize the subtle signs of long-term changes to the planet;

• cross-connected scheduling systems allow anyone to assemble, with a few clicks, a complex, multimodal travel itinerary that would have taken a human travel agent days to create.

If that last example sounds prosaic, it simply reflects how embedded these kinds of augmentation have become. Not much more than a decade ago, such a tool was outrageously impressive—and it destroyed the travel-agent industry.

The World Bank report found a strong link between GDP growth and broadband access, underlying the need for stimulus programmes in which governments have allocated billions of dollars to expand high-speed Internet access to fight recession.

It found that for every 10 percentage-point increase in high speed Internet connections there is an increase in economic growth of 1.3 percentage points.

Honduras's influential Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, the highest ranking Catholic Church official in the country, urged the exiled president not to come back. "We think that a return to the country at this time could unleash a bloodbath in the country," Cardinal Rodriguez said. "To this day, no Honduran has died. Please meditate because afterwards it would be too late."

The prelate also criticized Mr. Zelaya, suggesting the Church was taking sides. "The day of your swearing in, you clearly quoted the three commandments of the sacred law of God: Not to lie, not to steal, and not to kill," said the Cardinal.

The gist of the rumor is that an Alaska building company called Spenard Building Supplies (SBS) was awarded a contract by Palin to build a hockey arena in Wasilla, AK, and in return, SBS helped construct Palin’s home:

Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide open state.

SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004.

Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett’s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits—thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.

Just months before Palin left city hall to campaign for governor, she awarded a contract to SBS to help build the $13 million Wasilla Sports Complex. The most expensive building project in Wasilla history, the complex cost the city an addition $1.3 million in legal fees and threw it into severe long-term debt. For SBS, however, the bloated and bungled project was a cash cow. [...]

The New New Internet:  What do you believe the role of academia will be in the White House with the new emphasis on cybersecurity?

Marjory Blumenthal: The most important academic role is in research. Academia is where a lot of the new ideas for computing and communications originate. The truly new ideas for changing paradigms and for more-than-incremental improvement come from the academic side.  Academia also analyzes the nature of policies, of course.

The Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind

As it becomes more conversational, search has also gotten faster. Blogging added tens of millions of sites that needed to be crawled daily or even hourly, but microblogging requires instantaneous update – which means a significant shift in both infrastructure and approach. Anyone who searches Twitter on a trending topic has to be struck by the message: "See what’s happening right now" followed, a few moments later by "42 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them."

What’s more, users are continuing to co-evolve with our search systems. Take hashtags on Twitter: a human convention that facilitates real-time search on shared events. Once again, you see how human participation adds a layer of structure – rough and inconsistent as it is – to the raw data stream.

Real-time search encourages real-time response. Retweeted "information cascades" spread breaking news across Twitter in moments, making it the earliest source for many people to learn about what’s just happened. And again, this is just the beginning. With services like Twitter and Facebook’s status updates, a new data source has been added to the Web – realtime indications of what is on our collective mind.

Guatemala and Iran have both recently felt the Twitter effect, as political protests have been kicked off and coordinated via Twitter.

Which leads us to a timely debate: There are many who worry about the dehumanizing effect of technology. We share that worry, but also see the counter-trend, that communication binds us together, gives us shared context, and ultimately shared identity.

Twitter also teaches us something important about how applications adapt to devices. Tweets are limited to 140 characters; the very limits of Twitter have led to an outpouring of innovation. Twitter users developed shorthand (@username, #hashtag, $stockticker), which Twitter clients soon turned into clickable links. URL shorteners for traditional web links became popular, and soon realized that the database of clicked links enable new real-time analytics. Bit.ly, for example, shows the number of clicks your links generate in real time.

As a result, there’s a new information layer being built around Twitter that could grow up to rival the services that have become so central to the Web: search, analytics, and social networks. Twitter also provides an object lesson to mobile providers about what can happen when you provide APIs. Lessons from the Twitter application ecosystem could show opportunities for SMS and other mobile services, or it could grow up to replace them.

Real-time is not limited to social media or mobile. Much as Google realized that a link is a vote, WalMart realized that a customer purchasing an item is a vote, and the cash register is a sensor counting that vote. Real-time feedback loops drive inventory. WalMart may not be a Web 2.0 company, but they are without doubt a Web Squared company: one whose operations are so infused with IT, so innately driven by data from their customers, that it provides them immense competitive advantage. One of the great Web Squared opportunities is providing this kind of real-time intelligence to smaller retailers without monolithic supply chains.

As explained so eloquently by Vivek Ranadive, founder and CEO of Tibco, in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker profile:

"Everything in the world is now real time. So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software."

Even without sensor-driven purchasing, real-time information is having a huge impact on business. When your customers are declaring their intent all over the Web (and on Twitter) – either through their actions or their words, companies must both listen and join the conversation. Comcast has changed its customer service approach using Twitter; other companies are following suit.

Another striking story we’ve recently heard about a real-time feedback loop is the Houdini system used by the Obama campaign to remove voters from the Get Out the Vote calling list as soon as they had actually voted. Poll watchers in key districts reported in as they saw names crossed off the voter lists; these were then made to "disappear" from the calling lists that were being provided to volunteers. (Hence the name Houdini.)

Houdini is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk writ large: one group of volunteers acting as sensors, multiple real-time data queues being synchronized and used to affect the instructions for another group of volunteers being used as actuators in that same system.

Businesses must learn to harness real-time data as key signals that inform a far more efficient feedback loop for product development, customer service, and resource allocation.

• Why: Brands are trying to let their corporate and social content spread to many different communities in Facebook, Twitter, Email and others.
• Examples: Any blog post, press release, or product page that encourages readers to share the content to other locations.   Any brand created Facebook fan page, flickr account, or Twitter account.
• Risks: Letting content spread to other locations causes some angst, as brand managers now must monitor content and discusions elsehwere on the web.  The command+control mentality of “our corporate website is central” no longer holds true as people can share content using browser features like social bookmarking tool Delicious, or sharing links in Facebook.
• Vendors: A variety of tools have appeared such as sharethis, addtoany, addthis and others.  Incumbant players include: email, Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious that encourage content to be shared within those communities.

[To regain trust, corporate websites will look more like a collection of real-time customer discussions --not just product pitches]

There was one incident that reminded me that some Americans are unaware of other cultures. When the time came for us to leave America, Osama and I, along with our two boys, waited for our departure at the airport in Indiana. I was sitting quietly in my chair, relaxing, grateful that our boys were quiet….

I saw an American man gawking at me. I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume…

I took a side glance at Osama and saw that he was intently studying the curious man. I knew that my husband would never allow the man to approach me…

When my husband and I discussed the incident, we were both more amused than offended. That man gave us a good laugh, as it was clear he had no knowledge of veiled women…

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya's foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. "We won't go backwards," one sign said. "We want to live in peace, freedom and development."

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. Earlier this month he hosted an OAS general assembly and led the effort, along side OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, to bring Cuba back into the supposedly democratic organization.

Other Formulations

Campbell's proposed structure has been expanded and modified since its conception. Many modern characterizations of it add in new steps (such as the hero having a miraculous birth) or combine or prune others. For instance, Phil Cousineau, in his book, The Hero's Journey, divides it up into the following eight steps:

1. The Call to Adventure
2. The Road of Trials
3. The Vision Quest
4. The Meeting with the Goddess
5. The Boon
6. The Magic Flight
7. The Return Threshold
8. The Master of Two Worlds^[6]

Another eight-step formulation was given by David Adams Leeming in his book, Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero:

1. Miraculous conception and birth
2. Initiation of the hero-child
3. Withdrawal from family or community for meditation and preparation
4. Trial and Quest
5. Death
6. Descent into the underworld
7. Resurrection and rebirth
8. Ascension, apotheosis, and atonement^[7]

Joseph M. Reagle, an adjunct professor of communications at New York University who studies Wikipedia, said he was not sure whether its role in suppressing news about Mr. Rohde would prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake.

“Wikipedia has, over time, instituted gradually more control because of some embarrassing incidents, particularly involving potentially libelous material, and some people get histrionic about it, proclaiming the death of Wikipedia,” he said. “But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

Tyler Cowen previews a portion of his upcoming book, Create Your Own Economy, for Fast Company.

More and more, "production" -- that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations -- has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. A tweet may not look like much, but its value lies in the mental dimension. You use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other Web services to construct a complex meld of stories, images, and feelings in your mind. No single bit seems weighty on its own, but the resulting blend is rich in joy, emotion, and suspense. This is a new form of drama, and it plays out inside us -- with technological assistance -- rather than on a public stage.

The Billion Dollar HTML Tag

Can a single HTML tag really make a difference on a corporation’s financial results? It can at Google, according to Marissa Mayer, who says web page loading speed translates directly to the bottom line.

“It’s clear that latency really does matter to users,” said Mayer, the VP of Search and User Experience at Google and today’s keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference. Google found that delays of fractions of a second consistently caused users to search less. As a result, its engineers consistently refine page code to capture split-second improvements in  load time.

This phenomenon is best illustrated by a single design tweak to the Google search results page in 2000 that Mayer calls “The Billion Dollar HTML Tag.” Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asked Mayer to assess the impact of adding a column of text ads in the right-hand column of the results page. Could this design - which at the time required an HTML table - be implemented without the slower page load time often assciated with tables?

Mayer consulted the W3C HTML specs and found a tag (the “align=right” table attribute) that would allow the right-hand table to load before the search results, adding a revenue stream that has been critical to Google’s financial success.

Google tests the relationship between page load times and usage in regular experiments with sets of users. “Injecting delays consistently produced a drop in searches,” said Mayer. An example: the number of search results, which defaults to 10 results. When some users wanted to see more results, Google tested pages offering 20 or 30 results, which added between 0.4 and 0.9 seconds to the load time.

The outcome: users offered the page with 30 results would up conducting 25 percent fewer searches, a trend which could equate to billions of dollars of lost revenue if standardized. Google allows users to customize their search settings, but the default remains set at 10 results.

The oddest HTML hack involved the Google Checkout “shopping cart” icon that appears next to ads for vendors using checkout. Pages where the icon appeared were loading slower than other pages, “It’s such a little image,” said Mayer. “It shouldn;t make such a big difference. You actually have an image opening another connection, and connections are expensive.”

Google engineers found an unusual solution in HTML table code. “They actually found a way to draw the Google checkout cart using HTML,” said Mayer. “It renders faster. It’s interesting to think that HTML and images can affect user impressions of speed.”

We all

• Have the right to our own health data
• Have the right to know the source of each health data element
• Have the right to take possession of a complete copy of our individual health data, without delay, at minimal or no cost; if data exist in computable form, they must be made available in that form
• Have the right to share our health data with others as we see fit

Although the attacks on Estonia and Georgia are often grouped together—perhaps because of the tentative Russian involvement in both—they are also very different. One important difference is in the degree of technological sophistication of the two countries. Attacking the Internet in Estonia, which made Internet access a basic human right in 2000, is like attacking the banks in Lichtenstein: the country’s economy, politics, and even some emergency services are pegged to it so tightly that being offline is a national calamity.

Georgia, on the other hand, is a technological laggard. When Georgia’s major government Web sites became inaccessible during the war, the Foreign Ministry was slow in finding a temporary home on a blog. The lapse may have gone largely unnoticed: 2006 Internet statistics gathered by the United Nations show that Georgia had about seven Internet users per one hundred population compared to 55 in Estonia and 70 in the United States. The Georgian case also highlights the danger of drawing too many strategic lessons from cyber-attacks. After all, one common result of the loss of Internet access is power outages, common during wartime regardless of cyber-attacks.

Again, Nike is tapping into well-known science here—the power of communities. Nicholas Christakis, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, has been examining how social networks influence our behavior. For instance, in a network of more than 12,000 people in Framingham, Massachusetts, he found that smoking behavior tends to cluster: People quit smoking in groups, as part of a team effort; as more of them stop, the remaining smokers find themselves moving to the margins of the social network. Those community ties have direct effects on people's behavior.

Competition can be another great motivator. Nike+ has a feature that sets up challenges for a group of runners, from just two friends to the entire massive community. Software developer and Nike+ runner Cabel Sasser compares the system to a videogame. "Like any good online game, you can challenge your friends," wrote Sasser on his blog. "First to 100 miles? Fastest 5-mile time? Your call. These challenges wind up being incredibly inspiring ... Logging in after a long run, uploading your data, and seeing where you are in the standings is a pretty awesome way to wrap up your exercise. And more important, sitting around the house, wondering what to do, thinking about jogging, and then realizing that if you don't go jogging tonight you're going to lose points and slip in the standings—now that's true videogame motivation."

In a profile in Phrack Magazine in 2007, “Unix Terrorist” reflected on the old days.

“Looking back on my involvement in computers, I am very happy that the peak of my activity occurred right during the turn of the 20th century,” he wrote. “Hacking was no longer as simple as manual labor (wardialing, etc.) but finding vulnerabilities and writing exploits and tools was not exactly as tedious and prohibitively time-consuming as it is currently. To say that I would rather commit seppuku than adapt to the challenges of a changing world by auditing code for SQL injection vulnerabilities and client-side browser exploits is not an exaggeration.”

If there were any doubt about where Defense Secretary Gates stands on the concept of hybrid warfare, he cleared it up yesterday in his comments at a press conference:

So the notion that we are not taking seriously the range of potential future conflicts, I think, frankly is just a misunderstanding of what we're trying to do. It derives from my view that the old way, of looking at irregular warfare as being one kind of conflict and conventional warfare as a discreet kind of warfare, is an outdated concept. And my belief, that conflict in the future will slide up and down a scale, both in scope or scale and in lethality. And we have to procure the kinds of things that give us -- the kinds of equipment and weapons that give us the maximum flexibility, across the widest range of that spectrum of conflict."

The ferocity of Nadal’s spinning forehand was quantified three years ago, in fact, when a San Francisco tennis researcher named John Yandell used a high-speed video camera and special software to count the average number of revolutions of a tennis ball hit full force by Nadal. “We’ve measured the spin rates on the forehands of quite a few of the top players, including Nadal, Federer, Sampras and Andre Agassi,” Yandell told me when I visited the apartment from which he runs his online teaching site, www.tennisplayer.net, where videos and explanations of many famous players’ strokes are posted. (A brief Yandell video analysis of Nadal’s stroke can be found on nytimes.com.) “The first guys we did were Sampras and Agassi. They were hitting forehands that in general were spinning about 1,800 to 1,900 revolutions per minute.” Sampras’s serve, the deadliest in tennis during his five years as the world No. 1, was so hard to return partly because it combined so much speed with so much spin, Yandell said. “One guy who played against him said to me once: ‘John, I can return to guys who serve faster than Pete. But the problem with Pete’s serve is you’re trying to return a bowling ball with a badminton racket.’ ”

Yandell chuckled. “Federer is hitting with an amazing amount of spin, too, right? Twenty-seven hundred revolutions per minute. Well, we measured one forehand Nadal hit at 4,900. His average was 3,200. Think about that for a second. It’s a little frightening to contemplate. It takes a ball about a second to travel between the players’ rackets, O.K.?” He grabbed a calculator and punched in numbers. “So a Nadal forehand would have turned over 80 times in the second it took to get to Federer’s racket. I don’t know about you, but that’s almost impossible for me to visualize.”

5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge

For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques. Of course, Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting. In that way, Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presumably has some supporters somewhere in Iran, is losing in a North Korean-style landslide on Twitter.

A common thread among these three groups may be an emphasis on diligence or education, perhaps linked in part to an immigrant drive. Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy — the better to read the Talmud — some 1,700 years before any other group.

The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education. You can still sometimes see in rural China the remains of a monument to a villager who triumphed in the imperial exams. In contrast, if an American town has someone who earns a Ph.D., the impulse is not to build a monument but to pass a hat.

Chemonics, a for-profit development firm based in Washington, received the contract for southern Afghanistan in late 2005. It was one of many contracts won by the company, which has become a principal instrument of U.S. development policy in the country.

One of its first alternative-livelihoods projects was to build a road. And for that, it flew in 11 Bolivian engineers.

Andrew S. Natsios, the USAID administrator at the time, had recently viewed cobblestone roads in Bolivia's Chapare rainforest that were built under a U.S.-funded alternative-livelihoods program to discourage coca planting. He figured that such roads, which are inexpensive but require extensive manual labor to build, could be a new tool in the fight against poppies in southern Afghanistan because the construction effort would result in thousands of short-term jobs. Chemonics readily agreed.

The Bolivians trained 46 Afghans in the art of placing fist-size river stones on the ground. Then they set about constructing a road from the capital of Helmand to an archaeological site on the outskirts of the city. Once a sixth of a mile was complete, Chemonics held a celebration that featured speeches from local officials and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Chemonics had plans to build additional cobblestone roads across southern Afghanistan, but local Afghan leaders objected. They said that they were willing to humor the Americans with the path to the ruins, but that what they really wanted were gravel and asphalt roads. They complained that the cobblestones hurt their camels' hooves.

Mali's security forces have captured a suspected al-Qaeda base in the Sahara desert near the Algerian border, Malian officials say.

At least 12 militants died while five soldiers were killed by land mines during the operation.

Earlier this month, the al-Qaeda group is thought to have killed a UK hostage it had been holding for five months.

Last week, a senior Malian intelligence officer who was investigating the group was shot dead in Timbuktu.

MRS. OBAMA:  These students have learned a little bit. They've told us that they're not only making better choices when they're on their own, but they're also educating their families about how to eat in a healthier way, as well.  And this is all great news for us, for this group of kids. 

But unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet.  In so many of our communities, particularly in poorer and more isolated communities, fresh, healthy food is simply out of reach.  With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods, residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries. 

These food deserts leave too many families stranded and without enough choices when it comes to nourishing their loved ones.  And sadly, this is the case in many large cities and rural communities all across this nation.  So we need to do more to address the fact that so many of our citizens live in areas where access to healthy food, and thus a healthy future, is simply out of reach.

The Ethiopian school system like Rwanda's, is designed around rote memorization - the teacher copies material to the board and students write it down in notebooks. Then there is a national test that determines progression in the educational system - a test based on the ability to recalled the memorized facts.

This model is very teacher-centric. Teachers should have all the knowledge, and students, by cultural definition are there to listen, not to question, and will not be as smart as teachers until they have passed the national test.

Yet XO laptops were added this rigid system without extensive teacher training or tight integration into the national curriculum. So as the students progressed past the teachers in computing acumen, the teachers quickly felt threatened by this technology, and unable to control it, felt undermined by it, especially in the classroom.

A message from Bishop Tartaglia, president of a Bishops' Conference of Scotland communications group, has been sent to the 500 Catholic parishes of Scotland with instructions that it be read aloud at mass in every church.

Tartaglia writes that "we need to be wary of the inane chatter that can go on in the digital world which does nothing to promote growth in understanding and tolerance." In other words: Idle hands, when outfitted with a Twitter account, truly do perform the devil's work.

As a result, Federal Reserve policy-makers, whom Roubini says completely missed the magnitude of the crisis at its inception, face an unenviable set of policy choices.

He said weak growth would allow the U.S. central bank to leave interest rates near the current rock-bottom levels for the foreseeable future. Eventually, however, trillions of dollars of unprecedented emergency measures to heal the financial system will need to be mopped back up to prevent an upsurge in inflation.

In 1994, the same year Switzerland embraced health reform (also the same year Hillary Clinton botched it), Taiwan decided its health system needed an overhaul. "People said, let's do whatever the Americans do," according to one member of the planning commission quoted in Reid's book. After taking a closer look, though, this member says the commission decided:

American health care is not really a system at all. It's a market. In a market, people with money can buy what they want and many people are left out. So we thought, no, we don't want market-driven health care. We want a real system, something that covers everybody and doesn't depend on how much money you have.

This is a rebuke to the United States in two respects. One, Taiwan couldn't take seriously as a model for its own health system its strongest ally in the world, the country on whom it depends more than any other. Two, after rejecting the U.S. model, Taiwan did something the United States ought to be doing but isn't. It carefully examined, in great detail, other health systems around the globe. (It ended up adopting the National Health Insurance, i.e., Canadian, model.) There may be no country on earth with a greater siege mentality than Taiwan—and for good reason. Nonetheless, Taiwan was able to peer over the parapet long enough to take note of how other countries managed their affairs and acted accordingly. Fortress American could learn a lesson or two from that.

According to Domínguez, the sting grew out of his visit to a 2006 baseball tournament in Cartagena, Colombia, that included the Cuban team. ''Antonio was like a rock star, everyone asking to take photos with him -- and especially beautiful women,'' he recalled. ``That's where I got the idea that we could get close to him by posing as one of those women.''

First, he worked out a profile of the kind of woman the 42-year-old Castro apparently prefers. Domínguez looked at photos of Castro's current and former girlfriends, then created a ''virtual woman'' to fit the mold -- Claudia Valencia (very common names in Colombia), a 26-27 year old brunette with blond highlights and a sports journalist who, like Antonio, follows soccer and technology.

Then last summer, Claudiacartagena82@yahoo.com e-mailed ''tonycsport'' that they had met in Cartagena, and they became ''friends'' on the Tagged social networking site. Their online chats began in October, according to Domínguez.

Tonycsport sent Claudia photos of himself -- easily recognizable as Antonio Castro -- at the Beijing Olympics and in Moscow. When Tonycsport asked for photos of Claudia, Domínguez said, he e-mailed back what he would only describe as a ''virtual photo'' of Claudia. And when Tonycsport asked if she had a webcam, Claudia replied that her webcam was broken.

All of the 25-cent words I used in the lede of this post are on the list. The most confusing to readers, with 7,645 look-ups through May 26, is sui generis, the Latin term roughly meaning “unique” that’s frequently used in legal contexts. The most ironic word is laconic (#4), which means “concise.” The most curious is louche (#3), which means “dubious” or “shady” and, as Corbett observes in his memo, inexplicably found its way into the paper 27 times over 5 months. (A Nexis search reveals that the word is all over the arts pages, and Maureen Dowd is a repeat offender.)

Corbett also notes that some words, like pandemic (#24), appear on the list merely because they are used so often. Along those lines, feckless (#17) and fecklessness (#50) appear to be the favorite confounding words of Times opinion writers. The most looked-up word per instance of usage is saturnine (#5), which Dowd wielded to describe Dick Cheney’s policy on torture.

Thus, we have identified three Laws of Social Networking:

1. Promoting the open flow of personal information allows maximum profitability
2. Allowing user control over their information flows is counter to profit maximization
3. Provide some privacy controls, but make it hard

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

For a while now I’ve been interested in the Fermi Paradox. This is an observation about the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence visiting the Earth. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos calculations suggest that given the age of the universe, and the number of stars (and assuming the existence of life and progress on Earth is typical of the wider universe) there should be loads of technologically advanced aliens. The physicist Enrico Fermi asked why - if that’s the actually case - there’s no evidence or spacecraft or probes from these creatures arriving in our solar system. If the numbers suggest aliens should exist, where are they?

There are loads of suggestions for why we might not have encountered beings from other places, and loads of variants for each of these suggestions. They might have missed us, or might not want to interfere with us, or they might already be here and not be recognisable [See footnote.] My personal favourite is a variant of the “aliens just stayed home” hypothesis, by a chap called Michael Huang. He suggested that the aliens created such an amazing version of World Of Warcraft, that real life seemed boring, and they neglected the difficulties of space travel. Indeed, if space flight is really going to take thousands of years, hundreds of generations, and immense resources that could be better spent on having a good time, why should millions of sentient beings be expected to sink their lives into making it happen?

• Prioritize Open Fiber Networks Connecting Community Anchor Institutions

NAF et al. believes a key goal of the national broadband plan should be to deploy high-capacity fiber into every community with points-of-presence (POPs) at community anchor institutions including schools, libraries, hospitals, municipal/county buildings, and public safety operations.  In order to maximize the benefits of these publicly funded fiber POPs, community anchor networks must be required to provide open, wholesale access to excess capacity to any for-profit or non-profit provider - allowing the infrastructure to spur high-speed connectivity into the rest of the community. 

• Leverage Public Investment in Surface Transportation and Smart Grid toExtend Middle-Mile Fiber Access 

The U.S. can leverage the continuous construction and repair of infrastructure (e.g. highways, roads, bridges, tunnels, and railways) to extend the necessary to fiber infrastructure to every community across the nation.  As part of this effort, NAF et al. proposes a plan to fund and mandate the installation fiber-optic conduits and dark fiber bundles along all federally-subsidized and direct federal highway projects.  We can further integrate the build-out of neutral fiber-optic infrastructure into public investment in the smart grid - taking advantage of the efficiency of using a single infrastructure to facilitate connectivity for a multiplicity of services and applications.

• Map and Open Excess Capacity on Public Sector Fiber Networks

Broadband deployment, competition and affordability would also benefit enormously from a mapping of the public sector fiber networks used by federal, state and local public agencies nationwide.  Dark fiber and/or excess capacity on the public sector's own fiber line infrastructure, opened for wholesale access to any provider - commercial or non-commercial - including non-vertically-integrated cell phone carriers, WISPs, Rural LECs and muni- or community WiFi networks, could help to substantially increase middle-mile options in areas across the country.

• ARRA Broadband Mapping Should Include a Mapping of Public Spectrum Capability

NAF et al. recommends the Commission perform an Inventory of the Airwaves that maps how our public spectrum resource is being utilized or underutilized in various bands, by both commercial and government users.  Actual spectrum measurement data should be included in this White House-led initiative.  The Commission could draw upon funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to complete this inventory. 

• Build on the TV White Space Database to Open Access to Unused and Underutilized Frequency Bands

Although spectrum mapping would greatly facilitate the identification of bands that can be reallocated for more intensive and efficient use, the process of unlocking unused spectrum capacity should begin immediately on a band-by-band basis.  We believe that the most promising mechanism for making substantial new allocations of spectrum available for wireless broadband deployments and other innovation is to leverage the TV Bands Database that will be certified by the FCC for unlicensed access to vacant TV channels.

The first Mo Ibrahim prize, awarded in October 2007, went to Joaquin Chissano, the ex-president of Mozambique, who had brought his country out of the violence and starvation of the 80s, ushering in peace and multi-party democracy and using development money to assist the transition from a Marxist to a market economy. He stood down as president without seeking the third term to which the constitution entitled him, in order to help foster the growth of democratic institutions.

This year's prize went to Festus Mogae, former president of Botswana, whose country was already one of Africa's success stories when he came to power. The chairman of the judges, Kofi Annan, praised Mogae for ensuring the continued prosperity and stability of his country even in the face of an HIV/Aids pandemic and despite the mineral wealth (Botswana is rich in diamonds) that has so often proved a curse elsewhere in Africa. Botswana has an average annual income of $14,000 per person - which makes it a middle-ranking country globally. Mogae accepts ruefully that Botswana shows what all Africa might, with better leadership, have become.

[TEHRAN BUREAU] Iran’s Interior Ministry has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of yesterday’s election. This has been rejected by all the three opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Messrs Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezaaee.

The best evidence for the validity of the arguments of the three opponents of the President for rejecting the results declared by the Interior Ministry is the data the Ministry itself has issued. In the chart below, compiled based on the data released by the Ministry and announced by Iran’s national television, a perfect linear relation between the votes received by the President and Mir Hossein Mousavi has been maintained, and the President’s vote is always half of the President’s. The vertical axis (y) shows Mr. Mousavi’s votes, and the horizontal (x) the President’s. R^2 shows the correlation coefficient: the closer it is to 1.0, the more perfect is the fit, and it is 0.9995, as close to 1.0 as possible for any type of data.

Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own. For example, in the present elections, Mr. Mousavi is an Azeri and speaks Turkish. The Azeries make up 1/4 of all the eligible voters in Iran and in his trips to Azerbaijan province, where most of the Azeri population lives, Mr. Mousavi had been greeted by huge rallies in support of his campaign. Likewise, Mr. Karroubi, the other reformist candidate, is a Lor. But according to the data released by Iran’s Interior Ministry, in both cases, Mr. Ahmadinejad has far outdone both candidates in their own provinces of birth and among their own ethnic populations.

A notebook that law enforcement officers discovered in Mr. von Brunn’s 2002 red Hyundai, which he had double-parked outside the museum’s 14th Street entrance on Wednesday, appeared to offer insight into his mind-set before the shooting.

“You want my weapons — this is how you’ll get them,” Mr. von Brunn wrote in a note he had signed, according to the arrest affidavit.

“The Holocaust is a lie,” the note read. “Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.”

Mr. von Brunn’s note refers to himself in the third person by his initials, JVB, saying that he swore “to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Cheating is increasingly sophisticated. One group of parents last year outfitted their children with tiny earpieces, persuaded a teacher to fax them the questions and then transmitted the answers by cellphone. Another father equipped a student with a miniscanner and had nine teachers on standby to provide the answers. In all, 2,645 cheaters were caught last year.

Critics complain that the gao kao illustrates the flaws in an education system that stresses memorization over independent thinking and creativity. Educators also say that rural students are at a disadvantage and that the quality of higher education has been sacrificed for quantity.

The culture of the area often mocks residents who depend on their families. Misha Calvert, 26, a writer who relied on her parents during her first year in the city, now has three roommates, works in freelance jobs and organizes parties to help keep her afloat while she writes plays and acts in films. There is a “giant stigma,” she said, for Williamsburg residents who are not financially independent.

“It takes the wind out of you if you’re not the independent, self-reliant artist you claim to be,” she said, “if you’re just daddy’s little girl.”

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they knowⁱ. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).

Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

Nimmich stood on a dock at the task force's headquarters in Key West, Fla., beside a vessel dubbed Big Foot II. Captured last year 350 miles off the Guatemalan-Mexican coast, the sub had a four-man Colombian crew and 6.4 tons of cocaine aboard, worth more than $100 million.

Almost 60 feet long, the craft employed water-cooled exhaust mufflers to reduce its infrared heat signal. It was camouflaged in blue-gray paint. A small conning tower jutted from the deck at an angle designed to confuse radar signals.

The latest submersibles can go 3,000 miles without refueling.

One of the activists said of Obama, "He's an Arab Muslim and a gentile, he is fighting against the Jewish people and has declared that he will continue to do so. We already stated our intention to continue to build, no matter who is fighting us - Egypt, Germany or the US."

Among the 200 activists that gathered at the Maoz Esther site was Hebron-Kiryat Arba Chief Rabbi Dov Lior, who explained why peace was impossible in the Middle East.

"It's all illusions. With these savages, there was never peace, there is no peace and there will not be peace," he said. "It's not because we don't want it, but because they are enemies of peace. We just have to hope that our entire country is cleared of terrorists, their supporters, their backers and their camels. They should all be sent to Saudi Arabia."

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Jim Inhofe said today that President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo was "un-American" because he referred to the war in Iraq as "a war of choice" and didn't criticize Iran for developing a nuclear program.

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Inhofe, R-Tulsa, also criticized the president for suggesting that torture was conducted at the military prison in Guantanamo, saying, "There has never been a documented case of torture at Guantanamo."

"I just don't know whose side he's on,'' Inhofe said of the president.

“In order to make data computable, the tricky part is that there’s a lot of information — lots of collections of data where you can get a raw dump. But if you want to make a graph of quantities or compare data from another source, there are nagging problems, like the assumptions upon which these data were based,” said Grey.

So steps are required to take the raw data, transform it and make it ready to be transformed and compared with other sources. That process isn’t totally automated, but Grey says that Wolfram has found ways to “semi-automate” it. “It’s incredibly difficult and it’s a vast amount of work, but it’s not impossible or insane.”

Obama got a standing early ovation when he declared: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

But some audience members gasped when he followed that with: “That same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.”

Some research suggests that loneliness can hasten dementia, and Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, an internist and social scientist at Harvard, says he is considering research on whether online social connections can help delay dementia, as traditional ones have been found to do in some studies.

“Online social networks realize an ancient propensity we all have to connect with others,” he said.

At an event hosted by CompUSA in Miami, the engineers used liquid nitrogen and liquid helium cooling to reach 6.93 GHz on an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition quad core processor.

The 6.93 GHz speed, claims AMD, beats the previous record of 6.89 GHz for Phenom II quad-core processors. It is also more than twice the 3.2 GHz normal clock speed for the processor. AMD engineers cooled the processors to under three degrees kelvin or below 425 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 degrees Celsius)  to get the results.

In another report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Wisconsin reviewed a variety of studies and concluded that the achievement gap between boys and girls in mathematics performance had narrowed to the vanishing point.

“U.S. girls have now reached parity with boys, even in high school and even for measures requiring complex problem solving,” the Wisconsin researchers said. Although girls are still underrepresented in the ranks of young math prodigies, they said, that gap is narrowing, which undermines claims that a greater prevalence of profound mathematical talent in males is biologically determined. The researchers said this and other phenomena “provide abundant evidence for the impact of sociocultural and other environmental factors on the development of mathematical skills and talent and the size, if any, of math gender gaps.”

Calling on Georgetown

Lt. Dave Baker (left) with some of his soldiers before a patrol.

While they rely primarily on their military training to perform their duties in Iraq, all three men say that their Georgetown education has helped them assess and understand their experience of war. “I think that receiving something of a liberal education - that is to say reading widely in various disciplines - as well as living with a variety of different students from diverse backgrounds certainly gave me an appreciation for other cultures and other modes of thinking,” Baker says. “It was in some sense excellent preparation for entering into a foreign environment in the ambiguous role of diplomat, advisor and soldier with a mission to teach the Iraqi army as well as respect the Iraqi culture.”

The 300 Workout

The workout gets its name from the total number of repetitions. But those 300 reps weren't done daily, as some media accounts report, Twight says. Rather, the 300 workout was the finale of months of training, a kind of graduation test, after actors had weight lifted and trained with tools such as medicine balls and Kettlebells (cast iron weights with handles).

It's daunting, and includes these weight-training moves:

• 25 pull-ups
• 50 deadlifts at 135 pounds
• 50 push-ups
• 50 box jumps with a 24-inch box
• 50 "floor wipers" (a core and shoulders exercise at 135 pounds)
• 50 "clean and press" at 36 pounds (a weight-lifting exercise)
• 25 more pull-ups -- for a total of 300 reps

How much does Google spend on data centers?

According to Google’s earnings reports, they spent $1.9 billion on data centers in 2006, and $2.4 billion in 2007.

Google unveiled four new data center projects in 2007. Each has a cost estimate of $600 million, which will include everything from construction to equipment and computers.

Conservatives claim to see in Sotomayor a radical who will remake our laws in her image. Some liberals see an uncertain friend. What I see, what I must admit thrills me, is the ascent into the highest reaches of our judiciary of a certain kind of angst-ridden, self-aware Americanness.

Sotomayor is, of course, not the first Justice to rise from a humble background. But she has, I think, rather uniquely worn the vulnerabilities of that rise on her sleeve and, by putting her unstable, easily embattled sense of self at the forefront of her thought, promises to use it as a tool of analysis and empathy.

The thought of a Japanese outeating an American in a pizza contest wasn't lost on Kobayashi, who is recovering from TMJ, a painful jaw disorder.

''I love pizza,'' he said. ''When I come to America, pizza is my happiness. I look forward to eating it.''

Chestnut said he wasn't used to eating pizza that quickly.

''It's doughy,'' he said. ''It takes a lot of chewing. He got off to a really good technique early on, his rhythm was drinking water and swallowing. I changed mine a couple times and never got in the right rhythm.''

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now genetically engineered a strain of mice whose FOXP2 gene has been swapped out for the human version. Svante Paabo, in whose laboratory the mouse was engineered, promised several years ago that when the project was completed, “We will speak to the mouse.” He did not promise that the mouse would say anything in reply, doubtless because a great many genes must have undergone evolutionary change to endow people with the faculty of language, and the new mouse was gaining only one of them. So it is perhaps surprising that possession of the human version of FOXP2 does in fact change the sounds that mice use to communicate with other mice, as well as other aspects of brain function.

That is the result reported in the current issue of the journal Cell by Wolfgang Enard, also of the Leipzig institute, and a large team of German researchers who studied 300 features of the humanized mice. FOXP2, a gene whose protein product switches on other genes, is important during the embryo’s development and plays an active part in constructing many tissues, including the lungs, stomach and brain. The gene is so vital that mice in which both copies of the gene are disrupted die after a few weeks.

Despite the mammalian body’s dependence on having its two FOXP2 genes work just right, Dr. Enard’s team found that the human version of FOXP2 seemed to substitute perfectly for the mouse version in all the mouse’s tissues except for the brain.

In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says. Dr. Enard argues that putting significant human genes into mice is the only feasible way of exploring the essential differences between people and chimps, our closest living relatives.

But the argument against political appointees isn't that they're incompetent. John F. Kennedy made many keen political appointments, like sending Harvard professor Edwin O. Reischauer to Japan and John Kenneth Galbraith to India. Walter Mondale was well-liked in Japan. In France, Benjamin Franklin wasn't so bad, either.

No, the argument is that plum jobs should go to diplomats who dedicate their careers to the foreign service. A young person isn't likely to sign up with the State Department if the most he can hope for is to someday be deputy assistant ambassador to Botswana. Plus, the cushier embassies make good training grounds. "You want to test your people before you plunk them into a war zone," says Thomas Pickering, vice chairman of the American Academy of Diplomacy and former ambassador to Jordan, El Salvador, Nigeria, and Russia, among other locales. Finally, there's always a chance that today's sleepy hamlet is tomorrow's disaster area. For example, Barbados was a relaxed gig until the bloody coup in neighboring Grenada in 1983. Indonesia in 2004 wasn't too shabby. Then a tsunami hit.

The following afternoon, I visited the top managers of Doctors Hospital at Renaissance. We sat in their boardroom around one end of a yacht-length table. The chairman of the board offered me a soda. The chief of staff smiled at me. The chief financial officer shook my hand as if I were an old friend. The C.E.O., however, was having a hard time pretending that he was happy to see me. Lawrence Gelman was a fifty-seven-year-old anesthesiologist with a Bill Clinton shock of white hair and a weekly local radio show tag-lined “Opinions from an Unrelenting Conservative Spirit.” He had helped found the hospital. He barely greeted me, and while the others were trying for a how-can-I-help-you-today attitude, his body language was more let’s-get-this-over-with.

So I asked him why McAllen’s health-care costs were so high. What he gave me was a disquisition on the theory and history of American health-care financing going back to Lyndon Johnson and the creation of Medicare, the upshot of which was: (1) Government is the problem in health care. “The people in charge of the purse strings don’t know what they’re doing.” (2) If anything, government insurance programs like Medicare don’t pay enough. “I, as an anesthesiologist, know that they pay me ten per cent of what a private insurer pays.” (3) Government programs are full of waste. “Every person in this room could easily go through the expenditures of Medicare and Medicaid and see all kinds of waste.” (4) But not in McAllen. The clinicians here, at least at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, “are providing necessary, essential health care,” Gelman said. “We don’t invent patients.”

Q. DO YOU SEE ANY CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES OF THIS BEHAVIOR?

A. Facebook. People who use it say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home.

We all know of people who’ve been “friended” by old pals from college and former neighbors they’ve lost touch with. When they see pictures of them and read “sharings” from their Facebook partners, they are reminded of their presence in their lives.

One constantly hears stories of people finding jobs and business opportunities through these sites. Hey, and what does a blogger do? Tell stories! The videos and snapshots that people post echo the exchange gifts of the !Kung. They are a kind of token that says, “I’ve kept you in my heart.”

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said the teenage embrace is more a reflection of the overall evolution of the American greeting, which has become less formal since the 1970s. “Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,” she said. “We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”

Hugging appears to be a grass-roots phenomenon and not an imitation of a character or custom on TV or in movies. The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.

Mr. Sutardja was even more enthusiastic arguing that Android will become much better over the next five years.

“It will become pervasive,” he said. “It will be used in everything from TVs to I.P. phones to digital picture frames to washing machines.”

Washing machines, I asked?

“Why not?” he replied. A washing machine may well be better with a user interface that shows pictures of various types of clothing and stains, he said. In any case, the machines will have microprocessors and graphical interfaces. An appliance company isn’t going to write its own operating system, and a free version of Android will fill the bill.

“A lot of our customers are people who cannot afford to develop their own software,” Mr. Sutardja said. “Android practically is the only option for them.”

The case for Android is that it combines the benefit of open-source software with the benefits of a product of a big, reliable company. By being open, there are potentially many thousands of developers who can contribute code, solving little problems, often for little compensation.

“Open source is great because you have the smartest people in the world working simply because of principle,” Mr. Sutardja said.

There is an argument to be made that the same forces that helped build Microsoft are now aligned behind Android. Microsoft made some good products, was a tough and savvy competitor and benefited disproportionally from its first deal to make the operating system for I.B.M.’s personal computer. But the main reason that Windows become the dominant operating system and Office became the dominant productivity software is that the market wants a standard and will settle on the most plausible alternative.

Massively subsidizing the existing providers is the Asian model. Japan, for example, allowed its national provider, NTT, to completely write off the expenses incurred by building its network. South Korea did something similar. It’s not clear, though, that this solution is transferable to the United States. Do you really want to try to solve a problem by giving billions of dollars to the companies that created it—and which have records of squandering past subsidies, and powerful incentives to squash innovative solutions? Even today, incumbent telecom lobbyists are busy trying to crush plans for municipal WiFi and city-run fiber-to-the-home experiments.

Creating competition is, in general, the way the Europeans have built their networks. And while the time for mandating line sharing (as the 1996 Telecom Act did) has passed, there are some great ideas that can be taken from the other side of the Atlantic. For example, the nonprofit group Free Press has recommended that the Obama administration adopt an idea from Switzerland and offer tax credits to companies that build multiple lines of fiber into homes. If you lay in one strand of fiber, on which you’ll sell your service, you don’t get a credit. But if you lay in two or three, which competitors can rent, you get a huge deduction.

The third idea, floated by Columbia professor Tim Wu (who also is the chairman of Free Press), is to let customers own their own fiber connections instead of leasing them from the telecom companies. Cities or communities would decide to invest in a fiber network, which some central group would manage and maintain. Individuals, subsidized by the government, would then buy their own lines and decide what services they’d want sent over them.

The last, and probably the most likely to succeed, option is for the government to just jump into the market itself, creating a model something like the postal service. This is like what Australia has recently announced. There, a new government-controlled company is going to spend $31 billion connecting homes with fiber. It could start with fiber strung into schools and community centers, then government buildings, then public housing projects, and, eventually, every home in the country. Private companies would compete, just as UPS and FedEx compete with the postal service.

The focus of the Golden Shield project is on bringing computers to the police, from the lowest provincial levels, up to the Ministry of Public Security, and developing eight databases: population management, criminal records, fugitives, driver’s licenses, stolen vehicles, stolen property, national security, and border control. Some of those sound pretty sinister, while others are the sorts of databases we expect police to have. Lyons has focused on the “population management” database - described as “the dragon’s head of Golden Shield” - which tracks hukou registration (a registration of your city of residence) and the “second generation” national ID card, which features an RFID chip. Most of the country has moved to this new card, which stores a great deal of personal data.

Lyons points out that forgery is a serious problem in China. It’s possible to buy fake cards quite easily - indeed, in Mission Impossible 3, a single frame of the film features a piece of graffiti advertising the services of a ban jun, a forger, with a phone number. This was sufficiently provocative that the film was never screened in China… but it circulated widely via pirate DVDs. As a result, the ban jun advertised on the wall needed to change his phone number - he got so many calls that it got in the way of his business, weeding out the merely curious from potential customers. More ambitious forgers have been known to advertise by scrawling their numbers on police cars. So while the idea of a database that tracks all Chinese people is very scary, the reality may be a lot less so. “The biggest project of the golden shield has to do with accurately identifying citizens”, which can lead towards service delivery and accurate statistics, much like the census in the US.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

Now we're swimming in information. We can call up nearly every bit of news, music, and entertainment we want on demand. In fact, there's so much of it that we need filters to block the boring or irrelevant stuff and help us find the bits we need or desire. This has created what many call the "Attention Economy." Says Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard: "The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention." So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They're our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to. Online friendship is a hot focus for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. They joust to hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Microsoft just established a research division focused on social sciences in Cambridge, Mass.

Facebook today announced that Digital Sky Technologies (DST), one of the leading internet investment groups globally with significant stakes in Eastern European and Russian internet businesses, has made a $200 million investment in Facebook in exchange for preferred stock, representing a 1.96 percent equity stake at a $10 billion valuation.

In addition, DST has indicated that it is planning to offer to purchase at least $100 million of Facebook common stock from existing common stockholders that would facilitate liquidity for current and former employees' vested shares in the company. The details of the plan are expected to be announced to eligible participants during the summer. Consistent with Facebook's practice with other recent investors, DST will not be represented on the Facebook board or hold special observer rights.

The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out:

Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site.

The technology is here. Book nerds are now working on XML-like markup languages that would allow for really terrific linking and mashups. Imagine a world where there's a URL for every chapter and paragraph in a book—every sentence, even. Readers could point to their favorite sections in a MySpace update or instant message or respond to an argument by copiously linking to the smartest passages in a recent best seller.

This would massively improve what bibliophiles call book discovery. You're far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you're far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.

Even change-averse academia admitted that Hirsch had come up with a different mousetrap. "The h-index does seem to be able to identify good scientists, and it is becoming widely used informally," the journal Nature reported in 2007, perhaps somewhat grudgingly. The index makes it harder to cheat. Researchers have to be champion self-citers to move their own numbers, and editors have no reason to influence the system.

On the other hand, Hirsch acknowledges that the h-index has its own intrinsic weaknesses. It's kind to older folks, for example, but not great to younger scientists. If a scientist writes six brilliant papers and dies, his h-index will never be higher than six, even if each paper is cited 10,000 times. And by putting the onus on individuals, it encourages researchers to write about sexy topics and hew close to the conventional wisdom—exactly what Hirsch was trying to avoid. Plus, it has trouble apportioning credit on papers with multiple authors. (Complicated math might sort researchers by their respective contributions ... maybe.)

While the problems of the various citation-based ranking schemes might seem (ahem) academic, their strategies are increasingly the coin of the online realm. Understanding and quantifying reputation is the best approach to navigating the tsunami of information on the Internet. That's why Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin cited Eugene Garfield in their academic work on PageRank, the algorithm that powers their company's search engine. "Articles cited by this article" and "articles that cite this article" are really just outbound and inbound links. Today, citation analysis has come full circle. Eigenfactor and SCImago actually use variations of PageRank to evaluate scientific journals. And the introduction of Google Scholar, a search tool designed specifically for academic research, provided a whole new set of citation data; it can help calculate h-index, as well as a newer ranking system called the g-index that gives more weight to articles with higher citation counts.

Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.

The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more than anyone else about the politics of networks. "I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems," he says, noting that these activities "can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom." The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners, selecting management and limiting profit distribution, independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like writing enterprise software or reference books.

One key innovation was that all the sidebar slots on the results page were sold off in a single auction. (Compare that to an early pioneer of auction-driven search ads, Overture, which held a separate auction for each slot.) The problem with an all-at-once auction, however, was that advertisers might be inclined to lowball their bids to avoid the sucker's trap of paying a huge amount more than the guy just below them on the page. So the Googlers decided that the winner of each auction would pay the amount (plus a penny) of the bid from the advertiser with the next-highest offer. (If Joe bids $10, Alice bids $9, and Sue bids $6, Joe gets the top slot and pays $9.01. Alice gets the next slot for $6.01, and so on.) Since competitors didn't have to worry about costly overbidding errors, the paradoxical result was that it encouraged higher bids.

"Eric Veach did the math independently," Kamangar says. "We found out along the way that second-price auctions had existed in other forms in the past and were used at one time in Treasury auctions." (Another crucial innovation had to do with ad quality, but more on that later.)

Google's homemade solution to its ad problem impressed even Paul Milgrom, the Stanford economist who is to auction theory what Letitia Baldridge is to etiquette. "I've begun to realize that Google somehow stumbled on a level of simplification in ad auctions that was not included before," he says. And applying a variation on second-price auctions wasn't just a theoretical advance. "Google immediately started getting higher prices for advertising than Overture was getting."

Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org comments, "These findings suggest it is likely that in the future people will increasingly think of themselves as global citizens. Young people are more prone to see themselves this way. Also, with economic development people travel more, meet foreigners more and become more educated; all these developments are related to greater tendencies for people to see themselves as global citizens."

Kull adds, "These findings also suggest international exchange programs, where people meet people from other countries, may increase the likelihood that people will think of themselves in more global terms."

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

I've been making a similar point about why most online transparency projects in authoritarian states are useless: with or without transparency, many citizens are usually aware of acts of corruption and violence that are taking place - but their ability to act on that information - short of rebellion - is very limited and they do not have much moving space to act on all the injustices around them.

I believe that the usefulness of online transparency projects tends to increase if they are deployed in more democratic societies. This is what I call the Transparent Dictator paradox: countries that need democratic change the most are usually the ones that stand to benefit  from Internet-driven transparency projects the least. It works the other way around too: the governments of the United States or the United Kingdom might be the easiest ones to make totally transparent, but they would not probably top any global agenda of places that need transparency and democracy the most. 

Hacking Recaptcha (aka ‘The Penis Flood’)

The next tactic used was to see if they could find a flaw in the reCAPTCHA implementation.  One thing they discovered about reCAPTCHA was that it always presents two words to a user for decoding - one word is a control word known by the reCAPTCHA system, while the other is an unknown  word (reCAPTCHA uses the humans to help correct OCR errors).  Wikipedia describes the process: “Scanned text is subjected to analysis by two different optical character recognition programs; in cases where the programs disagree, the questionable word is converted into a CAPTCHA. The word is displayed along with a control word already known and is labeled by the human.  Those words that are consistently given a single label by human judges are recycled as control words”.  What Anonymous realized was that if they always labeled the unknown scanned text with the same word - and if they did this thousands and thousands of times eventually a large percentage of the unknown words would be mislabeled with their word. All they had to do was look at the two words in the captcha, enter the proper label for the ‘easy’ one (presumably that would be the one that the two optical scanners would agree upon) and enter the word “penis” for the hard one.  If they did this often enough, then soon a significant percentage of the images would be labeled as ‘penis’ and the ability to autovote would be restored (one side effect, that was not lost on Anonymous, was the notion that for years to come there would be a number of  digital books with  the word ‘penis’ randomly inserted throughout the text.    Update: I asked Ben Maurer, chief engineer of reCAPTCHA about this ‘penis flood‘ attack, Ben says that they’ve anticipated this type of attack and they have numerous protections that will keep the penises from penetrating the reCAPTCHA barrier.

The Swiss Post is a world leader in postal business-model innovation with operations in 16 countries across three continents. Despite its home-country’s population of only seven million, it generates $9 billion in revenue and earns an impressive 10 percent profit. It has aggressively rolled-up, partnered on or internally launched a variety of Internet-ready businesses that offer services such as document imaging, electronic document signature, electronic postage that costs less than paper stamps, and an international shipping network. Its annual report states that it generates 20 percent of its revenues from outside Switzerland. It is still 100 percent government owned, and its profits go to the general fund, but it acts more like a private corporation responsible to shareholders.

That’s not all. The Swiss know that paper mail volumes will continue to decline and that the Internet isn’t going away. So the forward-looking Swiss Post has been the first in Europe to introduce a service to deliver paper-originating postal mail via the Internet, called Swiss Post Box.

Swiss Post Box is powered by technology from Seattle-based Earth Class Mail. The service emails multi-sided color images of incoming envelopes and parcels to their recipients as soon as the mail reaches the first sorting center nearest where it was collected by the post office. While the mail and parcels are held in an automated temporary cache, recipients decide which mail pieces they want to have opened and scanned to PDF inside an ultra-secure scanning center at the Post Office (where confidential documents for Swiss banks are also scanned), and which are to be delivered physically to the address on the envelope, redirected to another address, shredded, recycled or archived for safekeeping. Three-quarters of the mail ends up leaving that first sorting center bound straight for recycling, either after being scanned to PDF or discarded unopened by customer’s choice. The energy savings implications are obvious.

The technology is revolutionary in that it reshapes the Universal Service Obligation to fit the mobile, digital, multiple-location life- and workstyles of many consumers. As more consumers and businesses switch to this form of mail delivery, postal operators may be able to switch to a dynamic routing model for delivering the much smaller volume of paper mail much like FedEx and UPS use, thus wasting less fuel to stop at mailboxes with nothing to insert or withdraw. Many other countries are now considering offering a Swiss-style service. Earth Class Mail, too, has announced that it is working on enabling mailers to inject electronic postal mail directly into users’ online accounts, thus eliminating the paper-delivery cycle altogether for those who choose that route. After all, almost every piece of paper mail delivered today started out as an electronic file that was converted to paper, delivered through an energy-intensive and polluting process, and in some cases even reconverted to an electronic document once it arrived at a place of business. Why go from digital to paper only to go back to digital? Why not skip the paper stage altogether?

In the future these electronic files could be directly transmitted to recipients through the Internet to their government-certified online mailing addresses—safe from exposure to hackers, viruses and other risks of open email. To get legal delivery status for a Swiss Post Box account, a Swiss citizen must go down to their local Swiss Post branch and have their appropriate identification papers verified.

The ecological impact of delivering postal mail electronically (as distinguished from simple email) would be even greater as certified electronic postal mailers joined the party. And the postage that the post office could earn from electronically injected items would be much more profitable than today’s first-class mail, to say nothing of advertising mail. If small nations such as Switzerland and Denmark can successfully deploy online postal mail, why can’t the most powerful and technologically advanced country in the world do it too?

Earth Class Mail isn’t alone in developing electronic alternatives to traditional mail delivery. In late 2008, a Southern California-based startup called Zumbox launched a service that creates an online mailbox corresponding to every U.S. street address, allowing individuals and businesses (the latter pay a 2-cents-per-address fee) to send digitized postal mail to those addresses. Small countries like Finland, Holland and Belgium have also introduced their own proprietary systems for e-invoicing, some with more success than others, using the Danes’ eBoks service as a model. Whether they adopt commercially developed systems like Earth Class Mail or Zumbox or develop their own alternatives to paper mail like eBoks, forward-looking postal operators are realizing that their long-standing business models need radical revamping.

I think that African societies need international help to overcome these problems; it is just that the help they need is not predominantly money. Aid is not a very potent instrument for enhancing either security or accountability. Our obsession with it has detracted from the more important ways in which we can promote development: peacekeeping, security guarantees, trade privileges, and governance.

But we must hope that Moyo's thesis is right: Britain has just implemented the sharp cuts in aid that she wants to see. Although this was achieved inadvertently, as a result of the sharp depreciation of the pound rather than by a cut in the sterling-denominated budget, it will have the same effect.

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In Major League Baseball, players from the Dominican Republic, many of them raised in poverty, have a reputation as free swingers who will chase almost any pitch rather than work a base on balls. When the former Atlanta Braves shortstop Rafael Ramirez was asked during the 1986 season about why he had gone some 40 games without drawing a walk, seemingly an impossibility, he famously replied, “A walk won’t get you off the island.”

A similar line of thinking prevailed at the Junior Phenom camp. The young players may not have known Francis’s precise methods, but they seemed to have a sense that they had better do something pretty spectacular, and quickly. One morning, I watched a game involving Billy Clark III, a quick and slippery 12-year-old guard from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn who had the speed and moves to evade his defender and get off a shot at any time. Which he did — just about every time he touched the ball. In a 32-minute game, of which he played just a little more than half, he put up 34 shots by my count.

All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you've got up there in your head — your education and training — it's worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. "The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond," says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. "Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth."

Human capital is worth quite a lot. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist, figures that in a modern industrialized economy, 75% to 80% of a person's economic output comes from human capital (as opposed to, say, land or machinery). Of course, during the bubble years (first stocks, then housing), the noneconomists among us didn't exactly think about it that way. "People became mesmerized by how rich they were," says Becker, "and didn't realize the crucial asset they had in their earning power."

Problems and Cheaters Curb Stomp Emergence Day is a blog entry that details cheating/gaming practices on Xbox Live (specifically, Gears of War.)

"I mentioned this in another thread, but it bears repeating. Leaderboards don't work. Even if you get past the Timmies and the cheaters, the people at the top of the boards are just the ones who have the most time on the game. If you didn't get GoW on launch day and you aren't willing to spend 40 hours a week online, you won't ever be at the top of the board. I wish they'd get over the whole ranked/unranked thing and just let us play the game." ~ ShadeHunter

In my recent trip to these two Central American countries, it occurred to me that it’s only a matter of time before one of my clients seeks advice on choosing between these two destinations, be it for a captive or outsourced operation. For the sake of full disclosure, I should state that I am Costa Rican, and have done much more business there than in Nicaragua. That said, I have tried to adjust for any bias that may make its way into this post. Both nations share the cultural affinity and proximity advantages I mentioned in my last post. But the opportunity in each is fundamentally different in my opinion, so in this post I will try to discuss why one would choose one or the other.

Costa Rica

Costa Rica was “discovered” as a destination for call centers, and more recently BPO, first. It’s highly educated population and political stability made it somewhat of the “obvious” near shore choice. Because of a steady influx of tourists and incoming American and Canadian retirees since 1986, English skills are pretty good. English is required through high school but like most public education, it does not produce fluent speakers. I think as much as 20-25% of the population may speak fluent English, but I can’t back that up with data. Some upscale neighborhoods have so many foreigners that more signs are printed in English than in Spanish. Consumer packaged good manufactured in the country are labeled in English and Spanish. Sykes (2500 employees), IBM (1200 employees), and HP (4000 employees) are some of the bigger international brand names providing services from Costa Rica’s central basin, where the majority of the population lives. Multi-nationals with significant presence include big tech names like Intel (2900 employees), Microsoft (2000 employees and 142 small software development companies), and Amazon (recently announced a 150-seat call center).

Like most mature markets, Costa Rica has experienced a qualified labor shortage and a bit of wage inflation. Infrastructure has not really kept up with economic development, and English language skills come at a premium. Politically, the current administration is pro-free trade, though it has been a political hurdle race to get the treaty ratified—with the opposition leveraging populist messaging, fear-mongering and foreign money to campaign against the pending free trade agreement with the US. Still, the current administration has not been politically adept at overcoming the obstacles and has seen its popularity decline significantly. By far the most stable democracy in Latin America, Costa Rica is a strong US ally, and the majority of the population understands that prosperity comes with access to the USA and other rich markets. CINDE, the government FDI agency, is a competent investment agency used to doing large deals. With the saturation of the market, it is unlikely that current players will leave, but continued growth will be a challenge.

Nicaragua

It doesn’t take long, if you visit these two countries back to back, to figure out that Nicaragua is the poorer of the two—it’s just something you see. After devastating civil wars, it now has had a stable democracy for almost 20 years. The capital, Managua, is the safest on the American continent (including Washington DC). The country, however, remains very poor, second only to Haiti in the Americas. The Nicaraguan government is serious about attracting FDI: 15-year tax holiday, anyone? ProNicaragua, the government’s FDI agency, is competent, welcoming, and very helpful. Infrastructure in general lags, but there are at least two world class facilities that would suit any multinational just fine: Invercasa and the soon to be completed refurbished former US Embassy.

The foreign businesspeople you see here are different than the corporate types setting up shop in Costa Rica. They are maverick entrepreneurs, cavalier risk-takers who see the potential and are willing to take some risks. As one of them said to me “this is just like Costa Rica 15 years ago…why wouldn’t I get in now?” Barring a political disaster, he’s right. These are the damn-the torpedoes entrepreneurs that make big things happen with their vision and drive. The client organizations are not Fortune 500 types—they are small and medium businesses—several start-ups amongst them—that have decided to avail themselves of the near shore advantage.

There’s a bit of an uncharted territory feel to it, but all parties—Nicaraguan and foreign, share in the excitement of what could be. I share that excitement—or most of it anyway. Perhaps my biggest let-down was in the hotel cab on my way back to the airport: the driver was listening to the radio, and I had the opportunity to listen in to a political talk show in which the host was spewing misinformed anti-American invective and propaganda on par with the most fervent of the so called political talk show hosts here in the USA. Now, I am all for free speech, including the bozos that work so hard to influence the American public, but my problem with this broadcast was two-fold: a) the show was on official government radio and b) it was on in a car that is exclusively used to shuttle hotel guests, about 70% of them American citizens, around Managua. So my issue with Nicaragua is one of risk (political) and judgment (the kind that makes a cab driver think it’s OK to offend his paying passengers).

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”

The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice — as exemplified by the New Deal and those movements that challenged it from both the left and the right. It’s too early in our crisis and too early in the new administration to know whether this decade will so closely replicate the 1930s, but so far Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America with the possible exception of his sometime ally, the Rev. Rick Warren.

History of Nuclear Weapon Stockpile Chart (1945-1995):

NOTE: Totals are estimates. Lists include strategic and non-strategic warheads, as well as warheads awaiting dismantling

Bank of America has become the first US bank to withdraw job offers made to MBA students graduating from US business schools this summer, citing conditions laid out in its bail-out deal as the reason.

The recently passed $787bn stimulus bill in effect prevents financial institutions that have received money from the government’s troubled asset relief programme from applying for H1-B visas for highly skilled immigrants if they have recently made US workers redundant.

BofA, which has received a total of $45bn in Tarp funds, is in the process of digesting two large acquisitions – Countrywide, the mortgage broker, and Merrill Lynch – which will see thousands of jobs lost.

A spokesman for the bank said: “Recent changes in legislation made it necessary for Bank of America to rescind job offers it had made to students requiring H-1B sponsorship.”

Bartz is looking at email as one of the anchors for Yahoo's business and she says that she ordered ads to be stopped on the companies email service in countries with low bandwidth to provide a better user experience. She said that the ads were slowing down the service and frustrating users. Bartz also said that she prefers Google Maps to Yahoo Maps and thinks that Yahoo has paid little attention to the application.

Bartz's future vision for Yahoo is to turn it into a portal that is continually visited by its users. She said, "I want the users to wake up in the morning, log into Yahoo, see what’s important, and I want them to do that before they go to bed at night. To do that, we owe them a fun experience, an easy experience, [and] a non-frustrating experience."

Angwin: This was a great corporate drama. What happened was MySpace had a complex relationship with Intermix. And they had a double put option. Which essentially meant that if MySpace sold itself first, it would be able to force Intermix to agree to that sale, and if Intermix sold itself first, it could force MySpace to be sold along with it. It was a strange structure set up at a time when nobody thought MySpace would be worth anything.

It suddenly became very important for both sides to sell first. So they were in this race to sell. MySpace was negotiating with Viacom, Intermix was negotiating with NewsCorp. And it was all sort of being done in secret. Neither side wanted to let each other know what they were doing. Intermix won, they sold first. They did a very fast deal with Rupert Murdoch. Basically told MySpace once the deal was almost done, and you know, did it in the dark of night.

If you look at the innovations that we’ve seen online, they’ve all been at the edges. No one wins by saying, “this is a better version of AOL” or “this is a better version of Yahoo.” Google won by finding an edge that Yahoo cared little about (search) and embracing it.

With tribal behavior, we see that most people aren’t interested in joining a new tribe. So who does? Fringe types. Restless folks. Dissatisifed seekers. That means that your earliest members are fellow travelers, people willing to take a leap. THEN they bring in their friends and the growth happens.

President Obama has often said that in the future, international prosperity will depend on the United States becoming an “innovation economy.” The administration’s economic recovery package includes added spending for areas favored by innovation policy advocates, including higher research and development spending and funds for high-technology fields like electronic health records. But the administration has no coordinated innovation agenda.

Some countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, Finland and China, are pursuing policies that are explicitly designed to spur innovation. These policies typically try to nurture a broader “ecology of innovation,” which often includes education, training, intellectual property protection and immigration. This is in contrast to the industrial policy of the 1980s in which governments helped pick winners among domestic industries.

The foundation study, according to John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations, is an ambitious effort at measurement. He called its conclusions “a wake-up call.”

1. Give publishers (throughout this post, when I say publishers, I also mean self-published authors) the ability to insert passalong credit with a book. So, if you buy a book, it might come with the right to forward it, for free, to two other people who also have Kindles. Three clicks and you just spread the book.

Let me log in with Facebook Connect and send certain books to all my friends who also have a Kindle.

Let me see the list of the fastest-spreading books. Or fastest spreading among my friends.

2. Give publishers the ability to send free samples of new books to people who have opted in. For example, I could have a master setting on my Kindle that said, "for any book I finish, give the publisher permission to send me up to six free samples." This creates a lever for successful authors and an asset for successful publishers. It lets them start publishing books for their readers instead of trying to find readers for their books.

What happens when Malcolm Gladwell sends a note to all his readers recommending a new book?

3. Anytime I send someone a book (see #1) or recommend a book, let me (with the other person's consent) see the comments they write in the margins of the book as they read it. Imagine being able to read a novel this way with your book group, or a sales manual with your department.

4. Create dynamic pricing. As a book gets more popular, allow the publisher to give a rebate to the first # of  readers... either all or part of a book. If I get good at reading hit books first, I'll end up paying close to nothing but be rewarded for my good taste and ability to sneeze ideas.

5. Let anyone become a publisher with just a few clicks.

6. Demolish the textbook market as soon as possible by publishing open source textbooks for free. It's only natural that profit-minded professors will work to replace this by using #5.

7. Give publishers the ability to insert quizzes or feedback. This creates a certification or continuing ed or textbook opportunity far bigger than a book can deliver.

8. Allow all-you-can-eat subscriptions if the author or publisher wants to provide it. Let me buy every book Seth has written, or all the business books I can handle, or "up to ten books a week." Remember, the marginal cost of a book is now the cost of the bandwidth to deliver it, so buffets make economic sense.

9. And my last one, which I think I mentioned earlier, but it's so good, I'll mention it again: ship the Kindle with $1000 worth of books on it. I'm willing to contribute a couple of titles, and my guess is that most authors would.

Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.

“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”

Yes it is. Historians such as A.G. Hopkins have argued in recent years that the wave of globalization that surged in the 1990s is just a continuation of a long-term process that started as far back as when migrating pre-modern human communities first encountered each other. They also note that the steamship revolutionized transportation as much or more than the advent of containerized cargo shipping and that the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone were technologies as disruptive in their day as the Internet. In short, there is nothing new under the sun.

Still, the current wave of globalization has many unprecedented characteristics. As Internet access penetrates the most remote corners of the globe, it is transforming the lives of more people, in more places, more cheaply than ever before—and the pace of change is accelerating faster than we can hope to chronicle it.

Today’s globalization is also more individualized than ever. The telegraph was most intensively used by institutions, but the Internet is a truly personal tool that allows Spanish women to find marriage prospects in Argentina, and South African teenagers to share music files with peers in Scotland. Contemporary globalization is also different in that the speed at which it is integrating human activities is often instantaneous and almost costless. Moreover, the quantitative change in each of globalization’s components—economic, cultural, military, etc.—is so enormous that it creates a qualitative change. This alone has opened possibilities that are completely new—and also consequences that humanity has never seen before.

But while the basic premise of Yelp hasn't changed since its inception, its spirit has changed for the worse, according to "Mark," the former contract employee. "I started with them at the beginning, helping them market and put the word out for the company, and I loved the concept of this," he said, sitting in a Berkeley cafe in December. "I thought the whole thing would be positive and will increase business to a lot of the small businesses, the mom-and-pops."

But Mark complained that in the past two years there has been an increase in negative, trash-talking reviews. "If you don't like somebody for no reason, you can go on there and talk horrible about their place for whatever reason and also encourage close friends to go on there and trash those places." Mark cited a recent case with his own cafe in which a customer who was angry that the business was closed for a private event went on Yelp and accused employees of being unsanitary.

In this way, Poole's problem is the problem of the entire Internet, which is built on wireless connections and a lot of "theoretically." It's where people spend time, make friends, play games, get news -- and yet despite all of that philosophical worth, the smartest minds in the country still struggle with how to make even the most successful sites profitable. In 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, but the site still hasn't found profits to match its implied worth. Twitter has an estimated 6 million users, but is still grappling with a firm business plan.

"4chan is the big question of the Internet wrapped into one big case study," says Hwang. "If Chris could find a way to hack the 4chan problem" -- to figure out how the site can make money -- "he'd be set."

The magnitude of the spending bill, and its urgency, drew a swarm of lobbyists seeking money and tax breaks. The concrete and asphalt industries battled over how the government should spend billions proposed for road and bridge repairs, while dairy and beef cattle producers butted heads over talk that the government might buy up dairy cattle for slaughter to drive up depressed milk prices. Unions backed infrastructure spending. States sought budget bailouts.

"When you've got 800-plus billion dollars to spend, you'll have an equal number of opinions on how it should be spent," said Chris Galen, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, the dairy industry's main lobbying group.

The economic stimulus package proposed by Democratic House leaders totals $825 billion and includes three broad pieces: a $365.6 billion spending measure for such brick-and-mortar projects as highways and bridges; a $180 billion measure to boost jobless benefits and Medicaid, among other things; and a $275 billion tax-relief package, which includes a plan to give a $500 payroll tax holiday to all workers, a proposal from Mr. Obama's presidential campaign.

Banks and other financial institutions should track how the federal money or guarantees they received helped them boost "prudent lending" and efforts to help at-risk borrowers avoid foreclosures, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Monday in a directive issued to the roughly 5,100 state-chartered banks and savings and loans for which it is the primary regulator.

"Banks are expected to document how they are continuing to meet the credit needs of creditworthy borrowers," the directive says. "The FDIC expects that ... (institutions) will deploy funding received from these federal programs to prudently support credit needs in their market and strengthen bank capital."

In fact, if we look at the correlations between rates of new firm formation and economic growth over the medium to long term, we see that firm formation declines as economic growth increases. For instance, in an article in Work, Employment and Society, sociologists Dieter Bögenhold and Udo Staber report that the correlation between real GNP growth rates and the rate of self-employment in France, West Germany, and Italy between 1953 and 1987, and in Sweden between 1962 and 1987, was negative.

We also have ample evidence that when governments intervene to encourage the creation of new businesses, they stimulate more people to start new companies disproportionately in competitive industries with lower barriers to entry and high rates of failure. That’s because the typical entrepreneur is very bad at picking industries and chooses the ones that are easiest to enter, not the ones that are best for start-ups. Rather than picking industries in which new companies are most successful, most entrepreneurs pick industries in which most start-ups fail. So by providing incentives for people to start businesses in general, we provide incentives for people to start the typical business, which is gone in five years.

Beneath the formalities of business -- the committees, the schedules, the payroll checks, the spray of assignments falling from above -- there’s a buzz, no, the sound of twigs breaking underfoot as paths are trod on the way to human connection. The most amazing thing: you can tell who’s talking by listening to the voice.

People are beginning to sound like themselves again.

The fact that Obama won so handily has caused a lot of us to sit back and relax. There's been a lot of popping of champagne corks and people drawing the conclusion that the system must work, because our guy won. Well, this is not a sports event. This is self-government.

    In fact, the evidence strongly suggests - and we haven't had a chance to talk about this since Election Day - that Obama probably won by twice as many votes as we think. Probably a good seven million votes for Obama were undone through vote suppression and fraud, because the stuff was extensive and pervasive, in places where you wouldn't expect it.

    The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project was monitoring the vote in DuPage County, right next door to Obama's, you know, backyard, Cook County. And two of them, in only two precincts on Election Day, saw with their own eyes 350 voters show up, only to be turned away, told, "You're not registered," people who were registered, who voted in the primary. All but one of these people was black. That's in Illinois.

    People at the Election Defense Alliance have discovered, from sifting through the numbers, an eleven-point red shift in New Hampshire. That means that there's a discrepancy in Obama's disfavor, primarily through use of the optical scan machines, an eleven-point discrepancy in the Republicans' favor, OK?

    You start to combine this with all the vote suppression, all the disenfranchisement, all the vote machine flipping that went on in this election, you realize, OK, Obama won, but millions of Americans, most of them African American and students, you know, were not able to participate in any civic sense, ironically, a lot of the same people, you know, who would have been disenfranchised and were disenfranchised before the civil rights movement. So the fact that a black president was elected, while cause for jubilation, see, ought not to take place at the expense of a whole lot of our fellow citizens who seem to have been disenfranchised on racial grounds. My point is very simply this: We've got to get past the victory of Obama and look seriously at what our election system is like, or else, I promise you, see, the setup that was put in place in this last election, in 2004 and in 2000, OK, will still be there in 2010, still be there in 2012. So we've got to take steps to do something about it now.

MCM: Well, specifically, there's a computer architecture setup called "Man in the Middle," which involves shunting the election returns from, you know, the state in question - in this case, Ohio - shunting them to a separate computer elsewhere. All of the election returns in Ohio in 2004 went from the Secretary of State's website - this is Ken Blackwell - to a separate computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was under the control of another private company called SMARTech.

    So we have now two private companies: GovTech Solutions, which is Connell's company, SMARTech, which is run by a guy named [Jeff] Averbeck. And the company - the third private company that managed the voting tabulators in Ohio was called Triad. All three of these companies worked closely together on election night in Ohio in 2004. It turns out that the state's own IT person was sent home at 9:00 p.m. They said, "Go ahead. Go home. We'll take care of this." So that this trio of highly partisan and, let me add, Christianist companies basically took over the whole -

So how do they know this? Does every child in Iceland spend their days working to memorise entire lineages? The fact is that since these are highly modern times and Icelanders are quick to catch novel ideas and make them their own, all this information is available online. One man, realising that there was a market for a computer program that kept all this information and could be updated at will, with little computer programming gadgets, took his chance. He started a company, named it after himself⁴ and went into business.

By using National Statistics of Iceland, censuses for the past centuries and other sources, he got his program up and running. Then, selling it to the people, he and others realised what a treasure this was. They put everything together in one rather big database and then put it online. The end result is Íslendingabók⁵, to which anyone Icelandic can gain access, and look at the information gathered about themselves and their family. The name was borrowed from the original Íslendingabók by Ari 'Fró�i' Þorgilsson, thought to have been written between 1122 and 1133; it told the history of Iceland from settlement to the time of writing.

This newer database is to span all Icelanders, living or dead, and although some information is sketchy at best, the database will be updated and kept alive with new generations. Access is restricted to your family and you must pre-apply for a username and password, but by inputting a name into a search box, you can find out just how you are related to the first settler, the Prime Minister or the latest pop star.

2009 will be a year of major uncertainty. The doom and gloom of the economic downturn, the deterioration of mass markets, the pervasiveness of the digital lifestyle, a host of explosive political conflicts, and the fragmentation of traditional societal institutions are causing anxiety and propel a new search for simplicity and non-economic value systems.

Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something “meaningful” rather than just acquire things. Trust and reputation are no longer enablers for the exchange of goods, services, and information, they are replacing them. Values are the new value. Meaning is succeeding experience and customer satisfaction. “The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It’s to make meaning,” writes management consultant John Hagel. Out: Bottom-line-pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers and ethicists.

This new cultural climate presents a historic opportunity for brands to transform themselves into arbiters of meaning. Becoming Chief Meaning Officers, business leaders must move beyond simply connecting products and customers with the goal to facilitate transactions - they must now create “meaning” through actions and interactions. When your brand is a vector, your base becomes a movement - that’s what we learned from Barack Obama’s campaign.

In 2009, we will see more examples of “meaningful marketing” and businesses generating value that goes beyond just meeting consumers’ needs. This will imply several profound paradigm shifts: essence instead of luxury, free sharing instead of monetized scarcity, radical transparency instead of brand control, authenticity instead of image, empathy instead of focus groups, conversations instead of messaging, collaboration instead of dissemination. A “meaning surplus” will become imperative: Only brands that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty.

The demilitarization conference also called for an immediate halt to the recently launched "Merida Initiative," the Bush administration's new Trojan horse for remilitarization of the region. The resolution asserts that the measure "expands U.S. military intervention and contributes to the militarization of our countries" and representatives from the Central American nations and Mexico included in the military aid package committed to a process of monitoring the funds and defeating further appropriations.

The Merida Initiative was announced by President Bush as a "counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security" cooperation initiative in October 2007. The model extends the Bush administration's infamous national security strategy of 2002 to impose it as the U.S.-led security model for the hemisphere. The approach relies on huge defense contracts to U.S. corporations, and military and police deployment to deal with issues ranging from drug trafficking to illegal immigration and seeks to extend U.S. military hegemony in foreign lands. It has been proven in Colombia and other areas where it has been applied to have the effect of increasing violence, failing to decrease drug flows, and leading to extensive human rights violations.

The 82-year-old Mr. Greenspan said he made "a mistake" in his hands-off regulatory philosophy, which many now blame in part for sparking the global economic troubles. He quoted something he had written in March: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief."

He conceded that he has "found a flaw" in his ideology and said he was "distressed by that." Yet Mr. Greenspan maintained that no regulator was smart enough to foresee the "once-in-a-century credit tsunami."

If the apparently high turnout — election officials said it could exceed 70 percent — was an endorsement of elected civilian rule, it was also a challenge to the nation’s political leaders to conduct themselves better than they had in recent years.

“I know politics in this country is dirty,” said Monira Khanam, 22, a medical student who voted in the capital, Dhaka. “Now that the country is returning to democracy after two years, I expect politicians will behave better. It is out of this expectation that I’ve come out to vote.”

Here is a translation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's fatwa or legal ruling issued on Sunday concerning the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Arabic text courtesy of Sawt al-Iraq. Sistani is the spiritual leader not only of Iraqi Shiites but of many other Shiites in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Lebanon and India. He is explicit in asking his followers to take practical steps to stop the Israeli attacks. Note that the Neoconservatives argued for putting the Shiites in control of Iraq on the grounds that, as a religious minority themselves, they would be more sympathetic to Israel, and as Shiites would have less empathy with Sunni and Christian Palestinians.

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

The beloved Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have, since noon yesterday, been subjected to a vicious attack and to continual strikes that have resulted so far in hundreds of victims being martyred or wounded.

This assault comes after a suffocating blockade to which this oppressed people has been subjected for several months. It had resulted in the creation of harsh humanitarian conditions as a result of lack of food, medicine, fuel and other necessities of daily life for the citizens.

Expressions of condemnation and disapproval of what is being done to our Palestinian brethren in Gaza, and solidarity with them, that are limited solely to words and phrases mean nothing before the immensity of this horrific tragedy to which they are being subjected.

The Arab and Muslim worlds are called upon, more than at any past time, to take practical steps in order to stop this continual aggression and to break this cruel blockade that has been imposed on that proud people.

We ask God, the Exalted, the All-Powerful to take the hands of all and lead them to that wherein lies goodness and righteousness. Verily, he is the All-Hearing, the Gracious.

The Office of Sayyid Sistani.
28/12/2008
29 Dhi al-Hijjah 1429

The lawsuit cites comments from a chaplain and a second soldier in Christian missionary publications about attempts to convert Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the two soldiers' desire to distribute Bibles.

The lawsuit also notes that in 2007, the Air Force sponsored "Team Faith," which performs motocross stunt shows to "lead extreme sports athletes to Christ."

Dr. John Holdren has agreed to serve as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  John is a professor and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as well as President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center.  A physicist renowned for his work on climate and energy, he’s received numerous honors and awards for his contributions and has been one of the most passionate and persistent voices of our time about the growing threat of climate change.  I look forward to his wise counsel in the years ahead.

John will also serve as a Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology – or PCAST – as will Dr. Harold Varmus and Dr. Eric Lander.  Together, they will work to remake PCAST into a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on scientific aspects of my policy priorities.

Dr. Varmus is no stranger to this work.  He is not just a path-breaking scientist, having won a Nobel Prize for his research on the causes of cancer – he also served as Director of the National Institutes of Health during the Clinton Administration.  I am grateful he has answered the call to serve once again.

Dr. Eric Lander is the Founding Director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard and was one of the driving forces behind mapping the human genome – one of the greatest scientific achievements in history.  I know he will be a powerful voice in my Administration as we seek to find the causes and cures of our most devastating diseases.

Finally, Dr. Jane Lubchenco has accepted my nomination as the Administrator of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is devoted to conserving our marine and coastal resources and monitoring our weather.  As an internationally known environmental scientist, ecologist and former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jane has advised the President and Congress on scientific matters, and I am confident she will provide passionate and dedicated leadership at NOAA.

The senior special operations staff officer acknowledged that SF A-teams in Afghanistan do not routinely partner with conventional Afghan units, but said some of the blame lies in the fact that “the advisory mission is separate from the SF mission. That’s the fundamental problem with Afghanistan.” As a result, he said, “our ODAs are not being effectively employed.”

Under the Defense Department plan for Afghanistan, Army brigade combat teams and Marine regimental combat teams would be responsible for “mentoring” Afghan National Army units, but “white” special operations forces would also have a role in tougher training missions, according to the Pentagon military official.

“The framework is going to look a lot more like the framework did in Iraq over the last couple of years,” the Pentagon military official said.

Part of the debate over the feasibility of a special operations surge revolves around the perception by some surge proponents that special operations leaders are not making as many of their forces available as they might. “Lute for a long time has been talking about his deeply held belief from his time as the J-3 [director of operations on the Joint Staff] that the SOF are withholding a lot of their assets in order to preserve their op tempo and their retention numbers,” said the field-grade officer in Washington who has been following the debate.

Tom Segev, for example, a left-wing historian and Haaretz columnist, said in a review that the book was "one of the most spaced out and in-your-face books this country has seen in many years."

What are Burg's prescriptions? He wants a new Jewish identity focused not on the particular but on the universal, asserting that "if we do not establish modern Israeli identity on foundations of optimism, faith in humans and full trust in the family of nations, we have no chance of existing." He wants Israel to dismantle the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and replace it with the headquarters for the International Criminal Court, making this the epicenter of international prevention of genocide.

In truth, he has gained almost no traction here with such recommendations. Yet what is perhaps most interesting of all is that Burg continues to play a public role in Israel. He is invited to speak to young people, he writes occasional opinion columns and he is greeted warmly, even embraced, in this city's cafes. This may be because, despite it all, Avrum Burg is family. And whether he likes it or not, Israelis look out for family.

TAMM’S LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

Hi [bmaz]. Thanks for your inquiry. The address of the defense fund
is:

Thomas Tamm Legal Defense Fund
Bank of Georgetown
5236 44th Street
Washington, DC 20015.

Tom appreciates your support and that of your readers. [Some
unrelated chit chat on another matter redacted]

Paul F. Kemp

The evolution of privacy, identity, and forgiveness:

"We will enter a time of mutually assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses. That will be positive for tolerance and understanding."
- Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

"Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will continue to happen."
- Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and director of computer services at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

"By 2020, the internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have happily traded their privacy -- consciously or unconsciously -- for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and manipulation will have largely disappeared."
- Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough Type blog and "The Big Switch"

"The volume and ubiquity of personal information, clicktrails, personal media, etc., will desensitize us. A super-abundance of transparency will lose its ability to shock. Maybe there will be software-driven real-time reputation insurance service, offering monitoring and repair to dinged reputations. This could be as ordinary as auto insurance or mortgage insurance is today, and as automated as the nightly backups performed by most online businesses. I don't agree that this will make us any kinder."
- Havi Hoffman, senior editor for product development at Yahoo and blogger

"People in Africa turned paid telephone minutes into an ad-hoc, grassroots, e-currency ... There are already reasons why people at the bottom of the economic system need and can use cheap telecommunication. Once they are connected, they will think of their own ways to use connectivity plus computation to relieve suffering or increase wealth."
- Howard Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author of "Virtual Community" and "Smart Mobs"

"By 2020, we'll have standard network connections around the world ... Billions of people will have joined the internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as 'phones' either -- these devices will be simply lenses on the online world."
- Susan Crawford, founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member

"The next five years will be rife with battles between carriers, municipal, and federal governments, handset makers, and content creators. I don't know who will win."
- danah boyd, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society

"Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era -- like transistor radios are today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device."
- Josh Quittner, executive editor of Fortune Magazine and longtime technology journalist and editor

"I agree, but I don't see this as entirely positive, as it perpetuates 'soundbite' dissemination and thinking, and the continuing move toward shorter attention spans and dumbing-down of content."
- Anonymous respondent