The second man, described as a Pakistani but otherwise not identified by authorities, was discovered to have already been in custody of Pakistani police for travel document violations, one administration source said.

"Give me a 'P'! Give me an 'R'! Give me some good PR!"

Agency Teamwork, Bin Laden Aide's Clues Led to Arrest

"With tattoos and piercings becoming much more common these days, I didn't expect the correlation to be as strong as it was," said Army doctor Sean Carroll, the study's lead author.

Marked for Trouble

Would you buy a lightweight wristwatch MP3 player that holds 150-300 albums worth of music?

IBM scientists say they have created a data-storage technology that can store the equivalent of 200 CD-ROM's on a surface the size of a postage stamp.

Writing in the current issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, researchers at IBM's laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks.

Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, an expert on molecular electronics at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Va., described the work as "incredible engineering."

... IBM project leader: The storage technology could cram 10 to 15 gigabytes of data into a tiny format that would fit in a multifunctional wristwatch.

Here is the abstract from the IEEE paper:

We present a new scanning-probe-based data-storage concept called the "millipede" that combines ultrahigh density, terabit capacity, small form factor, and high data rate. Ultrahigh storage density has been demonstrated by a new thermomechanical local-probe technique to store, read back, and erase data in very thin polymer films.With this new technique, nanometer-sized bit indentations and pitch sizes have been made by a single cantilever/tip into thin polymer layers, resulting in a data storage densities of up to 1 Tb/in2. High data rates are achieved by parallel operation of large two-dimensional (2-D) atomic force microscope (AFM) arrays that have been batch-fabricated by silicon surface-micromachining techniques. The very large-scale integration (VLSI) of micro/nanomechanical devices (cantilevers/tips) on a single chip leads to the largest and densest 2-D array of 32x32 (1024) AFM cantilevers with integrated write/read/erase storage functionality ever built. Time-multiplexed electronics control the functional storage cycles for parallel operation of the millipede array chip. Initial areal densities of 100-200 Gb/in2 have been achieved with the 32 32 array chip, which has potential for further improvements. A complete prototype system demonstrating the basic millipede functions has been built, and an integrated five-axis scanner device used in this prototype is described in detail. For millipede storage applications the polymer medium plays a crucial role. Based on a systematic study of different polymers with varying glass-transition temperatures, the underlying physical mechanism of bit writing has been identified, allowing the correlation of polymer properties with millipede-relevant parameters. In addition, a novel erase mechanism has been established that exploits the metastable nature of written bits.

A New System for Storing Data: Think Punch Cards, but Tiny

... Some Internet cable services that Adelphia carried had paid the company in stock, which was booked as revenue. When the value of the stock declined, though, Adelphia had not reduced its reported revenue accordingly.

Bankruptcy of a Division May Signal Adelphia's Fall

Take a sheet of graph paper that has been divided into grids. Color a square in the middle of the top row black. Drop down to the next row. Now invent a rule that will decide if a square should be black or white, based on the square above it and that square's neighbors -- for example, that a square should be the same color as the one above it unless that square has a black neighbor. Go across the second row filling in squares accordingly, then repeat the process, following the same rule, for the third row, the fourth row, and so on.

Today's NYT has an article on Stephen Wolfram's new book. This one is more interview-and-reaction than the book review published in the June 9 NYT.

Did This Man Just Rewrite Science?

This year-end report, Social Networks in the World of Abundant Connectivity, contains our methodology, key findings, a landscape of implications for businesses, and we also present the real-life stories of the participants and how they use technology to support and extend their networks.

Saffo gets serious about social networks. You can download the six-page introduction to the report in PDF format.

Social Networks in the World of Abundant Connectivity | Institute for the Future

Of course, this map of the future -- and the timelines inside the gatefold that follows -- will certainly err in some ways. But being wrong didn't hurt Watson and Gates, who went on to dominate industries built atop trends they overlooked in their early forecasts. The important thing is to have the agility to embrace change as it occurs. The advances of the next 20 years will present opportunities no one can imagine today. But the imagining has to start somewhere -- and the pages that follow are as good a place as any to begin.

Saffo's technology road map includes: Biofuels, Biointeractive Materials, Bionics, Cognitronics, Combinatorial science, Genotyping, Molecular manufacturing, and Quantum nucleonics.

... Words ...

Untangling the Future, by Paul Saffo | Business 2.0

"Even in a small world, there's room for disagreement."

Some skeptical scientists aren't yet buying into the small-worlds theory. They contend that although short paths may exist between two points in the network, the problem is finding them.

"The models we developed to show that these short paths actually exist don't explain how you can find them." ... How people recognize the routes to their distant affiliates is the next big small-world question.

Sounds like they're in search of a reputation system!

Six Degrees of Speculation | Discover - 6 June 2002

Social networks have the surprising property of being "searchable": Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a model that offers an explanation of social network searchability in terms of recognizable personal identities: sets of characteristics measured along a number of social dimensions. Our model defines a class of searchable networks and a method for searching them that may be applicable to many network search problems, including the location of data files in peer-to-peer networks, pages on the World Wide Web, and information in distributed databases.

Researchers from Columbia and the Santa Fe Institute in the 17 May issue of _Science_.

Identity and Search in Social Networks | Science

Abstract: The idea that people are connected through just "six degrees of separation," based on Stanley Milgram's "small world study," has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the "small world problem," reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that we actually live in a world deeply divided by social barriers such as race and class. An explosion of interest is occurring in the small world problem because mathematicians have developed computer models of how the small world phenomenon could logically work. But mathematical modeling is not a substitute for empirical evidence. At the core of the small world problem are fascinating psychological mysteries.

Could It Be A Big World After All?