Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

Walking back the cat ...

The Gray Zone | Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker

The current status of four major aspects of the program -- the enterprise architecture, system design, program management, and human resources -- are discussed, and recommendations are presented to address the problems.

The full text of this new report is available in PDF. Herb Lin is one of the co-editors of the report; you may remember him as co-editor of Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society. Among others, Matt Blaze was a member of the committee; and of course the sponsoring CSTB includes many notables, including Dave Clark, MIT; Eric Benhamou, 3Com; Randy Katz, UCB; Butler Lampson, Microsoft; Eric Schmidt, Google; and Andrew Viterbi.

A Review of the FBI's Trilogy Information Technology Modernization Program

Robert Wright, author of Nonzero, writes in the LA Times.

The revolution of grass-roots digital empowerment will change the nature of war and the place of war in American foreign policy.

Some people who see the Abu Ghraib scandal as technologically driven are suggesting technological reforms. At one level, Rumsfeld grasps the power of digital technology. It was because our troops were digitally empowered that we needed so few of them.

But this cuts both ways. Once you figure technology into both sides of the ledger, war looks different.

Note to Public: Although Rumsfudd^h^h^held has not issued you a trusty repeating rifle, let there be no mistake: you have been drafted.

Organized by Orkut, trained by TiVo, and equipped by Ericsson, we are all superempowered now.

Engage!

Creating a New Picture of War, Pixel by Pixel

"This is our destiny, we're all going to be like that."

Leader of Iraq's Governing Council Is Killed

Danny Hillis proposes to improve education, and the Reality Club responds. My favorite replies are from Freeman and Esther Dyson, and, intriguingly, Kai Krause, who is apparently sequestered deep inside an old German fortress working on a secret project that will emerge to revolutionize the Internet just when we least expect it.

In principle, the Internet could be done on paper, but the logistics are much better handled with the computer. "I am interested in the step beyond that, where what is going on is not just a passive document, but an active computation, where people are using the Net to think of new things that they couldn't think of as individuals, where the Net thinks of new things that the individuals on the Net couldn't think of."

"In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds. You can imagine something happening on the Internet along evolutionary lines, as in the simulations I run on my parallel computers. It already happens in trivial ways, with viruses, but that's just the beginning. I can imagine nontrivial forms of organization evolving on the Internet. Ideas could evolve on the Internet that are much too complicated to hold in any human mind."

At the same time that a solution is becoming possible, the problem is reaching a crisis point: the amount of knowledge is becoming overwhelming, and the need for it is increasing. There is a widespread conviction that something radical needs to be done about education -- both the education of children and the continuing education of adults. The world is becoming so complicated that schools are no longer able to teach students what they need to know, but industry is not equipped to deal with the problem either. Something needs to change.

Aristotle, by Danny Hillis | Edge

The system is currently being used to monitor traffic slowdowns. When it detects them, it turns on illuminated markers farther up the road as a warning.

In a Road That's All Eyes, the Driver Finds an Ally

They are cute. They are happy. And they bleed. Best Flash Ever.

Teletubbies meets Itchy & Scratchy.

Happy Tree Friends

Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the site of the Library of Alexandria, often described as the world's first major seat of learning.

Library of Alexandria discovered

"Neurotypical individuals find it difficult to be alone and are often intolerant of seemingly minor differences in others. Tragically, as many as 9,625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical."

Neurodiversity Forever

There are memes, and then there are Memes. Said another way: All memes are created equal, but some memes are more equal than others.

I am quite dismayed and disappointed that MemeStreams allowed an entire week to pass without forcing me to read and recommend the essay by Philip Kennicott that appeared in the May 5 edition of the Washington Post. This should not have been allowed to happen.

Between the time of publication and the time of this writing, I received several messages in my MemeBox, but none pointed to this essay. One of them was about a story in the Weekly World News. Another, which I ignored, appeared to be some kind of conspiracy theory involving the Mossad. A third item directed my attention to academically interesting but ultimately insignificant research results in the field of cryptanalysis.

An analogous situation is known in computer science as a priority inversion. It is an undesirable condition, but steps can be taken to design it out of the system. At this point I am forced to consider whether MemeStreams has taken sufficient measures to minimize the occurrence of priority inversion.

In part, the reputation agent is designed to solve this problem. By selecting and sorting available memes based on weighted adjacencies in the social network, the cream is supposed to rise to the top.

For many users, memes pass through the reputation agent in particular much as ideas flow through the news media in general: here today, gone tomorrow. While this approach generally suffices for the run of the mill meme, it is woefully inadequate for that most rare, truly exemplary meme. A remedy must be devised.

I have a proposal. It consists of one idea in two parts: gold stars and sticky bits. Allow me to explain.

Each year, on the anniversary of your blog, you are issued a one year supply of gold stars to use as you see fit. A year's supply is on the order of eight to ten gold stars. Use them with care, because they must last you through the entire year. When you see a truly outstanding must-read-NOW meme that is simply not to be missed under any circumstances, even if it means running around a one-stoplight town at 2 a.m. with a PowerBook and a WiFinder, attach one of your gold stars to this article. Don't jump the gun, because once you attach the star, it cannot be revoked, it cannot be reused, and it will be present for all to see, for all time.

The reputation agent knows about gold stars and takes notice when they appear. This is where the sticky bits come in. Starred memes are moved to the top of the stack, are unmistakably highlighted, with the normal white text on a blue background replaced by larger, bold white text on a red background. Regardless of the "TimeFrame" setting, these memes stay at the top of the stack until one of two actions is taken by the user. a) The user posts the meme to his/her weblog. b) The user explicitly dismisses the meme by clicking on a special purpose link at the bottom of the entry, next to the links for Thread, Recommend, and Reply. Like the Delete function, the Dismiss function prompts the user for confirmation, again presenting the description(s) provided by the user(s) who have attached (a) gold star(s) to the meme.

At the expense of a slight increase in complexity, this mechanism could be protected against abuse by new users. For example, gold stars could be held in escrow and rationed out to new users, at a maximum of one per month.

It is hoped that with gold stars and sticky bits, we can dramatically reduce the occurrence of missed excellence within the MemeStreams community.