Scott Boms:

Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating.

Ultimately, burnout results from a lack of equilibrium. When you lose your balance, physically, you fall over. Burnout is very similar, except that once you’re down, it can be a real challenge to get back up.

Ask yourself: Have you set sufficient boundaries between your job and your life outside of work? Are you guarding those boundaries?

Samantha Power:

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Paul Romer:

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Martha Beck:

We desperately want to take a break from our hectic, overscheduled lives -- but not right now.

Stefan Klein:

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Neil Postman:

In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Sterling Hayden:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called.

Burnout

China Miéville's new novel, The City & the City, gets starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist.

Denise Hamilton:

If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble China Miéville's new novel, "The City & the City."

Miéville's protagonist is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel, a fictional city-state that Miéville locates in southeastern Europe. The place is drab, the people glum, the culture a faded pastiche of Ottoman, Slav, Byzantine and Austro-Hungarian Mitteleuropa. It's a decaying, depressed world reminiscent of the 1949 film "The Third Man," where shadows, paranoia, secrecy and unseen forces reign.

Then things get really twisty.

Beszel has a ghostly and unacknowledged doppelgänger, a city-state called Ul Qoma that overlaps, or "crosshatches," with its twin, and it soon becomes clear that the dead girl has come from this mirror place whose very existence is a crime to acknowledge.

Mark Steyn:

There is literally no language in which what’s happening in suburban Maryland can be politely discussed.

David Kolb, on sprawl:

Are we imprisoned in a universal Disneyland?

Jonathan Franzen:

The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance -- the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today -- is the cell phone.

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

A Love Letter To Polyglot Sprawl

James L. Jones:

"There is no right-hand, left-hand anymore."

Ellen Nakashima:

President Obama is expected to announce late this week that he will create a "cyber czar."

Anonymous White House official:

"It's trying to steer us in the right direction."

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

cybernetics. Origin: 1940s, from Greek kybernētēs, "steersman", from kubernan, "to steer"

Why look when you can leap?

We are a cyber nation.

The NITRD Program Senior Steering Group (SSG) for cybersecurity R&D invites you to participate in the National Cyber Leap Year.

Bruce Sterling:

Follow your bliss into the abyss. That's my new bumper sticker. This is the abyss. You guys are the denizens of the abyss. I strap on my diver helmet and go into the internet as far as you can go.

Albert-László Barabási:

We modeled the mobility of mobile phone users in order to study the fundamental spreading patterns that characterize a mobile virus outbreak. Once a mobile operating system’s market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.

Speaking of serious threats:

At least one Russian official has said that a cyber-attack on Russia’s critical transportation or power infrastructure would warrant a nuclear response.

General "Buck" Turgidson:

Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice ...

Andy Borowitz:

Now, here’s something that honks me off: neighbors who call the fire department when you’re in the middle of a controlled burn. Those sirens start wailing and, before you know it, there goes my quiet time. I guess the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who understand quiet time and those who don’t. By the way, you know who really makes the most of their quiet time? Cheetahs. I saw a documentary on them one time and they are awesome.

Paul Graham:

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals.

Nathan Myhrvold:

Anybody who has seen a documentary "knows" that lions hunt cooperatively to bring down prey. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the lions this.

Lizzy Stewart:

Have You Seen This Cat?

Because it is awesome.

Mark Bittman:

Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.

Who would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?

Let go:

Laminated cards were made up announcing “quiet time” and attached to cubicles. But within a few weeks the workers found the system too restrictive, and the cards seemed like something from grade school.

The cards came down, and some employees started to use e-mail messages, though judiciously and with more awareness of their habits.

My Quiet Time

A call for papers:

This is the launching event of the Engaging Data Initiative. This initiative seeks to address the issues surrounding the application and management of personal electronic information by bringing together the main stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including social scientists, engineers, manufacturers, telecommunications service providers, Internet companies, credit companies and banks, privacy officers, lawyers, and watchdogs, and government officials.

The goal of this forum is to explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data.

The forum is seeking original contributions in the form of both position papers and technical papers. Of particular interest are papers that open new paths for research, express a creative vision for the future, and contribute to a lively debate.

Sandy Pentland, technical co-chair:

You have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.

Decius:

Unless there is some detail that I'm missing, this sounds positively Orwellian.

Lee Gomes, for Forbes:

Some complainers are obsessed with anonymity and appear bothered by any data sharing at all, even when entirely voluntary. It's reminiscent of the Navajo belief that letting someone take your picture is letting them steal a piece of your soul.

This preoccupation with keeping data anonymous can lead to surreal outcomes.

RFIDs are a good case study of the peculiar public relations dynamics of privacy. But some privacy advocates tell dark tales of RFIDs being part of an Orwellian nightmare in which citizens, by simply walking down the street, reveal everything about themselves to a network of ubiquitous scanners.

In the name of privacy, there have been campaigns against the RFID tagging of pets in Texas, while some New Hampshire citizens have argued about whether tagging a body inhibits the soul's progress to heaven.

Is there a way out of the current, overly legalized approach to privacy, which seems to make no one happy?

Ross Anderson:

It is difficult to safely reveal limited information about a social network.

Engaging Data Forum

Sebastian Rotella:

The accused abductors left a sloppy trail of phone activity, credit card charges and photo IDs that allowed Milan authorities to prosecute 26 Americans (in absentia), including the now-retired Lady, and seven Italian officials.

The brazen nature of the alleged rendition has gotten much attention. But the trial has also revealed how the Bush administration's drastic tactics shook up the secret world of U.S. intelligence work overseas. Testimony has featured remarkable allegations about feuds and rogue conduct. The case apparently made and crushed careers and spread betrayal and suspicion among U.S. and Italian anti-terrorism officials.

On the witness stand in October, Stefano D'Ambrosio summed it up: "We were between the tragic and the ridiculous."

Michael Scheuer:

Senior White House officials, in consultation with President Bill Clinton, set America's Al Qaeda policy from 1993 to 2001. They told the CIA what to do, and decided how it should pursue, capture and detain terrorists. They approved renditions to Egypt and elsewhere. Having failed to find a legal means to keep all the detainees in American custody, they preferred to let other countries do our dirty work.

Douglas Jehl:

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

Decius:

Getting tortured by a foreign government is a bit more serious than getting your phone tapped.

Trial of CIA, Italian agents provides rare look at intelligence work

The 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza conflict featured a series of innovative approaches to communications intelligence, which included utilizing civilian telephone networks to achieve tactical and psychological objectives. The "cell war" between the IDF and Hamas is indicative of an ongoing global struggle between asymmetrical insurgents and state actors to control large-scale telecommunications structures. "Cell wars" have been taking place for quite some time in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, and several other nations, including inside the United States. Weapons in this hi-tech conflict include surveillance satellites, voice scramblers, encryption software and mobile phone cameras, among other technologies. Essentially, this war is being fought over the control over national and international telecommunications grids, and centers increasingly on telecommunications service providers -- companies such as Jawwal in Palestine, Roshan in Afghanistan, or Mobilink in Pakistan. These companies are rapidly becoming combat zones in a battle to control the channels of digital communications in 21st-century asymmetrical warfare.

See also, The Athens Affair:

How some extremely smart hackers pulled off the most audacious cell-network break-in ever

From the archive:

The phone is ringing! Answer it!

Can you hear me now?

NSA is said to be offering "billions" to any firm which can offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic.

Recently:

Silvio Berlusconi's government has drawn up a bill which would restrict police wiretaps to only the most serious crimes.

From three years ago:

According to the report, fugitive CEO Kobi Alexander was located after making a one-minute call via the online telephone Skype service. The call, made from the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, alerted intelligence agencies to his presence in the country.

Got questions? Get answers:

Which people in Kabul are using Skype?

Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.

This is what you could call a Buy recommendation:

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

Cell Wars: The Changing Landscape of Communications Intelligence

Focus is the new distraction.

You've been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace's masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

Winifred Gallagher:

Even as a kid, I enjoyed focusing. I took a lot of pleasure in concentrating on things. You can’t be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

DFW:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Infinite Summer

Sam Anderson:

Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.

Marcel Proust's famous tea-soaked madeleine is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

David Meyer:

People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes, in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.

The damage will take decades to understand, let alone fix.

Winifred Gallagher:

Even as a kid, I enjoyed focusing. I took a lot of pleasure in concentrating on things. You can’t be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

Molly Young on Adderall:

It is the Las Vegas of pills, an object that conforms so gleefully to every pill cliché that taking it feels cinematic.

Merlin Mann:

When I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.

Carolyn Johnson:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Linda Stone:

Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad, it just is.

The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation

Killer Flu!! Or, maybe, “non-killer flu” to describe the current outbreak of swine flu! Here is a game that allows you to learn more about how the influenza virus is transmitted and how it changes every year - which explains why you can get more than one dose of the flu over your lifetime and why vaccines need changing every year. We also hope it will be a bit of fun.

The second level of the game is an opportunity to understand why pandemic flu is a bit different to normal yearly (seasonal) flu. Remember: even pandemic flu generally kills fewer people than you would think. Try to kill too many people in the game and see how difficult it is!

See also, Oiligarchy:

Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.

UK CVN Killer Flu