There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Sunday NYT Sampler for 27 January 2008, Part III
Topic: Miscellaneous
3:45 pm EST, Jan 27, 2008
At this time of year, Mr. Clinton could be in Davos, Switzerland, mingling with his fellow global elites at the annual economic summit. Instead, he is working like a precinct captain in places called Barnwell and Walterboro and Kingstree.
Last year, Mr. Gore accepted free merchandise that was worth $15,245, more than double the value of products accepted by any of Apple’s five other outside directors, Apple’s latest proxy shows.
John Shirley’s great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering. The opening line of his novel “Demons” states the theme succinctly: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.” In “The Sewing Room,” one of the new stories in the present collection, an ordinary woman discovers, to her horror, that her husband is a serial murderer, and we discover, to ours, that she can live with it.
When you see the market gyrating wildly downward and hear some pundit saying it’s because of this or that data or this paradigm or that ratio, remember trader realism. The traders move the market any way they want, any way they think they can make money, and then they whisper a reason to journalists later in the day. Then the journalists print it or say it on television, and the amateurs believe it. And the traders snicker.
The current slowdown is layered on top of deep-rooted economic problems that are not addressed by a stimulus package. If the nation’s leaders do not start showing the political will to do more than dole out popular tax breaks during an election year, short-term fixes could actually make the long-term problems worse.
Lisa Germinsky, 33, a screenwriter who lives in Gramercy, has just begun to trim back. “My boyfriend and I, we were talking and he’s just like doom and gloom, ‘impending recession,’ his stocks dropping,” she said. “And I’m a freelancer, so I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
“These are going to be tough economic times, very tough, and when I think about it, I want somebody who is going to hit the ground running."
“The great shame is that people are often never as good or as bad as they are held up to be."
The average top executive at a Standard & Poor’s 500 company now makes 550 times what the average worker makes.
Ultimately, the sudden loss of a young luminary offers a powerful message, not only about death but about life choices.
“I know a lot of car thieves who are now Taliban emirs,” he said.
The lessons of legal realism have always been uppermost in my mind when I think about law or about anything else important: Stated reasons are often not the real reasons.
Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways.
Mr. Bush says without amnesty, the government won’t get cooperation in the future. We don’t buy it. The real aim is to make sure the full story of the illegal wiretapping never comes out in court.
At a time when so many problems have arisen outside the limits of existing federal insurance programs, we need to do more than update the programs for inflation. We need to consider the fundamental principles on which they were based, stress-test them for today’s environment and consider extending them in creative ways.
“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett wrote in a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders six years ago. Unfortunately, this crisis’s outgoing tide has exposed some of the nation’s most esteemed institutions. Naked truths like these are never a pretty sight. And even after the tide comes back in, they are not likely to be soon forgotten.
Recent intelligence analysis indicated that Al Qaeda was now operating in the tribal areas with an impunity similar to the freedom that it had in Afghanistan before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity. On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks. The police were nowhere to be found.
The bank’s management has come under increasing pressure from French officials to provide a more detailed accounting of how Mr. Kerviel could have racked up such enormous losses by himself, over a year, without raising any red flags among either his supervisors or the bank’s internal auditors. Mr. Bouton described Mr. Kerviel’s elaborate efforts to hide his activities as being like a “mutating virus.” ... Within six hours, Mr. Kerviel’s losses swelled by 1.4 billion euros.
Information overload. If you're responsible for maintaining your network's security, you're living with it every day. Logs, alerts, packet captures, and even binary files take time and effort to analyze using text-based tools - and once your analysis is complete, the picture isn't always clear, or timely. And time is of the essence.
Information visualization is a branch of computer science concerned with modeling complex data using interactive images. When applied to network data, these interactive graphics allow administrators to quickly analyze, understand, and respond to emerging threats and vulnerabilities.
Security Data Visualization is a well-researched and richly illustrated introduction to the field. Greg Conti, creator of the network and security visualization tool RUMINT, shows you how to graph and display network data using a variety of tools so that you can understand complex datasets at a glance. And once you've seen what a network attack looks like, you'll have a better understanding of its low-level behavior - like how vulnerabilities are exploited and how worms and viruses propagate.
You'll learn how to use visualization techniques to:
# Audit your network for vulnerabilities using free visualization tools, such as AfterGlow and RUMINT # See the underlying structure of a text file and explore the faulty security behavior of a Microsoft Word document # Gain insight into large amounts of low-level packet data # Identify and dissect port scans, Nessus vulnerability assessments, and Metasploit attacks # View the global spread of the Sony rootkit, analyze antivirus effectiveness, and monitor widespread network attacks # View and analyze firewall and intrusion detection system (IDS) logs
Security visualization systems display data in ways that are illuminating to both professionals and amateurs. Once you've finished reading this book, you'll understand how visualization can make your response to security threats faster and more effective
We can assume that if the Iraq War ends badly, some Republican hard-liners, amplified by conservative talk radio, will accuse the Democrats of perfidy. The question is: Will the betrayal narrative find traction with the broader American public? In particular, will mainstream Republicans buy into it? Or will cooler heads prevail, so the country can heal and move on?
The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States
Topic: Politics and Law
7:05 pm EST, Jan 21, 2008
I picked up this book (actually, the out-of-print hardcover edition) last month. Apropos of the season in general and of recent discussion in particular, I thought I'd mention it.
This work traces the historical processes in thought by which American political leaders slowly edged away from their complete philosophical rejection of a party and hesitantly began to embrace a party system. In the author's words, "The emergence of legitimate party opposition and of a theory of politics that accepted it was something new in the history of the world; it required a bold new act of understanding on the part of its contemporaries and it still requires study on our part." Professor Richard Hofstadter's analysis of the idea of party and the development of legitimate opposition offers fresh insights into the political crisis of 1797-1801, on the thought of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren, and other leading figures, and on the beginnings of modern democratic politics.
A preview at Google is available. If you search in the book for "insidious alternative", and go to page 13, you'll find a relevant excerpt. Don't miss the footnote to the Washington Irving quote.
In a stunning reversal of more than 200 years of conventional wisdom, failure—traditionally believed to be an unacceptable outcome for a wide range of tasks and goals—is now increasingly seen as a viable alternative to success, sources confirmed Tuesday.
Recall, from last year:
Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google.
The latest myth is that the "surge" is working. In President Bush's pithy formulation, the United States is now "kicking ass" in Iraq.
By shifting the conversation to tactics, they seek to divert attention from flagrant failures of basic strategy. Yet what exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: not much.
First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?"
As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke.
Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush's successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift.
According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.
Contrast with Friedman's view that "the GWOT is won, what's next?"
Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data
Topic: High Tech Developments
12:58 pm EST, Jan 20, 2008
Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.
Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.
We hear that Google is hunting for cool datasets, so if you have one, it might pay to get in touch with them.
