Pentagon spy effort serves a purpose, by Mark Bowden

We are no longer in the Cold War, when spying meant monitoring the activities of an empire such as the Soviet Union. Infiltrating and targeting terror cells is work that requires boots on the ground - as with the unit in Jolo - who have relationships with the local military and police, who know the language, the culture, and the politics in obscure theaters of operation, and who are capable not only of gathering intel but acting upon it fast.

Some of the things Rumsfeld did were right.

He was also on the radio recently, talking about Iran.

Move over, James Bond

The problem is that audiences tend to prefer spy movies of the Mission: Impossible variety. Despite winning critical plaudits, The Good Shepherd has only made around $60m (£30m) in the US - a modest return for a big-budget, 167-minute all-star movie. Other downbeat spy yarns have also struggled. Michael Apted's Enigma (2002), about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, failed to capture the public imagination. Cinema goers don't always warm to tales about desk-bound cryptographers or tormented double agents.

There is a revealing anecdote in Leo Marks's memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide, chronicling his experiences as a codemaker for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. As far as Marks was concerned, he was doing work of the utmost national importance. But that wasn't how his neighbours saw it. They posted him a letter containing a white feather and the message, "shirker". To them, the idea that he could be contributing to the war effort by sitting in an office solving puzzles didn't stack up.

Manuel Castells, on blogs

Most importantly, the Internet increases the belief that you have power. And the belief that you have power, in Castells' formulation, constitutes real power.

Did you know that Larry Lessig gave the key note speech at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha? (See also here)

An American Family

Ten years ago, HBO bought a pilot script for a show that no one—not creator David Chase, lead actor James Gandolfini, or any of the original cast—thought would ever get made. Today, The Sopranos is perhaps the greatest pop-culture masterpiece of... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Help a child get in touch with her strange loopiness.

Scratch

ResearchChannel is a nonprofit media and technology organization that connects a global audience with the research and academic institutions whose developments, insights and discoveries affect our lives and futures.

An intellectual community, ResearchChannel was founded in 1996 by leading research and academic institutions so they could share the work of their researchers with the public. These ideas are shared in their original form — unmediated and without interruption. Today, more than 70 participating members and affiliates provide all programming, and that number continues to grow.

Remarkable speakers, researchers and professors present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries on ResearchChannel. Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington and the Library of Congress are just a few of the world-renowned institutions that participate and whose programs are featured.

ResearchChannel acts as a technology testbed and innovator for new methods of global distribution and interaction. Network, computing and content-creation collaborations allow participants to make the most of traditional, new and emerging technologies. Collaborative projects include those with Intel, IBM and Microsoft Research. New technologies are essential for enhancing research, reaching a wider audience and providing alternative, high-speed exchanges of video resources.

See, for example, 20 Questions for Startup Success

Building successful high-tech products and businesses actually involves about only 20% computer science expertise - there are many other factors that are required for success. In this talk, Norm Meyrowitz, NKM Advisors, examines the 20 questions - and the myriad disciplines - that are necessary to develop the 21st-century sliced bread.

ResearchChannel

Millions of people are on-line today and the number is rapidly growing - yet this virtual crowd is often invisible. In this course we will examine ways of visualizing people, their activities and their interactions. Students will study the cognitive and cultural basis for social visualization through readings drawn from sociology, psychology and interface design and they will explore new ways of depicting virtual crowds and mapping electronic spaces through a series of design exercises.

Check out the readings for pointers.

Social Visualization, MAS.965, Fall 2004 | MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences

The InfoVis:Wiki project is intended to provide a community platform and forum integrating recent developments and news on all areas and aspects of Information Visualization.

Using editable–by–anyone Wiki technology turned out to be the only way of keeping the presented information up to date and knowledge exchange vivid.

InfoVis:Wiki

Although current online chat environments provide new opportunities for communication, they are quite constrained in their ability to convey many important pieces of social information, ranging from the number of participants in a conversation to the subtle nuances of expression that enrich face to face speech. In this paper we present Chat Circles, an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversation. Here, presence and activity are made manifest by changes in color and form, proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups into conversational clusters, and the archives of a conversation are made visible through an integrated history interface. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions.

Chat Circles

We present Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship. This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of “big picture” trends and themes in email (haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration (needle mode). Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of the content parsing approach in Themail and the implications for further research on email content visualization.

Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories

PostHistory is one in a series of projects that explore the notion of history in computer applications and online environments. By developing time-based visualizations of digital activities, we hope to raise questions such as: what is digital memory? How can we understand, interact with and, more importantly, share our digital history?

PostHistory

(Image courtesy of edge.org)

I finished my PhD at the MIT Media Lab this past summer and now I am a researcher at IBM. My research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of my projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. I am particularly fascinated by the stories that these social archives tell us and the patterns they contain.

I am also interested in issues of online privacy. The results from the survey I did on Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability have been published here.

Watch her thesis defense in streaming video.

Also, read/see a talk from IDEA 2006. See also here.

See also: Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization

This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

Fernanda Viegas

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see--literally--the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

The Shape of Song