In today’s networked society, e-mail, instant messaging, online chats and other applications are instrumental in establishing and maintaining social ties, so creating what Manuel Castells calls a private "portfolio of sociability".

Apparently the path to profitability for MemeStreams involves partnering with a developer of urban housing for hip, young professionals.

Networked communities: an answer to urban alienation?

Don't you love to see social networking research get play in the major journals?

2006, I have decided, is the year that I'll make it big. I'll get a promotion. I'll be wildly popular. And in order to do this I'll meet lots of people and make them my friends.

So imagine my delight when I find a study about [social] networking in my inbox at the start of the week.

Duncan Watts finds that you are 30 times more likely to meet a friend of a friend than a friend of a friend of a friend. Apparently this is extraordinarily interesting. Don't get it? What's important is that we know it's 30, not 29 or 31. Woo hoo!

My resolution to schmooze is probably pointless: for all I know, my new friends are about to sever the very ties and influence I covet in them.

To be honest, this comes as a relief. I'm more comfortable being the cynical loner.

Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.

Fukuyama is the editor of a new book.

Bestselling author Francis Fukuyama brings together esteemed academics, political analysts, and practitioners to reflect on the U.S. experience with nation-building, from its historical underpinnings to its modern-day consequences. The United States has sought on repeated occasions to reconstruct states damaged by conflict, from Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War to Japan and Germany after World War II, to the ongoing rebuilding of Iraq. Despite this rich experience, there has been remarkably little systematic effort to learn lessons on how outside powers can assist in the building of strong and self-sufficient states in post-conflict situations.

The contributors dissect mistakes, false starts, and lessons learned from the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq within the broader context of reconstruction efforts in other parts of the world, including Latin America, Japan, and the Balkans. Examining the contrasting models in Afghanistan and Iraq, they highlight the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as a cautionary example of inadequate planning.

The need for post-conflict reconstruction will not cease with the end of the Afghanistan and Iraq missions. This timely volume offers the critical reflection and evaluation necessary to avoid repeating costly mistakes in the future.

Contributors: Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution and Stanford University; James Dobbins, RAND; David Ekbladh, American University; Michele A. Flournoy, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Francis Fukuyama, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Larry P. Goodson, U.S. Army War College; Johanna Mendelson Forman, UN Foundation; Minxin Pei, Samia Amin, and Seth Garz, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; S. Frederick Starr, Central Asia--Caucacus Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; F. X. Sutton, Ford Foundation Emeritus; Marvin G. Weinbaum, University of Illinois at Urbana--Champaign

Nation-Building : Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq

Fareed Zakaria has his own TV show. This week he sits down with Tom Friedman. You can stream the show.

With 2005 in the past, we now look forward to the new year. Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, joins us for a full show. We hear his thoughts on globalization, the Iraq War, and 2006.

Tom Friedman on Foreign Exchange, with Fareed Zakaria

Will there ever be a second coming of Einstein? I have my doubts.

Einstein seems bigger than modern physicists because, for the first half of the last century, physics mattered. These days, biology has displaced physics as the scientific enterprise with the most intellectual, practical and economic clout.

But science as a whole has lost its moral sheen. It has come to be perceived as just another guild pursuing its own selfish interests alongside truth and the common good.

Einstein didn't think he lived up to his own reputation either. "I am no Einstein," he once said.

Einstein Has Left the Building

Developers are just beginning to understand the meaning of personal time. Most obvious is calendars, scheduling, events, resource allocation over time (aka project management). But there are also less obvious ways time matters in software: how people work and think over time; how human relationships, article relevance, and purchase intentions and other commercial considerations change over time; how time patterns infuse a variety of applications; and how a sense of timing can improve the utility of everything from search results to social-network-driven tools.

The online world needs to get better at time-stamping content and activities and at standards for representing time and events - both times and durations, and all the patterns in time: speed, decay, growth, recurrence, (changing) frequency of events.

MemeStreams is a gold mine of untapped timing information.

When 2.0: Time and Timing

The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music services. In most music stores, CD's of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.

Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet

From a selection of letters to the public editor regarding NYT's handling of the domestic surveillance story, here's an interesting if somewhat contrived legal question for you to consider:

It is sweetly ironic to hear the editors' claim that information cannot be shared with you (and us) lest the reporters' sources and methods be compromised and leakers be revealed for possible negative repercussions, in this case prosecutions.

Isn't that the same basic explanation given by the administration for its secrecy?

How is it acceptable for the paper to keep certain information secret, especially if obtained illegally, to protect sources and methods, but for the government to do so is somehow un-American?

How The Times Handled the Surveillance Story

The reality is that Paris and its "difficult" banlieues [impoverished suburbs] are two worlds that are completely foreign to each other. They don't even speak the same language: polished, accent-free French on one side, the verlan, or "reversed" speech, of the housing projects on the other.

I was intrigued by the notion of verlan and decided to look it up.

Verlan is a form of French slang that consists of playing around with syllables, kind of along the same lines as pig Latin. Unlike pig Latin, however, verlan is actively spoken in France - many verlan words have become so commonplace that they are used in everyday French.

Verlan was invented as a secret language, a way for people (notably youths, drug users, and criminals) to communicate freely in front of authority figures (parents, police). Because much of verlan has become incorporated into French, verlan continues to evolve - sometimes words are "re-verlaned."

About verlan, [2], Wikipedia adds:

Generally speaking, creating a verlan word on the fly from any random French word will result in smirks.

A brief clip from NPR's On Point about verlan is available.

The French Disconnection

Our present obsession with science's ability to solve crimes and put ancient mysteries to rest has become epidemic.

This might seem little more than a passing fancy, except for the fact that

forensic science has become one of the hot undergraduate degrees.

How ridiculous is that? I mean, how many forensic scientists can the nation employ? They can't all be actors.

Are you not appalled at this faddish approach to career selection?

A Head for Music