The Open Source Center will gather and analyze information from the Web, broadcasts, newspapers and other unclassified sources around the world.

The Center will study obscure sources like T-shirt slogans in countries of interest.

All Your Base.

Intelligence Center Is Created for Unclassified Information

American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

About 21 million or 87% of those ages 12-17 use the internet, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results highlight that this is a generation comfortable with content- creating technology.Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider internet population.

Some key findings:

* 33% of online teens share their own creative content online, such as artwork, photos, stories or videos.
* 32% say that they have created or worked on webpages or blogs for others, including groups they belong to, friends or school assignments.
* 22% report keeping their own personal webpage.
* 19% of online teens keep a blog, and 38% of online teens read blogs.
* 19% of internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

57% of Teen Internet Users Create, Remix or Share Content Online

This has everything..
It's multi-cultural.
It's campy.
It's creepy.
It has a singing robot,
and it's about pi.

I'm re-recommending the original URL that appeared here, but you should view the higher-quality QuickTime 7 version instead.

Keith Schofield / Pi

The family tradition of exhibitionism, she added, is an asset: "It's a cycle. It's like molestation, but in a good way."

Oh, Sarah!

Speaking Softly While Tromping on Taboos

I haven't read this yet, but it seems worth a look.

In groups people can accomplish what they cannot do alone. Now new visual and social technologies are making it possible for people to make decisions and solve complex problems collectively. These technologies are enabling groups not only to create community but also to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. Electronic democracy theorists have either focused on the individual and the state, disregarding the collaborative nature of public life, or they remain wedded to outdated and unrealistic conceptions of deliberation. This article makes two central claims. First, technology will enable more effective forms of collective action. This is particularly so of the emerging tools for "collective visualization" which will profoundly reshape the ability of people to make decisions, own and dispose of assets, organize, protest, deliberate, dissent and resolve disputes together. From this argument derives a second, normative claim. We should explore ways to structure the law to defer political and legal decision–making downward to decentralized group–based decision–making. This argument about groups expands upon previous theories of law that recognize a center of power independent of central government: namely, the corporation. If we take seriously the potential impact of technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means to give groups body as well as soul — to "incorporate" them. This paper rejects the anti–group arguments of Sunstein, Posner and Netanel and argues for the potential to realize legitimate self–governance at a "lower" and more democratic level. The law has a central role to play in empowering active citizens to take part in this new form of democracy.

A democracy of groups

The magnetic hotel room key, one of the lodging industry's most popular but controversial creations, is losing some of its attraction.

I figured Acidus might want to see this.

"Do the research," he said. "The truth is out there."

Indeed.

Hotels are also considering another key system that employs proximity cards, according to a national sales manager for a manufacturer of security locks. "There is no strip that needs to be read," he said, so it is also harder to penetrate than a magnetic card.

Yeah, that's right.

The Embattled Swipe-Card Hotel Key

The Wall Street Journal Online is free this week.

Free This Week Only: WSJ.com

I've blogged about this book before, but now it's finally on the shelves at local bookstores.

Read more about this book at Us and Them: The Blog

An eye on science, current events and flummery about race, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, caste, class, ideology and other "human kinds."

The author, David Berreby, participated in the Edge World Question Center in 2004:

Berreby's First Law: Human kinds exist only in human minds.

Human differences and human similarities are infinite, therefore any assortment of people can be grouped together according to a shared trait or divided according to unshared traits. Our borders of race, ethnicity, nation, religion, class etc. are not, then, facts about the world. They are facts about belief. We should look at minds, not kinds, if we want to understand this phenomenon.

Berreby's Second Law: Science which seems to confirm human-kind beliefs is always welcome; science that undermines human-kind belief is always unpopular.

To put it more cynically, if your work lets people believe there are "Jewish genes'" (never mind that the same genes are found in Palestinians) or that criminals have different kinds of brains from regular people (never mind that regular people get arrested all the time), or that your ancestors 5,000 years ago lived in the same neck of the woods as you (never mind the whereabouts of all your other ancestors), well then, good press will be yours. On the other hand, if your work shows how thoroughly perceptions of race, ethnicity, and other traits change with circumstances, well, good luck. Common sense will defend itself against science.

Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

Who likes a contrarian? Especially when he's right?

Fukuyama dismantles the logic of GWOT like a house of cards.

Francis Fukuyama - A Year of Living Dangerously

One target of the effort are "swing voters," or consumers who have not soured on Wal-Mart. The new approach appears to reflect a fear that Wal-Mart's critics are alienating the very consumers it needs to keep growing, especially middle-income Americans motivated not just by price, but by image.

They should have hired the General Memetics Corporation.

A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room