You're trapped in a high tech Spanish slammer, crawling through real tunnels, behind real bars. First-person gameplay breaks out of the box.

Wired 14.03: The Great Escape

William Gibson apparently liked it, but everyone else seems to find it blah. Have you seen it?

Though Vendetta is a potential bonanza for a graduate student in search of a thesis topic, it may leave the rest of us scratching our heads.

That's not because Vendetta tries to pull together too many ideas and icons. It's because it doesn't pull together anything.

D for Vendetta

Icosystem's technology platform combines the principles of network
analysis, dynamic modeling and complexity science with leading-edge
computational tools to simulate a particular business ecosystem
and determine the validity of opportunities that might arise.

Icosystem - Technology

Since the dawn of computers, automated translation of human languages has been a tempting but elusive goal. Language Weaver now leads the evolution of an innovative statistical language translation technology that overcomes the problems of past machine translation. Language Weaver's systems return translations that are accurate, natural sounding and customized to specific subject domains. This breakthrough makes it "efficient and effective" to use automated translation where it was never used before.

Language Weaver - State of the Art in Automated Language Translation

Venture funded Language Weaver showed a taped demo of a bidirectional Arabic - English speech translation system, running on a laptop and used to interview informants and suspects in the field. It's not possible to assess its speaker independence and range of domains from a tape of course, but it's a reasonable first draft of something I've wanted since I first read about translator discs in Larry Niven's Ringworld, over thirty years back. Based on the pace of AI to date, I'd more or less given up on seeing it.

Due Diligence: The War and Technology Discontinuity

The layout of this page sucks, but the photos are interesting.

Do you wonder how the geniuses at BMW can fit tons of gadgets and provide the ultimate driving experience. Imagine how they would transform your air journey. Airbus will unveil its new A350 twinjet at the Aircraft Interiors Expo 2006 exhibition in Hamburg next month that will feature opulent interiors by BMW. The cabin will feature a number of new features, as Airbus seeks to counter the new concepts introduced by Boeing in the cabin of the rival 787 twinjet. It is unclear the exact extent of the German automotive company's participation in the new interiors.

Airbus A350 with BMW interiors - New Launches

There have been many Pretenders, but there is just one Chrissie Hynde: a walking combination of Fifties rockabilly, Sixties girl-group soul and Seventies punk who created some of the greatest rock and pop of the Eighties and beyond. The five-disc box set Pirate Radio documents the fluctuations of the Pretenders -- through good albums and bad, and through a series of lineup changes -- with Hynde serving as the immovable object.

Rolling Stone : The Pretenders : Review

RS likes the new Ben Harper album.

Harper is big among jam-banders, but he and the Criminals are more compositionally adventurous and experimental-minded than most jam bands. It's hard to imagine many of his Bonnaroo peers winning a Grammy for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album with a collaboration with the Blind Boys of Alabama, as Harper did in 2005. But Harper is not a gospel artist, either. He is, for all his flash, just Ben, a gifted singer, songwriter and guitarist bent on seeking transcendence in everyday places.

Rolling Stone : Both Sides Of The Gun : Review

The
winners of the 2006 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards -- recognizing those
titles independent booksellers most enjoyed handsellingduring the past year
-- as voted by the owners and staff of American Booksellers Association member
bookstores are:

Adult Fiction: The Historian: A Novel by Elizabeth Kostova
(Little, Brown)


Adult Nonfiction: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the
Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (William
Morrow)

I wish the nonfiction book had been something different; I've already read Freakonomics.

Bookselling This Week: 2006 Book Sense Book of the Year Award Winners Announced

The general thread of media commentary is that this is a more realist strategy than the 2002 document. I'll leave it to my readers to judge the accuracy of that assessment.

Daniel W. Drezner :: Open National Security Strategy thread