A total of 2,208 intercepts authorized by federal and state courts were completed in 2007, an increase of 20 percent compared to the number terminated in 2006. The number of applications for orders by federal authorities fell less than 1 percent to 457. The number of applications reported by state prosecuting officials grew 27 percent to 1,751, with 24 states providing reports, 1 more than in 2006. Installed wiretaps were in operation an average of 44 days per wiretap in 2007, compared to 40 days in 2006. The average number of persons whose communications were intercepted decreased from 122 per wiretap order in 2006 to 94 per wiretap order in 2007. The average percentage of intercepted communications that were incriminating was 30 percent in 2007, compared to 20 percent in 2006.

Full Report.

2007 Wiretap Report

Lacking a tangible homeland—other than, perhaps, scattered outposts in the wilds of Waziristan—Al-Qaeda has established itself as a virtual state that communicates with its “citizens” and cultivates an even larger audience through masterful use of the media, with heavy reliance on the Internet. For every conventional video performance by Bin-Laden that appears on Al-Jazeera and other major television outlets, there are hundreds of online videos that proselytize, recruit, and train the Al-Qaeda constituency.
…
The Al-Qaeda media machine has grown steadily. Qaeda and its jihadist brethren use more than 4,000 web sites to encourage the faithful and threaten their enemies. The Al-Qaeda production company, As-Sahab, released 16 videos during 2005, 58 in 2006, and produced more than 90 in 2007. Like a Hollywood studio, As-Sahab has a carefully honed understanding of what will attract an audience and how to shape the Al-Qaeda message.

The Al-Qaeda Media Machine

Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.

While most rail transit uses less energy than buses, rail transit does not operate in a vacuum: transit agencies supplement it with extensive feeder bus operations. Those feeder buses tend to have low ridership, so they have high energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile. The result is that, when new rail transit lines open, the transit systems as a whole can end up consuming more energy, per passenger mile, than they did before.

Even where rail transit operations save a little energy, the construction of rail transit lines consumes huge amounts of energy and emits large volumes of greenhouse gases. In most cases, many decades of energy savings would be needed to repay the energy cost of construction.

Rail transit attempts to improve the environment by changing people’s behavior so that they drive less. Such behavioral efforts have been far less successful than technical solutions to toxic air pollution and other environmental problems associated with automobiles.

Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

...

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus: Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008

Online profiles and painfully constructed "faves lists" have turned us into a bunch of unwitting snobs. Enough already.

Personal profiles, faves lists, snobbery, books

When Annie Leibovitz's picture of child star Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair her tween fans - and their parents - went ballistic. The naked back, the satin sheet, the damp hair ... how dare the innocent heroine of the hit series Hannah Montana look so provocative? Germaine Greer dissects the image itself, and we look at the people behind it: the photographer, Annie Leibovitz, and Disney, which markets the billion-dollar actor

Sexing it up

Her New York was a blemished and fallen apple strewn with piles of garbage. Prostitutes and bag ladies walked the streets, junkies staked out abandoned tenements, and children played in vacant lots.

“The city falling apart,” Ms. Freedman said one day recently in recalling that era. “It was great. I used to love to throw the camera over my shoulder and hit the street.”

For reasons involving both changing photographic styles and her personal circumstances, Ms. Freedman faded from the scene in the late 1980s. But at a moment when much of the city is bathed in money and glamour, her work offers a vivid portrait of a metropolis defined by violence, poverty and disarray — a New York that once was.

Through Weegee’s Lens

NPR:

Engineers build bridges, buildings, roads, structures that shelter us and help us move around. But now there's a new class of engineer. These folks build living things.

Minty E. Coli and Other Bioengineering Feats

There's nothing quite so satisfying as an all-knives-out book review, and in her tenure as the lead literary critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani has consistently dished them up. Martin Amis's new book, The Second Plane, was dismissed as "a weak, risible" volume; Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down was condemned as a "maudlin bit of tripe"; and Jonathan Franzen's memoir, The Discomfort Zone, was reviled as "an odious self-portrait of the -artist as a young jackass".

And this approach, while delicious for readers, has naturally won Kakutani enemies. Earlier this week, a Harvard student newspaper reported that Franzen had said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times". Salman Rushdie has described Kakutani as "a weird woman", while Nicholson Baker said that one of her reviews "was like having my liver taken out without anaesthesia".

Rather than blunting her criticism, these counterattacks have made Kakutani one of the world's most influential book reviewers.

Don't mess with Michiko Kakutani

At the world's leading baby brain research lab at Harvard University, Elizabeth Spelke's team is conducting experiments that reveal not only that humans are born with a range of innate skills, but that our prejudices are formed within the first few months of life.

Harvard's baby brain research lab