Guillermo del Toro is directing "The Hobbit" and its sequel, New Line Cinema announced Thursday. The 43-year-old filmmaker will move to New Zealand for four years to make the films back-to-back with executive producer Peter Jackson.

Guillermo del Toro to direct 'The Hobbit' and sequel

"Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport," Jay Leno once said. "The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances."

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter," said Marlene Dietrich.

Friends Indeed?

Charles Leadbeater:

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.

But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.

It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.

Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.

Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.

Everywhere we turn there will be struggles between people who want to freely share - music, films, ideas, information - and those who want to control this activity, either corporations who want to make money or governments who fear debate and democracy. This conflict between the rising surge of mass collaboration and attempts to retain top down control will be one of the defining battles of our time, from Communist China, to Microsoft's battle with open source and the music industry's desperate rearguard action against the web.

See also:

We-think is about what the rise of these phenomena (not all to do with the internet) means for the way we organise ourselves – not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators.

This is a huge cultural shift, for in this new economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part. In We-think Charles Leadbeater analyses not only these changes, but how they will affect us and how we can make the most of them. Just as, in the 1980s, his In Search of Work predicted the rise of more flexible employment, here he outlines a crucial shift that is already affecting all of us.

We-think: The power of mass creativity

HRC goes Giuliani.

Hell's Kitchen

One thousand men's urine is another scientist's latest discovery.

"Very broadly speaking, the southern Chinese are the healthiest and the people in southern Texas are least healthy."

See also, Gut reaction (subscription required for full text):

Thousands of frozen urine samples have yielded new information about the diversity of human metabolism across the globe — about who eats what, and how their unique internal microorganisms handle the input.

‘Genome-wide association studies’ can link specific gene variants with diseases and predictors of disease, such as blood pressure and weight.

Here's how metabolism varies between populations

Scarlett Johansson's inspired Atco Records debut album ANYWHERE I LAY MY HEAD features her distinctive interpretations of ten songs by Tom Waits plus one original selection, "Song For Jo." Johansson co-wrote the track with TV On The Radio's David Andrew Sitek, who produced the album and lends his multi-instrumental talents throughout as well. She is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration and others.

Scarlett Johansson: Anywhere I Lay My Head

Previously recommended on December 29, this report was updated on April 3, 2008.

Data mining has become one of the key features of many homeland security initiatives. Often used as a means for detecting fraud, assessing risk, and product retailing, data mining involves the use of data analysis tools to discover previously unknown, valid patterns and relationships in large data sets. In the context of homeland security, data mining can be a potential means to identify terrorist activities, such as money transfers and communications, and to identify and track individual terrorists themselves, such as through travel and immigration records.

While data mining represents a significant advance in the type of analytical tools currently available, there are limitations to its capability. One limitation is that although data mining can help reveal patterns and relationships, it does not tell the user the value or significance of these patterns. These types of determinations must be made by the user. A second limitation is that while data mining can identify connections between behaviors and/or variables, it does not necessarily identify a causal relationship. Successful data mining still requires skilled technical and analytical specialists who can structure the analysis and interpret the output.

Data mining is becoming increasingly common in both the private and public sectors. Industries such as banking, insurance, medicine, and retailing commonly use data mining to reduce costs, enhance research, and increase sales. In the public sector, data mining applications initially were used as a means to detect fraud and waste, but have grown to also be used for purposes such as measuring and improving program performance. However, some of the homeland security data mining applications represent a significant expansion in the quantity and scope of data to be analyzed. Some efforts that have attracted a higher level of congressional interest include the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project (now-discontinued) and the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II) project (now- canceled and replaced by Secure Flight). Other initiatives that have been the subject of congressional interest include the Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX), the Able Danger program, the Automated Targeting System (ATS), and data collection and analysis projects being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

As with other aspects of data mining, while technological capabilities are important, there are other implementation and oversight issues that can influence the success of a project’s outcome. One issue is data quality, which refers to the accuracy and completeness of the data being analyzed. A second issue is the interoperability of the data mining software and databases being used by different agencies. A third issue is mission creep, or the use of data for purposes other than for which the data were originally collected. A fourth issue is privacy. Questions that may be considered include the degree to which government agencies should use and mix commercial data with government data, whether data sources are being used for purposes other than those for which they were originally designed, and possible application of the Privacy Act to these initiatives. It is anticipated that congressional oversight of data mining projects will grow as data mining efforts continue to evolve. This report will be updated as events warrant.

Data Mining and Homeland Security: An Overview

Nora hates Times New Roman. She blogged about it awhile back, and lots of people chimed with in their take on favourite and despised fonts.

Virginal Postrel likes Times New Roman, but Nora forgives her. Virginia is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly Magazine and she's the author of The Substance of Style. Virginia wrote a great piece earlier this year about fonts and why they are so hot right now. She delves into the cultural and business trends that are driving our interest in typefaces.

Virginia appears on this week's episode of Spark.

See also:

DVNO by JUSTICE: Typography from the 1980s.

Virginia Postrel on fonts

Is this the silver lining to the global food crisis?

It seems the message is finally getting through. In parts of Helmand Afghan farmers are this year sowing wheat instead of poppy - not because they have suddenly been converted to the argument that producing heroin is not in the national interest.

Market forces have been the deciding factor - with wheat prices doubling in the past year, and the street price of heroin falling, it is now more cost effective to grow wheat.

At last there are signs of progress being made amidst Afghanistan’s battle-scarred landscape.

Afghanistan swaps heroin for wheat

Magnum Photographer Stuart Franklin has spent a decade exploring the beauty of trees and the unique place they occupy in man's world

From the archive:

In 1995, Steve Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany from Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present job, at Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy.

No scientist had been there before.

The tallest redwoods were regarded as inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time -- this was just eight years ago -- was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees.

Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.

In the Time of Trees - Photo Essays - TIME