These nine panelists describe ways in which the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be stretched, or applied in less traditional ways.

From the archive:

"One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems."

Essentially, the smaller a machine is, the greater the chance that it will run backwards. It could be extremely difficult to control.

Finally, and most importantly:

Marge: I'm worried about the kids, Homey. Lisa's becoming very obsessive. This morning I caught her trying to dissect her own raincoat.

Homer: [scoffs] I know. And this perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke! It just keeps going faster and faster.

Marge: And Bart isn't doing very well either. He needs boundaries and structure. There's something about flying a kite at night that's so unwholesome.

[looks out window]

Bart: [creepy voice] Hello, Mother dear.

Marge: [closing the curtains] That's it: we have to get them back to school.

Homer: I'm with you, Marge. Lisa! Get in here.

[Lisa walks in, chuckling nervously]

Homer: In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Frontiers of the Second Law

Keep it real.

The rapid pace at which digital printing is advancing is posing a very serious challenge to the U.S. Department of the Treasury s Bureau of Printing (BEP). The BEP needs to stay ahead of the evolving counterfeiting threats to U.S. currency. To help meet that challenge, A Path to the Next Generation of U.S. Banknotes provides an assessment of technologies and methods to produce designs that enhance the security of U.S. Federal Reserve notes (FRNs). This book presents the results of a systematic investigation of the trends in digital imaging and printing and how they enable emerging counterfeiting threats. It also provides the identification and analysis of new features of FRNs that could provide effective countermeasures to these threats and an overview of a requirements-driven development process that could be adapted to develop an advanced-generation currency.

Have you seen Die Fälscher?

A Path to the Next Generation of U.S. Banknotes: Keeping Them Real

Clay Shirky's new book is on sale now. He recently spoke to Information Week about LOLcats in Bahrain. Fortune offers an excerpt.

Publishers Weekly says:

Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented anti-authoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts.

The book jacket carries praise from Stewart Brand, Steven Johnson, Chris Anderson, Ray Ozzie, and Cory Doctorow. Shirky is collecting other mentions here.

Radar says:

Shirky efficiently straddles two worlds and satisfies the needs of two seemingly opposite groups: the seasoned sociologist and the easily distracted.

The Boston Globe pits Shirky against Lee Siegel's Against the Machine:

No short review can possibly convey the subtleties of these books. Siegel's is a brilliant indictment of what's wrong with today's Internet; Shirky's, an eye-opening paean to possibility.

Siegel is the more capacious thinker, evaluating the Internet in the light of broader cultural trends. Its great promise is the democratic, universal expansion of information. Yet information, however trustworthy, cannot be equated with knowledge born of reflection.

From the archive:

All we need to do is remember that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context.

Many students have less orientation towards reflection and more orientation towards résumé-building than students a generation ago.

Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together like laundry in an industrial dryer -- without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.

Although my grandmother has seen a lot of it, she never liked change much. "The things you see when you don't have a gun" was a favorite expression, delivered on encountering any novelty or irritant.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

The latest CAP report:

With intra-Sunni tensions and violence rising, continued sectarian divisions between Shi’a and Sunnis, and ethnic tensions between Kurds and Arabs plaguing Iraq, the country is no closer to a sustainable security framework than it was at the start of 2007. In many ways, the situation in Iraq is beginning to look increasingly like what has recently transpired in Lebanon, with the emergence and strengthening of smaller political factions, each with its own armed militia asserting its influence in different parts of the country.

This is hardly the outcome that President Bush and top officials in his administration had hoped for when they began the war nearly five years ago. Yet these confusing and chaotic political cross currents are an outcome that leaves Iraq and its neighbors in an even more tenuous situation -- one that requires a wholesale shift and strategic reset of US policy in the region.

New Middle Ages ...

Awakening to New Dangers in Iraq

Another CAP report:

The United States cannot afford strategically, economically, or politically to stay on the offensive forever in an ill-defined and open-ended conflict in Iraq. At the current “burn rate” of more than $15 billion per month, funding to stay on the “offensive” has severe opportunity costs, siphoning away finite resources from dimensions of national security, including defense and deterrence.

In 2008, 20 percent of the $740 billion “national security budget” will be spent on Iraq, twice what the federal government spends defending the homeland. We suffer from a strategic disconnect—the strategy we have places too much emphasis on military intervention and not enough on the other elements of national power that are more likely to reduce the threat of terrorism to the United States. We also suffer from a budget disconnect—our existing national security budget funds the strategy we have, not the one we need.

Safe at Home: A National Security Strategy to Protect the American Homeland, the Real Central Front

Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it's already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq

The Myth of the Surge

Space Sunset

A far-reaching history of terrorism across the world from its beginnings to the modern-day, from the highly acclaimed author of 'Sacred Causes' and 'Earthly Powers'. Basing his study on a wide range of sources and key players from the world of terrorism, Michael Burleigh explains and defines the meaning of terrorism and marks its progression from its hard to trace beginnings to the modern-day. He begins with the first modern terrorist groups: the Irish Republican Brotherhood -- the precursors of the IRA -- who played a key role in the formation of an Irish Republican ideology. He goes on to look at Tsarist Russia where the 'intelligentsia' launched attacks on organs of state, left-wing fighting against 'Fascism' and 'Nazism' in the 70's and 80's in western Germany and Italy, and Britain and Spain's long and drawn out battles with their own terrorist groups the IRA and ETA respectively. He ends with the first globally inclusive account of Islamist terrorism since 1980s till the present. Primarily, Burleigh aims to elucidate the mind-set of people who use political violence and explore the background and the milieu of the people involved. He will be interviewing several senior military and police figures who were responsible for security in Northern Ireland, as well as former soldiers who took part in operations such as 'Bloody Sunday'.

He will examine the Middle East which, since 1970's, has been the world's epicentre for terrorism and the mythologies and delusions of Islamist radicals. Finally, he makes clear that the west has considerable resources to comprehend and combat terrorism -- despite consistently failing to do so -- and highlights the shamefully inadequate nature of US public diplomacy. The book also includes a number of practical suggestions as to how terrorism can be combated both ideologically and militarily. 'Blood and Rage' is an unrivalled study that sheds an insightful new light, and a refreshingly complex angle, on a plight that threatens to affect the world at large for many years to come and establishes Michael Burleigh as one of the most original, learned and important historians of our time.

It seems this book has not yet been published in the US and Canada, but the title is currently available from UK retailers.

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

We can try to become more aware of the patterns governing our blunders, as “Predictably Irrational” urges. Or we can try to prod people toward more rational choices, as “Nudge” suggests. But if we really are wired to make certain kinds of mistakes, as Thaler and Sunstein and Ariely all argue, we will, it seems safe to predict, keep finding new ways to make them. (Ariely confesses that he recently bought a thirty-thousand-dollar car after reading an ad offering FREE oil changes for the next three years.)

If there is any consolation to take from behavioral economics—and this impulse itself probably counts as irrational—it is that irrationality is not always altogether a bad thing. What we most value in other people, after all, has little to do with the values of economics. (Who wants a friend or a lover who is too precise a calculator?) Some of the same experiments that demonstrate people’s weak-mindedness also reveal, to use a quaint term, their humanity. One study that Ariely relates explored people’s willingness to perform a task for different levels of compensation. Subjects were willing to help out -- moving a couch, performing a tedious exercise on a computer -- when they were offered a reasonable wage. When they were offered less, they were less likely to make an effort, but when they were asked to contribute their labor for nothing they started trying again. People, it turns out, want to be generous and they want to retain their dignity -- even when it doesn’t really make sense.

What Was I Thinking?

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new take—from neither the left nor the right—on many hot-button issues, for individuals and governments alike. This is one of the most engaging and provocative books to come along in many years.

Praise:

"... both important and amusing, both practical and deep ... [a] gem of a book ... a must-read."

"... utterly brilliant ... it will knock you off your feet."

"... engaging, informative, and thoroughly delightful ..."

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness