Mark Bowden, from the Atlantic archive:

The inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle—without resorting to torture—and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq

The Ploy

No matter what Israel does, the rockets from the Gaza Strip just keep coming. Young men like Abdul are the reason why. He studies by day, but at night he builds bombs for the Islamic Jihad. He and his fellow militants can produce up to 100 per night.

Graveyard Shift for Islamic Jihad: A Visit to a Gaza Rocket Factory

The convergence of communication and multi-media platforms has enabled a key capability: mobility tracking via GPS. Business plans of most major cellular phone manufacturers such as Nokia include embedding GPS in all manufactured cell phones within less than 18 months. Thus, a high penetration rate of GPS-equipped travelers on freeways is expected in the near future. This has major implications for the traffic engineering community, which currently monitors traffic using mostly fixed sensors such as cameras and loop detectors, or location specific sensors such as FasTrak or EZ-pass transponders.

Soon, using universally available equipped cell phones, a new category of location-based services will become possible: multi-modal travel time estimation for commuters using bikes, busses, cars, or trains; itinerary advisories for navigation; geolocalization and context aware applications for social networks; cell phone based monitoring applications for epidemiology in developing countries.

Mobile Century: Using GPS Mobile Phones as Traffic Sensors | CITRIS

This briefing reviews current U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) policy for ensuring interoperability and information assurance of command, control, communication, intelligence, and weapon systems. DoD interoperability, information assurance, acquisition, and joint requirement policy are reviewed. This review identifies ambiguities, conflicts, overlaps, and shortfalls in DoD policy and recommends solutions for clarifying policy and remedying other shortcomings. The authors found that interoperability-related policy issuance has sharply increased in recent years and includes conflicts and redundancies. They also found that global information grid (GIG) technical guidance is still evolving because of continuing advances and change in networking and software technologies. The authors recommend reducing the number of policies and increasing their actionability and traceability. They also recommend that technology risk levels be developed for GIG functional areas, that these be used to track GIG programs during development, and that net-centric implementation documents more carefully define the capabilities for core GIG enterprise services and specify the technical standards with which GIG programs will have to comply for interoperability.

Navy/OSD Collaborative Review of Acquisition Policy for DoD C3I and Weapon Programs

Richard A. Clarke:

When I left the Bush administration in 2003, it was clear to me that its strategy for defeating terrorism was leaving our nation more vulnerable and our people in a perilous place. Not only did its policies misappropriate resources, weaken the moral standing of America, and threaten long-standing legal and constitutional provisions, but the president also employed misleading and reckless rhetoric to perpetuate his agenda.

This week's State of the Union proved nothing has changed.

Bush legacy: Setting a standard in fear-mongering

The sunscreen that you dutifully slather on before a swim on the beach may be protecting your body—but a new study finds that the chemicals are also killing coral reefs worldwide.

Swimmers' Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

Here is the Discovery Institute trying to make hay out of a recent symposium hosted by John "Edge" Brockman:

In the end, Robert Shapiro’s statements said it all: We don’t know how the ribosome and its required proteins evolved, but we know that “Both are obviously products of long evolution of preexisting life through the process of trial and error.” This is a prime example of “evolution-of-the-gaps,” and it demonstrates that intelligent design could go a long way towards solving problems in 21st century biology. This also demonstrates that intelligent design proponents have worthwhile contributions to make and deserve a place at the table in these kinds of discussions.

After all, 21st century biology is synthetic, right?

Leading Biologists Marvel at the “Irreducible Complexity” of the Ribosome, but Prefer Evolution-of-the-Gaps

In the aftermath of the cable cuts this week, it's worth revisiting a Wired classic.

The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

Mother Earth Mother Board

Imagine that you're a composer. Imagine getting this commission: “Please write us a song that will allow family members to face the death of a loved one…” Well, composer David Lang had to do just that when a hospital in Garches, France, asked him to write music for their morgue, or "Salle Des Departs."

What do you do? What should death sound like?

Producer Jocelyn Gonzales brings us this piece about David Lang and his commission for the “Salle Des Departs.”

WNYC - Radiolab: Salle Des Departs (January 29, 2008)

Potentially useful.

RFCVision: A tool for visualizing RFC relationships