The vault opens; treasures await within.

Each year for hundreds of thousands of American women there is a wide gulf between what the law forbids and what they feel they must do. The author of this article, whose credentials are trusted by the Atlantic, is a college graduate in her forty-sixth year, the mother of three children, living with her husband and family in one of the many commuter communities in the East.

The Atlantic Online | August 1965 | One Woman's Abortion | Mrs. X

See also "Blink".

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results," says Ambady.

Romantic attraction likely works just as fast, notes psychologist Paul Eastwick of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "If people make accurate judgments about sexually relevant aspects of a person this quickly," he says, "you have to stop and wonder how we size up one another's romantic potential in a matter of milliseconds."

An Eye for Sexual Orientation

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his anointed successor, Dmitri Medvedev, were in Bulgaria on Jan. 17. The point of the trip was to put the crowning touch on a Russian effort to hook Europe into Moscow’s energy orbit. After a touch of bitter rhetoric about how Russia and Bulgaria were “doomed to be partners,” Putin agreed to grant equal rights to the South Stream natural gas pipeline Moscow hopes to lay through Bulgaria. Yet the tension of the meeting and the concessions that Putin had to make simply to get permission are symptomatic of a broad unraveling of Russian foreign policy toward Europe.

The Unraveling of Russia’s Europe Policy

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Russia left in its wake has long since moved past the bad old days. Or has it? Rare survey data from the four main universities that feed Russia's Foreign Ministry reveals that the next generation of Russian diplomats may not turn out to be as “post-Soviet” as you think.

Generation Putin

Judith Thurman's book of essays possesses the three cardinal virtues of nonfiction: Its prose is stylish and often witty; it delves into various topics with hungry curiosity, and it is very, very intelligent. Thurman takes her subjects seriously, giving the same respect and in-depth analysis to "Hump the Grinder's Hair Wars" as she does to the novels of Gustave Flaubert.

Many essays are about fashion, treating it not as a trivial pursuit of the chic and moneyed, but as the preeminent domain of beauty and its transgressions, of disguise and invention, of the making and remaking of identity. Her subjects include Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, Bill Blass and Ralph Lauren.

Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley has released the Air Force's weapon system "roadmap," a long-term plan for providing Air Force capabilities the nation needs in the 21st century to meet threats to the nation's security.

...

Airmen provide the nation with Global Vigilance, a system of "eyes and ears" to see and sense anything on the face of the Earth from the vantage of air, space and cyberspace. Airmen watch and listen across the electromagnetic spectrum, and put that information into context, providing decision-quality intelligence to political leaders, joint and combined commanders and combatants the world over.

Airmen provide the nation unrivalled Global Reach throughout the world.
They deliver the goods, the gas and their fellow warfighters beyond oceans, in hostile territory and across the last tactical mile, relying on the range, payload and speed of mobility aircraft. The Air Force's Global Reach allows joint military forces to hold targets or activities at risk and to communicate, command, supply, rescue, support or destroy them; and to reach into the far regions of space and cyberspace with a variety of payloads.

This really seems to be more about deciding which bases (not) to close under BRAC. Good luck finding anything "cyber" here.

Air Force weapon system roadmap released

Clay Shirky has a book coming out.

A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'etre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

PROFILES of Paul and Patricia Churchland. Paul and Patricia Churchland are in their early sixties and are both professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego (U.C.S.D.). They have been talking about philosophy together since they met; they test ideas on each other and criticize each other’s work.

Some of their ideas are quite radical.

The guiding obsession of their lives is the mind-body problem, or how to understand the relationship between conscious experience and the brain. In the past, everyone was a dualist. Nowadays, few people doubt that the mind somehow is the brain. Paul and Pat Churchland believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists. Describes Pat’s childhood and background; she attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she met Paul, and Oxford. Describes Paul’s background; as a child he was influenced by the science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein.

Mentions Wilfrid Sellars. Describes their jobs as professors at the University of Manitoba in the early 1970s. Mentions Pat’s study of the “split brain.” Mentions Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Pat disagreed with Nagel’s assertion that science could never understand consciousness. She also objected to the prevelant notion that neuroscience would never be relevant to philosophical concerns. In the early 1990s, Australian philosopher David Chalmers developed a theory of consciousness as a universal primitive, like mass or space. Mentions Francis Crick and the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran.

These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for making the link between the mind-body problem and the brain. Pat and Paul are currently studying the implications of neuroscience for ethics and the law. Much of Paul’s work is focused far into the future. Both he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English are replaced by scientific words. As people learn to speak differently, they’ll learn to experience and think differently. Paul believes that someday language will disappear altogether and people will communicate by thought. If so, a philosopher might come to know what it’s like to be a bat.

Two Heads | The New Yorker

This talk is an essay on design. In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne invented a new genre of writing he called an essai, which in modern French translates to attempt. Since then, the best essays have been explorations by an author of a topic or question, perhaps or probably without a definitive conclusion. Certainly there can be no theme or conclusion stated at the outset, repeated several times, and supported throughout, because a true essay takes the reader on the journey of discovery that the author has or is experiencing.

This essay -- on design -- is based on my reflections on work I’ve done over the past 3 years. Some of that work has been on looking at what constitutes an “ultra large scale software system” and on researching how to keep a software system operating in the face of internal and external errors and unexpected conditions.

In this presentation I’ll look at the nature of design through the lenses these two inquiries provide. Namely, what can we learn of design when we look at an extreme design situation, and when we look at how to give a system the characteristic of homeostasis: the ability of a system to regulate its internal environment to maintain a stable, constant condition. The exploration is what we can learn about design when we examine design situations that are beyond (current) human abilities.

Design Beyond Human Abilities

It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in part responsible for this decline. We examine briefly the set of programming skills that should be part of every software professional’s repertoire.

Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?