While many Democratic strategists are confident that the deteriorating economy virtually assures the victory of their presidential candidate on November 4, there is a quiet debate over whether the party and prospective nominee are likely to get blindsided by Republicans raising issues of terrorism and national security.

Republicans are making no secret of their intentions in the general election.

Alex Castellanos, Republican media strategist, told the Huffington Post that the continuing concerns of American voters about the dangers of another terrorist attack will be the engine behind a Republican victory in November.

I don't think McCain will sign up for that.

Will The GOP Blindside The Democrats On Terror Issues?

From the Annals of "Influencers", a new paper entitled, "Terrorist Recruitment in American Correctional Institutions: An Exploratory Study of Non-Traditional Faith Groups".

The study's main conclusion is that the danger to U.S. security from inmate adherents to nontraditional religions is not the number of adherents to Islam or to White supremacy religions, but rather the potential for small groups of radical believers to instigate terrorist acts upon their release from custody. Among recommendations for addressing this issue is the hiring of chaplains in overcrowded maximum-security prisons, so as to provide authoritative teachers who will ensure moderation and tolerance. Findings show that prisoners have been converted to the following nontraditional religious groups: Islam (traditional Islam, Nation of Islam, Moorish Science Temple, and Prison Islam); Hinduism; Buddhism; Native-American religions; Black Hebrew Israelism; Wicca; and White supremacy religions (Odin/ Asatru and Christian Identity). Although some conversions to these religions are motivated by personal crises and the need for protection, the primary motivation for conversions is spiritual searching. Although most of the prisoner conversions to these nontraditional religions exert a positive influence on inmate attitudes and behaviors, some carry the potential for ideologically inspired criminal attitudes and behaviors. This risk is especially high in overcrowded maximum-security prisons where there are few rehabilitation programs, a shortage of chaplains, and gang influences. The most significant threat stems from fringe elements of Prison Islam. Former gang rivals are joining forces under Islamic banners. Neo-Nazis are becoming Sunni Muslims. There is growing conflict within inmate Islam as various factions of this faith compete for followers. Data were obtained from interviews with 15 prison chaplains, 9 gang intelligence officials, and 30 inmates incarcerated for violent crimes in Florida and California.

Get the full text.

The Local War on Drugs Meets the Global War on Terror

We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-level perspective.

Engineers of Jihad

Clive Thompson, in the latest issue of Fast Company:

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Interested marketers apply here?

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Oliver James is an assiduous trawler of the densest psychological and psychiatric studies to retrieve the nuggets of wisdom buried therein. He's also a modern day missionary, fired with a passionate desire to relieve the growing emotional suffering in rich countries, which has led the World Health Organisation to predict that depression is on track to become the second most widespread disease, after heart disease, in the developed world by 2020. His writing career has been an attempt to marry these two impulses (which can often tug in opposite directions) and thus bring to a wider public the growing body of research, particularly in the US, into what constitutes human well-being and why it appears to be in decline.

The big question

This list of classic books is the result of a poll ACM conducted where members named their favorite computer science books.We plan to make the full text available online to members as we obtain permissions from authors to display each book. We hope you enjoy the books in this Classic Books series!

ACM Classic Books

This is the official website for the free multiplayer first person shooter: Urban Terror. Unlike older versions, Urban Terror no longer requires you to have Quake3; anyone can download and play it for free. Urban Terror is available for windows, linux and macintosh. The current version of Urban Terror is 4.1. We are currently working on 4.2 (no release date yet).

Urban Terror could best be described as a Hollywood tactical shooter; it is realism based to a certain extent (environments/weapons/player models), but also goes by the motto "fun over realism" (fast gameplay and lots of action). This combination of reality and action results in a very unique, enjoyable and addictive game.

Urban Terror

Ours are ominous times. We are on the verge of eroding away our ozone layer. Within decades we could face major oceanic flooding. We are close to annihilating hundreds of exquisite animal species. Soon our forests will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we now find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war.

But there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous: We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy.

What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss?

Have you seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Savages?

In Praise of Melancholy

In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies’ Mile, opened a “mourning store,” where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson & Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: “Black Crape Grenadines / Black Balzerines / Black Baryadere Bareges / Black Bareges.” The Civil War dead are still among us—long after their beautifully dressed widows have passed away—and the problem is how to get them buried. The acceptable thing to say now, as it was then, is that the soldiers, and their sacrifice, are what remain to inspire us. But it’s the corpses that haunt us, not the soldiers, as they haunted us then, and no amount of black crêpe can cover them over. The scale of the dying disillusioned a country, and also, as Lincoln saw, gave us a country—turned a provisional arrangement of states into a modern nation. A few new books attempt to place the dying in the right context: What did people of the time make of all that dying? More provocatively, did those who died in some sense want to die, and, most provocative, did so many die, after all?

In the Mourning Store

Donated hearts for lifesaving transplants are scarce, but now researchers may have hit upon a way to generate the blood-pumping organs in the lab--at least in rats. The approach, which involves transplanting cells from a newborn rat onto the framework of an adult heart, produced an organ that could beat and pump fluid. Further refinement will be necessary before the technique is ready for people, but it could also generate other organs.

Approximately 3000 patients in the United States are on the waiting list for a heart transplant, but only about 2000 donor organs become available each year. Stem cells, which can give rise to heart tissue, offer a potential solution. But to form an entire heart, the cells require a framework, or scaffolding, to grow on, and finding an adequate structure has proven difficult. Now, a team led by bioengineer Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has shown that old hearts stripped of their cells may provide a fix for the scaffolding problem.

Building a New Heart From Old Tissue