Francis Fukuyama, in the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly:

Not surprisingly, many in Washington, both on the Left and on the Right, are pressing for a change in US foreign policy objectives. In a German Marshall Fund survey of European and US attitudes on foreign policy in 2007, a solid majority (71 percent) of Europeans believed the European Union should promote democracy in other countries, but US support for this project declined to 37 percent, down from 45 percent in 2006, and 52 percent in 2005. When broken down along partisan lines, Democrats in the United States are about one-half as likely to support democracy promotion as Republicans. Among foreign policy elites, only those at the extreme on each end of the political spectrum advocate completely abandoning democracy promotion as a US foreign policy objective. Instead, skepticism is largely couched as “realism” and a return to a greater focus on traditional US national security objectives. From this perspective, democracy promotion should take a back seat to strategic aims such as securing US access to energy resources, building military alliances to fight terrorist organizations, and fostering stability within states.

Although focusing on the more traditional goals of national security is important, a zero-sum trade-off does not exist between these traditional security objectives and democracy promotion. Moreover, the Bush administration’s mixed if not disappointing efforts to promote democracy in the past few years do not mean that democracy promotion should be downgraded or removed from US foreign policy priorities. The United States should promote democracy, but there are new strategies and better modalities for pursuing this objective.

Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?

Discover reports (briefly) on a Nature article from this past summer.

Natural selection, we’re told, is the process by which nature promotes our best qualities. But a look around strains that notion. If nature selects health, beauty, and intelligence, why are most of us far from flawless?

It may be because genes involved in reproduction work against themselves in opposite sexes across generations, says biologist Katharina Foerster at the University of Edinburgh. In her study of eight generations of red deer in Scotland, she noticed a curious pattern: The most prolific male deer sired daughters that tended to have fewer offspring, while the worst male breeders (the deer equivalent of ugly) fathered females that had more offspring. This is evidence, Foerster says, of sexually antagonistic genes. The same gene that makes a buck sexually successful can leave his daughter behind.

Foerster suspects that sexual antagonism is a way to maintain genetic diversity. But with so many reproductive choices available, it would be nearly impossible to detect this pattern in humans.

That's the water cooler version.

Details are also available, including the latest paper (although a subscription is required for full text). A more recent paper cites Foerster's work.

Why Aren’t You Beautiful?

In a bid to progress beyond the shotgun approach to fighting cancer—blasting malignant cells with toxic chemicals or radiation, which kills surrounding healthy cells in the process—researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) are using nanotechnology to develop seek-and-destroy models to zero in on and dismantle tumors without damaging nearby normal tissue.

Nanoparticles Enable Surgical Strikes against Cancer

"An American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century."

"It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful."

"Vivid, eloquent, ... consistently brilliant."

"Simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear."

"Easily one of the most harrowing books you'll ever encounter."

"Magnificent."

"Devastating ... Extraordinarily lovely and sad. . . . [A] masterpiece."

"Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book."

This gets my gold star for November.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Dark days ahead. Stock up.

Here's Harvard's Lawrence Summers, whose assets are clearly in derivatives based on shorting the market:

Three months ago it was reasonable to expect that the subprime credit crisis would be a financially significant event but not one that would threaten the overall pattern of economic growth. This is still a possible outcome but no longer the preponderant probability.

Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have been observed to date, moreover, there is the risk that the adverse impacts will be felt for the rest of this decade and beyond.

Others have ideas, too:

HSBC Bails Out its SIVs

While the big American banks are trying to organize a collective superfund to shore up their shaky off-balance-sheet debt, Europe's biggest bank, HSBC of Britain, is simply taking its troubled children in.

The move "prevents the need for a fire sale of the assets" and makes it less likely that HSBC will join the banks' superfund.

Wake up to the dangers of a deepening crisis

Have you seen the Cronenberg film with the rampaging gang of mallet-wielding dwarves?

This is not a horror movie but a slick and atmospheric thriller, a sort of cross between Goodfellas and The Godfather only set in London and with Russians as the gangsters. But then I realised that this movie too ... is all about a violence and horror that come from somewhere else, invading the ordinary world from a zone as strange as the individual angry mind. Not Russia, I think, and not even ‘Russia’, but some place in our imagination where the secret kindnesses, family values and occasional lovable gestures of the American mob are all banished, and only a mixture of power and pathology remain.

... the [bath] scene is beautifully choreographed. But what does he want? Does he want us to laugh, as most people were doing in the cinema where I saw the film? Does he want nervous laughter perhaps?

Previous mentions of Eastern Promises:

Today’s Hidden Slave Trade

Women and Children for Sale

Previous mentions of Cronenberg:

Cache (Hidden) Movie Review
The 10 most controversial films of all time

'Eastern Promises' Reviewed | LRB

We have developed a mathematical approach to the study of dynamical biological networks, based on combining large-scale numerical simulation with nonlinear ‘‘dimensionality reduction’’ methods. Our work was motivated by an interest in the complex organization of the signaling cascade centered on the neuronal phosphoprotein DARPP-32 (dopamine- and cAMP-regulated phosphoprotein of molecular weight 32,000). Our approach has allowed us to detect robust features of the system in the presence of noise. In particular, the global network topology serves to stabilize the net state of DARPP-32 phosphorylation in response to variation of the input levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, despite significant perturbation to the concentrations and levels of activity of a number of intermediate chemical species. Further, our results suggest that the entire topology of the network is needed to impart this stability to one portion of the network at the expense of the rest. This could have significant implications for systems biology, in that large, complex pathways may have properties that are not easily replicated with simple modules.

This is an open access article.

A mathematical tool for exploring the dynamics of biological networks

Provided that Google has the nerve and resources to try to remake wireless in its image, it'll either prove its greatest triumph or its Waterloo.

Google is as much an ideology as a firm and can resemble a nation-state in its pursuit of power rather than a mere corporation chasing quarterly numbers. Google and its allies are now trying to make the principles of openness—the commanding ideology of the Internet—the conquering principle of the wireless world, and the Android announcement is just the first step.

Yes, Google Is Trying To Take Over the World

It is our opinion that Google (GOOG) has designed and deployed home-grown 10GbE switches as part of a secret internal initiative that was launched when it realized commercial options couldn’t meet the cost and power consumption targets required for their data centers.

This decision by Google, while small in terms of units purchased, is enormous in terms of the disruptive impact it should have on 10GbE switching equipment providers and their component supply chains. It is as if a MACHO just arrived in the Enterprise networking business and the orbits of the existing satellites have begun to shift without observers knowing why - until now.

Google’s Secret 10GbE Switch

Because of the importance of technology to the operations of modern terrorist groups, the factors that affect the technological sophistication of extreme organizations are of great interest. In this article, the process through which terrorist groups seek out and deploy new technology is examined by bringing to bear the deep literature that exists on technology adoption by commercial organizations. A framework is described that delineates not only the factors that influence a group’s decisionmaking processes surrounding new technology but also the obstacles that stand in the way of the successful absorption and use of unfamiliar technologies by a terrorist organization. This framework, by taking a holistic view of the entire technology adoption process, sets out a methodology to both more reasonably predict the outcome of a group’s technology-seeking efforts and to speculate about its future innovation efforts. Such a technology focused viewpoint provides a route to more fully inform risk assessment, especially with regard to the low probability-high consequence technologies that have served as the focus of much recent counterterrorist deliberation. The lessons provided by the framework with respect to weapons of mass destruction terrorism and to novel counterterrorist routes are discussed.

As I've said before, AQIM runs SAP.

Technology Acquisition by Terrorist Groups