The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has adopted a focused approach to risk reduction. DHS is moving increasingly to risk analysis and risk-based resource allocation, a process that is designed to manage the greatest risks instead of attempting to protect everything. This report applies a probabilistic terrorism model that is broadly applied in the insurance industry to assess risk across cities, to assess risks within specific cities, and to assist intelligence analysis. Among the authors’ conclusions: Terrorism risk is concentrated in a small number of cities, with most cities having negligible relative risk, so terrorism estimates such as those described in the report should be incorporated into the grant allocation assessment process. DHS should consider funding the development of city profiles of major metropolitan areas receiving DHS preparedness grants. It should also develop descriptions of terrorist attack planning and operations that can be used to translate estimates from risk models of likely attack scenarios into detailed recommendations. Finally, DHS should develop tabletop exercises to test the scenarios and provide feedback.

Terrorism Risk Modeling for Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure Protection

From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes.

AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance

Similarity search is the problem of preprocessing a database of N objects in such a way that given a query object, one can effectively determine its nearest...

Slides are here.

Similarity Search: A Web Perspective

Sacha van Loo, 36, is not your typical cop. He wields a white cane instead of a gun. And from the purr of an engine on a wiretap, he can discern whether a suspect is driving a Peugeot, a Honda or a Mercedes.

Van Loo is one of Europe's newest weapons in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime: a blind Sherlock Holmes, whose disability allows him to spot clues sighted detectives don't see.

"Being blind has forced me to develop my other senses, and my power as a detective rests in my ears," he said from his office at the Belgian Federal Police, where a bullet-riddled piece of paper from a recent target-shooting session was proudly displayed on the wall. "Being blind also requires recognizing your limitations," he added with a smile, noting that a sighted trainer guided his hands during target practice "to make sure no one got wounded."

Something of a thematic follow-up to The boy who sees without eyes ...

A blind Sherlock Holmes: Fighting crime with acute listening

Much of Sacks's meat in between is concerned with the great variety of ways musicality and a startling appetite for music can be present in those afflicted by appalling and often all too common brain degenerations and dementias. Among the weirder stories from his long clinical experience are those that show how memory for melody or rhythm can exist where other forms of memory have been destroyed.

The sounds of music

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind

Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.

The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected.

"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony, associate professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't allow for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."

See also, KING ALGORITHM:

No one but a utopian would have predicted how readily people will work for free.

Confirming the power of altruism in Wikipedia

... Magicians. Musicians. Technocrats. Inventors. Philosophers. Photographers. Artists. Humorists. Producers. Performers. Visionaries. Iconoclasts. Living National Treasures. Some of the most dynamic, innovative, eclectic and luminous talents in our culture are coming to EG, 2–4 December at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Welcome to a preview of heaven.

This is another Richard Saul Wurman project.

EG - The Entertainment Gathering

If you're into LED Throwies, you might like this:

This lightwriting project is the work of LICHTFAKTOR; on their MySpace page, they cite explanatory text from another blog, "colourlovers":

A number of graffiti artists have been tagging everything thought to be impossible without being caught. Well — it’s actually not illegal for them. They’re not using paint. As it turns out, time-lapse photography isn’t just for blooming flowers, skyscapes, or brake lights anymore. Termed Light Graffiti, tag artists are taking their colour to an all new level.

Using an exposure of about ten-to-thirty seconds and a tripod for best results, Light Graffiti artists start at the first click. Glowsticks, flashlights, reflectors, and even torches have been used as mediums to create all sorts of designs and tags, as the artist becomes a ghost of a blur, if visible at all.

Any person, place, or thing can become a central piece of the art. Because all it really takes is less than a minute, light tagging phone booth can be just as easy as something in the privacy of home, though staying home is certainly less fun. Some ‘hardcore’ taggers are set on Light Graffiti not actually being graffiti because it doesn’t have a physical presence, but after seeing photos of it, it’s not too different from tagging a building and having it covered or removed the next day.

See if you can make some yourself. The general rule of Light Graffiti seems to be experimentation and play, so, if your first ‘tag’ isn’t brilliance, keep at it.

Here is "Star Wars vs. Star Trek":

energie in motion

There are few areas of music where repetition in its myriad forms assumes a greater significance -- and holds greater promises of joy -- than jazz. Despite the changes presented and challenges posed by many jazz recordings released in and after 1959 (Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane's Giant Steps were all released that year), the essential core of jazz coalesces around group interplay over successive sonic cycles from twelve or thirty-two bars in length. The repetition and moment-to-moment alteration of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments, even when they recur in tunes with different names, provide a ground for further exploration. When alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley begins his fourth solo chorus on "Straight, No Chaser" (from the Davis album Milestones) with a blustery one-bar figure that Charlie Parker frequently used on blues-based tunes, we hear both possible results of repetition at work. Adderley doesn't merely reproduce Bird's tones and phrasing: he worries the line, twisting and transforming it almost as though he has caught himself falling back into old habits and is trying to break their hold.

Play It (Over and Over Again)