Our policy-makers and media rely too much on the "expert" advice of a self-interested insider's club of pundits and big-shot academics. These pundits are rewarded too much for telling good stories, and for supporting each other, rather than for being "right". Instead, let us create betting markets on most controversial questions, and treat the current market odds as our best expert consensus. The real experts (maybe you), would then be rewarded for their contributions, while clueless pundits would learn to stay away. You should have a free-speech right to bet on political questions in policy markets, and we could even base a new form of government on idea futures.

Idea Futures - The Concept

Examines the various factors that impelled leaders on both sides of the conflict in World War II to respond to immediate problems with actions resulting in effects that were often neither planned nor foreseen. Both Great Britain and Germany drifted into an escalation that ended in the wholesale bombardment of cities and civilian populations, when neither had originally planned any such action, and serves as the author’s lesson to show us how decisionmakers can respond once more to provocations and counterreactions. Emotional pressures, the fog of war, and judgments blurred by wishful thinking can produce decisions, even self-destructive decisions, and lead down an inexorable path to all-out, total war. More than thirty years after its initial publication, and to celebrate RAND’s 60th Anniversary, RAND is proud to bring this classic work back into print in paperback and digital formats.

The Road to Total War

The problem with the music labels is not that music is an industry in decline, but that they have a too-narrow view of what business they're in.

"Soon a lot of these companies won't define themselves as record companies," says Steve Greenberg, the former head of Columbia Records who now runs the independent record company S-Curve. "They'll define themselves as artist development companies. If you're involved in an entire career with an artist, then everyone's interests can be aligned."

Everything in the music industry is up! (except those plastic discs)

Of course, just because a futurist's value is hard to measure doesn't mean he's worthless. "What's the value of a single strategic insight that allows you to avoid some catastrophic event?" Chermack asks rhetorically. Even barring mega-insights, there's no harm in hiring someone to collect, analyze and deliver information to time-strapped staffers.

If your company gets blindsided anyway, you might want to consider a career as a futurist.

Forbes has a special feature on futurists. See articles by James Surowiecki, along with a bunch of other names you'll recognize: Cory Doctorow, David Brin, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte, Paul Saffo, Stephen Wolfram, and more.

The Futurists | Forbes

A paper by Frank Mabry, John James, and Aaron Ferguson, all from the Information Technology and Operations Center at West Point, in the latest issue of IEEE Security & Privacy.

Unicode is rapidly becoming the preferred means for representing symbols used in creating multimedia content, especially for information that's presented in multiple languages. A vulnerability in unicode leaves such content susceptible to being used for the creation of covert channel communications.

Also at IEEEXplore.

Unicode Steganographic Exploits: Maintaining Enterprise Border Security

Security screeners at two of the nation's busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year.

Most fake bombs missed by screeners

My fellow Americans, in the coming presidential election, the voters of this nation will plot a course for the future. There are many candidates, each of whom brings a different vision of that future. But only one has the conviction and strength to lead this great country. Only one is a popular television and film actor ready to face the challenges of the 21st century head-on. And, most importantly, there is only one candidate with a bombshell trophy wife nearly a quarter-century younger than himself.

I urge each and every one of you to run a Google image search ...

That's her, ladies and gentlemen. That's my wife. Yes, we are actually married.

If elected, I pledge that same woman—who is a full six years younger than my eldest son—will be by my side at all state dinners, dressed to the nines, causing the Chinese delegation's jaws to drop in amazement at her gravity-defying rack.

This is my solemn vow to all Americans.

I am aware of the critics who doubt my ability to deliver on this promise. "What about Jackie Kennedy?" they ask. "Wasn't she a hotter first lady?" If all America cares about is hotness from the neck up, then yes. Though Jackie looked good in a pillbox hat, she never possessed that I-have-obvious-father-issues sort of hotness the people of this country appreciate so deeply. Go on, close your eyes and try picturing Jackie Kennedy on the cover of some magazine spilling out of a bikini. You can't do it, can you? Now try the same mental experiment with Mrs. Fred. The results speak for themselves.

I say America deserves hotter.

If Elected, I Will Have The Hottest First Lady In U.S. History

All round the world, women live longer than men. Why they should do so is not immediately obvious.

Most students of ageing agree that an animal's maximum lifespan is set by how long it can reasonably expect to escape predation, disease, accident and damaging aggression by others of its kind. If it will be killed quickly anyway, there is not much reason for evolution to divert scarce resources into keeping the machine in tip-top condition. Those resources should, instead, be devoted to reproduction.

The paper, Ecological correlates of extra-group paternity in mammals, is rather more technical:

Extra-group paternity (EGP) can form an important part of the mating system in birds and mammals. However, our present understanding of its extent and ecology comes primarily from birds. Here, we use data from 26 species and phylogenetic comparative methods to explore interspecific variation in EGP in mammals and test prominent ecological hypotheses for this variation. We found extensive EGP (46% of species showed more than 20% EGP), indicating that EGP is likely to play an important role in the mating system and the dynamics of sexual selection in mammals. Variation in EGP was most closely correlated with the length of the mating season. As the length of the mating season increased, EGP declined, suggesting that it is increasingly difficult for males to monopolize their social mates when mating seasons are short and overlap among females in oestrus is likely to be high. EGP was secondarily correlated with the number of females in a breeding group, consistent with the idea that as female clustering increases, males are less able to monopolize individual females. Finally, EGP was not related to social mating system, suggesting that the opportunities for the extra-group fertilizations and the payoffs involved do not consistently vary with social mating system.

Live fast, love hard, die young

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

See also:

To test claims by users that Comcast Corp. was blocking some forms of file-sharing traffic, The Associated Press went to the Bible.

Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic

Ruth is a protective mother and wants a say in whom her daughters choose for friends. But can a parent tell her kids she thinks Jesus is a bad influence and retain the moral high ground?

Tom Perrotta ("Little Children" [1, 2]) has a new book, The Abstinence Teacher.

True Believers