This is what you might call a timely delivery.

Understanding how terrorists conduct successful operations is critical to countering them. Terrorist organizations use a wide range of network technologies as they plan and stage attacks. This book explores the role that these communications and computer technologies play and the net effect of their use, the purpose and manner in which the technology is used, the operational actions of terrorists and possible responses of security forces. The authors conclude that future network technologies modestly improve terrorist group efficiency, particularly for their supporting activities, but do not dramatically improve their attack operations. Precluding terrorists from getting the technology they want is impractical; developing direct counters is unlikely to yield high payoffs. Instead, exploiting the technologies and the information such technologies use to enable more direct security force operations are more promising options.

I want this on a t-shirt:

AQI runs SAP.

Presumably the global AQ is also up to date, although they might be GNU guys. I wonder if it took bin Laden four years to transition all of his legacy applications. Anyway, I'm sure the old guard is kvetching about how the new software has made things worse. ("If everything is in the system, why do I still have to print out my expense report?")

Network Technologies for Networked Terrorists: Assessing the Value of ICTs to Modern Terrorist Organizations

Sons are tough on their mothers. They reduce a mother’s life span by an average of 34 weeks.

File this as a follow-up to the popular thread, Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions.

The Trouble with Men

These seem the best of times for America's elite cities. Wall Street's 2006 megabonuses created thousands of instant millionaires ... The bluest of the blue cities can also celebrate their rise to the top of the congressional pole.

Yet these triumphs obscure the longer-term developments that continue to reshape metropolitan America. Economic and demographic trends suggest that the future of American urbanism lies not in the elite cities but in younger, more affordable and less self-regarding places.

The Myth of 'Superstar Cities'

This is about cities, not countries.

Why to Move to a Startup Hub

Here's Ed Felten:

Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.

This is a simple consequence of Moore’s Law which, in one of its variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you’ll find the magic date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is concerned.

This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you’re willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In a world of infinite storage you’ll be able to keep around a huge amount of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to everything?

Infinite Storage for Music

Yesterday was a crazy day.

In the morning I found myself car-less and skateboarding to Santa Monica High School in a suitcoat and wool Vans with my computer in a leather satchel over my shoulder (a byproduct of sharing my car with my seventeen year-old daughter — or more accurately her sharing the car with me). In the afternoon I sat on a panel at Digital Media Forum West with the Usual Suspects (TM), and for dinner I had the pleasure of hearing David Pakman’s “drum story” (which was amazing, btw) and sushi at Ike on Hollyweird Blvd.

But in the middle I gave a brief, twenty minute presentation to some friends in the music industry about why it’s time we pay closer attention to consumer needs when it comes to digital music. I thought I’d share my presentation in case others were interested.

Enjoy,
ian

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends

There is no money in recorded music any more, that’s why bands are now giving it away.

The day the music industry died

Ashley Gilbertson photographs the war in Iraq for the New York Times. He talks about the invasion of Iraq, the battle for Falluja, the Marines he worked with, post-traumatic stress disorder, Iraqi civilians, and the future of photojournalism. His work is available in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War published by the University of Chicago Press.

Praise for the book:

“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.

“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

This essay is what makes "Omnivore's Dilemma" so great.

Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The Jungle,'' by questions about what we're really eating when we eat meat. Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I'd try to own it, in other words.

So this is the biography of my cow.

Power Steer, by Michael Pollan

What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients.

Silent Minds, by Jerome Groopman