Opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no longer associated with poverty – quite the opposite.

It works like this: the rich buy political protection, so by default, eradication efforts (though hopelessly half-hearted) fall almost exclusively on the poor, who are forced to convert to "cash crops" for which they have neither the scale nor the technology to compete on the open market. Meanwhile, the sanctioned producers more than pick up the slack, and, having eliminated the local competition, reap outsize profits.

In 2007, Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium poppies, an increase of 17% over last year. The amount of Afghan land used for opium is now larger than the corresponding total for coca cultivation in Latin America (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined).

Favourable weather conditions produced opium yields (42.5 kg per hectare) higher than last year (37.0 kg/ha). As a result, in 2007 Afghanistan produced an extraordinary 8,200 tons of opium (34% more than in 2006), becoming practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug (93% of the global opiates market). Leaving aside 19th century China, that had a population at that time 15 times larger than today’s Afghanistan, no other country in the world has ever produced narcotics on such a deadly scale.

On aggregate, Afghanistan’s opium production has thus reached a frighteningly new level, twice the amount produced just two years ago.

Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007: Executive Summary | United Nations

An award-winning children’s book based on the true story of two male penguins who reared a baby penguin stands atop the American Library Association’s annual list of works that drew the most complaints from parents, library patrons and others, The Associated Press reported.

Published in 2005, the book, “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, with illustrations by Henry Cole (Simon & Schuster), was named one of that year’s best by the association.

But some parents and educators complained that it advocated homosexuality.

Next week's headline: Parents complain that National Geographic documentary about lions advocates polygamy.

(I wonder if these complainants would self-classify as "educators.")

See also coverage in the LA Times.

Paternal Penguins Pique Parents

Bad monkeys!

A troop of monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

Local MP Paul Muite told parliament that the monkeys had taken to harassing and mocking women in a village.

Nachu's women have tried wearing their husbands' clothes in an attempt to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed, they say.

"The monkeys can tell the difference ... They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops."

"The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts."

See also:

I have also been harassed by vervets. The vervet in the photo above stole my bananas.

The vervet was quick and smart, I must grant him that. But he was also greedy.

The bunch of bananas - about eight bananas - was too heavy for the vervet. He could therefore only drag them behind him, slowing him down considerably, and keeping him from the trees. My pursuit through woods and valleys was closing the gap.

I was about to dive for the bananas - honest, actually dive for them - when the vervet cut his losses by plucking one banana from the bunch and scrambling up a tree. He chattered down at me sarcastically between bites of his purloined banana.

I believe I shook my fist at him, as humans are known to do when provoked.

Monkey misery for Kenyan women villagers | BBC

Damn that innovation!

The ratio of total household debt to aggregate personal income in the United States has risen from an average of 0.6 in the 1980s to an average of 1.0 so far this decade.

In this paper we explore the causes and consequences of this dramatic increase.

Demographic shifts, house price increases, and financial innovation all appear to have contributed to the rise. Households have become more exposed to shocks to asset prices through the greater leverage in their balance sheets, and more exposed to unexpected changes in income and interest rates because of higher debt payments relative to income. At the same time, an increase in access to credit and higher levels of assets should give households, on average, a greater ability to smooth through shocks.

We conclude by discussing some of the risks associated with some households having become very highly indebted relative to their assets.

The Rise in US Household Indebtedness: Causes and Consequences | FRB

Bad monkeys are no joke!

“Bad Monkeys” is something of a science-fiction “Catcher in the Rye.” Along with the Salingeresque details, author Matt Ruff has animated “Bad Monkeys” with the spirit of Philip K. Dick, and he’s borrowed a little seasoning from Jim Thompson and Thomas Pynchon. The real debt is to Dick, in the way Ruff expertly plays with notions of what is real and what is illusion.

From the first chapter:

"We don't fight crime, we fight evil. There's a difference. And Bad Monkeys is the name of my division. The organization as a whole doesn't have a name, at least not that I ever heard. It's just 'the organization.'"

"And what does 'Bad Monkeys' mean?"

"It's a nickname," she says. "All the divisions have them. The official names are too long and complicated to use on anything but letterhead, so people come up with shorthand versions. Like the administrative branch, officially they're 'The Department for Optimal Utilization of Resources and Personnel,' but everyone just calls them Cost-Benefits. And the intel-gathering group, that's 'The Department of Ubiquitous Intermittent Surveillance,' but in conversation they're just Panopticon. And then there's my division, 'The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons ...'"

"Irredeemable persons." The doctor smiles. "Bad monkeys."

Death Angel: Bad Monkeys | NYT

Dmitri Krioukov and George Riley have collaborated with Xenofontas Dimitropoulos and Amin Vahdat on a new paper.

The coarsest approximation of the structure of a complex network, such as the Internet, is a simple undirected unweighted graph. This approximation, however, loses too much detail.

In reality, objects represented by vertices and edges in such a graph possess some non-trivial internal structure that varies across and differentiates among distinct types of links or nodes.

In this work, we abstract such additional information as network annotations. We introduce a network topology modeling framework that treats annotations as an extended correlation profile of a network.

Assuming we have this profile measured for a given network, we present an algorithm to rescale it in order to construct networks of varying size that still reproduce the original measured annotation profile.

Graph Annotations in Modeling Complex Network Topologies

The genetic reversal problem lies at the intersection of biology, mathematics and computer science. For some time, the prospects for finding a simple and efficient solution seemed dim, even with the most powerful tools of all three disciplines. But the story has a happy ending. A little more than a decade ago, computing gene reversals was still a subtle research problem; now it can be done with such ease that it's a matter of routine technology. If you need to know the "reversal distance" between two genomes, you can go to a Web site and get the answer in seconds.

See also coverage in Science.

To put your genes in order, flip them like pancakes

Geoff Huston discusses the call for papers I recently recommended.

Trust and networking go hand in hand, and I'm pleased to see that the topic of trust has been raised by the Internet Society recently.

In this column I'd like to informally respond to this call for participation and revise some earlier thoughts I had on trust to see if we've made any significant progress on the issue of trust in the Internet in the past four years.

Jumping to the end:

So is trust the universal answer?

The problem for me is that "trust" is not that much different from blind faith, and, in that light, "trust”"is not a very satisfying answer. The difference between "fortuitous trust" and "misplaced trust" is often just a matter of pure luck, and that’s just not good enough for a useful and valuable network infrastructure. "Trust" needs to be replaced with the capability for deterministic validation of actions and outcomes of network-based service transactions. In other words, what is needed is less trust and better security.

Trust | Geoff Huston's ISP Column | September 2007

Wellcome Trust scientists have identified for the first time how our brain's response changes the closer a threat gets. Using a Pac Man-like computer game where a volunteer is pursued by an artificial predator, the researchers showed that the fear response moves from the strategic areas of the brain towards more reactive responses as the artificial predator approaches.

When faced with a threat - such as a large bear - humans, like other animals, alter their behaviour depending on whether the threat is close or distant. This is because different defence mechanisms are needed depending on whether, for example, the bear is fifty feet away, when being aware of its presence may be enough, or five feet away, when we might need to fight or run away.

To investigate what happens in the brain in such a situation, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London created a game where subjects were chased through a maze by an artificial predator – if caught, they would receive a mild electric shock. The researchers then measured their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results are published today in the journal 'Science'.

See also Nathan Myhrvold's photo essay on African lions.

Free will takes flight: how our brains respond to approaching menace

Just wait for the "5 Things You Didn't Know about UBL" meme to get going.

Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modeled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Two thoughts:

Goal: Ultimately make the social graph a community asset.

If you trust us, you're stupid.

With so many agencies in the IC, analysts have been wasting a lot of time checking sixteen different sites to see what their 'friends' are up to.

Yes, a little infrastructure consolidation project is just what the doctor ordered. There must be an ESX pony in there, somewhere.

Look out for Long Bets on when 'Twitter for spies' and 'Zivity for spies' will be announced.

US launches 'MySpace for spies'