Long-time fans of Fukuyama's Trust (*) will appreciate this.

Outside a small family circle, the links of kinship are biologically trifling, vulnerable to manipulation, and inimical to modernity. For all that, the almost mystical bond that we feel with those whom we perceive as kin continues to be a potent force in human affairs.

It is no small irony that in an age in which technology allows us to indulge (*) these emotions as never before, our political culture systematically misunderstands them.

This is also a partial response to the observation by Decius that "People who have different identities tend to fight." This is not unrelated to Tom Friedman's McDonald's Theory:

"No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's."

(*) Acidus should definitely be posting here: [1,2,3,4,5]

Strangled by Roots | Steven Pinker

In partial response to the observation by Decius that "The end of the reign of mass media means the end of the reign of mass culture", I offer this:

There is a danger that recommender systems may simply magnify the popularity of whatever is currently hot - that they may just amplify the voice of marketing machines rather than reveal previously-hidden gems. Even worse, their presence may drive out other sources of cultural diversity (small bookstores, independent music labels, libraries) concentrating the rewards of cultural production in fewer hands than ever and leading us to a more homogeneous, winner-take-all culture.

I'm no futurist, but I see little evidence from the first 300 days of the Netflix Prize that recommender systems are the magic ingredient that will reveal the wisdom of crowds.

You may recall that I recently wrote:

Obscure people, bring us your good arguments!

Tyler Cohen, "cult hero" and author of the recently published "Discover Your Inner Economist", notes that "recommender systems work best when combined with non-articulable knowledge." (Does MemeStreams some of have that?) Incidentally, for those of you in the DC area, Cohen will be at the 18th St. Lounge tomorrow for a Reason happy hour:

... come out and meet everyone. They also (seriously) have lots of beautiful women at these events, not like when I was a young libertarian.

The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later

This is an amusing throw-away:

It's just shameful that the best Microsoft can do for [web search] market share is to pay robots to play cartoon chicken games.

MSN Search Scam

Decius wrote recently:

There are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.

I thought of this when I heard the short NPR piece linked here.

Nature writer David Gessner believes you don't have to climb Everest or raft the Amazon to find wildness. It's often found much closer to home, in our backyards and in the experiences of daily life.

Experiencing a Feeling of Wildness [MP3]

Sven Birkerts on the slow death of literary life.

In the past few years, as revenue flees from print on paper, newspapers have worried their declining circulation figures and have had to make cutbacks.

A flashpoint of sorts was reached this spring when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced that it would eliminate its book-reviews editor and rely on wire-service reviews exclusively. The decision prompted swift response from the National Book Critics Circle, which spearheaded a picket protest of the paper. The ensuing crossfire (mainly online, as it happens) between bloggers and print critics was intense and acrimonious enough to suggest that more than the disposition of a few column inches is at stake.

The controversy has to do with the fact that people in various quarters, literary bloggers prominently among them, are proposing that old-style print reviewing -- the word-count-driven evaluation of select titles by credentialed reviewers -- is outmoded, and that the deficit will be more than made up by the now-flourishing blog commentary. The blogosphere's boosters pitch its virtues of variety, grass-roots initiative, linkage, and freedom from perceived marketing influence (books by major trade publishers, which advertise more, sometimes appear to get premium treatment in the print book review sections).

I'm hard put to repudiate these virtues of the blogosphere. But can it really compensate for losses in the more clearly bounded print sector? The bigger question, if we accept that these are the early symptoms of a far-reaching transformation, is what does this transformation mean for books, for reviewing, for the literary life?

First books, then magazines, then movies, then what?

Can there ever be another Bergman? Unlikely.

Lost in the blogosphere

How new technologies, a proliferation of resources, and a disenchantment with the corporate world are making Generation Y the most entrepreneurial in history.

They worked really hard to find people you've never heard of. (I recognized Mental Floss.)

The Making of an Entrepreneurial Generation - 30 Under 30

Over a period of approximately five years, Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School and Daniel Levinthal of the Wharton School have been working on a detailed simulation (producing approximately a million fitness landscape graphs) in order to determine optimal patterns of decision-making for corporations. In 2006, we adapted this study, combining it with our own work on terrorism to examine what would happen if we inverted Ghemawat and Levinthal's findings and sought to provide disinformation or otherwise interfere with the communications and decision processes of terrorist organizations in order to optimize poor decision making and inefficiencies in organizational coordination, command and control.

The bulk of this study was then presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the North American Association for Computation in the Social and Organizational Sciences. We present here an updated version of that study, emphasizing the rather counter-intuitive finding that "soft" targets have almost no value and that unless one can influence key factors, an effort directed at the easy to reach elements of terrorist organizations may actually be worse than mounting no effort at all.

We conclude with the recommendation that some fundamental rethinking may be required if the United States is to effectively defend itself from future terrorist attacks.

Here are links to a few of the author's other papers:

Why the World Isn’t Flat

Globalization has bound people, countries, and markets closer than ever, rendering national borders relics of a bygone era—or so we’re told. But a close look at the data reveals a world that’s just a fraction as integrated as the one we thought we knew. In fact, more than 90 percent of all phone calls, Web traffic, and investment is local. What’s more, even this small level of globalization could still slip away.

The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change

Discussions of technological change have offered sharply contrasting perspectives of technological change as gradual or incremental and the image of technological change as being rapid, even discontinuous. These alternative perspectives are bridged using the punctuated equilibrium framework of evolutionary biology. Using this framework, it is argued that the critical event is not a transformation of the technology, but speciation—the application of existing technology to a new domain of application. As a result of the distinct selection criteria and the degree of resource abundance in the new domain, a... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Disrupting Terrorist Networks, a dynamic fitness landscape approach

Apply the principles of computer/network security. Can your democracy tolerate the false alarms that are the price for zero tolerance of missed detections?

Although much political capital has been made regarding the war on terrorism, and while appropriations have gotten underway, there has been a dearth of deep work on counter-terrorism, and despite massive efforts by the federal government, most cities and states do not have a robust response system.

In fact, most do not yet have a robust audit system with which to evaluate their vulnerabilities or their responses. At the federal level there remain many unresolved problems of coordination. One reason for this is the shift of much of federal spending on war-fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. While this approach has drawn deep and lasting criticism, it is, in fact, in accord with many principles of both military and corporate strategy.

In the following paper we explore several models of terrorist networks and the implications of both the models and their substantive conclusions for combating terrorism.

The Symmetries and Redundancies of Terror: Patterns in the Dark

Hamilton is right that people love biographies, and he is right about some of the reasons. We learn about ourselves by reading about the lives of other people, for one thing. And biographies of the powerful and the famous that humanize their subjects may play some kind of egalitarian social role. It's naïve, though, to suppose that the forces driving the appetite for "critical, incisive" (that is, highly revealing) biographies are all about democracy and demystification. Secrest is more to the point: people are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people’s lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species’ more attractive addictions, and, on the whole, it's probably better to indulge it on the life of a person you have never met.

They ought to call it Other People.

Lives of Others | Louis Menand, in The New Yorker

Six years after 9/11 , US intel officials are complaining about the emergence of a major "gap" in their ability to secretly eavesdrop on suspected terrorist plotters.

In a series of increasingly anxious pleas to Congress, intel "czar" Mike McConnell has argued that the nation's spook community is "missing a significant portion of what we should be getting" from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots.

Remember:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Now, back to that news story:

Rep. Heather Wilson, a GOP member of the House intelligence community, told NEWSWEEK she has learned of "specific cases where US lives have been put at risk" as a result.

Intel agency spokespeople declined to elaborate.

See also:

McConnell told Congress that we are "significantly burdened in capturing overseas communications of foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside the United States."

Critics of the administration have expressed reluctance about expanding the surveillance powers of the government.

Midday Saturday, the White House re-released the text of the president's address, removing the sentence: "Every day that Congress puts off these reforms increases the danger to our Nation."

An 'Intel Gap': What We're Missing